Monthly Archives: April 2011

Please Visit Me Today Over At Tribal Blogs

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Today is a very special day for me.

No, I didn’t marry a prince, although I wish I had. Princes are rich, and, apparently, very charming.

But I did write a guest post for Tribal Blogs. It’s my very first guest post, and I’m as nervous a bride on her wedding night. It’s about how to get more comments on your blog, which I know nothing about, of course. But Jen, the creator of Tribal Blogs, was so desperate for copy she turned to me for help. So I threw something together, trying to sound authoritative and confident.

Officious, even.  

If you’d like to read it, and I can’t imagine why you would, please click here. You can comment on it and ask me questions, too. Your questions don’t even have to be related to blogging. For example, you could ask me about that nasty rash you picked up last weekend. And I promise to respond, although not always intelligently.

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You Think Of A Headline — I’m Too Tired

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I’m tired, more tired than I can remember ever being.

There are reasons: work and school, family, I don’t sleep well — or enough. I can’t stop thinking, either, about this and that, and the other thing, and sometimes all three at once, which can be confusing.

I’ve had it worse, though, which makes me wonder: “Why am I so tired? And, if I am not for myself, then who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when? And why am I thinking of Rabbi Hillel and his cryptic aphorism at a time like this, when I’m so tired? I’m not Jewish, although I freely admit that I enjoy a fresh cheese blintz as much as the next man.”

So maybe I’m losing my mind.

Or dying.

Some days, I feel so flat, so thin, I think I’m a can of beige paint that’s been rolled onto a wall, and now I’m being forced to watch myself dry.

Or, perhaps, like Marshall Cogburn in True Grit, who runs for miles with the near-lifeless body of the snake-bitten girl Mattie Ross in his arms only to collapse within sight of the doctor’s house, “I done got old.” I hear that old people lose energy, and need a lot of naps. Something to do with hormones. Or liking naps.

Probably naps.

Sometimes I think old people lie a lot about their hormones to avoid obligations. And who can blame them? Obligations are tiresome, especially if they involve people, and they almost always do. Maybe this ability to squirm out of obligations explains why old people are considered wise, if also lazy, or, at best, tired.

Whatever the cause, the effects of being tired are many, and interesting — to me at least, if not also to you, the by-now perplexed reader, whom I have decided to call Hugh, or as gender necessitates, Colleen, or then again, in very rare circumstances only, Pat. I’ll give you an example of the sort of behavioral oddities that crop up in me when I get tired, Hugh, Colleen and Pat, just in case it’s not already painfully clear:

One night, I noticed that I had five distinct ridges on the palm of my right hand, but only four on my left. On a whim, I counted the ridges on my thumbs and index fingers. Five and four, matching my palms. Weird, huh? I would’ve counted the ridges on the rest of my fingers, but it seemed obsessive. I’m fighting the urge to do it even now as I sit here in my recliner writing. I’m also wondering why I prefer to cross my left ankle over my right so much that I  instinctively do it eight times out of ten, even if the weight of my left leg makes my right ankle numb.

There are other effects of being tired.

I perseverate on random smells, tastes, colors, shapes, textures and sounds, for instance.

A few days ago, I listened to a live recording of Ryan Adams’ song, “Oh My Sweet Carolina,” at least eight times in a row. I was captivated by the buzz of the guitar strings, the way his voice cracked when he dropped into a whisper.

Ceilings are also more interesting than they’ve ever been, especially if they’re uneven, or cracked. I spent an entire hour compulsively staring at the tiny holes in the acoustic ceiling tiles in a conference room at work last week, giving my co-workers a good view up my nose and something to wonder about when our meeting was over.

I’ve also noticed that iceberg lettuce doesn’t smell the same as Romaine, that chocolate brown is a very popular color, and that cigarette ash never falls in a straight line, but to one side or the other, or sometimes down and out with a little upward curl at the end.

Being tired also affects my emotions.

In between feeling normal, which is increasingly rare in my present condition, I’m alternately giddy and morose, although more sullen than lighthearted on average. Frequently, I’m neither. I’m just flat, which is to say that I don’t feel much of anything at all, just frightening neutrality. In sensory terms, I would describe that state as beige, smooth, odorless, tasteless, silent and hollow. Some days, I feel so flat, so thin, I think I’m a can of beige paint that’s been rolled onto a wall, and now I’m forced to watch myself dry.

I could go on, and on and on and on about being tired, rambling being yet another symptom for me. But I’ll spare you because I suspect — hope? — this condition will pass, probably starting about May 11, the last day of class this semester. Or when I win an all-expense-paid vacation to Europe, hit the lottery and quit work, or lapse into a stress-induced coma.

Also, another one of the side effects of being tired is that I’m highly distractible, and quickly bored. I’m bored now, to be honest, and you probably are, too, Hugh, Colleen and Pat. Most people don’t like to read, especially when the author’s acting like a whiny baby, and obviously craving a blintz. Also, I have to be careful to finish this post while I still can, because I never know when I’m going to fall asleez zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzz zzzzzzzzzz zzzzzz.

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Well, It’s About Time, Isn’t It?

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You might not think there's a connection between former supermodel Elle Macpherson and time-travel science, but you're wrong.

From time to time, I make time to think about time. But the more time I spend thinking about time, the more I think I might be wasting my time, because time is very confusing.

For example, even though everybody says time keeps on ticking, I often seem to be running out of time.

When say I’m running out of time, I don’t mean literally. Time is very large, and I don’t have the endurance or aerobic conditioning required to run out of it, let alone the motivation. I think it would take practically forever, and I honestly believe I don’t have the patience for that.

What I really mean is that I don’t feel like I have enough time to do all things I want or need to do. Consider tomorrow’s to-do list:

1) Accidentally sleep 12 hours, wake up too late to get to work on time, take a few hours of sick time.

2) Take a sauna, shower, check the e-mail, watch The Price is Right and Jeopardy!, start writing my postmodern, magically realistic, historical science-fiction novel about Abraham Lincoln and his time-travelling personal assistant, U Thant. (Don’t judge it until you read it. There’s a reason why Lincoln seemed so far ahead of his time.)

3) Go to work, check the e-mail, find out what people did for fun last night, kill some time by filling up the inbox on my desk with old reports and memos so I look busy when my boss stops by to sign my time sheet.

4) Eat lunch, go on a walk and take time to smell the roses, pick up groceries for tonight’s meal, return to work, check the e-mail, find out what other people had for lunch and are going to do for fun that night if they have the time.

5) Go home, nap, make dinner, check the e-mail, find out how my wife’s day went, watch The Mentalist, The Office, 30 Rock, any episode of Glee featuring Jane Lynch, CBS News 4, Parks and Recreation, Criminal Minds, The Amazing Race, Body of Evidence, The Closer, Southland, David Letterman, John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, reminisce with my wife about how much time we had for fun before we had kids,  read a magazine article or three, argue about religion and/or politics online with somebody I don’t know, finish my novel, check the e-mail, take a relaxing sauna, go to sleep.

Is it any wonder I feel like I’m running out of time? Sometimes I feel like I should institute a little time management and quit work just so I can cram the important stuff in.

On the other hand, I often feel like I also have too much time on my hands.

I don’t mean literally on my hands, because I don’t know if that’s possible, let alone safe. Time might be radioactive for all we know, or worse, affiliated with the politically conservative Tea Party. If I thought I was going to have poisonous, brain-killing time crawling all over my hands, I’d wear surgical gloves 24/7 for protection, even if people thought I was a doctor and kept asking me to give them rectal exams, which I’d probably decline to do no matter how much time I had available.

What I really mean is that sometimes time feels like it stops moving very quickly and suddenly starts moving very slowly, or not at all, just like kids act when you ask them to do their chores. In fact, there seems to be a sliding scale of time, or what USS Enterprise Science Officer Spock might call a Time-Event Anomaly:

1) Mind-blowing sex: 20 minutes = 20 seconds.

2) Good movie: 2 hours = 20 minutes.

3) Vacation day: 24 hours = 2 hours.

4) Work: 1 minute = 2 hours.

5) Meeting with income-tax preparer: 1 hour = Eternity, in the 9th Circle of Hell.

These wild variations in my perception of time make no sense.  It ought to feel as regular as clockwork. My Timex wristwatch certainly appears to measure time in nearly perfect one-second increments, one following the other every day until the battery dies.

Some people prefer to do their time travelling in a modified DeLorean, but I like the copper-and-brass Victorian stylings of H.G. Wells.

Which reminds me, I need to add getting a new watch battery to my to-do list.

Even if my watch isn’t running, however, the latest atomic clocks over at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) near my house in Denver are. Scientists there claim their clocks are astonishingly accurate, gaining or losing less than a second of time over a billion years, although I doubt anybody makes a battery that good, or that anybody’s going to wait around to see if they’re right.

Planes, trains, buses and ships worldwide rely on NIST’s split-second timekeeping to maintain their schedules, which is strange because whenever I travel I’ve come to expect accuracy of minus one hour to one day. That sort of delay feels like a billion years, give or take a second, especially if you’re stuck somewhere like Idaho’s Boise Airport. It’s got a dinky terminal and a lousy food court featuring the inappropriately named Maui Taco restaurant, Home of the Honolili Burrito.

I mean, come on, Boise, you’re totally land-locked and three time zones away from Hawaii!

A Hawaiian burrito?

Really?

Scientists can’t explain Idaho—they don’t even try—but they are feverishly working on a definition of time, perhaps because they know better than anybody that time is of the essence. Scientists like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking argue that the passage of time is an illusion, that clocks don’t measure the speed or flow of time, just the distance between events, which are packed together in something they call “space-time.” In simple terms, which are the only terms I have the slightest chance of understanding, the current theory is that time isn’t like a river, flowing in one direction from the past into the future, but more like a lake. It’s not moving at all, it’s just hanging out passing time, waiting for us to go fishing or skinny-dipping.

I like this description of time, partly because it means time travel is theoretically possible. You don’t have to paddle like a madman to reach the past or future, you simply dive into a different part of Loch Chronos.

Imagine the possibilities: With a time machine—I’m partial to the brass-and-copper Steampunk contraptions envisioned by H.G. Wells—you could float over to the 1980s and catch former supermodel Elle Macpherson skinny-dipping. Or have lunch with Abraham Lincoln. Or catch Elle Macpherson skinny-dipping with fellow supermodel Christy Turlington. Or have dinner with Jesus. Or maybe have lunch with Lincoln and Jesus, take a long nap, and then join Elle and Christy at the hotel later for dinner and apéritifs.  

Anyway, I mostly like the latest concept of time because it helps me answer a question that’s always bothered me: If there is no time like the present and the time is now, then why am I able to envision the future and remember the past, or at least the parts of my future and past that don’t involve remembering my relative’s birthdays or when and where I lost my car keys? Theoretically, the future hasn’t happened, and the past is gone, and yet there they are, shimmering like the surface of a lake in the afternoon sun.

I'm no neat-freak, but this artist's rendition of space-time seems a little messy to me.

With Elle Macpherson.

Skinny-dipping.

The problem is, scientists don’t know if they’re right.

They never know if they’re right, to be honest, particularly when they’re talking about something as elusive as time, which is always getting away from us. Scientists used to believe the world was flat, for instance, and that Pluto was a planet instead of an oversized cosmic ice cube. Or that the insufferably cute Triceratops was a separate type of dinosaur and not just a baby Torosaurus, one of the meanest, ugliest reptiles ever—essentially the prehistoric world’s version of a loveable kitten that turns into a—gasp!—aloof cat that believes it belongs on the cover of Cat Fancy magazine.

So for all scientists know, time is exactly like a river, and we’re floundering in its Class 6 rapids without a life preserver, rushing headlong toward the Waterfall of Oblivion.

Only time will tell if their research is time well spent, or just a waste of time. I just hope they figure it out before I run out of time, because time is everything, and it’s a-wasting.

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Facebook of the Damned

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Adam: "I 'Friended' you on Facebook of the Damned this morning." Eve: "That tickles."

I died, and immediately felt my soul separate from my body.

Instead of drifting up toward the ceiling and the light, however, I dropped down through the vinyl floor of the operating room. Floated into a long, dark tunnel with a dim blue light at the far end.

I wasn’t scared at first.

Then I heard my Uncle Earl calling my name.

Uncle Earl spent most of his life drinking, smoking, cussing, gambling and consorting with a Whitman’s Sampler of ladies whose morals were at least as liberal as his own. “Women are like a box of chocolates—they’re all sweet, but you never know what you’re going to get,” he liked to say. Uncle Earl also never paid his taxes. Rode his neighbor’s wi-fi. Stole packets of cheese and lunch meat from the grocery store. Sometimes grabbed a couple of slices of bread and made himself a sandwich right there in the aisles.

Remembering him then, it suddenly occurred to me that my soul’s final destination might be less Club Med and more Motel 6. So I panicked and started flailing my arms. Back-pedaling faster than a politician caught with his hanging chad in Cookie’s jar.

But it was too late.

I succeeded only in arriving at the gates of hell winded and sweaty, with the belated insight that perhaps I should have eaten a little less and exercised a little more, perhaps by jogging to church. Or said my prayers. Or dropped my spare change in the Salvation Army’s bucket at Christmas instead of saving it for a candy bar from the office vending machine. Whatever it is people do to keep from getting basted on Beelzebub’s barbecue.

Too late for me now.

I expected darkness and fire. But my feet touched down against my will in a large, open room. Counters arranged in parallel, like the cashier’s aisles at Wal-Mart. Cleaner and well-lighted. A computer monitor and keyboard at the end of every counter. Dozens of them all in a line. Black cases. Every one with a login screen requesting an e-mail address and password. I stood in front of one, puzzled. Hesitating so long I finally drew the attention of one of the nearby attendants.

He looked very old. Ancient. He shuffled toward me, leaning on an aluminum walker with a Baby on Board sticker. A dented oxygen tank hanging from one of its crossbars. A long, clear-plastic tube connected to the tank. A pair of hoses snaked beneath his chin, up and over his ears, and into a respirator stuck into his nostrils. I could hear him wheezing.

“Welcome to Hades,” he said, pulling a Bic pen from the front pocket of his vest and tapping the screen. “Please login.”

“Login?”

“You need to create a screen name and password before entering.”

“I need password to get into…into…into here?” I sputtered.

Because if you don't, you'll need a screen name and password to get one.

He nodded. “And it must contain at least 12 characters. A mix of numbers, upper- and lower-case letters and at least one special symbol. Make it easy to remember, because you can’t write it down. But don’t use something obvious like ‘MyPassword2 Hell!’ We have a huge problem with hackers and spammers down here. We get the best of the worst.”

“But why do I need a password?”

“For your job.”

“Job? We have jobs?”

“Of course. It’s hell, not Europe. No handouts or social programs here. We’re capitalists. Everybody works. And the Conservatives—we get a lot of them—busted all the labor unions a long time ago, so you’ll be putting in 12-hour shifts six days a week 52 weeks a year from the comfort of your 6-foot by 8-foot cubicle. With 10-minute breaks in the mornings and afternoons, and 45 minutes for lunch, you’ll be glad to hear.”

“But work? Doing what, for God’s sake?”

“Please don’t use that language here!”

“What language?”

 “You know. The G-word. Him.” The attendant pointed up. “He’s kind of on our shit list here.”

“Oh, sorry.” I paused. “So what will I be doing?

“Facebook of the Damned. ”

“Facebook of the what?”

“I’ll tell you more about it after you login.” He tapped the screen again, more insistently this time.

“What if I refuse?”

“Then we’ll assign one to you. Trust me, you don’t want that in your personnel file.”

“Okay. Fine.” In a few minutes, it was finished. Then it was my turn to get some questions answered.

Curiously, Facebook's logo is the same in hell as it is on earth.

 ”So tell me about this Facebook of the Damned. What makes it different from regular Facebook?”

 ”Not much, to be honest. Up there, you go to work and try to sneak in a little Facebook on your lunch break, or when things get slow. Here, Facebook of the Damned is your work. One of your tasks will be to ‘Friend’ as many people as you can.”

 ”That doesn’t sound so bad. I like people.”

“Not everybody here is agreeable. President Nixon and the guy who invented plastic security packaging are pretty irritating, for example. And we’re expecting Dick Cheney’s arrival any day. If there’s anybody who can bring this place down, it’s him. That doesn’t even count the father killers, mother rapers and Wall Street bankers we get. You’re not going to like your work most of the time. Meanwhile, you’ll be posting required status updates every 15 minutes.”

 ”Every 15 minutes! About what?”

 ”Same stupid shit as up there. I’m eating a sandwich! My kids are so cute/irritating! I love/hate the president/my congressman! Isn’t my new kitty/puppy/boyfriend/girlfriend/wife/husband adorable? Just more of it. Every mundane aspect of your pathetic endless afterlife will eventually become a status update. After a while, you’ll be telling people about your latest freckle, or what you watched on TV last night. You’ll also be ‘Liking’ and commenting on people’s status updates and ‘Unfriending’ the people who ‘Friended’ you as fast as you can.”

“What’s the point of that?” I exclaimed. “That’s like digging a hole just to fill it up again. I might as well be fighting to establish world peace or trying save the environment!”

“I know, right? If it helps, think of it as a game, like Farmville or Mafia Wars—which we don’t allow here because they’re huge time wasters, by the way. Every quarter, Lord Zuckerberg—that’s our nickname for His Infernal Majesty—gives a nice bonus to those people with the best score, the highest net gain of comments, likes and friends. And at the end of every year, He picks the top ten winners.”

“What do they get?”

“Points.”

“Points for what?”

Facebook of the Damned was created by Lord Zuckerberg to help lost souls find one another.

“Accumulate enough points, and you get a promotion.”

“To what?”

“A better job. No more cubicle. No tedious days doing Facebook of the Damned. A job like mine, for example.”

“No offense, but that doesn’t seem like much!”

“Well, as I’ve already pointed out, this is hell, not dinner and movie night. You’ve only got yourself to blame. Remember when you ate your sister’s Ring Dings, blamed it on your brother and let him do the grounding your parents doled out? Or when you told your boss you were going on a sales call but went to see Inception instead?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Bad ideas. Two of many.”

“Point taken. So how long did it take you to get a promotion?”

“About 4,200 years, give or take. But I was really good at it. And most people will never make it out.”

“What?! Forty-two hundred years! Facebook didn’t even exist back then!”

The attendant shrugged. “Time doesn’t work the same way here as it does up there. Remember that bit about Adam and Eve and the all-knowing tree with the apple?”

“Sure. What about it?”

“It wasn’t an apple. It was an Apple—a Mac Book Pro. They used it to upload some nudie photos of themselves to the Internet when they should’ve been tending the sheep and whatnot. I’ve seen the photos, too. Eve was hot, even in fig-leaf lingerie. Adam carved her a pair of 6-inch stripper heels out of a fig tree. Anyway, Lord Zuckerberg got the idea for Facebook of the Damned right after they were expelled from the garden. He figured Adam and Eve would need a way to find friends, and he was right. The Man Upstairs wasn’t too happy about it, but you don’t help a few billion lost and tormented souls find friends without making some enemies along the way.”

“Shit.” I felt a little sick to my stomach thinking about the rest of my forever. “So we do get some time off, though. What do people do then?”

The attendant grabbed his belly with both of his hands, laughing so hard that he started hacking and coughing uncontrollably. When he finally caught his breath again, he flashed me a wry smile.

“Oh, you’re going to love this. Most people use their free time to catch up on their blogging. Or MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn and the like.”  He paused, and directed my attention to a metal security door behind him. “And now, it’s time for you to watch the orientation film and get to work.”

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