“You Are Absolved, My Son.”

You know the phrase “you get more with honey than with vinegar”?

I’m willing to bet you do, but I recently did a workplace poll on who had or hadn’t heard the phrase “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” and was astounded by how many people hadn’t.

So, however extra (as The Kids are wont to say these days) it may be, it basically means that you’ll garner a more positive attitude and curry more favor with folks if you’re sweet and kind than if you’re kind of a mean, smarmy douche.

A few weeks ago, I accompanied Ms. Amanda (#fiance) to a colleague’s retirement party, and this thing was a bash. There were probably two hundred people at what was basically a hilltop mansion, enough food to feed a zoo, and a live band. Like I said, a bash. Maybe a bash and a half. And all of it for a retiring elementary school teacher.

This dude was be-love-ed.

Funnily enough, since I went to this thing expecting to obviously be a plus-one that was a fish woefully out of water (which is, uh, something you say when you feel out of place, #extra), I knew a number of people who were there. I guess if you live in a city long enough, the world can only really get so big. One of them was actually the host!

Here’s to you, Chuck. Helluva place you have, and it was good to see you.

Another was one of the band members. Standing tall and proud in his cowboy hat and blue button-up playing the stand-up bass was my old high school physics teacher, Mr. Davis. First, the wash of nostalgia and familiarity hit me, but second was the dawning realization that this was going to be a day of reckoning.

Back-story time.

See, the last time I saw Mr. Davis, I was a sixteen-year-old rapscallion and troublemaker. Like I said, he taught me physics in high school, and during the segment of the year we were studying sound waves, he comes into class with a shiny set of tuning forks – they’re the two-prong things you hit on something and they go “Biiiiiiiiinnnnng!” They have practical uses, but that was the extent of my interest in them: hit thing, go bing.

So at the end of class that day, I put one of them in my backpack. I nicked it. Absconded with it. Freakin’ stole it.

I’m ashamed of it now, but at the time I fancied myself some kind of cunning rogue.

At the beginning of class the next day, Mr. Davis comes into the class room, and you can tell he’s in a somber mood. Like, really sad. After the morning announcements over the PA, he addresses us:

“Hey guys. I, uh, I noticed that in the back there, some of my tuning forks are missing. (So I wasn’t the only one!!) And I, uh, y’know, the school didn’t pay for those, I did. With my own money, and I did it because I thought they would be a fun thing for us to get to use and learn with and- ah, anyway. Hey so, if I could just get those back, I’d appreciate it. Nobody’s in trouble or anything. I could even watch you put them back. I’m not gonna get mad or say anything, I’d just, ah, I’d like my things back because…well, anyway. Yeah. Please. Thank you. Ahem, anyway, today we’re going to cover…”

Y’all. I was heartbroken over what I’d done. I couldn’t possibly have focused that day. I was so wracked with shame at having stolen this man’s property. I was a dirt bag, and I remember (stupidly) telling a friend later that I’d have felt justified if only he’d come in with fire and brimstone. But he didn’t. He spoke softly, honestly, and sadly. Christ…

I put that tuning fork back in my backpack the second that I got home that day.

The next day, when I returned it, oooooo, the glares that I got from my classmates – and I deserved them. I did it while he was out of the room during announcements, but my peers did, and his plea had tugged at their heartstrings like it had mine.

And I carried around that guilt for thirteen years, until this retirement party.

I see that Mr. Davis is in the band, and eventually the musicians go on break to get some food. As they do, I get up from my seat and follow him, calling “Hey! Matt!” (I get to call him that because I’m an adult now.) He looks back at me with an eyebrow raised, but smiles too. We shake hands, he says he’s headed to the food tables, and I say I’ll join him. On our way he asks, sort of hesitantly, “So, um, how do I know you?”

I laugh and tell him that he taught me physics a lifetime ago, and we chit chat a couple of seconds over how life has gone and where it’s taken us, but them I tell him that, actually, I have a confession. And I tell him about how I stole one of his tuning forks, but what his plea did to my conscience, and how I returned it and all the rest.

No joke, in between scoops of potato salad, he stops, faces me, and performs the sign of the Cross over me saying, “You are absolved, my son,” and laughs.

I laugh with him, but then rightly tell him, “Hey man, this might have been a joke to you, but I legitimately feel lighter all of a sudden. I’ve been carrying that shit around with me for over thirteen years.”

And it was true! Like, there was a crick in my neck that’s gone now, I sit and stand a little taller with a straighter back now. I freakin’ feel like my conscience, at last, has been cleared.

By the end of the night we bumped into one another again, brought it back up, joked, and he friggin’ hugged me. It feels good, closing the loop on a thirteen-year quest for redemption you’re on for stealing from an honest man. 10/10, would recommend.

…

But….except- just, don’t steal.

#PSA

See you guys.

My First Hater (?)

I’m a nobody.

Not demeaning myself, either. The world’s just huge with a lot of people in it. But especially in internet terms, my little presence here is barely non-zero sum. But it is kind of cool to, on occasions when I feel the need to validate my existence through a search engine, google the title of one of my stories and – pop! – there it is with my name next to it.

Today was one of those days, but I found something new.

Now, I haven’t really written anything since about April. No major life events or distractions, I just straight up hit a wall, and after a pretty busy couple of months in the Spring, that silence has been kinda deafening. Normally, when I hit a block in the past, I’ll just try and hammer through it. I’ll sit down and just write a whole bunch of bullcrap with no direction or intention of it being any good ever, but just used to beat down the door of nothingness that was halting me.

This time, I decided to take a different tactic. I decided to take a break.

Revolutionary concept, maybe, but I made the choice to just chill out and take a break from writing for a minute, my story schedule be damned. But a look in the mirror told me that the burnout was very real, and a moment away to let the idea of my notepads and keyboard become fresh (and something that I wanted to do) again was a good move. Rather than beat my head against a wall, I would patiently take some time away and let inspiration come to me…

I posted recently about my one-sided rivalry with a successful author who probably couldn’t remember me if his life depended on it, and as a part of that shared an anecdote that I introduced with a complaint over not having any negativity in my writing life to harness for motivation.

Well’p, found some.

I googled an old story of mine that aired with the NoSleep Podcast a couple years ago, “The Bones of Lily Gordon”. It was a spiritual sequel to another, “The Scars of Eliza Gray”, that aired with The Nightlight Podcast a little bit before that. (Funny enough, I wrote it off of a recommendation that Nightlight’s showrunner Tonia Thompson gave me during my interview with her for my story’s episode.) It’s definitely nothing prolific, but still pretty good, I think. Ironically, though I’ve had a number of horror pieces get picked up, I’ve long said I’m more in camp Fantasy Nerd than I will ever be in tribe Horror Geek.

And “Bones” certainly isn’t a thrill-hopping ride of terror, but a slower, aesthetic horror story with soft worldbuilding and intentional vaguery.

Well, I guess it also has a reddit post dedicated to shitting on it.

I want to be clear that there exists much harsher criticism for art out in the world than was given to my poor story, and I’m sure other work of mine has been read by someone who then went, “Eeeh, not for me,” “Pfft, lame,” or “Jesus, that was stupid”, but I’ve never had to see or hear that before.

But the title of the post is “The Bones of Lily Gordon LOL or whatever”.

…

“Or whatever”??

And don’t you laugh out loud all dismissively at me, whoever you are. You…nerd.

The post addresses some of the vaguery in the story and postulates answers for some of the unexplained, shown-not-told elements, and certainly came away with vastly different answers than what I thought while putting it together. But cow tools are cow tools, and you’re not gonna please everybody.

On the plus side, I feel like a kid that just fell off of his bike for the first time, came away with a lightly skinned wrist, and got those first critic jitters behind me. It also makes me feel sorta bonafide. Like, the worst response you could hope for to your art is apathy (which…I mean, happens plenty, but that’s a separate thing entirely), so if someone thinks negatively of it (ie calls it sleep-inducing, nonsensical, and lame) I’m weirdly compelled to think of that as a compliment.

And it’s gotten me back at my desk and back at work to fill the world with more of my literary crap on this quest for glory and lame critics. So, thank you KF2015 or whatever, you total nerd from two years ago, for reigniting the creative fire in me that fuels my passion for this weird pursuit.

To the rest of you: You’re…you’re just the best.

Update: Truth be told, I wrote this about a week ago and have been meaning to find the time to post it. In the meantime, while looking up the URL’s for the links for this post, I actually found another one critiquing the same episode, that restored my faith in humanity some. Not saying that just because this one included some compliments for my story this time (among more critiques), but the critiques that were present were more fairly given. Also, in reading the first “mean” post back…it really was pretty dang tame. Just called my story “sleep-inducing”, pretty harmless, and I was frumpy about that.
But the praise did help. It always helps. lol
I’m a Leo.

Fiction isn’t (Just) Nonsense

We’ve all had those times after a conversation with someone. You know the ones I’m talking about. The “Oo, I should have said this” times. And of course, then, we replay the conversation in our heads but this time it goes in such a way that we’re a badass with all the right things to say.

The other thing about those moments is that they can stick with you for years down the road.

I was having a conversation in the break room with my boss years ago, we’ll call him Mike, and he’d heard about my (at the time) upcoming sabbatical. I never knew him all too personally, but my read on him was that he was a very left-brain sort of guy: math, numbers, engineering, logistics, factors, etc. He knew that I was trying to become a fiction writer and I think that he was just trying to find a way to relate, even if that meant communicating a lack of relation.

“I tried reading a bit of fiction before,” he laughed. “But once I was done, I was like, ‘What was the point of that?’ I just have all this useless information now.”

I’m loosely quoting him there, but the words I’m sure about are the ones of him referring to fiction as “useless information”. And again, I’m pretty sure he meant it kind-heartedly and jokingly, but whoa, bub, word choice. In the moment, I just laughed a bit awkwardly and agreed because I was twenty-five, not sure of what the heck I was doing (still not), and talking to the CEO of the company about a pursuit he just deigned “useless”.

Since then, I’ve found myself in odd moments here or there having that conversation again in my head and justifying the value of fiction to him. The first quote that came to mind to neatly and concisely encapsulate the sentiment I wish I’d had the presence of mind to communicate in the moment is one from Neil Gaiman:

“Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people and gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.”

The ability to relate a situation in your life to another you know of, whether real or fantastical as found in fiction, that skill of being able to draw patterns and associations between those circumstances and draw wisdom, advice, inspiration, or answers from them is valuable. Characters found in novels or movies are just constructs in our own minds, but the beautiful part is that by their nature we forget about that fact. Those characters, for all intents and purposes, are people with real experiences that we can choose to relate to and learn from – if you just freakin’ choose to.

Don’t believe me? While thinking up this little piece you’re reading right now, I jotted down two names that, in very real, substantial, earth-changing ways have historically demonstrated the value of storytelling.

Jesus and Disney.

One can be a devoted church-goer and readily tell you of the impact that a powerfully delivered sermon had on their life, or be decidedly atheist and still see Christianity’s undeniable impact on world history and society today. And if money is the measure by which you choose to estimate success, Disney Enterprises–a massive corporation built off the back of selling fictional stories–could buy the moon, half of Western Europe, every truffle to come out of the earth from now until the collapse of society, and still have plenty left over to continue bankrupting the state of Florida to spite DeSantis.

And all of this cutting, razor-sharp wit is what I would have said to Mike…if I’d freaking thought of it in the moment.

Eh. There’s always next time.

Professional Profiling

Some of, if not all, of my favorite characters in fiction are scoundrels. In the conflict of a story, I have a soft spot for renegades or independent operators that stand apart from the protagonists and antagonists with their own individual goals. They’re usually plucky, funny, clever, and come packin’ a pretty sharp wit.

I would never in a thousand years say that I truly have a gift of gab, but have moments of inspiration where, if you squint, it kind of looks like I do. When my social battery’s nice and full, I love small talk, vigorous discussions, and volleying a string of jokes back and forth with someone. And I usually credit my love of fictional scoundrels as what I’m subconsciously trying to emulate in those moments.

Take for example a random Wednesday night about eight years ago. My fiancee got an invitation in the mail from a local car dealership in the form of a kind of lottery ticket. The gist of it was that it was a scratcher ticket, and if you felt so inclined, you revealed the numbers and went down to the dealership to see if they matched and collect your prize.

Of course it’s just a way to fish for new customers, get them down to the dealership, and once they’re there in person, start trying to sell them on the shiny showroom floor models. But Amanda asks if we can go, see if maybe we won a prize, and since we had nothing more significant going on in the evening, I relent. We make our way down there and naturally the salesman starts working us on whether or not we’re happy with our current vehicles, all but ignoring our “lottery” ticket.

“Fine,” I think to myself, “if this guy is going to waste my Wednesday night, I’m going to waste his.”

I start to play a game with the guy. I figure just as he’s trying to spin the conversation however he can to the subject of buying a new car, I’m going to, at every opportunity, guide it away from that topic. I take note of the time and decide to see how long I can keep us purely dancing around with light conversation and small talk.

“What’re you driving now?” he asks. “What color’s your current vehicle?”
“It’s a black Sebring,” I say. “It works for me, y’know?”
“Sure, black’s good. Any new car you might get going to be black too?”
“Don’t see why not. I know it shows dirt a bit more, but that’s fine. Only really gets dirty when I take it camping. Oo! You ever go camping? Make your way out to Salt Point or Doran?”
“Heh, I don’t think I have,” he chuckles, then prepares another car question.
“Ah, you should,” I follow quickly. “You have any siblings? Big family?”
“Sort of big,” he answers, but masks his irritation. “Only a brother though.”
“Older or younger?”
“He’s the older one.”
“Ah, cool. I’m an only child. Any nieces or nephews? It’s a good spot for kids with the beach so close.”
“I bet.” He pauses a moment, calculating. “You take your sedan to a camping place near the beach? Wouldn’t an SUV be more fitting?”
“Nah, why not? The trunk’s surprisingly spacious, and I only make it out there maybe once or twice a year. And I mainly go to fly my stunt kite. You ever fly a kite as a kid?”
“Not really, no.”
“Dang. Ever hear of stunt kites?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Shoot, dude. Alright, next time you’re heading out to the coast, there’s this little shop called Candy and Kites. I swear, check them out and….”

Rinse and repeat for about the next hour or so. I say “or so” but I’m not perfectly certain we made it a full trip around the clock, but I’d like to think I did. My poor fiancee stayed mostly quiet during these exchanges, so I do ultimately have to reconcile the fact that there was some conversational collateral damage in boxing her out like that.

But, that said, it was because of her that we got the golden nugget that, almost a decade later, we remember that night for. Eventually, probably sensing that she’d been mostly quiet up to about the half-hour mark (and likely truly tired of my meandering small talk), our salesman turns to involve her in the conversation.

This is also a good point to mention that we were about twenty-one years old when this took place, and our salesman was GREEN at the job, maybe our age or a hair younger than us. So he’s somewhat fresh out of high school and now in a charisma-driven job trying to handle a bored jackass with no business there (me). That became relevant and especially noticeable with what came next, since I will forever remain positive that what he said was straight out of his salesman’s handbook.

“And how about you, miss?” he asks, turning to Amanda. “What do you do for work?”
“I work at an artisan meat and cheese distributor,” she said delightfully.
“Ah, you look like someone who works with artisan meats,” he replied.

…

Um, what?

I will not be convinced out of my certainty that that guy was going off of a template, “Ask Question A: ‘What do you do for work?’, and plug their answer [X] into Response B: ‘Ah, you look like someone who does [X].'”

This guy was expecting- nay, praying for something like Teacher, Nurse, Secretary, Banker, Waitress, f*cking Dispatch Operator. Literally anything other than “artisan meat and cheese.” There was a palpable beat the moment after he said it, and his eyes were glued to his computer screen after he did, so I’m guessing that he gave the B-side of that response by reflex and the inside of his head sounded like this: “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” etc.

I don’t remember how we reacted, but I’d like to think that it was with polite silence. I know that if we were being open and honest, our response would have been, “Yeah? You just have that profile in your head? Firefighter. Accountant. Mechanic. Nurse, or Teacher. Like, those are stereotypes I can understand having a picture of in your head already. But I go diving for the mental file on Artisan Meat and Cheese Lady, and I’m sad to say I don’t have that one on record already.

Some time after that, our sales guy goes “to get our prize” (it was a [probably counterfeit] $2 bill), and comes back with an older gentleman that looked like a senior salesman–probably our guy calling in the cavalry. And this guy’s veteran savvy showed through immediately:

“Hey, evenin’ guys,” he says.
“Hello hello,” I beam back.
“You two interested in buying a car tonight?”
“Ah, no sir, I don’t think I am.”
“Anything I can say to change your mind?”
“At this point it time, I don’t think there is.”
“Mm, well you two have a good night.” Then he nodded politely enough and walked away.

What a pro.

It wasn’t long after that that we left, but the legend of that guys endures to this day, and Amanda and I together have long joked that we should get t-shirts made. Not totally sure what the design would be, and we’re halfway joking anyway, but I imagine a black tee with a Dork Tower art style salesman on the front saying, “You look like you work with artisan meats!” Or maybe just plain text in a goofy font. Nonetheless, the joke would be for us.

Unless…

If we were to bump into that guy out there, in this wild, wild world, and he recognized us…

Because, as a point to close this story out today, I recognize that all of us, every single one, puts our foot in our mouths occasionally. But I do sincerely hope that that guys, wherever he might be, thinks back to that interaction every so often and shakes his head in shame. Just a victim of circumstance, that. And maybe he’s gone onto become a super salesman, or became a famous drummer, but regardless, it’d be a reunion for the ages.

Ciao for now.

Chicken and Waffles Almost Changed my Life

There’s another universe out there, parallel to this one, where I became a millionaire as a teenager.

As I think I’ve mentioned on here at some point or another, my first job out of high school was as a lot assistant for a car dealership. It was an absolute circus of colorful characters and some outrageous personalities. And as is tradition for a first job, it paid like crap but acted as a wellspring for interesting stories I still get my jollies by telling today.

One that I remember I didn’t find interesting at all when it happened, but that I caught myself recounting a couple of days ago and made my jaw drop when I realized what I was saying, is as follows:

I was nineteen at the time, and Amanda and I had just started dating. I’d been at the job for about a year, but I was the lowest possible part of the totem pole, obviously. But of course – again, being nineteen – my year’s tenure meant that I felt firmly established there. We were going to take a trip down to Los Angeles for about a week to get out of town for a little while, and being that my job paid like crap, I was short on cash to actually help make that happen. To be clear, the trip was Amanda’s brainchild, planned by her, using her car, and all else. I was just happy to come along. But I still wanted to be able to contribute something other than a weakly charming smile.

So I went to the owner of the company and asked for a loan.

Oh, to be naively optimistic as a teenager. I should mention that this dealership was huge, not just somebody’s corner lot. It sprawled over multiple acres of paved parking lot, with several buildings, some thousands of vehicles, and remains a somewhat prominent part of the city. I still remember walking to the administrative building where the owner and president of the company had his office, asking his receptionist if he was in, and the confused look on her face when she let me in. Looking back, I’m sure she thought either I knew something nefarious that she didn’t or that she was looking at the beginning of some kind of lawsuit she would get to gossip about later. After all, I was a peasant boy requesting audience with the king.

But goddammit, it worked.

I walked in, shook his hand, and explained my situation, that I was going on a trip with my new girlfriend but was short on cash, wondering if I could get an advance. And remembering it now some ten years later, I feel I can better interpret the “Sure, let me understand you clearly” look on his face I saw at the time now more appropriately as, “Who the fuck is this kid, and is he being goddamn serious?” But by what I’m guessing is some combination of sympathy for a young buck just trying to do right by his lady, and a shade of respect for the sheer freakin’ brazenness of who was naively asking who for what here, he took out his wallet and handed me a hundred dollars of his own money, saying, “This isn’t an advance. This is a loan, and I expect to be paid back.”

It was a bonding moment.

And I did just that. I paid him back in full soon as I was able when we got back, and I mentioned it in passing to my manager maybe a week later. He went white as a sheet and asked me to clarify. When I simply repeated that I went to the owner of the company for a cash loan, his voice changed to the nervous tone of one who just missed a bullet whizzing past his head. “Just…uh, you know, uh, in the future, just- um, just come to me with that sorta thing.”

Now, again, to stress, I think it only worked because I was an adorable, dumbly innocent kid. I tried that kinda crap now, no way it’s working and nobody’s feeling bad for me.

Another brief adventure was getting lost in San Francisco. This was before GPS in phones really took off in any sort of a reliable way, and my phone was a cheap toy anyway. I was delivering a courtesy vehicle to a customer about an hour south of the city (the dealership is located an hour north of the city, so it was a day with a lot of driving), and when I asked them directions for the best way to get home, they started listing off a whole bunch of complicated turns and routes. “Yeah, you’re going to want to take this highway to this junction, then merge to this other junction, then turn here to merge back to this, to that, to this” so on and so forth. And so the whole time in my head I’m going, “Right. Take Highway 101 the whole way back.”

What I didn’t know is that Highway 101 in California goes through San Francisco where I was. And that the turn to remain on 101 was reeeeaaally easy to miss if you didn’t know it was coming, because the sign telling you so is reeeaaally small. So I suddenly find that I’m utterly lost in the city in a big expensive truck that’s low on gas and no sense of where I am. That being the case, I channeled my inner D&D nerd and put together a survival plan.

“What do I know about San Fran?” I asked myself. Well, it has a lot of hills and there’s water by the Golden Gate Bridge (which was what I was trying to find as my way home). So, I figure, I’ll just use a hill to go up high, find the water, then drive towards the water where I’ll find the bridge.

Which friggin’ worked perfectly. I felt like an old school explorer, like Francis Drake or Ferdinand Magellan.

But what crowned them all, probably, was the situation that inspired this post’s title.

Maybe a few months into the job, a friend from high school, Austin, also got hired on for the same position. Now there were two of us (a number that would later grow, but that’s irrelevant here). He and I are getting lunch one day from a nearby deli, and he picks up a bag of Lays potato chips to go with his sandwich. We get back to the lot and are eating in the break room when he takes a look at the back of the bag.

“Huh, check this out,” he says, and points to a spot on the back of the bag promoting a contest that Lays was having wherein people could call in with ideas for new flavors of potato chips. So we start bouncing ideas back and forth before ultimately falling on Chicken and Waffles. We agree that one’s a winner, and Austin calls the number on the bag, putting the call on speaker. A little bit of menu-hopping later, we’re connected to a representative for Lays. She asks us for our chip flavor, we give our genius suggestion of Chicken and Waffles, to which she tells us that that’s not an applicable flavor and ends the call. We shake our heads about how she’s kind of a donk (we used different words, though) and go about our day. That is until a couple of months later, when Lays unveils their new chip flavors and contest winners (and million dollar recipients).

Among the chosen flavors: Chicken and Waffles.

Austin and I are close to rioting, when the winners’ details are also revealed, and apparently a lady from Illinois had submitted our own genius flavor hardly a week before we had. I remain convinced to this day, however, that that lady doesn’t actually exist and that the game was rigged from the start. I’d bet a bag of chips that the woman on the phone with us that day experienced that phone call like this: “Hello, Lays’ chip flavor contest hotline, what is your suggestion? Ahuh. Ahuh. I’m sorry, that flavor isn’t applicable.” <hangs up phone, begins scribbling on a notepad> “Chicken and waffles, hot damn. That’s a good idea. Gonna go to the boss with this one.”

But my hare-brained Big Chip conspiracy theories aside, yeah, bottom line is that Austin and I were apparently just a few days separated from being potato chip millionaires.

Ah, what could have been.

Ciao for now, y’all.

The Legend of Eagle Grandpa

A couple of years ago, I told the story of when I learned not to be “That Guy”.

The short version is that I was standing at an ATM when someone was hit by a car, and being EMT certified at the time, I was going to finish up my transaction and go attend to the gentleman – basically hold him still and ask questions while someone called 9-1-1. In the couple of seconds it took for me to retrieve my card and turn around, there was already another fella doing exactly that, in as calm a manner as I could have or better. So, looking around to see a light crowd already forming, I figured it was best to leave rather than further congest the scene. However, there was one dude, who was hellbent on involving himself. He had long hair, sandals, and a loose backpack, and he was throwing himself at cars on the insistence that traffic in the area needed to stop. He even tried chasing one down the road in those dorky-ass sandals to get his point across.

Moral of the story: If there’s no meaningful way you can contribute to the resolution of a situation, then the best thing you can do is not get in the way. But whatever you do, don’t be that guy.

Well, a couple of months ago, I mean a new Guy.

We were in Texas visiting my fiancee’s parents, and one of our days there was spent going to her cousin’s college basketball game. Now, I’d been to basketball games before – heck I’d been in a couple – but they had all been high school level or lower. I didn’t really see any reason why a collegiate basketball game would be any different.

Boy howdy, was I ever wrong, sorta.

It was a home game for Amanda’s cousin, and as the visiting team is getting introduced, it’s a pretty ho-hum affair. “Introducing first, Point Guard for the Wherever They’re From Raptors or Something, #5, Jimmy What’s-his-Butt.” You got a weak smattering of applause from what sparse crowd there was, and this repeated for the other four starting players. But when they started introducing the Home team…

Damn.

The lights when down, spotlights began tracing the arena, music blared, and the announcer turned their mic way the hell up. It was like we got teleported straight to the middle of an NBA scrimmage game or something, and the announcer’s bias was…well, he wasn’t hiding it.

“Now, welcome to the court – he’s lean, he’s mean, he’s a divine blend of American steel and sex appeal, hung like a horse and has got a bright future – your Point Guard of the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor Cruuuuusaaaaadeeeers, #11! Johnny “God-Given” Griffin!!”

It was nuts.

The game was pretty great, too. Fast, competitive. A fun affair all around.

But the whole time the teams battled back and forth, I couldn’t help notice one guy. He was a spectator like us, older, and was sitting courtside beside one of the hoops in a fold-out chair with a straight posture and his arms crossed in front of him the whole time. He must have been someone’s grandpa or coach or something. Maybe he had a lot of money riding on the game, I don’t know, but he was less watching the game for fun and more examining the game with the intensity of a diving eagle.

Good thing he was, too, because while the offense was on his side of the court, a pass went wide and rocketed his way. And when I say “rocketed”, I do mean that this basketball crossed space with the speed of a bullet, and it flew straight at Coach Intense Eagle Grandpa.

This guy…doesn’t even flinch.

And he probably does kung fu.

This basketball flies at his face with enough speed to challenge the sound barrier, and in the half-moment it takes for the ball to reach him, his hands are out in front of him catching it a few inches from his nose. It was like when the hero in a cheesy martial arts movie catches the sword between their palms. It was rad. He does this, holds it for a quarter-second, and bounce passes it back onto the court like nothing happened.

THAT’S the guy you want on your team, giving you advice, or setting an example when the shit hits the fan. When a situation arises, don’t be a Loose Backpack. Be an Eagle Grandpa.

Don’t Buy Your Adult Kid a Sex Toy

Gonna say at the top of this one that the following tale from my life bears plenty of funny inferences about graphic, adult themes and, in light of those, a significant risk of oversharing on my part. So, I guess what I mean to say is that if you find yourself squeamish about feces in any form, discussions about self-pleasure, awkward encounters with one’s mother (don’t read to far into that one), or other pulpy topics that shake the buckles off a Puritan’s shoes…

Maybe skip this one.

But if what you’re looking for is an NSFW-lite story of all the above elements and more, well then, saddle up, Buttercup.

Now, where to start…?

Really, it’s a story of two parts, so let’s start where most trauma bgins and take a brief trip into my childhood.

My mom is the coolest person on the planet in the best way, that being that she doesn’t try to be cool, she’s just naturally great. That said, there was a hiccup period when I was a teenager where she went a bit out of her way to be The Cool Mom.

What does a stereotypical teenage boy’s room look like? Probably has a bit of mess, a guitar or skateboard leaned against the corner, and posters of swimsuit models on the walls, yeah? If ever we wondered where the hypothetical teenage boy in the given model got these sexy posters from, I can tell you: single mothers making an effort to be The Cool Mom.

And it wasnt just that she got them for me, she also bragged about doing so to my friends (and girlfriends) who came over. “Yeah, you know who got him those?” she would ask. “I did. And it’s, heh, hey man. Whatever, you know? I’m cool.”

A touch awkward, you say? I agree, but I was fifteen with tasteful boobs n’ butts on my wall. I wasn’t going to argue.

Now, let’s fast-forward a few years to Christmas of 2011. I’m eighteen now, have a job, have a car, taking college classes, but do still have those posters up. It’s Christmas morning, and momand I are exchanging fits. In addition to her myriad talents, mom’s an awesome gift giver. And part of that is in how she would disguise said gift in its packaging. Once, as a kid, she got me a Game Boy Advance game (which weighs about 0.0002 oz) put it in a box the size of a small dog, and weighed it down with four jugs of vegetable stock. Suffice to say, I was well surprised – the box sloshed! But part of the genius is that other times, she wouldn’t disguise something at all, just wrap it messily in paper to keep you on your toes. Is this disguised to look like something else, or is it exactly what it looks like? I dunno! Part of the fun!

Anyway, Christmas. 2011. Job. Gifts.

So we’re exchanging presents, and she grabs one in particular from under the tree with a knowing, mischieveous grin. A thing about mom’s humor: it’s not terribly sophisticated. Loud farts, poop jokes, people getting hit in the balls, and plain idiocy are all guaranteed hitters. I say all this as context for my concern when, as she hands me this…object, she says, “Heehee, I think you’re gonna have some fun with this one.”

The object in question was shaped like a cylinder, about eight inches long, narrowing slightly toward one end while being soft and squishy on the other, about as wide around as an adult fist.

Does…?

Is there anything that maybe…?

Do those dimensions remind anyone else of something like-

Okay. Yes. I was terrified in that moment just thinking, “Oh my God, don’t be a Fleshlight. Christ Almighty don’t be a Fleshlight. Just, Jesus please God don’t be a Fleshlight.”

And back me up, you can understand my logic, right? I’ve never owned one, but dammit if it didn’t look like the pictures. And that would be the escalation of the swimsuit poster principle. It’s what you’re supposed to do at eighteen in the States: buy a cigar, a lottery ticket or scratcher, and some pornography, all because you can now. You’re an adult in the law’s eyes. Flex your newfound power. Hoorah!

So it was while these thoughts raced in my mind and I broke out in a cold sweat that I shakily unwrapped my gift…

It was a thermos.

It was a plastic coffee cup with a lid. It was colored a light brown with white lettering that read, “Coffee Makes Me Poop!”

Mom bursts out in proud laughter at her own gag gift, and I loudly match with laughter that’s laced in profound relief. I just stare at it, eternally grateful that I ended up in the Good Timeline where my mother DIDN’T buy me a sex toy. Because that sh*t would change you as a person.

Anyway, a couple of years on, I’m still using the cup on a regular basis. I’m 22 now, my birthday having been maybe a week or two prior, and I’m at work during a standard morning meeting. We’re going over the day’s expectations and such when my manager looks over at me and, in front of the whole group goes, “You’re rocking a bit of a theme today, eh Evan?”

At first I raise my eyebrow, but then quickly see what he’s talking about.

I like to keep my birthdays pretty low-key, something I learned from my uncle. One year after his birthday I asked him what he got up to, and he said, “Oh, slept in a little bit. Then I tidied up the house, took myself out to lunch, got a haircut, and went a saw a movie. Nothing crazy.” And it was simple, but wow did that ever become my model for the perfect birthday.

So that week prior when I turned 22, I did damned near the same thing, but also went to a flea market that was going on a town over and picked up a few quirky things for really cheap, one item being the shirt I was wearing in this morning meeting during the call-out.

It was black with white lettering and a stick figure that was holding its arms up in celebration. It read, “I Pooped Today!”

I look at my shirt, then to my coffee cup, and realize my mistake. So I grabbed a piece of masking tape, put it over the “Poop!” part of “Coffee Makes Me Poop!” on my cup, and scribbled in marker “Smile!” instead. It was great. It cleaned up the message, but if you looked carefully through the tape you could still read the Poop! part of the cup, and there was this funny anecdote out of it now.

So, there you have it. A true coming-of-age tale with feces, sex toys, and light workplace scandals.

I Don’t Get Sick Anymore

Alright, as of a couple weeks ago, the title isn’t exactly, totally true anymore, but the spirit of the statement remains. I turned 29 back in August, and in preparation for meeting my thirties, I took a step towards taking better care of myself. Not to say that I trash my mortal coil, or that it was the beginning of a great big health kick, but I did seek out and start taking once-daily multivitamins.

And much to the amusement (or dismay) of my friends and coworkers, I haven’t shut up about it since.

You’re feeling a little slow and sluggish? Want to try a once-daily multivitamin by Nature Made?

You got the sniffles? How about a once-daily?

You sprained your ankle after falling off your mountain bike yesterday? Have you heard of Nature Made once-daily multi- you get it.

Also, to be clear, I’m not talking about the gummies or chewables. I’m talkin’ the big honkin’ horse pills that have edges and taste like grass if you don’t get them down quickly enough. It’s how you know it’s medicine that works. Anything else is just candy and it’s cheating.

And while it certainly just sounds like a joke, I’ve been pretty serious about it. Since taking them on a mostly-regular basis, I made it through Cold Season, Flu Season, and the general Winter Blues all virtually unscathed. Not chalking it up to luck, either. I was surrounded by sickies, and I could very much feel when my body was fighting something off, it’s just that every defense my body mounted was super successful.

In fact, that little disclaimer up at the top about being sick a few weeks ago only further cements my confidence in my Nature Made multivitamin theory. I spent a weekend drinking with friends, not sleeping a wink, and skipping my vitamins – boom, sick. I start taking them again the next day – bam, sickness clears up with a quickness.

Now, all of this certainly has the bones of an advertisement, but it isn’t.

Yet.

I’ve been so chatty at work about this miracle pill that is a simple multivitamin, that the idea sprouted to pursue a sponsorship from the vitamin company, and I currently have a background bet going with a coworker which gives me pretty serious bragging rights if I ever show up with confirmation of said sponsorship.

Fun fact: I have a Twitter account that I’ve used maybe two or three times ever, but one of those times was to tweet at Nicolas Cage asking him to send me five dollars for all of the word-of-mouth advertising I did for his movie “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent”. I told him I would frame the five dollar bill to use as a conversation starter at dinner parties, but he never got back to me.

But as they say, “If you fail, try, try again.”

I think 2023’s my year. When I’m feeling confident, I’m probably going to start taking proper confessionals from those around me about all the preaching I’ve been doing and how it’s affected their lives, then sending that to Nature Made to see about a sponsorship. And I don’t need anything huge, this is for bragging rights remember, but it does need to be official. So just $1 and a certificate will do the job.

Failing even that, though, I have a contingency.

This coworker and I agreed that even if I can’t snag a proper sponsorship, if I get an official Cease & Desist from Nature Made for how much I start harrassing them in my pursuit of one, that will count for similar street cred. Maybe even more.

In the end, all I want to say, really, is this: Take your vitamins, mind your health, chewables are for cheaters, and if you eventually see an affiliate link to Nature Made products on this blog, please bear in mind proudly how much I had to annoy their company to make that a reality.

Ciao for now, y’all.

Belated Happy New Year

Woof. It’s been a second, huh?

The past twenty days have been a conflicting bunch. I’ve spouted for years that my two favorite holidays, as a devoted contrarian to the Christmas Crowd, are Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, in that order. And I think it’s in no small part, if I check the depths of my soul, because they’re holidays that most folks kind of hate.

With Thanksgiving, people dislike needing to get dressed up in their starched Sunday Best for the sole purpose of eating a dry bird and navigating a fight with their uncle over politics; and a lot of folks seem to like making fun of New Year’s for the resolution aspect, pointing out folks running or going to the gym and preaching about how the commitment will only last a couple of weeks.

Well, I say poo-on-you to both of those opinions. Thanksgiving is great (genocide notwithstanding) for the simple fact that it’s a holiday boiled down to its base and most important aspects: togetherness and feasting. Boom. It’s a classic combination, and you don’t mess with a classic. Of course here in the States, I observe the irony that Thanksgiving, a holiday meant for appreciating what we already have, comes mere hours before Black Friday, an annual excuse for the public to stampede over strangers for a deal on a television they never needed.

And if you’re going to crap on someone’s resolutions, wafer-thin commitment or not, I say you’re just projecting your own fear of failure. Allow yourself the wiggle room to try something new, the opportunity to fail, the exercise of discipline and see what comes of it. Sheesh.

Anyway, my 2022 holiday season was great. Halloween saw an awesome house party take place, and Thanksgiving and Christmas both were terrifically cozy, intimate, and memorable affairs, they way they ought to be done, in my opinion. But New Year’s…

2023 ain’t that great yet.

I know this is way too easy to say in retrospect if I didn’t record myself for posterity’s sake, but when all the “2023 is going to be my year, I can feel it” talk started going around a few months ago, I won’t lie, my gut reaction was a little, “I don’t know…kinda feeling 2024 is really going to be what’s better.” And so far, I haven’t been wrong.

I woke up on the 1st of January with a monstrous cramp in my back, and it took me almost two weeks for it to get right. I’m sort of a caveman when it comes to self-care, meaning my first line of defense when it comes to fixing health problems is to just isolate in a cave until the problem goes away. Worked great for the pandemic, not so much for dental issues, vision problems, a hernia, this back thing, etc.

My usual New Year’s tradition is to buy a calendar and start off on some of the resolutions I’ve written, but hot damn have I not been able to giddy-up for much anything yet. Here in California it’s been raining heaps, which further incentivized that “hole up in a cave” tactic, but lot of good that does when the muscles in your back feel like someone mistook you for Dracula and rammed a stake through your chest.

What the time inside did afford us here in the Davis household was some TV time (just what we need), and we finally checked out the Wednesday Addams Family series on Netflix. It was good. Didn’t love it, maybe, but liked it a lot. For some reason, my main takeaway was the episode featuring Wednesday’s birthday, and she refers to birthdays as “another year closer to the yawning oblivion of death” or something. For some reason, I set aside my usual curmudgeonly old man pants and fought that sentiment.

As opposed to another year closer to the grave, I thought, I like to think of each new year as another collection of memoires to cherish when I’m old – if I get old, you never know. Even the bad stuff, the struggles, the loss, you wind up thinking back on those times when you’re past them as notches in your belt, things you overcame or survived, things that added to your story; and I think that’s increasingly important to hold onto, as sentiments go.

Something else I’ve tried in the numbing excitement that’s been my life since last writing was that I tried out Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

For the uninitiated, Kingdom Come is a roleplaying video game that places you in the role of Hal, a peasant boy in 1405 Bohemia. And you know what I’ve found?

I suck at life as a peasant boy in 1405 Bohemia.

In the tutorial town alone, I was: beaten up, berated, covered in shit, and killed, mostly in that order. In the TUTORIAL. I eventually started it up again after some time away, hoping to gain some new ground after learning from my failures, only to find that I can add “ability to eat correctly” to my list of failures. When I wasn’t starving, I was apparently making my character overeat to the point of dizziness.

Dude, f*ck life in medieval Europe. That sucked.

Like, I applaud the game’s commitment to realism or whatever, but dang that was rough.

Anyway, back-ish into the swing of things here, and life is truly good enough that the complaining I do is just for fun. I’m currently taking part in NYC Midnight’s Microfiction Challenge 2022, and while I’m sure my second round submission has a good chance of flopping, I did come in 1st place in my heat in round one. So that was cool. Otherwise, I have some stuff coming out later this month I should probably announce on the day of…so I will, I guess. (I’m not even trying to be funny, the words you just read was my train of thought as it happened. Just felt like being honest with you.)

Ciao, beautiful people.

Epic Dreams of Dirt (+ Announcement)

I eat a lot of hot sauce. I used to put it on everything and get the really spicy ones so that I could be that guy, but I’ve calmed it down a little in recent years. I also used to specifically eat something spicy right before bed, because I noticed doing so gave me really vivid, really strange and surreal dreams.

Now I’ve stopped doing that entirely, but I guess I conditioned my brain enough to think it’s alright to give me strange dreams most nights. One such was just the other night…

Oh! I should put here that I’ve been playing a lot of Deep Rock Galactic recently, and I only say that because it’ll soon become obvious the ways that game influenced the dream. (If you haven’t heard of it and you don’t feel like following the link, in short, it’s a game where you play as a space dwarf mining crystals and minerals out of a giant asteroid-planet-thing.)

Anyway, the other night…

Like most dreams, I don’t remember how I got to the start, but I knew I was being hunted by the Italian mafia. Somehow, at the beginning of the dream, that meant I GUESS that I was in a motel outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico while on the run from them. Of course, one of their hitmen finds me and I’m sure you can guess who it is.

That’s right, Danny Trejo.

So Danny Trejo shows up going full Machete on me, showering the motel in bullets while I run, duck, and dodge behind cover.

^In case you wondered, this is what “going full Machete” looks like.
It’s a fun movie.

Eventually, he runs out of ammo and hops in an old car, trying to run me down. Now my memory gets kind of spotty around this point in the story, but the end point is that I successfully kill him in self-defense. (I think I trick him into crashing the car, or something. Let’s just assume it was something clever.)

That dramatic scene winds up placing me in Witness Protection. I remember they handed me a special form to fill out for, like, my preferences of what kind of Witness Protection I would prefer, and in the special comments section I just wrote “No Italians, please.” Which is several shades of stupid, but made sense in the moment since I was on the run from the Italian mafia.

It doesn’t wind up working.

So Witness Protection places me in a sort of special boarding house that looks like an old Victorian manor out in New England. (Heh, I just noticed the dream keeps taking place in “New” places. New Mexico to New England. Weird.) The boarding house is run by a kindly old woman with red hair and she shows me to my room toward the back of the manor. My paranoia sets in, and on one of the first nights, I remove a couple panels from the floor and I start digging.

The logic at work is that I’m going to construct a series of tunnels to really live in, or at least have as a getaway in case the mob ever finds me. I think I distantly remember reading about or hearing about an either Roman or Chinese emperor who did the same thing with their palace, filling it with a hundred rooms and sleeping in a different one every night to confuse would-be assassins.

Which is basically what I did.

I dug a whole bunch of tunnels into the ground beneath the mansion, and I filled those tunnels with a bunch of dummy routes, dead ends, tunnels that looped back in on themselves. I dug enough dirt to last eleven lifetimes to make sure the mob would never find me.

Along the way, I met another resident of the house, a young girl named Alyssa, who found my series of tunnels and asked to help me dig more because she thought it was cool. At first I said no, wary of outsiders and not wanting to share my masterpiece with another, but ultimately relented.

I also found this awesome, green, furry mole-ferret creature while digging. I never really thought of a name for him, but he was adorable, helped me dig, and loved to snuggle while making this soft purring noise. He was great.

At this point, there’s a bit of a time skip, or a fast-forwarding. I met Alyssa, found my giant ferret creature, at one point we struck ground water and essentially dug out a massive underground grotto or lake. We brought in bamboo from the Overworld (just the regular world, but we’d become underground people) to build scaffolding and walking pathways around this body of water. It was a good time.

But nothing good lasts forever.

One day while I’m hanging out on the big wrap-around porch of the house, I see a car with tinted windows drive slowly by. The window rolls down and a bald man with a scar on his cheek stares me down for a moment, before rolling the window back up and driving away. (No idea why, but I name him Spencer.

My God. I’ve been found.

I have a discussion with the headmaster lady of the house, and she gives me a sort of “Ah, alas. I feared this day would come” sort of monologue, and says she’ll prep the house for battle – or something of the sort. Eventually, it falls to dusk, and a train of twelve cars pulls up in front of the place. Out of each one, a uniquely dressed, themed, and deadly hitman steps out with an intent to kill. They charge the house, and I kung-fu fight with about four or five of them around the house, killing or incapacitating them mightily before I begin to tire and worry for the worse. All around the house, the headmaster lady and other residents are doing their own righteous battle with these (apparently still supposed to be Italian mafia) hitmen.

I’m wounded, and the headmaster lady tells me to fall back, and that they have it from here. So I do, and retreat into my tunnel system. While down there, Alyssa finds me and tells me that our ferret isn’t doing so good, she thinks he’s sick. So I pick up the little guy, he purrs against my chest and neck while I carry him down one of the tunnels, across our underground lake (taking up the bamboo walkways behind us), and into the deepest tunnel that is my Sanctuary. For extra security, I lay a couple of satchel charges in the dirt (which I apparently have) and lie in wait with my ferret creature.

The End

I woke up at that point, but I assume that Spencer the Hitman followed my trail down the tunnels and would have fallen upon me and my ferret, but got blown up by my booby traps. That’s my head canon and I’m sticking to it.

Anyway, if you’ve stuck with it this far or just skipped down until you saw “The End”, either way: The News!

I’ve stopped announcing these sorts of things with any regularity, both because life is busy and because I’m not sure who’s listening with bated breath on this, my tiny, eensy weensy slice of the internet, but we’ve got another publication in the books! (lol Pun.)

Flame Tree Publishing is coming out with their Gothic Fantasy ‘Alternate History’ anthology early next year and are including a reprint of one of my first ever stories, “The Sixth-Gun Conspiracy Letters”, wherein we learn the tragic, twisted truth behind the cloak-and-dagger game which shadowed the American Civil War and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

It’s an oldie, but a goodie, and I’m extra stoked about this one because Flame Tree is based out of London, UK, which means ya boi has gone international! And I think that’s worth a nod. -cheers- (<– the polite gesture at a dinner party, not a crowd erupting with applause)

Anyhoo, that’s all for now. Thanks for sticking around. Ciao, everybody.