October 2010 Archives

Carl was quieter now from his end of the bar. Though his heart undoubtedly still ached for his beloved Marlo Thomas, he wouldn't risk getting cut off.  The prospect of sobering up up must fill a man like Carl with dread, so the only noise he made was a low hum like a dial tone punctuated with the occasional tearful sniffle.

Henry had picked up his towel and glass, and started his cleaning routine.  He seemed to be concentrating on one area, some smudge or water stain visible only to him. 

"Any retards in your family, Dave?" he asked.

"No, but a lot of them sure act like it."

I laughed.  Henry didn't.  I was hoping a little levity would speed this process along.  He would tell me about some cousin or niece of his who could recite Dr. Seuss books verbatim or had sculpted Barney the Dinosaur out of a lump of shit.  I would say how wonderful that was and then steer the conversation toward Henry's cop past.  Something told me it wasn't going to be that way and that I was going to get an earful.

"My grandfather was retarded," he went on.  "He was also the greatest man I ever knew.  Of course, when I was a kid I didn't used to see him that way.  Back then, he was just Grandpa 'Tard.  When we used to go visit, I would laugh at him for opening the cereal box from the bottom and spilling Cheerios all over the kitchen table.  I stopped doing that the day my grandmother hit me upside the head and told me to show some respect.  My grandmother had a huge hand to slap you with, big enough to palm a Thanksgiving turkey.  Anyway, that was the day I found out that my retarded grandfather was a war hero."

"Really?" I asked.

"Yeah, the Big One.  He stormed the beaches of Normandy and by the time the war was over, he had been through Operation Market Garden, the Battle of the Bulge, and earned himself a Purple Heart."

"OK, now I understand," I said. "There was brain damage from his war wound."

"Oh hell no," Henry said.  "Grandpa was shot in the ass.  No, he was retarded from the day he was born.  People used to say the stork dropped him a few times on the way over.  They didn't say it in front of Grandma though, not unless they wanted to get smacked by that big old hand of hers."

"No offense, but I didn't know the Army took people with a serious mental handicap," I said.

"There was a war on, so I guess they were a little more lax then.  Maybe they had a whole different kind of 'don't ask; don't tell' going on at the time, or maybe he just put one over on those Army recruiters.  'He wore a hat and he had a job and he brought home the bacon so no one knew,' just like the song goes.  Grandpa could be very resourceful despite being retarded and all."

"Wow," I said.  "That's really amazing.  May I have another bourbon?"

"Water back?"

"Please."

Henry put the pristine glass and bar towel down, then picked up my empty tumbler and water glass.  I pulled four more dollar bills from my wallet.  When Henry returned, there was twice as much bourbon in my glass as last time.

"This one's on me."

I put another dollar on the bar and stuffed the other three in my shirt pocket.  Henry went down to the end of the bar, poured some more brandy in Carl's glass, gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder, and returned.  He picked up his towel and glass again and commenced giving the rim a good wipe.

"So where was I?" he asked.

"Your grandfather's enlistment."

"Ah yes.  Grandpa had a lot of trouble getting through basic training even though he tried harder than anybody.  Physically, there was no problem.  Grandpa may be have been pushing 40 when he enlisted, but working on the killing floor at his uncle's slaughterhouse since the age of five toughened him up for pretty much anything they could throw at him.  It was the retardation.  I remember how reading and simple arithmetic used to enrage him.  He almost flunked out of basic.  Fortunately, the army had a special, slower-paced program for people who grew up in Mississippi.  Once my grandfather got transferred into that one, he did just fine and was the first one off his boat on D-Day.  You remind me of him in a way."

"I do?"

"Sure, Grandpa was creative too, always making stuff.  There's one of his creations over there," and motioned with his head toward a framed picture next to the cash register. 

It was an old black-and-white photograph of a snowman in the woods.  I never paid much attention to it before.  Upon closer inspection, I could see that the trees looked like they had been blown apart by artillery fire and that the snowman was wearing a Hitler mustache.

"Bastogne," he said. 

Henry stopped wiping the glass, folded the towel, and put them both down on the bar.  It looked like he ran out of things so say, or at least ran out of steam.  It was time to change the subject.  His grandfather must have been a real inspiration to any retard who had ever lusted for battle, but I had heard about enough. I tried what I thought was a clever segue to move the topic to Henry Silt, police officer.

"I bet knowing what obstacles your grandfather had to overcome really came in handy during your tougher days on the force," I said.

"Indeed it did," said Henry.  "A lot of people don't know this but most criminals are retarded, or at least borderline cases.  I know their challenges and how their frustrations can lead them to break the law.  Drunks are retarded too, at least while they're still drunk.  Just look at poor Carl over there.  But knowing what I know, I have never had to reach for that baseball bat because I know how to talk to people.  And in the 20 years that I was a police officer, I never once had to draw my gun for exactly the same reason."

This was not the sort of cop story that I wanted to write.

"Not every cop was like me," he continued.  "How could they be? And the results were often tragic.  Cop plus retard plus misunderstanding equals senseless killing."

And right there, Henry Silt gave me my story premise on a plate.  It was going to be intense, violent, moving, and full of gritty realism.  I could not wait to get started.

Down at the end of the bar, Carl got it into his head that quiet time was over.

"Fuck you Troy Donahue!" he yelled.

"It's Phil," said Henry. "Not Troy.  She married Phil Donahue and if you can't keep quiet, I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

I pulled my spiral notebook from my backpack and put it on the bar.  Drawing a pen from my jacket pocket, I began to write:

It was a dark and stormy night at the donut shop...

I was glad to be outside.  I stopped briefly at the front door to observe two Huey Lewis aficionados engaged in a game of rock-paper-scissors, perhaps to decide who was next to sing.  The owner of the clenched-fist rock smiled with satisfaction at the two fingers scissors guy, who was not pleased.

"Scissors chip rock," I said and walked away, leaving the two to debate my interpretation of the rules between them.

The wind had picked up somewhat while I had been indoors and a light rain had begun to fall.  I liked how the sparse cool drops felt against my face and was looking forward to a real downpour once I was safely indoors.  As much as I liked it when city streets took a beating from the elements, I could not help but think about how the weather effected the homeless who had no place to go.

There was one such unfortunate soul up at the next corner.  He was sitting cross-legged wearing a Hefty Bag fashioned into a poncho, the ink on his cardboard sign already starting to run.  Here was a man who looked truly needy so I crossed to the other side of the street to avoid him.

Panhandlers are annoying enough under any circumstances.  The way they ask for money, it's as if I'm personally responsible for their poverty.  When the raindrops start to fall, they kick it up a notch and give me attitude like the bad weather is my fault as well.  Do I really need to tell these people that even if I am charitable and give, it's still up to them at the end of the day? That if they ever wish to better their lives, they need to lay off the booze and be willing to work any job regardless if they feel it's beneath them?  I resented the unfairness of the world for making me feel compelled to say these things when a simple "fuck off" should suffice.

Meanwhile, evidence of my own failure in life sat in my backpack.  Or rather, it didn't.  I might be better off giving up and never writing that story if it weren't for how much I'd hyped it, mostly to myself.  Much of the power of this literary vaporware lay in the fact that it had never been written.  Stories I've actually completed have visible flaws and are probably unpublishable nowhere other than my blog, but this is not the case when a creative work has no substance to tarnish its promise.

I hoped to get some writing done at Henry's bar.  No, I didn't believe that liquor would improve my skills as an author, though it can seem like it does at the time.  It was the proprietor, Henry Silt, who would.  I walked the rest of the way in the drizzle and went inside.

Henry was a retired cop so I was confident that if I could get him talking about his days on the force, his anecdotes could put some meat on the bones on my story.  He ran his business with a concise if old-fashioned vision of what a bar should be.  There was the obligatory neon sign of a martini glass out front even thought most of the clientele drank whiskey or beer, or perhaps wine out of a box for the ladies.  Unlike a lot of bars in the city, there was no art on the walls, just wood paneling and beer posters with patriotic bikini babes sporting Old Glory camel toe.

Henry's never had a deejay.  If people wanted music they could pick a song on the jukebox that featured such 70s luminaries as Supertramp, Kansas, and the Captain and Tennille. 

Nor was there a need for video cameras as a deterrent against misbehavior.  Order was maintained by a baseball bat kept behind the bar and a proprietor who brooked no bullshit.  People hardly ever got out of line and nobody did it more than once. This is not to say that Henry was not a nice guy, far from it.  As long as you managed to stay out of people's faces and keep your head off the bar, he was a real sweetheart.

Henry was wearing his usual getup, a white dress shirt and a black vest.  It was what you saw bartenders wear on old TV shows, back in the days of ashtrays, cigarette smoke, and pickled eggs in a jar.  Henry was no longer a policeman but it was his nature to always be a man in uniform.

I took a seat on a barstool in front of Henry, who was cleaning a glass with a towel.  As far as I could tell it was always the same glass and he never used it to pour a drink.  It was the cleanest glass in the place, too clean for the likes of us.

I ordered a well bourbon straight up with a water back.  Henry brought them and I laid four dollar bills on the bar, three for the drink and a buck for tip.  He scooped up the money, rapped his knuckles on the bar, and went back to the register.

"Slow night," I said as he was ringing up the sale.

"Yeah, so far," he said.  "It may pick up."

That was possible.  At the moment though, the only other customer was a regular named Carl.  I once made the mistake of making conversation with him.  He told me he lost his wife.  I never found out if he meant that she died or left him, a point that became moot when he showed me a picture of her.  His "wife" turned out to be Marlo Thomas, the photograph cut out from an old magazine.  Business might pick up later but it was a safe bet the barstools on either side of Carl wouldn't stay occupied for long.

"So how's the night treating you?" asked Henry.

"Eh, all right," I said.  "I had hoped to get some pizza at the Chuck E. Cheese down the street but they had some sort of special-ed karaoke thing going on, which is fine but not my scene."

"You don't like retarded people much, do you Dave?"

"I like them about as much as I like anybody," I said.

"Fair enough," said Henry.  "But you probably think the retarded life is easy street, kind of like going cradle to grave on 'Romper Room.'  A lot of people do, but it ain't like that.  Ordinarily, I wouldn't say anything.  I make it my policy to let people believe what they want, but I know you're a writer so you're all up in that human-condition shit.  Do you want to know the real deal?"

Down at the other end of the bar, Carl slammed his drink glass down, shouted "Marlo, you bitch!" and started sobbing with his head in his hands.

"Quiet down, Carl," said.  "We're trying to have a conversation over here.  So how about it, Dave?"

"Yeah," I said.  "I'd like to know."

Night fell and the fog hung thick and still on the city streets.  It was as if the cold Pacific wind could not go on after its ocean journey and had chosen this place to die.  The heavy mist muffled all sound, so the honking horns, wailing sirens, and screaming homeless schizophrenics of city life all seemed fainter, farther away.

I walked along a dimly lit backstreet with broken bottles in the gutters and the odd mattress tossed onto the sidewalk.  I turned the collar of my jacket up, as much to hide my face from a world I loathed as from the damp chill in the air.  If I had been wearing a fedora, I would have pulled the brim down until it was resting on the bridge of my nose.  If I'd smoked, I would have puffed away to keep my features obscured in a cloud of nicotine exhaust.  Yeah, I was having that kind of night.

My mood would have been better if I'd finished my latest fiction project, or started it for that matter.  All I had to show for my efforts was a single page in the spiral notebook in my backpack, with half a dozen story titles crossed out.  I hadn't even decided on the name of a single character.  All I had was the general idea for the story.  It was going to be about two cops who had to confront their inner demons as well as the criminal underworld.  I'd planned on clean, crisp prose that held true to the practice of showing and not telling.  It was going to be my best work yet if I could ever get around to writing the thing.

I decided to put the matter out of my mind and headed off toward Chuck E. Cheese, which was only a few blocks away.  A lot of people don't like the place, snobs mostly.  They would rather go to one of those authentic Italian pizzerias, the kind where both the men and women working there look like Vic Tayback.  I prefer the sound of arcade games, the animatronic vaudeville, and every pizza pie made in strict compliance with corporate standards.

Hawaiian was the way to go, just a slice or two, rather than the entire pie of that variety I ritually consume each December 7th to honor the brave Americans killed at Pearl Harbor.  Even one slice would be enough to whisk my mind away from these dreary urban climes to a tropical paradise, a land where all beverages are drunk from coconut shells and there is a miniature hula girl dancing on every dashboard.  In a few short minutes, I'd be making my purchase and thanking the pimply cashier with a heartfelt Mahalo.

I turned the corner onto the street where my local Chuck E. Cheese was located, about a block away between a massage parlor and a methadone clinic.  The eponymous cap-wearing rodent on the brightly lit sign welcomed visitors to what was advertised as a place  "where a kid can be kid."  I was glad it was past 9 pm because that was exactly the kind of situation I wanted to avoid.  I never much liked children and didn't know which was worse, their nonstop entitled cacophony or the dirty looks their parents would give me whenever I told the little bastards to go fuck themselves.

When I walked through the front door of Chuck E Cheese, it was more like a nightclub than a pizza parlor inside.  The lights were dimmed and there were a number of people milling around in the dark.  Mercifully, none of them appeared to be child-sized.  Music started playing in the back room and when I was trying to figure out what song it was, some guy straight-armed me between the shoulder blades while shouting "Excyooze meee!"

I spun around and had every intention of punching him out if he were smaller and weaker than I was.  He was likely both, but since he clearly had Down syndrome it would have been considered poor form to clock him one.  I was still trying to make sense of the "HUEY RAWKS!" emblazoned across the front of his tee shirt when he elbowed past me and started making his way toward the back.

By now, there was no doubt in my mind what song was playing.  It was "Workin for a Livin" by Huey Lewis and the News.  It was one of his earlier songs, off his second album I believe.  At the time, it was almost considered sort of new wave in an AM radio sort of way.

When I followed the bonus-chromosomed man back, I saw a makeshift stage and a hand-painted banner that read:

DEVELOPMENTALLY DELAYED KARAOKE NITE @ DA CHEEZ!!!

ALL HUEY LEWIS, ALL NITE LONG

YEAH!!!

So that was it then.  The speds had taken over.  So much for enjoying my slice of Hawaiian in peace.

The singer who got up on stage was a youngish woman with a mousie-brown Cleopatra haircut.  She stood about five-foot nothing and had a girlish figure that was equal parts Tweedledum and Tweedledee.  There was a video screen displaying the lyrics to the song but she either could not read them or she just decided to improvise.

"I take a lot of ribbin' 'cause I'm workin' for a gibbon," she sang.

Some in the crowd loudly cheered her on while others silently rocked back and forth, either to the beat of the music or to their own internal metronome.   Nobody seemed to care whether she was singing the right words or not.

And why should they, I thought as a deep-seated ugly bitterness overtook me and forced my lip into a sneer.  What did they know about working for a living, struggling day to day where the victor gets the spoils.  Their Olympics was not about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, it was about winning a medal even if you ran the wrong way down the track when the starting pistol fired.

I wisely chose to keep my contempt to myself.  I was outnumbered.  Sure, the Downsers and thyroid dwarfs wouldn't put up much of a fight if the scene turned violent.  However, the hulking man-child contingent was also there, real Mice and Men Lenny brutes who are real sweethearts unless you're foolish enough to make them think you're not nice.  I had no desire to be clubbed over the head with my arm after it had been ripped from its socket.

The song ended and the singer took a moment to bow and wave to the crowd as they thunderously applauded before she left the stage.  There was a new singer, the guy who had jostled me, and a new song, "I Want a New Drug."

A new drug.  That was an excellent idea.  The intoxicating effects of music, particularly this Huey Lewis karaoke, just wasn't doing it for me.  I turned and made my way to the exit.  There was a bar a few blocks away.  It was a real dive, perfect for man who had a hankering for a cheap well bourbon, served neat, maybe with a hair in it.

When I opened my desk drawer at work yesterday, I noticed that someone had put a box of tampons there.  There were 16 of the 18 remaining.  Who put them there, and why?

Since there were a couple of tampons missing, I began with the assumption that whoever put them there planted them as a stash for personal use.  If this was the case, I could safely eliminate all male coworkers from my suspect list.  The same logic could be used to eliminate all the more venerable female ones as well, especially the few whose blue-rinse cooters haven't shed a drop of blood since Hinckley shot Reagan.

Unfortunately, this did not even come close to eliminating the possibilities to a select few.  My workplace is pretty large, relatively young, and women make up at least half of it.  Even if it did not run afoul of both the sexual-harassment policy and common courtesy, it simply would not be feasible for me to confront and accuse each potential tampon-box planter individually.

As if the question of who wasn't perplexing enough, figuring out why seemed absolutely mind boggling.  We all have desk drawers.  Why would a woman choose to store her feminine-hygiene products in my cube rather than her own?  Naturally, I smelled a conspiracy.

One only has to look through my extensive secret file that is no doubt being amassed in the basement of some quasi-legal shadow-government agency somewhere.  "It is hard to imagine how someone who is so chronically inappropriate with the basest of sensibilities and immaturity run riot has neither been incarcerated or beaten to death by decent people.  It is our recommendation that Jennings be tempted to perform some loathsome act for which he shall be apprehended and severely punished."

In light of this, the motivation behind this becomes pretty clear.  The person or persons responsible placed the tampons in my cube in the hope that I would be caught on video taking one one of them out of its wrapper and putting it in the office coffee pot.  You know what?  I would have done it in a heartbeat too if I had not been onto their little game.

These sorts of dirty tricks by the Global Managers are nothing new.  One need only look at the tragic case of Phineas Gage.  Gage was a railroad employee in the mid-nineteenth century.  By all accounts, he was both a conscientious worker and a virtuous person.  All accounts, that is, until his "accident."  In 1848 while working as a crew foreman in Vermont, Gage was in the vicinity of some dynamite that "just happened to go off" and launch a three and a half foot tamping iron up through his jaw and out the top of his head.

It is my guess that he learned something he shouldn't have and because he was a good American, said he would go public.  Among the railroad robber barons, only locomotives were allowed to do any whistle blowing.

The injury changed Phineas Gage forever.  The once solid citizen had been transformed into a violent and lecherous alcoholic.  Even if he made good on his threat to tell all, no one would trust a man who was known for the horrible sucking sounds his cranium made while he downed one rye whiskey after another and tried to ram his hand up a barmaid's skirt.

I was certain that the merciless success of silencing Phineas Gage has emboldened many thuggish operatives over the years and that I was the intended target of this brutal legacy.  I have to admit that I was skeptical at first.  I was willing to accept as mere coincidence the fact that both of us being in the employ of large profit-motivated organizations, or even that "Gage" and "Dave" have the same number of letters.  What I could not dismiss was the undeniable fact that TAMPING IRON THROUGH THE BRAIN is an anagram of INHERIT THROUGH BRING A TAMPON.

I know that I'm going to have to watch my back to avoid a similar fate.

This is another placeholder post.  I am still working out how frequently I can update the blog without burning out or resorting to posting filler like you'rre reading now.  I'm writing a little every day now but I can't always get something worth a damn finished inside of 24 hours.

Sometimes that's because my writing for that day is complete crap.  On my latest project, I don't think that's the case.  At least I hope so.  It's a longer piece, not as long as "Hold Me Closer Tiny Cancer," but too lengthy to whip out in a single day.

That's about it for now.  I don't have much more to say today.  It would be a shame to finish before culturally enriching you in some small way.  I know.  How about a haiku about tea?  Ito En Teas' Tea had a haiku contest and I really wanted to enter, but the contest was already over when I went to their website.  Oh well, their loss is your gain.  Here is my haiku:

I pissed in your tea

Hey you stupid fucking bitch

Drink my goddamn piss

I'll be back Friday.  I think.  Fuck, I don't know.

I did laundry this weekend, two whole loads.  It was time.  Actually, it was well past time.  For the last three weeks I've been avoiding the chore, figuring no one would catch on if I never wore the same shirt to work two days in a row.  I could conceivably continue in this manner indefinitely if it weren't for the smell.  Even with a cushy office job, the pits can get a little ripe after a while.

So I took care of that task.  Along with sleep, feeding myself, and basic personal hygiene, the bare essentials were checked off my to-do list.  It was time to get creative.

I have a couple of good ideas for stories (along with countless bad ones) but I felt this weird inertia that kept me from diving into either of them.  I wasn't too worried.  It was only Saturday afternoon and my muse would either return to me or wouldn't.

I spent a couple of hours on Stickam chatting with a friend of mine in Europe.  He's usually a good conversationalist and it was my hope that some witty banter would provide a colonic for my writer's block

There were two factors that kept this from working out as well as I liked.  The first was the time-zone difference.  My friend was nine hours ahead so mid afternoon for me was past midnight for him.  The second factor was the lump of hashish he decided to smoke.  In a few short moments, an engaging and intelligent human being was transformed into a spaced-out dullard with sleepy-creepy Baldwin eyes.  I was on my own.

So there I was, craving an artistic outlet but not knowing quite what to write.  If I could draw, paint, or play an instrument, I might have created something beautiful that I could be proud of.  Instead I had to make do with whatever was within reach, which turned out to be a roll of toilet paper, a bottle of Tapatio hot sauce, and a plastic baby head.

The baby head, purchased in Japan in 2003, is actually a piggy bank with the coin slot in the location of the fontanel.  Now before any of you jump to conclusions, let me just say that the slot is too narrow and the plastic too hard to use the head as a sex toy. Besides, I'm not just some sicko.  I have the soul of an artist.  That's why I used the hot sauce and toilet paper to make it look like the baby had its eyes gushed out and then was hastily bandaged in a futile attempt to keep the blood from gushing down its face.

So that was Saturday.  Sunday was, of anything, even less productive.  I finished reading Roald Dahl's My Uncle Oswald, which I enjoyed for the most part but was a little let down by the ending.  I've read books with worse endings (most of Harry Crews' work falls under this category), but Dahl's short stories have never lacked for satisfying and twisted conclusions.

I eventually found my way down to the Argus, as I am prone to do.  I waited until after the Giant's game was over because I don't do well around sports fans who are drunk and stupid enough to think that their home-team hard on had any bearing on the outcome of the game.  Instead I showed up while the 49ers were playing.  They suck this year so the crowd was not nearly so rowdy.

I took out my notebook and scribbled down the opening to one of the stories.  It wasn't much but it was something I could work with.  Every little bit helps.

I was still feeling distracted so I started surfing the web on my iPhone.  I learned that the flood of red sludge in Hungary had actually killed people, at least seven of them.  The phrase "Hungarian Ghoulish" popped into my head and I was proud of myself coming up with that.  I wanted to turn that into something, a poem perhaps.  I never got that far in this endeavor, probably because I could not decide between this opening verse:

Red Sludge

Red Death

I can barely hold my breath

and this one:

Red Death

Red Sludge

I can barely hold my fudge

There are some things in life best left unaccomplished.

I checked the calendar.  Seven and a half weeks went by with nary an update to Poison Spur.  I figured that was pretty awful.  Rather than hold myself accountable, I decided to blame the American legal system.  No, the law didn't finally catch up with me for all those high-spirited felonies I allegedly committed over the years.  It was something far more ordinary in the form of a jury summons.

This sounds like a lame excuse but let me explain.  I hated getting that jury summons.  Obsessing over it took up all my free time, well, except for the hours spent drinking or playing Civilization IV with the space race and time limit options turned off so I could experiencing the joys of endless wars.  More on that later.

At this point, some of you are no doubt shaking your heads and thinking that not only am I an unreliable blogger, but also a real crybaby in the citizenship department.  I can't say I blame you.  The right to trial by jury is one of those things that makes this country great.  The orientation video they play in the jury assembly room says so and I could see myself enjoying the experience.  With California's three strikes law, I might even have a hand in putting some guy away for 25 to life for stealing a candy bar.  Ha ha.  Fuck you. The gavel comes down.

The only drawback is not getting paid for my time.  Your bosses can't legally fire you for going on jury duty, nor can they threaten you, call you mean names, or put a thumbtack on your chair if you are called upon to serve.  However, they are under no obligation to pay you and your landlady is able to legally evict you if you don't earn enough money to pay rent.

Granted, such an outcome is extremely unlikely.  I have yet to hear of a single instance of someone being thrown out on the street as a result of having to sit on a jury.  Most cases don't last that long and for the ones that do, even the least sympathetic of judges are willing to dismiss a juror because of financial hardship.  Unfortunately, they rarely share my view that hardship begins with the first penny of lost income.  I must therefore fall back on the proud tradition of using every trick in the book to get out of jury duty. 

A little finesse is necessary here.  Unless you're willing to get cited for contempt, you can't threaten the judge with causing a mistrial out of spite.  A juror does have the right to do exactly that but only as an unanounced act of revenge and only if one at least pretends to have considered the evidence in the trial.  You just have to be able to say with a straight face, "I voted to acquit because the prosecution based their entire case on just three eyewitnesses and a single fingerprint lifted from the victim's perineum.  I still got reasonable doubt to burn."

Even if you do have the kind of mean streak necessary for this act of vengeance, you still had to sit on a jury.  As I said before, I'm fine with fulfilling my civic duty as long as my employer picks up the tab.  Unfortunately, I work as a contractor for an agency that pays nothing.  That means I make no money.  That also means that I will pay no taxes on the money I do not earn and if you hadn't noticed, this country is strapped for cash.  I would argue that it is my patriotic duty to earn a full paycheck and let some non-taxpayer sit in the jury box.  If you look around, there are plenty of these folks to choose from.  If need be, they can wheel in some retiree from an assisted-living center, feeding tube and all.

The wheels in my head started turning about how I could get myself excused.  Because I was summoned to the courthouse near Civic Center and not the Hall of Justice, this was to be a civil suit rather a criminal trial.  If this was to be personal-injury case, my plan was to say the same things I said when I summoned a decade ago.  "Mr. Plaintiff's attorney, pull your snout up out of the trough and listen to me.  When awarding damages, I will vote against any sum in excess of what covers medical expenses and lost wages.  This is a court of law, not the goddamn lottery."

I'm paraphrasing here but you get the general idea.

I could tell the judge was onto me but we both knew there wasn't a thing he could do about it.  I had played the tort-reform card and it was either boot me or suffer the consequences.  I was out the door within the hour.

 So I had a plan that may or may not work.  The week of 9/27 was a long way off.  I have a nasty habit of worrying about things that I can't do anything about and nonproductive diversion is often my only escape.  Heading out to the bar is usually a good plan but my liver is not as resilient a punching bag as it once was.  I find most TV unwatchable and while reading is quite enjoyable, it stimulates rather than numbs the mind.  When my mind is stimulated it gravitates toward unpleasant topics, like my jury summons.

To save both my liver and my sanity, I started playing Civilization IV on my laptop at home.  This was exactly the kind of diversion I needed but I found the early stages of each game tedious.  Let's face it.  Building a granary is never going to be as much fun as orchestrating land, sea, and air units to pound the crap out of an enemy position.  Just when things started getting good, some rival would launch a mission to Alpha Centauri and the game would be over.  I turned off the space-race option but that only got me as far as 2050, the normal ending year for the game.  After I turned off the time limit, the game could pretty much last forever as long as I didn't score a quick and decisive victory.  Since I'm at best a mediocre player this was not to be an issue.

I imagined myself ruling Civ empire as a modern Tiberius: brooding, suspicious, and delighted by perversion.  I closed my borders to other civilizations and built up a huge military, often starting senseless wars where the sole objective was to capture a single enemy city so I could rename it to "Fort Buttrape."  The real world has never been this good. 

As years of unchecked pollution took their toll, the global-warming feature of the game started transforming fertile farmland in this world into desert.  The populations in my cities began to starve and the shortage of arable land served as yet another reason to start wars of expansion.  In my mind's eye, my empire had a quaint but effective propaganda machine.  Every night the populace was herded into classrooms where movie projectors reminiscent of those from my school days would show inspirational newsreels with booming narration like:

INDUSTRY AND AGGRESSION WORKING TOGETHER FOR A LARGER TOMORROW

This sort of thing filled my head even when I wasn't playing the game.  I maintained my presence of mind at work, but only because I had to.  In social circles, I'd nod my head and say things like "Is that a fact?" while thinking more about my game world than what was being said to me.  In my world, you see, no one would receive a jury summons.  The court system would overhauled so human juries were replaced by a panel of 12 Daleks.  The conviction rate would hold at a steady 100 percent.  Crime would cease to exist.  If it weren't for the specter of global extinction by famine, the place would be paradise.

Time on planet earth continued to move ahead and before I knew it, the week of 9/27 was upon me.  On 4:30 in the afternoon of the preceding Friday, I checked the court website to see if my jury group was order was ordered to report.  It wasn't.  I dodged the first bullet.  There were four more to go and then I was off the hook for another year.  The next two days followed the same pattern and I thought I was home free.  Then my number came up and I was to report to the jury assembly room at 8:45 Thursday morning.

I could scarcely believe it.  Every time I've been summoned for jury duty, they've called in everybody they need in the first cxouple of days of the week.  I felt cheated.  I didn't sleep well that night.  I spent a lot of time thinking of every possible way I could get excused from jury service.  Since I knew nothing about the case or the judge, nothing could be a guaranteed success.

In the end, I lucked out.  Whatever case I was supposed to be on went into continuance and we were all excused.  The total length of my jury service was less than an hour and a half.  I was a free man, and a good thing too.  I needed to have all my wits about me because the city that would one day be known as "Port Yeastclam" was not going to liberate itself.

I suppose I could have given up entirely, never write another word, and just leave the blog the way it was.  Some readers would want me to continue; some wouldn't much care.

I would not even have to make a conscious decision to stop writing.  If experience has taught me anything, it is that not writing is the default behavior.  Writers walk way from their craft all the time, never to return.  They go on to do other things with their lives like pay attention to their loved ones or pursue some other creative endeavor that does not make them want to drink heavily.  Sometimes giving up is the smart and healthy thing to do.

Then again, I've never been one to lead either a smart or healthy life.  I have therefore decided to get myself out of whatever rut I've been in and give this writing thing another go.  I owe it to...well, no one in particular except for that part of me that craves attention.

After reading the preceding paragraphs, you have probably already figured out that the only point this blog entry has is to be simply be there, which is kind of like masturbating while fantasizing about your hand.

Anyway, I'll post more tomorrow and I promise it will be better than this.  I figure pretty much anything would have to be.