Anxiety Attack

It starts with feeling in the pit of your stomach, like you want to throw up but you know it's just not going to happen. But it lingers, and you just wish you could, or you would... you know...vomit...just to get it over with. But you don't because you're not supposed to do that, right? Unless you have to. Vomiting should not be a choice.

So you go on, paralyzed. You know your job, you know what you're doing. You could kick ass and take care of everything on your work plate in two hours. If you could just start. That's all. Just start.

But you can't start. You only can stare. You can't relax and do something else, because then you wouldn't be doing your job. But you can't do your job either, so you just sit...and stare. And click and click and click.

So you update the blog that no one reads. To get yourself typing, to get y0urself thinking. To limber the fingers and give the brain somewhere to spill its excess...brain stuff. And you wonder why your doing this? Why you're pretending to write for the public, when a private journal would do just fine? You wonder if anyone, besides the three people who you've told about the blog will ever read this? You strategize about how to draw readers to you ... should you tell more friends? Post the blog in the online forums that might as well be a row of shot glasses filled with Grey Goose? Why?

You hope, perhaps, that someone will read this...that someone will understand. That someone will say it's OK and rescue you from this trap. That someone will say, "follow me -- this is where we're going to go...and we'll do great things there."

But there are no rescuers. You know you can only rely on yourself, and if it's not your own decision, your own idea, then, really, it has no meaning for you.

That would be just like you, right?

---------------------------------------------------
And now, back to our regularly scheduled humor ...

One Minute Story #4 - The Damage is Done

"I'm late I'm late I'm late!"

"What's late?"

"Everything is late. Articles. My period. Mr. Chow's Chinese Delivery. Reports. Invoices. Everything!"

"Have the clients noticed?"

"Noticed what?"

"The late stuff."

"They'll notice soon enough. I'm just that far behind."

"Here's what I do: I make a list. You can tackle each item on the list, one at a time. Cross off each item as you finish it. Put appointments on a calendar. Put it all on the computer. It'll help keep you on track. It helps me a lot."

"Shut up."

"Why?"

"Because I know how to keep organized. I could teach you how to keep organized. I could create a school dedicated to nothing but helping people keep organized. I've got enough lists to fill a shopping cart. A shopping cart full of things...on lists. Shut up about lists."

"Okay. So I'll get back to work again.

"Good."

A long pause.

"So your period is late?"

# # #

Very Funny...Somewhat Disturbing

We've recently had our third known reader (after my wife and friend Steve) ... since this blog was founded with guiding principles that emphasize highly personalized customer service, we just wanted to say: Hi, Brian! Thanks for Visiting!

Even better, Brian offers the first known review of what we at headquarters like to call MCID... without his permission, I will repeat it here... "Very funny! Extremely. Somewhat disturbing on occasion, but extremely funny."

That about covers it!

Let the integrated multi-channel cross-media marketing campaign commence.

Gloom and Despair: One Minute Story #3

The man in the overalls leaned back against the rotting wood fence. The cross bar slipped out of the hole that once held it so snug and secure, and the man in the overalls stumbled and fell, his straw hat rolling like a tumbleweed till it disappeared into the tall grass.

"If it weren't for bad luck," the man spat, "I'd have no luck at all."

The man crawled into the tall grass. Later, when the police arrived, witnesses were said to have heard a creative string of curses, then nothing at all. All they found was an old pair of overalls and a bloodied straw hat.

# # #

One Minute Story

((I have about 2 minutes until a conference call begins...This story thus shall be written in one minute))

Rapel, he thought. I'm rapelling.

"Rapell-ent," called a voice from above. "The word is rapellent. Actually, the word is 're-pellent'. And so are you." The voice was clear, strong, rich and female, one that brought up unwanted memories of his mother's nagging and great-aunt's psychological manipulation.

"Get out of my head!" Brian shouted.

"Why? It's so comfy in here," she said sweetly. And she began to gnaw upon the rope.

"Goddammit. How dare you?" Brian was feeling rudely violated, and in more than a little physical danger. "Where are your manners?"

"You stink," she said, sweetly again.

Brian bounced faster. His hands burned despite the thick gloves he wore.

"I can change," he cried.

"I'd rather you not," she called. "Or, rather, I'd rather you not knot."

"What?" Brian said, not hearing the silent 'k'.

"No knots!" she called, laughing.

Brian hit the ground with a stomp as the full length of rope came tumbling down the cliff like an attacking anaconda.

The laughing from above...stopped.

Brian squinted up.

"You've been repelled."

Drat.

It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Tender Chicken

The New York Times > AP > Business > Frank Perdue, Chicken Magnate, Dies at 84

Frank Purdue, Dead. Probably my favorite advertising icon back when I lived in Rhode Island. Or was it New Jersey? There was his bust, on the TV screen -- this little bald beady-eyed fellow who did goofy stuff with chickens.

According to this obituary, he was tougher than he let on:

"In 1986, Perdue told to a presidential commission that he had twice unsuccessfully sought help from a reputed New York crime boss to put down union activities, actions he later said he regretted deeply."

Does that mean that the "reputed" crime boss refused to help, or was ineffective? We'll never know.

The other question Mr. Purdue always raised for me was whether it indeed took a tough man to raise a tender chicken. I mean, don't the chickens have it rough enough already, what with the cramped quarters, wallowing in their own chicken feces, the pecking and the incessent clucking and then the decapitation and the plucking and the rendering and the chopping and the quartering and the nuggeting and the deep frying?

I'm gonna go have me some chicken right now!

Requiem: Terri Schiavo

Terri Schiavo Died This Morning

What else is there to say? It's over, and you feel relief for the media circus has ended. That Jesse Jackson can go home.

But in the end, there is this poor family. Let's see them at their best. Parents who never lost hope. A husband struggling to honor his wife and live his life. A young woman struck down, never to return.

You always hold out hope. You always want to fight for another day of life. But when the river is rushing you toward the waterfall, at some point, when the body can no longer struggle against the current, you must confront the new reality that lies yet unseen, over the edge, and embrace it, imbue it with all of the new hope and new possibilities of an undiscovered country...and dive.

If you like to believe that the soul lives on when the body fails, let her revel in the wonder...

Synchronicity

Today I had a frozen lunch. It was bland and depressing. There was a review of frozen meals published in Slate today...the very same day I ate a frozen meal!

(apparently, most frozen meals are bland and depressing).

I also thought about exercising this morning. I really should exercise again...and restart my morning journal. And, there was an article in my morning paper about how exercising eases depression. I'm depressed. And I thought about exercising this very same day!

Yes, my friends, there are days when all the stars line up. When coincidence becomes incidence and when you must take heed of the signs all around you. How a radio snippet about Iraq connects to the holes in my sock and to the girl in the pretty frock who's always listening to Bach and when she takes her boat away from the dock and across the water and into the rocks where...crash...and I realize that it's not funny to mock ... synchronicity.

There are signs and omens everywhere.

It's really spooky, you know.

"Strange Things are A-Foot at the Circle K"

A Short Tale of A Man, A Dinosaur and His Foot

Today I took a walk around downtown with a dinosaur attached to my foot. It was, you may have already guessed, one of those really small dinosaurs. The ones they never talk about.

Anyway, he bit my shoe. It hurt a lot, like a small animal was sinking razor sharp teeth into my foot. Exactly like that, actually. I howled. I kicked. The really small dinosaur wouldn't let go at first, so I went to the drugstore, all calm-like, and purchased a bottle of Vaseline. I rubbed it all over the dinosaur's mouth and head. I heard a little avian-reptillian coo, which I think meant he liked it. Glad your so HAPPY! I thought. Then I gave another kick and slammed him against the cornerstone of a skyscraper. The Dino fell to the ground, and so did I, and then I swiped at him with my foot one more time, just because I could, because I'm big and he was small and dammit isn't that the way it's supposed to be in the world, when natural selection takes over and big people with hands and feet and the ability to purchase Vaseline encounter smaller, weaker species?

The feisty little beast came to quickly and scampered off... I threw a rock at it. It stopped, turned around and I could swear that evil lizard mouth curved into a smile. Because in its little, not-quite-atrophied hand was my shoe. And in my shoe was a single, bloody foot in a black argyle dress sock.

Ouch! I said, and hobbled back to work, rethinking my feelings on natural selection.




-------------------------------------------------
where did that come from?

Stuart Smalley Saves ... Me

I'm reading The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron, a how-to guide for unlocking your creative soul, or some such nonsense.

Oh, right. I'm not supposed to engage in such negative "blurtings."

On this continuing journey to find my muse that will enable me to produce creative works that nourish my soul and bring in piles of cash so I can quit my job, I have discovered that what I like to call "considering every last barrier to success to fully understand the problem" is actually "finding endless reasons not to start or finish everything so I can sit on my ass and surf the Internet all day."

The Artists Way recommends starting each day writing three pages in a journal (to save time on this, my first day, I have chosen a half-size steno pad). Cameron recommends beginning with affirmations that really boil down to Stuart Smalley's famous "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggonit, people like me!"

Okay, I'm blurting again.

Irony is overrated, and as Al Gore once said, "a cynic is just a disappointed idealist in disguise, a dreamer yearning to dream again." (I actually remembered that one).

And, as I'm about to say: every journey begins. Or it's not really a journey, is it?

There. I said it.

The Rules

My wife has some specific rules about our household. After seven years of marriage, I've finally figured them out.

When your husband is at home:

1) Never enter the garage. The garage is a cold, dark and scary place at night. Not to be entered lightly by the fairer sex, it is best to send your man, shoeless, to the minivan for the forgotten cell phone phone, PDA, kids' art projects, soiled toddler underwear and the like.

2) Never lift a laundry basket. The laundry basket, while of reasonable weight during the day, increases in weight tenfold in the evenings, requiring the better-developed musculaculture of an American male transport it from bedroom to washer.

3) Never fill an ice tray. Filling an ice tray, requiring addition of water to a small plastic receptical with multiple trapezoids that allow ice blocks to form, is an unendurable duty, yet vital to the maintenance of the household. Best to let your husband do it.

4) Never go up or down stairs. While in daylight, stairclimbing is, again, a routine task. In the evenings, gravity exacts a heavier toll. When sweatshirts are required from the closet, toys from the basement or frozen meats from the freezer, it takes a man to traverse the mighty pathways of our house....both up...and down.

6) Change a diaper, say, if you can avoid it. Well, who would, really?

Breaking News

Milk no longer grows strong bones... say the vegetarians...

Aspirin no longer eases headaches...say the herbalists...

Clubs ineffective as fighting tools...say the baby seals...

Marijuana really good for you...says Dominos...

Dog food really really bad for dogs...say the horses...

Soylent Green really really bad for people...say people...

Humor Hiatus

Since I begin many days by reading myself into an alchohol-like stupor, I tend to get obsessed certain favorites. My flavors of choice have certain similarities:

* Daily updates
* Rich feature catalogs
* Humor, typically of the literate-and-clever-yet-juvenile category.

I tend to stick with my favorites ... if a satisfying buzz can be obtained, why not go back again and again? But when their owners stop updating, it can be a very unsettling experience for me.
Witness LostBrain. This humor site, while sloppily edited and unevenly written, has had its moments over the years, and, most importantly, delivered the potential for laugh-out-loud comedy on an almost daily basis. Then, after writing a send up of Martha Stewart's website for fans written as she faced her prison sentence, and, in April 2004, a lame call to hack into Gmail, the site went dark. No updates, no explanation. No comments comments on the web about the site. No bylines by the writers in other publications.

And yet, I keep going back, maybe once a week, just to see if they have added a story, or a letter to poor, pathetic readers like me who wondered where they've been. And I dropped in again yesterday, and, good lord, there's an update. An extremely lame story about Barry Bonds and steroids, and a couple vague references in the headline links that the stories are all a year old or so. I feel vindicated for my loyalty, and betrayed by the editors' utter indifference to my plight.

And don't even get me started on Modern Humorist.

Hi, Steve

I just told my friend Steve about this. Which may make him this site's very first visitor.

So, Hi, Steve! Hope you like my Blog so far! Try not to spill anything on the carpet!

And get your feet off my coffee table, dammit.

Thinking happy thoughts

I'm riffing on the power of positive thinking, or, as my wife calls it, "Talk a Good Life." It goes something like this: If you always see your life as positive and talk about what you're doing as something you're excited about, you'll feel good about that and, incidentally, people will feel good about it. My immediate reaction: phony, phony phony.

My more considered reaction: For a long time, I've pictured my thoughts as liquid circuits, and my brain as a planetary surface, cut by channels like Martian canals. Unhealthy thoughts run over and over again in hard cut channels, and change direction only by great force of will. Like 'talking a good life'.

I say this because I tried thinking something nice about something I did yesterday: how I contributed to an office brainstorm. While most of my liquid circuits flashed the "roll your eyes sarcastically" signal, there was this small, happy wave of clarity, like a pair of hands brushing away some dust and papers from a cluttered desk.

I will continue explore this. But first, back to my real cluttered desk.

In sickness and in health

...but mostly sickness.

I've been suffering my first serious cold in many years over the past four days. I'm feeling almost desperate to kick this. I'm drinking water, and forcing myself to go to bed early. Nothing's working. Last night, I crawled into bed at 8:00, fell asleep at 9:00, woke up again at 12:30 am, went downstairs and turned on the TV at 1:00 am, watched the mystifying Wolf's Rain and then something else, went back to bed at 2:00 am and was up pretty much every hour after that until 6:30 am, at which point there was nothing better to do than to go to work. Where I did very little today...

So, I just checked out that link on Wolf's Rain. It appears that they actually are wolves. Well. Good.

There isn't enough time

I was wondering today what it would take to break my internet addiction. What if I were to start a blog?

Some background: I was reading a book last night called Delivered From Distraction, about dealing with ADD. Yeah, I'm probably poster child for this "collection of traits", as the author genially names it. People with ADD, apparently, often will "medicate" themselves with alcohol, drugs, sex.

I don't.

I medicate myself with words.

I read. All the time. I get to work in the morning, log in, check email. If there's nothing disasterous there, I start my routine.

First Slate... I like the media column, movie reviews, the political/military analyses and pop culture. Now that the elections are over, it's a harder read.

Then, to the humor sites...Pointless Waste of Time...incredibly juvenile, incredibly funny, over and over again. Related is Pinkerton's Weblog...highly creative, blunt, juvenile humor with a brain...and a working knowledge off comic books.

From there, it can vary...a quick check of fantasy basketball scores...My Yahoo page to review client news. Romenesko for what's on The Media's mind. Metafilter when I just need fix of something new. After a couple of hours of this, I'm wasted.

The goal is to never be alone with my thoughts. I do shots of the New York Times Crossword in the john, and the read the editorial page while walking to lunch. At home, it's The Atlantic and Sports Illustrated ... in a pinch, the daily newspaper. In the car, talk radio, bouncing between sports and offensively conservative talk to avoid the ads.

Turn it off? What would happen then?

Is anyone else like this?

Gotta Get Out of This Place

We gotta get out of this place
If it's the last thing we ever do
We gotta get out of this place'cause girl,
there's a better life for me and you
Eric Bourdon and the Animals

I’m having trouble concentrating. When I talk to someone, it’s fun. I wake up. I’m a little more energized. When I sit down at my computer, my head gets heavy, my eyes blur and I feel vaguely dizzy. I’m writing. It’s all I can do. Last year, I saw a career counselor. Let’s call her “Colleen” (her real name is “Colleen”). She got me to define what I was after in a career. I think my problems may just be deeper than that. Let’s define it:

Fear.

In my internal biological debate on how to react to fear, “flight” wins out of “fight” about 90 percent of the time.

Here is a start on the list of things that make me afraid:

Changing jobs·
Doing my current job·
Challenging authority·
Losing my paycheck·
Getting fired·
Not getting fired·
That I’ll be found out·
That I won’t be found out.

Frankly, I’m just afraid that anything will happen. Or that it won’t. I’m afraid of doing whatever it is myself, and afraid that it won’t happen on its own.

* * *

I wrote the above about a year ago. Not much has changed. But I'm learning... I'm finally talking to someone about net around my mind, the one that has settled gently over my life like a blanket that comfortably discourages the straining and striving against something so intrinsicially unfair as a net.

This is an exercise in straining and striving.

Manifesto

This blog will remain "under construction" for a little while...whilst I figure out what to do with it. What am I thinking?

It will chronicle the flotsam and jetsam of my brain; the grand dreams, broken promises, aching desires.

It will over promise and under deliver. Or, as a sage candyman once said, "strike that...reverse it!" Perhaps.

It will be an outlet for stories and essays and maybe a song or two.

It might even be funny.

And finally: It will be honest. This is a very scary thing.