Yearly Archives: 2013

More made-for-TV shark movies, please

Sharknado was so three weeks ago, I know, but that’s exactly when I usually like to jump on a bandwagon, after mostly everybody’s already gotten off. Can you imagine what it would have been like for me to make some Sharknado comments at the same time as everybody else in the country? They would have been drowned in an ocean of exactly the same stuff. But I find that if you wait a few weeks, it’ll be over, most people have already stopped talking about it, and now I’m free to join in, uninterrupted.

Besides, I’m not here to talk about Sharknado anyway, I’m here to talk about other ideas for made-for-TV sci-fi movies. Like Sharkcountant. What would you do if you brought your taxes in to get filed, only to find a shark sitting behind the desk? Would you freak out? I mean, I’d be scared initially, like, if it’s a shark, they’re pretty nasty looking, all of those rows of teeth. But the movie would have to make at least a little sense, and so yeah, he’d still look like a shark, but he’d probably be able to talk. I don’t know how difficult it would be for a shark to pass his CPA exam, but I’m guessing he’d have to behave at least well enough to get through business school, to get hired, eventually starting his own practice.

And so yeah, maybe Sharkcountant might be a little boring. It would make for a great ten-minute intro. Like you’d see the shark, but he’d be wearing a tie, maybe some glasses, and as the main character tries to run away, the shark would have to beg him to stop screaming, “Please! I know how this looks, but I assure you I’m an accountant. I won’t eat you, I promise!”

Obviously, Sharkitect, that’s a title just begging for a low-budget production. But that’s got to be a hard directorial choice to make, do you go for an anthropomorphic shark going through the above scenario, going to architecture school, finding an apprenticeship willing to at least entertain the idea of employing a shark? Or do you take it in a different direction? Maybe this movie is underwater, deep below the sea there’s maybe like a shark civilization, and they live in buildings designed for sharks, by sharks. And it could just be the tale of a sharkitect with a vision, a dream to bust into the rarified world of high-end sharkitecture.

I guess … that’s it? When I started writing this, Sharkcountant popped into my head almost immediately. I had this false sense that this whole thing was going to write itself. It’d be easy, I’d just make shark jokes and combine shark with other non-shark words and, you know, basically what they do whenever they make one of those shark movies for TV. But I wrote out the Sharkcountant paragraph, and then I was like, huh, there’s still a lot of empty page that I’m going to have to cover.

And then I sat here for like twenty minutes, eventually getting to the point where I was just looking for any word that could handle being merged with the word shark. Sharkitect. Done. But again, I really didn’t have anything to say besides the whole underwater thing, and let’s be honest, that was kind of boring, right?

Another twenty minutes of staring off into space, then some brainstorming. Shark Therapy. Pool shark. The Curious Life of Sharkamin Button. Sharkano, like half shark, half volcano.

And that’s when I realized I wasn’t going anywhere, Sharkano, one because I’d have to explain it, it’s a title that doesn’t speak for itself. People would see it and be like, Sharkano? What is that, like half shark half … what? And then maybe the subtitle would be, “Half shark, half volcano.” But even then, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe a volcano that spews out sharks instead of lava, but I feel that’s kind of just ripping off the Sharknado, a tornado comprised of sharks.

What if I keep it simple? What about a crossover? I could do like Sharkcountant Meets the Sharkitect. You know, maybe the Sharkitect finally does start his own small architecture firm, but he’s bad with numbers, so he needs to hire an accountant. And maybe a few regular human accountants interview for the position, but right before he makes the decision, Sharkcountant walks in.

The Sharkitect obviously wants to pick the other shark, but he doesn’t want to make it look like he’s playing favorites, so he just tells everyone that he went with someone who’d make a better fit. Eventually it would blow up, they’d realize that they have too little in common once they got past the fact that they’re both sharks. And that could lead to the long awaited Sharkitect vs. Sharkcountant, they’d get angry, their true shark natures would tear through and they’d have to fight to the death.

All right, I’m bored. I wish I had never jumped on this bandwagon. Sharknado was fun while it lasted, but did anybody else watch it? It was awful. It wasn’t even funny awful. I didn’t even watch the whole thing. After like fifteen minutes I took stock of my life, I was like, I’m really sitting here watching this? And did anybody else think that there were way too many commercials?

Crab grass

Maybe I like crab grass better than regular grass. I just wish I’d thought of this sooner, I could have used the change in perspective, the shift in attitude like a month ago, more toward the beginning of spring, not now, middle of summer, I’ve already waged this ridiculous lawn war against, who? What? And mostly unsuccessful by the way.

It was really nothing that I cared about at all, until one day one of my neighbors left this old push lawnmower on my lawn. No, I still don’t know which neighbor, by the way, I think it’s such a coward’s move. Fine, I haven’t been keeping my side of the street clean, that’s great, you want the block to be a little bit more presentable? I understand that. But maybe, I don’t know, knock on my door? Say something face to face?

Talk about passive aggressive. I’m a reasonable guy. I like to believe that I could have been approached like any other human being, “Hey Rob, we’ve been a little concerned lately about your grass,” which, who really cares about grass anyway? You’re telling me that you’ve got nothing better to do than to sit around and worry about me letting my grass get a little high?

And so what if it’s a little high, maybe I like my grass a little taller. But whatever, I’m reasonable, to a point. It’s hard to be reasonable to an inanimate object, some stupid piece of shit old-fashioned lawnmower. Where the hell did you find something like this anyway? What, was this thing inherited? Like did the owners of the property use it to keep their lawn pretty in case General Washington happened to be passing through town?

I left it there for a while, like don’t tell me how to keep my lawn, like this is America. But one day, I don’t know, I guess I got bored, I guess I just wanted to show the neighbors, OK, I get it, yeah, the lawn could use a little upkeep. And it’s not like I had my own lawnmower anyway. I just, I don’t remember this being an issue last year. The grass wasn’t that tall. Why was it so much bushier this year?

So I got out there and started pushing this thing around, and it was terrible. I’m pretty sure that the blades were all dull, I mean, I did cut myself when I went to feel them, but I’ve cut my hand with a butter knife before, I’m telling you, these things were dull. And I tried, I ran this thing up and down the front lawn, over and over again, the whole time looking at the houses next to me, across the street from me, just focusing on those blinds, one of them would move maybe, whoever planted this piece of garbage on my property, maybe they were watching, like, finally, he’s finally using it.

But I think that I was paying so much attention to the windows – nothing, by the way – that I didn’t notice the dull blades digging out these thick chunk of dirt. I was just hacking away at the soil, making a huge mess. And yeah, I’ve admitted it, it was kind of overgrown before, but now it was definitely worse. Like I wish I had taken a before photo. Or even an after photo. I never take photos. Why do I have this camera on my phone if I’m not going to take photos?

But just chunks of grass and dirt here and there, like worms coming up, it was terrible. And of course I got pissed. I was actually already pissed, like I already said, just from having this thing on my lawn. What the fuck? You want me to start getting in your face with your housework? Huh? I’ve got a bunch of half-empty cans of paint somewhere in the basement, you want me to leave them on your porch? Maybe I’ll paint out a big message, “Paint me!” right on the front of your house, so if you want it gone you’ll have to paint the rest.

No, it’s fine, I’m fine, I’m not pissed off. A little pissed off. But I’m fine. Because now the lawn looked worse, like much worse, and if my shaggy grass was too much of an eyesore for Mr. or Mrs. busybody neighbor, than this, the way it was after, that’s probably like cause enough for aneurysm, a whole shit-fit, I can just picture them looking out the window, I can picture them, but I can’t see them, but I know they’re there, they’re like, “Really? He’s really just going to keep his lawn like that?”

And all of the grass that I turned up got brown within like a week. I stopped thinking much of it. The lawnmower disappeared off of the front lawn one day, nice try buddy, put that thing back in the shed and so help me God don’t let me see you wheeling it out one day. But that’s when the crab grass started. I guess with a whole new playing field, all of those freshly unearthed chunks of dirt, the crab grass had ample opportunity to sprout, to really get in there and recolonize.

I don’t know, I bought some of this weed spray at Home Depot, but it didn’t do anything. In fact, I think it just killed the remaining good grass, because that’s when the crab grass really took off, just these mini bushes of thick blades. Again, I kind of liked it, but the town, these buttinskis with their village ordinances and state wildlife guidelines, they’re putting notices on my front door when I’m not home. Just show your faces, all right? Telling me I’ve got to take care of the crab grass, that I might attract ticks. What if I like ticks, huh? How come nobody’s asking me if I don’t like ticks, or crab grass? Huh? Hey Rob, I hope you don’t mind that our lawns aren’t covered in ticks and crabgrass like yours is. Is that cool? Do you mind? We wouldn’t want to get in the way of what you want, how you like things around here, on what you like on your lawns. And I’m the crazy one here?

Fresh power chords, pointy toothpicks, brand new shirts with the tags still on

I love it when you buy a new phone or a new laptop or keyboard and they always come with a new cord or a new charger. It’s always perfectly wrapped, the chord looped around itself in a way that’s impossible to replicate with your bare hands. After it’s worn and used a couple of times you might try and see if you can get it back in that shape, but never, it’s not happening, and then you try to untangle it again and somehow there’s a knot now, like how did it get there? It just kind of tied itself out of nowhere.

And that feeling, man, fresh power chord. In a week it’s not going to be white anymore, it’s not going to feel like it does now, it’s going to be slick, slippery, there’ll be like scuff marks on it, even though you don’t remember scuffing it on anything. Why can’t it feel brand new for a little longer? What’s going on in the air or by the wall that makes this thing degrade in quality almost overnight?

It’s like when you’re at a restaurant and right in the middle of the table there’s a toothpick dispenser, and all of the toothpicks are individually wrapped. And, I don’t know about all of you, but toothpicks don’t work for me. The idea of stabbing the space in between my teeth with a sharpened pointy little stick, no thanks, I’ll stick to floss picks. But there they are, so of course I’m going to dispense a few, play around with them in my hands, take them out of the wrappers. And these things are perfect, pristine, it’s exactly how I imagine a toothpick to be when I’m thinking about toothpicks. I touch the end and it’s the definition of pointy. But that’s it. You touch it once, it does something to the point, you touch it again, it’s not so pointy anymore.

And then you start chewing on it and rolling it around in your fingers and now you’ve got like individual wood fibers or whatever, it’s on your clothes, there are pieces of it in your mouth, and you look down at the tables and you’ve already done it three or four times, and so you try to push it all to one side, so that way when the waitress drops off your food, she doesn’t make this huge effort to wipe down the table, all of those toothpicks, and look, you did it to the straw wrapper also, all of the straw wrappers everywhere.

This is all reminding me of clothing, like when you buy a brand new shirt at the mall, and I’m not talking about anything fancy, not necessarily. It’s just a regular t-shirt, a simple short-sleeved button down maybe, and everything’s comfortable, you get out of the shower, you throw on your new shirt, you leave the house. Maybe like ten minutes after you’re out the front door you notice it, that little itch right on your side, right above the belt line.

It’s a small itch at first, maybe you’re not even totally conscious of what’s going on, but eventually, you find yourself scratching this same spot over and over again, and it’s not working, maybe it’s getting worse from all of the excessive itching. And so your brain takes over, all right, now you’ve got my attention, what seems to be the problem?

And it’s a tag. Why would they put a tag there? Why would they put a tag anywhere on a shirt? It’s the most annoying sensation. I remember being a little kid and actually being afraid of certain pieces of clothing, knowing that, once my mom laid out an outfit for me, that was it, I’d be condemned to a whole day of not being able to sit still, totally uncomfortable, please get this tag to stop making my life miserable.

And some shirts, it’s even worse. They put this really long tag on top of that tag, and it’s a little fabric pouch, it’s got a long hard strip in there. What is this, anti-theft technology? How do they deactivate it after purchase? Why am I carrying this thing out of the store with no alarms going off? And it’s always out of the house when I figure out the problem. Because, in the house would be too convenient, I’d get a pair of scissors, problem would be solved.

No, this is going to drive me crazy all day, I’ll start playing with the tag, seeing if I can’t rip it out with my hands, knowing that I’m probably going to damage the shirt, trying to set it out of my mind, not doing a good job of setting it out of my mind. Now I’m playing with it unconsciously and, yep, now I’ve done it. Maybe I haven’t ruined the shirt like ruined it, ruined it, but it’s definitely stretched out a little, like if you’re wearing it and you’re looking at it you’ll think, what they hell? Why is this little spot so stretched out?

Like when you’re playing basketball at your parents’ house, and yeah they have a ball, and yeah, they’ve got a pump, so everything should be OK, but that ball, nobody really plays basketball here that much, not anymore, not since everybody moved out. There’s a little bubble, something, it’s a lump. It’s like the shape of the basketball is just slightly, almost imperceptibly lumped on just this one side. But what are you going to do, complain? You’re just shooting around with your brothers. But every once in a while you’ve got possession, you go to make a move but the ball dribbles right on that lump, just enough so that it bounces maybe an inch or two to the left. Your younger brother takes advantage, steals the ball and scores. What are you going to do, you’re going to say something? I guess it’s his disadvantage also. But come on, there’s no way that would have happened if we just had a regular ball, no lumps, no tiny little bumps sending everything just a little off, just totally ruining an otherwise nice game of basketball.

You have to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables

I saw this commercial on TV the other day, it was some public service announcement reminding Americans that we’re supposed to eat a certain number of servings of fresh fruits and vegetables every day. And right at that moment, I was halfway down one of those new oversized Slim Jims, like it’s just like an original Slim Jim, but it’s about as thick as an Italian sausage. I had a pause, I thought, yeah, I don’t eat any fruits or vegetables.

So I went to the grocery store and picked up a little basket, committed to buying lots and lots of fruits. What a selection! I can’t remember the last time I went fruit shopping, so many different varieties. I bought like four bags, full of fruits, and that wasn’t even counting the watermelon, which didn’t fit inside a bag at all. And yeah, I probably should have listened to the cashier, she was like, “Honey, that’s not going to fit in there,” as I was trying to get it in.

But I don’t know, I’m defiant sometimes, and that whole honey business, please, I’m not you’re honey, all right toots? And to my credit, I did eventually get that watermelon inside, although, it didn’t do any good at all, because the bag was so stretched from the melon that there weren’t even any handles to grip anymore, it was just a giant watermelon half covered in tight plastic. Still, I acted like that was what I was trying to go for all along.

I got home and started to dig in, but the first thing I went for was this box of blackberries. It was like, eh, maybe one out of every ten blackberries had a nice taste. The rest were all like way too sour, and not in a cool Sour Patch Kids way, this was like biting into something and then immediately having a sense memory of being a two-year-old and putting something in my mouth that I definitely shouldn’t have, like a sour bar of soup.

Also, and this was the same with the raspberries, you really can’t just throw them in your mouth. I don’t know where, because I’ve opened a few up and tried to find the source, but there are always like three or four really small, really hard little seeds. And if they don’t hurt one of your teeth as you accidentally take a bite, they wedge themselves right inside your back molars, like they perfectly conform to the shape of whatever’s back there. And so for the rest of the day I was just feeling it with my tongue, I couldn’t do anything to dislodge it, dental floss wasn’t doing the trick. It was just torture, this one spot on the side of my tongue got raw from trying to play it out.

I thought, OK, blackberries, maybe there was a reason my mom never bought blackberries when I was a little kid. What about kiwis? I always love it when there’s a fruit salad, something you get at the deli, or one of those prepackaged breakfasts they hand out at some of the nicer hotels, there are always like one or two slices of kiwi on top, and it’s delicious.

But having a nice precut piece of kiwi is worlds away from actually buying a whole kiwi, bringing it back to your house and thinking, OK, how am I supposed to get those slices out of this fuzzy little ball and into my stomach? Because how are you supposed to peel a kiwi? I tried cutting the skin off with a knife but it’s so delicate, I was hacking away chunks of flesh. I found a potato peeler but that was also a no-go. You squeeze the fruit hard enough to work the peeler and it just collapses, there’s juice everywhere, your hands are getting sticky.

I was getting frustrated, looking at this whole bag full of fruits that I realized I had no idea how to eat, even hungrier, I was getting desperate enough where I started looking for the other half of the Slim Jim, the one I threw away before I had the bright idea to go out to the grocery store. And why didn’t I pick up some regular food while I was out there? Now what, if I want to get something else to eat I have to go back? Two grocery store trips in one day? I can’t.

I went for a banana but they were still way too green, the inside tasted like a potato. My ruby red grapefruits were so riddled with seeds that when I went to cut it down its equator, the knife slipped on a seed cluster and I almost cut the tip off of my left pinky off. Does anybody else have an allergy not to mangoes, but to mango skins? Is that even real? I didn’t notice a problem until I put my lips to the outside because, how are you supposed to get the fruit off of around that huge pit? And come on, where does all of that mango string come from? It’s worse than eating a pulled pork sandwich found under a heat lamp at some gas station on a highway rest stop.

The peaches were too sour. The seedless watermelon must have gotten lost in the seedless bin on its way to the extra seeded bin. The plums were rock hard and the apples way too mushy. Apricots, pineapples, oranges … my stomach was starting to hurt from too many little bites of under-ripe produce.

Forget the fruit, thanks, I think I’ll just move along to veggies if that’s all right. That’s what I hoped. Of course it wouldn’t be that easy. Like, what the hell are those little spikes on top of every artichoke leaf? And what about that prickly thing inside? Come on, a guy can’t even make himself a healthy bite to eat once in a while. Maybe these stores could have a little sign next to whatever it is they’re selling, like I don’t even know what Okra is, how am I supposed to get it into my mouth? Is this really too much to ask? Is this really supposed to be this difficult?

I miss summer vacation

What am I supposed to do for the rest of the summer? The Fourth of July is long gone. There aren’t really any holidays to look forward to until Labor Day, which in my line of employment, it’s more of a joke than an actual holiday, because I always work Mondays at the restaurant, and especially on holidays, especially on holidays that don’t really have anything to do with anything real, it’s like people go out to eat in droves. Personally, I’d never wait on line for more than ten minutes to sit down and eat, but I’m clearly in the minority here, because on any sort of a day off, it’s like, let’s go out to a restaurant everybody.

Labor Day, it’s an actual day of labor for me. So I’m not counting that as a holiday. And then Columbus Day? Again, it’s the same. Most jobs still make you come in anyway. I think it’s just banks that take the day off. But that’s not until fall. I’m losing track of where I was going with this. It’s still technically summer, and I can’t think of anything special to do.

And I don’t know what the problem is, really, because when you think about it, there’s nothing really at all different about July or August than there is February or March. They’re all just regular months, go to your regular job, wait for the next holiday, which is always way too far away. It’s just the weather that changes. I’m freezing, and then the next thing I know I’m way too hot.

It just sucks because we spend the first twenty-two years of our lives having summer as a vacation. Even if you had a job growing up, which I always did, you still got two months where you didn’t have to go to school. When I was in high school, and then during those summers in between college, I’d love to work some crappy job. One, regardless of how pointless the work might have been, it was all very temporary. And two, it was a break from the normal routine. No school, no classes, something different.

And then you’re an adult and the weather starts getting warmer and there’s still that expectation that something different is going to happen, that for two months anyway, even if I’m not going to be able to sit around and do nothing, I’ll at least get a well needed change of scenery.

Now I’m twenty-nine, so I’m still at this point where the majority of my life experience is telling me something different than what I’m actually experiencing: a life of going to work over and over again, maybe I don’t hate it, maybe sometimes I do hate it, but it’s something that I have to deal with, because it’s never going away, there’s no rest at all. Once in a while maybe I’ll take a day off or a couple of days, a week or two once a year, but that’s it.

It’s just so soul crushing. And I hate sounding like such a whiney little brat, I totally realize how entitled this all sounds. But I just hate the fact that we have this warm weather, that all I really want to do is just go outside and run around and relax and play with my dog and cook a nice meal. I’d get my writing done when I felt like it, I’d have plenty of time to read the newspaper or some books, all of the stuff that I never get to do.

Because my real life is just waking up, struggling to get a run in, making myself sit down to write all of this stuff out, why? Because I want to be a writer. Why? So that way I could do all of this fun stuff that I’m talking about without having to sacrifice seven hours a day at a restaurant. And again, I don’t hate it. I definitely don’t love it, but in terms of a job that I have to do to pay my bills, whatever, I could have it a lot worse.

But all of that stuff, the reading, the cooking, more exercise, more time to just take a walk with my dog, maybe do a little gardening, there’s never enough time. I always go to bed at the end of the day thinking that there was so much more that I wanted to do that I wasn’t able to because I had to go to the restaurant and run around like a crazy person getting this, doing that, and by the time I get home, I always tell myself, you can do it Rob, you can stay up a little bit longer and get some more work done. But then I’m asleep. And then I’m waking up again. And it’s the same old, same old, every day, winter or summer. I just want to go outside. Just give me two months to go outside and hang out. That’s not so bad. We’re a pretty rich country. This is a pretty advanced society. Can’t we make it so we take turns working? Right? Wouldn’t that be nice?