Author Archives: Rob G.

I thought I saw something

You ever get that feeling like you just saw something out of the corner of your eye, but you’re not sure if it was real or imaginary? I was just sitting at my desk when I swore I noticed some sort of movement, just right at the edge of my peripheral vision. I looked, and there was nothing. But what was it that I thought I saw? Was it real? I have no idea. I don’t want to say it could’ve been a bug, because to verbalize it might make it come true. So I kind of do a quick check behind the desk, alongside the wall. There’s nothing out of the ordinary.

It’s tough because there’s no reliable track record for this type of activity. I can’t go back and judge this experience based off of past encounters with roaches or spiders. It’s like, every once in a while, I’ll think I see something, and then a minute passes, maybe another minute and, yep, it’s a bug, it’s a roach and it’s running across the floor.

But then other times it’s all in my head. Like when I was a little kid and I still believed in Santa Claus, every now and then I’d swear I caught a flash of red out of the corner of my eye. So I don’t know what to believe. I do know that if I’m not careful, I’ll let my imagination get the best of me. If I too actively seek out every shadow or imaginary movement I think I see, it’s only going to increase the frequency at which I’m seeing these phantom blurs.

But I also know that I live in New York, that maybe half the time I catch myself looking behind the dresser or underneath that stack of plates, it’s because I actually did see something. And sitting back and ignoring it, pretending like I never saw it in the first place, it never solves the problem. Best case scenario, it just comes back out a minute or two later, and now I’ve definitely seen it, now I have to take action and kill it. Worst case, it disappears into the cracks and crevasses of my walls and flooring where it’ll spawn an entire generation of creepy-crawlies.

I hope I’m not giving the impression that I’m living in a bug-infested dump. My place is very clean. But I’d say once or twice a year I’ve got to kill a roach, usually a really big one that’s either trying to find a warm place, or that’s trying to get back outside now that the weather is nice. I definitely see bugs all the time outside. And mice. And rats. Luckily my block is overrun with feral cats, and so yeah, I’d much rather stray cat colonies to rats.

Several years ago I was living at this apartment by my school in the Bronx. That was the first time that I had an actual mouse try to move in. Those little guys are fast, much faster than any bug. And so that feeling of seeing something moving in the corner, once you actually get a mouse cohabitating with you, it becomes way more pronounced. You’ll see that blur of darkness every time you enter a room. And the worst part is, once out of every twenty or so times, you’ll actually see it, like for real, a real mouse.

Then you have to lay out traps, and worry that the peanut butter is going to attract bugs. And then you finally catch the mouse and you have to wipe up all of the guts and everything that explode all over the place when the mouse finally takes the bait. Like I said, I’ve been really lucky that the worst I’ve had to deal with here is the occasional roach.

And a silverfish every now and then. I don’t know why, but silverfish don’t gross me out as much. For some reason they always kind of blend in with the floor, and so maybe it’s just like an optical illusion, but I never see any imaginary silverfish.

OK, I just saw it again, the movement, something creeping around. I’m still not convinced that it’s anything real, because I’ve just spent the better part of a half an hour talking about roaches and mice. If anything, I’d be more concerned if by this point I hadn’t concocted some hallucinatory pests. But still, I’m having a hard time suppressing my urge to start stomping on the floor, kicking piles of stuff. If it’s hiding in there, I want to see it. I don’t really want to see it. I hate when it comes true, when it pops out from one hiding spot and immediately dives into another. I just … I just wish I had X-Ray vision, that I could see any bugs in the walls of under the floors. No, that would be a terrible super power. A curse really. I just want the phantom movements to stop.

Let the dog have his bones

I feel bad that my dog doesn’t have an iPhone. I have an iPhone. All that my dog has is a bunch of dumb bones that I bought at Petco. He’s happy with them for a while, until there’s no more liver-flavored paste in the center. After that they just kind of take up space. I try to keep all of his old bones in one central location, but he much prefers it if they’re scattered across the living room floor. I should just throw the old ones away whenever I buy a new one, but I feel like he’s always looking at me, right as I’m about to toss them in the trash, he’s thinking, “Come on Rob, you have an iPhone, you have the Internet. For me, it’s just these bones, and that’s it. You really want to throw them away?”

And I make it a point to just do it, because I can’t have these bones everywhere. It’s like, even when I think they’re all accounted for, there is always at least one or two hidden away where I’ll never be able to find them. Sometimes I think they’re so well hidden that even my dog loses track of where they are. And it’s like one day I’ll be looking for the remote or for my phone and I’ll lift up the couch to see if there’s any way that it’s maybe stuck deep between the cushions, and out falls a bone, sometimes right on my foot. I’ll go to throw it away but there he is again, he’s so happy to see this particular bone. Even though there’s no more liver-paste, it’s like he totally forgot about this bone.

It’s kind of like when you’re a little kid and your mom makes an effort to really clean out the downstairs closet. And you see that she’s putting your old Nerf gun into a black trash bag. Of course you haven’t played with it in years, but you also haven’t seen it forever. It’s been buried under all of your Lego sets and wrestling actions figures, you’re like, “Mom! Don’t throw that out, that’s such a cool Nerf gun!” and she’s like, “You never play with this stuff, come on, it’s just taking up space.” But you’re insistent, and you kind of even believe at some level that you’ll use it again, but you’re mistaking this nostalgia for a forgotten item with a feeling of genuine interest in a toy that … well, sure, go ahead, fire off a few rounds.

By tomorrow your mom’s going to be looking at this plastic piece of junk lying in the corner, saying stuff like, “See? I told you we should have thrown it out. Now it’s just another piece of clutter taking up visible space.” And so you pretend to play with it for a little while longer, just until she leaves the room, and then you bury it back under the Sit-n-Spin, somewhere you can’t see it. You don’t want to play with it, but you don’t want to face the idea that you’ll never be able to play with it again either.

And yeah, maybe things would have been different if you were a little kid today. But only if you were a kid and you had an iPhone. Would you have had an iPhone? I don’t know. Your mom wouldn’t buy you a Sega Genesis back then, she probably wouldn’t buy you an iPhone. You can just hear it now, “What does a little kid need an iPhone for?”

My dog doesn’t have an iPhone either, and I’m always wondering whether or not he’s secretly jealous, watching me spend so much time staring at my little screen. Why don’t they make iPhones for dogs? Something a little more durable, so he could chew on it while he’s not surfing the web, watching clips of the Puppy Bowl on YouTube, I’m just kind of throwing out dog-related Internet activities, I’m not sure exactly what he’d use an iPhone for, or if it would have the same user interface as human iPhones do.

But even if they did exist, am I really going to spend that much money on a piece of equipment that I’m not even really sure my dog would even enjoy? No, just let him have his bones. Sure, he’s figuring out how to get at that liver paste faster and faster each time, it’s like I can’t keep up with all of the empty bones lying around everywhere. And just last week, I woke up and came downstairs barefooted in my pajamas, my dog walked up to me, but I didn’t realize that he had a bone in his mouth. This one had to have been his biggest bone, and these things are heavy, sometimes too heavy for him to keep in his jaw. And I don’t know if he was just happy to see me, but he walked over with this thing in his mouth and dropped it right on my foot. It hurt so badly, a sharp pain that shot straight up my leg, like I could feel it in my shoulders.

And I wanted to round up all the bones right there and toss them in the trash. But then my iPhone made a buzz, like I got a message or an email, and my dog went over to the coffee table to investigate the sound. For a minute I thought, is he looking at the phone? Is he interested in text messages? At the very least, I thought he looked curious, and maybe he really does want one, and so I forgot all about my foot. I’ve got my technology, let the dog have his bones. So what if the place is a mess? What right do I have to take them away?

Beyond my wildest dreams

I want to paint my house bright green. Neon green. But just talking about it, I’ve already ruined it. This can’t be something planned. I just want to get up out of this chair, go to the Home Depot, have them mix me up a bunch of cans of the most fluorescent green anybody’s ever seen, and then I want to come home and start painting. I don’t want to have to ask my wife’s permission, or look up on the Internet how you’re supposed to go about painting a house, OK, I want this project done by the end of the day. I just want to take a wild impulse and run with it all the way to the end, straight off a neon green cliff.

OK, I want to take out a thousand dollars in cash, buy a bunch of sandwiches, hop on my bike and just start riding west. No, I won’t know where I’m going, OK, and I’m not bringing my cell phone either, so don’t think I’m going to wimp out once it starts getting dark out, looking for directions home, asking somebody to drive out and give me a ride back to town. No, no plans, nothing thought out. That’s what the thousand dollars is going to be for, I’ll have my money do all of the thinking for me. Like, where am I going to sleep? I don’t know, I’ll buy a really small tent, something I can put in my backpack, next to my sandwiches. I’ll camp out wherever. Just straight out west.

I want one of those long jobs at sea on a freighter, all right, and I don’t want to join any union or train for any certain position. No, I want to be right at the docks, I’ll already have the perfect seaman’s beard, I’ll have everything that I need, ready to go, the ship’s going to be ready to drift out of the port, I’m just going to hop on with the rest of the crew, right, I’ll blend right in. I’ll do like they do, swabbing the deck, I’ll jump in the kitchen at dinnertime and start chopping vegetables, making a nice stew for the crew. Maybe they’ll catch on eventually that I’m a stowaway, but by then I’ll have earned my spot. Sure, they’re not paying me anything, but by this point I’ll have a totally self-sufficient life, just sailing, eating, more swabbing the deck, a real marine life for me.

What I really want though is just to play a ton of video games. Like every time I go to a video game web site, all I hear about are all of these amazing games out, stuff I’ve never heard of, with fully immersive single-player stories, all backed up by massive online multiplayer fun. I don’t have enough time for video games. But that’s what I really want, nothing but time for XBOX and PlayStation. You’ll never find me in anything but pajamas. But it won’t be weird. Like when I order delivery from the diner, I won’t have to be ashamed to open the door looking like I haven’t been out of the house in weeks. I’ll just be like, “This is the best man, I am living the dream, all the time in the world to play all of the video games I want.” And the delivery guy is going to be like, “Yeah man, looks like you’ve really got it all.”

But that can’t be all there is to life. No, I’m still young enough to make something of myself physically. Wasn’t there a Disney movie about a guy in his fifties that became a rookie professional baseball player? I don’t know, all of those inspirational based-on-a-true-story movies kind of blend into each other after a while. But that’s what I’d really want to do with my life, if I could drop it all right now, I’d choose professional hockey player. Like, send me to hockey boot camp, get me hands-on training with the best hockey coaches in the world. I’ll give it my all, twenty-four seven, I’ll work like you’ve never seen anybody work before. I’m not looking to be a star, OK, but I’ve got to be of some value somewhere, a minor league franchise even, or somewhere in Russia. And then years from now they’ll make an inspirational Disney movie about me, and then an ice-capades meta-version of that movie.

I’m not asking for much out of life. Just the ability to dream. And then also the ability to wake up and make those dreams a reality. And I want them all, conflicting dreams, impulse dreams, I just want to do it, I just want somebody to give me all of these things. I want to be the first person to eat a thousand hot dogs in one sitting. You’ll see the Nathan’s Hot Dog championship scoreboard, it’ll be like 2012, some guy with 70. 2013, some other guy with 73. 2014, Rob G. with 1,000. 2015, some other guy with 75. And nobody’ll ever come close. I’ve just got to get out there and do it. I’m spending too much time sitting here writing about the life beyond my wildest dreams and not enough time actually making it happen. I’ve got to make it happen. All of it.

Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite

I hate it when you go out to a restaurant and all they have to drink is Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite. That’s all we serve at my restaurant. The royal triumvirate of boring sodas. It’s like I can just picture whoever started the place, they’re considering all of the locally selected ingredients for each carefully plated dish. And then right after they finish planning the menu, one of them says, “Oh wait, we forgot to go over beverages.”

The other guy goes, “What do you mean, like soda? Just get Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite.” And that’s it. It’s like there’s no imagination at all, not even the possibility that you might branch out even a step into the wider world of soft drinks.

And this isn’t anything against Coke. It’s great. I hate Diet Coke, but whatever, that’s not a fight I’m willing to pick, because people love Diet Coke, and so yeah, not my cup of tea. I do love Coke Classic. But I love cheeseburgers also. It doesn’t mean I want every meal to be a cheeseburger. Nor do I want every drink I have to be a Coke.

I just don’t get it, because there are so many more interesting sodas besides Coke and Sprite. How did we wind up as these two being the standard? It’s like ice cream, you’ve got vanilla and chocolate. Hot drinks, it’s coffee and tea. And for soda, you’ve got whatever flavor Coke is supposed to be and then lemon-lime.

You ever go to a restaurant and ask if they orange soda? Or Mountain Dew? You won’t even get a response right away. The waiter or waitress is just going to stare at you for a little while, to communicate as passive-aggressively as they can, are you kidding me? Are you seriously asking me if we have orange soda or Mountain Dew? Of course we don’t. Of course we only have Coke or Sprite. What the hell is your problem?

I know this because I’m a waiter, and I can’t stand it when people waste my time, “What kind of soft drinks do you have?” And what do I do? I don’t want to be a dick. I don’t want to be like, you’re an idiot, we only have Coke, Diet Coke and Sprite. But that’s all we have. Sure, I can mention unsweetened ice tea, I can throw in seltzer, but that’s it, everybody’s left deflated by the interaction. I don’t know what you were expecting.

But why is artificial orange flavor that much different than artificial lemon and lime flavor? Why is it socially acceptable to have a brown or a clear carbonated beverage in front of you at a restaurant while a green or a neon yellow one would make it look like you snuck out to Pizza Hut to order a soda to bring back to the table?

Cream soda, root beer, grape soda, Dr. Pepper, there are so many alternative soda flavors we could add to the standard restaurant drink menu to make everything more interesting. But no, you’re lucky if you go to a restaurant that has ginger ale.

Every restaurant by me, they proudly serve at least forty-five craft beers on tap. The wine gets its own telephone book sized menu. Bourbons, scotches, spirits, hold on, let me get the liquor manager to come over and give you a history lesson on single malts vs. blends. But soda? We’ve got Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite. It’s not fair. I love soda. I would love to have some variety when I feel like enjoying a sugary carbonated beverage.

Hey Bill, are you reading this?

Dear Bill Simmons:

Man, sometimes I feel like I’m never going to get a job at Grantland. Like, I’ll keep writing you these open letters every week, but that’s as far as my one-sided relationship with you is going to go. But I don’t know what else to do. Maybe a year or so ago, I wrote a real letter to you, to Grantland. I went to the web site and went to the “Contact Us” page and there was an email address to the editors. And I don’t remember what I wrote exactly, but it was all professional, like, “Dear editors: This is a very serious inquiry seriously inquiring about writing for Grantland,” blah blah blah.

And look, I know that you probably get way too much email to respond to, I get it. So I’m not mad or anything, it’s not like I take it as a personal snub. But it’s incredibly frustrating, to want something so bad, to want to be a professional writer, just throwing yourself out there on the Internet, over and over again, never getting any sort of response.

It’s like, even these letters, this whatever it is that I’m doing on my blog every week. Dear Bill Simmons: please give me a job. And then I go onto Twitter and tweet you a copy of the link, knowing that you get tons of tweets, that there’s no way you’re able to even view every tweet you receive, let alone consider a response.

But I don’t know what else to do. And it’s you, it’s Gawker, it’s all of these other professional high-trafficked web sites that publish all sorts of cool stories written by authors who, when I click on their profiles, they all look like they’re my age, like it shouldn’t be totally inconceivable that I could be doing what they’re doing.

It’s a tough job, getting a cool job, a job where you get to make stuff and write stuff and somehow earn money from it, enough money that you could theoretically support yourself. So far I think I’ve made about seventeen dollars from my writing. I don’t know how you do it, Bill, how you’ve built this media empire all based on your words, writing about sports, about pop culture, about stuff that you love.

Man, this is a pretty boring letter so far, I’m aware of that. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t think of anything to say right now. Last week I wrote about how I’d start from the bottom and work my way up. That was pretty cool, at least, it was cool in the way that I didn’t really have to think about it as I wrote it. The words just kind of flowed through me from somewhere else.

But right now, man, it’s really a struggle to get these sentences into paragraphs. You must be able to relate, right? I mean, you’ve done it, you’ve made it as a writer. What do you do when you can’t think of anything to write about? I’ve read all sorts of stuff on the topic, and most advice from professional writers always boils down to the inspiration/perspiration argument, that talent is cheap but work is hard.

And yeah, it’s hard to get this letter out there, I don’t know what to say, I’m feeling each week like I’m making a fool out of myself, desperately invoking your name on the Internet, like you’re magically going to swoop down from cyberspace and elevate my status from professional waiter to professional writer.

But isn’t that the kind of guy you want working for you at Grantland? Just think, I’m not afraid of my own self-imposed Internet writing deadlines. I need to write a letter to you every week. Why? I don’t know. I just made up a deadline and ran with it. Can you imagine what I’d do for you? For Grantland? Give me a deadline, and I’ll stick to it. I’ll get something out. I’ll perspire all over the place.

I guess that’s all I’ve got. Not very entertaining, I know, but sometimes you’ve just got to be willing to write something bad in hopes of eventually being able to maybe write something good. In the meantime, please read this letter from last week, the one I was telling you about just before. Also this letter, about a dream I had where you and I both went to space. That was a pretty cool one.

-Rob G.