I’m thinking about writing my own etiquette book. Geez, I think I need to learn how to spell etiquette first. Obviously, you have no idea what I’m talking about because, if you’re reading this, you’ve already seen the word spelled correctly twice. That’s because you’re viewing the finished product. Whenever I’m writing, I’m typing, and it’s always really fast. I’m the fastest typist. I initially wrote typer, but apparently that’s not a word, it’s typist. Man, anyway, what I was trying to say, before I was so rudely interrupted by Microsoft Word, was that I need to type fast, because the sentences, as they play out in my head, like when I want to write them down, they’re being thought out really fast. The typing, the writing, it feels like this constant game of catch up, my hands struggling to keep up with whatever’s going through my head.

And as long as I’m uninterrupted, it’s fine. It’s like those Tony Hawk video games, when you’d be riding around on your skateboard, and there would be a car driving around, and you’d have to wait for it to slow down, and then you’d skate up to it and hold down one of the buttons, and Tony Hawk would grab onto the back. It was called sketching. Or skitching. I don’t remember which one; it’s been years since I’ve played those games. But once Tony Hawk grabbed onto a car, you were just along for the ride. It actually wasn’t as easy as it sounds. There was a balance meter that you had to keep locked in the center, and if it went too far off balance, you would wipe out and, well, you wouldn’t die, it wasn’t like other video games where you had lives and you could lose them. No, if you jumped off a cliff in Tony Hawk you would just instantly reappear somewhere else on the map. Maps are what they call levels. I’m only explaining this because maybe you’re reading this and you don’t know anything about video games. Actually, let’s be real here, if you don’t know about Tony Hawk, chances are you’re not getting any of my other lame-o references. And maybe that’s good. Maybe this blog is educational for you. I’m educating people on nonsense.

I don’t even know how I got here, halfway through this blog post. I was going to write something about etiquette. At work the bosses put out this etiquette book, telling us to leaf through it in our spare time, learn how to act all proper and stuff. This book is gigantic, like two Bibles and a Koran smashed together. I was working the other day and I felt like taking a break without really taking a break and so I went over to the book, planning on pretending to read it for a little bit while I zoned out into space. I wouldn’t be getting any work done, but if my bosses caught me standing there, they might at first come over to scold me, to quit standing around, to get back to work, but as they got closer, they’d notice that I’m looking at their etiquette book, and they’d think to themselves, look at that go-getter, bettering himself with our book. And I’d be flipping pages at regular intervals, my brow furrowed, giving the impression to the outside world that I’m interested in learning all about manners and whatever.

But on the inside I’m still thinking about that Tony Hawk game. And I imagine a car driving through the restaurant, and I can skitch, or sketch, or whatever I can whip out a skateboard and hold onto the car and joyride around, going faster and faster, and it would be so much fun. That was my plan, to open this book and ignore it and think about a nice little daydream, but I opened it randomly and the first etiquette rule that I saw was something like, “What should I do if my ex-husband invites me to his wedding?” And I couldn’t help but to start reading. And the answers were so specific. I’m like, who’s making up all of these random rules? Is there a single authority on what to do in crazy situations like this? I thought to myself, I could probably make up answers to this type of stuff as well as anybody else can. And then I thought, well, I have a blog, I should write about etiquette and what to do in situations that normal people will probably never have to deal with.

So that’s what I was planning on writing about today. I was starting to talk about etiquette, but the spell check thing totally sidetracked me, immediately. That’s how this always goes down. Microsoft Word sucks. I’ll be writing really fast, skitching on the back of a really cool idea, when a word that I rarely, if ever, use, like etiquette comes along, and I give it a decent shot. It’s not the best spelling, whatever. But Word’s like, ah, ah, ah, Rob, you spelled that all wrong. And here, let me just underline your poor spelling with a nice obtrusive red squiggly line. There. Good luck finishing out that story that you were working on. Just try to ignore your error. Just try not to double click and see how it’s supposed to be spelled.

Of course I correct it. Those red lines drive me crazy. And Word sucks so bad. Sometimes it’ll correct words that I’ve spelled correctly, but then when I double click on it, to be like, what the hell Word, the red line just disappears. It’s like Word is going, haha, just kidding. Haha is underlined in red. Skitching is underlined in red. Facebook is underlined in red. Word, why don’t you keep your stupid spelling corrections to yourself until after I’m done? Geez, now I’m stuck with this crazy blog post that started going in one direction but splintered into a thousand different tangents. That etiquette idea was going to be hilarious, insanely funny, the essay that was finally going to put me on the map as a writer. But what do I have now? Nothing. One thousand words about nothing.