YOUR BUSINESS IS REJOICING!

A Thursday morning last fall found me in a middle school auditorium, reliving painful adolescent experiences of alienation. Once a year our company gathers its many employees together to bestow awards, listen to a motivational speaker, and of course pray. This year’s big inspirational to-do took the form of a mock pep rally, something the planners no doubt thought would be fun and kitschy. We all wore colored shirts to represent our different sites (mine was orange!), and we drove out to a middle school in the West End where my bosses took the stage and led cheers, which I was told it was important I participate in no matter how silly or degraded I might feel because company morale depended on my positive attitude, and so I stood, teeth clenched in a half-smile, plastic megaphone at my lips, hollering in a way I hoped was sincere. Hollering stuff like, “WE’VE GOT SPIRIT YES WE DO, WE’VE GOT SPIRIT HOW ‘BOUT YOU?!?!?!”
Abruptly, a young woman took the stage and began to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” a cappella and badly. A hush fell over the auditorium as she sang, and, while her thin, unappealing voice struggled to keep on pitch, the sound of my group’s snorts and sobs was hard to miss. We sat shuddering, heads bowed and faces covered, trying desperately not to look at one another. We knew full well that if we did look at one another we would be overcome with laughter, and that this poor girl on stage might burst into tears and run away. Not laughing at her was one of the hardest things I have ever done, and I only half succeeded. As I shuddered, tears streaming down my face, a new employee who was sitting next to me gently touched my arm.
“Are you okay?” she asked me, genuinely concerned. I nodded that I was, but couldn’t speak for fear of what might come out. She seemed like she might put her arm around me, but I held up my hand to stop her, and we both listened to the bit about the pretty little bluebirds awkwardly.
If “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” weren’t bad enough, it was followed by a very solemn and completely indecipherable prayer—an earnest mumbling that began with a request for bowed heads and ended bizarrely with the words “It is finished.”
At this point the President herself took the stage and proclaimed excitedly, “Today is all about you!” She seemed very pleased and excited by this idea, and, as she went on talking her passionate management-speak, I tried to decide whether she was manipulative or just extremely out of touch. I was sitting in a middle school auditorium dressed in an orange baseball shirt with my name on the back. I had yelled into a plastic megaphone that I had “spirit.” Later I would listen to a minister give a talk about his folksy personal philosophy about overcoming adversity and it’s roots in Popeye cartoons that he was sure most of us were too young to remember. As I listened to him earnestly declaim, “I yam what I yam,” I couldn’t help but think that I had never spent two hours that were less about me.

It's Not a Shovel

When I was fifteen or so my parents went away for a week in July and left my sister and I with an old woman named Jeanette. I railed hard against this, to no avail.
“Sarah’s too young to be left alone for a week,” they said, “Jeanette’s coming mostly for her sake.”
Mostly.
Jeanette, like many older people, believed that the only manners that mattered were those of others: other drivers, other church-goers, other restaurant patrons, other people whose respect she had earned because she was born a substantial amount of time before them. Her own manners she neglected. Something about not having much time left makes people feel entitled to spend what time they have thinking exclusively about themselves—only one reason of many why people over sixty should be barred from holding public office, but I digress.

At fifteen I began learning how to cook, and one night while we were with Jeanette I made dinner. I microwaved frozen corn, baked some potatoes, and pan-fried some pork chops. I put garlic powder and salt and pepper on the pork chops, the way I always did, and because they were thick I cooked them slowly over low heat.
As I cooked, Jeanette watched. She didn’t trust me, and when she saw how I was cooking the pork chops she adjusted the heat on the stove for me.
“You’ll never get those cooked without some sizzle in the pan,” she told me.
“No, you’ll burn them,” I told her.
“Young man, you aren’t going to make me sick with undercooked pig flesh,” she said, and set the knob to high heat.
Later at the dinner table Jeanette admitted that the pork chops were burned, which made me feel a little better. Then, as though to make up for the lapse, she told me to stop using my fork like it was a shovel.
“But I’m growing,” I said, defusing the situation as best I could.
“Growing sideways, maybe,” said Jeanette.
It’s amazing how I can forget so much about childhood, but still remember that conversation perfectly. I remember where I was sitting, and I remember the look on her face as she spoke. It wasn’t a mean look. Most people don’t try to be mean, they do it by accident, by failing to think about things outside of themselves. At the time I didn’t know that, and I looked carefully at Jeanette’s face to find some hint of dislike or anger. All I saw was a stupid old woman, just like millions of others, only this one was friends with my parents. Seeing that she spoke not out of anger but unable to recognize the motive, and being too stupid myself to know better, I put my fork down and forced myself not to eat anymore. It was burnt pork anyway.
She did many nice things for me after that, but I don’t remember many of them. If I saw her on the street tomorrow, I don’t know if I would be civil.

From the Shores of Cape Hatteras

I was drinking a beer on the beach, as is the custom, feet a-propped, borrowed umbrella fending off the harsh ultra-violet rays, a fine and gentle breeze caressing the old cheek, when I was confronted not unexpectedly by one of man’s basest urges. I rose from my seat.
“What’s up, Andrew?” inquired a near-by friend, she who lent the umbrella.
“I have to pee,” I told her, “and I don’t like the looks of the ocean.”
The natural thing to do, of course, when at the beach and needing to relieve ones self, is to head out into the sea and let your micturition disperse there. Everyone does this. I had done it myself the three days before this, and all had been well. But now, as I mentioned to my friend, the sea was a good deal angrier than in days past. It was with a good deal of apprehension that I approached the surf..

It wasn’t bad at first. I got a few feet out, and the waves were a little strong, but nothing unmanageable. I headed a little further out, and my head went under a couple of times, but I bobbed back up, and was soon far enough in to lower the old swimmers’ trunks.
I had brought one pair of trunks only, you see, and had no desire to piss into them. So I lowered the trunks, exposing the necessary apparatus, and began getting down to business. Only the business refused to be got down to.
One has to be relaxed if business is to be got down to, and relaxation doesn’t come naturally when every ten seconds or so another great honking wave is bearing down on you and you have to doggy paddle like crazy to keep your head above surface. Add to that lowered trunks, an exposed apparatus, and the close proximity of young ladies in bikinis, and relaxation becomes well nigh impossible. What if some great surge of water up-ended me, exposing God knows what to the eyes of total strangers, all of whom would know doubt point me out to their friends. I’d be discussed at dinner, “that stupid bearded jerk,” whose “huge pale ass” seared itself onto their mind’s eye, making causal dining at the Froggy Dog impossible even three hours later. It was as I imagined this particular scenario that the big one hit me.
My head was not merely pushed under, but pushed to the ocean floor, upon which I slammed my chin, thus prompting me to open my mouth and take in several gulps of salt water. As I struggled to right myself, to little effect, I remembered the words of my friend Allison on the trip down. Getting off the phone with her family, she said, “My dad wanted everyone to be sure to watch out for the undertow.” We'd laughed at this—Oh concerned parents, HA!—but now the irony struck me as unbearable. I'd never encountered an undertow before, but this was surely it, and soon my lungs would fill with water and I'd be some sad story that Gene Cox would report to an uncaring Richmond, Virginia on Channel 12.
But it was no undertow, and moments later I did right myself, maybe thirty seconds later but it felt far longer. I also managed somehow to hold onto my trunks, and I staggered out of the ocean clutching them as though some new wave might come up onto the sand and try to rip them from me.
“Are you ok?” the friends asked.
I don’t remember what I said. Not stopping to towel off, I limped off in the direction of the beach house: hair mussed, nose be-snotted, desperate for some calm indoor facility where I might relieve myself without drowning.

When the Bug Hits, That's the Time to Scratch It

I was tired from a day with my sister and her husband (then boyfriend) in their town of Blacksburg. He was a graduate student there, and she lived with him, and they both hated it. As we drove down the street we would point out to each other the various morons and idiots of Blacksburg, with explanations of what was particularly moronic or idiotic about them. She showed me the places she liked to go, the store where she worked, the people she was friends with, and I tried my best to take in all these things and to be polite and friendly, which is always more effort than anyone wants to admit.
Lying down to sleep on the air mattress, I was just beginning to doze when I felt a tickle on my right ear. I moved to scratch it. There was another tickle. I put a finger to my ear to examine the situation further, and without meaning to pushed a beetle deep into my ear canal. I then began to scream.
“SARAH!” I screamed, “SOMETHING'S IN MY EAR! SOMETHING'S IN MY EAR!”
My sister was really very good-natured and helpful for a person who has just been woken by a brother running into her bedroom at 2 in the morning, yelling something unintelligible about his ear. She calmly listened to what I had to say, my head all the while tilted to the right and twitching manically, my whole body shuddering with each movement of the bug against my eardrum.
“Do you know what ear-candling is?” she asked me.
“NO, WHAT THE FUCK, I DON’T, ARRRGH, KNOW WHAT IT, FUCK, IS,” I hollered at her as nicely as I was able.
Ear-candling is, as my sister explained to me, a process by which ‘toxins’ are removed from the ear using a hollow candle made from paper coated in wax. You put the small end in your ear and light the other end, the idea being that somehow the burning creates some sort of vacuum that draws things out of your ear. Later I would research this further to find that the ‘toxins’ which accumulate at the bottom of the candle are actually the ashes of the candle itself, that the process removes nothing from your ear whatsoever, and furthermore risks dripping hot wax into your ear and is therefore quite unhealthy, but at the time my sister knew only that ear-candles were supposed to suck unwanted things out of your ear. I was skeptical, but in no position to argue.
I laid down on my side, right ear up, and my sister inserted the ear candle and set it aflame.
“I DON’T, FUCKCRAP, THINK THIS IS WORKING” I told her.
“Hold still!” said Sarah, “It won’t work if you don’t stay still and let it burn.”
“GODDAMN, IT’S HARD TO LAY, FUCK, STILL WITH THIS BUG IN MY HEAD, HOLYCHRIST,” I told her.
The ear-candle burned down. My sister cut it open and showed me the ashes that were supposedly toxins from inside my ear, but no bugs. The powerful ear-candle vacuum had proved no match against this mighty beetle, his six legs still dancing a gigue on my eardrum. Quackery exhausted, we proceeded to the hospital.

I sat in the waiting room for what felt like several days. It is understandable now why a hospital would see “bug in ear” as a relatively low priority, but at the time, with the filthy little bastard still wriggling away in my head, the holdup seemed like criminal negligence.
I watched as some upset frat boys came rushing in to check on a friend with alcohol poisoning. They were refused admittance to their friend’s room, and so began to call the nurse who had refused them a bitch and a whore and the probably one or two other misogynistic words they knew. My sister whispered something cutting about how members of Greek organizations are somehow less capable of showing emotion in their voices than normal people, how they might say “My friend died in a car crash” with the exact same inflections as “I burned the steaks.” But I was in no mood to appreciate her wit.

Finally, I was shown to an exam room where an awkward man calling himself Dr. Livingstone examined me.
“Well,” he said, looking into my head with his standard doctor’s ear inspection device, “that’s a great big bug you’ve got in there.”
He left and came back with some water.
“This is going to be wet,” he said.
I lay down on my side, and he filled my ear with water. A few minutes later, the bug was still doing cartwheels, and I was still shuddering and yelling stuff like “MOTHERFUCKING ASSFUCK” and “HOLY FUCKING COCKSHIT,” so Dr. Livingstone upped the ante and filled my ear with hydrogen peroxide. This time the bug crawled out, and Dr. Livingstone flicked my ear with his finger in a most un-scientific way, sending the little guy sailing across the room.
“You can stomp on him if you like,” he said.
The bug was indeed big, much bigger than I had thought. We put him into a Ziploc bag so I could show my sister, who was asleep in the waiting room.
While Dr. Livingstone wrote out a prescription for ear drops I noticed a pair of tweezers lying on the counter.
“Was that the next step?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “but we try not to go that route. Sometimes the bug’ll grab hold of your eardrum when we do that, and there’s a good chance he’ll rip it.”
I didn’t stamp on the bug—my sister set it free, “the right thing to do” she said. Fucking vegetarians. She took a picture though, my bug on the sidewalk next to a quarter to give it scale. It looked harmless enough sitting there, and the pain in my head was gone. I felt as if I'd awoken from a nightmare, excited to tell bored friends about some crazy shit that had happened in my sleep.

Last night I dreamt of Randy Moss.

I dreamt it was the eighth round of my fantasy football draft, and somehow nobody had taken Randy Moss, or incredibly, Tom Brady. I was the only one to realize this, and found myself trying to pick between the two. My great dilemma, I remember vividly, was trying to think of a way to get both. I knew that since they were on the same team, I couldn’t take one without alerting my friends to the availability of the other. Was there some way I could get both, some cunning stratagem I could use to secure both the best fantasy football quarterback and the best fantasy wide receiver? Perhaps wait and make my pick when everyone else went to the bathroom, which they apparently might do as a group, this being a dream. Before I could make my decision I was confronted with some child from work who had a problem I barely remember, but which probably had to do with crayons and pinching.
Looking back on it, I obviously should have taken Brady.

Sleepover Diary—Wrap-Up

I fell asleep around 5 am. I was back up at 6, before all my lame-ass co-workers who went to bed at 12. Parents started picking kids up shortly thereafter, and I helped them find their kids, their kids’ shoes, their kids’ sleeping bag covers, whatever needed finding. An older girl who had gone to bed with her hair curled like she was headed to some sort of elementary school prom stumbled out to meet her mom bleary-eyed, half awake, her hair now poofed out in a great frizzy white-girl afro. A little boy limped up to his mom on one flip-flop, blue goo stuck in his hair, and wrapped his arms around her waist. Parents walked up to shake my hand, asking,
“Awake yet?”
“Have fun?”
“When’d they finally turn in?”
“Late night?”
Many of them actually said thank you, which was unexpected, but gratifying.
After they left my co-workers and I spent half an hour putting the building back together, and then went to Cracker Barrel for breakfast. Then I went home and slept for six hours, waking up at four and feeling like a vampire.

Sleepover Diary 4

4:05 am
The quiet is broken only by a single cricket who somehow got inside and is chirping to himself. That, and the sound of a six year old hitting his friend in the head over and over with a large inflatable bat that he won as a carnival prize. I take the bat away, but the cricket chirps on.

Sleepover Diary 3

3:30 am
The green on light of the coffee pot is staring at me, daring me to have another cup. I'm debating it, unsure if I'll want to give in and sleep later. It reminds me of the first time I tried to pull an all-nighter, in college.

I put off a paper until the last minute, and found myself calling the professor to ask for an extension. I planned to use my grandfather's recent death as an excuse- callous maybe, but I told myself grandpa wouldn't mind and I was probably right. But the professor didn't care. "You weren't in class for the discussion on Monday, " he says, "no extension."
So I resolved to stay up all night and finish it. I locked myself into the music lab where I wrote all my papers, and sat down with a 24 ounce coffee from 7 eleven. I never drank coffee, and I poured in lots of Irish Cream sweetener to make it palatable.
After fifteen minutes or so the coffee was gone, and half an hour after that I was yawning. And hell, I felt like a break anyway, so I walked back to 7 eleven for another 24 ounce coffee.
And an hour later another. 72 ounces of coffee now in me, I sat down to work in earnest, only to find that I couldn't keep a single thought in my head, they seemed to be coming in packs of five. At one point I re-read what I had typed and found a sentence with no articles that seemed vaguely to be about tuna salad. So I gave up, and decided to sleep. Ah, but 72 ounces coffee will brook no sleep, and I lay in bed sweating, listening to my heart race until about 5:30, when I fell asleep. I woke four hours later, and when I urinated it smelled like Irish cream.

In spite of all of that, I am going to have another cup.

Sleepover Diary 2

3:00 am
"I've already told you three times, if I come back you are all coming out to the green to sleep separately. Now whisper. You know how to whisper? Whisper. I mean it. Or else."
And I move on to the next room, where a girl is pretending to snore, loudly.
"SNOOOORRRRRRGHHHH....... SHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWW.... SNOOOOORRRRRRRGHHHH.....SHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEWWWWW...."
I stand there for five minutes to see how long she will do it, and for five minutes she doesn't stop. When I walk away I hear giggling.