-We're under attack!-

This Friday would have been a good day to stay home.

Last weekend was an experiment in sleep deprivation, long distance driving, questionable food, and constant secondhand smoke. By this past Tuesday, I had symptoms of my first illness of the year. Congestion, high temperatures, headaches, etc. I misappropriated Pere Goriot and begged for a guillotine to remove the offending body part.

But go to work I did, and attended the opening for the new building on campus. State Senators and Board members and academic bureaucrats. I tried to stay out of the way of the hobnobbing and especially the table laden with cheeses, fruit, and bottles of water - common courtesy from the sick and possible contagious, though it should be noted that I was not alone in my condition. And no sooner had the speechifying ended, and I returned to the library to listen to my temples pound out Carmina Burana, then did word reach me of the school president's question and answer session. With free Pizza.

But somebody there responding to the bribe of pizza wasn't a student. He was the live-in companion of a coworker of mine, and he has too much time on his hands. I heard later that he told the president that the library was on the brink of collapse. He didn't mention any names, but he also described some of the workers negatively (not me) and spilled the beans on his companion's retirement plans.

He thought he was being funny, stunning the president like that. Sick as I was, I couldn't let that be the last thing the president heard. Her next move would be an interrogation of the absent director of the library, who would likely return from her vacation early to implement a furious staff restructuring.

So I went in, and stood between the president and her late lunch, and tried to assure her that we are thriving, really. Too bad her only questions for me were the only ones I couldn't answer. Only the director knows which staffing plan she'll propose.

Safe money is on the cheapest, of course.

-Negotiating a new ten (10) year contract-

Business A (the incumbent) was a three (3) member delegation headed by a man who resembles those western sheriffs who grimly enforce the letter of the law in a town overrun by bandits. Not a coward, necessarily, but unable to do more than speechify after the unknown stranger massacres every evil henchmen and rides off into the sunset.

Come to think of it, this role is reprised as the sergeant in post 1960 cop movies. Clint Eastwood used the same actor, at any rate. Oh, digression; I only mean to imply that this delegation is on the defensive, incumbent providers with a ten year record ridden with bullets.

POW POP BANG BarAying!

The last is my interpretation of the fourth and longest note of a bullet sound, the supposed deflection of the slug off another object. Maybe it is a weakness of the human ear, but sound artists have been putting those four (4) sounds in the exact same order for nearly a century of talkies, and we never catch on.

POW POP BANG BarAying!

Business B (the challenger) is a slick corporate operation lead by a woman who resembles Anne Archer. It was our campus horndog who first pointed out the resemblance to me. My mistake for asking his opinion on the business matter of choosing a provider. His business, as I have repeatedly been warned and have repeatedly dismissed as gossip, is in his pants, and as he whispered what he would like to do to Anne Archer, I had to concede that he was every bit the walking lawsuit people said he was.

Damn. Up to this point, he was becoming one of my favorite people.

Anyway, Anne Archer and her team did an excellent job of implying extravagant things they could not possibly deliver in our space and within our budget, but never explicitly promised. Moreover, our college’s real growth bolstered those implications, and the two loudest, least competent faculty members built strawmen out of Business A’s tattered pieces. The loudest, least competent Business B flunky could not have failed to knock it down.

Sorry, sheriff. There is no unnamed stranger to save your dusty streets and two dimensional (2D) storefronts.

-Double-

My friend Set and I are at the same stage of dating. Phone numbers swapped by friends, phone conversations that didn't kill anyone's enthusiasm, and first in-person dates that didn't spark, but didn't suck, either. So we've decided to join forces and double-date this Thursday.

We both took a shine to this plan immediately, but couldn't resist playing devil's advocate.

Set: What if they crush on each other?

Benedict: Very Anais Nin of them if they did, but worth the risk.
What if either one of us dislikes the other's date?

Set: [pause] I guess we talk about it later, in private.
What if either one of them dislikes one of us?

Benedict:

Set:

Benedict and Set: F@$% 'em.

-..and the doctor said, “I cannot operate on this patient, because he is my son.”-

That is the end of a riddle designed to flush out male chauvinists. And I am here to tell you of new one I stepped into, on a recent date.

The woman told me she coached hockey and softball, and do you know what I said, a few minutes later?

“So, how is the field hockey team doing?”

At that moment, the entire region got blasted with cold weather. Coincidence?

Ice hockey, she answered flatly, and I thought of the sound Mia Farrow's Rosemary makes when she finally sees her baby.

Field hockey is played in the fall, she added.

Impeccable logic, I said, and tried to change the subject.

The father died in the crash, and the doctor is the boy's mother!

-Restraint-

My monolithic coworker snapped at me yesterday over nothing. Publicly. I guess it had been building for some time.

They tell me she is envious of my easy acceptance into the college, but I don't believe I did anything extraordinary for that. Just don't be a jerk, and you're in.

Until now, I sensed her irritation and felt only mild amusement. But if there will scenes in the library like the one yesterday, it makes us both look bad. I still want another job, but I don't want to burn too many bridges before or after it happens.

At the time, and after, I considered calling her into my office to discuss the matter privately. I still think it might be a good idea. But as more time goes by, I think the power of the initial insult is waning too much to debate without seeming thinskinned, or silly.

'Course, getting steamrolled by jerks isn't my favorite sport either, so I need to manage this problem quickly.

-Callback-

There was a note on my computer when I came in this morning.

"Please phone (xxx) xxx-xxxx
She is sick & not able to come in."

"She" in this case is my boss, and this is not unusual.

But when I called, someone on the other end picked up the phone and put it back on the receiver.

Now what?

-On the blink-

The view screen on the phone winked at me once, then went blank. Thirty seconds later, it winked again, then went blank again. And so on, and so forth.

Funny, I thought. I’m supposed to do a phone interview in five hours.

It was a perfect day for electronic equipment to go haywire. The new ipod, about which I still harbor a great deal of class trepidation for merely owning, also needed repair. And I think one of the brake lights on my car might be going.

Phoneless, toneless, and brakelight-less, the confluence of electronic mishap left me scratching my head and thinking about popular culture, and how much of our attention it still demands. Is it only the loss of all these other distractions that has me seeking another distraction?

Don't answer that.

A leader of a Christian fellowship can rail against 'Book of Daniel' for an alleged anti-christian sentiment. But what gets my goat? Knowing so little about television these days, except for those informative tidbits that somehow cross the gator-filled moat and scale the walls, I did manage to come up with one show that fills with me with hate; not for its ideas, but its lazy style.

Put aside for the moment their voyeuristic and sleazy tapping of juvenile kidnappings and sex crimes. I recently saw the moronic police officers on a Law and Order clone (all of them are awful, it doesn't matter which one you see) did one of their preachy group-exposition pieces. They stand roughly in a circle, and pipe up one by one.

Hargitay: What about these children? My character is childless, but look at me as if I’m maternal, will you please?
Melloni: Yeah, what about all of those missing children’s fathers? And do I get to beat the crap out of their stepdads, or what?
Wong: It’s all psychological with these missing girls. They look for father figures, and the pimp takes advantage of that.

Suspect: um, are you actually going to ask me any questions?

Ice-T: Lotta broken homes, lotta pimps. This problem is all over the country.
Belzer: wouldn’t be so many pimps if there weren’t so many johns to pay for it.

Just once, I’d like to see the perp in the other room look from expository cop to expository cop, incredulity growing. When the police captain finally comes in to worry about jurisdiction – his only other job is to exhort them to “find the girl!” – the perp should slip off the cuffs he’s been working on, and walk out of the station shaking his head.

“Jesus,” he should say once he’s outside. “It’s almost as if it’s in all of their contracts to take turns recapping the social issue of the day.”

“The writers must really think we’re fucking stupid.”

:Roll Credits:

Are they right? Are all our brains on the blink?

Don't answer that.