Author Archive: Christopher Waldrop

January 19, 2007

The following story is inspired by fictional events.

It was a dark night in the lambent city. I was sitting in my office and had half-polished a bottle of corn when a dame walked in. She breezed past my secretary who wasn’t there. My secretary had stopped taking "I’ll be your friend" as payment six months before. I was three sheets to the wind. Two of those sheets were held on with really cheap plastic clothespins, and this dame was a strong wind. She had legs down to there, arms out to here, hair that was yay long, and eyes that ended somewhere in yonder. She sat down and crossed her teeth and laid the skinny on me quick and simple, which I liked because I’ve got a lower than average IQ. "I need help," she said. I knew what she needed because I’m a dick, a shamus, a sleuth, and I do a little detective work on the side. That’s when it hit me: a piece of plaster. I’ve gotta get that ceiling fixed. I poured each of us a cup of java, then got that funny feeling that she wanted me to rub someone out. Or she wanted someone to rub me out. Maybe she was even trying to kill me. I decided to breeze out. I set out on a long walk through a part of town that had been on the wrong side of the tracks since before there were railroads and stopped in at the Water Hole for a smell of the barrel and to jaw with McFeeney the Aardvark. There’s a funny story behind that name. I wish I knew what it was. McFeeney’s a kingpin, a butter and egg man who’s lousy with more cabbage than he knows how to handle. He runs a hinky flophouse for palookas, claims to be a world-class stoolie, and he could take duck soup and turn a Chinese angle on it from behind the eight-ball. I told him about the dame and said I was afraid I was going to dangle. I told him I wasn’t a rube, a sap, a Jasper, a roundheels, or a lunger. I was just a gumshoe on a job and needed him to be square. I didn’t want to make this trip for biscuits. He gave me a jorum of skee, but I think he slipped me a mickey because that’s when things got really weird. I think I was red-lighted, given a powder, stepped off, socked, snowed, maybe even thrown around a little. I’ll be square with you, officer. I’m really not sure why I was in the middle of a highway construction site putting pants on all the barricades.

January 12, 2007

The other day I saw a kid in my neighborhood dangling something long and shiny, and I immediately thought, "What the hell is that? Is that mucous?" Then I realized it was a long piece of scotch tape. It’s nice to know that there are some things that never change, like the fact that mucous is always funny. Once in Latin class during a test a guy next to me whispered, "Hey Chris, what’s the word for ‘river’?" I told him it was "flumen", and he started yelling. "Flumen? FLUMEN? That can’t be right. That sounds like mucous or something." Then he made loud gagging noises and asked to be excused because he had some flumen in his throat. At this point we were both laughing so hard it didn’t matter that we’d flunked the test, or that the Latin word for mucous is "mucus", which just proves the Romans had no sense of humor, not even when it came to flumen.

But I digress. What interested me is that, even with the invention of computers and interactive DVDs and the new handheld Victrola and all kinds of other electronic crap scotch tape is still a kid’s best friend. Teach a man to fish and he’ll sit in a boat and drink beer for a day, but give a kid a roll of scotch tape and a cardboard box and you’ll keep him occupied for hours, although I’m not sure why it’s called "scotch tape". Maybe it’s made from haggis or something. I still hear parents complain that they spend thousands of dollars on fancy electronic toys and their kids end up playing with the boxes.

Think about it, though. Most of us were kids once, except Al Lewis who was born sixty-three, and we all know that even though we were easy marks for advertisers the expensive toys that we begged our parents to buy us were only fun for about twenty minutes. The more complicated the toy the more limited its function, but you can do anything with a cardboard box. And the scotch tape is important because, no matter what that box becomes, it’s got to have things attached to it. Scotch tape is infinitely superior to glue because it’s instant gratification. When you’re in the middle of a countdown for a mission to Neptune and you suddenly realize you need to add an auxiliary ion drive you can’t stop for a couple of hours and wait for glue to dry because you’ll miss your launch window. Even NASA uses scotch tape, which explains a lot about their Mars exploration program.

But I digress. Glue is also no good because it only comes in one of two forms: the white paste that always hardens in the bottle because someone, probably the guy who sat next to me in Latin class, always goes off and leaves it open, or the amber gel that has that weird orange rubber top with a little mouth that you have to press down then hold at an angle for a day and a half while the glue slowly oozes out. Then the glue forms a film over the top and hardens so the next time you use it the little mouth crackles like it’s laughing at you. And maybe it is laughing at you. Then when you leave the room it talks. It says, "Hey, you should have put the wall of your submarine on the floor after you glued that depth gauge to it because it just fell off and now your mom’s going to yell because there’s glue on the carpet." And maybe the scotch tape is over there in the corner saying, "Aye laddie, the best laid plans of submarine makers aft gang agley."

But I digress. If that weren’t bad enough I always end up wondering how they manufacture that glue. I won’t tell you where I think it comes from. Let’s just say it looks a lot like flumen to me.

December 8, 2006

Now that the year is winding down, it might be a good time to pause and consider something that everybody forgets about ten minutes after the new year has started: fruitcake. But maybe you’ve already gotten a fruitcake this year, so you can take the one you got last year from its place in the basement where it’s been propping up the water heater, re-wrap it, and give it to someone else. So instead you could think about something everybody only thinks about a couple of days before New Year’s Eve, then forgets about ten seconds after the new year has started: resolutions.

Everybody I know makes New Year’s Resolutions, and nobody I know can tell me what their resolutions were by the time we get to December. Or April. This year I’m going to write my resolutions down to make sure I can refer back to them. I will lose ten pounds. I will hold doors for complete strangers. I will be on time to all shareholders’ meetings. I will floss at least once this year. I will also floss my teeth. At least once. I will eat more leafy green vegetables. I will stop impersonating a doctor so I can get free guacamole. I will walk more. I will stop calling my friends after I’ve been up half the night licking salamanders. I will overcome my irrational fears of the dark, twist-off bottle caps, and people from Finland. I will get more fiber in my diet. I will discover a cheap, renewable source of energy. I will learn to make a torte. I will exceed the speed of light. I will discover a way to deep-fry sticks of butter. I will make a colorful pie chart of my favorite swear words and take it to a shareholders’ meeting. If I win an Academy Award I will adopt a young African houseplant. I will exercise three times a week. Tu zanahoria es muy bonita. I will stop using words without knowing what they mean. I will be more pusillanimous. Or less. I will stop sending mass e-mails with subject lines like "Loquacious Bosoms Actuary" that turn out to be cheap drug advertisements. I will recycle celery. I will stop drinking paint thinner. I will find and join a group of shareholders and never show up for meetings. I will come up with resolutions I can actually keep, because no one believes I’m going to eat more leafy green vegetables.

December 1, 2006

This year I’m giving a gift to the future: I’m taking all those catalogs that fill up my mailbox and taking them straight to the recycle bin. And I’m doing it for my own health, too. I get plenty of exercise carrying three-hundred pounds of slick paper across the yard, and if I take them inside I won’t order most of that crap, and it’ll just make me hungry because everything, from clothes to carpentry equipment, is described with food. Here’s a memo to the people who write the catalogs: those pants aren’t chocolate, they’re brown, those shoes aren’t cherry, they’re red, and that sweater isn’t mustard–it’s yellow. That umbrella isn’t orange it’s…er, well, it’s more of a tangerine, really. It’s confusing enough that socks come in jet, ebony, and slate, which looks like black, black, and gray to me, but when they come in kiwi I have no idea what color that’s supposed to be. Maybe it’s that bright green of the inside of the kiwi that’s really more of a chartreuse, or maybe puce. Or maybe it’s not puce, maybe it’s pusillanimous. Okay, I admit I have no clue what "pusillanimous" means, so let’s not get pugilistic about it. Maybe when something’s color is "kiwi" it’s light brown with little tiny hairs all over it.

Don’t get me wrong–I love kiwi, but someone else has to prepare it for me. I just can’t bring myself to eat a fruit that I have to shave first. But I digress. The same socks also come in apricot, rambutan, and mulberry. Mulberry? What the heck is a mulberry? I wouldn’t know a mulberry if one came up and bit me, and for all I know that’s possible. If I get bitten by a mulberry do I have to get a shot? I don’t know if I should wear them or eat them. I do know this much about mulberry: it’s a few shades lighter than aubergine, and aubergine is an eggplant that got a really good agent. But what kind of eggplant? Is it one of those long, stringy Japanese eggplants? Maybe it’s one of those white eggplants. Well, technically they’re not white: they’re vanilla, cream, eggshell, or ecru. Maybe it’s those purple and white eggplants, making it even harder to decide what tie to wear. At least it would be a problem if I wore ties. Or maybe it’s the big, traditional eggplants you use for eggplant parmesan–the ones that are so dark they’re almost black, and when they’re baked in eggplant parmesan they’re black and white and red. There’s a new twist on an old joke: the next time someone asks you what’s black, white, and red all over, say, "Eggplant parmesan." But I digress. Then there’s cobalt, which you can’t eat, and that’s probably just as well because only chemists really know what color cobalt is. Usually it’s blue, but I think cobalt can also be pink. Why call a strong, dark blue "cobalt", anyway? Why not call it "roentgenium", since not even chemists know what color roentgenium is? It could be blue. It could be paisely for all I know. Either way, roentgenium sounds strong and powerful and bold. roentgenium: that’s a color that’ll put hair on your chest. And roentgenium will take hair off your chest and anything else it gets close to, but at least it’ll never be pink like that turncoat cobalt. Think about how embarrassing it would be to buy some cobalt swimming trunks for a guy and find out when they arrive that they’re pink. A guy has to be really strong and secure to wear pink to the pool or the beach. He has to be a manly man, a man’s man, mano a mano, a man among men, a man who would be king, a man who could, to be blunt, shave his own kiwis.

November 17, 2006

Every time he would make a trip to the grocery store my grandfather would say, "I guess I’d better buy some food. I haven’t figured out how to live without it yet." I think he was kidding, but I thought about that expression a lot the summer I worked in a restaurant. It wasn’t exactly a fast food place–it was one of those places where you sit down and get real utensils, so it wasn’t exactly "fast", but what they gave you wasn’t exactly "food" either. Mainly it was known for its breakfast and salad bar. Actually that was the only thing it was known for, the pride and joy of the place, or at least the pride. They had a big bottle of Joy, but the guy in charge of washing the dishes never used anything but hot water and a piece of fabric torn from whatever shirt he was wearing at the time.

But I digress. When I was hired, a college student with no restaurant experience who was only going to stick around for a few months, they naturally put me in charge of the breakfast and salad bar. Maybe they’d heard I had a lot of experience with bars but didn’t realize it wasn’t the kind you go to for breakfast, unless your idea of breakfast is a Bloody Mary.

But I digress. Working the breakfast and salad bar was the perfect job for someone in college, if your definition of "perfect" is broad enough to include "lousy". I had to come in five minutes before dawn to give the bar enough time to heat up so when the cook came in two hours later the containers that held the eggs and pancakes and sausage would be warm enough. The only people who came in earlier than I did were the guy who hosed down the parking lot, which is so important it had to be done even when it was raining, and the guy who put the letters on the outside marquee. The marquee guy was the only one whose job was worse than mine: he had to come in first thing every morning and put, "COME IN FR OUR BREKFAST BAR" on the marquee, and then come back in last thing every night and take the letters down. He had to do this because once he left the letters up overnight and vandals came and spelled, "A BACKBITER REFORMS FOR NU." I can’t tell you how much trouble this caused. The guy who hosed down the parking lot was from Finland, and, when he was done, always came in to have a cup of coffee and tell me I was very nice, which is the kindest thing anyone from Finland has ever said to me.

But I digress. While they were doing their jobs I was busy putting together the salad bar. The restaurant manual explained that the salad bar was to be set up first, and then the breakfast bar had to be put on top of it. That way after the breakfast rush was over the eggs and pancakes and bacon could simply be removed and the lettuce and sliced vegetables and salad dressings would be nice and hot in time for lunch. Also I had to make fluff, which was artificially processed whipped topping substitute mixed with the liquid from a jar of maraschino cherries. For some reason people ate this stuff. Actually one of the most valuable lessons I learned working there is that if you put it on a bar people will eat it. I once left my towel on the bar by mistake and came back to find someone putting syrup on it. The other valuable lesson I learned is that everything restaurants serve can be powdered. When I told people where I worked they would always say, "Oh, I love their gravy! How do they make it?" I would tell them it was a powder that came in a bag. No one would believe me, so I finally started photocopying and handing out the gravy instructions from the manual: "First shake the bag several times to make sure the cockroaches are evenly distributed." Pretty soon people stopped asking me about the gravy. I also learned never to eat at that restaurant again. In fact the whole experience was almost enough to put me off food entirely, but I never could learn to live without it.

November 10, 2006

So I got some blood drawn recently for an experiment. As much as I like advancing science I wasn’t looking forward to it because, from what I remember of the last time I had blood drawn, it was painful. Admittedly it wasn’t unbearably painful, but, strange as it may seem, I don’t like pain. I try to avoid things like jumping off buildings or setting my hair on fire or being jabbed by needles because, and maybe I’m mistaken, I think these things will cause pain. But then I don’t really know how painful getting blood drawn was the last time it happened, which was several years ago, because I was already in pain from what doctors ended up thinking might be a kidney stone. And I was in a hospital emergency room at four a.m. on Christmas Eve. If this had been a television drama about doctors the waiting room would be full of guys in Santa suits who’d set their hair on fire or jumped off buildings, all the doctors would be married to, and in the middle of divorcing, each other, and the entire nursing staff would be drunk. Fortunately life is rarely like television and, aside from my very worried wife, the only other thing in the waiting room was a video tape about spinal injuries that was unplayable because it looked like somebody sat on it. And although the technician who handled the X-ray machine told me she was hung over, which is one of those things you don’t want to hear from someone who’s about to bombard you with radiation, everybody was nice and professional and low-key and, after drawing some blood, they gave me some nice drugs that made the pain, and everything else, go away.

Then, about a week later, there was the sonogram. I can’t complain about that because it not only didn’t hurt, but they let me look at the monitor so I could see that my spleen looks exactly like Ed Koch. But I digress. Then there was the visit with my doctor. By then I wasn’t doubled over in pain anymore, but he was doubled over laughing that someone as young as me would have a kidney stone. I’m still not sure what he found so funny. Maybe it hadn’t sunk in yet how little time a really sick patient would leave him for playing golf. Fortunately he’ s not my doctor anymore, and since then I’ve never had a recurrence. In fact I haven’t had anything major. I’ve avoided disease and doctors and hospitals like the plague. I’ve even avoided the plague like the plague. And while I’m still not going to go stabbing myself with needles all the time I’m happy that this last time it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. The nurse was nice and professional and the best part is she wasn’t hung over.

November 3, 2006

I love Daylight Savings Time. Or, more specifically, I love when it ends. I’m not such a big fan of the springing forward, but falling back into an extra hour of sleep is something I’m happy to do any time. Of course I don’t always get an extra hour of sleep, but since I’m awake and it’s the weekend I might as well sit around in my pajamas, eat cereal, and watch cartoons. Just because I’m an adult I don’t have to put away all childish things, right? And cartoons prepared me for adulthood, or at least for college. I’m not talking about the cartoons that exploded when I was a kid and that were designed solely to sell me crap–I eat cereal, but even when I was a kid I stayed away from any cereal that was based on a cartoon, or that had a cartoon based on it. Sometimes they both appeared so close together it was hard to tell which came first: the cheap, cloying doll, the cheap, cloying breakfast cereal, or the cheap, cloying cartoon show.

I’m talking about the classic cartoons: the Looney Toons. I think they even prepared me for adulthood, or at least college. I spent four years in college reading authors like Camus, Beckett, and Danielle Steele who went on and on and on about how life is absurd and we’re engaged in the futile pursuit of the unattainable. I kept thinking it sounded familiar, and then I realized that I’d seen it all before in all those Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons. "Waiting for Godot" would have been a lot better if it had been about two guys buying catapults and rocket-propelled roller skates from the Acme company.

But I digress. I’ve decided that falling back from Daylight Savings Time is such a good idea that we should skip the springing forward and just fall back. This will eventually put us in a weird state where the sun is up at midnight and noon falls in the middle of the night, but think about how much daylight we’ll be saving.

October 27, 2006

I’ve never been in a real, bona fide haunted house. Sure, there was something that lived in my closet when I was a kid, and I’ve been in houses where the doorknobs rattled, the lights flickered, and the walls oozed green slime dredged up from the depths of Hell, but those weren’t "haunted" so much as "built in the 1970’s", when green slime dredged up from the depths of Hell was a very popular insulating material. Once, while out cruising around late at night, my friends and I went in what someone claimed was a haunted barn. It was pretty scary when we were wandering around inside it and heard a strange sound that sounded vaguely like "gloot, gloot, gloot." It turned out to be a cow drinking from a trough. If you don’t think cows are scary in the daytime try meeting one in a dark barn in the middle of the night.

But I digress. There was a time when various youth groups would put on their own haunted house in a church basement or old house. These are a great fundraiser, if by "fundraiser" you mean "spending four-hundred dollars to make two-hundred dollars". Nowadays every theme park has its annual Hallowe’en festival where the scariest thing is the admission price, and there are the new professional haunted houses, set up in old prisons or out-of-business warehouse stores. If you want something really scary go to a warehouse store that’s still in business. A set of patio furniture for just twenty dollars? Shocking! Terrifying! Xiphosuran!

But I digress. You might have heard the urban legend about the haunted house out in a field in Nebraska, or maybe Nevada, or maybe Nigeria, some place that starts with ‘N’. This house, so the story goes, has thirteen floors and you pay fifty bucks to get in, or maybe it’s fifty floors and you pay thirteen bucks to get in, and if you make it through the entire thing you get your money back. Here’s the scary part: the house is so terrifying that no one’s ever made it all the way through. That sounds almost like the plot of an old horror movie: "The Refund That No One Ever Got", starring Dick Miller, Beverly Garland, and Charles Middleton as The Bald Guy. Filmed in glorious Consternation-o-Vision!

But I digress. When I was a kid there was a house in my neighborhood that I thought was haunted. The people who lived there were the Huns, who were pretty ordinary people, if by "pretty ordinary people" you mean "The Manson Family". They had twelve boys who made the gang from "A Clockwork Orange" look like Boy Scouts. They moved away and were replaced with a succession of people who never stayed more than six months but each new family that moved in brought a bigger, stranger dog. By the time I left the people living there had what looked like a haystack with ears. This "dog", if that’s really what it was, only barked once and all the windows in the neighborhood broke. It wasn’t the dogs, or their owners, though, that made me think the place was haunted so much as the house itself. It was tall and narrow with a high-peaked roof. The windows and door were placed to make it look like the house had a face, and if that wasn’t spooky enough the Huns, or maybe their predecessors, had decided that dark gray and brown was a nice color scheme. No one ever stayed around long enough to repaint it. It was a seriously creepy house from the outside. I never saw the inside of it. If I ever went inside I probably wouldn’t make it all the way through and would lose my fifty bucks.

October 20, 2006

Every once in a while someone tries to sell me the Hot Rods of the Gods theory–the idea some time ago in distant history aliens landed on this planet and mated with humans or otherwise influenced our development. As proof they usually point to the pyramids, or at least in a random direction because they’re not always sure where the pyramids are, although they’re pretty sure the pyramids are somewhere East of here. Supposedly humans couldn’t possibly have built the pyramids, but why not? The way I see it the ancient Egyptians had a choice: they could either devote themselves to building monuments or they could figure out how to keep the sand out of their food. So they ended up toothless but with the only one of the seven wonders of the ancient world that’s still standing. What could aliens do for us that we couldn’t do for ourselves, aside from inventing drywall? And even if aliens did make us who we are it wouldn’t be all the aliens. Somebody has to stay home on Rigel Seven and cook the meals and dig the ditches while a select group went off to a small blue-green planet to muck around with the DNA of some chimpanzees, build the pyramids, paint the Mona Lisa, and invent Velcro. It would be the explorers, the inquisitive ones, the ones who couldn’t get real jobs–in a word, the scientists. I’m not knocking scientists. Scientists figured out how to pasteurize cheese, and this is a lot of fun at parties, but scientists also recently got into a massive argument over whether Pluto was a planet. Admittedly they didn’t clumsily shoehorn two completely unrelated things together like I just did, but I thought I’d distract you with a little stuff about aliens that I’ve had on the back burner for years then sideswipe you with my fury over Pluto becoming a galactic second-class citizen. Never mind that it doesn’t matter to anyone except Percival Lowell’s relatives whether Pluto’s a planet, a planetoid, an asteroid, or an aster.

Discovering a new planet is a reason to rewrite the textbooks, but shouldn’t Pluto get some credit for being a planet for most of the last century? Yes, it’s an oddball–which makes it like a lot of scientists. Obviously when they wrote the rules for planets they didn’t plan it very well. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune don’t even have a surface you can stand on. (I’ll take a moment while all those of you who are mentally thirteen make a joke about standing on Uranus.) They’re gas giants. So is my Uncle Harry, but I don’t hear anyone calling him a planet even though he believes everything revolves around him. But I digress. Scientists should know better than anyone else the dangers of baseless decisions and sloppy classification. For all we know there are aliens living on Pluto, and now that we’ve demoted it they might get mad enough to come down here and take back their pyramids.