To the Boys in Brown

Wednesday, July 05, 2006 • 05:58:57 PM EDT

Dear UPS Driver:

You have my new phone.

Don't deny it…it says so right on the UPS website. You've had it since 5:04 AM. It's now 5:46 PM. You've been screwing around all day long and now, I have to insist that you dig deep and find the courage to finally deliver the damned thing.

They're not paying you to go see the new "Superman" movie on company time. I don't care if you do hear the ice cream man.

And look…I know you're not lost. You deliver to this house several times a week.

Funny, isn't it, how when it's just a silly, over-wrought PR package that spills purple glitter all over my carpet, you get it in my hands before lunchtime. But when it's an eagerly-awaited new toy that's already been needlessly delayed a week by the shipper, you feel the need to stop and dawdle at every bird and flower along the way.

Enough. E. Neuf.

If you're not here pretty damned soon, I'm going to be waiting for you in my car. I'm going to wait for your truck to pull into the driveway and then I'm going to back straight into your fender and we'll just see if your dispatcher believes your cock-and-bull story about what happened. For my part, I will testify that I'm in the final week or so of a major book project and my car hasn't moved from its space in days.

"Check his website! He wrote all about it on his blog!" you'll sputter. And so he shall, only to find a time and date-stamped testimony of events that perfectly mirrors what I'd just told him.

You'll be drummed straight out of the Service. Not just for causing $1200 in damage to a customer's parked car, but for lying -- lying! to the safety board about what had happened.

What will your mother think when I show her the videotape? Drums ruffle as the district manager, resplendent in his dress tunic and shorts, marches you past a line of your former brothers and sisters in brown. Each will theatrically turn on their heel at your approach, their gaze lingering just long enough to register their outright contempt for you and how you've disgraced the uniform. In this flickering instant you will be desperate to detect a single gram of pity or compassion. You will find none.

I don't want any of this to happen, any more than you do.

I just want my phone. Let's both be reasonable.

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It's a WON-derful TOWWWNNN!!!

Tuesday, July 11, 2006 • 11:22:27 AM EDT

I read the news yesterday about the building collapse on 62nd Street. And although I was greatly cheered to learn that it was no accidental gas explosion, I still felt let down.

City of New York, you can do better. As you've always suspected, we out-of-towners are pathetic hayseeds living dull, hollow lives of bleak routine. During the day, we bring in the harvest. During the evening, we dance our rustic dances. We bury the children and the elderly who died of the consumption over the course of the day. We offer our desperate thanks and prayers to an angry and indifferent God, and then we're asleep by 8, to start the tortuous cycle all over again.

So throw us a bone. Like a couple of weeks ago, when a Skilsaw-wielding maniac on the subway attacked a passenger at random as city employees calmly looked on. That's the Fun City we've grown to love and rely upon. It has all of the elements of a profoundly satisfying New York news story:

1. (singing) There's no crazy/Like New York crazy/Like no crazy I know.
2. As a populace, New Yorkers have committed themselves to the same conclusions about sympathy, compassion, and even fundamental respect for human life as the computer in the movie "Wargames" ultimately reached about Tic-Tac-Toe. A strange game…the only way to win is not to play."
3. The implication that the subway system, as the connective tissue that binds all of the boroughs together, acts as a hyper-accelerated Darwinian petri dish hinting at the future state of the entire region.

I mean, even the week-old leftovers of this story are more filling and satisfying than the fresh-baked 62nd Street explosion story:

A stunning re-affirmation of Element Two. One imagines that if the assailant had actually been a city maintenance worker, the Mayor's damage control would consist of a hastily-arranged press event in which the employee is forced to hand over $6 to replace the city-owned sawblade that he broke off in that passenger's sternum.

But

…only slaps at that kind of grandeur. What if we just punch that up a little?

Now that would bring in the tourists. And who knows? Maybe while they're in town, they'll eat out at restaurants and see a Broadway show, pumping dollars into local businesses. It's a win for the tourists, the city, and the thousands of wild jungle animals being kept as pets in midtown apartments. Isn't there an office that can coordinate this sort of thing?

As I write this, Boston is in a state of mild alarm over a partial ceiling collapse in one of the city's new Big Dig tunnels. An enormous concrete slab crushed a car last night, killing one woman instantly and leaving her husband to extricate himself from the wreckage. The entire tunnel has been closed down so that an extensive safety check can be completed.

The inspection could take days. And although the impact on city traffic is devastating for the entire region, the public's focus is firmly on sympathy for the survivor and the need to prevent future tragedy.

See what I mean? We New Englanders lack both the resources and the callous, selfish disregard necessary for your kind of brilliance. Nobody's pissed off about being late for work, and both the mayor and highway officials are acknowledging the problem and taking responsibility.

New York…we need you. It's going to be a long, long summer for all of us if you don't step up to the plate.

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...In COLOR!

Wednesday, July 12, 2006 • 12:12:22 PM EDT

A semi-sucky start to the day, sensation-seekers. The Book has nearly slouched itself all the way to Bethlehem, so to speak. Which is a wonderful state of affairs but it means that as I strive to finish off the few bits and pieces that remain on the punch board in the coming week I've had to cut a few little frills from my schedule.

Such as daily showers.

Yeah: ick. But that's no big deal, because all this week I've only left the house for an hour a day. Even there, I offend no one because I don't leave the car. I'm just taking a longish drive to remind myself that the outside world exists and thus help to keep body and mind duct-taped together.

No, what causes me to apply the Semi-Sucky tag to this morning is the fact that I had both a newspaper column and a magazine one due today. And although I duly delivered both items, I didn't have the time to apply what could be termed a heroic amount of polish to them before shrinkwrapping and shipping.

Those columns aren't bad, mind you. They wouldn't leave my PowerBook if I thought they weren't good stuff. But the most important part of any production are those few final hours of luxurious self-doubt. If you sit and think hard, you can usually come up with a better way of saying just about anything. And "better" can mean making a passage a bit livelier, or tightening it up, or moving it to a new spot where it seems to fit the music of the piece better…or ripping it out entirely.

Oh, well. I remind myself that no matter what I think of a column when I file it, three months later I can never tell the difference between the ones which (in my unprejudiced opinion) Conclusively Re-Affirmed My Genius and the ones where I metaphorically stormed away from the batter's box after three straight pitches and kicked the hell out of the dugout water cooler. But it serves as another reminder that as a writer, the best gift you can give to yourself is to make sure that by the time you send something off, you're certain that every last detail is a Flawless Gem of Perfect Truth, Beauty and Wisdom.

Fortunately, the Universe has favored me with a fantastic mood-restorer. It came in the form of a sidebar headline in today's Boston Globe: "Romney points to drivers' fears as death probe begins."

No, absolutely not…there's nothing funny about yesterday's deadly tunnel collapse. But my creative genius is like a fluorescent light fixture: it's cheaper to keep it on 24/7 than to keep switching it on and off all the time. You toss a phrase like "death probe" into the hopper along with the just-too-damned-butch name of our Governor and the result is an unshakeable mental picture of a Seventies cop show entitled "Mitt Romney: DEATH PROBE."

And because I live alone (and am more than a little bit sleep-deprived), I was free to amuse myself thusly through the whole rest of the morning.

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Holiday Ro-OOO-oo-oooo-oo-oo-OOOO-oo-o-oood...

Thursday, July 13, 2006 • 07:45:53 AM EDT

ROAD TRIIIIIIP!!!!!

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And Dove bars. Hand out free Dove bars, too.

Friday, July 28, 2006 • 03:29:11 PM EDT

TO: The World
FROM: Ihnatko
RE: My Orbiting Mind-Control Ray

Howdy!

I just thought I'd tell you all that the mind-control ray that I put into orbit a while ago has passed all of its initial setup tests and appears to be functioning perfectly. Hooray, me!

To be honest, I wasn't completely sure it was going to work…so I've been holding this pretty close to my vest. As you can imagine, you can't just walk into Radio Shack and buy something like this off the shelf. I probably had to design at least 70% of the thing's electronics and 20% of the guided isoneuropathic frequency beam subsystem from scratch. If you've got similar goals, take my advice: WikiPedia's info on theta-synaptic dipole harmonics isn't worth crap.

Yes, I said "crap." I must have exploded thirty or even forty squirrels before I threw out all those equations and started again from scratch.

Of course, I owe most of this success to the unnamed telecommunications company that put my package into orbit. I would love to give them proper credit, but it's probably better that they don't know. I bamboozled them into mounting the apparatus on the earthward side of one of their satellites, you see. I just told them that the PC-sized box contained the ashes of my recently-departed mother, a woman who (a) loved that telecommunications company with all her heart, (b) always wanted to visit space, and (c) was absolutely ungodly fat.

Sneaky of me, I know. But the ruse worked. I got a ping from the box about three months after the satellite was launched, which told me that it had finished booting up, it had aligned its emitter array, and it was ready for its first command.

Well, you'd think that after ten years' worth of work on this thing, I'd have its first command all worked out, wouldn't you? But I was pretty stumped. The orbiting mind-control ray — it has the acronym "BOG-COOKIE" stenciled on the side of it but I never wrote down what it was supposed to mean and now I'm damned if I can figure it out — wasn't a scheme in and of itself. It's just one component step in a much larger scheme that I probably won't be ready to put into play until 2119 or so.

No, all I wanted to do was test the system. I needed to send a command to Humanity that would be subtle enough that it wouldn't call a whole lot of attention to itself (and thus to the Ray and the Scheme) but which nonetheless would be so improbable and so obvious that I couldn't dismiss it as a random coincidence.

The Command:

Before I continue, I should probably explain that I was sort of in a dating dry-spell in 2002. So when I telnetted up the Ray and it responded with "RR -> " (Ready to Receive) I found myself typing

HOT-LOOKING WOMEN OF EARTH: CONSTRUCT PERFECT REPLICAS OF THE REALLY SKIMPY METAL SLAVE-GIRL OUTFIT THAT PRINCESS LEIA WORE IN "RETURN OF THE JEDI." YOU SHOULD ALSO PARADE AROUND IN PUBLIC WEARING IT, ESPECIALLY IN PLACES WHERE MALE GEEKS IN THEIR THIRTIES ARE KNOWN TO CONGREGATE. AND IF ANYBODY SHOULD ASK YOU IF THEY CAN TAKE YOUR PICTURE AND PUT IT ON THE INTERNET FOR MILLIONS OF STRANGERS TO SEE, YOU SHOULD BE EAGER, NAY ALMOST ***GRATEFUL,*** TO COMPLY. SO ORDERED.

And then I typed the nineteen-digit keycode that fires up the neuradio array and I pressed Return.

Eight minutes later, a response:

RC AK
OP SB

(Command received and acknowledged; operation processing; stand by.)

About thirty minutes later:

OC RC 00
RR -> 

(Operation complete; result code: 00 (success). Ready to receive.)

The frustrating thing was having to wait so long to find out whether everything had actually worked or not. I didn't want to tip my hand, so I couldn't exactly go around asking people "Say, have you seen any hot-looking women out in public wearing a perfect replica of the 'slave' bikini that Princess Leia wore in 'Return Of The Jedi'?" Plus, I had to be fair and allow the hot-looking women of Earth time to put their outfits together and maybe do some ab crunches.

Honestly, until recently I had thrown up my hands and concluded that the Ray was a failure. But photos don't lie:

Flickr: Slave Leia Appreciation Society Pool
Leia's Metal Bikini

So it's a Job Well Done, clearly. Don't tell too many people about this, obviously. I've gone ahead and issued a "IF PEOPLE TELL YOU SOMETHING ABOUT A MIND-CONTROL SATELLITE, HEAR 'YOU LOOK TERRIFIC IN THAT BIKINI; YOU SHOULD WEAR IT TO WORK, TOO' INSTEAD" command, so no worries there.

But I don't want to spoil the big surprise coming in 2119. All I'll say is that if you don't already own a pair of those rubber boots with the anti-slip soles, you'll want to have them in the back-pouch of your hovercoat. Oh, and you ought to make sure you have a hovercoat as well.

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