Clarion Content

Welcome to an on-going work of meta-fiction and gonzo journalism reminiscent of the late Hunter S. Thompson.

Brought to you by one of Durham's very own.

Some language and situations may not be appropriate for younger readers!!!

Follow this link to Chapter One.

Follow this link to Chapter Two.


Chapter Three, "No Ian"

There are good ways and bad ways to wake up in the morning.

A good way is to be awoken by an alarm clock playing some early Led Zeppelin, while a scantily-clad bathycolpian woman flounces into your bedroom bearing scalding coffee and a plate of eggs, in preparation for the first day on the job of a new promotion which came with a brand new company car which you discovered the evening before could hit 120 mph without any trouble.

A bad way to wake up in the morning is with a throbbing hangover and the vision of a large, hairy caucasion buttock being thrust into your line of sight.

"Dude, is this a zit or an abscess? Can you lance it?"

My Chuck tends to tilt my mornings in one way, rather than the other.

Now the Chuck is not the only person in the world who mistakenly tries to utilize me for medical advice, he just happens to do so in the most memorable ways.

I should explain that I do work at a hospital. This does, in many ways, explain why many people ask but, of course, is despite the fact that I am no more qualified to tell you if your ankle is broken or merely sprained than your average tattoo artist or aromatherapist. Even when I get to work, the fact that I'm the guy wearing a suit instead of a nurse's uniform means that I get all sorts of hacking coughs sprayed in my face, befouled infants posteriors presented to me, or hideous wounds shoved in front of my face in the mistaken impression that I can fix them. Really, people, I'm just here to take your money. Take your problems to the guy with the stethoscope. Especially if I'm not at work, and all you know is that I've got a hospital ID tag unfortunately still pinned onto my shirt.

So it ain't easy being the guy who works in a hospital and doesn't wear scrubs. On some days where I'm feeling particularly like an asshole, I'll actually offer a medical opinion in these cases, which tends to involve a cursory look, a jabbing finger into a sore spot, and a quick pronouncement of "It's lupus or leprosy. Either way, it'll have to come off."

No the worst part of not being a clinical staffer is that there's a very distinct hierarchy in the hospital world. The doctors are lords of the manor. They're everyone's boss, and they know it. Immediately below them come the nurses: that fun breed of women and devil-may-care gay men who think they're your mother. All of them think they're smarter than the docs. Below them, there's a swarm nurses' aids, radiology technicians, lab rats, and other assorted first-aid certified folks that still barely count as human beings in the eyes of our first two categories.

At the bottom of the heap, barely above the true scum, the enemy: the patients(!) come the herd of unskilled labor: security, the cleaning staff, the gruel sloppers in the cafeteria, the porters who shove the patients back and forth between floors.

Now I fall somewhere in the middle of this feudal system, between the clinical staff and the peasant worker-bees, which generally means that when one side gets miffed with the other, I'm lumped in with the enemy. This suits me very much, of course, as I don't want to go to their birthday parties, anyway.

A few weeks before our story begins, there had been a rash of theft from the emergency room breakroom. Lunches eaten, umbrellas borrowed, and the outright theft of an apparently expensive pair of earrings that had no business being left unattended in any office breakroom, much less one where hundreds of people have access. The result of the outcry and hub-bub was the obvious conclusion that the thievery must have been committed by a member of the serf-caste, and therefore anyone without a fancy set of initials after their name would be henceforth banned from said breakroom. While this meant that eating lunch was a tad difficult, it was something I could deal with.

A few days later, one of the lockers in the male employee's bathroom was broken into. These lockers were split between myself, Lou the Security Guard (an old buddy of mine), and about 20 assorted doctors and male nurses. A few years back, there was a more even split between the clinical staff and the 'others' in the men's locker rooms, but this balance had slowly shifted when the MDs decided to not let new pond scum store their dirty Nikes in the same room as the docs did.

But I digress. Two non-clinicals in the locker room (also the bathroom, remember), the theft had to be one of us. Much discussion was made of putting a lock on the door, which would have been inconvenient. It's one thing to find a quiet corner of a stairwell to eat your tuna sandwich. It's quite another thing to find a nice comfy supply closet to relieve oneself in. Oh, it can be done, especially after Pedro, the internist with really bad gas has been in the proper bathrooms, but you won't be making friends with the janitorial staff, who find the excuse of "It's just a frickin' drain!" to be less than comforting. Happily, things never came to the lock on the locker/bathroom door, but the whole situation put me on my guard.

I walked into work one evening to see a sad sight. Lou's locker was cleaned out: the old Minnesota Vikings sticker had been peeled off the front, and a quick check with some of the other security guards confirmed that Lou had finally retired and moved back to Duluth. Summer was rapidly approaching, he was fully vested in his pension, and his old lady decided she wasn't interested in another July or August in North Carolina. I can hardly blame the guy, so don't think this was the reason that I turned red with rage, yanked the paper towel dispenser off the wall, and only barely restrained myself from hurling it into the mirror behind the sinks.

No. What got me more aggravated than a ballet instructor with a class full of epileptics was that the new occupant of the locker had attached a strip of scotch tape to the front of Lou's old locker. Written, in simple block letters was "No Ian"

Now this was one step too far. Being included in a general cast of the distrusted, squalid masses was one thing. Being singled out as an object of suspicion by whatever ass had co-opted Lou's old locker? This meant war.

War, for a bureaucrat, means a lot of angry phone calls. Frothing with the rage of a fat child sent to bed before dessert, I rang up my boss. My manager is a phlegmatic sort, and shrugged off with my demands for a witch hunt, inquisition, and some good old fashioned torturing or the guilty party.

"Could you just pull the tape off?" passed his lips.

I hung up. I was dealing with a man who never felt a kinship with the Furies such as I did at that moment.

The head of nursing, my next contact, was a little more sympathetic.

"Figure out whose locker it is, and I'll have a talk with him."

"A talk? You mean you'll rip their toenails out with a rusty pair of pliers?"

"I think my pliers are all stainless, Ian. We'll see."

Now that I had my source of righteous vengeance, all I needed was a target.

Laying in wait, hidden in the depths of the hospital, was Ernest. Ernest should be sympathetic to me, as a fellow paper-pusher caught somewhere in the middle of scalpel-wielders and minimum-wage labor. Alas, he's been at his job too long. He'd spent years of keeping records of which patient is sleeping in which room, how many cases of chamber pots had been delivered to the rehab floor, and yes, which locker had been assigned to which staffer. You put a man in an office alone for enough years with nothing to do but tally down names and numbers, and he goes a bit weird. And from what I heard, Ernest came in a little more than halfway to weird.
His office was in the bowels of the hospital, far from anywhere a human being might willingly roam. It was dimly-lit, which kept you from clearly seeing the faded motivational posters left there by his predecessor. His desk was filled with stacks and stacks of books containing the whereabouts of pretty much everything in the hospital, and a phone. No computer: he didn't trust 'em. No items reflecting a personal life, perhaps because he didn't have one. No blotter to write his appointments on, because who would ever want to make an appointment with Ernest?
There was also a funk in the room. Not that Ernest didn't shower, but the scent of failure about the place. Ernest kept records, but he had a reputation for not sharing them. This was a place where hopes of finding out the information in those records came to die. I'd heard stories about people trying to get him to divulge the information he was required to keep, and none of them ended without tears.

"Ernest, I need to know who most recently was assigned a locker in the ER men's room."

"That's classified."

He didn't even take a breath. Denying information was this man's one soul purpose in life.

"Classified? This isn't like tax information, or psychiatric information, or somebody's underwear size. This is just a locker."

"It's protected health information." Ernest pointed to a sign behind me, with a dancing purple hippo explaining the guarantees of HIPAA.

"That protects patient privacy... not..."

I stopped. I knew that going down this road would not lead to anything. More persuasive people than I had tried and failed this course.

I started again, "Wait.... I'm curious, why are you so possessive of these things? Do you not share them because you just don't bother to keep the damn records in the first place?"

Ernest's eyebrows shot up. He'd been accused of many things before, but I doubt anyone had ever outright accused the little troll of outright neglecting his job. His hand reached out and rested somewhat protectively atop a red binder towards the front of his desk. I saw it had "Locker Assignments" written in very small, very precise handwriting on a label stuck to the corner.

"How dare you?"

Silly Ernest, I dare plenty of things. One such thing, of course, is a little theft for a good cause. My hand shot out, I snatched the binder, and I booked it out of there before he could get around his desk. As I pounded down the bright and empty hallways back towards civilization, I felt the flush of victory spread throughout my chest. In my hands, the "No Ian" writer's identity was kept. Once I knew who it was, I could finally strike a blow back against one of the over-lording clinical staffers who dared to accuse me of having poor moral fiber.

I slipped into an unused room, wedging my foot against the door in case Ernest came hunting for his book.

I carefully opened the binder, and looked for the most recent assigned locker. Sure enough, it was marked as being in the men's bathroom in the ER.

The locker was signed out to a nurse, with the last name of Barton. Yes... Nolan Barton, you would soon be ...

Nolan?

I looked at the name written in Ernest's small precise hand... and then imagined a sloppier hand mistakenly leaving a little bit more space between the O and the L than the other letters.

Yeah.

Write it out yourself, it was an easy mistake for anyone to make.

Christ.

I crept back to Ernest's office, and leaned the binder up against the closed door as quietly as I could, and then snuck back to my post in the ER. As it turned out, Nolan had just started that day, and was a funny and engaging guy, despite being Canadian. The rest of the night went wonderfully.

If Ernest finds out that the head of nursing doesn't mind wielding a pair of toenail pliers for a good cause though, I'm fucked.

Labels: Guest columns, meta-fiction

Welcome to an on-going work of meta-fiction and gonzo journalism reminiscent of the late Hunter S. Thompson.

Brought to you by one of Durham's very own.

Some language and situations may not be appropriate for younger readers!!!

Follow this link to Chapter One.


Chapter Two, "Charity"

So I pissed on a cat once, but that's probably the worst thing I ever did. I've never intentionally caused someone actual emotional or physical trauma. I've never stolen someone else's girlfri... I've never intentionally stolen someone else's girlfriend. Never killed anyone, never robbed anyone, I've even done some charitable things!

I think I've done charitable things, I know that I've done things where I've gotten that warm, fuzzy, post-charity feeling anyway, I'm remembering what it feels like right now... I just can't immediately remember anything I've done to warrant it.

"Hey Chuck!" I holler. "I've done nice things though, right?" The fact that I'm talking to my hobo friend who's taking advantage of my hospitality should be enough, but I still feel like there are other things.

"Sure you have, Geoff. Hell, just last night you let me have more than my share of the free trivia night beer. That was nice of you."

"Yeah, but I'm talking about bigger things, y'know, charitable things" In my mind I'm constructing an Albert Schweitzer size list of good deeds that I've just somehow forgotten, I just need a little memory jog, I swear!

"Well... hmm.... there was that Gypsy you took in for a while, remember that? That was charitable."

Fuck.

I do not want to remember the Gypsy.

"I told you never to remind me of the Gypsy again!"

"Well, I'm sorry dude, It was the first thing that came into my head. Seems to me that if you don't want to remember that kinda thing, you shouldn't take in vagabonds in the first place"

like raaaaaiiiiin... on your wedding day....

"Riiiiight Chuck. So when am I getting this month's rent?"

"I'll have it by next Monday, dude."

It's always next Monday. It's been next Monday for the past 3 months. I just wish occasionally he'd switch it up and make it next Tuesday, or maybe in a fortnight, but that's primarily because I wish more people would use the word "fortnight".

So fine, there was this Gypsy.

One night, about a few months ago, I went down to my local watering hole, The Green Room. The Green Room is one of those fantastic places where you can swear that globalization and McDonald's and TGI Fridays never happened. This is not merely a statement of the fact that it is locally owned and independently run, this is also a statement that it is an absolute shithole. You can pretend that massive global chains never happened because it is miraculously a successful bar regardless of the fact that is falls well below the bar of cleanliness and structural soundness that massive chains so expertly have raised over the past 50 years. The whole place smells of old men, Old Spice and Old Style (which is surprising, as they don't serve it). When it rains, they have to set out an antique, claw-footed bathtub underneath a hole in the ceiling so that the place doesn't flood. The pool tables, which I imagine were once a lush green, are now the color of swiss cheese that's been left in the fridge for 4 to 5 years, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the hepatitis patients I see at the hospital contracted their condition by having the audacity to sit on the toilets. In case you need further reasoning why I come to this marvelous place, we come to the genesis of this whole story: they've got a shuffleboard table.

Shuffleboard is an amazing, amazing thing. #1, nobody plays it, so it's easy as hell to get a game in, even if the bar is packed, and #2, people are fascinated by the fact that you do play it. It's one of those things that became immensely square in my father's generation, and thus it is not my father's game, it is my grandfather's game. I love my grandfather, I hate my father, you do the math. I imagine it's somewhat like how über-feminist types can sit down and get some good knitting in, even though the last generation's feminists fought long and hard to make sure that their daughters would never have to do something as obviously degrading as knitting; I'm not sure though, because I do not understand feminists of any generation.

Step up to a shuffleboard table, and toss the disks back and forth, just to warm up, and you'll find yourself the center of a crowd of younger sorts, wanting to know what you're doing, and how to play. I find meeting women at a bar somewhat imposing, partially based on the fact that the number of women looking for sham-intellectual, slightly overweight guys with 'creative' facial hair is not a large one. Women who are interested in being taught a game fill a much larger subset of the population. The night in question was no anomaly.

Within a few minutes, I had begun a game with three new folks: a couple and a single friend of theirs. This, by the way, is the perfect set-up. You play gents versus ladies, and let the couple sit at the far end of the table while you play in turns. It allows long periods of rest between actually playing the game that are ripe for conversation and flirtation. The young girl in question who was at my end was slightly inebriated, bubbly, and more than happy to tell me all about her hopes and dreams. She, by the way, was a member of a traveling Gypsy cast.

Now before throngs of Roma start beating down my doors for using an ethnic slur against them, I should add that she was not, in fact, a member of a transient ethnic tribe portrayed so expertly by Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp. Instead, she was a member of a traveling Rennsaisance Faire troupe. 'Renn Fairs', as I would soon learn, are a type of carnival where the carnies dress up as people from the 16th century. They bash each other with blunt swords, play instruments called 'lutes' and sell overpriced ribbons and wool caps to local rubes. I don't know if you've ever met carnival people, but they're a dirty little folk, with grabbing hands and shifty eyes. They speak in their own patois, and will generally try to rip you off if you make the unforgivable sin of walking within 20 feet of them.

My natural reaction when finding myself around a group of carnies is to run like hell. However, this girl in question was cute, and not a half-bad shuffleboard player. The fact that the entire bar was filled up with her fellow Renn Fair cast didn't leave me anywhere else to go, plus she was the only one who was fewer sheets to the wind than Drake's Armada.

The whole "gypsy" notion was not helped, I might add, when she introduced herself as "Nastasia", and I later found out that the name on her driver's license was "Stephanie".

She introduced herself as a tattoo artist at first, something no doubt intended to pique my interest, even though it was a mere half truth. This was before "Miami Ink" and its ilk of reality TV shows revealed that tattoo artists as a whole are in fact as interesting as your average hairdresser or interior designer. There was still that illusion that tattoo artists were a dangerous and mysterious corner of society, one step away on the fascination scale from being a loan shark or someone who ran numbers. I asked her the standard gamut of things one asks tattoo artists, what was her best piece done (full back piece of an eagle), has she ever had to tattoo a neo-nazi (never), what was the most ridiculous thing she's done (knuckle tattoos that instead of reading something normal like "hate" and "love" instead said across both hands "fish" and "chips"), By this time, I was a pull of whiskey (off her illicit flask) and one and a half beers drunker, so while she did become moderately less fascinating, she did become a bit more attractive, which made up for it.

Besides, there were all new avenues of conversation to follow! Tell me all about the Renn Faire! Who's the biggest asshole among the production (one of the guys who sells turkey legs and tankards of beer), does anyone ever get hurt during the duels and joust (one bruised clavicle, but that's it) strangest group of nerds to arrive (a group of Trekkies who roleplayed that the Enterprise was sending an away mission to a primitive planet), etc. etc. More than enough conversation to lead to more drinks, which in turn led to a shared cab ride back to my place, which led to clothes being removed, which led to a good amount of mediocre drunk sex.

Early the next morning, your industry standard awkward-post-one-night-stand-
mildly-regretted-by-both-parties-conversation transpired. I announced that I really needed to go get my car and get to work, she said she really needed to get back to the Faire. We both made mention of how busy we both were going to be over the next week, but maybe we could go out and get some dinner? Sure, sounds good, but oh! I forgot to give her my phone number. Oh well, I guess it won't happen, and besides, if she really wanted it, she would have pressed me to give it to her. It was so perfectly stock it might as well have been scripted, and we both knew what we're saying to each other between the lines. "That was fun, let's not do it again"

So imagine my shock when I returned home after work to discover her sitting in my living room, drawing up new designs to hang in her tent.

"So... umm... hi" I stammered out.

"Oh, hello." She replied.

It was strange. It was like a real-life version of the Jedi mind trick. She didn't wave her hand across my face, but she simply acted with complete confidence that absolutely nothing was wrong, and so in as much, nothing was wrong, at least for those few seconds.

"You hungry? We could go get some tacos..." I said with the cool nerve of a man who knows a good taco stand, far from my house and close to the fairgrounds where I hoped to dump her off.

"Thanks for the offer, but I think I'm going to go eat with Thor from the Faire."

I stood shocked. A few minutes of conversation transpired where I soon learned that Renn Faire workers have a lot more in common with carnies or gypsies than I ever had imagined. They travel with the 'Faire' from place to place all summer long. Unlike your standard gypsy, they don't have brightly decorated caravans, but instead, camp out near the fairground where these events are held. As a result, a key skill for all Renn-Faire workers to develop is meeting locals, in order to have the occasional night with access to a shower and a soft bed. This made some sense to me. Happily, she seemed showered, rested, and hopefully out of my hair.

"Oh, okay, well, see you... around... then?"

"See you!" She cheerfully quipped. The strangeness of the situation started to dawn on me as I walked back in the house, but by then she'd already left.

This had to end.

When she came back from her dinner with the Norse god, I confronted her and asked her why she was still there, in fact, why she was returning, rather than staying the hell away.

"I'm confused here, I thought it was clear that last night was.... fun, sure, but all the signs were there that you didn't want to continue this, I mean, do you?"

"Oh no, not really."

"So... why are you here?"

"Well, I figured I could either spend the remainder of my two weeks in a field in a tent, or staying at a rather nice house."

"But... that's my house!"

"Well yeah, but I earned a stay didn't I?"

"For a night, maybe! Plus, I resent the implication that I'm your john!"

"Well, I could continue 'earning' it if you'd like." Mind you, she didn't say this in any kind of sultry, seductress way, more like she was offering to give me a discount on a living room set.

"Look, I don't want to go down that road. Last night was lovely, but I really would prefer you not to stay the entire two weeks, I've got enough unwanted company at my house."

"Fine, but I have a feeling you'll change your mind."

And so she spent the evening again, this time with less athletic nudity and more doing laundry while watching Law & Order reruns. I am gratified to know that even gypsies love Arthur Branch.

Upon returning home after work the next day, I discovered the "incentive" she was alluding to with regards to me letting her stay.

She hexed the washing machine.

The washer had some kind of an occult design on it. Not a pentagram, but something pseudo-Celtic and equally creepy, complete with candles burned down to the nubs. There were bits of string tied to the washer and to the piping around it, I can only imagine in a strange attempt to draw and quarter it. The best part though was the dead chicken. It was obvious that she was going for the voodoo finisher to her pseudo-magic (I imagine she'd prefer "mageick" or something.) But instead of going the proper route and getting a live chicken and killing it, it was quite obvious that this was your industry standard Perdue chicken from the Kroger that had been unwrapped and thrown in the washer. (It even still had the giblet bag.)

I discussed the problem with the Iguana before she returned.

"How do I talk some sense into this woman?"

"Well, you already tried sense, didn't you. Seems like your only recourse now is the law."

"I'm not going to call the police. It seems a bit of a cop out to call the man. I mean, I should be able to keep her off the premises without resorting to that, shouldn't I?"

"I dunno dude, she was talking about bringing over her pet llama tomorrow."

"Well what the hell should I do?"

"I dunno dude, I don't think anything short of armed police officers or magic is going to keep her away."

"Chuck, you're a genius."

"So you're gonna call the cops?"

"Nope, gotta run, dude, I'm not sure how much time I have."

There's a little shop on 9th St. that sells odd nick-knacks and incense. I collect elephants for my home, and I had heard that there were fantastic ceramic ones for sale there. The first time I visited, little did I know that I was walking into a scene from a Kipling novel about the heathen wog. The place was tiny, with rugs hanging on all the walls, various shelves with odds and ends, sticks of incense, jars of mysterious substances, carved heffalumps and various other mysterious non-wholesome items. There was an old, bearded, somewhat smelly Indian man sitting cross legged on a stool in the corner of the room. He was muttering to himself and smoking a hookah. I wouldn't have been surprised if there were a monkey jumping around inside, but sadly there wasn't. That time I paid for my elephant and got the hell out, but this time would be a little different.

The gypsy returned later that evening. No llama, but some strange variety of rat in tow. Perhaps it was a ferret. I was standing triumphantly, Indian man next to me, muttering.

"What are you doing?" She asked.

"मिश्रित दही मक्खन आटा और पानी की एक फर्म आटा तक बनाई है..." The Indian muttered

"I'm putting up a shield around my house to keep freeloaders out."

"You can't do that!" She shouted.

The ferret gurgled.

"Oh yeah? Watch me!"

"सुनहरा भूरा और जब तक एक पत्थर पर सेंकना..."

She made a defiant gesture as if to walk towards the house, but actually acted like she was bouncing off something invisible about ten feet from the back door. She even did a halfway decent Marcel Marceau invisible wall for a couple of seconds before resigning herself to the "fact" that she wasn't getting in.

"You can pick up your stuff over there, it's not inside the barrier"

She gathered her things, and walked off, thankfully, completely out of my life (so far).

I asked the Indian man (I suppose I should say for the sake of I'm-not-a-racist at this point that his name was Vishal, though he still gave me the creeps) what on earth he had been muttering.

"It was my family's naan recipe. I figured it would take me long enough to recite it for your person there to get the idea."

"You, sir, are a genius." I gave him his payment and promised him I'd come by the shop and buy a rug sometime. A promise I really should keep, I suppose.

Labels: Guest columns, meta-fiction

Welcome to a work of meta-fiction and gonzo journalism reminiscent of the late Hunter S. Thompson.

Brought to you by one of Durham's very own.

Some language and situations may not be appropriate for younger readers

Chapter One, "I once met this cat in South Carolina..."

A lot of people consider me a bad person, and I can never quite understand why. Okay, so maybe not a lot of people, the figure is probably closer to the vast majority of the people I meet, most of those people don't even matter though. The guy I sideswiped coming out of the Cookout? He's never gonna see me again; to him, I'm just an act of God. But among people I actually know and care about -- my friends, my coworkers, my family, the regulars at the Green Room, etc. -- I think the figure is significantly lower.

Might just ask the Chuck to make sure.

"Hey Chuck!"

"Yes, Geoffrey?"

"Do people think that I'm a bad person?"

He responds quickly and unconditionally, as though I had asked if it were raining outside "Yes"

"Okay... so a lot of people do, but how about you?"

"Well... yeah. You're an asshole, Geoff, but you're my kind of asshole"

So Chuck still likes me, in spite of my apparent failings as a likable human being. I should explain something: The Chuck is my roommate... well, no... roommates pay rent... I'd call him a houseguest, but houseguests don't stay at your house for 2 years. Ah hah! The Chuck is my infestation. I have an infestation of The Chuck. Now, I'm not particularly bothered by this... most of the time. Because the Chuck offers me a benign sort of quiet companionship, and I can afford to keep him around... (well, maybe he's more like a pet then... like one of those big ol' iguanas). So when I'm alone wondering something, my first response is to ask the Chuck. There are other people I call on, as I wonder about stuff a lot, but we'll get to that later.

In the mean time, we were busy talking about how I'm supposedly a bad person, but I'm not really! My methodology is different from most, but not in an evil way, just in an unorthodox way.

Take the time I pissed on a cat.

Now I know what you're thinking, that's insanely cruel and awful, and that is the definition of animal cruelty which is just one of those fundamental things that make people into bad people.

Trust me, nothing was so cruel as the Baby Jesus allowing this critter to stay alive.

I should start at the beginning. One long weekend, my Buddy Jamie and I went to South Carolina to visit a friend of his. I can't remember her name, so we'll call her Velma. Now, James was just going down to get his dick wet, and I'm reasonably sure that I was invited along as a courtesy. But still, it was my long weekend too, and I was determined to have some fun. During one afternoon's marathon blowjob solo by Velma, I'm wandering around her house, seeing if there's anything beyond your standard American diversions to pass the time. Low and behold, I did discover this beautiful Hibachi grill sitting outside. Once the lovebirds came up for air I asked Velma if I could use the Hibachi.

"Sure thing", she said, walking towards the window "but it can't be today. I don't have anything grillable in the house, and the neighbor's cat is in the driveway"

I failed to see the connection between the two phrases. "I'm sorry, what about the cat?"

"The neighbor's cat is in the driveway, we can't drive anywhere, and I am sure as hell not walking to the Farmer's Market"

I peered outside and saw no cat. I looked back at her and informed her that Jamie and I would move the cat, all would be well, and then there would be steak. She told us if we could, we were welcome to try, but in that condescending way that the queen tells the strange knight that he is welcome to try to kill the savage dragon. It would certainly be nice if he could, but too many have tried and died for her to get her hopes up.

Jamie and I sauntered out of the house to have a better look at the driveway. Now honestly, even up close I don't want to say that I saw the cat, because I didn't. This thing didn't look like a cat, it looked like a blob of fur, but it was certainly more cat shaped than the gravel on the driveway or the half a rake that had fallen in it. The blob was roughly circular, about 18 inches in diameter and 6 inches tall. No visible signs of a head, tail, feet, or life. Oh, and it was an orange tabby.

I first tried a rather direct measure.

"Cat!"

No response.

"Hey... Fat Cat!"

Still no response.

I nudged it a couple of times with my boot. Still nothing.

"Jaime, get over here and help me pick up this cat!"

Now before I go into the results of me trying to pick up the cat, I want you at home to go and do a little science experiment. Go into your kitchen (assuming that's where you keep 'em) and grab one of the bigger sized trash cans you own. Liberally grease the outside with cooking spray. Fill the inside with at least five gallons of water. Put it on your kitchen floor, and pick it up from beneath without using the handle.

Go ahead, I'll wait for you.

You notice pretty quick that unless your arms are the size of Henry Rollins's you can't get your arms to cover the entirety of the bottom of the surface area. All you can do is attempt to hoist it up at its center of gravity. Problem is, much like an incredibly fat cat, the majority of its weight is fairly fluid, so the center of gravity shifts and you end up dropping it a half a second after you get it off the ground. And much like be-Pam-ed plastic, cat hair is fairly smooth and slick, (though I'm happy to say not nearly as greasy), so you can't rely on friction to keep you holding on.

So regardless to say that the respective arrays of myself, myself & Jamie, Jamie, myself & Jamie with a rake, myself with a rake & Jamie with a shovel, and of course, Jamie with a rake & myself with a shovel & the vocabulary of a drunken wounded sailor with Tourette's, we were never able to get the damned cat off the driveway.

Jamie and I returned towards the house with our honor shattered.

"I told you so" Velma intoned from the doorway.

Nuh uh.

No

Hell No!

No one tells me "I told you so." Ever.

"I'm moving that damned cat"

So I start going though the various facets of cat psychology that I'd picked up from years of reading Garfield out of habit. Maybe lure cat with lasagna? No... there needed to be some kind of deterrent. I only had to ponder mere moments before I remembered something. Water! Kitties hate water. So I start looking around for a hose, of which there is none. Now a man in control over his wits at this point would have gone and gotten a bucket or something, but I was not in control over my wits at that point. I was possessed. Ahab and the Orange Furry Whale. "Hell" I thought to myself "If I can't use her hose, I suppose I can use mine"

So I went over, unzipped, and started pissing on the cat.

I pissed on that damned cat for a good 10 seconds before anything happened. Now before you go and think that isn't that long. I want you to imagine yourself in that situation, pissing, in public, on an animal. Now count it out in your head.

One thousand one.

One thousand two

One thousand three

One thousand four

One thousand five

One thousand six

One thousand seven

One thousand eight

One thousand nine

One thousand ten.

Finally, I saw the critter's head. It looked up at me with an expression of pure hate, hissed, and hobbled over the two feet it needed to go to get out of the yard.

I moved the cat, but Velma sure wouldn't talk to me for the rest of the weekend.

That steak was fantastic though.

Labels: Guest columns, meta-fiction