This is week 102 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment. This week is a long one, clocking in at a little over 7600 words.

Sunday (Day 707): Fabricated Mother’s Day Memories

Even though #1GF! can have anything she wants for breakfast on a Sunday morning (Belgian waffles, omelets, fruits, muffins, or whatever), I can almost guarantee that on most Sundays I will be making a variation of one thing: a bagel, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwich. This week, I was leaning towards omelets, but ended up making sandwiches with yellow peppers, mozzarella and American cheese. I think the variations in Sunday sandwiches are more for my entertainment than by #1GF!’s request.

#1GF! and I played a quick round of Pandemic before going out to sit on the stoop. It was windy and cool with clear skies, and felt like we had skipped summer and had stepped into fall six months early. The air had the feeling of stiff school sneakers and the restraint of an impending detention.

#1GF! timed me doing the cube because there were no neighbors around to witness one of my nerdy quirks. I completed it in 1:36, which as far as I can tell, is a record for me. I lightly spiked it on the floor as I went inside.

It was Mother’s Day, so we drove to Mike’s pastry to pick up cannolis for #1GF!’s mother. #1GF! waited in the double parked car, and I sneaked in the side and up to the front, bypassing all the swirling and indecisive tourists clogging up the middle of the counter. I picked up a dozen cannolis and was out within five minutes. By the time we got to #1GF!’s mom’s house, her family was already there.

They ordered Chinese food, and #1GF! and I went out to pick it up at a local restaurant. We saw one of #1GF!’s ex employees who had left the company, but I don’t think she saw us. We sat and waited among the fountains and tile until our food was ready. I mentally compared it to the Chinese places I ate as a kid, and the lack of a golden dragon or single red item anywhere in sight made my memories seem almost created compared to the modern and subdued atmosphere that we were in.

We got in the car and Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” came on the radio. The song is about some woman who is so drunk that she can’t see straight. She can’t find her drink, her keys, or phone, and she’s so trashed that she can’t even remember the name of the club she’s in.

“This girl’s in rough shape,” said #1GF!.

“And what is her solution?”

“Just Dayance.” said #1GF! imitating the song.

“Solves everything.”

“Dayance.”

“DAYAnce.”

#1GF! shut off the engine, and we left the car laughing. We went into the house and the contents of the paper bags were transferred into everyone there. Oddly, there were no fortune cookies included. Someone claimed that there should be free rice and soda included because that’s how the Chinese restaurants operate back home. I had the feeling that I wasn’t the only one who might’ve been operating under some sort of blanket of fabricated memories.

After dinner, everyone had dessert, but I was pretty full of Chinese food. I sat on the couch watching a poker tournament. Trust me, if there was something else on, I would’ve watched it. Everyone else left, and #1GF! had to help out with some scheduling, so we stayed for another three hours. There was nothing I could do to help, so I watched more poker. It was a step above golf on the excitement scale (which is right above watching competitive knitting), yet the more I watched, the more involved I got. I couldn’t explain it. We left at 7:30PM.

“Are you Ok?” asked #1GF!

“I’m tired for some reason. Today felt like a mini version of the Christmas holiday runaround.”

“It does sort of feel like that.”

“I don’t really know where the weekend went. Just a little bit tired, I guess. What about you? How are you doing.”

“I could sleep.”

We drove home, and that’s what we did.

Monday (Day 708): Live Or Tell

I woke up, and everything outside was so bright green in the sunshine, that without my glasses, it looked like someone had dug up the 1980′s and dumped them outside my window in all their neon glory.

I took out the trash, emptied the dishwasher, and sat down at the counter to eat my cereal. I wondered where the weeks were going. Even though I can tell you almost exactly where my weeks have gone, they still seemed as if they had slipped away behind my back. I wondered how normal people feel about it when they wonder where the last month, week, or day went. Do they just trust that they did something useful with their days?

I got a call from my mother, and we had a minor dispute about the size that a baby shower should be. I think that it should be two people who are immediate family, one of which who calls to say that they can’t make it. My mom, like most women, has different ideas about such things.

I feel like showers are begging for gifts and I’ve never really understood the whole concept. “Oh, hey, come over to the house for snacks next Saturday… and bring a gift.” I would feel better about people having other plans than putting up with such nonsense. I don’t want to rob #!GF! of anything, so I agreed to step out of the way. A shower is a lady thing, and I have no right to get involved beyond helping to carry what I’ve been told to. I dunno. Even as the potential beneficiary, I still can’t get behind the concept.

I got off the phone and started into my writing. I’ve said it before, but this blog is a literary bag of chips. It’s hits the spot at times, but there is very little nutritional value. And some days, massaging the boring shit that I do all day into something that has a laugh or spare thought in it can take an astounding amount of time. I always think of Sartre when I find myself feeling like the rope in a tug of war between writing and living:

“For the most banal event to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.”

I don’t recall the whole quote, really. I merely paraphrase and think to myself, “You have to live, or write. You can’t do both. When you try to do both, you do neither.”

I was at a point where I had been writing a lot, but without going through the required living to generate the stories. Without the living, it’s all just me recounting what I ate for breakfast and talking to imaginary robots.

Toward 5PM, I finished up LOR for the week. I avoided playing any post workday Quake because video games are bad for the unemployed. I wanted to force myself into a better way to spend my time by pulling out the video game crutch. I didn’t manage to do anything interesting besides start roughing out the next week’s LOR.

When #1GF! got home, we ate leftovers, and she read LOR while I solved the cube on the couch. I couldn’t manage to break two minutes. She would laugh every once and a while, and I would make her explain what she was reading. #1GF!’s reactions to the Life Of Riley are one of the main reasons that I spend write this thing, but it has gotten so long over the years that I’m rarely in the room when she reads it these days. Being able to have her read my writing while I’m in the room (even if to herself) gives me a bit of live reaction that makes it more worthwhile.

Tuesday (Day 709): Long Live The McDLT

#1GF! ran out early to take her mom to her appointments. Tuesday used to be one of my days, but I was relieved of Tuesday duty in the last few weeks. I have a sneaking suspicion that it has something to do with me talking too much about naming our child “Mothra” or “Godzuki”, but I can’t be sure.

I got dressed, and set up #1GF!’s new work PC. Then, I cleaned the tub so that I could caulk it. I busted out some Pine Sol, and I wasn’t all that impressed with its supposedly mighty cleaning power. It got it clean enough for caulking. I accidentally bought clear caulk instead of white, so I caulked the tub, but couldn’t fill in a crack on the vanity because clear caulk wouldn’t make the crack less noticeable.

I hadn’t planned on going to get a tube of caulk because it would be more efficient to pick it up with a bundle of stuff when I went to take #1GF!’s mom to her appointment later in the week. Although my plan was logical, I was in need of a checkmark right then and there.

I ran out to get a tube of white caulk from the local hardware store, brought it home, and caulked the sink. By then it was about noon, and #1GF! was calling to check in on me.

I sat on the stoop talking and watched a cardinal hop around the yard chasing off other birds. Although the warm sun felt good on my back, I went back inside as soon as I hung up. I ate a sandwich, paid a couple of bills, and noticed that it was only 1PM. I sat down to check my mail only to find out that I didn’t have any.

I looked at the computer screen, wondering what to do. There were a thousand things that I could do, but most of them were chores. By their nature, chores are an endless, replenishing fountain of short-term busywork that is beneficial only in the short-term.

The only things that were beneficial in the long term were writing a book and getting a job, and both were mutually exclusive, tedious, and provided no short term reward. I need a job, but I feel like if I don’t write at least one crappy book before going back, I’ll never write one. Even if the book never finds a home with a publishing company, I need to know that I at least tried and failed. I didn’t want to have to convince myself that I could’ve written a book if I tried. Wishing is a child’s game, and nothing but sad on old men.

I sat down to earnestly work on my book, and cranked out a couple of thousand words. Like a lazy roommate, the college radio played on the boom box in the front of the house, doing nothing but keeping me company. I typically write in silence, but working earnestly on a book did not make it a typical day.

At some point, I put on my headphones because the characters were listening to ‘Priest… Live and I thought listening to it might help me to write the scene. I never stopped listening, so when #1GF! eventually walked in, the radio and the headphones left no way for me to hear her. She walked in and I was completely lost and isolated in my writing.

I quit at around 6:30PM and made turkey burgers for #1GF!. I mixed some chimichurri rub that I made up back in LOR week 30 because that stuff makes just about everything taste good in the summer. They didn’t come out half bad, but took about twenty minutes to cook. I thought they would be done in half that time. I threw a burger onto a fat onion roll for #1GF!.

“You want lettuce and tomato on your burger?” I asked her.

“No thanks.”

It’s so much more than a burger with lettuce and tomato,” I said, knowing full well that she was aware of, yet didn’t agree with, my views on the subject. “You’re so quirky with your burgers,” I said matter-of-factly. I put lettuce and slice of tomato on my roll.

#1GF! scooped a burger out of the pan. “Do you want this on top of your tomato?” she asked with a smile.

“Nonono,” I said quickly. “McDLT. Hot side hot. Cold side cold,” I said in what can be described as a minor panic. As panicked as one can get about food, anyway. I wondered what chemicals had combined in my brain to suddenly reference a McDonald’s sandwich that hasn’t been around since Jason Alexander had hair and fast food was served in Styrofoam containers (check the McDLT commercial). I tried to shrug it off. “It all goes to the same place anyway, I guess.”

“Well, I thought I’d ask,” said #1GF! with a grin, “because you can be so quirky with your food.”

We ate while watching Jeopardy!, and #1GF! cranked out the answers (well, as much as a normal person can crank out answers while watching a show like Jeopardy!). I would pat her on the shoulder once and a while with wide eyed approval, not being able to do much else thanks to the ginormous burger bites that were steadily marching through my mouth. I knew that saying anything might lead to laughter, and that would lead to us picking stray burger bits out of everything for the next three months.

Wednesday (Day 710): Minerbot 2000

Once #1GF! was off to work, I stood thinking about what to do. It would be more efficient to go to the hardware store on the way back from #1GF!’s mom’s appointment the next day, but I needed to get at least something small done.

I stood looking in the mirror and weighing all the things that I could get done and how inefficient it was to do them today. “Fuck it. Get moving. Just do something.”

What I really should’ve been doing was looking for a job or working on my book, but they offer no check marks. Instead, I ran out to a local hardware store to get some weed control for the pock marked gathering place for weeds that I loosely refer to as my lawn. When I got back, I put on my mowing sneakers, and headed into the basement to get the spreader. I wondered why I couldn’t see. The robot rolled toward the flashlight on the steps.

“Stop. Thanks. I got it. It’s fine.” The robot turned his body toward me without stopping his forward motion, and fell backwards over a broom. I shook my head as he rocked back and forth.

“Hold on, buddy.” I picked him up and set him right. “Thanks. I don’t need the flashlight. I just didn’t think to turn the light on.” I stood between the robot and the flashlight. “Go ahead back to your corner.”

The robot slowly retreated and I moved the flashlight a few steps out of his reach. The last time he picked up the flashlight, he not only ran a the lantern battery dead on it from clicking it on and off, but strapped it to his head with a bungee cord and refused to take it off. He even went so far as to refuse to answer to anything but “Minerbot 2000″ for two solid weeks. One of those weeks was after I had taken the flashlight away. He wasn’t the brightest robot ever built.

The robot rolled back to his corner and shut down.

I grabbed the spreader and opened the bulkhead door. There was a dead mouse on my new grass, so flicked it to the edge of the yard with a stick so that some snake could eat it. If you don’t like bugs, you live with spiders. If you don’t like mice, you live with snakes. If you don’t like snakes, you live with birds. That’s the way the world works.

The birds were all over the lawn again, and were paying no attention to me at all. They seemed less bold than stupid. If I didn’t think they’d make a supreme mess of robot, I’d have introduced them and let them stare at each other in the yard until one fell asleep.

I thought about patching some of the holes with seed, but the fertilizer package said that grass wouldn’t take root for four weeks after application. I had a choice: fill the holes with weeds, or kill the weeds and fill the holes later.

I filled the spreader, and spread the fertilizer all over the lawn. I ran out of fertilizer by the time I was done, and washed out the spreader. The water pooled all around the spigot and I hoped that it would eventually drain. I left the spreader out in the sun to dry.

I went inside and was going to make ice cream for #1GF!, but realized that I didn’t have any bittersweet chocolate. The recipe said that semisweet wouldn’t work, so I gave up on the project until I could get to a store.

I stood in the kitchen for a few minutes, weighing tasks that I knew didn’t have a required completion time. I headed to the local library to make a photocopy that my doctor was looking for, and on the way back, stopped into the little local grocery store.

There was an old man having what looked like a pretty serious debate about the various chocolate morsel options. I wondered if he liked to bake or had been sent out on an errand. I looked around him, and found that the store didn’t have bittersweet chocolate. What grocery store doesn’t have bittersweet chocolate? I left and headed home. The sun was out, my windows were down, and there was no one on the street enjoying the weather except a few old people and workers on smoke breaks.

When I got home, I faxed off the form to the doctor and started a little LOR. I got a call about a job, and was told that I’d have to go in and meet a high ranking member of the group before anything could move forward. I took that as a good and bad sign. Good that the baby might not have an author for a father, but bad that the baby might not have an author for a father.

It was already noon by the time #1GF! called to check in on me and I couldn’t believe the time. I started working on my book, and then got distracted and built a logo for Arpeggio’s Strings & Things. I wasn’t asked to. I merely didn’t like the pixelation on their current logo and offered to fix it. After that, I simply got carried away.

I wrote the book until 7:15PM, and cranked out another couple of thousand words. That’s only about eight pages of text, but a couple of thousand words with the book feels harder to come by than a couple of thousand words blogging. At a couple of thousand words a day, a book could potentially take a couple of months to rough out, if I could maintain a daily writing schedule. I’m positive that the editing would take just as long.

Thursday (Day 711): Hit Me Two Times

I went to drive #1GF!’s mom to her appointment, and got stuck in construction traffic. There was a detour, but no one had any idea because the officer in charge of directing traffic was busy talking to the cars in front of us one at a time. I couldn’t see the sign until it was right in front of me and I was past the point where I should’ve turned off. I had to actually do a 180 to make the detour. A lot of people did. If there wasn’t a cop there, everyone would see the sign and detour just fine. If a person is less effective than a sign, then shouldn’t that hourly detail salary should be spent on something else?

I picked up #1GF!’s mom and got her to her appointment on time. While I waited, an old guy with suspenders walked in to the waiting room. He walked in through the office door and directly to the bathroom as if he knew exactly where it was.

Two seconds later a massive fart rocked the easy new age jazz that was playing over the loudspeakers. BRAAAPPP! It was the kind of noise that sounded as if it should’ve had a surprised “Oh, boy” appended on the end. The women giggled. I smiled and tried not to laugh because I was in public, and propriety makes us pretend like we don’t hear things that are naturally funny.

Like a one two punch, an even bigger, fart ripped from behind the door and echoed through the room. BRAAAAAAAPPPAPPPAP! I was really trying to control my laughter and behave like an adult, but there’s something in human DNA that makes the sound of a fart funny. The louder they are, the funnier they seem to be. I sat there grinning like an idiot trying to keep anything but a quiet “heh heh” escape.

The door unlatched, and the guy walked straight out of the office. I stared thoughtfully as if engrossed in my book because I didn’t want to smirk in front of the guy, even if he did bring a bit of laughter to my day.

I took #1GF!’s mom home and couldn’t help but tell her about the two massive farts that brightened up the waiting room while she was gone.

“Oh that poor man!” she said. It was not the reaction that I expected. “I would just die.”

“He was a man. Men don’t ‘die’ over farts. They try not to let them escape, but if one makes it past the guards, a man will generally let him run off into the treeline.”

“Oh no. That’s so embarrassing. That poor, poor man.”

“He’s a man. He was in the bathroom. Farts are funny to men. He’s fine.”

“That poor man. Imagine if it was you!”

I paused. “I wish I had a fart right now because I would let that thing fly just to prove a point.

“Aggh! No! You would not.”

“Oh, I would. I wish I had beans last night.”

This is probably the reason that I have been relegated to driving #1GF!’s mother one day a week. You do not threaten your girlfriend’s mother with asphyxiation just to prove a point about how disgusting men really are.

I went to Walmart because it seemed like the place that unemployed single parents with gas problems go in the mid afternoon on a Thursday. I can’t say that I was wrong. I picked up a shower curtain liner and then went to a home megastore.

I looked at everything and couldn’t remember a single thing I needed besides grout sealer. I looked at doors, plants, tools, power tools, and everything in between, and knew that I was wasting my time. I paid for grout sealer with a gift card with $6 on it. Again, it seemed like an appropriate thing for an unemployed single parent with a gas problem to do in the middle of the day on Thursday afternoon.

I dropped into the supermarket and bought bittersweet chocolate to make #1GF! ice cream. I thought about buying other stuff, but only had four crumpled dollars and a few half eaten gift cards in my pocket. We didn’t really need a round of food shopping done anyway.

I stood in the parking lot of the grocery store with my bittersweet chocolate, and thought about walking over to a nearby home store to get a couple of lamps. It was raining, so I decided against it. It wasn’t actually the rain that bothered me. Rain is just water. I just didn’t want to shop for lamps.

On the way home, I got stuck in traffic again. There were four sets of police officers that I could see, and I still couldn’t figure out how any of them were actually making the situation better.

I stopped in to the library to drop off some items, and picked up the new Christopher Moore book, Fool. I doubted that I could read it before it was due, but I got it anyway.

On the way out of the parking lot, I was sure that I wouldn’t have the time to read it all. In fact, I wasn’t sure that I’d even get home before the week was up. I had pulled behind Grandpa McGee who was going through the parking lot as if checking to make sure that his 70 year old daughter wasn’t canoodling in any of the parked cars. It was slow punctuated by frequent stops over the course of twenty of the longest yards of the day.

I accelerated up and coasted down hills the whole way home to see how far I could get without stepping on the gas. There was no one behind me, and it was still raining on and off. My thoughts drifted like my car over the hills, as I thought about other things that I should be doing.

When I got home, I threw the book on the counter and had a quick sandwich topped off with one too many animal crackers. Neither lifted my mood very much, although there wasn’t really anything wrong.

I got a Linkedin invitation to apply for a job in a semi bad part of town, and I politely declined rather than wonder which junkie would be relieving himself on my car while I was at work.

To entertain myself, I made a ring tone out of Eddie Murphy imitating Bill Cosby. One of my friends now has a personalized ring tone that says, “I would like to talk to yOOOOuUuU [about the level of profanity in your act].” I’m hoping the guy calls soon just so I can get an unexpectedly laugh.

Once that important matter was taken care of, I worked on LOR a little bit. For some reason, roughing out LOR sort of warms me up for book writing. I cranked out another 2,000 words of the book. Considering this post is more than three times that size, I don’t know how such a small amount of writing can feel so satisfying.

By then it was 6:45PM. I didn’t know if I could get more writing out because I was starting to stare at the words in longer bursts than I was writing them. I decided to stop. I closed everything down, played two quick rounds of Quake, and went to make dinner. I should’ve spent the Quake time putting up a shower curtain, but we don’t always make the best choices.

#1GF! came home, we ate dinner, watched Jeopardy and a couple of other shows, and put up the shower curtain before bed.

Friday (Day 712): 3,700 Down, 85,000 To Go

I cranked out 2,200 words by noon and felt really good about it. I took a break in the middle of the day to add a guitar headstock to Arpeggio’s logo. I thought it would be a nice touch. Then I made a d20 t-shirt that may never see the light of day. Once my head was sufficiently cleared of words, I went back to writing. I only got another 1,500 out before 5PM. 3,700 words in a day. It was about half of what a weekly LOR post typically covers, so I don’t know why I was impressed with it, but I was.

#1GF! and I went to dinner at our local restaurant just to avoid cooking. We took a walk afterward at #1GF!’s suggestion. I talked to her about where I thought the story might be going and eventually fizzled out because not all of the story has been written. She turned to me on the way back.

“Stick your belly out as far as you can.”

I did. “Oh yea. Feel the burn.”

“That’s the way I feel all the time.”

“You’re pregnant.

“I know.”

Saturday (Day 713): Strange Dreams From The Rest Home

I woke up with “Come on baby, show some class. Why you want to move so fast?” I knew what was coming, and I jumped on the tracks and frantically tried to flag down that train. It kept right on coming. I groaned as the train barreled into my first waking moments. “We don’t have to take our… clothes off. To have a good time… Oh No.” Oh, no is right. Jermaine Stewart is no way to wake up on a Saturday morning without a good goddamned reason. And I didn’t have one.

It was around 6AM on a Saturday, but there was no sleep to be had. #1GF! went out for a walk along the beach, and I sat on the couch flipping between The Outer Limits and home improvement shows.

#1GF! came back and we tried to figure out where everything was going to go now that the baby was throwing a small, plastic wrench into the roles that we had currently assigned our rooms. We had a couple of workable ideas pretty quickly. None were ideal, but they seemed to work.

Even though we were dressed and out the door by 9, it felt like it was later in the day. I eat cereal in the morning. #1GF! has a thing for breakfast. I sometimes think it’s her favorite meal of the day. #1GF! wanted to go out to breakfast, and I wasn’t about to resist her. We got breakfast at the same restaurant that we ate at the night before. We felt weird going back for two back to back meals at a restaurant that wasn’t attached to a hotel, but it wasn’t a weird enough feeling to get us to go somewhere else.

#1GF! talked to one of the neighbors there about having a nine and a half pound baby, and I stared, silently happy that I was a man and my part in the baby making process had nothing to do with squeezing big things out of little openings.

We stuffed our bellies until they stretched and left to get the day started. It was really foggy out and cold. We headed out of town to go furniture shopping and then picked up some giant boxes of cereal at the food warehouse. We ended up looking at some flowers at the home megastore down the street. We looked at everything, pointed at a number of things, and walked out empty handed.

“You know, we’re going to have to buy something eventually.”

“Did you see something you liked?”

“Not really.”

“Neither did I.”

We were only twenty miles from home, yet the sun was blazing. I wondered why I had been so foolish as to wear jeans. As we sat in the car, I rolled my jeans up to my knees. It didn’t help a bit. I stared at the white sticks tethering my knees to my Vans. “Maybe we should go to a real plant place. I think there’s one up in the Blue Hills.”

Just then, we got a call asking if we wanted to go to the movies later on. Our friends had won free tickets and claimed that they couldn’t be used to see Star Trek. The tickets were slated to be exchanged for four seats at a movie called The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. I sat in the passenger seat trying not to twitch.

I nonchalantly chimed in to #1GF!’s phone conversation. “What time do you think you’ll be home later?”

“Did you hear him?” #1GF! said into the phone. After a pause she turned to me. “She says that you need to be trained better.”

“Oh good luck.”

#1GF! turned back to her conversation. “He says, ‘Good luck.’ We’ll see you at around five.”

We dropped by my parents to see how they were, and they were busy cleaning the house. After being in the blazing sun ten minutes before, we were surprised to be back in the cold again. It seemed like the weather had gone completely insane.

We didn’t stay too long because we were short on time and had to get some flowers picked out for our yard before going to the movies. We drove through the Blue Hills and past what used to be a large reservoir. The area was blocked off and drained, and looked like it was being replaced with large concrete tanks. I craned to see over the fence like a seven year old, and was just as disappointed when I didn’t see much.

We drove by a bunch of bikers sitting on the side of the road.

“Let me ask you something,” I said to #1GF!. What’s with bikers wearing leather? I mean, do they wake up and think, ‘Yep, leather vest / no shirt… Check. Chaps… check. Silver studs on leather pouches… Check. Leather tassels hanging from the handle bars… check. THE CHICKS ARE GOING TO TEAR MY CHAPS OFF! FUCK, I LOOK TOUGH!’?”

#1GF! shrugged.

“If you’re trying to reel in Rob Halford it makes sense, but otherwise I don’t get it.”

As if to exemplify how what a radical authority on macho I am, we pulled into the nursery to look at flowers. We walked around the perennial pots for a good half hour, reading tags and trying to figure out what would work in the sun and what would bloom when. #1GF! got sick of reading before I did. I was a stranger in a strange land, so I figured that the more I read, the better I’d be able to figure out what kind of dead plants would be in my yard next month. We eventually had to ask a guy who worked there. He ended up reading the tags and giving us a couple of helpful tips.

We pulled out seven pots and laid them out in a line to see if they would be enough. The guy came back over and rearranged some of them and suggested putting things in clumps. I took in the info, and went to grab a cart to haul the pots down to the car. I went all the way to the front of the store, walking past a couple of carts that were right next to us. I loaded the plants on the cart and we headed out.

We were cutting it very close on time to meet up with our friends before dinner, but #1GF! wanted to run to the house and drop off the stuff. I grabbed the cereal (I could only carry two under an arm) and loaded it into the house. #1GF! started carrying plants in, but I made her stop because I didn’t want her to get dirty. I loaded the plants out, and in a few minutes, we were on our way.

On the drive over, we had the luck to get behind behind a Cadillac that was following a Mercury. Each was competing to see who could drive more slowly. Add a Buick, Lincoln, or any car driven by someone with a feather in their hat, and we might still be driving now. #1GF! was not what I would describe as radiantly happy pregnant lady.

“Maybe they’re afraid that driving east is slowing down the rotation of the Earth and they don’t want to accidentally go back in time.”

#1GF! barley paid attention.

“You know,” I offered. “Like Superman.”

She changed her firewall configuration, and my packets were suddenly being dropped.

I looked out the window. The robot would’ve laughed, I thought.

When we got to the house, our friends’ college age daughter had arrived home from school. She seemed like she was all in once piece (possibly thanks to last year’s College Freshman Survival Guide?), and was coming along with us.

We had a nice dinner, even though at one point, someone used the phrase “Star Track”. In the interest of galactic peace, I let it go.

We got out of the car at the theater, and I debated on whether to take my fleece. I’ll wear a fleece with shorts in the summer. Fleece works for me, and have a tendency to stick to what works. I took it. And three steps later, I put it on. Everyone else was jeans and light shirts. I was in a fleece. I wondered if I was 92 years old and imagining this whole “going to the movies” scene from a hospital bed.

We walked into the mall theater, which I haven’t visited since I was a teenager, and I stared up at the Marquee. Besides Star Trek, I didn’t recognize any of the movies. I figured that I was definitely sleeping in a bed somewhere under a shawl. I hoped that I wasn’t drooling or wearing any hat with a pom pom on the top.

The men walked past the ticket booth and stood near the video game machines while the ladies got the tickets. “Wow. Centipede. You don’t see that much anymore,” I said, genuinely surprised the they were charging $.50 to play such an old game.

“Oh, I love that one.” said the other guy.

“A friend of mine supposedly has a full sized cabinet with a PC inside that you can play all the old games on. I guess it has buttons and everything. Although, I’ve never actually seen it.”

“You need the track ball though. Get that track ball spinning…” He looked like he wanted to sigh. “I could play that all day.”

The ladies approached, and his daughter was leading by a few steps. “Are you guys talking about Pac-Man?” she asked.

I chuckled. “Centipede.” Then I half joked, “It’s Ok. It’s way before your time.” I paused. “Hold on. When were you born?”

“1990.”

I quickly did the math. She was telling the truth. She had also just finished her freshman year at college. The young image of myself was suddenly being shattered by the genuine article. Centipede was way before her time.

Freshmen in college were born a full decade after Centipede. They never had to flip the antenna / game switch, or decide between squash, hockey, tennis, or plain old Pong. They never went to an arcade with a pocket full of quarters because the stand-up games had better graphics than the ones you could play at home.

They never suffered through the bonk bonk sound of the Atari 2600 Pac-Man that couldn’t face up or down and ate dashes instead of dots. They never experienced the pure evil of the computerized voice of Intellivision Baseball telling you that you were out. They never had Venture or Zaxxon on Colecovision. No Asteroids on Vectrex. No Tecmo bowl on the NES. No marveling at the breakthrough, breakneck speed of Sonic on the SEGA Genesis. Every game that they started out with was ten times more advanced.

The first fond memory of a gaming system from today’s college kid would probably not involve the mysterious tradition of blowing into a cartridge to get it to work. It would be more likely that the systems being sold by the time those kids were ready for them involved games on disc.

They started with discs I thought. Oh my lord, am I old. I hoped that the doctor would up my medication and make me dream that I was a cage fighter tomorrow. Dreaming of being old when you’re drooling in a pom pom hat in some hospital somewhere was not fun. I zipped up my fleece so as not to catch a chill and wake up with a cold.

We walked down the hall to the movie. I veered off toward Star Trek and went in. It was half of a joke. They were still showing previews. I slumped. Although I thought that it would be funny and entertaining to remain in Star Trek until #1GF! came to get me, our friends were burning free movie passes to take us to the movies. I couldn’t sit in another theater without feeling like a bit of a dick. I slumped further and pulled the door to the theater open and went back into the brightly lit hall.

#1GF! was peeking out of the romantic comedy smiling. “Get in here, you.”

I made a face and trudged in. I sat in the seat and I swear that even though the movie was based on A Christmas Carol (replacing a miser with a womanizer), I only accidentally sighed once and it was halfway through the movie. I tried to fall asleep, but didn’t want to get busted and be rude. I looked around the theater at the other people. It was two hours without a laugh or entertainment of any kind.

I hit the point where I couldn’t stand looking at the screen anymore, so I spent some time trying to figure out who the target audience was supposed to be. I immediately crossed off half of the world for having testicles. In the fairer half, I couldn’t find a target either because every woman was portrayed as a simpleton willing to be repeatedly treated like dirt for a roll in the hay with the lead character.

It made as much sense as a movie being set in winter being put out in May. It’s almost summer, bitches. You know, sunshine? Why would you remind us of winter when we’ve been trying for months to get out of it? Wait, was your option was release the movie now or go straight to DVD?

I was trying really hard not to be aggravated at how bad the movie was, but it was really, really bad. So, when the credits rolled, I started clapping like it was the greatest thing ever. It was sort of a cross between a slow clap and a regular clap that sucked in a few other people into clapping. I managed to get only a small amount of joy spread before #1GF! slapped her hands on mine and said “Stop being fresh.” I could’ve gotten a lot more people involved. I know it. I might’ve had a chance at figuring out who the target audience was. #1GF! snipped my nets and let my fish swim free.

As we left the theater, I tried not to say anything, but no one liked the movie. It was horribly and awfully bad. Bad acting, bad release time, and astoundingly bad writing. If you’re going to base a story on the framework of A Christmas Carol, you should be able to spend more time writing something extra interesting to weave around frame. Then again, if you’d steal the framework and try to pawn off such bad acting and sadly unfunny jokes, you might not be the most creative writer in the world.

I hadn’t been to the movies in a long time, and was thinking that it’s so much better with a pause button and nearby refrigerator, when the guy spoke up. “You know, I stopped watching the movie after a while. At one point, I was looking around the background wondering ‘How’d they park those cars so close together.’”

“There was not one laugh,” said one of the women.

I tried not to tear it up, but fuck man, it was bad. Imagine a woman who is stupid as hell and put her in a shirt that says “Pure Geunius.” Just for the heck of it, give her lips that make her look like she kissed an iron. The type of lips where you look at them and go, “Ok, you went to plastic surgery, and I get what you were trying to do, but you should sue your doctor and move out of California.”

Now imagine that this woman thinks she’s really funny and only speaks in baby talk. To a chihuahua. That’s sitting on her lap wearing a little hat and matching coat. And she’s telling jokes about knitting that would only be funny to people who have an in-depth knowledge of auto mechanics. Now make that a movie. As long as that fiasco went on for two hours or less, I would consider watching that over The Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past even if it came with a free hammer blow to the head during the previews.

Oh, and I’m officially going on record to say that Matthew McConaughey is the Keanu Reaves of romantic comedies. He’s always named something like Brandon or Connor and plays the same boring smug, two dimensional, one trick character who talks so slowly that it’s easy to confuse his version of sexy with everyone else’s notion of mild retardation.

Ok. I think I’m done. I feel like we owe our friends a movie. A good one. Like with Vulcans in it and whatnot.

After we got home, I climbed into bed and groaned.

#1GF! looked at me. “What?”

“We don’t have to take our, clothes off…”

“Oh, is that very nice? Is it?”

“to have a good time…”

“It’s not. Not nice at all.”

I grinned as I shut the light off and drifted off to sleep.

What I Learned

• I can solve a Rubik’s cube in 1:36.
• Rubik’s cubes do not like to be spiked.
• Jason Alexander had hair?
• Uh, plants are not cheap. I had no idea you could spend so much on things you can’t even eat.
• The average college kid’s first home game system used a disc instead of a cartridge.
• Matthew McConaughey is the Keanu Reaves of romantic comedies.
• 2,000 words toward a book feels better than 7,000 in a post.

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Posted in Life of Riley