A LITERARY INTERMEZZO

THE APPALACIAN TRAIL
By Bruce Eason

Today she tells me that it is her ambition to walk the Appalachian Trail, from Maine to Georgia. I ask her far it is. She says, “Some two thousand miles.”

“No, no,” I reply, “you must mean two hundred, not two thousand.”

“I mean two thousand,” she says, “more or less, two thousand miles long. I’ve done some reading, too, about people who’ve completed the journey. It’s amazing.”

“Well, you’ve read the wrong stuff,” I say. “You should’ve read about the ones that didn’t make it. Those stories are more important. Why they gave up is probably why you shouldn’t be going.”

“I don’t care abut that, I’m going,” she says with a determined look. “My mind is made up.”

“Listen,” I say, reaching for words to crush her dream. “Figure it out, figure out the time. How long will it take to walk two thousand miles?” I leap up to get a pen and paper. Her eyes follow me, like a cat that is ready to pounce.

“Here now,” I say, pen working, setting numbers deep into the paper. “Let’s say you walk, on average, some twenty miles a day. That’s twenty into two thousand, right? It goes one hundred times. And so, one hundred equals exactly one hundred years. It’ll take you one hundred years!”

“Don’t be stupid,” she says. “One hundred DAYS, not years.”

“Oh, yeah, okay, days,” I mumble. I was never good at math. I feel as if someone had suddenly twisted an elastic band around my forehead. I crumple the paper, turn to her and say, “So if it’s one hundred days, what is that? How many months?”

“A little over three.” She calculates so fast that I agree without thinking. “Fine, but call it four months,” I say, “because there’s bound to be some delay; weather, shopping for supplies, maybe first-aid treatments. You never know, you have to make allowances.”

“All right, I make allowances, four months.”

What have I done? It sounds as if all of this nonsense is still in full swing. SAY MORE ABOUT THE TIME. “Okay,” I say, “so where do we get the time to go? What about my job? What about my responsibilities, YOUR responsibilities, too? What about--?”

“What about I send you a postcard when I finish the trip,” she says, leaving the room.

I sit there mouthing my pen. I hear her going down the basement steps. Pouting now, I think. Sulking. She knows she’s wrong about this one.

“Seen my backpack?” she calls from below. God, she’s really going to do it. “Next to mine,” I say, “On the shelf beside the freezer.”

I am angry with myself. She has had her way, won without even trying “Take mine down too,” I blurt out. “You can’t expect to walk the Appalachian Trail all alone.” I stare at my feet. “Sorry,” I say to them both. “I’m really sorry about all of this.”



From: Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories. James Thomas, Denise Thomas & Tom Hazuka, editors. W.W. Norton & Co. Publishing © 1992

TH' BALLAD OF TH' ONLY CHILD

I've been hanging on to this passage for the better part of a year or more trying to think of something to do with it. Other than saying "I'm an only child", which is probably all that's necessary, I can't think of how else to stretch it out into anything interesting. I think th' passage stands for itself.

Izumi took a handkerchief from her coat pocket and wiped away her tears. With a start, I realized she’d been crying for some time. I had no idea what to say, so I sat waiting for her to continue.

“you prefer to think things over all by yourself, and you don’t like anyone peeking inside your head. Maybe that’s because you’re an only child. You’re used to thinking and acting alone. You figure that as long as you understand something, that’s enough.” She shook her head. “And that makes me afraid. I feel abandoned.”

Only child. I hadn’t heard those words in a long while. In elementary school the words had hurt me. But Izumi was using them in a different sense. Her “only child” didn’t mean a pampered, spoiled kid but spoke to my isolated ego, which kept the world at arm’s length. She wasn’t blaming me. The situation just made her very sad.

---Haruki Murakami
South of the Border, West of the Sun

MY JOB'S STRANGER THAN YOUR JOB PRESENTS: THINGS O’ERHEARD @ WORK

“if you DO have an anal infection in the first 30 days, you DO have a problem.”

“How can I assist you and Boogers?”

“we don’t cover deworming.”

“How can I help you and Richard Poo-Poo?”

“We do pay for euthanasia.”

“that would be what we call a ‘dietary indiscression.’”

FUN WITH SPREADSHEETS!! #42: COUNTDOWN!!

I like to keep one open at the end of the day that counts down how many seconds are left before I can log out and go home. How 'boutchoo??

HAPPY FIRST FRIDAY IN NaBloPoMo, EVERYBODEEE!!

I'm supposed to post every day for a month. But no one said I had to write brilliant bits of western literature every day, did they? SO! One of my fav Peanuts strips for today...

EVER NOTICE THAT EVERYONE HAS 2 WORD SOLUTIONS TO VASTLY COMPLICATED PROBLEMS? PRESENTS: THANK GAWD I DON’T HAVE TO GO THROUGH THAT ANY

Ages ago when I was writing as a citrus fruit, I wrote a blogcake in which I noted that one of the big problems with the world today is that everyone’s got a simple, 2 word solution for a vastly complicated problem: witness the cake about the rude dude in McDonalds who’s answer to illegal immigrants was to round ‘em up and lock ‘em away. You’ll note in THAT cake my response to his 7 word solution ran to about 3 typewritten pages with references to the US Constitution. I’m also put in mind of a Star Trek episode where Q was robbed of his Q-ish powers and made human. When Geordi was saying that the ship was in trouble Q’s solution was “just change the gravitational constant of the universe.”

That line was one I used quite frequently in my former life as a schoolteacher. A student would have vastly complicated learning issues, stemming in part from a hard family life, a lack of motivation and probable organic processing disorders inside their own skull. The general solution for how to help them learn and achieve better test scores were along the lines of “give them more work,” or “you’ve got to motivate them more.” Advice that’s about as helpful as Q’s suggestion to change the laws of gravity or Dilbert’s Pointy-Haired Boss saying “work smarter, not harder!” It was one of the most frustrating aspects of my life as a teacher because A) such advise is ridiculous and unhelpful and B) when the kid DIDN’T achieve then everyone would say, "well, we TOLD him how to improve his student’s scores! We TOLD him to motivate his students and he wouldn’t do it!” You can see why, after 7 years of that, a person might begin to H-A-T-E teaching.

This came back to me th’ other day when I got a call from someone who was obviously a school counselor. She was asking me about her insurance policy when I heard a door open in her background and a piercing wail issue forth. A second, very tense voice in the caller’s background said that the wailer had sat in the middle of the floor and refused to budge and was out of control and disrupting the classroom. THIS was the point where I thought the call would end: a school employee would naturally hang up from calling her insurance company and deal with the screaming child on the floor, correct?

No, of course not (otherwise I’d not be writing this, would I?) No, the caller immediately went into Q Mode. Said she to the wailing child who was presumably on the floor, and I quote: “behave yourself.”

Well, gee, if the kid was able to DO that, he wouldn’t be IN the counselors office in the FIRST place, would he?

Need I say more??

THE CULTURE OF BABBLE, CHAPTER 4 PRESENTS: 46 WORDS

You start a conversation, you can’t even finish it!
You’re talkin’ a lot, but you ain’t saying a thing.
When I’ve got nuthin’ to say, my lips are sealed!
Say something once… why say it again??

---Talking Heads
Psycho Killer


I come from a long line of talkers, I make no bones or apologies about it. My family gatherings were a magnificent thing to behold because it was perfectly common for a person to be carrying on more than one conversation at a time. Call it verbal multitasking: Aunt Jo could be talking with Aunt Barb AND Uncle Bob at the same time about two completely different things. (I’ve also developed the ability to read a book and listen to a separate audio book at the same time).

You’d THINK a person like me would have th’ Gift o’ Gab and would be a storyteller and life o’ th’ party, quick w/a joke or a light up your smoke, but in truth I’ve become more of a listener than a talker (though lord knows you get me going on something and I’m worse, verbally, than the Energizer Bunny). Still, though, there’s a limit to what even a listener can put up with before ya wanna’ just shout, Bugs Bunny style, “SHAAAAD-AAAAAP!”

Somewhere along the line our world became a helluva lot more talkative than ever before, and it’s been within my lifetime that this change has occurred. Hell, since my adolescence. It used to be when you went to the McDonald’s drive through they would say how can I help you and that was IT. 5 words—more of an acknowledgement that you’re there and the speaker is working than anything else. NOW there’s some spiel that goes on for half an hour while they thank you for choosing McD’s, then offer you something that you may or may not have wanted, and then tell you to go ahead with your order; an increase to something like 25 words. Not only is it silly and vaguely insulting—are we all THAT weak and easily lead around by the nose that some pimply teenage stranger saying “wanna try our new frappy-cheeno?” will suddenly make us want one if we didn’t want one before we got there??—it’s NOT NECESSARY. By 2009 I think we can all assume that when the person taking the order STOPS TALKING that’s OUR cue to make the order, telling us “go ahead with your order when you’re ready!” hasn’t been necessary since the dawn of communication.

But this sort of thing is getting worse and worse. I’ve noticed that all outgoing voice mail on cell phones, even if the person themselves puts a personal message on it, tells you to begin speaking after the tone. Wha? Is there ANYONE left who would USE a cell phone in the first place that DOESN’T know how to use voice mail? Why is this necessary?

Ever called Radio Shack? Those fuckers started this whole biz about 20 years ago with their “Thank you for calling Radio Shack where you’ve got questions and we’ve got answers! My name is Joe Blow, how can I help you today?” That’s 25 words, where a simple “This is Radio Shack, how can I help you?” (9 words, a reduction of over half) is sufficient.

This is, no doubt, why I get interrupted all the time at work: according to the official script, OUR greeting is FORTY-SIX WORDS LONG. That is, about 14 to 15 seconds worth of talking, and from what I’ve gathered from years of being a grownup and a teacher, that’s about HALF of the total attention span of your average American. Of course, in certain parts of the country (California and New York & New Jersey) people run at a pace where they act like they’ve only got an hour left to live and to sit and listen to ME talk for 15 seconds is hatcheting away at their precious remaining time. Still, though, they’ve got a point: it IS annoying to sit and listen to someone just TALK about stuff that’s not necessary.

Part of the problem is, of course, technology. Thanks to the prevailing norms of putting 50 TV sets into every room and turning them to different channels, cell phones that ring incessantly (some run-down dude got a call on his cell every 2.5 minutes at a Chinese restaurant Spooky and I went to and the dude’s conversations were about 1.2 minutes long—who IS this guy that he’s so popular as to receive 17 calls in 30 minutes? Is he dealing drugs?!), there’s ALREADY more talk out there than we can handle. We’re already tuning out the TV’s at the head of the grocery store line and people are far WORSE at communicating and even READING than we were 50 years ago, so the logical answer would be to REDUCE the amount of talk and babble, but instead, we’re doing just the opposite.

Offering great customer service DOESN’T mean talking your head off at the person who’s calling YOU for help. That’s rude. Great service also is NOT trying to sell something to someone before they’ve said anything to you—“wouldja’ like to try a crappy-chino?”—THAT is rude, too. In fact, a generation ago it would’ve been vastly rude to have a TV on AT ALL while people were eating, let alone putting more TV’s in a restaurant than there were in the final scene of the second Matrix movie.

SO! There was only one thing to do! Take th’ law into me own hands!!! I’m secretly taking th’ verbal scissors to my daily work life. One script for explaining part of our coverage is 221 words long; I’ve cut it to 126. Our survey script is 40 words, I’d cut it to 29. We have some profoundly wordy (and frankly dumb) cancellation rebuttal scripts that are 108, 116 & 96 words long respectively; I don’t use a single one of ‘em. The longest script for adding on coverage is currently 593 words long, which is my next lil’ pet project. I speak as little as possible when I’ve got angry people on the phone because, lets face it, you CAN’T talk to angry people, and ARGUING with them, pointing out that their claim was denied because they didn’t BUY the plan that covers dental cleaning and they obviously didn’t read their policy, will only make it W-O-R-S-E. I actually find it somewhat amusing when someone calls me up, begins babbling at me in anger, and goes on and on and finally hangs up 4 minutes later; I’ve have the call muted the whole time and didn’t need to say a thing! I don’t make small talk while I’m waiting for the system to pull up information, though I might mumble “lets seeee….” So they know I’m not dead. It’s a small start, but all revolutions must start small.

(oh, and now that I’ve passed 1.5k words, you should note I’m referring to TALKING, not WRITING. It’s gonna take me a lot longer to work on editing my stuff down to the paragraph-sound bite length we’re all used to. THAT will be next.