As a Doctor Who fan, I enjoy multi-Doctor adventures, in which they bring back their former lead or leads to interact with the present star. “The Three Doctors,” in 1973, set the precedent that the Doctors squabble amongst themselves. The Doctor is played by different actors, so they were like different people, but what if they were all the same actor?
I thought about it in earnest one day, and I concluded that, if my past selves met me, they would hate me, or at least see me as a big disappointment. If there’s one thing I do with gusto is reinvent myself every few years. I change hairstyles, I change wardrobes, I change shape. Sometimes I have a beard. Sometimes I’m wearing glasses.
In parts of college, I was a condescending intellectual. In my mid-twenties, I was a miserable
dude who partied somewhat hard. When I was a kid, I could be downright feral. And then there was the polyamorous fitness buff.
I wrote a screenplay about it. I started working on it in Atlanta during my society’s ostentatious 2021 annual meeting. I remember this because I was thumbing through the program for names. I had no idea what I was doing, and it shows. It was proof that an idea is not enough.
I haven’t really been writing anything new lately, but I’m still being productive by finishing unfinished books or completely rewriting garbage drafts. I’m adapting the screenplay into a novel, which means adding a coherent plot and ton of new material.
It’s a sci-fi comedy about a middle-aged loser who is temping at an evil genius’s secret headquarters. A cute scientist flirts with him for a few days, then she lures him into a dangerous experiment. The result is that his past selves have materialized with him in the lab.
The polar opposites that were Ryan, at forty-five, thirty-six, twenty-seven, eighteen, and nine, must all work together, with the help of the cute scientist, to escape before they are disposed of.
It’s been really cold here lately (Colorado people, shut up), and I’ve been working from home so I don’t have to walk a mile to my Metro stop through some Jack London nightmarescape with tundra temperatures (I said shut up, Colorado people).
Just as an aside, my job is awesome.
The temperature Saturday got as high as 42, which is the answer to life, the universe, and getting the hell out of the house. It’s a three-day weekend, and I thought it would be nice to go to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Chinatown.
I forgot what was happening Monday.
My train pulled into the Chinatown station, and quite a few people exited, which was unusual for this time of day on a Sunday. I listened to my podcast and kept moving. One of the exits takes you right to the steps of the gallery, but it was gated off. The other exit was two blocks away, which meant I had to walk two blocks to get to it and two blocks back to the museum. However, those exits were gated off too, and transit workers were yelling at us to go away.
A worker stood near the stairs and told us we needed to get on a train and take it to the next stop to get out. Emboldened by the injustice of it all, I asked her why they didn’t just shut the station down. She said, “I don’t make the rules, I just tell you what to do.”
I took a train to the closest stop and realized I didn’t know which way to get to Chinatown. The National Mall was straight ahead, so I went in the other direction. I wasn’t 100 percent, though, so I stopped at a corner to get my bearings.
A smug, condescending douchebag walked by me, smirked, and said, “I’m from here, and we don’t pay attention to those things.”
I looked up from my phone and said, “I’m from here, and I don’t either. I’m just a little disoriented.”
“Sure.” He strode off.
With surer footing, I headed for Chinatown, weaving between National Guardsmen and their rifles, emergency fencing, and a thick crowd of white people. I saw a long line of red hats, and I couldn’t imagine where they might be going. As I walked past, I searched for the destination, but I couldn’t see one, nor could I see the end. It wrapped around a whole block, then crossed the street, then turned a corner, and disappeared.
Two blocks later, the museum was surrounded by guardsmen who weren’t going to let me in. I normally don’t eat lunch, but there was a Nando’s here, so I stopped in. The host asked me how many. I said one. He looked me up and down and narrowed his eyes, “I see.”
It was about noon that the MAGAs started coming in. I knew they were MAGAs for two reasons. One, there was nobody else in this part of town today; the locals know to stay clear. Two, they were wearing red hats, even the toddler, which I consider to be child abuse. Next, several tables of really hot people showed up. I was hit with the dilemma of admiring them while finding their entire worldview to be nauseating.
The worst part about the entire situation was that people thought I was one of them, especially because I was wearing my lumberjack shirt. On the other hand, blending in allowed me to enjoy my chicken in peace, live blogging the entire experience to my friend Emilie, who I picture reading it in a luxurious bath, sipping cava and shaking her head at my antics.
The only time I felt nervous were when the wannabes moseyed in and took a seat. If you’ve ever been in a Nandos before, you’d know to let the host seat you. If you could read, there is a large sign that says, “Please wait for the host to seat you.”
They wore black T-shirts, black sweats, black boots, black gloves, and black trench coats. Their glasses matched, and they both wore their thinning hair tightly clipped. I checked them for weapons when they pulled off their jackets because I didn’t want to be in the middle of a shooting when I was right across from them.
Most of the patrons got up and left when they realized Nandos was foreign food. I’m just relieved they didn’t stick around long enough to find this:
(Trigger Warning: It took a lot of work to keep this PG-13. I had to take a shower after the events of this brief adventure, and not in a fun way.)
I hate it when Facebook recommends stuff to me, based on my “interests,” including the reels. At one point, I was only getting clips from 2 Broke Girls, even though I am not remotely interested in that show.
The algorithm decided that, if Kat Dennings wasn’t enough, it would send me all the big boobs they had. Even though I didn’t click on them, the algorithm decided I needed to see more uncomfortable-looking breasts. It sent me reel upon reel of buxom women, mostly dancing.
When that phase passed, it switched to end-to-end Taylor Tomlinson clips, which finally got me clicking on them. (Her comedy connects with me.) However, the batch I actually engaged with didn’t last long.
Now it’s kind of crazy. Mostly, it’s gone back to big boobs, but they’re uncomfortably huge now, and I’m not turned on. I feel bad for the girls. Also there are the occasional clips from 2 Broke Girls and Taylor Tomlinson.
Today, I made a huge mistake. I saw a preview for a reel that featured an inhumanly pretty ginger in a corset. Her boobs were average-sized, so I don’t know what she was doing here.
I’m making huge strides in my artwork, and I’m trying to spend more time on faces. She was a beautiful model. And not because she was in a corset. Honest. In that two-second preview, she became a muse to me, and I needed to see more. I knew not to click on it, but I did anyway.
The video lasted about thirty seconds, and it was on a loop. The entire show featured this beautiful woman digitally stimulating the camera, as if it had male parts.
She could have been playing with a cat. She could have been banging on a silent bongo. She could have been painting. She could have been using a shake weight. But she wasn’t. She had the smug look and rhythm people have when they’re engaged in this kind of activity. Or so I’ve heard.
I closed my laptop and thought about my choices. I feel really gross now. I know I’m a vulgar person. I own this about myself. However, there’s a time and a place, and I don’t think Facebook is it. It’s not even sexy, it’s icky. Never again will I click on—ooh! Taylor Tomlinson video!
A couple of months ago, I volunteered to be an usher at a community theater production that in no way needed an usher. They told me they’d be in touch if they thought I could help out on their next production. Right before the holidays, a group email went out, rife with reply-alls, soliciting volunteers for set painting.
I like my life. But I need to get out. I need to have conversations with people who can answer me and don’t bite me at random. I’ll take one or the other.
There was a Saturday and Sunday slot. Because I greet the world like a vampire if you wake him up in the afternoon, I volunteered for the two hours Saturday, and not the four hours Sunday. My contact was Ruth, which is one of those wholesome old-person names that you rarely hear anymore. I had a picture of her in my head.
I arrived a quarter after because I timed everything badly. And most of the work had been done because the rehearsal ended early, and the cast had decided to attack the primered foam trees with rollers. They were baffled by me, I was baffled by them, until Ruth showed up.
Ruth was not an old person. Ruth was a perky, bouncy, thirtysomething, cute as a button, who threw herself into the work. She had no idea what was going on, but she was going to take point because someone had to. The woman with the plan was Kathryn, who was a hippie from the sixties and fussed like Piglet. She was what I thought Ruth was going to be like.
One of the volunteers was a house-painter, so he was available to coach, which he was more than happy to do. He didn’t even need prompting. He would just show up behind you and point out an uneven patch, then stroll away for the next tree trunk where they awaited his wisdom. He was a silver fox with no neck, a fitted T-shirt, and wranglers he kept pulling up.
He and I bonded over the Doors. One of their songs started playing on the radio station (I didn’t know they still had those), and he couldn’t identify it. I asked, “Want me to tell you?” It was “LA Woman.” He explained to his companion that the Doors were from the sixties more than the seventies because Jim Morrison died in the early part of the seventies. Was it ’71? ’72? ’73? He then rattled off a bunch of the Dead at 27 Club.
I spent most of my time in the storage closet with Ruth because it looked like someone emptied a giant junk drawer into it. The storage closet is about the same size as the one Kate dumped my stuff in after the divorce, which is to say it’s very small. The theater troop were there by the grace of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, with a Sunday school in the room the next day, so all the trees were going to have to be put away. Apparently, the stage had to be broken down and stashed every Saturday night for mass.
I have no spatial reasoning, so I don’t know how to make things fit, until Saturday night, when I was directing Ruth to move things into the best space. She laughed a lot, which was good because I was supposed to be funny.
When everyone went home, Ruth hung out with me while I waited for my Uber. She asked me my favorite part of community theater thirty-five years ago, and I told her working in the wings. I’m the first person who didn’t say acting, so she is going to talk to the stage manager, who might need an assistant, as the play is a farce.
I made it to bed and woke up the next morning to continue the project I was working on Saturday. I asked myself if I wanted to stay home all day like I’ve done for the past bunch of Sundays. I did not, so that afternoon, I headed out to St. Mark’s Church and met more people.
I arrived early because I overcompensated, so Ruth and I cleared up the chairs from Sunday school and learned stuff about each other. She told me her husband was a novelist, with one book self-published, and he was interested in trying out his hand with traditional publishers. I offered some tips.
She was very excited to introduce me to Jess. Jess is on “The Board” with her husband, and she’s an artist. When she was showing off the samples she wanted to do, she turned to me for my expertise, even though I explained I am not an expert. When I asked what kind of art she did, she sheepishly told me crafts stuff, as well as a large bus for a karaoke competition. She was way more of an expert here than I was. In fact, I did two things all afternoon. First, I attempted to sponge over the base layer in a way that looked like leaves. It did not work. I attempted to add highlights. It looked like Jackson Pollack had rolled around on one of his canvasses. The second thing I did was paint over it with the base color and left it to Jess, whose trees looked magnificent.
Meanwhile, Kathryn, who assured us she was no artist, singlehandedly added a level of depth to the tree trunks that was uncanny. Ruth painted the moon, using a video on TikTok for a reference, and Kathryn was there to help. But she was not an artist. No, sir.
When I showed up, I told them I could only stay for two of the four scheduled hours because I would need to return to my cave with my cat and shun the outside world. We were done within two hours.
Now, all I have to do is wait for Ruth’s email, and maybe I’ll be able to hang out backstage and juggle, while surrounded by weird people.
My favorite artist is John Singer Sargent, and I think that, ultimately, Impressionism is my favorite movement. The classical, non-portrait art galleries in Washington, D.C. have plenty of Impressionist pieces, but it’s the National Gallery West Wing that has the most massive collection.
I hadn’t been there since the pandemic, when I went to see my favorite painting. (Nonchaloir (Repose), by Sargent.) I think it’s with this painting that the impression Impressionism has left on me is apparent. It’s a picture of a woman with a floofy dress relaxing on a couch, and it looks like it was thrown together in twenty minutes. But that’s not true at all. If you look at her hands, you can see sharp detail and precision that only looks sloppy. It’s an amazing piece of art.
And on that day, four years ago, the entire that whole section of the museum was closed off. No Sargent. No Whistler. No Monet. No girl in yellow reading a book. And I hadn’t been back since.
Because I’ve hit a steady routine of drawing in cafes on Saturdays and/or Sundays, and because you can’t spell routine without rut, I gave the museum another shot. And it hit the target. I got to see my favorites, I got to see new, exciting pieces, and I got to see the same people over again.
This is normal. Depending on which entrance they use, the gallery herds you through the maze of rooms, and certain pieces demand a certain amount of attention from different people, which averages out, and boom, there they are.
Usually, I’d only see them in a couple of rooms, especially when I would sit down and draw a painting that grabbed my attention. I divided my attention between the canvas and the eyes surreptitiously peeking over my shoulder to watch what I was doing. My rough sketches, as you can see, put the rough in rough. There’s a reason I color and ink these pieces as fast as I can.
Normally, most the fun of coming to a museum is people-watching, but I didn’t do that this time because I was so focused on capturing the figures in my style, and quickly. Also, the crowd was really dull. Hair was dark brown, black, and white. Parkas were black or navy blue. There weren’t patrons there I’d describe as bright or notable.
Then there was the woman who interrupted my work by being really striking. Her hair was a very red shade of auburn, and her sweater was white with blue stripes. She was petite and middle-aged, and I watched her do a bored circuit of the room and leave. When she wasn’t distracting me anymore, I finished my drawing.
Later, I was looking for another painting to sketch out, and there she was again, sprawled out on a bench, playing with her phone like a teenager. I just kept seeing her. It took fifteen-to-twenty minutes to finish a sketch, and I did five of them, so she was going through these rooms incredibly slowly. And she wasn’t looking at the art.
Between the first and second time I saw the striking woman, I zeroed in on a great painting of a clown at exactly the same time as an old woman. She was bell-shaped, with a shawl draped over her round, hunched shoulders. She wore a fishing hat and glasses that are so thick, if you rub them you can see the future.
She started talking to me, and I responded, and she gasped and staggered back in shock, as if I’d forgotten to tuck after using a urinal. (I hadn’t forgotten.) What followed was incoherent jabbering, until she said slowly and deliberately, “I thought you were my husband. But you look nothing like him.”
We chatted about the painting for a minute, and she laughed at her antics and left the room. A few minutes later, I too exited the room, and there she was, pointing at me gleefully and whispering to a man who did not look a thing like me, in the slightest. Our clothes were completely different. We were different heights. I had a beard. I was wearing an orange beanie, and he was not.
The man chuckled. “You must be my doppelganger.”
“I’m the World’s Worst Doppelganger,” I said and got the hell out of there, where I ran into a guard.
“Excuse me, sir,” he asked, “is that a sketchbook?”
The guard is an artist, but he’s hit a low point with his art. He’s second-guessing himself, his output has been low and crappy. I’ve been there. I stopped drawing for five years because of it. He wondered if I had any advice about getting back on the horse.
I couldn’t give any advice because I don’t know what I’m doing, but I told him what broke my empty streak: go back to basics. Get rid of everything and start with a pencil and an eraser. Use a sketchpad you don’t care about and go and make mistakes. Draw often. And remember, your art is better than you think it is.
Wisdom. I got it.
That was my outing. People being weird, and some beautiful art. And some sketches. I hope you had a good weekend.
My job is amazing. It fell into my lap, when I received a call from a recruiter who wanted to hook me up with a six-month temp gig with an option for full time, based on my LinkedIn profile. Think about that for a minute. I was recruited from LinkedIn. I can go to my grave knowing I’m the only one who can say that.
After a confusing interview, I got a job that was excessively boring. I had a couple of hours’ worth of work to do every day. However, at an even pace, I was introduced to new work and given a month or so to get used to it before another task was given to me. This is the best way to teach me, and I became an expert on everything that didn’t have lawyers.
I make mistakes a lot, and no one ever gets mad at me about it—they just explain what I did wrong and ask me to fix it.
It was the editorial inbox where I found my footing, answering panicked questions for authors, helping the editors through the process, and extending deadlines. Lately, I’ve been volunteering to train in some of the tasks I don’t know how to do and volunteering for anything or any backup I can do. I did this, not for career advancement, but to keep myself busy. Even so, when I realized no one was going to think about it if I didn’t bring it up, I asked about a promotion and got it.
I feel appreciated, and I’m never stressed out, though there are situations that make me want to flip my desk, but I can’t because it’s anchored to the cubicle. One of these situations is the all-employee meetings, which takes an hour to tell you about the DEI initiative, and sometimes the HR Boss gets roasted by a Zoom guest for eleven minutes.
Before the last meeting, everyone headed for the 10th floor, asking me if I was coming. I said I’d catch up, and I just didn’t go. I wasn’t being paid to be bored. Nobody missed me, and I didn’t miss anything. I had to go to this one because they’re shaking our office like a snow globe, and everybody is moving.
Because the office is closed from Christmas to New Year’s, the move would be then, and we needed to pack up our desks into these large moving crates. The movers would put them into your cubicle, and you just had to unpack and return the crates. HR Mom asked if there were any questions.
KAREN #1: What if we have too much stuff?
HR MOM: We have cardboard boxes in the work rooms. Just make sure you use labels.
The next Karen came to the microphone, and she looked ready to storm the place. “Are the boxes assembled? No? How are we supposed to know how to tape up the boxes?” She looked around at the rest of the audience who wanted her to stop talking so they could get back to work. Karen took it as support.
HR Mom said, “The boxes don’t require tape. Next question.” She eventually decided to give a demonstration on the assembly of the boxes, and the result was the same as if you rode a bull side-saddle.
This is when the Expert came in. Amused, he plucked the box out of HR Mom’s hands, and he couldn’t get it to work. HR Giant stepped in, and he came dangerously close to hitting the front row in the face.
They were banker’s boxes. I know they’re tricky, but they’re not that tricky. You’d think the Expert could navigate a banker’s box. If they started slapping each other, it would have been a Three Stooges short.
This is when I left.
Anyway, here’s the portrait I drew of the Expert when he was just hanging back and letting HR Mom run the show.
When going through my photo albums, I seemed to hit the sweet spot for nostalgia. Most of my friends throughout my history have been larger-than-life, to the point where I sometimes think of them as characters. When it comes to thinking human beings with their own lives separate from me as characters, the one who demands it the most is Jeff.
If I had to sum Jeff up in two words, they would be “Sassy Nerd.” He was the first Hastings College student I met, and I immediately wrote him off. When it came to being geeky, he was only missing tape on his glasses. It didn’t help that his roommate and my first friend, Rick, declared war on him. On the former’s side were an army of Madonna posters. On the latter’s, Reba McIntyre, all fighting for supremacy.
I didn’t think much of Jeff until my family experienced a loss, and Jeff stepped up to help me out. He volunteered to meet me at the airport and drive me back to school, even though said airport was three hours away. Oh, and it turned out that he was hilarious. And really clever. And sincere. And dangerously unhinged.
His brand was Evil Genius. He literally carried around a checklist for conquering the world, and one of the items was, “Befriend Jeremiah Murphy.” He steepled his fingers with even more menace than Mr. Burns, and when he laughed maniacally, he committed to it.
He said things like, “When life hands you dilemmas, make dilemonade.” For a teenager, he had a lot of wisdom, but he usually delivered it in the snarkiest way imaginable.
He would pathologically not swear. This was part of his identity. As part of out schtick, he and I left movies together behaving like the characters, but after Pulp Fiction, he said nothing. No amount of anything could get him to say something profane.
Except once. Late at night, while I was sitting captive behind the Altman front desk, he approached without emotion, and he whispered into my ear, “Don’t fuck with me.” I fell out of my chair. He denied it for all of college, and if I’m guessing, he’d deny it today.
Though he swears now. I have receipts.
For a while, we were a matched set, despite that the two of us couldn’t be more different. We moved in together sophomore year when Rick fled and there was no way Hastings College was going to let me keep my single without paying for it.
It was not smooth sailing, especially because he could make himself even more irritating if he was mad at you, and I was an unmedicated bipolar, but we came out on top. When we went our separate ways, him still in the dorm, me to a college-owned apartment, we parted as good friends. I even called him at random after I’d had a very weird Halloween.
He’s bald now. He didn’t used to be.
Anyway, I’m not good at likenesses, but this catches the vibe.
Jeremiah Murphy 