Tag Archives: bonkers

Tales from the Cubicle

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*thunder and organ music*

Gather round, boys and GHOULS, for I bring you DOUBLE the frights in tonight’s chilling tale: “Terror in Team Room 5.”

*lightning*

It seemed like such a normal day. The sky was overcast, and the air was warm, but not too warm. It was more of a cuddle than a scalding. I had done a great deal of work that day, I made a drawing I can’t wait to share, and I gathered in Team Room 5 with the managers and the giant TV to talk to the editors and those who couldn’t make it that day.

Then there’s Brandy (not her real name). Brandy’s desk is fifty yards from Team Room 5, but she Zooms into the weekly meeting. I’m sure there’s a good reason. She’s our staff influencer, and there might be some reason she can’t leave her desk. Whatever.

The meeting was pretty typical, until three-quarters through, when a figure stepped into Brandy’s blurred background. I was watching the editor-in-chief at that moment, so it took Clara (not her real name) whispering at me around the Vice President of Publishing for me to notice. When I looked over Brandy’s shoulder, I saw me.

My height, my build, my bad posture, my complexion, my burgundy T-shirt, my jeans, and platinum blond or white hair were all there. There was no way to communicate to Brandy while he just stood there, shuffling around, giving me the heebie-jeebies.

The Vice President of Publishing, visibly bored, got the editors to stop talking and set us free. After confirming on Brandy’s screen that I was still there, Clara and I raced to her desk. We were between my doppelganger and the elevator, so there was no way he was getting out. And yet, he was nowhere to be seen.

We asked Brandy who he was, and she told us she never got a look at his face. Who was he? Where did he go? We will never know. Watch the background. Always watch the background.

Well, that tale was TWICE the scares! Hahahahaha! It was TWO frightening! Hahahahaha! That’s a tale you enjoy with a hot cup of COPY! Hahahahaha! It gives a whole new meaning to “talking to yourself”! Hahahahaha! I hope you enjoyed this DOS of horror and tune in next time to Tales from the Cubicle. Hahahahaha!

*thunder and organ music*

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Spite of the Lepus 

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I’m sure you might remember how I once expressed my mourning for the lost art of making a tape, especially when putting together a playlist is what people do now, and it sounds unsatisfying. When you made a tape, you had to listen to each song, calculate how long each song was so you didn’t have too much blank space at the end. (Or, as many chose to do it, just play as much of the next song as you can before the tape runs out.) You put stickers on the tape, you decorated the case. You only made tapes for someone you’re trying to impress. A mix tape was a goddamned work of art, and you couldn’t do that with any other music medium.  

Another work of art I miss is letter-writing. I have had several pen-pals, and they were my closest friends at the time. One of my correspondents told me she said to her doctor that she did go to therapy—she wrote me every week. I would illustrate the margins when I was feeling whimsical, and if I was feeling ambitious, I’d do something fun with the envelope. The paper smelled like paper and felt crisp in your hands, while you reread what the final line was on a page so you could make sure it matched up with the next one. I’ve tried to revive letter-writing as an adult (I’ve got all these blank cards I never sold), but it never caught on with anybody. Writing a letter is a commitment, one most people don’t seem have the time or the will to make anymore. But when you take the time to write someone a letter on paper, you are spending every minute you work on it with them, and that is an act of intimacy that you will never find when someone slides into your DMs.   

For our evolution, we next got email, which was about 75 percent less commitment. You could say whatever you want, but not how you would say it. It’s not like your typing changes size or sprawls when you’re agitated. In email, you can capitalize words for emphasis, like some people still do in their comments and IMs, but that just gives people headaches. From there society moved onto comment threads, and the less said about that, the better (though that is how I met my ex-girlfriend and one of my best friends, so it’s not all bad). From there, we moved to IM, which had been around since the beginning, but went mainstream with social media (which is not at all bad, in that I met my eyes and ears in Finland, Wippa, the Norse Goddess of Punishment, through Myspace).  

But going back to email, I called myself a writer, but I hardly wrote because I was I was putting so much energy into emails. I just wanted to entertain my friends, so I wrote little plays, limericks, newscasts, an Oscar speech, the screenplay for a Kung Fu movie starring my coworkers, an ode to my missing button, and song lyrics that I made up. 

I only wrote two songs, one being a blues song about being dumped completely out of the blue that did not obey the laws of music. The other one sounded suspiciously like “A Boy Named Sue,” by Johnny Cash. The subject matter is a little difficult to describe. 

When I moved into my apartment in Jersey City, New Jersey, after the last tenant was removed on a stretcher, which I witnessed, I discovered what I considered to be a design flaw. There was a single pink strip of wallpaper that ran the circumference of my room, and it was decorated by bunnies, rolling around on their backs, sniffing flowers, wrestling, chasing butterflies.  

I looked around and decided that I was never going to get laid in this room (I was wrong), so I got the landlord’s permission and tried everything I could think of to get rid of the accursed bunnies. I even went to an Internet café and looked up how to get rid of wallpaper. I left the one wall for the bunnies that talked to me, but I covered the other walls with magazine clippings, art, and posters. If anything on my walls was going to cock-block me, it would be that. 

One day, while lying in bed and listening to the bunnies, I thought of a song. I emailed it to my friend Barry, and I thought it lost on the median of the Information Superhighway. Today, while poking around on my laptop, I found it: the song. And now I bring it to you. 

“Ballad of the Bunnies” 

When I was young, just twenty-two, 
I sought a place that had a view
, 
And one that didn’t cost a lot of money. 

I found a home, in Jersey City;  
It was cheap, and not real pretty,  
But still the deal was looking kind of sunny. 

So I unpacked my little room 
And saw what would now be my doom:  
A ring around the wall—and it was bunnies. 

Their background: pink. Their pelts were gray.  
Their poses were prepared for play.  
Their coal black eyes were looking at me funny. 

Their origin: I did not know,  
I didn’t care—they had to go, 
Or never would I find myself a honey. 

I scrubbed and washed and scraped that wall.  
I steamed and peeled; I tried it all!  
It only made my paint look kind of runny. 

Those rabbits cut me down to size,  
I had to reach a compromise; 
And now I’m left with just one wall of bunny. 

“This,” He said quietly as he got onto the bus, “is cool.”

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Every couple of years this comes up.

In 1991, I was sitting in drama class with the person I most looked up to in early high school, and we came up with some truly bizarre, baffling, high-energy situations to share with our friends. It was a tale that couldn’t be told by one story. It needed three stories. It needed “Three Stories in One.” Since I made a noble effort of illustrating the whole thing, getting distracted at fifty-six pages, I have a clear idea what they look like, and I like to revisit them. I can’t just pick up the last 10-15 pages because comparing my style to the style I had seventeen years ago is like asking Michelangelo to fill in some of the gaps on a cave painting. I’m proud of the work I did, but I’ve made some improvements.

This time, I thought hard about these faces as I worked on them. Since everybody’s based on a real person, I concentrated on features I remember most and spent a lot of time erasing. Luke didn’t look like that. Amber didn’t look like that, and Wendy didn’t look like that, except for the parts that totally did. Amber smiles with her eyes (still does), Wendy always looked annoyed at me—but with affection. Luke was robbed for the Best Dressed in the Class of ’93 (I mean that sincerely). Naturally, Jeremiah looked exactly like that in 1991. Boone really did have that playful smirk when she was up.

And now we need to have a quick word about Boone. A few years ago, Boone transitioned into Severian, a woman. I have not spoken to her as a woman, I have not even seen photos. I’m not even sure I got her name right. The only conception I have in my mind of Severian is when she was presenting as Boone, and the only reason I know about the transition at all is because one of our mutual friends chewed me out for dead-naming her in my last “Three Stories in One” post. Once I knew, I don’t refer to her as Boone anymore.

Last summer, I presumptively wrote my memoirs, each chapter representing the most influential figures in my life. And she was, without a doubt, going to be a very important. I did not dead-name her once, not even in my first draft. I believe that you should be who you need to be. A trans woman is a woman, period.

That said, I’ve spent a lot of time debating this in my head, and I’m not going to change Boone’s name or gender in “Three Stories in One.” The reason I won’t is because Boone is not Severian. Boone is a character based loosely on Severian when she was sixteen. While Severian was throwing bullets at elaborate Lego constructions with her buddy, Matt, Boone was picking up cheerleaders and playing meaningless board games with them.

On the same token, Luke is not a complete bastard, only kind of a bastard. Wendy was not a good driver back then, but at least she wasn’t driving her sweet Karmenn Ghia like it was the Batmobile. Amber was perky, but she was more than just a smile and the attention span of a hamster. (What I remember most about Amber was how kind she was to me. The popular girl treated me as just another student she was on a first-name basis with, not a nerd on the lowest rung.) And if I suddenly found myself, on my bike, in the middle of the Indy 500, I’d be a smear. At the risk of grandiosity, “Three Stories in One” is a historical document.

To be clear, if Severian tells me that “Three Stories in One,” particularly my decision to leave Boone as is, is offensive to her, then I’ll stop making these posts. I hope she doesn’t. I hope she appreciates it for the playful, teasing nostalgic spirit that went into these illustrations.

I’m not George Lucas. I tend to let things go when I’m done with them, but sometimes present circumstances demand that you change the past. Once again, I’m not going to. They were a product of their time.

Danger Returns

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Since she was on campus, Lisa thought she’d ask the asshole in person. He’d been missing for a few days, and she might like to see her worst enemy in person again. She knocked on his door, and he didn’t answer, like he hadn’t answered the past few days she’d been checking on him to make sure he wasn’t in the process of killing himself. She knocked again, and again he didn’t answer. She thought nothing of pulling out the key his mother gave her and opening the door, like she did whenever he didn’t answer. She would never forgive herself if he was successful, but she couldn’t sit with him every hour of the day, especially with his sleep schedule. Maybe when he got back, her boyfriend could take a couple of shifts.  

The door swung open, and when she saw the asshole, he was scrambling, and he straightened out with his hands behind his back. He wasn’t wearing his ratty-ass cardigan, and he liked baggy clothes, so the sight of him in a yummy black T-shirt (did she just think of the asshole as yummy? Ew!) looked so good you could forget he was a walking skeleton. 

“Oh, hi, Lisa! Why are you breaking into my dorm room? I know you have a key, but you can’t—” 

“Sean,” she snapped, “I’ve been worried sick about you. I promised your mother that I would protect you, and she meant from yourself.”  

“I’m sorry,” he replied, “I’m fine. I stayed in a hotel for a couple of days.” 

“Why is your hand behind your back, Sean?” 

“It’s like that military thing,” the asshole said. “You know, at ease?” 

“Let me see your hands, Sean.” 

He raised his left hand to shoulder level. “See?” 

She breathed in and out and growled. “I want to see your other hand too.” 

He started to return his left hand to its at-ease position when Lisa pounced. She grabbed his left arm and twisted it behind his back while slamming him against the wall. He coughed. “Now use your words.”  

She peeled him off the wall and slammed him again. 

“Safe word!” he groaned. 

Now that she had him where she wanted him, she could focus on what he was holding. Was it a bottle of pills? A sharp knife again? A fucking gun? She emptied his hand, and it was not any of those things. It was a thick, round disk about the size of her palm. The disc was split down the middle on the narrow side. In the center was a wound-up slip of string. “Is this?” she demanded. “A fucking yo-yo?” 

He sat down on his bed and hung his head. “I didn’t want anybody to see me like this.” 

“How long do you think you could hide this from us?” 

“Why do you think I disappeared to a hotel this past few days?” he said. “I just wanted to try it out.” 

She sat next to him and put a hand on his knee. “Look, Sean,” she said with a sign. “Just because you’re curious about yo-yos doesn’t make you a bad person. Everyone experiments with yo-yos at some point in their life.” 

“Really?” he sniffed, finally looking up. “I thought it was just me. 

“I know how you feel. I used a yo-yo when I was younger. But I’m okay now,” she told him. “You will be too.” With the hand that wasn’t on his knee, she held his. “We’re going to get through this together.” 

He put his head on her shoulder.  

She held the accursed thing directly in front of his eyes. “Now tell me, where did you get this? Who taught you how to use this thing?” 

“It’s going to be okay, Sean,” she cooed soothingly. “Do you trust me?” 

“YouTube tutorials, mostly,” he replied. “As for how I got it, I was walking by a toy store, and in a fit of whimsy, I went inside. Toward the back was where the forgotten toys of yesteryear dwell—the wooden bock, the hula hoop, the ball on a string with the cup on the top, you know what I’m talking about. There was this employee using a yo-yo, and I didn’t know what to do. I just kept watching. He seemed so happy. There was no sign of the misery and pain yo-yos cause. I knew that yo-yos came with a price, and I knew I shouldn’t pay it, and I know a bunch of tricks now. Would I do it again? I don’t have the answers. I know I can’t keep living like this.”

“Do you trust me?”

“Of course not,” he replied. “You’re a succubus.” 

She smiled weakly. “Then it’s not going to be okay.” 

He smiled back.  

They turned to each other again, and once again, she was alarmed at how close they were. Lisa couldn’t figure out where this was coming from. Why was her heart rate increasing exponentially? Why was her mouth so dry? Why were her palms sweating? Did she get covid? 

The asshole quickly looked away and sprang to his feet.  

Her heart immediately began to slow down. She had no idea what was causing this. “You said you picked up some tricks.” 

“Why do you think I spent three days in yo-yo boot camp?” 

“Show me.” 

He dropped the yo-yo until it reached the end of its string, and it hung there, until it returned to his hand with a snap of the wrist. “Sleeper.” 

“That’s just yo-yoing in slow motion. I want to see more advanced tricks.”  

“Check it out. Walk the dog. Elevator. Cradle. Those are basic tricks. One I could never get ahold of is the loopty-loop.” 

“Try it,” she demanded. 

He tossed the yo-yo, pulled it back, and didn’t catch it when it wound back up the second time the asshole screamed, “It’s coming back!” and dove to the floor. He forgot that it was attached to him, and Lisa laughed her ass off. 

Credit Where It’s Due

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Well, that was close. I received a text today telling me that my package couldn’t be delivered because something was wrong with the address, and I needed to go to follow the link to correct it and get sent on. So I did, and I clicked the “Forward” link, and they told me it would cost $3.00 to send and gave me some spaces to fill in my credit card information. The only package I’m waiting on is some meds for Newcastle, so I needed those to be delivered. I would have entered my credit card information, but I was working outside, and my wallet was inside, and I figured I’d get back to it later.

At dinner, I was telling Nicole about it, and I realized with crystal clarity that I almost got scammed. The site looked like the Post Office site, and charging $3.00 to redeliver a package sounds exactly like something they’d do, but there were enough red flags that I should have caught it right away, but I didn’t.

The moral of this story is, if I had been any less lazy, I would have spent all of today on the phone with the bank, cancelling my credit card and disputing charges.

This is a victory for sloth.

Ain’t That a Kick in the Pants?

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Does anybody remember America’s Funniest Home Videos? Honestly, the adults who condemn younger people for their TikTok hijinks really have no place to talk because they made that show a hit, and America’s Funniest Home Videos was TikTok before the internet, except for one difference. TikTok doesn’t have Bob Saget narrating the videos with funny voices and sound effects. Maybe if they did that on TikTok, more Boomers and Gen-Xers could get behind that. Where is Bob Saget anyway? He’s not doing anything. He should get on that.

But I digress. America’s Funniest Home Videos was a contest, and every week there was a first, second, and third place winner, and every single week, one of the placers was a male of some age getting punched, kicked, crushed by a ball or rake, or experiencing some other impact to his crotch. Rule number one of comedy: temporary, debilitating pain is funny.

Today, I had an America’s Funniest Home Video moment during my tennis lesson, when the instructor served a ball directly at me at my most sensitive. It has been decades since I’ve experienced a collision with that part of my body (I was drunk and trying to leap-frog over a parking meter; spoiler alert, I didn’t make it), so I’d forgotten how utterly painful it was. I had to sit the rest of the lesson out. I was lucky the instructor was hitting them slow, or it could have been a lot worse.

Where was my tennis partner during this? She was bent over, laughing her ass off. Because that’s the kind of relationship we have.

An Excerpt

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Actual dialogue from meeting my downstairs neighbor for the first time:

HER: … because I grew up in the Southwest.

ME: Where in the Southwest did you grow up?

HER: Well, New Mexico.

ME: Where in New Mexico?

HER: I tell people Albuquerque because that’s a place they’ve heard of, but it’s actually not very close to Albuquerque.

ME: Oh, where’s that? I might have heard of it.

HER: I was born in Gallup.

ME: Oh.

HER: It’s actually—

ME: I was raised in Gallup.

HER: What?!

Looking back, I didn’t ask her enough questions about it, and seeing as I’ve lived here for almost nine months and had only seen her once through the window, I probably won’t get the chance. But hey, pretty wild, right?

A Very Bad Joke

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One fine morning, Patricia Black set out for work. By the time she arrived at The People’s National Bank, she was ready for anything.  

Well, almost everything.  

At about ten o’clock, she was surprised by the appearance of a frog, who hopped right up to her desk and said, “Ribbit!” 

Not one to turn away a customer, she asked, “What can I help you with today?” 

The frog said, “Ribbit.” 

She didn’t know what ribbit meant, so she would have to make some guesses. “Would you like a loan?” 

“Ribbit!”  

There was something affirmative in that ribbit, so she replied, “You’ve come to the right place! The first thing I need to know is if you have some collateral.” 

The frog spit up something on the desktop.  

Delicately she picked it up and studied it. It was some sort of clay statue of a unicorn, about the size of a cell phone. But what was it? Knowing she wasn’t going to get a straight answer out of the frog, she turned to the man at the desk next to her, Joel Bey. “Joel, can you tell me what this is?” 

Joel frowned thoughtfully, but he shrugged. “No idea.” 

If there was anyone who would know, it was her boss, the bank manager, Walter O’Connor. She excused herself to the frog and headed to his office immediately.  

He waved her in as if he were glad to see her. He was always glad to see everybody. He was just that kind of boss. “What can I help you with, Patricia?” he asked. 

She explained her new client and held up the unicorn. “And this is what he would like to use as collateral, but I have no idea what it is.” 

Walter studied it, muttering, “I haven’t seen one of these in a long time.” 

“What is it?” 

“Why it’s a knick-knack, Patty Black, give the frog a loan!” 

I … I’ll see myself out. 

The Aristotle Code

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I’ve decided that, when I finish the novel I’m working on, I want the next one to be a conspiracy thriller. I’ve done some thinking on it, and this is the plot: 

The hero is a middle-aged, square-jawed professor in the philosophical anthropology department of Yale named John Hawke. He has eight PhDs and speaks twelve languages, none of which will ever come up in this book. All of his straight male students want to be him, and his straight female students want him, but not in a creepy way. One day, during office hours, when he’s teaching a student a fresh, exciting way to see philosophical anthropology, a beautiful, alluring, stunning, mysterious woman appears.  

The woman, Vanessa Riviera, came to John because he’s the World’s foremost expert on Aristotle, and with his dying words, Aristotle revealed the location of The Holy Grail, but in code. Together, with a mysterious organization that doesn’t want The Holy Grail found dogging their trail, they travel the globe and find the location of The Holy Grail, only to discover that it had been moved. They do more globetrotting, and they are pursued again, until it is finally revealed to them: 

The Holy Grail is actually a wine goblet a suburban mom in Wisconsin named Karen picked up at a garage sale because she thought it would look so cute next to her Hummel figurines on her mantel, but the cat kept knocking it down so now it’s in a box in the storage shed that her husband, Harold, has been promising that he’ll clean, but he never does, instead he watches football and History Channel documentaries about World War 2. 

The climax of the book is fifty pages of Dr. Hawke, Vanessa, and representatives of the mysterious organization standing around Karen’s backyard as she goes through her boxes and talks about everything she pulls out. (“This is the bowling trophy Harold won in ’08 for bowling his first 200. He never got a 300, but he was always proud of this little thing. Here’s an ash tray little Mackenzie made me in school. We don’t smoke, but it was a sweet thought, and we had it on our coffee table for years. Here’s the monogrammed coasters we picked up in the Black Hills in South Dakota. Hunter was conceived there. Well, there’s no Holy Grail in this box. Maybe it got put in with the Halloween decorations.”) 

Eventually the mysterious organization gets bored and leaves, and Dr. Hawke gets The Grail. This turns out not to matter to the world in any way whatsoever.  

The Hell with It

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Today, from 11:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. is our work Holiday Party. Those of you who have read Jeremiah’s Inferno will know that this is the Seventh Circle of Hell, below Standing in Line and one above Stuck in Traffic. 

For those not in the know, the Circles of Hell are as follows:  

1. Four-Year-Old Explaining the Plot of their Favorite Anime;  

2. First Dates;  

3. Holding in a Fart for a Long Elevator Ride;  

4. Pickles and Mushrooms;  

5. Exercising;  

6. Standing in Line;  

7. Work Holiday Parties;  

8. Stuck in Traffic;  

9. Discussing Politics with my Former Best Friend from High School.