The F-Bomb Project Episode Three
Yea, Verily: The Third episode of The F-Bomb Project, starring Bill Cameron’s Vest, Patty Blount, and Sean “Master Blaster” Ferrell:
Fucking Master will be a Thing. I swears it.
Bullshit
Essay
The First Time I Ever Got Fired
(Originally published in Angry Thoreauan #27, November 2000)
I was eighteen years old and entering my Freshman year at Rutgers University and already I’d managed spectacular, if invisible, failure financially: In what was to soon become the soundtrack of my life, I found myself submerged in debt, most of it mysterious and vaguely disturbing. I usually chose to not think about it. Since at the time I was in the middle of my own personal Pax Soberia (having had a really disturbing “oh Jesus, that smell is me” revelation recently, inspiring me into my first and last foray into the nondrinking world) I approached this problem of debt with uncharacteristic sensibility, and decided to get a job. Prior to the Pax Soberia I would have spent a lot of time trying to alchemize cash out of used beer bottles and cigarette filters. Newly arrived at the University, I eschewed this standard solution in favor of a radical new one: Get a job. I figured for someone with my personal charm and adequate IQ, earning money would be easy.
Located in the middle of a formless grey cloud I can only refer to as nowhere, my campus was basically a roiling sea of tightly-packed and pressure-crushed Engineering students, and almost nothing else. It was just a big plain dotted with dorms and parking lots, and that was it. There was a Student Center, of course, which boasted video games, a pool table, a Wendys, and a Pizza Parlor. The glittering, oasis-like Student Center bravely employed and occupied about twenty of the thousands of students on a nightly basis. The rest of us had to sit in our rooms spitting at each other for entertainment, or take a six hour bus ride to the other campus, where there were bars and stores and (rumor had it) Things to Do. Or, of course, you could manufacture designer drugs out of the materials on hand (cleaning solutions, toothpaste, couch cushc ions, etc) and get stoned.
Looking back, it isn’t very surprising that my Pax Soberia didn’t last very long.
Buried in the middle of this wasteland, though, was a small grocery store which had refused to sell out to the University when the campus had been planned, leaving it the only non-University building on campus, not to mention the only other jobs on-campus. And Lo! A “Help Wanted” sign hanging in the door on that long-ago September day when I finally woke up and thought to myself, Well, I’ve been here for two weeks, might as well go to a class or get that job, or something.
I showed up and discovered that I wasn’t alone in my desire to work for the grocery store. Dozens of others were there, filling out applications for the fifty hours or so of shifts available. The owners of the store new a good deal when they saw one, and they announced that we would each be assigned a test shift, and that after the week decisions would be made as to which of us would be lucky enough to earn minimum-wage stocking shelves. I took my assigned shift and promptly forgot all about it. How hard could it be to get a job in a grocery store? I’d observed the people who worked in the grocery stores back home and had always assumed their sole recommendation for the job was their ability to show up for it every day instead of killing themselves. I could do that. For a while. Especially since I could already tell that the Pax Soberia was going to end soon; a group of us had been hoarding grape juice from the dining hall, and it was silently fermenting in my closet.
When I showed up for my test shift a few days later, one of the co-owners, a short balding man in thick glasses, greeted me warmly enough and introduced himself as Mike. Mike ran me through my responsibilities quickly: Keep the store clean, stock the shelves, and run the register. It sounded simple enough, and I was encouraged when Mike got into details and demonstrated the first third of my job: Keeping the place clean. Sweeping, dusting, litter-detail — all these things were simple and easily within my (even then) withered abilities.
Mike then tried to teach me how to stock the shelves and freezers. This was more complicated than I would have ever imagined. The sodas in the freezer, for example, were to be stocked in a specific order, in a specific way. Mike showed me twice. Mike’s way of showing me was to perform the chore very quickly, without saying a word, and then turning to me brightly and saying “See?”
Having detected absolutely no pattern to the way he’d stocked the freezer, I nodded enthusiastically and said “Sure!”
Mike stared at me. At first I figured he could smell the ripe funk of my lie, and was simply waiting for me to Do the Right Thing. Then I figured it out: he was just staring. Mike liked to stare. Over the course of the next few hours of my employment, Mike stared at me a lot.
Next, Mike showed me how to work the register. Due to Mike’s habit of staring at me, I’d come to the conclusion that he and the two women he owned the store with were telepaths, communicating mentally. Thus it didn’t surprise me when there was no system of codes or UPCs for the approximately infinite number of products the store sold. Mike cheerfully explained that I would be expected to memorize all the prices of all the items offered by the store (listed in a oft-folded typewritten and hand-corrected booklet), do the tax calculation in my head, and count out the change. Then he stared at me until my hair began to singe a little.
Mike supervised my first transaction, which went fairly smoothly. Then he slapped me on the back heartily and went into his office. I finished out my four hour shift, shook hands with the next person up, thought HAVE A NICE DAY, MIKE really hard in Mike’s general direction, and went home to check on the fermenting grape juice.
The next day, I got a call from one of the other owners asking me to stop by. Figuring that my use of the New Math at the register had netted them big profits and I was about to be offered a partnership, I stopped by later on that day. I was ushered into .their office where Mike and one of the others sat waiting. A check was handed to me, and I was informed that they appreciated me coming in for the one shift, but I hadn’t made the cut.
I was dumbfounded. I’d never been fired before. I’d never gotten a failing grade before. I felt like I was about to cry. I managed to ask what I’d done wrong, in some pathetic effort to salvage knowledge, if nothing else, from this horrible incident.
Mike leaned forward and stared at me.
“You didn’t stock the sodas correctly, Jeff. And I showed you twice.”
I floated gently out of the store like they do in Spike Lee movies, staring down at my first and last check. I was numb. Not only had I been rejected by a dumb, hole-in-the-wall grocery store, but my financial morass had suddenly gotten much, much deeper.
If nothing else, I had the end of my Pax Soberia to look forward to.
A Play
RENOVATION FAILURE
(A Play in One Act)
<JEFF is at Home Depot, mystified>
JEFF: Excuse me, where are the door saddles? For an interior door?
CLUELESS HD EMPLOYEE: We only have these two kinds.
<JEFF buys one>
<JEFF is at home>
JEFF: Hey guys, I bought this saddle. They said it was one of two they had.
<CONTRACTOR1 gives JEFF his sad face>
CONTRACTOR2: Uh … we’ll just pick one up for you tomorrow.
JEFF: <slumping in defeat> Dang.
AND: Scene.
The F-Bomb Project Trailer
This is what happens when you have an idea just before the weekend: That’s right, a trailer for a trailer!
Come on, people. Get cussin’.
The F-Bomb Project
Yesterday on Twitter while rambling on pointlessly as usual (my tweets can be boiled down to <joke about pants> + <joke about liquor> + <random comment on what I’m writing> + <link to something vaguely interesting on the Internet> = hilarity) I thought about creating a book trailer where a bunch of people read one line from a passage in The Final Evolution or something, and I spliced them together into a trailer (inspired by this.)
Then Bill Cameron said “If my passage doesn’t have a lot of f-bombs, I’m not doing it. Hahahaha.” And I thought, yes. Let’s create a trailer of people reading just lines with the word fuck in them. I mean, I counted 593 of them in The Final Evolution alone.
Then, I thought, why not make that into a trailer for the whole series? Boom.
So, here’s the deal: Got Avery Cates books? A video camera of some sort? Film yourself reading any line, from any of the books, as long as that line contains an F-Bomb. Send it to me. Everything else is up to you: How you do, where you do it, what line you read, what you’re wearing, how many of you are involved – go nuts. Have fun. All I ask is that when you send me the clip, you identify exactly what line you’re reading by book, page, and line (just to spare me from having to search for each instance). Email everything to mreditor@innerswine.com
I’ll need a bunch of these to make it workable, so I won’t be doing any work on it until I have critical mass. So encourage everyone you know to send me a clip!
Jeff In the Wild
I’ll be crawling out of my lair for a few hours in September to discuss the Avery Cates books, beg piteously for money, and possibly humiliate myself when someone offers me a dollar to “shake my money-maker” and I accept, gyrating as tears stream down my face, certain that despite my efforts I will never get that dollar.
WHAT: The SFSNNJ Face the Fiction series.
WHERE: Well Read Books, 425 Lafayette Avenue, Hawthorne, NJ 07506; 973-949-3440
WHEN: Saturday, September 10, 2011, 8PM
I hung out with these folks a few years ago and had a really great time – these are book lovers and SF lovers. They also let me talk and talk and talk, which warms my black little heart. So come on out and watch me attempt to be coherent. And possibly dance for your dollars.
The Politics of the Third Floor Restroom
From The Inner SwineVolume 10, Issue 3, September 2004
LET’s FACE IT, piggies, politics is just a fancy-pants way of channeling aggression. People opposed to each other in a system instinctively hate each other, and back in our blood-splattered glory days as a race any time two Chiefs went against each other on policy, they generally killed thousands in a war between their tribes, or at the very least engaged in man-to-man combat, gouging out eyes and ripping open abdomens until one ‘policy’ had triumphed over the other. In today’s more civilized society this sort of thing is frowned upon—the man-to-man combat thing; war, thank goodness, remains a socially acceptable way of killing thousands in order to determine policy. You won’t see John Kerry and George Bush wrestling at the base of the Washington Monument to see who gets to order the next few thousand men and women to their deaths, no sir. We’ve invented politics to take the place of violence.
Of course, you can invent all sorts of rules and procedures designed to keep the Monkeys we all live side-by-side with under control, and while it may work on a macro-scale, when you get down to the nitty-gritty life remains a struggle between violent personalities for control of their immediate airspace. Political candidates can’t fight each other for the job, but I’ll bet they wouldn’t mind. People remain pretty much primitive in their desires and the manner in which they pursue them.
For proof, I offer you the third-floor restroom at my job.
Someone in my building wishes to be King of the Third Floor Restroom. Someone else opposes his candidacy. I know this because there is a war going on in there, one which I know too much about already. In a more evolved society, the question of who will be King of the Third Floor Restroom would be addressed through a civilized and organized procedure: Nomination of candidates, presentation of views and policies regarding the restroom, and, finally, an election of some sort, probably conducted using urinal cakes. Since society remains woefully un-evolved, what we have instead is a classic battle between signage and someone with what appears to be Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
Some background and geographic detail, then: I started a new job back in April, and the offices are located on the third floor of a large Manhattan office building. The floor has several offices being rented, and sports one large restroom for each gender, used in common by all the offices (it’s possible some of the fancier offices sport private bathrooms, and if I ever discover this to be so you can bet we’ll take that office by force, kill its men and enslave its women, and enjoy the facilities). A perfectly acceptable situation, especially since I personally frown on anything aside from urination being performed in semi-public restrooms like that. Shared restroom toilets just weren’t meant to be used except under dire emergency situations, you ask me. If everyone would just use the urinals (a wonderful invention—I’d have a urinal in my home if I could) and get the hell out, we’d have a lot fewer problems in this world. There are two urinals and three stalls in the men’s restroom, along with two sinks, of course, so we can fool ourselves into thinking we’ve washed away the microbes, and a towel-dispenser and trashcan. Standard stuff.
So, I stay away from the stalls if I can. I’m not one of those people who thinks he’s going to get the Andromeda Strain if my skin comes in contact with a public toilet; I don’t have to get into a Virus Suit in order to take a shit in a public restroom. I also believe firmly that human beings have been dealing with germs and microbes and all sorts of nasty shit for thousands of years, and while you can argue that some of those microbes are pretty nasty (Black Death, for example) I still doubt anyone is going to become the new Typhoid Mary by using a public restroom. That said, I see no reason to expose myself to nasty public toilets any more than necessary, chum. So that’s my policy on toilets: Avoid if possible, but use when necessary and don’t lose sleep over it.
I first became aware that a campaign to be King of the Third Floor Restroom when I entered the restroom one day and discovered a neat, laser-printed sign had been taped on the rear wall of stall #3:
PLEASE
DON’T
URINATE ON
THE
SEAT
Poetic, in a way; hauntingly beautiful. This seemed like common sense to me, and one thing I’ve learned over the years is that you can’t teach people anything common: Sense, decency, or knowledge. They get violent and huffy, is my experience, and I wasn’t disappointed. After the first candidate for kingship threw his hat into the ring with this bit of pithy signage, our second candidate responded the next day by detonating an ass explosion reminiscent of Hiroshima in stall #3. It looked like an infinite number of monkeys had suffered an infinite number of bowel spasms in there. He’d painted the damn place with his feces. And there, sitting above it like an ironic caption was the Signage.
I would have thought this to be just a merry moment of societal collapse, like many I witness on a daily basis, except that it wasn’t an isolated event. Over the next few weeks, these ass detonations became common, always in stall #3. Candidate #1 for King of the Third Floor Restroom, whom we’ll call IBS, was obviously passionately dedicated to fouling stall #3 and keeping it fouled.
Candidate #2, who we’ll call Mr. Placard, laid low for a few days while this assault on the senses went on. Mr. Placard obviously believes that what the world needs is more signage, that everything could be perfect if only we had the proper signs and a population that slavishly, unquestioningly obeyed the signs. A few days after the first ass detonation, Mr. Placard crept in one afternoon and pasted a new sign on the radioactive door of stall #3:
OUT
OF
ORDER
I’ve rarely witnessed such a powerful message packed into three little words; I may have wept. This took balls, if you ask me: I wouldn’t have touched anything near that stall for anything in the known universe. I didn’t even like the idea of breathing that funk. So the sight of that flimsy, delicate piece of paper with the hopeful call for civilized discourse (behind the safety of anonymous notes) moved me. Both these men were uncompromising heroes, in their way. The campaign escalated immediately. The next time I found myself in the bathroom, the Out of Order sign had been ripped off the stall door and tossed to the floor, and the stall door thrown open so that the Beta Males of the floor could see the power of IBS, and cower before it. I cowered all right. I cowered to think this motherfucker might be touching the same things I did in the building, that he might be standing next to me in the elevator one day, that he might be someone I’d someday shake hands with.
For a few weeks, the debates continued: A new sign, a new ass detonation. I came to admire IBS for his physical prowess in the ass detonation department, even as I wondered what in the fucking world was wrong with him. I mean, to continuously generate that sort of ammunition, you have to have one hell of a bad diet, or one hell of a physical condition. Mr. Placard, on the other hand, was clearly one of those frightening men who spend their lives complaining about their neighbors and co-workers, and finally kill all of them in an orgy of justice. I imagined he’d adorn each of his victims with a crisp Post-It note, listing the crimes he’d just avenged. This was a battle for the ages, and whoever won, I was sure, deserved the awesome power invested in the King of the Third Floor Bathroom.
It ended as you might expect: IBS, with his awesome physical abilities, was victorious. I knew that Mr. Placard had conceded when IBS invaded and conquered stall #2 in addition to stall #3 without suffering any signage at all. IBS was obviously free to do as he wished in the bathroom. I was apparently not invited to the coronation ceremony. And thank goodness.
This is politics in its purest form, if you think about it: One man believes the restroom should be a sort of Thunderdome, a land without rules, where men are free to behave in any way they wish. Another believes otherwise: That even restrooms should be governed by the Rule of Polite Society, with said rules enforced via the written word. The rest of us, the citizens, are ostensibly involved in the process of voting—we could speak up at any time, if we wished, join in the desecration of stalls or put up our own notes in support of one side or another—but in reality we’re just underfoot, just like voters in this country. We exist merely as an audience, really. The shit-flinging begins, and after a brief struggle one policy is adopted—if that ain’t government on a micro-scale, I don’t know what is. Of course some might say that my stunted comprehension of the world around me is one good reason why I am not in politics. I’d say I’m not in politics because I’m too smart to waste my time. Time rubs everything blank in the end, mi amigos.
As for IBS, there haven’t been any ass detonations recently, and I wonder if he’s finally died of some sort of internal rot.
Ask Jeff Anything 7-26-11
More than a year after I started doing these ridiculous videos, the questions keep coming in. Because the public wants to know. They want to know what kind of Scotch I drink (expensive if you’re buying), what I think about character development (deprecated), and … pants (definitely deprecated):
We now return you to our regularly scheduled complaining and lazy attempts at wit.
Friday Is Guitar Day
Yea, verily, despite the growing disinterest all over the world WRT my epic song writing skilz, here are, once again, some songs I made. Me, a guitar or two, and some software. I’m living in the future!
Herewith:
Song393
Song395
Song400
Song401
Song404
Song407
Song408
Song409
The usual disclaimer: 1. I admit these are not great music; 2. I claim copyright anyway, so there; 3. No, I cannot do anything about the general quality of the mix, as I am incompetent.
A Morality Car Wash: A Trip to Las Vegas
from Volume 13, Issue 3, of The Inner Swine, September 2007
Here is an actual conversation:
DUCHESS: For my birthday, I’d like to travel somewhere for a little vacation.
ME: <incoherent weeping>
DUCHESS: Man up, weepy boy—we’re going.
This happens more than would be tolerable in my life if not for liquor’s sweet, forgetful embrace, and it never gets easier. My wife likes to travel, and I do not. This means we travel on a regular basis. Now, if you were to ask The Duchess if we traveled a lot, she’d laugh sarcastically and possibly harm you in some minor physical way. If you ask me, we travel far too much. Objectively, I find myself on an airplane about twice a year, heading somewhere I do not want to go (which is everywhere, because travel sucks). One of these trips is usually the annual pilgrimage to Texas to visit with my wife’s family, which is non-negotiable, and the other is generally a brief vacation-type trip that The Duchess plans for us. I always greet the news with weeping, and she always sedates me before dragging me to the airport because of my childish behavior when a trip is in the offing.
I know my wife is physically stronger than me, you see, so I have learned to resort to childish tantrums in order to try and hold down the number of loathsome planes I have to get on in a year. I’ll never avoid traveling altogether, I know, but The Duchess is like a river breaking through a dam. If you don’t do something, you’re going to get washed away. At least if you plug up some holes and make a go of it you can reduce your damage.
So, when she announced that she had a bizarre desire to go to Las Vegas, I sighed wearily, did my weeping, and then resigned myself to the trip. We had enough frequent flyer miles or something to fly first-class for free, and The Duchess tried to sweeten my reaction to the trip by reminding me, constantly, that you get to drink cocktails for free in first class.
Someday we will examine the fact that everyone in my life tries to make me do stuff by offering me free booze, but let’s not go there yet.