Bullshit

SO, this is going to be a post about the dishwasher. Fair warning.

I grew up without a dishwasher. As a kid, washing dishes was one of the chores our parents assigned to my brother and I in exchange for our allowance. It was also one of the chores that they more or less had to re-do after we were finished because we were trash at it. As an adult, Present Day Jeff is disgusted by Past Jeff’s willingness to run a dish under lukewarm water and call it clean. But hey, I was, like, 10 years old.

In college, I was kind of a dick roommate. I was that guy who literally took all the dirty dishes out of the sink and put them in my roommate’s bed, to make a point. Which was not made. I can remember making tiny fists of rage every time one of my roommates took a dish out of the sink, washed it, cooked something, and then put it back in the sink and walked away.

It wasn’t until many years later that I realized I was kind of the dick in that situation, trying to force people to live according to my rules. I now embrace the fact that I am pretty much always the dick in every situation; this attitude has clarified many things for me.

Flash forward to today: I have complex feelings about dirty dishes and dishwashers. They’re triggering.

Is It Weird That We Only Own One Cutting Board?

The Duchess is a firm believer in the power of convenient modern appliances, and she has resolved to never wash a dish by hand, ever. I can respect this, actually, I really can. The problem is that we only have a finite number of dishes, utensils, and cookware pieces. And we’re only two people. When you do the math on that, it means that if you use the one and only example of a certain item — say, a cutting board — on Monday, and then put it in the dishwasher, it sits there until you accumulate enough other dirty dishes¹ to justify running the dishwasher.

Which is madness. I need that cutting board every day.

Maturity — adulthood — is often more or less the humiliation of your younger self. Where once I saw myself as a rebel who refused to do the dishes well in order to spite my parents, now I am a man who does the dishes constantly in an effort to always have a cutting board available. I am, in other words, a small man shaking tiny fists of rage at my own dishes. No wonder I drink so damn much. You would too.

I wind up washing many, many dishes by hand every day in order to ensure I have them when I want them, but I admit this also contributes to the problem: Because I hand-wash so many dishes, the dishwasher never fills up enough to justify running it. Which in turn means I hand-wash more dishes, onward and downward until we’re all pants-shittingly drunk on the kitchen floor, laughing uproariously at our own incredible stupidity and meaninglessness. I mean, a star exploded billions of years ago in order to supply the atoms that I currently use as a flesh shell, and here I am getting pants-shittingly drunk while washing dishes.

Why We Write

This is why I write, I think². In my fiction, I control the universe, and thus even if it never makes it to the page I can rest assured that the people in my fictional universe handle the dishwasher properly, at least according to my weird Universal Weak Theory of Dishwasher Protocol.

The urge to impose your will on the universe shouldn’t be discounted as inspiration; we love to talk about ‘storytelling’ and ‘world-building,’ but sometimes it boils down to a desire to create a sandbox where you can impose what you think is the right way to do things and then use a sequence of thought experiments to see how it might actually play out. At the end, having a marketable manuscript is just a bonus.

I also only have one vintage Playboy shot glass left to me by my father, and that baby gets a lot of use, so it gets hand-washed constantly. Just sayin’.

I’m a writer who’s obsessed with his own statistics as proof of his existence. This dates back to long before I started writing, in fact; I have every book I’ve ever read, for example—every single book—because the sight of all of those physical spines on a bookshelf is evidence that I am here. I have every baseball card I ever bought for the same reason, and also because of the mystical relationship between baseball stats and my own personal existential scorecard. Barry Bonds may have hit 73 home runs in 2001, but I read 37 books that year, and wrote 12 short stories and 2 novels³.

Over drinks recently a fellow writer told me they still print out hardcopy of their work each and every night⁴. Whatever they’d managed to write that day, they printed. They had stacks and stacks of paper everywhere, monuments to their work. I experienced a pang of regret, because my desire for those same kinds of monuments has run straight into my desire to live in the future, because like a lot of people, I’m running a 100% paperless writing career right now⁵.

But I miss the paper.

Stacks and Stacks

I held out for a long time. Until some time in 2005, I wrote all my fiction on a 1950s manual typewriter I stole from my sainted mother. Every story, novel, and failed experiment was tapped out on that old machine, resulting in a new stack of tidy white paper to add to the existing stacks crowding my apartments⁶. Moving house was a logistical nightmare thanks to the books and the manuscripts, and I quickly ran out of friends willing to show up for a slice of pizza and a beer⁷. That was okay, because all that physical paper reminded me that I was there. I had done things. Those ideas and stories weren’t just my imagination, I’d made them real.

It’s different today. Are the new ideas real? I don’t know. I have an obsessive spreadsheet where I keep track of finished works, and the numbers are comforting⁸. But it’s not the same. First of all, unfinished works have their own charms to the writer⁹, and they are invisible to the spreadsheet. And all those ones and zeros—no matter how many clouds you back them up to—exist only because civilization exists, because of the power grid and the technological infrastructure. When the world ends, and it inevitably will, when everything shuts off, in a split second everything I’ve ever created will more or less vanish until some super-evolved species of ant rises up from the radioactive slush and re-invents computer forensics.

In so many ways, the modern writing career is an improvement. Research is a matter of a few clicks. Submissions don’t require a trip to the post office¹⁰. Social media allows me to pretend to be much, much more successful than I actually am. And, yes, I can now move my entire life’s work to a new house by sticking a thumb drive into my pocket as I leave¹¹.

But I miss them, the stacks of paper. Because if the health department isn’t called to my Collyer Brother-like mansion because I have died after being trapped for weeks beneath a collapsed pile of ancient manuscripts, did I even actually exist¹²??

When discussing the craft of writing, you might not think Brad Pitt comes into it all that much. Or, perhaps, you expect Brad Pitt to come into it constantly, to be a part of every conversation. Which: Fair.

I bring up Brad Pitt because I recently saw the film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and thus was exposed to over two hours of Pitt being impossibly cool as the confident, athletic, and possibly homicidal failed stuntman Cliff Booth. This included a gratuitous scene where Cliff climbs onto a roof to fix a fallen television antennae and takes off his shirt to bask in the California sun. I can imagine zero reason for this scene to be in the film except that Quentin Tarantino knew it would please his audience, or possibly because Pitt just takes his shirt off constantly and it was bound to be in the final cut by sheer weight of minutes captured on film.

But! I have not come here to drag Brad Pitt. He’s a fine-looking man, and obviously works hard at being fit and at acting. He’s fun to watch on the screen. That’s actually my point: Brad Pitt works hard at things. Cliff Booth? Not so much.

Effortlessly Cool

While it is true that no one wants their movies to be an hour longer so the director can include many lengthy sequences when their badass characters work out in the gym, train with weapons and in hand-to-hand combat, and drink endless beige smoothies filled with disgusting healthy goop, I wish there was at least a hint at that. Instead, Cliff is pretty typical: He’s never shown exercising, he drinks a fair amount, the one meal he’s shown preparing and eating is mac and cheese from a box, and yet he’s a smooth criminal who nearly defeats Bruce Fucking Lee in a fight. He exhibits badassery at several moments, most notably the bloody, hysterical ending. When he ascends that roof to fix the antennae, he does so in a few parkour-esque bounds. And, of course, he has Brad Pitt’s abs.

If I lived Cliff’s lifestyle, I’d be 300 pounds. Possibly dead. I would not be capable of killing hippies and bounding onto roofs.

Now, full disclosure, I don’t usually detail my characters’ training regimen in my own fiction. Avery Cates never spends a few pages doing crunches while he contemplates his reaction times. But! Avery is a desperate criminal, and he’s usually being pushed from one desperate fight to the next, so I always imagined his lifestyle just generally kept him in decent shape.

But so many stories have Cliff Booths in them: Mere mortal men who are somehow killing machines with perfect abs despite spending most of their time sitting around doing nothing.

A Pet Peeve

It’s a pet peeve, is all. And something to think about when you’re writing your own characters. You don’t need to detail their gym routines, but a little hint that it doesn’t just come natural would be appreciated, and will add to the verisimilitude of the piece. As well as a reduction of stress in our audience.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve been inspired by Cliff Booth to drink six beers and climb onto my roof. If you don’t hear from me in three or four days, assume I’m dead and someone please burn my hard drive.