I’ll go months without really laughing – laughing the way my mother would make me laugh. Out-of-breath laughing. Acid-trip laughing. Sure I giggle, snort, guffaw and yuk my way through the days, but really laughing takes some serious pie. And when I do, my wife always points out how long it’s been.

My mother was funny. Not funny like Mickey Mouse pancakes or knock-knock jokes funny. She was dine-and-dash funny. She was Visine-in-your-coffee funny. She was pull-your-porta-potty-door-open-at-a-music-festival funny. We laughed when cops got involved. We laughed when others were horrified, especially when others were horrified, because that’s just funny. She was funny because she was unpredictable, and original, and extreme.

The downside was that by the time we recognized horror for what it was, it was too late, and immeasurable.

NBC’s sitcom Community is funny. Not just giggle and yuk funny, but Holy Crap funny. Alone, the writing is outrageous. By itself, the acting is fantastic. The directing is superb. And the editing is as good as it gets. But combined, Community is the unexpected production-value blast of genius that causes one to fart laugh. And you know what that is.

So when garden variety funny gets thrown against the wall, it’s disappointing. Whitney. Whitney is so garden variety and banal that it’s embarrassing. It’s predictable. It’s derived. And it’s obvious. NBC went one worse by making the show’s star the poster child in its own effort to get back in the network race after being publicly buggered by both CBS and ABC. This, my friends, is business TV at its worst.

The Office is okay, but it isn’t fresh anymore. 30 Rock is smart, but a juggernaut is just a juggernaut. Parks And Recreation’s Amy Poehler rode Tina Fey’s coat tails into a slot (with a blatant Office rip off), and Amy’s power mate Will Arnett drafted behind her with Up All Night. All those, compared to Community, simply aren’t funny, and the decision making that put and keeps those shows on the air is transparent. It’s regime think. It’s horrible.

Maybe that came out wrong. Office, Rock, Parks and All Night are really really good shows (though Will Arnett still isn’t funny). But they aren’t the unexpected E Ticket ride Community is. They aren’t the incredibly produced talent orgies each and every episode of Community is. And so one can only wonder, why is Community’s future being toyed with while mediocre shows are exalted?

I’d hate to boil it down to simple numbers, but viewership is an obvious player. Community just doesn’t have the fan base, just as Burger King has fewer numbers despite being far superior to McDonalds. But what else?

Esquire landed on my porch with Rihanna on the cover. They’re claiming she’s the sexiest woman alive. Is she? Of course not. She’s not even the cutest girl singing R&B at any given moment. But between agents and editors, a deal is struck and someone pulls Jesus duty. It’s business.

Methinks the producers and agents spearheading Community simply haven’t the clout Whitney does. And in the game of back room butt scratching, Community will lose out, and thus, so shall we.

Conan rings a bell, (to this day I refuse to watch Leno.) I’m wondering, if NBC doesn’t want it, can Community sell to another network? Family Guy rings a bell. FOX didn’t throw it a whole lot of love either, before it was recognized and placed in the annals of history. Five years from now, nobody will even remember Whitney. Maybe even three. It’s possible NBC is already trying to forget the slice of power pie they served to her.

Hi. I’m Anthony, and I’m a Communiholic.

When hit by a writer with your talent, blindsided this time really, sucker punched actually, from behind, I lash out somehow by engaging a low-level jealous behavior. This time I’ve scrapped the letters from my laptop’s keys as they’ve been revealed as traitorously insufficient in my own writing. They shall now live anonymously. For the writing talent of Tom Junod I routinely force my wife’s toothpaste to the bottom of its tube. And for The Whole 9’s own Jim Kalin, I draw lines through the names of people before me on any list. I am especially cruel in the doctor’s office.

I’ve avoided searching out your particular website until today for the same reason I turn my eyes from gay porn: my personal feelings of inadequacy hardly need the added pressure. That being said, I found your website, and was simultaneously thrilled and disappointed to notice your blog silent since the date June 4, 2010.

Upon finding typos in your Slate pieces, I could have taken some delight. However, I realize that could be the fault of any numbskull intern. But your having given up on your blog is simply brosse à cheveux
(that’s French for “your own fault”). I am saddened as I’d hoped to peak into your day-to-day thoughts, yet relieved that your energy has limits after all.

kkkkkkkkkkkkkk . . . Sorry, my k key had some face left.

And thus I’m torn. Either I wish for you to falter further, at which time I may feel better about myself, or I wish for you to blog more, as is my dark true wish after reading your diar’ish experiments in November of 1996, and again in November of 1999, both which are brilliant. Blast!

oooooooooo . . .

It’s not you. It’s me, you understand. I’m hysterical about the endless pool of phrase running out soon, if it hasn’t already, and everything brilliant I read of someone else’s reminds me that the bottom of the barrel grows nearer, like the rocks of a dangerous strait (yeah, that’s one less for you!). It’s all been written, I believe, and it’s a matter of time before we’re simply embroiled in a war for credits.

Oh, of course I feel shame. Deep regrettable shame, dirty and anguished. But it’s short lived as I’m taunted, dddddddddd, and prodded like a caged animal, kkkkkkkkkk. Damn that k.

I’ll keep this short, as I’m known to drone. So, more, please.

There, I’ve said it.

****
*Malcolm Gladwell is the brilliant author of Outliers, Blink, The Tipping Point and countless magazine features seen mostly in The New Yorker. To see him in action, catch this video from TED, where he delivers a stage version of a chapter from his book, What The Dog Saw.

I wasn’t really into the poster for its various subjects. I was hanging whatever I could on the walls: I once covered half a room in Star Wars cards. Hundreds of them. The poster was simply the Cadillac of wall material, and perhaps my earliest marketing-induced hysteria to spend. As time went on I was hanging magazine pages, flags, maps, tee shirts, records, beer boxes, skis, stolen street signs, stray lingerie, and even windsurfing sails from the ceiling. I somehow felt safer with covered walls. There’s also a sense of efficiency having your life easily scanable and accessible, if not quantifiable.

Before leaving LA four years ago, my wife and I had a lot of my photography on our walls. Travel stuff mostly. Not only am I now sick of my own images, we also take our 100 year-old lathe and plaster walls pretty seriously, and driving nails into them must be escrowed with really good reason. In the past three years, I’ve lost the desire to hang anything, and our walls are relatively bare. Beautifully bare.

I’ve noticed over the last year how my subscription to Esquire magazine has changed. The magazine has changed, not the terms of my subscription. For a long time magazines in general have been filled with subscription cards that make thumbing through an issue nearly impossible. At first, though a pain, these cards fell out easily when the magazine was held by the scruff like a cat and shaken toward the floor. Then publishers started fixing them in, requiring an accurate tear to remove. Then the perfume sample peel-and-sniffs migrated their way from the women-targeted fashion rags and into the mens’ magazines. But in the last few months, Esquire has been including multiple-page booklets and advertorial inserts that have turned the magazine, once smooth and classic, into the equivalent of Overstock’s home page. Esquire now feels more like a stack of Valpacs and brochures of various sizes, paper stocks and finishes. It’s a mess. But, I will say, a mess well done.

I picked September up from the floor last week and it was stuffed with junk. It took a few passes tearing out the spam before I found one particular piece, a poster. I opened up the double truck foldout to find four or five ’60s era Playboy Bunnies smiling at me, hawking the upcoming television series, The Playboy Club. I felt a moment of primitive joy as synaptic reflex fired off “Poster! Poster! Poster! Poster!” But that was short lived. Then I was just annoyed, and took offense that anyone would think I would hang this thing on my wall.

I reached for the piece to tear it out at its perforations, and found that it wasn’t perforated. For some reason, Esquire glued this thing into September’s DNA, mid chromosome. Then I was mad. Thinking unclearly, I gave it a good pull, not caring if the poster got damaged during the ectomy. I think in the ATCGs was included instructions to self-destruct if tampered with, as September’s spine exploded right down the middle as I tore the poster out. I threw the poster to the flood and quickly squeezed the pages together hoping the massive wound would close. It did. An hour later I put the thing up over the lights in the master bathroom. It’s still there, and I have no idea what my wife is waiting for.

Why would Esquire do that? Looking at the Mendelsohns, there’s nothing suggesting Esquire’s readership is still in the habit of Scotch-taping booty posters up around the pad. Unless I’m reading the digits incorrectly, nearly half of the subscribing men rake in over 100 pianos a year. If they do hang posters, they’re signed by Frank Zappa, or Obama, or Kubrick, and framed.

Being that it hadn’t been perforated or otherwise designed for removal, maybe it isn’t a poster at all. Then what is it? The paper is of significant weight, which, if it isn’t meant to lie flat on a wall, why waste that much money on it? Does paper weight equate to a boost in product quality perception? Or does it just take that kind of thickness, cut a half-inch short, to insure the infuriating page roulette landing? And if it isn’t a poster and is geared to a more sophisticated audience, then they at least could have made it interesting. As you can see, it was designed to be seen from a distance, with nothing tony about it.

Even with Esquire’s upscale male readership, are men really that interested in what seems like an Oprah-produced after-school special? With all the real ass playing out on cable (catch an episode of Californication and compare notes), methinks not. Looking at the reviews, they run from suspiciously quiet about the show, to more interested about Gloria Steinem’s feelings of regret (former Playboy Bunny), to The Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman writing, “The Playboy Club isn’t likely to work. . .” to even Esquire’s own editorial director Helene F. Rubinstein writing, “Movie actors doing TV (Amber Heard on The Playboy Club. . .) . . . should be a good thing. Not true.” All this is very telling.

(I will also acknowledge that nearly 40% of Esquire subscribers are women. But at this demographic, even they aren’t hanging posters, much less posters of actresses playing exploited women.)

The money spent on this poster and magazine tumor looks like a Hail Mary. Lord knows I’ve produced enough entertainment marketing to have seen massive bucks pissed away on garbage programming, and even B2B stuff for content that never made it to TV, or even DVD. And yes, they usually know early when something won’t have the legs. I think someone’s trying to ride Mad Men’s coat tails with Playboy, and a lot of sycophantic head-nodders bobbled their way through conference calls from the 19th hole in support. Of the two derived shows, I’ll give Pan Am a better chance.

Well, that’s unfair. A lot of good talented people are working hard on this project I’m sure. I’m just bent that my relationship with my favorite magazine was infringed. I didn’t subscribe to Esquire to get gimmicky posters stuffed between Chiarella and Junod and Klosterman. Maybe I’m getting old. I have been reading a lot of The New Yorker recently. I imagine were The New Yorker to add some kind of insert, it would be an eye chart paid for by the AARP. And that I might hang.

Months would pass between Kerry sightings. I got distant glimpses of her life over the years as she grew into less of a gawky teen and more into a magazine cover model where she pretty much leveled off. I had no idea really what she did in her day-to-day life. I only caught the drama highlights and CliffsNotes from my sister. Then one day, thanks to Facebook, I caught sight of a painting she’d done.

The work was rough, but there was something about it that pulled me in, something in the expression, and the colors, and something in the concept that she was trying to convey. I wondered, ‘where the hell did that come from?’ I was floored.

In an October 2008 piece in The New Yorker titled “Late Bloomers,” Malcolm Gladwell wrote on the difference between the explosive genius seen in prodigies, and the slow-growth talent seen in late bloomers. He compared Picasso to Cezanne, the former being the immediate hit at 20, and the latter ripening in his fifties. The story of Cezanne is one of personal anguish that dragged on for years, and for Picasso, well, there’s really no story as he simply exploded from the gate.

So what is it about Kerry? Was she to have put crayon to paper at 12, would there have been a recognizable seed of talent? And, was she to have had an enabler, such as Picasso had his father, would her talent have led to an earlier career in art? Or, is this a story of experiment, where over time and circumstance she developed a sense for these things until something formed that translated to canvass? And if she were to keep painting, where might it go?

In 1995 the writer John Barnes, a new professor at Western, approached me and asked that I take a class he was to teach the next semester. I told him I’d already taken more than my fair share of fiction writing courses, but he said this one would be different, and he’d appreciate having me in the class, as I would set the bar higher. He had me at flattery.

The first day of class found a number of students milling in their seats, looking forward to a semester of colorful self-expression. And this is how I remember his initial pitch to the students:

“If you’re here to express the hurt of your painful childhood, get out. This is a course about writing for the business of writing, about writing when you don’t want to write, perhaps about subjects you don’t necessarily care about, and about being rejected.”

I’m sure Picasso had no shortage of competition. I’m also sure that in this day and age of content and access, his ratio of 1:3 compared to our ratio of 1:1,000,000 is a universe apart. Throw a digital rock into the depths of the Webernet, and listen as it hits any number of extremely talented people on the way down, and each one more talented that the previous.

What John Barnes taught me was that to succeed in today’s world, which is gagging on talent, it’s a matter of how long you can kick your feet and keep your head above water until you get plucked to the dry safety of success.

Recently I introduced Kerry to a client of mine here in Seattle who buys my photography. He saw Kerry’s raw talent as well, and commissioned her to do “something.” She exploded. Color, texture, symbolism, and things I can’t finger. “Goddammit,” I said. I was jealous.

“Keep painting,” I told her. “And keep your work in people’s faces for as long and as hard as you can.”

She’s no Picasso. I’m no Gladwell. But that doesn’t mean the Picassos and the Gladwells always take center stage. Sometimes, in fact often times there is horribly mediocre talent put in the spotlight for whatever reason, while really good stuff collects dust in plain sight. So, the question could be raised, is explosive talent often converted into late-blooming talent for reasons that have nothing to do with talent? Well, Malcolm Gladwell also covered that in his book, Outliers, which takes a close look at access and opportunity.

I don’t know what Kerry’s doing today, as we’ve gone about our separate orbits again. I know I saw in her many of the same frustrations I have about trying. As limited as my appetite is for the game of recognition, I fear hers is even shorter. But I also feel she has more going for her than I, and so I keep rooting, “Paint, Kerry. Paint.”

During purchases my wife is one to watch the register like a hawk, catching mistakes and asking about things that look fishy. When leaving with groceries, or a car, or a home loan, she strolls at a slow pace and studies the receipts and paperwork for errors. Fifty percent of the times she’ll walk back with questions. Half of those times she leaves with coin in her hand, just because she went the extra mile. It’s a carry over from her distrustful days growing up in a communist society.

Overcharging, if it could be quantified, and I think it has been, must be in the tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions. Some of it may be devised, while the majority is probably a combination of laziness and ignorance, on both parties. I am of the former. When a statement comes in the mail, all I see is a mess of numbers, meaningless numbers. Who knows what they’d be getting away with were I to handle the books. But my wife spots the smallest discrepancies, and routinely nails people to the wall over them.

This morning at the medical lab a woman asked for a $45 deposit for blood tests. Lia pulled out her card and asked, “Why?” The receptionist, a kindly Filipino woman somewhere in her late fifties (who ended up being excellent with the needle), thought about it for a moment and said something to the effect, “In case there’s a problem. . . If the insurance. . . For if. . . To cover anything the insurance. . .”

“But the insurance covers one-hundred percent. I checked already,” my wife said as she handed over the card.

I didn’t need to know numbers to know what was going on there. There is a new crook in the system, and it’s going to prey on the lazy and ignorant to the tunes of millions, if not, billions of dollars.

Anyone who’s dealt with his or her healthcare provider regarding coverage and billing knows what a hassle it can be. Companies duck and dodge, pass the buck, and generally wear you down with BS until you simply throw up your hands in frustration, say, “Screw it,” and walk away from what’s rightfully yours. It’s a war of attrition. Even doctors offices have to haggle with insurance companies, and it appears they don’t want to do it anymore, and have devised a way to pass it on. To us.

I’m pretty certain the industry has a definite number, probably data matrixes and profiles and models depicting what percentage of people, what kind of people, and in what industries people are more or less likely to fight for their money, or walk away. They probably have a number that pegs how much that fight costs, or makes, right down to a doctor’s office employee’s time in chasing insurance companies around. And my guess is that there is money to be made all around with a $45 “deposit that wont be charged to your card unless something happens.”

Malcome Gladwell, in the quote leading this blog commented on our nature to bet small for potential gains, but bet bigger in the face of potential losses. Lia had no problem handing over money for what appeared to be an improbable loss. “In case something goes wrong” implies an unlikelihood. But once they have that money, they know that the average person is, let’s say, 84.7% less likely to fight past the 26.8% point required to win in the struggle to get it back, and that even if they did fight, 95% of them would be 100% happy to only get 50% of it back at all. Add that up, and it’s a gang of warm, sweet-smelling, blood-sticky cash.

Undoubtedly this little measure is going to start appearing all over the place as little deposits that aren’t really deposits at all, but tiny slush funds to be fought over at a later date. Stay tuned.

“Eeeeeeeyooooooooow!” he’d shriek. It made me crazy, that and the stupid ferret-like grin he’d get on his face after catcalling 16 year-olds trolling the sidewalks. In all the times he’d done it, I don’t remember a single instance ending with him being rewarded with a pair of legs wrapped around his neck, much less a phone number tucked into his fingers.

Then one day I’d had enough. As he leaned out the window and let loose a spectacularly hairy yell, I slammed on the breaks and pulled the car nearly up onto the sidewalk right in front of the girls he’d just assaulted. I remember that he was wearing his Navy uniform – and not the officer’s garb the smart girls are looking for, but the Popeye pajamas normally associated with deck moppers, though, he was a radioman.

And my car was foul. Imagine a beer-soaked beige ’77 Toyota Celica covered in foot-shaped dents, with it’s headliner hanging down, fan belts squeaking, dashboard cracked and it’s rear window shot out. I had no shame, as I was used to the looks by then. But I wasn’t the one half hanging out a window in Popeye’s best threads sporting that ferret grin, which was quickly melting into a panicked look.

“What are you doing dude?” he turned and barked. “Go!”

I was sure to speak loudly enough for the girls to hear. “Well, throw your thing down man! Show ‘em what you got! Go on Bryan, drop your best line! GET ‘EM!”

He held his hand up to the side of his face, and just smiled the way he always did when I busted him for being, as he used to say, “Gay.” That was the last time he ever yelled out of my car window.

Skip ahead twenty-five years to yesterday, and while returning from an IHOP lunch (yeah I know) with my car full of dudes (to be read as Old Guys), someone spotted a girl crossing the road (to get to the other side I suppose) and said, “Honk!”

Reflexively, I hit the breaks, and started honking. The guy next to me was not expecting that, and his head snapped forward and he froze. Someone in the back seat started giggling, “Oh no he didn’t!”

Oh yes I did. Anyhow, it just brought back memories. And Bryan, you still owe me $20.

He looked at me, took a breath, and explained why he needed me, and how I was, in fact, a producer. He was terse about it. I turned down a much cushier offer, and took the job.

I ended up working for him for close to four years at two different Los Angeles companies on accounts like Disney, Red Bull, FOX and others. It was the birth of a new mindset in creativity and communications, it was exciting, it was crazy. But I always had the feeling he hated me.

We didn’t rub elbows together. Didn’t know the same people outside the office. Toward the end, we grouped together on a ski trip or two, even took up surfing at about the same time. But we worked. Hard. And then it was over.

Skip ahead years later and I’d been told an HR director hadn’t taken a shine to me when I’d been introduced to a particular Seattle company, and that it was really important to fit in with her. I was getting to know one of the company’s owners more personally then professionally, and she kept me alert to openings.

She told me the HR director would be at some small venue concert, and encouraged me to mingle. When I saw the HR director there, she was shit-faced drunk, with mascara streaming down her sweaty face slurring her words and hanging on some guy who seemed embarrassed.

I remember thinking, “Fuck.”

Skip ahead and there’s me sitting in an interview at ZAAZ. I felt something was wrong by the way one of their creative directors lazily poked at my portfolio piece with disinterest from the start. He’d walked in bent about something, and pushed around the papers the way a disgruntled chimpanzee might toy with a cell phone.

What he was doing wearing a Mickey Mouse tee shirt was beyond me. He was years past pulling off Mickey Mouse. Or tee shirts. I’m sure Esquire has a rule about such things.

Rule No. 866: No wearing of Mickey Mouse tee shirts in the office past the age of 35, no matter how creative or eccentric your position.

His cohort was beautiful, bubbly, even jittery with yam can breasts peering over a disco-appropriate top. (I had been feeling pretty edgy in my $100 Lucky Brand shirt my wife picked out for me just for this occasion. The girl dressed as an actual pirate at ZAAZ’s reception desk should have told me something.) She kept asking me about Maui and other places I’d lived. She would have been better suited at a travel agent’s desk planning out her honeymoon than in an interview. She said she was brand new to the company. The other guy just sat there, brooding.

I’d been referred to ZAAZ by people at Wunderman, a sizable agency that has experience with them. “They’re looking for writers,” I was told. “They’re full of kids over there, and could use some experienced people like you.”

I met with a ZAAZ recruiter, spoke for an hour and toured around their offices. A few days later she got back to me, said a creative director there’d seen my work and said I’d be better suited as an associate creative director, and should come in to talk.

So it seemed funny that there in front of me sat a bitter man in some kind of charge, and his bubbly lingerie model hitting me up about Hawaii and other exciting things in my past. But little about work. Of course I was interested in what they saw in me that brought us all to the table. Then interest turned into suspicion.

“I have no idea why I’m here!” Mickey barked when I asked. “I know nothing about you!” He was openly perturbed about something, and I was thinking that with whatever it was that was bothering him, maybe we should reschedule. He looked me up and down, and went on to infer that I was past my prime, not at the top of my game, and wouldn’t fit in to the cool environment that was ZAAZ.

This guy, who easily had a few years on me, got all this from my Lucky Brand shirt.

They left the room, and sent in a mouth-breather kid with meth teeth to interview me. He complained intensely about how he’d been sent to LA on some commercial shoot and how he was pissed because people kept asking him director-type questions. “Not my job!” he repeated. I bet Mickey was proud when he hired this one.

The main HR rep that was supposed to meet with me suddenly had other plans, and I left the place feeling raped. I got the official blow-off email days later.

Jump ahead a couple years or so and I’m back at ZAAZ, attending some panel party about the rise of some trend. I spotted her from across the room, and when she saw me she came bounding up like a deer through briar.

“Hi!” she said excitedly. “How do I know you I recognize you from somewhere did we work together we worked together didn’t we how do I know you?” I told her she and Mickey had interviewed me, and when she recognized me, she buried her nose in her drink and scurried off, disappointed. I guess I looked cool from a distance.

It’s just me. I am the cheese.

And so now I’m wondering how the hell I ended up in media and marketing in the first place. I’ve actually never been very cool or trendy or hip, having only had a Mickey Mouse watch briefly in high school. But still, there’s my name in the credits on some pretty serious projects.

A couple months ago a news story hit the local channels on how Seattle shipyards can’t find qualified workers, and how training programs were available to meet the demand. I noticed how workers in the piece were mostly clean-cut guys around 40. One of them actually said he couldn’t find work after years of agency experience. Maybe he figured it out himself, or maybe Mickey Mouse explained it to him, too.

My wife got pretty upset when I mentioned it might be a good idea. She started talking about wasted talent, and experience and blah blah blah. My first thought was how funny it seemed that her horse in the race, running dead last, had an out to make some money plowing fields, but instead she’s thinking of laying out more stake on 1000 to 1 odds, probably only to shoot the horse on the back stretch, anyway.

Plowing fields ain’t all bad, I suppose.

A couple weeks ago someone pointed me toward a position I’m uniquely qualified for. I applied in person, even chatted with HR. A few days later I’m told they hired someone, and today, there’s a fresh listing for the same position.

I’m a big dude, and should have little problem handling grinders and rivet hammers and what not. Perhaps welding requires the same accuracy as digital design and I’m in. I don’t suspect I’ll be sniffed out for my hip factor by younglings in skinny jeans. And I doubt I’ll be dealing with uptalk. You thIIINK? God I fucking hate uptalk.

In a folder on my computer are over 70 cover letters I’ve sent out.

Of course it’s walking away from a massive investment – years of work gaining ability and knowledge and talent, and thousands of dollars in hardware. Tens, actually. And let’s not forget nearly ten large in student loans. But maybe that’s what it’s all about: Out with the old, and in with the new. If there is a game to be played, and that’s what it seems to be, then perhaps I’m simply not a game player. At least not this one.

I have no problem moving on. I never really have.

I suppose it wouldn’t bother me much were I not to already have everything I could want. But I’m STUFFED with STUFF. My STUFF even has STUFF of its own. And having made informed decisions, I’m pretty happy with my STUFF, and my STUFF is happy with its STUFF.

But when I received an email invite to join Google+ (thanks Kurt), I got nauseous thinking, ‘What’s wrong with my Facebook stuff?’ And then I felt some strange pressure, as if working and living a digital life and being a heavy user of social media somehow obligated me to immediately dive into Google+ and comment on it exhaustively and passionately here on my soapbox regarding how awesome or anti-awesome it is, thus joining the ranks of writers duped into sneezing the word about the product all over their readers so Google doesn’t waste its own snot.

But I can’t bring myself to do it, for it seems a game for STUFFERS far more passionate about STUFFING themselves full of more STUFF than I am. So I’ll simply comment on how irked I am about Google’s move to reinvent the wheel, which in the end I’m sure will still be round, only running over that which its previous driver had missed.

I’m a pretty prolific Facebooker, and being a writer who has no qualms about turning my life inside out for all to see, it’s perfect, and has been for years. I believe at first there was some chortling about Facebook ripping off MySpace (yes, I had a MySpace account), but that was short lived as FB reinvented the square into one that actually rolled. Oh look, it’s a circle.

Facebook became not just a page for me to play with, but a neighborhood in which I live. And like my neighborhood, Facebook took a lot of time, effort, patience and personal investment to build to where I like it. I have good neighbors and bad neighbors; break-ins, births, fall outs and random yet sometimes endearing litter landing on my lawn. And like my neighborhood and my house and all things involved, moving would be a great big deal.

Between my first crib and my home now, I must have moved 50 times. It was fun, and the next greener pasture was always such a draw and easily advertised with promises of better times. Sometimes I settled in, while others I didn’t even bother unpacking. But today I’m more likely to voluntarily catch a dose of that new clap than I am as likely to move, though looking at that, the former is likely to lead to the latter. Maybe that’s a bad example. I’m just sayin.’

One of my clients is an architect and builder. I photograph and market some pretty amazing custom homes, complete with edgy designs and modern goodies that make living so much more enjoyable. And as awed as I am by the workmanship and the design and the miracle of spec building in this economy, I remain unmoved. It’s a house. It’s just a new house. They design and build with passion, I’m sure. But make no mistake; it’s what they do to live.

Be glad that you’re greedy; the national economy would collapse if you weren’t. – Mignon McLaughlin

Enter Google, whose existence has been characterized by many as a clever invasive organism with no boundaries. A parasite. A virus. Google+, then, is a fancy new vine evolved to mimic an existing life form, with bells and whistles, some of which will work while others will not. There will be issues with the roads, address numbers will be hard to see or will be too big, the school will not be kind to your kids, and you will be duped into homeowner’s association issues that weren’t apparent when the faceless and now disappeared Realtor showed you around. You’ll miss your old neighborhood and will try to swing through like you promised, but then you’ll realize that unless you’re a split couple with kids, dual allegiances are just strange.

As much a distraction as Facebook can be, do I even have the time and energy for another of possibly greater size? More important, do I have the need? They’re simple nays. But here’s the kicker: Why – in a time of such great economic and social upheaval – would one of this country’s usurpers of our best and brightest talent and with such endless resources, focus its efforts to dopplegang something as basic as baseball, for no other clear benefit than to feed its own greed, and worse, that which we cannot see clearly?

Maybe I’m making too much of nothing. But like anything new, I shall proceed with caution, and for now, I ain’t moving a thing.

I lay there under my house and the sum of all my life’s little failures came to me in a flash. And not the “life-flashing-before-my-eyes” sort of way where my mother cuddles me in her arms before everything goes dark and I finally sleep without the interruptions, but the “crap-now-I-have-to-tell-my-electrician-that-I’d-just-blasted-a-staple-through-the-30-feet-of-wire-he’d-trusted-me-to-secure-under-my-house,” sort of way.

I saw airplane models smeared in Testors missing little parts like lights and pilots with their tiny plastic faces. I saw leftover bolts from what few engine repairs I’d attempted myself. I saw burnt milk on the bottom of pans. I saw windows that when the sun is just right, still had streaks.

I saw things that would have been different had I just been a bit more patient.

The last time a contractor let me be helpful, all I had to do was dig a drainage hole 12 inches wide by 24 inches deep. Instead I butchered a 4×6 timber with a pick ax at the front most corner of the yard he and his people had just built for us. I couldn’t have selected anything more visible, more delicate, or more perfect to destroy. I can still feel the way the pick swung over my head, came streaking toward the earth and then drove into the soft wood. There was something very 2001 ape-with-a-bone about it. It felt perfect though, I think because I was paying him, and not him paying me. But, you know, still, it was just . . . what was I talking about?

Oh, so, laying there under my house last week, looking up at the wire with the staple through it, I wondered how it is that I can sit at my computer and push pixels or vectors around for hours, even days, and with all the patience in the world, but I can’t take a moment to aim a staple gun, or double check my ax swing angle, or set up a double boiler?

Some art, and I’m sure many of you can attest to this, is as much about having the will to do it as it is having the talent. I understand there are processes to certain art such as painting, or pottery, or gardening that require waiting for things to happen. More recently I’ve been dealing with wood, which I’ve found requires sanding, and staining, and then waiting, more sanding, and more waiting. It’s okay in short bursts, but not for me.

Writing. Writers will tell you it is as much about reading as it is writing. By the time this goes to press I will have reread it over and over, tweaked this word that word words and adjusted that phrase this phrase phrases. I guess it takes patience as well, patience to sit and think and craft the alphabet in ways no one else would and even fewer will actually read. And so what’s so different about writing and designing and digitally adjusting than taking the time to properly aim a staple gun or an ax?

Pushing a mouse around isn’t very difficult I suppose. Am I lazy? I don’t think so, as I’ll swing that ax without much complaint, over and over until there’s nothing left to destroy. I’ve been known to dig holes in the dirt looking for nothing in particular. And dirt’s heavy.

I am getting better. Ten years ago I would have left a staple trail in the floor joists just to feel the kick of the staple gun. Ga-blang! Ga-blang! Ga-blang! Ga-blang! It kicks pretty well, but not nearly as hard as the big nail gun my contractor was using. I asked him if I could fire it and he looked me up and down before saying no, and . . . what was I talking about?

Oh, well, there are painters here on The Whole 9 with art that must have taken weeks, if not months to complete. How do you do it? Or there are artist who do things, or, stuff, that will fail with one wrong step in the process. That, to me, is talent. Nothing I do requires much talent when defined as such.

My wife, now there’s talent. She deals with massive stacks of numbers, huge pools of data that can become unhinged if but a single number is wrong. Ask me what we pay for water each month and I’m suddenly in over my head. Ask her our 24-character account number for some off-the-trail credit card we have and she spits it out like her birth date. Is it just me, or is that creepy? Not that I’m saying she’s creepy, but once she . . . what was I talking about?

Right, digital art and patience. Why am I writing about that?

I gotta go.

There stood an unknown face. He was thin, and seemed young to have already stained the edges of his longish blond mustache nicotine orange. He was younger than me, for sure. His flannel shirt was comfortably worn, Abercrombie I thought. On one wrist he had some braided leather thing, and on the other a Milgauss with the green around the bezel. His shoes had holes that looked as though they’d come preinstalled, and at a premium. Looked like maybe he was in a successful band.

“Jesus,” he said in a way that hid if he were asking or declaring.

His dramatic arrival was admirable. He was mysterious to the point of creepy, yet evoked a type of empathy most salesmen can only dream of. He had kind eyes, and I hoped he was a new neighbor introducing himself.

I opened the door wider to accept a potential few words, maybe a conversation, or to at least avoid offending him by peering out through a cracked door. Even if things got religious – and don’t get me started on religion – he carried himself like he deserved to be heard.

The breeze wafted in through the door. He smelled of chlorine.

“That’s right. He’s supposed to be here today,” I said, and quickly looked left to right to see if Rapture had passed me by. It was my way of establishing myself as a religion skeptic.

He smiled, pointed both of his index fingers to his face in a jazz hands sort of way and said. “Surprise.”

I laughed unexpectedly, and reflexively replied, “Prove it.”

I’ve had conversations about what a person would do if they actually came face to face with a dead relative, a ghost, or an angel. It won’t be like in the movies where people fall into awkward conversations with them like strangers on a buss. I suspected there’ll be screaming, probably some throwing up, panic, running and outright hysterics.

I still had my bong in my hand and had been hiding it behind the door. It started growing hot, so hot that I had to set it down quickly on the floor with a bang.

“Guatemala,” he said. “All high altitude beans picked from between 5700 and 6000 feet.”

I looked at the glass bubbler and saw what was clearly steam rising from it. I bent over slowly, reached out and picked it up by the throat. I looked him in the eye as I brought it up to my nose. Coffee. What had moments before been a slushy mixture of ice and bongy water was now steaming coffee, the best coffee I’d ever had in my life. Godoy’s Coffee.

And that’s what went through my mind first, that I was going to run, screaming, and spill coffee on my wife’s freshly cleaned floors. But I didn’t. Instead, I sipped. He’d turned bong water into coffee. It was Jesus.

“I’m actually just here to ask if I can use your phone,” he said. There was an awkward pause. He slowly put on a smile before saying, “But first you have to invite me in.”

He went on to tell me that in an effort to gain some working capital, the “angel airwaves” had been sold as the new G4 wireless phone network and that they’d lost free access to it themselves – Heaven and it’s people. (G4 was as far into the future of technology as God could foresee in just 7 days, which makes sense considering the Mayan calendar. Heaven had been operating on G4 since the beginning, and had now sold it to the telecom industry). It was just a matter of time before Walken’s “talking monkeys” caught up and “invented” it anyhow, so why not beat them to the punch and walk away with some start up funds. I was reminded of how transparent aluminum had been discovered in Star Trek IV.

“So then today is Rapture?” I asked.

He scoffed a little. “You have any idea of the logistics behind such an event? We can’t even keep our own “phone” system running,” he said, and added sarcastic jazz hands rabbit ears for the quotes around “phone.”

“Not that I’d know anyhow. And even if I did, my money says you people will jump the gun with some premature war.” He looked me up and down. “Not a big Bible reader?”

“What do you mean YOU people?” I asked.

He looked down at my phone in his hands and started dialing.

“Well, you know, Old Scratch hasn’t had a straight job in years. No need with YOU PEOPLE reinventing evil all the time.” He held the phone to his ear, and turned to look out the door. “I mean look at him, canvassing the streets like an ordinary Joe.”

I peered over his shoulder and saw across the street a man who looked not too unlike Jesus take a cell phone from my neighbor. I could hear it ring, and the man answered it.

“There’s a Grocery Outlet down the block,” Jesus said. He looked to me and asked, “About half a mile down MLK, right?”

“Yeah,” I answered while keeping my eyes fixed on the Devil across the street. He recognized my gaze, smiled in a familiar way and waved to me. I knew him from somewhere.

“If you get there before me, grab the last bag of those fig cookie things, would you?”

I saw the man across the street nod his head, and hand the neighbor’s phone back. He said something to her before setting off down the sidewalk with a cheerful gait.

Jesus handed me back my phone, turned, and marched down my front steps. Without stopping, he pointed down at my lawn.

“I like your grass. Keep raking the clippings in like you’re doing. You’ll mow more often, but it’ll be worth it.”

And he was gone.

“Rapture,” and I’m adding my own jazz rabbit ear fingers quotes here, has come and gone, and all I really seem to care about is that my neighbor got to meet Lucifer, and that Jesus likes my lawn.