Chapter 1: a brief history of the Stillwater family
They got born; they begat; they mainly died of national or natural causes. Told you it was going to be brief, didn’t I?
Chapter 2: the birth of James Stillwater
I was born in the flat part of the country, where it’s cold and windy in the winter, hot and muggy and mosquito-infested in the summer, and a good many folks to this very day leave their back doors unlocked when they go out for an evening walk, and stop by the Kentucky Fried Pigeon stand for a little snack on the way home, too, sometimes. If it’s real hot out, they might even take the long way home and stop off at the root beer stand, although the price of a brown cow has gone up quite a little bit in recent years.
Chapter 3: the early education of James Stillwater
I don’t mean to tell you my intellectual development was a trifle lopsided, but ever since my third grade teacher broke me of the habit of counting on my fingers, (broken bones heal pretty quickly at that age, you know,) I haven’t actually been all that good at math. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve sorely regretted not having mastered the intricacies of trigonometry, I’d have enough to buy a third of a stick of chewing gum. Fairly realistically speaking, not too many people hand out nickels for things like that.
Just in case you’re curious, the reason I haven’t carried on the Stillwater family tradition of begetting children isn’t that I’m not bright enough to figure out how, nor even that I’ve never troubled myself to find Ms. Right, but just that every time Ms. Right and I arrive at the point in Our Relationship at which ordinary folks start Sharing Dreams, Making Plans, and arguing about whose brother gets to be the best man, I break into a cold sweat. My teeth chatter. My fingers and toes turn numb. My back goes out with no warning. I’ve even been known to go to bed and pull my special best blankey all the way over my head and cry myself to sleep. What if the offspring needed help with long division story problems? You’d think those would have gone the way of mastodons, slide rules, and good manners by now!
Chapter 4: measles, mumps, chicken pox, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, mumps again, et cetera
If it’s Monday morning and you’ve got the adding and subtracting test of the century coming up as soon as the little hand is on nine and the big hand is on upside-down nine, all you’ve got to do is tell your mother you’re sick. No, of course she’s not going to believe you, but so what? The minute she turns her back, you just quick pull the thermometer out of your mouth and hold the business end against the nearest light bulb for about four seconds. You don’t want to hold it there too long, you understand, because nobody’s going to believe you could run a fever of 188 °, and the last thing you want to do is go to school to face the adding and subtracting test of the century with your back side blistered.
Chapter 5: abducted by space aliens!
I was abducted by space aliens at an early age. I was digging a hole in the back yard at the time. All at once, these guys showed up in a flying saucer and abducted me. They looked more or less like ordinary folks. In fact, their space ship looked kind of like Grandpa Butternut’s trusty old blue Nash, except cleaner and not quite so rusty, and it didn’t smell like cigars inside, either. The space aliens themselves wore overalls and plaid flannel shirts, and most of them stood around jingling the change in their pockets. “Hot out t’day, ungh?” their leader greeted me. He was a fat guy without too much hair on his head, and he looked as if he might have been related to the assistant manager at the hardware store downtown who always followed me around for no good reason when I needed to borrow some tools for a couple hours to make my bike go faster. I said, “well, warm enough, I guess, but it’s the darn’ humidity more’n the heat that wears you down.” How was I supposed to know that was the top secret code phrase? It turned out later they were actually visiting the planet Earth to pick up a compatriot who’d left their home planet 121 years earlier and had radioed back he was done gathering vital information about the planet Earth, which they’d been thinking about colonizing.
Anyhow, to make a long story short, they took me to Xyxox, their planet in their own solar system, where I stayed for a few years. As soon as they figured out I wasn’t quite exactly who they figured I was—which may be the story of my life in half a sentence—they turned me over to their government interrogators, who wanted to know all about Earth and Earthlings. How was a kid that age supposed to know much of anything that would prove useful to space aliens? They figured I was holding out on them. I got busy and recited most of the alphabet again, and counted all the way up to 8, and so forth—but nope, none of that did the trick. They were the meanest and cruelest space aliens I ever met.
They made me play with new toys, and wouldn’t let me put them away or pick up after myself, and made me choose more and more and more new toys from the Sears catalogue to replace the ones that broke. Whenever I got totally out of control, they settled me down in a nice warm lap and read stories to me, and generally made my young life miserable.
Finally, in utter desperation, I told them a few more things, such as the Russians were evil communist people who wanted to drop atom bombs on us regular American people, and the Chinese were evil communist people who wanted to drop atom bombs on us regular American people, and so forth. That type of hard to get secret information made them a little happier, but they still forced me against my will to go to a school where nobody had to play touch football in mud, and my teacher, Miss Kemper, not only loved me back, but took me home lots of afternoons after school and made jam and banana sandwiches for me. Know what the very worst thing was? I couldn’t just draw pictures with a plain old number 2 pencil on regular old boring school notebook paper with lines to mess things up. I had to draw on real drawing paper with the big box of 64 Crayolas. Getting abducted by space aliens was heck, I’ll tell you!
Chapter 6: rescued by Elvis
Anyhow, to make a long story short, Elvis Presley saved my skinny little back side. Oh. Did I forget to mention about the time warp? Yeah. Well. Turns out the whole planet Xyxox is in the future, (light waves or something, I guess,) so when they abducted me, Elvis had already been abducted from Graceland by space aliens from the planet Zlubob, and then captured by the Xyxoxians during the great interplanetary battle that was on late night TV about two months ago. Elvis and I shared an abiding dislike of the space aliens on Xyxox, so minutes before he escaped in a titanium-powered rocket ship, he invited me along. We had quite a few close calls, I’ll tell you.
Anyhow, to make a long story short, Elvis never made it all the way back to our home planet Earth, because we were intercepted by space aliens from Earth. Yes, that’s right. That’s not just your average typo there, friend. It’s the Truth with a capital “T.” What NASA doesn’t want you to know is half the rocket ships they’ve sent up over the years were intercepted by space aliens who’ve been living on the planet Earth for more years than your average dog has fleas. NASA knows pretty much where the main groups of space aliens on Earth hide out, but it doesn’t want the truth to get out and scare the socks off the tax payers, so it’s never done anything about them except classify all the facts it can get its hands on. I could tell you quite a little bit more than I’m actually going to—national security, you know—but I’ll say this much: the space aliens on the planet Earth even have one or two representatives in congress. I’ll let you figure out which ones I’m talking about, okay?
Anyhow, to continue making a long story short, space aliens from right here on planet Earth intercepted the rocket ship Elvis Presley was rescuing me in. They put up a kind of giant invisible trampoline in the sky about two minutes before we were due to land, and we bounced around so much I got confused about all the fine particulars of the attack. About two dozen of them grabbed Elvis and hustled him off to their space ship to turn him back over to the Zlubobians. They let me go, no doubt because I wasn’t big enough to be considered a keeper yet, but they kept poor Elvis.
Chapter 7: a warm welcome home
“Well, I’ll be dipped in 10-W-30 and fried like a catfish!” exclaimed my father when I showed up at the back door after all those years in space alien captivity on the planet Xyxox. “You look kind’a like little lost what’s his name, y’know it, kid?”
I told him I was little lost what’s his name.
“Well, where ya been all this time, kid?”
I tried to tell him I’d been abducted by space aliens and held captive on the planet Xyxox in the future for a few years, but he was more interested in the lawn, which needed mowing, and the garage, which apparently hadn’t had a thorough cleaning since the last time I’d tried and failed to skunk out of that particular Herculean labor, and the paint job on the side yard fence, and...
My mother didn’t believe me. “Sufferin’ sea horses on a stale soda cracker!” she exclaimed, and gave her head a sad shake. “You can’t any more be little lost what’s his name than I can, because we already had the funeral and the tuna noodle casserole wake.” I tried to convince her by telling her all kinds of things nobody outside the family could possibly know, but she still didn’t believe me—or not till I told her I was hungry for a jam and banana sandwich, anyhow. That convinced her—and what’s more, that reminded her: I’d taken off for outer space or wherever without even making my bed, and just to ice the cherry pie, I’d left my dirty socks on the floor under the dining room table, and...
Chapter 8: I wasn’t still an only child
Anyhow, to make a long story short, it turned out I wasn’t still an only child. I had a little sister named “Esplanadia” and a little brother named “Athelstane.” Esplanadia reminded me of a cute little fuzzy brown puppy dog, except she was generally quieter, although she did seem to have to scratch a lot. Athelstane was another story. Any time you left him alone longer than about a minute and a half, he’d start barking his fool head off. He mainly just wanted to be petted, usually, or fed or exercised—except if you tied a left over piece of clothes line to his collar and took him out for a walk anywhere, he’d chew on the rope and jump up and claw your legs and try to roll around in dead bird. I liked Esplanadia a lot more than Athelstane, frankly, especially after she finally got over drinking out of the toilet.
I know all that probably sounds like I’m stretching things a little around the edges, but every word of it’s True with a capital “T.” Here comes the incredible part I’m sure you just plain won’t believe. Esplanadia grew up to be a rocket scientist, and now works for NASA. She lives in Texas these days, and goes to all the big rodeos.
No matter how hard I tried to encourage Athelstane to scamper out and chase cars on the highway, he never actually quite got run over, and grew up to be a city planner. He still lives in the flat part of the country, where it’s cold and windy in the winter, hot and muggy and mosquito-infested in the summer, et cetera. You probably wouldn’t recognize him these days, since he mainly walks around on his hind legs, and doesn’t go into his barking fits too often unless he’s been over-exercising his elbow down at the Porcupine lodge. He’s the assistant top guy in charge of synchronizing stop lights so you can drive all the way across town on green lights if you keep your speed just about exactly one mile per hour below the posted limit, which is 25, of course: it says right on the big sign on your way into town: “We Love Our Kids—Drive Careful.”
Chapter 9: James Stillwater’s illustrious high school career
Anyhow, to make a long story short, I had to make a fair number of promises, some of which I kept, and most of which I at least meant to keep while I was making them. I’m sure you don’t want to hear all the fine details about my first used car, my big date with Eloise McNortle, or the scientific experiment I conducted in the former chemistry lab. Actually, now that I “stop and think about it in retrospect at this point in time,” as people used to say in the People’s Republic of California, it wasn’t really all that illustrious a high school career, except for maybe my second date with Eloise McNortle.
Eloise, see, was the twin sister of Rudolph McNortle, except they didn’t look an awful lot alike, he being a big tall strapping fella with about a size 3 brain and lots of sports enthusiasm, and she being just about exactly the opposite. She wasn’t really all that pretty, I wouldn’t say, but she was more than pretty enough for a skinny, pimply, mouthy kid like me, and especially considering neither one of us was exactly a model of popularity in that high school. She wasn’t fat, and she dressed fairly well—and so what if she was taking physics and I wasn’t exactly the star of the whole introduction to science class that I got transferred into after the chemistry lab turned into a construction site? Actually, I had a little bit of what you might call an “ulterior motive,” if you want to be precise about the assorted fine details: I had a hunch if Eloise turned out to be the brainy kind, she could maybe help me out a little bit with some of the worst of the story problems from math.
Oh. You say you don’t remember those, hunh?
Chapter 10: a typical story problem
A farmer decides to take his usual Saturday night bath at 8:15. This was in the flat part of the country, where it’s cold and windy in the winter, hot and muggy and mosquito-infested in the summer, so the story problem doesn’t start out by saying he decides to take his usual Saturday night bath at 8:15 p.m. in the evening, but just plain old-fashioned 8:15. All at once, one of his prize pigs gets sick, and he’s got to run out to the barn and nurse it back to health. Meanwhile, water flows into the farmer’s trusty old claw-footed bath tub at the rate of 23.65 quarts per minute at a temperature of 104.33 ° Fahrenheit. The tub holds 486.22 gallons of water. The stopper leaks at the rate of one cup every 1.31 minutes. Water cools at the rate of .875 ° Celsius every 67.43 seconds at this latitude. So far, so good, right? It’s all starting to come back, isn’t it? I had faith. Okay. Anyhow, here’s the giant killer: what time will the water flooding the farmer’s bath room floor reach exactly 68.45 ° Fahrenheit? For bonus points, assume water leaks under the bath room door at the rate of .37 liters every 43.22 seconds, and then figure out how deep the water flooding the farmer’s bath room will be when it reaches exactly 68.45 ° Fahrenheit.
Chapter 11: back to James Stillwater’s hot passionate second date with Eloise McNortle
If I guess I haven’t exactly described Eloise McNortle too specifically, this will tell you more or less everything you need to know about her: she was the kind of girl who could nibble delicately on her pencil for about three seconds, do a little advanced rocket science on a piece of scratch paper for about ten more seconds, and come up with the right answer to a question like that—plus the bonus points, too, of course—and just to add injury to insult and rub salt in the wound, she always sat quietly at her desk for half an hour while all the rest of us poor ordinary dummies moaned and groaned and raced against the clock to finish the test. Eloise McNortle was a no holds barred capital “B” type Brain.
Anyhow, to make a long story short, Eloise McNortle and I went to the public library on our first date. She had one or two scruples about doing other people’s math assignments, but I happened to mention I’d been thinking about maybe asking a girl to the school dance that Friday evening, if I could think of one. Eloise blushed and crossed her eyes and wiggled and hemmed and giggled and hawed and looked this way and that and flushed and squirmed and said she guessed she could give a fellow denizen of Mr. Antler’s first period class—and a pretty good picture drawer, too, actually—a few friendly hints to help him start getting the hang of math. You know what she said next, of course: “It’s easy.”
I’ll gloss over the three weeks it seemed to take for Friday to get there, and then the problem of shaving around the pimple of the century, and then the additional problem of borrowing the family car without quite being old enough to qualify for a driver’s license, and as long as I’m glossing along a mile a minute, I’ll conveniently forget to mention the titles of the songs we danced to, although I’ll admit this much, anyhow: I still hum some of them in the shower. Eloise McNortle’s shoes and mine both ended up with quite a few scuffs. We clutched and swayed and couldn’t think of an awful lot to say all the way through the last dance, and then we cruised across town to the Kentucky Fried Pigeon stand, and then she had to call her mom for a ride home from the police station after a couple big meanies in blue uniforms pulled me over for no good reason.
Chapter 12: James Stillwater’s illustrious colledge career
I don’t mean to tell you I went to a big, impersonal state school in the flat part of the country, where it’s cold and windy in the winter, hot and muggy and mosquito-infested in the summer, but it took me till a week or so before Thanksgiving vacation of my freshman year to find the dormitory laundry room, my remedial math class, and the part of the library where you could sometimes peek through the shelves and see upperclass guys making out with freshman girls who wouldn’t give freshman guys the time of day. After I figured out where the main things were, it didn’t take too long to figure out how to cut classes, find somebody with a few extra joints or a fairly convincing ID that a guy could borrow to buy a bottle of gin, and cook up the admittedly pretty brilliant idea of telling freshman girls I was a senior. By the time I actually got to be a senior, my reputation had preceded me everywhere I went.
Anyhow, to make a long story short, I doubt if I actually learned all that much at colledge, or not all that much that turned out to be useful, anyhow, but along the way, I read a few good books, picked up the occasional semi-useful fact, didn’t get any freshman girls pregnant, and even managed to pick out a career in the proverbial “nick of time” the night before graduation. I didn’t quite get all my incompletes taken care of, you understand, but fairly realistically speaking, was that going to push up the price of ping pong balls in Peru?
My counselor suggested I might want to look into a career as a poser of rhetorical questions. My girl friend thought I should hang around for a year or two—or five or ten—of graduate school so I could explore some more viable alternatives. My best friend’s room mate was going to be an astrophysicist, so he wasn’t much help, but his girl friend said she thought I ought to open a restaurant, since after all, Stillwater’s Ongoing Soup was famous throughout the rooming house. If I hadn’t learned an awful lot else at colledge, I’d at least developed a masterful mastery of the rare art of ignoring good advice. I powered up a joint and put on some tunes and sat down and contemplated My Future for nearly 25 minutes. I decided I’d be a Great Writer. I might have given My Future a little more thought, but I came down with a killer attack of the munchies and had to go out for something salty and crunchy.
Chapter 13: James Stillwater, aspiring great writer
If I do say so myself, I had it pretty well figured out even before I sat down to pound out phrase one of sentence one of page one of chapter one of the Great American Novel: you had to be able to type if you didn’t want to wear out your hand halfway through the first night’s worth of Creative Writing, and being able to hold your liquor probably wouldn’t be too bad an idea. I could spell fairly well. I knew a split infinitive from a split of champagne. I knew you couldn’t get away with paraphrasing Thomas Hardy’s books—not if you wanted your audience to stay awake, anyhow. As far as holding my liquor was concerned... Well, what about Hemingway, hunh? Yeah, and Faulkner, too, right? All those famous guys?
Anyhow, to make a long story short, the Great American Novel was 132 pages long. It was about a sensitive, artistically inclined, somewhat rebellious colledge boy who meets a slightly mentally dented girl, and they fall in love, and so forth. There was a certain amount of sex and violence in it, I guess. It had some pretty good characterization, now that I stop to think about it in retrospect at this late date, although maybe not quite enough symbolism, or theme, or whatever. It’s hard to say, you know?
It might have been hard for the author to say, but it evidently wasn’t all that hard for publishers to say, because they’d already had about a gazillion post cards printed to mail to earnest recent colledge graduates who’d just finished Expressing Themselves in a 132-page way.
Chapter 14: advice to the lovelorn
Fairly realistically speaking, you can’t expect to have all that much fun on a first date after the age of 30 unless you’ve got an ex-spouse to complain about. You can probably still get away with complaining about your job on a first date in the flat part of the country, where it’s cold and windy in the winter, hot and muggy and mosquito-infested in the summer, et cetera, but hey, these are modern times we’ve been having lately, folks, so if you don’t have an ex-spouse, you’re not really on the map, socially speaking.
Wait a minute. You say you don’t have an ex-spouse? Well, friend, here’s all you need to do:
- Run an ad in the personals column of your friendly local newspaper. It’s okay to lie about yourself a little.
- Go on blind dates with several hundred responsees who’ve lied about themselves more than a little, and in fact, quite a lot. Don’t worry if you get only a few dozen responsees instead of hundreds: it just means you didn’t lie about yourself with requisite élan. Be creative! You don’t want people to think you’re not attractive, do you? If you’ve gone grocery shopping more than twice in the past month, you’re entitled to say you love traveling, and if the unemployment office didn’t reject your appeal, you’re a professional. “Desperate” is an unimaginative way of saying “I love spending quiet, romantic quality time by the fireplace,” and hey, so what if it’s a $49.95 VCR instead of an old-fashioned forest-wasting ecologically unsound fireplace? Has your mother been bugging you about grandchildren all this time, or calling you every Sunday evening to brag and boast about her election to high office in the local sky diving club? You don’t want to let Mom down, do you?
- Go on a second blind date with the one responsee out of all those hundreds who lied about herself or himself only a very little, and doesn’t really look all that bad—especially if you get about half-blind.
- Get married.
- Surprise your new spouse with a few amusing discoveries. Hey, why settle for half-measures? Surprise your new spouse’s whole family and half the neighborhood while you’re at it.
- Stick it out for the sake of the puppy, the credit cards, the car payments, the kids, or the whatever all else you’ve got in common. This is usually good for about three years, four months, three weeks, two days, eleven hours, and thirty-six minutes. After that, you’re going to have to Grow up, Get a Decent Job, Think about Serious Things Once in Awhile, Act Your Age, and generally Make up Your @#$%^&* Mind. You don’t actually have to do any of that, you understand: sooner or later, your spouse will take care of that for you, too.
Now that you’ve got your very own personal ex-spouse to complain about, you can go on first dates with hundreds upon hundreds of fascinating fellow complainers. If you’re a guy, it’s the most fun you’ll ever have while wearing tolerably clean underwear; if you’re a gal, it’s the most fun you’ll ever have while wondering why you wasted a whole lunch hour buying new undergarments.
Chapter 15: jobs, careers, and the dawn of the information age
Anyhow, to make a long story short, I went through about as many jobs as pimples in high school, with the main difference that if you’ve got enough IQ points to power a 25-Watt light bulb, you can generally outgrow pimples, but former employers tend to float around out there in the stratosphere, armed with gazillions of intercontinental ballistic missiles to aim at your prospective new employers.
I ran a library for awhile, but uppermost mismanagement inexplicably didn’t entirely approve of my sitting around reading the books instead of accounting for every penny’s worth of the fines I was supposed to inflict on people for not returning them in a timely manner. I worked in a store selling something or other for awhile. I pounded a typewriter for awhile. I moved to a different part of the flat part of the country—and I’ll just gloss over the meteorological and entomological details this time—and got a job as a prison guard. That was good for about five months’ worth of fathomless depression. I moved to another different part of the flat part of the country, and got a job as a fingerprint expert down at the local sheriff’s department. To my considerable surprise, I turned out to be fairly good at fingerprints, but as in the prison guard line of work, my coworkers weren’t measurably more convivial than the clientele. I pounded another few typewriters awhile longer.
The best thing about the Information Age we’re living now in is that middle mismanagement can’t tell just by listening how hard you’re working. When it got too quiet in your depressing size 3 grey cubicle way back in typewriter days, middle mismanagement could tell you were slacking off on company time, and promptly find something else for you to retype before the end of the day. When it gets real quiet in your depressing size 3 grey cubicle in the Information Age, so what? Middle mismanagement has to walk all the way into your depressing size 3 grey cubicle and squint hard at the screen to see you’re giving the corporate T1 line a little sorely needed exercise instead of slaving away at the whatever it was that was fairly high up on your list of so-called “objectives” for the week.
Chapter 16: meanwhile, in exalted literary circles
I was still pounding away at the Great American Novel—or rather, a whole big sturdy cardboard box full of Great American Novels that kept getting post cards from freshly hired junior assistant editors instead of rave reviews in big city newspapers. I figured the world wasn’t quite ready for the tale of a sensitive young artistic type who meets a gorgeous, eccentric young lady, and they... Then there was the one about the divorce. Then there was the one about the sensitive, still fairly young artistic type who’s squinting at fingerprints down at the local police station on the night shift, and on his way home from work early one frosty morning in the flat part of the country, where it’s cold and windy in the winter, hot and muggy and mosquito-infested in the summer, he meets...
Chapter 17: if all else fails
I owe it all to marketing and advertising, and specifically, I owe it all to Danny D. Diamond, President and CEO of Danny D. Diamond Communications, Your Cutting Edge in Marketing, Advertising, Public Relations, and Print Brokering. I don’t mean to tell you Danny D. Diamond was a trifle dull around the edges, but a.) the poor nitwit hired me, and b.) it took him two and a half years to figure out I was competing with him evenings and week ends.
Anyhow, to make a long story short, marketing and advertising are what you do if you’ve got tastes too refined for welfare and ambition insufficient for actual work. Frankly, I wish somebody had told me about the marketing and advertising line of gainful employment when I was in high school: I could have saved myself the high cost of colledge tuition and over a decade’s worth of pounding typewriters, squinting at fingerprints, forgetting to keep track of overdue book fines, and the rest of that general silliness.
If you can put half a sentence together, you can write advertising copy. If you’re too dull-witted to figure out how to write in sentence fragments, don’t worry: you can still be an account executive and spend the lion’s share of your work day inviting people to lunch, meeting people for lunch, eating lunch, and chatting with important clients over a few drinks after lunch. Well, let’s say you’ve got too much self-respect and intelligence to get your nose quite that brown. Sounds like a major problem, right? Hey, not to worry, friend! I told you this is the Information Age, didn’t I? You didn’t really think it’s got anything to do with actual information, did you? That’s just the name of it, dig?
If all else fails, just buy yourself a computer and cook up some business cards that say “Graphic Designer” in big letters, Helvetica, for example. Now that we’ve got the internet—or I guess I should make that “Internet” with a capital “I,” since it’s a pretty important word—how’s anybody supposed to know the difference?
Chapter 18: after numerous marketing and advertising adventures in the flat part of the country
I don’t mean to brag and boast, you understand—at least, I sincerely hope you understand—but I did fairly well in the marketing and advertising line of gainful employment in the flat part of the country, where it’s cold and windy in the winter, hot and muggy and mosquito-infested in the summer, et cetera. I started out billing myself as “James Stillwater, Marketing & Advertising Duct Tape with Extra Stickum,” only to realize a third of my prospects thought the product’s real name was “duck tape;” another third were convinced it was actually called “90 mile an hour tape,” and the remainder, who probably didn’t need an awful lot of marketing and advertising expertise, anyway, just called it “tractor tape.” I changed my billing to “James Stillwater, Marketing & Advertising Guy,” which most folks still didn’t understand, although it at least didn’t cause too much controversy.
I helped a furniture store sell $5,000 couches through the mail. I wrote memorable advertising copy for a third-generation family-owned enterprise that delivered janitorial supplies all over two and a half counties. I forced myself to keep nodding and smiling instead of vomiting when assistant marketing coordinators revised my meticulously crafted copy to read, “We think that you’ll agree that our new, improved VX-2 Mark III Fractilator Pro was designed with your specific application requirements in mind.” You know those amazing offers to eat in low budget restaurants and enjoy $5 off dinner for two you get with your Visa bill? I not only wrote a gazillion descriptions of beaneries specializing in delicious, reasonably priced home-cooked fare in quaint, comfortable, informal atmospheres, I was promoted to management and assigned the task of encouraging fresh, bright-eyed recent colledge graduates to remember to put little round black dots at the ends of sentence fragments.
Anyhow, to make a long story short, I got hooked on HyperCard, and ended up in Silicon Valley, the People’s Republic of Califrnia. It’s not necessarily where your computer came from, you understand, but the venture capital behind the international conglomerate that made the defective electricity bracket for your old computer that’s taking up valuable closet space is headquartered there. All the frannispans and analog to digital demobulators and interoperable kerning recalculators and semi-extensible gonkulators are manufactured on the far side of the Pacific Ocean, but the raw greed and reserves of corporate unscrupulousness that have made Silicon Valley great are considered national assets: strictly not for export.
Remember that $12,000 program your ex-boss commissioned about a year before your last employer went belly-up? You know: the one that cost $496,548 and had a couple minor bugs that took a little while to chase down?
Yeah, well, I’m the guy who wrote the script the technical support people hid behind when your ex-boss called you at 3:00 in the morning and screamed at you to get ahold of that @#$%^&* software company and figure out how to get the *&^%$#@! database to stop devouring the @#$%^&* data. Pardon me for bragging and boasting, but I’m the guy who authored the soul-soothing statement, “I’ll have to check with our new head of technical specifications on that and call you right back, but don’t worry: I’m sure it won’t take ten minutes.”
Remember that web site you visited yesterday afternoon? Your new boss asked you to find out what the competition’s up to, so you waded through six and a half gigabytes’ worth of press releases padded with semi-literate quotes by important people who’ve actually got about half as much to say as the guy who makes sure the air conditioners are properly maladjusted?
Yeah, well, I’m the guy who spent three and a half weeks perfecting the neon green “Next” and “Back” buttons that turn neon orange when you move your cursor over them, along with the animated GIF at the top of every page that insulted your intelligence and left your hand numb from scrolling downward to get the wretched neon buttons out of your eyesight. Yeah, those buttons. I was reasonably sure you wouldn’t forget them. I was in the æsthetically stimulating size 3 grey cubicle next to the part-time consultant who helped the esteemed webmaster devise a fully automated way to capture your E-mail address when you visited the site and rent it for a tidy sum to the spam king and his merry band of golden opportunists.
Chapter 19: can you trust a man who takes his own advice?
I might as well have spared myself the bother of taking my own Advice to the Lovelorn, for all the good it ever actually did me. In terms of pure numbers, (admittedly not my “strong suit,” to coin a phrase,) I did all right for a long time with personals columns, but a.) an awful lot of responsees outweighed me by 50 and 75 and 100 pounds; b.) an awful lot had three and four ex-spouses to complain about at considerable length, and c.) after a substantial quantity of trial and error, it became apparent that if her children were old enough not to require $100 worth of child care for a Saturday evening’s dinner and movie and dancing and we’ll see, dear, the odds were better than even her pager would go off halfway through the movie, and we’d have to curtail the festivities to bail one of her kids out of the local juvenile detention center and visit another at the pre-adolescent psychiatric facility as long as we were in the neighborhood. That might be some people’s idea of an intellectually stimulating, morally uplifting, and positively fun-filled Saturday evening, but personally, I’d be hard-pressed to choose between all that and watching old Sylvester Stallone videos and enjoying a bag of nutritious microwave popcorn.
“Yeah, well,” you’re probably thinking, “what about networking in these modern times we’ve been having lately?”
When I let programmers and hardware engineers set me up with their spouses’ freshly divorced older sisters, I ended up treating women who outweighed me by 50 and 75 and 100 pounds to expensive meals in fern restaurants. When I let my fellow marketing flakes set me up with their dear old best friends from colledge, I ended up nodding and smiling a lot and trying to keep from falling asleep while hearing out the tale of the hot date with the third ex-husband’s sex change counselor.
“Yeah, well,” you’re probably thinking, “what about these gorgeous young models in the art pages of your web site?”
I’ll admit that’s a promising-looking theory, all right, but a.) the models who’ve seemed romantically inclined toward me have let it be known quickies are available for an extra $250; b.) you’d be surprised how many have to stop and think real hard to remember which way is left, and c.) I don’t mean to tell you I’ve started to commence to begin to get a trifle middle-aged around the edges, but it’s been awhile since the last time I had the time of my life at a beer and ecstasy rave.
Chapter 20: did you think I was just making up that part about space aliens living on the planet Earth?
The company was headquartered in the medium-large fake redwood business complex about half a mile down the street from the famous combination sports bar, fern restaurant, and psychic restitution center in Santa Clara, the People’s Republic of California. The parking lot was full of red Miatas. The receptionist spoke some English, which meant she could say “no” eleven different ways. The vice president in charge of engineering was a failed salesman with a $750 genuine ostrich hide briefcase bulging with Zen football metaphors. The vice president in charge of marketing left the week after I started to found an internet video empire in his garage and begin shopping around for venture capital and an IPO brokerage house with a proven track record. Most of the sales people were in perpetual recuperation from the last off-site, a word that’s currently in training to become a verb.
Every promising Silicon Valley enterprise has a nameless, faceless guy in a size 3 neutral grey cubicle well away from the windows who keeps an eye on the nouns and gerunds and prepositions for press release purposes, as well as concocting graphic elements for the super-duper corporate web site. Anyhow, to make a long story short, the nouns and gerunds and prepositions and animated GIFs and cool fake 3D buttons in Las Vegas colors didn’t get to me, but the space aliens did. I found myself teetering on the brink of subscribing to an on-line IPO newsletter. It seemed to make sense to consider the idea of starting to begin to contemplate the possibility of investing in a $350,000 condominium with 800 square feet, one and a half bed rooms, and a genuine front door. Miatas didn’t start looking good to my eye, but there was something about the Acura NSX... Midway through an early Monday morning staff meeting in June, 2002, I found myself almost starting a statement with the phrase “Bottom line,” and suddenly knew it was time to flee Silicon Valley with my rapidly shredding sanity and return to the United States.
I live in Colorado now. I still address people as “dude” by accident, and it continues to amaze me that nearly everyone speaks English and 10:00 meetings actually start at 10:00, but I’ve bought a lawn mower and plaid flannel shirts and a snow blower, and am looking at SUVs these days. I’m so busy adjusting to plain old-fashioned reality, in fact, I’m going to have to ask you to settle for this abbreviated version of The Genuine Official Bona Fide, Qualified, Certified Autobiography of James Stillwater. Thanks for contemplating.
Chapter 21: if you don’t believe me
Every word of this is true—and if you don’t believe me, just ask my minister, priest, rabbi, social worker, psychiatric social worker, psychologist, sensei, both psychiatrists, masseuse, chiropractor, aromatherapist, neurophysiologist, pharmacist, human resources person, models, ethnomusicologist, licensed public nudity instructor, probation officer, and parole officer.
Copyright © 1998–2007, James Stillwater. All rights reserved. No part of this document, including text and images, may be copied, downloaded, printed, or used in any other manner without prior written permission of James Stillwater.
