Man Shopping

Greetings WYMOP readers!

It's just after the holidays, and everyone's still shopping crazy and burnt out on the mall. Except me. I went to the mall one (1) time during the holidays, and it just happened to be two (2) days after Christmas - the height of Return Season. But I did it right.

I did it like a man.

Here's the story...

~ ~ * * ~ ~

My SanDisc Clip 4G Mp3 player wore out.

Stopped working.

Broke.

I needed a new one.

I didn’t comparison shop. I didn’t spend any time looking at fliers, or calling from store to store, or buying multiple MP3 players at different stores in order to see which one I liked best and then run about returning the ones that didn’t make the cut.

I wanted a SanDisc Clip 4G MP3 player. So this is what I did.

I pulled into the parking lot at my nearest Best Buy. This Best Buy happens to be attached to a mall, and it was only two days after Christmas, so the lot was full of cars —  people returning stuff, in order to buy more stuff. Rather than drive around looking for a spot as close to the building as possible, spending minutes circling in search of an open spot, or slowly tailing someone walking through the parking lot like some pedophile who ‘just wants to make sure the little ones get home from school safely, officer’, I had decided to just drive away from the building in a straight line and take the first open spot I saw, even if it was in the next county.

I got stuck momentarily behind a car that was blocking the aisle, directional flashing away, as they waited for a woman to vacate her spot. The woman, a matron of about one hundred and nine, helped what looked like her mother into the driver’s seat, then stood behind the car to help guide the ancient crone as she backed out of the spot. There was backing and stopping. And backing. And stopping.

I went around.

I found an open parking spot and pulled in, hopped out, and started hot-footing it back across the parking lot. I was in luck: the spot I found was close enough that the mall was still in sight, and I would not have to stop to ask for directions along the way. As I beelined up the aisle I passed the spot that had been so recently vacated by Methuselah's grandmother, and saw the driver of the car I had been stuck behind. I noted in passing that she was a woman of about my age, and was accompanied by a boy in a green shirt. I would have fit into this shirt three times over, probably with room for my son as well, but on this young lad the fabric was stretched so tight he looked a little like some bizarre party balloon.

I did not slow.

I slammed through the entrance like an invading army bashing through a castle gate. The young tough manning the door was alert and aware, the words “Welcome to Best Buy, can I help you find anything?” slapping me in the face just as my lead foot came down on their inner carpet. I flung up a hand, fending him off with a well-placed “No thanks, I got it!” and slipped by the stunned guard. Gazing upward, I took in the department signs suspended from the ceiling.

TV and Home Theater... Computers and Laptops... iPod and MP3 players.

MP3 Players. I took that as a clue. I headed that way.

Juking left and right like some Top Gun extra (kids, ask your parents or look it up) I zipped through the crowd. I was moving with purpose, and though I went around people larger than me, anyone smaller got the hell out of my way. I shouted an apology over my shoulder to the old woman who didn’t move fast enough.

I’m sure she’ll be fine.

I slipped into the MP3 aisle with a smoothness that would have made Fred Astaire cry (kids, parents!) and stopped in front of a SanDisc Clip 4G. The last one on the rack. I gave myself leave to do a two step happy-dance, then retraced my steps to the front of the store, hurdling the old woman who was still struggling to her feet. I can’t print what she called me, but I can tell you there’s nothing wrong with her lungs.

I’m sure she’ll be fine.

I hit some luck at the registers: that maze they make out of ropes and crowd control stanchions, the one that started at the bank but rapidly spread across our retail society like syphilis blasting its way through 16th century Europe, was, astonishingly, empty. I bee-bopped through the maze at a speed approaching Dark (because no matter how fast Light is, whenever it gets somewhere it finds that Dark is already there and waiting) and appeared at one of the open registers like a stage magician’s trick gone wrong. Old, and bald, and wrong.

“Did you find everything you were looking for?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a Best Buy rewards card?”

“No, and I don’t think I’ll open one tonight, thanks.”

“Okay, sir, if you’d just slide your —”

I was already sliding my debit card through the machine. I keyed in my PIN like a CPA on meth putting a serious beat-down on his adding machine, took the receipt she held out to me, and with a “You have a wonderful New Year too!” I was heading for the door Apollo Ono style —  head low, arm swinging, big strides, and at the head of the pack.

I paused to hold the door for a frazzled-looking woman who entered the store followed by a huge green balloon-shirt with legs. The shirt was bitching about something. The long walk in from the parking lot, I think. I grinned and let the door hit him in the ass as I strode out into the parking lot.

Total time in Best Buy, from sidewalk to sidewalk: less than 120 seconds.

Man Shopping. That’s how it’s done.

Identify.

Seek.

Acquire.

Let the door hit the bitching green shirt in the ass.

I’m going to go listen to my brand-new, fully functional SanDisc Clip 4G MP3 player.

Y’all have a good day.

Talk to you later!

Author’s Note: In the course of writing this post I realized I could not recall the actual term “crowd control stanchions”, so I Googled the phrase “in line at the bank thingie”... and it @#$%ing worked! How @#$%ing cool is Google?

Awesome!

~ ~ * * ~ ~

That's all I have for now. Talk to you later!




Bonus Video:

I just finished reading my first Jack Reacher novel, and I have to say that although in the books he's 6'5" and 250 lbs, little Tom Cruise does a pretty good job depicting the brutality of Reacher's fighting style.

Disclaimer: No testicles were hurt in the making of this film.As far as I know. I think. Maybe.

And so This is Christmas...

It’s Christmas morning.

I got up at 5:00 am. Nothing special about that, it’s my usual time to get up. I dithered around with my tablet a bit, trying to free up some memory, then got dressed and headed down to the Jeep. On my way down, I picked up the bag I left by the door last night containing some last-minute presents for Handsome, and a few of the ingredients I’ll need for the casserole I’ll be making as my contribution to the Christmas spread. It’s only 11 degrees, so I waste no time hustling across the driveway to jump in the driver’s seat, then pause to curse the amount of cold that leather seats seem to store up. Good Lord!

I flew over to The House that Once was Mine, (okay, technically it still is mine, but The House that Once was Mine has a nice ring to it) giggling at the complete lack of traffic I found on the road at 5:45 am on Christmas Day. I made every light, barely having to touch the brake and maintaining about 10 mph over the speed limit for the entire trip. I didn’t even touch the brake when I went speeding past the cop parked by the side of the road, parked there specifically to catch asshats like me who are out there giggling and flaunting the law in the pre-Christmas-dawn.

I did, however spend 30 seconds with both feet hovering in the air, not touching either pedal, as I kept one eye on the parked cop car, the other watching speed bleed off the speedometer all the way down to 5 mph below the posted limit. Brake lights, as any Massachusetts driver knows, are a sign of weakness, and when flashed in front of a police officer on asshat patrol will immediately stimulate a pull-over, the black-and-white zipping out onto the road behind you like a shark zeroing in on any boat containing Roy Scheider. As long as there were no brake lights involved, one can always try the wide-eyed “Oh, really, Officer? I had no idea!” defense. Flash those brake lights: Guilty.

This morning, though, I cruise past the cop car. Must have been the way I was projecting my thoughts just as hard as I could, like some Postal Jedi running the mind-trick:

...no asshats here… no need to interrupt your doughnut...no asshats here…

I pulled into the driveway over at Handsome’s house in record time. I’m looking forward to sneaking into the house trying not to wake everyone in the house up, while all three dogs go ballistic, trying to wake everyone in the neighborhood up. I’ll pick up the required pile of poo in the kitchen, then give the hairy eyeball to all three dogs, trying to figure out whodunnit. All three dogs will look guilty; they always do. I will ponder the possibility of all three dogs contributing, either one at a time or all at once, to the night-deposit on the linoleum, before shaking my head, rejecting the logistics of the thing.

I’m looking forward, too, to turning on the Christmas lights, both outside and in, and enjoying them by myself for a time while the household sleeps. I’ll turn up the heat a touch, get the living room all cozy-warm, and admire the heap-O-presents under the tree, knowing they are all for Handsome. I’m looking forward to watching him tear into them since, eleven and outgrowing me or not, making him smile is still a big deal for me.

I’ll set up my ChromeBook at the dining room table and maybe write a blog post about all this as I wait for everyone to wake up on their own. I haven’t written a post in a while. I’ve just been all kinds of busy with a writing project, and the month of December has every postal worker in the country running about all day like their asses are on fire. Luckily our bosses are right there with buckets of kerosene to throw on the blaze. Sometimes I think they think they’re helping…

But for now, though, I’ll sit here in the driveway. I did make it over here in record time, and that may have worked against me. The whole while I was making lights and giggling, lifting my feet and avoiding the tell-tale flash of brake lights, I’d failed to notice one very important thing: my fat ass was flash-frozen to that 11 degree seat just as sure as that doofus’ tongue stuck to the pole in A Christmas Story. I got here so fast the heat’s just starting to come on, and now I have to sit here until some warmth penetrates the leather.

Damn.

Merry Christmas!

And just for the heck of it, my current favorite commercials, starring none other than Christopher Walken... because he's made from Cool.

Hi There -- Remember Me?

Greetings WYMOP readers!

I look at the date on the last post and I feel extremely guilty. It's been nearly a month since the last time I shot all of you a 'Hi', and I've left not a word of explanation. 

I'm sorry.

I actually had a post almost ready to send out when the used food hit the rotating blade over here in WYMOP-ville. I'm going to include it below, but first I have to explain myself, if I can:

For those of you who don't know, I'm a writer. I generally (at the moment, anyway) write horror stories, but this blog is my place to write stuff that's not horror, just based on my day-to-day life. For a while there, though, writing took over. Everything was cruising along quite well for a moment. I mainly write short stories, though that will be changing soon, and I had a few anthologies featuring my work come out all at the same time.

1. The Bloody Book of Halloween, featuring my story "And She Watches".
2. Dark in the Limelight had my tale "Let Them Eat Cake".
3. Dark Bits used "The Visit".
4. Demonic Visions is where you can find "The Tank".
5. Death by Drive-In published my story "The Colossal Monster"
   and
6. if you want to be frightened, Wicked Seasons is available from Amazon and contains "A Night at the Show", from yours truly.
   

All these came out within the same six weeks or so. Mixed in with all that was two different conventions I attended, Rock and Shock and Anthocon. Plus the Coffin Hop during the week of Halloween. Plus an appearance on Sci-Fi Saturday Night, an internet radio show/podcast (and if you click on that link you'll go right to my show, to listen to me say 'um' and 'ah' and all sorts of other brilliant things!).

Sound busy? Wait: There's more!

While all this was going on I found out there was a slight editing difficulty with a little something called Dead of Winter - the first book comprised entirely of my own work.

My own first book. Difficulty. Ack.

So I dropped everything I was doing and I started editing.

Most writers will tell you (and every editor, too) that editing your own work is a mistake. You're too comfortable with the writing, with what it's supposed to say rather than what it really says, and you'll miss things. Those writers (and editors, too) would be correct. I, however, had a secret: I would edit it backward, paragraph by paragraph, rather than looking at the whole story. 

It worked: I found countless things to correct or change. It was, however, extremely, exhaustively, mind-numbingly slow.

It took me two weeks of sleeping just 2-3 hours a night rather than my usual 3-4, but I got it done. It is, at the time of this writing, back with the publisher being gone over a final time before (hopefully) going to print sometime late this month... or maybe early next month? We'll see.

This is, however, the first book in a series of four. There are three more to come. That means there is a massive amount of editing still to be done, as well as some of the actual writing for book four. I went right into that, trying to head off any future editing emergencies, and am currently using the push of NaNoWriMo (that's National Novel Writing Month) as a springboard to help me get all of the writing for the project done so I can just edit myself into oblivion.

This means, though, that WYMOP is on a sort of hold. Not gone. Not by a long shot -- I have too much fun doing it to just up and quit like that. But this little Seasons of the Dead project is kind of important to me, and I'm trying very hard not to let it suck too much. 

So for now I'll be devoting quite a bit of time to just getting that done. I'll still be posting occasional blogs, just as I'll be putting up occasional Friday Frights. Just not every week. If you want to keep track of what I'm doing writer-wise (and I'd love it if you did) then your best bet would be to 'like' my Writer Page on FaceBook. That'll keep you pretty much in the loop. As much as anything can.

For now, though, I'd like to post to you the little bit I'd worked up to share with you before everything here went kablooey. To that end, I give you:

~ ~ * * ~ ~

Words are Weapons

The alarm went off on my phone.

I have several of these set, for various things, to go off at different times during the day and week. This one I knew right off the bat, however: my 9:30 pm alarm that basically means Dude! Get off your ass and put Handsome to bed!

But Jeremy Wade had just gotten his first bite of the show on River Monsters, and I didn’t want to get up. I was watching it on Netflix, so I could have easily paused it, but I didn’t. I was watching it on the 11” screen of my oh-so-portable Chromebook, so I could have even taken it with me, but I didn’t.

Instead, I hollered.

“Handsome! Nine-thirty!”

I heard an answering sound, inquisitive but muffled. Though I couldn’t make it out I assumed it was his usual response when all mind-sucked into his computer game:

“What, Dad?”

He could have gotten up and come to ask me, but he didn’t. I know I hadn’t gotten up either, but I’m the dad. I don’t have to. Instead, I shouted again, a little louder this time.

“Nine-thirty!”

There was another inquisitive sound. I began to get annoyed.

“Nine-thirty!” I bellowed.

The sound of a chair scraping back. Footsteps making their way across the kitchen. Handsome’s face appearing in the doorway, eyes a little wide, exacerbated by the double raised eyebrows.

“What?”

“Nine-thirty,” I said, loud and clear.

“So?”

I beg your pardon? ran through my head, and I felt my own eyes getting wider. I inhaled to give him a piece of my mind, to run through all the possible consequences to his saying “So?”, none of them good, from his perspective. Instead I said, just as loud as before and just as clear:

“Bed. Time.”

Just to be sure he understood, I added in a clarifying syllable.

“Now.”

“It’s Friday,” he said.

My mind leapt ahead to the alarm that was going to go off at 10:00. There was a connection between that alarm and bed time and Friday, my mind knew there was, but just couldn’t see it. Somewhere in there, though, I realized I had been about to make a complete ass of myself. Now what I needed was a way out. My mouth, realizing my brain had slipped out of gear and was spinning like mad but not getting anywhere, went into “Emergency Stall Mode”.

“It’s Friday”, it said, maintaining that loud and clear tone.

“Yeah,” said a confused-looking Handsome. “It’s the weekend.”

“It is the weekend,” said my mouth.

The part of my mind that was pumping the clutch and yanking the gearshift like a little old lady working the slots on an all-expense-paid trip to Atlantic City, just trying to get some psychic traction, noted the slight change in verbiage and the added emphasis on that one word. It felt a moment of pride in the mouth, realizing it was pushing “Echo Mode” above and beyond and was on the verge of slipping into “Blind Improvisation Mode”.

“My bedtime?” said Handsome, searching my face for some sign I was recognizing any of this information. “It’s ten o’clock?”

“Your bedtime is ten o’clock,” the mouth said, in full declarative voice.

Go, Mouth! Go! my mind said, giving up on the gearshift entirely and opting instead to watch my mouth dig us out of this one all on its own.

Handsome squinted at me, unable to figure out exactly what the hell I was doing. He kept his squint on me as he backed toward the door.

“You’re weird.”

“I am weird!

He was gone, returned to the seat in front of the screen in his room.  I went back to watching Jeremy land a hell of a big fish with a mouth full of sharp, pointed teeth.

The fish had the teeth, I mean. Not Jeremy. Jeremy did have teeth, but not like that fish. It was in the middle of admiring the teeth that my mind slapped into gear and started making connections. The first connection it made was that I had succeeded in not getting up from my seat on the couch.

That was far enough for me. I slipped it back into neutral again.

“Good job, mouth,” I said.

~ ~ * * ~ ~

That's all I have for now. I can't apologize enough for leaving you all hanging, but I hope you'll all be here when I get back to WYMOP full-time again.

Until then, I'll talk to you later!

Just to keep you laughing and thinking, here are a couple of clips from a master of both: 

George Carlin.