Don’t misuse your talents, or God knows in how many lifetimes you’ll be paying for it!

While trying to remember how to use a word processor, after an inadvertent writing hiatus, complicated by technical difficulties, sloth, baseball, and excessive peristaltic activity, I, Gino accidentally wrote the following very short story about people who work and play in the Yacht Club. And it goes like this . . . 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. . . .

Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, there was a moocow coming down along the road. But then it turned into a crone and entered the Yacht Club. The Crone, which has a name, which may or may not be Barbara, sat at the big, empty table by the window and prepared to do what she had done every day for the past three weeks, which was create mayhem to alleviate the terrible boredom afflicting her.

Unfortunately for her, the first person she engaged in stimulating conversation was Hippy. And as she spewed forth her rigmarole-spiel, her rap, calculated to cow any member of the timecard-punching class, and started making queenly demands, she was brought up short by a simple Hippy question. “Who are you?”

Oweee! When you ask nobody who they are it upsets them. It puts them off.

Carving out the unpalatable fat of the conversation (Yes, yes, I realize the fat is your favorite part, and that it adds flavor, but I have a hyperactive gag reflex) it came down to Barbara telling Hippy that “These little people” (gesturing with a dismissive wave of her hand at, not only the staff, but at the bar) had committed this and that outrage against her royal personage. That’s when Hippy said, and I quote, “On behalf of the little people who work here, I must tell you that I don’t want you on the premises.”

And so, of course, she pulled out her big gun and demanded to know who he was. And, well, as we all know, he’s Hippy and he and Michel own the bar! Oops! Undaunted, Barbara proceeded to tell Hippy that she was worth a million dollars, and that she was going to buy the bar and throw everyone out! YIKES!

Luckily, Hippy backed down and told the crone she could do whatever she wanted and that she could abuse the staff to her hearts content on account of her being so wealthy and all. NO!! That’s not what happened at all! She, in fact, got the old heave-ho!

(Somewhere above insert the physical description of Barbara the crone, how she had crazy, wiry gray hair, a wart on her cheek with a single thick black hair, and mention the way her long pointy nose practically touched her long, pointy, warty, hairy chin when she cackled.) Also, mention her all-around-I-eat-children aura. Or just leave it here and claim it’s a new style.

And but so then, so anyway, (as Faylynn would say), Barbara’s name was entered into the Rolodex of Shame, and I guess if you’re reading this, you probably know what the RoS is.

So! Stay tuned for more Yacht Club Drama Stories featuring the REAL NAMES of employees and customers!

COMING SOON! Crazy Mike vs. Dennis the Menace!
And
How The Gamecock Gnome turned a nasty little cat into porcelain!

Also in the days ahead, everyone’s friend (and yours), Mike Griffin will be writing something in his smallest, most satanic handwriting, and then typing it into some sort of device which will ultimately allow you to view it through the miracle of the internet.

Oh my God! Mike Griffin is trying to steal my job! I just realized it! The way he has carefully manipulated me into not writing anything for months and then making me go on vacation to Oregon for 10 DAYS! And then making Frank deploy my airbags so that I couldn’t write for a couple days, and then making me feel like not writing!

Well, I’ll show you! I feel like writing! I feel like writing about everyone’s favorite subject! The sex lives of Yacht Club employees and customers, using their real names, and the way those sex lives relate to my ten biggest gripes about modern physics. As you swallow the load of sordid details that follow, try to read between the lines and see if you notice that, maybe, beneath the unsavory surface, the cold hard facts of modern physics mingle with the steamy, chrysanthemum-scented breath of Yacht Club lovers as they fumble and grope with the elastic nature of reality.

#1) FAYLYNN – Even inside a black hole, neither the density of matter, nor the force of gravity become infinite. (Accept this fact and you are well on your way to solving a big puzzle, which you could do IN BED!!) Fighting and struggling won’t help. Infinity is a man-made concept. It’s dumb, unlike Faylynn, who is very intelligent. Don’t spend your life wallowing in the mud like a dragonfly larvae that didn’t metamorphose! Shed the condom of infinity.

#2) Clay – The theory of General Relativity is inadequate to explain what happened one second before the big bang. If someone asks you, “What happened one second before the big bang?” don’t answer that time didn’t exist before the big bang. That’s just sad and pathetic. Don’t get me wrong; General Relativity is great 99.9999% of the time. I love it. But I also have enough compassion to put an old blind, lame dog down when its time has come.

#3) Danni – If light can be a wave and a particle simultaneously, it means that it is not impossible for something to be two different things at one time. It means I can be a bird and a fish. It means Danni could be a man and a woman. It means the vacuum of space can be warm and cold. If you weren’t an unbelievably close-minded nerd physicist, what would you conclude from this? That’s right! You would conclude that light is in fact not a particle and a wave, but seems to have the properties of both. Then you would man up and admit that quantum mechanics is simply inadequate to explain light, among other things, although, like general relativity (see Faylynn) it is wonderful and useful 99.9999% of the time.

#4) Scottie – You are really not going to like this one . . . Reality depends upon our existence. The “real world” does not exist independently of Scottie’s ability to observe it. If Scottie wasn’t doing it, and nobody else was observing it, reality wouldn’t exist. It is impossible and futile to try and prove otherwise.

#5) Hippy – The coldest, hardest fact of all . . . There isn’t, and can never be a unified theory. “Nature” works in different ways for different things. Just because in theoretical models where you plug in your sideways eight and get nonsensical answers . . . that’s no reason to have a temper tantrum. It’s like God making a rock so heavy that he can’t pick it up. I suspect there is an analogy here somewhere between the long, slow evolution of the human brain and the quick development of the brain of a (human) male adolescent. Maybe even an analogy involving the evolution of the giraffe’s neck. Like when the animals get together at their evolution-discussion groups and talk about their necks and the giraffe says stuff like, “ Ooh! I’ve got such a long one!” and “I can really get high with it!” and “I can eat stuff high”. And then the human (man is an animal) has to be a dick and bide his time and say, “Well, I got a really big brain. After the other creatures think about it for a minute, they begin to murmur. Some of them get the chills; some feel their hair stand on end. This is a truly “Oh shit!” moment as various creatures realize the implications of not having drawn the big brain card for their own species. Humans will be able to invent stuff. And they have those damned opposable thumbs. They’ll be able to invent and build stuff to enable them to fly, to breathe under water, reach things up high, burrow beneath the ground, protect themselves with hard or spiky armor, shoot, stab and squirt their enemies, see things far away, see tiny things close up, make poison and stink bombs, move super fast . . . emulate any other creature’s evolutionary benefits. They had not so much drawn a card as a deck.

Anyway, back to the cold hard fact that the universe can work in different ways for different things (and you thought it was just a theory! Sorry, but my big brain was just doing its thing!)

That the very forces of nature can work differently for the miniscule quantum particles and the colossal galaxy-clusters is just another growing pain for the human brain to assimilate. Nor is it even the first or most distressing. Remember when Copernicus forced us to confront the absolutely inconceivable fact that the sun didn’t revolve around the Earth? For crying out loud, you could walk into your front yard and see the sun revolving around the Earth.

Plugging infinity into equations that already have over a dozen manufactured constants is juvenile and self-serving. Like God and his heavy rock, creating a paradoxical situation that can’t be solved is merely self-defeating and meaningless. Well, we drew the big brain card so congratulations! We can create a Paradoxical Situation that can’t be Solved! But that’s the extent of the accomplishment, or failure, depending on how you look at it, as long as one doesn’t waste an entire, precious, human lifetime trying to solve the P.S.T.C.B.S. That’s probably what happened to poor old God; he’s off somewhere trying to lift the rock he made too heavy to lift and that’s why he’s not on hand any more to cure my ills and solve my problems and be the buddyroo I’d like him to be. Don’t go the way of God and the dinosaurs (I think that would be a cool name for a band, by the way.). Having established that the human brain is capable of creating a Paradoxical Situation that can’t be Solved, it’s time to move on!

JEN – Unification of physics through a single law is an unnecessary goal and a waste of time. It is simply not how the real world out there operates.

Anna – Constants are silly and embarrassing, unless they have some divine DaVinci-codesque meaning, which maybe they do. Maybe those constants are the names of the various gods in their various realms. That would be cool.

Meredith – There is no such thing as dark matter. Sorry! But the existence of dark matter is based on the “observation” that the mass of the gas, stars, planets, dust and various debris in a galaxy doesn’t jibe with Newton’s laws of gravity and motion which are derived by using the speed of a star and the distance between said star and what it is orbiting. Aye yi yi! The only word which comes to mind when considering the claim that calculations about a distant galaxy’s mass have been made using either of these methods accurately is hubris (and I actually would have liked to put hubris in bold face but this stupid double-meaning, reading between the lines “Sex Lives of the Yacht Club Staff” trick using real names disallows it, as Meredith would undoubtedly zoom in on this sentence and think that I was accusing her of hubris, when, in fact, she is possibly the least hubristic person God ever put on this green Earth, and is in fact very humble and self effacing and if anything, lacks the confidence she needs to take over the whole world because she is super organized and thinks ahead, like Michel, as opposed to, say, me.). Fuck it; let’s call it hubris on high to not only claim to have made both of these calculations, but to then posit that the reason they do not agree is that there is invisible matter in the universe, and that, hmm, come to think of it there is even more invisible matter than visible matter! That is . . . wow!

Just for fun, let’s revisit something we all learned in high school, (even though you may not remember, trust me, you learned this.). There are around 100 billion stars in an average galaxy. (You can see already where this is going and the staggering, breath-taking margin of error we are building up to, but let us forge on, like the scientists we aren’t!). We are nowhere near being able to detect planets around any of those stars, but some stars probably have some planets, and planets have a decent amount of mass, so I guess maybe throw in an average of 3 planets per star? (I’m assuming you know that the stars are like the sun but way far away. If you just learned that, I want to give you a hug.) Then you have to know how fast all the stars are moving around the center of their galaxy. Seriously. Oh my God let’s just, for simplicity’s sake, say they are all moving at the same speed. Whew! So then, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada, and the results are in! Oh my gosh! The mass of the galaxy as we observed it doesn’t match the mass of the galaxy as we calculated it using Newton’s laws! That must mean that the galaxy is full of invisible matter! OMG! I don’t like invisible, it sounds like 1950s comics. Let’s call it dark matter. Ooooohhh! Meredith is awesome.

Michel – Oregon is cooler than Georgia. I just mean in a temperature way. However, I think I could get used to gazing off at snow-capped mountains, and the thought of millions of tons of lava being regurgitated from the Earth and falling down on my head as dry, choking dust does not bother me at all. In fact, I find it rather stimulating. Plus, stagnation is abhorrent.

Laura – It doesn’t matter who is elected president of the U.S.A. There is going to be a presidential election next year, and it’s going to be the first one I ever enjoy, because I just read a book that had a ten-page synopsis of every single election since the 18th century, and I learned that the candidates, and their “people” accuse the opposition of the most despicable crimes against humanity that can possibly be fabricated, but it’s funny and doesn’t matter, much like the job. There is no way that any normal, likable human being could endure the rigors of a presidential campaign, which means that whoever is running is a scary sociopath. To get an inkling of what it would be like, consider a mailman. One of those kind that go about on foot, like the Inman Park mailman. And just for the sake of this analogy, say you own a couple little dogs, like a Chihuahua and a Jack Russell terrier. As you’re relaxing at home reading a book in the early afternoon you start to hear dogs barking faintly down the street. Over the next ten minutes the barking gets louder and nearer, until finally your dogs start barking and a useless pile of cable TV circulars falls through the mail slot in your front door. The barking of your beloved pets reaches a crescendo. After a few minutes they quiet down and fainter and fainter barks can be heard until, finally all is quiet and peaceful and you can resume your reading. The ordeal has lasted twenty minutes.

But if you’re the mailman the barking dog is always barking at you. You can hear the dogs ahead on your route, and you can hear the ones you left behind. And they don’t start barking until new dogs have taken up the task. The mailman doesn’t come out of peacefulness to endure your barking dogs for a few minutes, than return to his tranquil, idyllic walk. Much like presidential candidates. A group of people doesn’t appear around them for ten minutes accompanied by dozens of television cameras, microphones, and reporters, then melt away so the candidate can go back to his calm life. Every waking minute of his life for a year those aggravations are constantly around the candidate getting more and more aggressive as November approaches. And then, what is the reward for enduring such a torture? Four more years of the same! Good God! What kind of a sick freak would want that?!

Lionel – We have one year of election coverage to get through, starting in November. And you thought that malls putting up Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving was bad (you are right, by the way.). For a solid year we will be subjected to, what in no way could be considered a serious discussion of how best to resolve the problems the country is facing today. Nor will it be an opportunity for the American people to see what the two candidates stand for, nor how those values will be employed in addressing the serious social, financial and medical issues the United States is grappling with. It would be awesome if someone could just draw a line in time and tell the candidates, “No talking about what your opponent has done or failed to do in the past. Just talk about the country’s problems and how you would solve them.” But that is not going

Susan – Sometimes, when I call someone, the person I am calling (and they usually don’t answer my call, so I find out about this much later) tells me that I was identified as UNKNOWN by their caller ID. It’s inconsistent, and seems to happen more frequently with some people than with others. Usually it’s no big deal, but recently I tried to call my unbelievably awesome automobile technician, Pete (Pete’s import auto, Dekalb Ave) and I got a message saying that the number I had reached was not able to take calls from phones with “blocked numbers”, and that I could hang up, unblock my number and try again.

Who do I get mad at?

It’s like when you are as ignorant about your cell phone as I am and you are right in the middle of composing a time sensitive text and some one calls you with the best of intentions and it totally fucks you up because you are too ignorant to figure out how to deal with an incoming call and maintain the integrity of your text. It is very frustrating and your anger gets misdirected at the people calling (some of) whom are really trying to help you.

Thom Doyle – I’ve decided to model my life on God’s.
God, in his infinite wisdom, has shown us the way. Whatever God’s reasons and rational are for not helping anyone; my reasons are the same. “I’m sorry, but I will not help you, for the same reason that God won’t help you.” If God is sorry I am sorry. If God has nothing to say, nor do I. I am totally modeling my life on, not the teachings, but the practices of God. I don’t see how I can go wrong, unless you have to earn the privilege of acting like God by creating the universe or something. Hopefully not. I’ll reread the bible again and see if I can find where this specific philosophical quandary is addressed.

Which brings me to the fulfillment, last Wednesday, of a quest I didn’t even know I was on! I would say it started years ago when Kim and Mike Bogen turned me on to a book called Lamb by Christopher Moore. It is the gospel according to Jesus’ childhood friend, Biff, and has been suppressed for centuries, by royal councils and Arch Angels, among others. Damn, is that ever a funny book!

Around a month ago, Kim and Mike started calling me, and I made a few half-assed attempts to call them back. This situation was aggravated by the fact that they (like Laura) are not into texting (OMG! My spell-check didn’t recognize texting as a word! It’s like Mike and Kim and Laura!) and I have done a complete about-face on the topic and basically don’t feel I ever need to talk to anyone on the phone ever again, except my mother (Although I feel that her aversion to texting is age-based, although, come to think of it Mike and Kim are older than me and may be on the other side of the Mendoza Line which is an age-determined inability to accept new technology. But that wouldn’t explain Laura. Obviously there is a lot of research that needs to be done in this area.). So, if Mike and Kim’s calls are hint #1, hint #2 comes in the guise of my sudden and shocking realization that I had never read Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. In spite of Ross’ attempts to ruin the book for me, it being one of his favorites, by asking me if I had gotten to this or that part yet when I had not, I finished it and thoroughly enjoyed it. Upon returning to my regular, steady diet of science fiction, I was slapped in the face by hint #3. I was dissatisfied and bored with science fiction. Now came, what I consider more of a puzzle piece than a proper hint. Crazy Mike, when he moved from the Bass Lofts, gave me his entire book collection, most of which were indisputable works of greatness. Among those works were several by Heller. I read Something Happened, which was excellent, but also pretty depressing. A couple years ago I cut depressing music out of my listening diet. I’ve found that as I age I am more and more inclined to bouts of depression myself, and so, taking this as a sort of combination hint/puzzle-piece, I looked to see if I might have something by Heller that was funny. And arrived by this circuitous route at the Holy Grail. Last night I started reading a book by Joseph Heller called God Knows, and I believe it just may be the smartest, funniest book I have ever read. Not only that, but it seems tailored philosophically to my personal desires and needs. It’s like the HBO version of Lamb. Larry David is to Seinfeld what God Knows is to Lamb. Yes, yes, I know everyone hates Curb your Enthusiasm (I’ve never seen it myself) but the analogy is unassailable, so stop assailing it already!

I am about to try something desperate and exciting

I have this other short story in another file about real people at the Yacht Club using their real names, and I’m going to try to cut and paste it below, so if a story of that nature follows, you’ll know it worked, otherwise blame it on . . .

Coya –
And

This is going to be a totally untrue story that I make up, but it’s going to have real people in it, and so it seems like I should get in trouble for writing it. Just to make this totally clear, all of the people in the following story are 100 percent real, but I am making up blatant, bald-faced lies about what happened to them. According to my calculations I should be enjoying tremendous fame from a comfy jail cell by Halloween

Well, it all started when Crazy Mike decided that football was the only true team sport. “In football,” said Crazy Mike, “Eleven people must coordinate their actions to achieve a goal, whereas in other sports, such as baseball, basketball, and hockey, it’s basically just a bunch of individuals doing their own thing.” Needless to say, Frank came flying out of a cabinet, where he had been hiding, trying to get some peace, and tackled Crazy Mike. A melee ensued. Punches flew. Chairs were smashed in two! There was blood and a single gunshot, but just who shot who? At the Yacht Club! Yacht Club McYacht Club! The hottest spot north of the hot tub!

Never the less to say*, as we (my lovely and talented co-worker, Thom Doyle and I) separated the combatants, Barry Manilow, who was in town for a show with Elton John at Phillips Arena, walked into the bar and said in a very rude Garfield New Jersey accent, “Hey, can I get a beer, or do I just piss on the first retarded midget I see?”

OH MY GOD! The PC crowd went nuts! Even members of the PC crowd who were huge Barry Manilow fans! Moleen (Not her real name only because I personally promised her I wouldn’t use her real name) started clawing Barry Manilow’s eyes out and shrieking at the top of her lungs.

So, of course, that’s when Michel showed up with her dog Chaco, because she “had to get out of the house before she went crazy”. (Editor’s note: Never go to the Yacht Club to prevent an onset of insanity. It flat-out doesn’t work. However, once you have accepted and embraced the overwhelming, relentless, insatiable insanity of the universe, come to the Yacht Club every day.) So Michel rushes up to Barry Manilow, peels Moleen off his face and yells, “Oh my God! Chuck Norris! Get the Hell out of Dodge!” And so she takes Barry/Chuck back to the little table by the dartboard and commences a quiet conversation about the intricacies and technological headaches of photographing nematodes on a Shure 57, and then they spoke of the rain.

Meanwhile, back at the motel, Frank is applying a raw goose liver to his eye because he got punched in the lip and although he doesn’t like the taste of raw goose liver, he still thinks it looks pretty cool, which, all things considered, to have a discerning eye of that caliber kind of means you won the fight/argument with Crazy Mike, even though Crazy Mike is still in the bar, as opposed to being in a motel room, and is not nursing any wounds at all. In fact, it’s almost as if the entire altercation took place in Frank’s mind!

Hmm . . . what else might be in Frank’s mind that we can all take a look at. Mm hmm, a lot of fighting, a lot of sex . . . there’s some music floating around, a big pile of money! And Air bags. Lots of air bags. Also, I see a white pick up truck. I am getting a very hostile vibe regarding Frank from this white pick up truck. Frank! My brother! Stay away from white pick up trucks!

And but so then, so anyway, there I was, my legs freshly shaved, short tartan skirt, immaculately clean white socks scrunched down to that precise point between calf and ankle, super cute sparkly silver and pink tennis shoes, and who should walk up, but the ghost of David Foster Wallace. And so he says to me, he says, “ God, I am so ashamed of myself. I wanted to write something like Ulysses, that you could just go pluck off the shelf and play Bible Roulette with and just . . . anything your eyes fell on was totally worth writing down.”

And I said, “Well David, may I call you David?” Because I practically worship him and I think he may have had similar wardrobe issues, so I’m sort of intrigued that he has caught me in this unguarded moment, not that my front door isn’t wide open and any large man couldn’t come in and do something funny to me, like slit my throat and steal my eighty dollars. Funny, ha ha, get it?
“Just open it,” David says wearily. I have Infinite Jest on my desk, but also Ulysses, so I hesitate. I look at his “I just ate lemons,” face and open Ulysses. And it says “Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? Looking at yourself in the mirror.” So I get up from my desk, collect up the three $4 mirrors positioned around my bed, and throw them out the window, where, hopefully they will land in the soft grass and not break so I can go collect them up the next time I have one of these unbearable fits of narcissism. When I turn from the sash David is gone, but it puts me in mind to inspect the merit badges on my girl scout uniform. Everything is satisfactory and ready for Halloween, the only time I . . . say, wait a minute. I’m sure I don’t need to explain to any of my readers that the reason I shave my legs and then spend an hour working Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion into them is because I have a bicycle. Whoa! I’m not gay or anything, but by shaving my legs and dressing in cute little outfits, and then making sure my legs are smooth by applying lotion, I can shave (Haha, pardon the pun!) a good .003 seconds off my 50K ride! God! Will you please get your filthy perverted minds out of the gutter for two seconds!?

The point, obviously, is that God is a crazy, sneaky weirdo, and he made you (and me) with quirks that can push one over the edge. So, make his day and just laugh and indulge yourself and then throw yourself on your face and weep in shame, but remember, it’s all His fault. You are blameless. You are the way God made you. Just don’t hurt anyone else or the game is off. If he made you so that you enjoy hurting other people (and he can be a dick like that) you’re just going to have to put extra effort into finding someone he made that likes to be hurt. Yes, when is life ever fair? And remember, no matter how bad your troubles seem, there is always a fresh batch of exciting new ones lurking in your future, problems that will make your current ones seem like child’s play. Unbelievably, some day you will wish you only had your current problems to deal with, so enjoy them! These are the good ol’ days!

Sigh! Since Tommy has a job now we are unable to get together to get this farce on line. Five year Hiatus blah blah blah.

*This is an exciting new malapropism I am working on, a cross between needless to say, and never the less. -Ed

And then she kissed me, and it annoyed me because she loved me and I couldn’t feel that. So I put on an immaculately clean white blouse, a navy blue skirt, white tights, and red canvas Keds and watched Taxi Driver because it was 911. I am a patriot! Like Doyle, only less weird.

Which brings me to an exciting new important fact. Possibly this piece is called 9-11, which, when I wrote it was supposed to be a little joke because 9-11 was so far in the future, but now it’s really far in the past, but it’s not because of my procrastination . . . it’s because of a breakdown in a system in which I would bring Tommy a flash drive and he would put it on the web site, which worked out great for me because Tommy didn’t have a job, so of course he was wisely hanging out at the Yacht Club, but now he has a job which is totally fucking me up, as far as my publication dates go.

BUT! First he entered the room. Or he would have, had he been able to find the room. But let’s take freedom of the press for a little test drive and see if it means anything to Mel.

I got a nice little letter by snail mail from my dear, dear friends, The Krewe of the Grateful Gluttens (sic) asking me if I would like to be a member of this creative hotbed. Needless to say, of course I would!

But, (Everyone has a big butt, Simone) someone had to text me to get my snail mail address. This, of course, hurt my feelings, as any of my 29 readers would understand, considering that I always state my snail mail address in every column along with various bribes on what my readers could get in return for writing to me.

Well, all seriousness aside, I got chastised for not having an e-mail address! And now there was the insurmountable problem of conveying to me when and where the welcoming party would be!

Well, in the 11th hour I got a petulantly hand-drawn map which accurately directed me to some rednecks bachelor party, where I had a pretty good time until some naked dude started running around. After several calls and texts to . . . people I knew (?) at the party I was invited to I just went home.

Too bad I’m not online, everything would have been fine. Too bad the people in the group who know me couldn’t communicate to me in person. Too bad no one ever read my little Yacht Club column so they could make my day and send me a snail mail. Too bad communicating has come to this.

Too bad for me.

-Gino