Well, probably the surprise of the century is that we have a winner already for the 2010 Yacht Club short story contest. As always, the entries were many (even more so than usual) and the judges really had their work cut out for them trying to winnow a winner from the bountiful harvest of excellent entries. Needless to say there were several entries which require an honorable mention, such as the story of the young man who was so addicted to pain pills that he was trying to give away his cat (oddly and coincidentally named Fay Lynn) so he could kill himself without a shred of remorse about the total wreck of a life he was leaving behind, and the story about blah blah bah, which again although excellent and brilliantly realized, didn’t quite meet the standards of tone which, if not as clearly defined under the rules from the Creative Loafing as many would have liked , well, how about some common sense? It is Christmas after all, and so we decided to go with a story, which is not only lyrical and insightful about the ways and workings of the Yacht Club, but also seems pervasive of a whole new era of scientific hope and optimism.

The Swashbuckler’s Tale

The thick smoke, broken glass and stench of stomach fluids from the survivors of the previous engagement distracted the boarding party only slightly as they entered the early A.M. aftermath, dim light faltering as they rolled their way through the debris and various detritus of debauchery. If anything registered, it was amazement at the simultaneous levels of both destruction and revelry which had evidently preceded their arrival. The boarding party came on as a team of seven, strapped into sophisticated, state of the art, motorized wheelchairs, able to open doors, by manipulating prosthetic “limbs” to extract and turn keys, grasp and move small tools, and most importantly, lift lidded Styrofoam cups of rum and coke to their lips.

“We’re in,” Glen said into his headset, as the front door swung shut and locked behind him with a loud “snick”. The seven chairs fanned out around a grouping of graffiti-carved wooden tables, the chairs stacked atop them, making the room a paradise of accessibility. “Let’s get a head count via com link and bring up our maps before I start the countdown.”

“A head count?” Xeno snorted, “We’re all right here, Glen. There’s hardly anywhere in the bar we can’t all see each other.”

“Wrong reality!” Bill said sternly from his chair to Xeno’s right. “This isn’t a bar, it’s a disabled shuttle, and we are here to rescue survivors and secure the loaf.”

“Oops, sorry,” Xeno said, chastised. “Xeno present. Screen up. X marks the spot.” He touched his tongue to the back of his teeth and his wheelchair rotated the opposite of the way he had expected it to, but he continued on through nearly 360 degrees hoping no one would be the wiser and oriented himself until the large red X on his screen was dead ahead of him. He was looking into the darkness of the kitchen.

“Bill present. Screen up. X marks the spot.” He likewise used his tongue implant to touch the hair-fine wire that ran around the inside of his teeth and oriented his chair so that it faced an archway leading into the other half of the restaurant.

“Roy present. My screen’s up. X is marking the. . . .” Before he could finish his sentence, his wheelchair shot forward into the table and the pyramid of chairs atop it crashed down, shattering the 4A.M stillness of the closed restaurant. “Oh, my god, oh my god oh my god!” Roy gasped.

“Get a grip on yourself Gbiv,” Glen snapped. “Anyone hurt, or in need of assistance?”

“Negative,” came six replies, almost simultaneously.

“Rich Present. Uhh, X marks the spot.” He rotated his chair maybe 10 degrees and consulted again his monitor. “This is weird, though. I seem to be right on top of my X.”

“Or maybe right beneath it. Scott present. Pinging . . . homing. Hmmm. That’s interesting, he said, letting his ruined eyes gaze in essentially Rich’s direction. I have to admit I didn’t expect a three dimensional grid. I’m impressed.”

“Man! Me too,” said Xeno, looking at the ceiling above Rich and the floor below.

“Eh hem,” Maria said. “Maria present. X marks the spot.” She used her dental input console slowly and carefully and oriented her chair until it pointed into the dark back corner of the restaurant, where a short hallway led to a set of men’s and women’s single-occupancy restrooms.

“Ross present. Acquiring X on screen.” He sat motionless for a second, then burst out angrily. “ I knew it. I told that idiot that the triple diode relay wasn’t going to work. I have nothing. No maneuverability! It’s exactly what I said. . . .”

“I don’t remember you saying anything like that,” Xeno said.

“Did you initialize your function pad with a triple roof tap?” Maria asked, making a show of opening her mouth and tapping the roof of her mouth three times.

“Of course I did!” Ross said angrily, mimicking her facial contortions, at which point his chair zoomed backwards, until his wheels encountered a strong, sticky rat trap, and he toppled over backwards, his headrest hitting the floor with a scary sounding crack. “I’m OK,” he said. But I may have to break the rules to get upright.”

“You do and you’re out,” Rich sneered.

“Fuck you, Rich,” Ross said, angrily struggling with the complicated safety harness he had helped to design, which held him snugly in his seat. He was in the exact predicament he had fantasized Maria would get herself into.

Filling in for the report of a pistol at the starting line of the hundred-yard dash, Glen yelled, “Go!” and held a stopwatch up with his prosthetic limb. His tongue moved erratically behind his upper teeth until his channel lock hand crushed the timepiece and it’s various components flew out in all directions. “Damn it!” Glen laughed. Since injuring his spine in a diving accident fifteen years ago he hadn’t done much smashing of things, nor did breaking an eight dollar stop watch register on his list of things to get mad about. “Let’s secure the treasure.”

“Maybe we should secure Ross first,” Maria said.

“God, the compassion,” Xeno mocked.

“Actually, he’s in my way.”

“This would be really cool if we could right him,” Bill said, moving to Ross’s headrest and securing it with his pincer arm.

“Quickly,” Ross urged. “Some of my drink is dribbling out through the straw.” Xeno and Maria got a grip on either side of his armrests and on Bill’s count they hoisted him into an upright position. The sadistically adhesive rattrap was still stuck to his back, but otherwise he was fine.

“Parasite unlikely to interfere with mission,” Bill stated, trying not to smile. “Proceed with plan.” Everyone realigned themselves so that that the Xs on their screen were at twelve o’clock. “You know, if nothing else goes right at all, we’ve already proven that this technology is priceless.”

* * * * * * * * *

“I’m telling you it’s true! It’s called The Tongue Drive Study. I already signed up for it. Look it up on your girlfriend if you don’t believe me.”

“I will,” Roy said, pulling his I-phone from its pink satin and angora case. “It’s OK sweetie,” he said, stroking her tenderly with a finger to bring her to life, “I just need you to prove that Xeno’s a liar. You’ll be back safe and comfy in no time.”

“Oh my God, please stop it,” Ross said, looking up and down the empty bar to make sure no one was overhearing this. “What if someone else comes in?”

“It’s one o’clock on a beautiful Friday afternoon,” Xeno said, coming around from behind the bar to peer over Roy’s shoulder. “What kind of horrible losers would come into this dank cave?”

“Hello everybody,” Rich said. “I’m taking over the world and killing all the poor and sick.” He sat at the bar and ordered a cup of water.

“Holy crap, here it is,” Roy said, swapping out one pair of eyeglasses for another. “The Tongue Drive Study. It says it’s a grain-of-rice-sized sensor implanted in the tip of the tongue. Blah blah blah. Used to tap out commands programmed into the teeth. Blah blah blah. Hair-sized strands of super conducting filament placed behind the teeth.” He stroked the screen again with his finger and text whizzed by.

“See?” Xeno smirked at Ross.

“Says it was developed at the nanotech laboratory at Georgia Tech. Medical procedure done at the Emory Medical Center. Holy shit!”

“And I’m signed up for it.”

“Signed up at that piercing place . . . Kolo?”

“Three doors down.”

“And they pay you?”

“Hundred fifty bucks.”

“I’m there,” Ross said, ambling out the door. Roy took a moment to tuck his I-phone into its little sleeping bag and zip it into his jacket pocket.

“What’s new?” Bill asked as he and Maria walked in and sidled up to the bar their usual drinks placed before them.

“Funny you should ask,” Xeno said. “But I just signed up to have a sensor implanted into my tongue so I can tap out commands on the back of my teeth. It’s a beta test for paraplegics to operate wheelchairs and manipulate computers.”

“Bullshit.” Maria said.

“Look it up on your boyfriend,” Xeno said patiently. “It’s called Tongue Drive Study.”

“Don’t think I won’t,” Maria said, extracting her Droid from its black leather sheath. Within a minute she gave Xeno the sheepish
I was wrong look. Within thirty seconds they were out the door and headed down to Kolo piercing shop to sign up, and Xeno was once again alone in the bar, as Rich had disappeared into the bathroom to write his threats of world domination on the wall. Sighing, he poured himself a fair-sized Captain Morgan’s and Coke and waited for Roy and Ross and Rich to return. Their reappearance coincided exactly with a very Yacht Club/Three Stooges moment in which Glen Spitz, Scott Keller and Jim Trabeck all Tried to wedge in the front door at the same time, the fault of such a faux pax being difficult to pin on any one individual as Jim was there first, Scott was blind, and Glenn was in a motorized wheel chair. Xeno decided to assign them all equal blame and served up their usual drinks, a can of Schlitz and a shot of Rumplemintz for Jim, a glass of Yeungling for Scott, and a can of Tecate for Glen.

“Can I also get a pack of smokes there, Xeno?” Scott asked, and they were at his fingertips along with a clean ashtray seconds later.

“Look, before she comes back, there’s this girl I’m totally in love with coming back in any second,” Gino said so don’t embarrass me.”

“Would this be the lovely lady coming in now?” Scott asked, as Ross and Roy returned and rearranged their drinks at the bar to better fit in with the newcomer.

“Yup, that’s her,” Xeno said. “Thanks a million Scott.”

“Xeno was just telling us all about you,” Scott said to Ross, lighting up a Camel light. You must be quite a special young lady to have caught Xeno’s eye.”

“I’m quite sexy,” Ross said in a high pitched falsetto.

“See, I want a smart, funny girlfriend like Maria, with a super-useful skill like cinematography, but one I can slip into a little sleeping bag customized to her personality.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, Xeno,” Maria said, “but I have a boyfriend.”

“But doesn’t the fact that I find you perfect for me eliminate that minor obstacle?”

“You would think it would,” she said, “but, oddly, it doesn’t.”

“Surely, the fact that I blew up my priceless, vintage Kiss dolls so you could videotape it? And don’t forget about our identical tongue implants? I mean, even in a biotechnological sense we’d make a great couple.

“Unfortunately that would make you a viable biotechnological mate with five other dudes, at least one of whom is a dangerous sociopath.”

“Anyway, I like your boyfriend,” Xeno lied. “So the heck with it. There’s probably dozens of girls like you in the known universe.”

“Oh, probably hundreds.”

“So, you’re all signed up for the tongue implant study?” Trabeck asked. Conspiratorial smiles traveled up and down the bar.

“Don’t tell me you have an exciting idea,” Xeno said.

“Huddle up,” Trabeck said. “This is for our ears only.”

“Rich, if you want in,” Xeno said. “You need to skeedaddle down to Kolo and sign up for the beta testing of the Tongue implant.”

“If you think I would have anything implanted into my body by those liberal monkeys from Emory . . ..”

“Thank God,” Ross said. “Because if he’s in, I’m out.”

“I’ll be right back,” Rich said looking Maria up and down, and out the door he limped.

“Xeno, your ability to ruin my life is . . . well, actually my vocabulary escapes me,” Ross said. The withering look from Maria pretty much made Xeno want to go home and put a bullet in his brain, not that he would have needed to travel that far for a means of self-annihilation, working behind a fully stocked bar and all. But finally he had the nerve to glance up at Trabeck’s face, and the grin he saw made him know he had made the right decision.

“Woot! Woot! Woot!” Xeno hooted. Oh ye of little faith and vision!”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Wow! Did everyone actually find a sealed envelope with their name on it?” Glen asked.

The wheelchair-bound scavenger hunters, once again situated loosely in a circle in the middle of the restaurant floor, all nodded their heads solemnly and fidgeted with their personalized clues.

“Well, blow me down and shiver me timbers,” Bill said. “I had serious doubts we’d even make it in the door.”

“Well, I’m not blown away yet,” Rich said. And I won’t be until we complete the mission.”

“Lighten up, Francis,” Ross said, rolling his eyes.

“Should we go ahead and open them?” Maria asked.

“On my command,” Glen said, but before he could utter another word the sound of tearing paper washed out all other sounds in the room.

“There is a bible in this bar isn’t there?” Xeno asked, but he was shouted down by everyone else’s questions and complaints about the contents of their sealed envelopes.

* * * * * * * * * *

“Is it possible I got the wrong one?” Roy asked. “I mean, why would mine say ‘Xeno, if it takes you ten years, please figure this out. Enlist help.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Xeno said, “but that sounds really familiar for some reason.”

“I’m pretty sure mine is for me,” Ross said. “It just says Xn+Yn=Zn when n >2. I mean, I know that’s Fermat’s last theorem and all but. . . . “

“Um, something about that’s making Roy’s clue sound even more familiar,” Xeno said.

“Mine just says MUSIC” Rich said dejectedly.

“Maybe this will cheer you up,” Maria said, then read, “ Never let that pill head Rich forget the date.”

“Our date?” Rich asked, visibly cheering.

“I seriously doubt it.”

“What about you Xeno?” Glen asked. “One of these is going to have to give us a finger hold into something.”

“It’s like trying to start a crossword puzzle,” Maria said.

“Exodus 20:17” Xeno said apologetically.

“That fucking Trabeck,” Bill said, tonguing his teeth to move beyond the circle. “I think we may have had a very unfunny joke played on us.”

“Why?” Xeno and Roy asked simultaneously.

“Actually . . . that was pretty goddamned weird,” Bill said, looking at them slantwise.

“What was?”

“Why?”

“My clue,” Bill said, still looking at them as if they were involved in some conspiracy, “It says, Roy and Xeno at play together.”

“Oh, I knew it,” Rich said angrily, “this is some sort of fruity pervert thing.” But Xeno and Roy were looking at each other with varying levels of realization spreading across their faces.

“That play!” Roy said.

“The Stoppard!”

“There’s a copy of it here! It’s called Arcadia. I brought it back from London for Gino, and Trabeck knows about it!”

“Is that that play about Fermat?” Ross asked. “The one you guys blabbed on and on about ad nauseum?”

“Of course it is!” Xeno gushed. “And if I didn’t think it would give Rich the biggest boner in L5P I’d give you a huge wet kiss on the lips!”

“On the stairs I smoke a cigarette alone!” Rich screamed.

“Jesus fucking Christ! It is The fourth of July isn’t it?” Xeno asked.

“Oh my God, so Trabeck is some sort of genius after all?!” Roy exclaimed through a mouth full of tongue/teeth commands which caused his wheel chair to shoot backwards and become wedged in a small window area alternately called the porthole because there was a small, round ship’s window mounted on the wall behind it and the fish tank because sitting in it was much like being a fish in a bowl watching people walk to and fro.

“Oh my god! I love that song!” Maria said, motoring behind the bar. “Can we listen to it?”

“If it’s on the I-Pod,” Xeno said. “In fact, why haven’t we been cranking tunes this whole time?”

“Fucking brilliant misdirection,” Maria said. “X is queued up and 4th Of July is ready to go.”

“There’s no way that’s a coincidence,” Glen said.

“I don’t understand anything anyone just said,” Bill complained.

“This is where we start the crossword puzzle,” Maria said. “Today is the 4th of July, which is a song by the band X.”

“Which song is coincidentally queued up on the I-pod,” Rich added.

“But I always thought they said ’understands I smoke a cigarette alone’”, Roy said, still trying to maneuver his way back into the cleared area in the center of the bar.

“We’ve had this conversation before,” Ross said.

“And much more importantly, we’ve had this conversation with Trabeck.”

“And what was his opinion?” Rich asked. “Because I always thought it was ‘On the stairs’”

“It totally doesn’t matter,” Xeno said, becoming impatient. “It only matters that he knows we’ll argue about it.”

“I’ll tell you what does matter,” Bill said. “And that’s how the hell are we going to get these chairs up seven stairs, and if we do get them up there, what exactly are we looking for? A pack of cigarettes?”

“Meredith keeps a pack squirreled away up there somewhere,” Xeno said, looking forlornly at the access to the back door fire escape as if it were Mount Everest.

“Roy, if you can get yourself out of the fishbowl, could you look up that Arcadia?” Xeno asked, meticulously using his prosthetic arm to apply fire to a Camel cigarette.

“And how are we supposed to get up these stairs again?” Maria asked.

There was a distinctive golden hue reflecting off the windows of the vintage clothing store across the street as the seven circled their wheel chairs and held forth the scraps of paper they had been figuring on.

“Dawn already,” Glen sighed.

“Here’s the copy of Arcadia,” Roy said, reaching up into the wine rack where there was a small collection of books. “It’s right next to a Gideon’s Bible.”

“You wrote something on the front, inside page.”

“Well I’ll be danged. ‘Gino, if it takes you ten years. . . . “

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Glen said.

“This has something to do with marginalia,” Ross said.

“Grab that Bible down while you’re there,” Xeno said. “Exodus 20:17.”

“It’s the tenth commandment,” Roy said, leaving the bible opened on the bar. “About coveting your neighbor’s ass.”

“Hmm . . . must be further along in the crossword puzzle,” Glen said.

“Let’s just go with what we know so far,” Ross suggested. “We all have solid leads on how to get to our second clues, and the sun is already coming up.”

“We have about three hours before Meredith gets here to start setting up the bar,” Xeno said.

“Look,” Glen interrupted excitedly. “We’ve already used the tongue implants to pull up maps on our I-pads, set right an over-turned wheelchair, and get books down from a high wine rack!” Do any of you really doubt we’ll figure out a way to get up seven stairs and ultimately solve the puzzle . . . find the treasure?” They all stared at him for a few seconds, then as the glow from the rising sun filled the room they gunned their wheel chairs to form a circle around Glen.

“X marks the spot!” they all said together, like a septuplet version of the wonder twins invoking their various powers. “Bring it together!”

The end?

Well, normally the announcement and publishing of the annual short story winner is sufficient copy for a log entry, but again, it’s Christmas, and I know how everyone, myself included, wants more of everything, so this go round you’re getting an exciting, first annual double log entry! Woot! Woot! And since the second half of it will be mostly me blatantly plagiarizing Hippy’s December church newsletter (how’s that for low laities and gentlenuns?) you need not concern yourselves with my health and well being. And since I obviously didn’t write the winning short story either, well, I actually end up doing less work while still producing a two-banger! Efficiency! Excelsior! Son!

So anyway, In Hippy’s church’s newsletter (The Angelus, published by The Church of Our Saviour, 1068 North Highland Avenue) the editor, Oreta Hinamon Taylor, wrote a well-researched and thoroughly footnoted piece on how Christmas came to be celebrated on Dec. 25th.

Of course, I have always considered myself especially erudite because I have known for years that Christmas was a kind of merging with pre-existing pagan holidays such as Saturnalia, you know the winter solstice and all, but it turns out that that thinking is so19th century. Modern religious scholars point to numerous references of early Christians who practically broke their necks to distance themselves from the pagans who themselves were pretty much hell bent on persecuting and killing the Christians. No, it seems like there is much more math involved in the modern theory of how Christmas ended up on December 25th (yay!) and it goes like this, to the best of my calculus-failing understanding. You have to start off with Easter, the day of the resurrection, and the central point to all of Christianity.

In the early days of the church it was believed that Jesus rose from the dead on March 25th. (How they arrived at that date is a whole different set of equations which we will explore in the spring). Now you have to remember that back in those days life was just one interminable nightmare of painful suffering and insanity (no cars, no malls, no internet, no xanax) and so, whenever any kind of festival or celebration rolled around, they would make it last. In the case of Easter, 60 days was not uncommon. So between the protracted celebrating, and some kind of spurious wheeling and dealing between the Western and Eastern Orthodox Catholic churches we ended up with Easter being when it is now, which is what I specifically said we were not going to talk about yet, so suffice it must to say that back in the day Jesus was believed to have risen from the dead on March 25th.

Now, if you go back and read your early Christian philosophers, like Saint Augustine (yawn!), you will find a pervading belief that Jesus died on the same day he was conceived. So you figure, if he rose from the dead on March 25th, he died three days earlier, March 22nd, factor in the Gregorian Calendar constant k, adjust for leap year, allow for the twelve days of Christmas (evidentally the amount of time women spent in labor during those horrible, horrible times), and what you have is Jesus being conceived on March 25th. Now, here’s the easy part. Since all pregnancies lasted exactly nine months, you simply add March 25th plus 9 equals March 34th or, since March only has 31 days it equals December 25th.

Final Proof

Xmas = C/k+9 Where C equals the date of conception.

Pardon me, I have the wrong glasses on (the ones held together with the black Yacht Club straw which so many people find inexplicably endearing), though that certainly is no excuse for lying or being unavailable and so I would like to immediately apologize for having the output of a mock turtle since the late summer. If my memory serves me correctly (that caused me almost Christ like suffering to type by the way), I’ve never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve and need a little pain as a life lesson, and certainly the thought of anyone in distress makes me physically ill. But I had a sort of a half-dream last night while still sitting up with a book in my hands, in which there was an alternate world where that is not true. And who would you be in that world? Thankfully there will be no specifics addressed re: this imaginary world, but on account of it being Thanksgiving and all, maybe it would be a good time to thank Her, Him, It that, instead of evolving something amazingly intricate such as a turkey’s succulence or a giraffe’s long neck, which enables those wonderful creatures to find food where nothing else possibly could, we humans have evolved this crazy, often self-defeating thing called a conscience. Boy, what a short-straw draw it sometimes seems.

So the other day I was nibbling on these delicious fruits growing way above the heads of all the other creatures around me who were intellectually starving to death and I thought to myself, “ Wow, maybe this is some kind of crazy Adam and Eve thing.” But don’t worry. Turns out that part of the bible was absolutely, literally true, and I was eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Whew! For a few seconds there I was actually afraid that I had stumbled across some philosophical conundrum. I mean, sure, now I was going to die but, well, seriously, at the time it seemed like an excellent alternative to living forever in a state of perpetual ignorance.

See how we always think we’re so smart? Turns out there are infinitely more torturous things to go without than food. Who knew?! Well, it turns out God knew. But luckily I still get to stand in a warm cozy bar five days a week while people in long leather coats (mostly stolen or “borrowed”) swill bottles of Budweiser and debate God’s lack of wisdom. And not a damned one of them has a neck even eight inches long.

One thing seems certain however to these post-adolescent intellectuals who I am privileged to get to listen to for hours at a time . . . the bible should be dismissed out of hand, especially if you’re stupid and can’t read. And even if you can read, you can always just rummage through it and find the things that seem really stupid ten thousand years after they were scribbled down, because there sure aren’t any decent, timeless philosophies to be found anywhere in there. (Irony snobs unite!)

As just the simplest example, nowhere in the bible does it even mention the way that the entire universe exploded into existence from nothing! DUH! Come on! Rewrite the stupid thing so it can at least keep up with modern science! You know how many black holes there are in the bible? ZERO! You know how many black holes humans have actually observed with only the aid of man-made implements? Well, none yet but you just wait! There’s bound to be a BUNCH! They’ll be like PCs, (or for you kids, cell phones!) in their ubiquity. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was one in every household by 2025AD. Oh my God, I can just hear my mom now in fifteen years. “It’s enough that I’ve allowed Facebook to poison my computer, but I’ll be damned if I’m allowing a microscopic black hole in my house! What if it blows up!? What if it gives me brain cancer?!”

Because I am (obviously) a disorganized thinker, and total fraud as a writer, I just played Bible roulette and drew Leviticus 10:1 The Death of Nadab and Abihu. Now, I swear I read the whole bible around twenty years ago, but it’s a lot like Moby Dick in its leviathanosity (How’s that for wiping your ass with Strunk and White?). In other words, I forgot an awful lot of it. I also forgot quite a bit of War and Peace and The Infinite Jest. But on re-reading about the deaths of N & A I was reminded of a book that, I think, was called Ridley Walker. Is that a book? Is it an author? I don’t have the internet so I have to do this the fun, old-fashioned way, which is to ask you to do the academic leg work for me (And by the way, many thanks to the now, gasp, 27 people who understand that I write this log entry on a computer that doesn’t have internet access by putting it onto a flash drive, and giving it to my dear, dear friend Tommy who then magically makes it appear on the internet. You know, after all this time, I still encounter people who look at me smugly when I tell them I don’t have internet access, as if they’ve caught me in a lie.) Anyway, if anyone knows anything about Ridley Walker, stop by the Yacht Club any Friday between noon and 4pm and refresh my memory. I have a really weird feeling that there’s something about this book that’s going to be really important to the Yacht Club this Holiday Season.

Don’t forget, Gingerbread Trailer Park December 4th. Don’t forget #1 Atlanta Falcons vs. New Orleans Saints Sunday Dec. 27th. Don’t forget Full Moon and First Day of Winter Tuesday December 21st. (Days will start getting longer! Woot! Woot! Woot!) And most important of all, don’t forget the true meaning of Christmas (and no, it’s not when Jesus rises out of the pumpkin patch to eat the flesh and drink the blood of virgins wearing white tights and shiny black Mary Janes) which is to remember how good it feels to give.

And I will always be here for you.

Happy Holidays.

Gino.

One more reminder. It is time for the second annual Yacht Club Short Story-Writing Contest. To simplify things lets just say all the same rules that applied for the Creative Loafing competition apply here, that way if you feel you need to look up rules you can. Only difference is the story has to be tangentially (stole that from the loaf too!) related to the Yacht Club! Good luck! Get it to us any way you can, snail mail, e-mail, moon-mail, pale ale. You can even give it to Scotty orally if it’s really good. Then there’s always 1768 Pennington Place Atlanta, GA 30316.

Halloween. That’s right. It’s Halloween again, even though it was Halloween two seconds ago. Usually, right about now I’m asking my friend Frank, “How many days until baseball starts?” and he always says, “A hundred and sixty-eight days,” without missing a beat. That’s because right about mid-September the Braves are always getting themselves mathematically eliminated from the play-offs, and I want to know how long until the next season starts. But this year it’s gonna be (was) different! This year we’re gonna (didn’t) win the division title, and make it to the world series and and play the Yankees and it’s gonna go to seven games an and then it’s gonna go into extra innings in the seventh game against the Yankees and it’s gonna be the longest baseball game ever, and I’m going to write a science fiction novel about it while it’s going on and the game will be so long that next baseball season will be here before it even ends and it will be an awesome time-traveling conundrum and, and, and, and . . . .

OK. That’s what’s gonna happen next year, as in 2011.

And but so then, so anyway, it is almost Halloween (As in only 340 days). Don’t be that idiot (me the last three years) scrounging around the totally mauled costume stores the day before Halloween trying to piece something together. Do it now! Take your costume for a test drive on talk like a pirate day! It isn’t just for pirates anymore. In fact I am officially renaming it TALK LIKE YOU’RE TEST DRIVING YOUR HALLOWEEN COSTUME DAY. (I’m so smart, and all my ideas always come together given time, which isn’t linear, but rather malleable, like Play-DOH!)

And but so then, so anyway . . . Once there was this scientist named Fermi, and he was sitting around with his goober friends eating lunch and talking about really esoteric science-mystery stuff so that he wouldn’t have to think about his bills and his aging parents and his own failing health and sex and stuff at work and his friends were saying that since there were hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy, and a hundred billion other galaxies each with hundreds of billions of stars in them, why then, there must be other life out there and in fact the universe is probably teeming with life. And they felt so smug and self assured with their billions and billions of worlds that they said even if you did that dumb old creationist trick where you put all the parts of a watch in a bucket and shook it up that eventually it would come out a watch after billions and trillions of tries, so much so that they were quite taken aback by Fermi when he, very cavalierly, (and one can only imagine that, being a goober scientist, he probably spoke with his mouth full), when he said, “So, where are they?”

And but so then, so anyway . . . there was this scientist named Turing, and he is on the shortlist for people who have contributed the most to the advancement of humanity. He merely invented the computer. (And, no, it’s not analogous to the way Al Gore invented the internet). But he was gay in 1950’s England, which, evidently wasn’t quite like being gay in 2010’s Atlanta. He was loathed and reviled because of his sexual orientation, even though he invented a machine that cracked the Nazi submarine codes, which were considered so unbreakable by the Nazis that when it became apparent that their moves were being anticipated, they executed all their submarine commanding officers.

Maybe in a couple decades someone with an abhorrent sexual malfunction will save the world from North Korea’s killer satellite fleet. Do we even have anything analogous to being gay in the 1950s? Sexual attraction to stray cats?

I have this pet snail named Gary. No, that’s sponge Bob. I have this feral cat named Gary, brother of Owen Meany (my little beanie weanie) who is wise to me. Gary knows that I am trying to trap him so I can torture him to death. I have not been able to fool him by feeding him every day for six months, nor did successfully capturing him and then turning him loose, unharmed, a dozen times fool him. He knows I’m trying to trap him so I can torture him.

And but so then I was talking to a client and he said, “I have spent so much of my life contemplating the human condition and observing men and women and searching my own feelings and desires and I have come to the conclusion that, much like Crohn’s Disease, there is no cause and no cure and that the only thing you can do is, live with it as best you can, and if that means you want to be alone 80% of the time then, by golly that’s what you should do and if you have any vague sexual fantasies that you can fulfill, without hurting anybody else, well then, by golly you should fulfill them, and who are you to say that there isn’t an analogous puzzle piece out there somewhere that fits you perfectly?: and who are you to say that you should eat broccoli because it’s healthy and who are you to say that there isn’t some woman out there somewhere who would love to give 25% of her time to making you happy if you also made her happy, and who are you to say that you should not try to get from birth to death and make it as wonderful as it can be, and if that means getting a sense of satisfaction from helping others than so be it, and if that means wrapping yourself up in some obscure study, so be it, and if that means experiencing suffering, so be it, and if that means pursuing fame, fortune, or power, so be it. It’s not like you are not going to secretly, or subconsciously pursue your innermost, deep-seated needs at some level anyway?! Is it?

I may have to say this a million times before I die but, you can take a cheap transistor radio that operates on batteries and pinch the handle atop it between two fingers and hold it away from your body and listen to music or talking coming out of the speaker. You could climb a tree and toss the radio into the air and it will broadcast songs and/or talking until it has landed in the net you have wisely placed below it, and the whole time, music or talking will come out of it, even when it’s not touching anything. I imagine you could drop it from a tall building and it would transmit on the way down. It kind of implies that there are songs and words in the air, everywhere, at all times.

Luckily your brain is nowhere as sophisticated as a $10 radio, and so of course there is absolutely no way that anyone could ever conceivably receive anything in that way.

Right! So, and not to offer this as any kind of excuse or explanation or anything, but when I was yanked into this world from my mother’s womb, held aloft and slapped, instead of bursting into tears, much to the discomfiture of the attending physicians, I laughed my little head off. In desperation I was administered a second slap at which point I projectile vomited right into the left eye of the nurse who promptly dropped me on my head. And if that’s not the truth, may God spank my bare bottom in front of all my friends.

I’m sure many Yacht Clubbers are excitedly putting the finishing touches on their short stories for the Creative Loafing short story contest this weekend. The theme is X and it has to be less than 3000 words long, or something like that.

Just a note of caution . . . should you, by some supremely depraved caprice of fortune, decide to write a story about how X marks the spot during a treasure hunt in the Yacht Club on Talks Like a Pirate Night, well then, your time-traveling, plagiarist’s tongue shall be cut from your body and super-glued to your time-traveling plagiarist fingers. If you write about how X is the roman numeral 10, and try to incorporate the 10th commandment, well, then, Frank may do something gross and weird to you.

The Turing Test. Please submit your thoughts on the Turing Test to Gino for cash and prizes.

Please do not submit your thoughts on the Turing Test to Hippy, or Michel, or Meredith, or Jen or Medium-sized Jeff. It will just upset them, and you will be disqualified from receiving cash and prizes from anyone, ever

Send your thoughts on the Turing Test to 1768 Pennington Place, Atlanta GA 30316, or deliver them in person to 1136 Euclid Ave any Friday between noon and 4pm.

In summary, there are 365 days in a standard earth year. There are 320 days until Halloween. In 174 days you must set your clocks one hour into the future, thus “springing ahead” and losing a precious hour of sleep. There are 45 days until Christmas. There 14 days until Thanksgiving, on which day the Yacht Club will open at 6pm, (or as we say in the world of marketing and advertising, THE YACHT CLUB WILL OPEN AT 6pm ON THANKSGIVING AND WILL BE SERVING DELICIOUS SMOKED TURKEY DINNERS PREPARED BY HIPPY WITH EXTRA LOVE AND CARE).

On a lesser note, because you demanded it, and I like to be thorough, my birthday is July 19th, and I won’t be embarrassed if you shower me with gifts. I know how good it feels to give, and I want you to know that I will always be here for you. Ladies, ditto for Valentine’s, only 93 days away. St. Patrick’s a month later (it may be leap year, but there’s thorough, and then there’s anal).

Also there’s the Gingerbread Trailer Park which you very seriously should very seriously buy a lot for right this second since they all sold out last year in less than one week. Five bucks! Buy it NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW!!

One last thing. Buy an album called Metallic Spheres by the Orb featuring David Gilmore, and play it while you clean your house. You will totally think you’re in a movie where cleaning your house makes you a hero! You don’t even need to eat carrot cake while you’re cleaning, but it wouldn’t hurt. Thank you. And have a nice month.

-Gino

From my experience, dominance and submissiveness are as necessary for each other as oxygen-breathing creatures are to photosynthesis-using plants.  If this seems too intellectual for you, please stop reading and go back to describing your day on your facebook page, or suck it in and get out your dusty, old dictionary (an anachronism, I know, in this age of American-Heritage-Online) because for once, oh victim, I really have something to teach you.  A snake killed my cat, and the story goes like this.

It is a sort-of sad, yet endlessly fascinating aspect of the human condition that people are born with dispositions along various continuums, such as fat/skinny, smart/stupid, (intelligence is physical and if you don’t have an inkling about brain physiology or neuroanatomy, or if you haven’t played Dungeons and Dragons enough to differentiate between wisdom and intelligence then I demand to be unfriended by you)  male/female, cruel/kind, sadistic/masochistic, dominant/submissive, and on into infinity.  Since the shit can be shot about any and all of these, I am going to put them all in a hat and choose one.

I choo choo choose . . . YOU!

Much the same way that predatory creatures become excited or aroused by the sound of squeaking or the sight of furtive movement, so too do predatory money makers react when those being fleeced whine for justice or fairness.  A few hours of watching my own cat while writing out checks for all the parking tickets I’ve gotten in the past month really brought the striking similarities home.  As soon as the mouse (or shrew) finds it unbearable to play dead any longer the predator becomes excited and  “toys” with the catch, giving it a false sense that it has a chance.  Should the catch actually fight back in any way the cat becomes very aroused indeed and strikes an overly aggressive blow to demonstrate its overwhelming dominance and bring the prey back to a state of helpless resignation from which it is terrified to stray.

On a completely unrelated note, have you been following this crazy parking situation in L5P?  Basically, a couple years ago, the city of Atlanta had a squad of police officers and a bunch of parking meters that mostly worked.  Then, a business genius (sadly, an Inman park resident) had the unbelievable idea to insert a niche company, which tore down the old meters, put up new meters (sorry, I don’t understand how they work either) and hired (this is my favorite part) off-duty Atlanta Police Department officers to write tickets.  And boy do they ever write tickets!   All day, every day they walk up and down Euclid Avenue writing ticket after ticket (at 25 bucks a pop).  Obviously it’s not in the company’s interest to put up clear, understandable signage, or they probably would have.  I’ve wondered if one were to walk around L5P for an hour studying the signs, if they would ever yield clear instructions on where and when you can park, and how the meters work.  I sort of doubt it.  One thing is certain though.  If you were driving into L5P from out of town, as thousands of people do each weekend, there’s no possible way you could figure out what the parking situation was, and really, the absence of a meter next to each space is artfully deceptive and leads most out-of-towners to think parking is free, the way it is right down the road in the almost identical neighborhood of East Atlanta.  I suppose that scamming tourists must not seem so wrong when those piles of twenty-five-dollar checks start rolling in.  Man!  I wish I’d thought of this niche!

Anyway, as you’ve probably figured out if you work in the neighborhood, you pretty much have to park along the side streets in front of houses anymore, which I’m sure is thrilling for the people that live there.  Sorry, but Park Atlanta is a little out of my price range 9 hours a day 5 days a week.

Bonus

(Actual conversation between Atlanta Politician and niche-business owner)

Politician: I agree with these shop owners that your parking scheme is bad for their business.

Niche businesswoman:  OK.  Here’s your cut of the money.

Politician:  Whoa!  Which one of these shop owners is squeaking and bothering you?  I’ll take care of him!

Niche businesswoman: No!  No!  Their struggling arouses and excites me.

Meow

This may seem like it starts right in the middle . . .

For instance when I was twenty-six and trying to make some extra money babysitting for my six-year-old neighbor, Stefani Germanotta, after I put her to bed and read her the dream-inducing children’s story Lindsay Long and the Time Beans (which I had just written) and I was in the living room practicing my Ace Frehley moves with a glow-in-the-dark light-saberesque sword trying to enhance my stage presence for the next Reluctant Debutantes gig (the band I played lead guitar for at the time) and when I looked up through my long, orange-dyed, Duran Duran bangs I saw the young imp in her white terry-cloth robe mocking me (or so I thought) when in fact she was emulating me. I foolishly scolded her and put her back to bed harshly, having already forgotten that her mother had taken her to see an afternoon performance of my band the previous week and that she had been too shy (star struck) to talk to me after the show. Monstrous.

Wow! This is a very heavy, serious mindset! Umm, that’s a quote from Callahan’s Cross Time Saloon. And it will make no sense if you are reading these blog entries in the order which they are presented to you, which is the exact opposite of the order in which they are written. You probably couldn’t possibly fathom how much I appreciate that Tommy has never asked me for a cigarette . . .yet. Read on MacDuff!

In spite of Rich’s best efforts to use me as a weapon to influence a group of mind-bogglingly smug and stupid people to instigate strife and discord at the Yacht Club, what I did was . . . act naturally . . . under the most dire circumstances no less. And after I escaped, I realized how lucky you were, for had he been successful I’d have been forced to “bar anyone who didn’t understand Obama’s health-care-plan.” (which evidently he does, complete with death panels.) Yikes! I’d have to bar the guy who mops up Rich’s puke on Saturday mornings! I’d have to bar that girl who broke his heart. I’d have to bar sister morphine and sweet cousin cocaine!

I don’t know why I get such jollies watching people battle addictions. Maybe it’s because addictions are so alien to me and don’t run in my genes. Hmmm . . . uh oh. . . .

Cigarettes! Boy, those are some tenacious little fuckers. I know what solipsism is, and I know that you have all been duped into thinking you are the only person in the world. Fair enough. But when anywhere from ten to a hundred only persons in the world ask me for a cigarette every day, it gets a little pricey. Especially when someone says “I just don’t want to buy a whole pack” and then proceeds to bum five off of me. I’m not just talking about faceless non-entities here like the idiotic street-poetry guy, I’m talking about my personal friends who I know have strong moral fiber and are financially able to afford a pack.. Nothing is stronger than the urge for a cigarette. There was a time when I justified to myself that “if I was going to give away so many cigarettes in the bar, than the bar should buy my cigarettes. Than I substituted the word “cigarette” for “beer” and said to myself, “Oh shit,” and that was very quickly the end of that philosophy. And again, and finally, I am sorry, but although it might seem to you like you are different or special in some way, if you want a cigarette, you are just going to have to buy twenty. Smoke what you want and then leave a pack for your poor old bar tender to dole out. Be a hero.

Another idea, (thank you Tommy!) is, when someone asks for a cigarette, instead of charging a quarter, or whatever, demand a joke, or witty saying or a stupid human trick. If it’s a cute member of the opposite sex, ask them to tell a little about themselves. Hell, ask for a kiss or a hug. You’re basically saving them five bucks and satisfying a tremendous craving they are having. Don’t sell yourself short. Sure, you can bitch at people about how much they cost, or about how they should be ashamed of themselves for begging, but whenever I do that I always feel lousy, and then if they see you when your car won’t start or something they will feel all smug and serves-you-rightish, as if your not giving something to them (and remember they are the only person in the world) was the cause of your misfortune.

So, like, recently, Hippy found himself in a peculiar setting which seemed hurtful, but turned out to be more dangerous than anything else. In my opinion that is. It went like this . . . ATLANTA magazine had an issue about barbeque in Georgia. Looking at the clever cover, you would swear that it said ATLANTA’S BEST BARBEQUE. It doesn’t. But he fell for it, got his feelings hurt, then almost took action which would have really been . . . .

After glancing through the magazine, Hippy felt slighted, not so much because his Yacht Club BBQ wasn’t mentioned, but much more so because, if you just glanced through it, it seemed for all the world as if P’cheen had won 4th best BBQ in Atlanta. Now, before you think any of us have anything against P’cheen, let me set the record straight. We love it, we think it’s awesome, we always have a good time when we go, but we didn’t even know they had BBQ! Well, after pulling the stock of his harquebus from his pantaloons to prevent a despondency-blowing-out of-brains (DBOOT) , it was pointed out to the smarting Q-maester (Hip slang for person who cooks BBQ) that:
A) there are an estimated 300 BBQ places in metro Atlanta.

B) The guy admitted, right off the bat in the article, that he only went to 60.

C) He went to, and awarded high honors to many that were waaaaaaay outside of Atlanta.

D) He was definitely a very informed BBQ enthusiast who could (and did!) bust some BBQ places down to size and did not pull any punches in his criticisms (and was always fair enough to acknowledge that this or that establishment may have just been having a bad day).

Basically, if the guy lucked into an especially fun night, and the BBQ was fresh and perfect, he was giving you a good review. And again, he was very forthright and honest about this.

But can you imagine if you were the 57th place he went to, and he was in a crabby mood? “Fuck that,” I say! If that guy had come around when our supremely colorful Q-maestro hadn’t been on hand, and had merely had a delicious brisket platter served by wonderful, inimitable elves and gnomes, he might have printed something that was off-putting to . . . ummm . . . you know . . . those people that read that magazine . . . ATLANTA! We could have been ruined! Like half the restaurants that guy reviewed! Whew! Bullet dodged I say!

Dang! I really wish I hadn’t thrown up earlier. I made it to the toilet and everything, so it’s not a cleaning up issue. It’s just that I wasn’t drunk and I think I pulled a muscle in my rib-cage. And since I’m in my mid forties now it surely must mean I’m dying of whatever killed my little sweetie-pie kitteny-cute, Owen Meanie, the little teeny eeny beeny cleany weeny!

I miss Owen Meany worse than Hippy misses not getting in that BARBEQUE MAGAZINE.

Which brings me to the solemn topic of self-pity.

YOU SHOULD NOT READ THIS NEXT PART UNLESS YOU WANT TO HEAR A TRUE STORY THAT WILL MAKE YOU REALIZE THAT YOUR OWN PROBLEMS COULD BE MUCH WORSE
(In other words it is a super-horrible true story that will totally bum you out unless you use it to compare to your own real problems and make them seem almost funny)

There is this young girl, sophmore in highschool, who lives across the street from my mom in Virginia. And one of her girlfriends (fellow cheerleader, etc.) had to stay with her and her (upper-middle-class) family recently because . . . . Last chance . . . bail out! (Skip down to where it says “Skip down to here.”)

Because . . . last year her mother contracted some rare, weird disease and passed away (At 44 years old). Then, six months later her father was killed in an automobile accident, so she and her twin brother were adopted by the father’s brother, their uncle, who lived in the same neighborhood and had a wife and good tree-removal business and they could still go to the same highschool and be among caring family and friends. Well, three months later the girl’s brother was dragged into a wood chipper. (I can only imagine that it was like the first time I fell down on water skies and was too stunned to let go of the rope for a few seconds.) The twin brother was killed, and the courts took the girl away from her uncle and aunt and the state is pressing charges against the uncle because the twin boy was evidently too young to be doing that kind of work legally and blah blah blah. So the girl is staying with the family that lives across the street from my mom.

Now, if you have read the preceeding paragraph, reevaluate your own problems. Also, read the book of JOB. I know people become beside themselves with anger at God because they get a flat tire in the rain. Don’t be one of those people! Don’t tell people how angry you are or how much you hate this or that. What if you’re venting to someone who has problems one tenth as bad as the girl in the story above? Put your problems and grievances into perspective before sharing them.

SKIP DOWN TO HERE

If you have not read the above story, good for you! I am now going to toss out a few Yacht Club philosophies about anger, sadness, frustration, and all the sucky ways that you can feel. Then I’m going to outline a few strategies that the Yacht Club staff have come up with to get you back to feeling good again.

1)Put it in perspective. Even if you didn’t read the above story, just take your problems and imagine that they were ten times as bad. Instead of twisting your ankle, you had your hands chopped off. Instead of a DUI, it’s your 3rd DUI. Instead of being at the Yacht Club you’re at some awful, stepford-wives bar. Instead of being overlooked by the Atlanta Magazine guy, he wrote an article about how lousy everything about The Yacht Club and L5P were because he got harrassed by street poets and meter maids outside and was hostile to L5P’s evolving demographic and was just having an all around shitty day and it felt GREAT to take it all out on the barbeque at the Yacht Club, which he never even tried.

2)Don’t be the boy/girl who cried wolf. There is a much larger demand for sympathetic ears than there is for complainers. But if there is really something you want to get off your chest we are here for you! But try to be aware of your facial expressions and your tone. Do you really want to blow your wad on arguing that soccer is less exciting than baseball? Is it really worth losing a future sympathetic ear because you were so vehement about how exciting one sport was compared to another? What if someone smashes through your front door and runs off with your personal possessions? Or a good friend gets hurt or killed? Do you really want to be incapable of ratcheting up your emotions from the dumb thing you were mad about last week?

3)Unless you’re a noob, give and take. If you’re on the receiving end of a bitch fest, get some food into your interlocuter. (I’m not saying buy them a meal, but take a page from Randall’s book. Get some peanuts or popcon, or wings or knuckle sandwiches. Most people are crabby because they’re hungry (or in physical pain, or both). Put yourself in their place, because you know you’re gonna be in it, one way or ten others, within a year.

4)Be conscientious. Make sure your teeth are brushed and your hair is fresh and clean before masturbating. You never know when God is watching. He may be appraising you for a position as a guardian angel, which is worth, like, a thousand years in purgatory.

5) Remember, your main objective is to make others feel better. Don’t get bogged down in tedious facts and “truths”. Let it all hang out, baby! Be creative and imaginitive! Make sad people laugh at all costs.

6)Forget your own problems for ten minutes. It may do you a world of good, whether you’re listening to another’s trivial problems (brainstorm and help them out) or their overwhelmingly horrifying problems (compare to your own, realize how relatively happy you are).

7)Evaluate your own knowledge. Sure, throw a little malarky around, but don’t be adamant about something that isn’t a concrete fact.

8)Don’t confuse your opinion for a fact. Even the dumbest people in the world can perceive when this is going down. They’re like, in the commercials, those little girls who want a real pony, or who say toys instead of two. They may not be able to articulate how, but people, even kids, know when you are trying to slip your opinion in for facts. And that’s a fact.

9)Don’t try to be an amateur psychiatrist) Stick with what you know or can make up. Don’t try to prescribe meds, especially not xanax. It is a short-term solution that turns your brain into swiss cheese.

10) And last, but definitely not least, don’t tell people to “get help”. That’s why they’re at the Yacht Club. It’s why they’re talking to you. Unless you specifically have the name and number of a trained professional who you are sincerely recommending. It comes off as condescending. And in most cases it is impractical, cost prohibitive, and demeaning. If all you can offer someone is “get help”, than you get help.

When Meredith asks me why I must always be the center of attention, it actually makes me stop and think. If someone gives me a guitar shirt for my birthday on Thursday, and I am the center of attention by playing it all day, and then I don’t wear it the next day and a bunch of people bring their friends in to see it and are disappointed and mad at me, and so I wear it Saturday, and even more people say that they are going to bring people in on Sunday to see it, so I wear it Sunday, and then the people who have already seen it get tired of it, but there are even more people who want to see it, I just have to say to myself “Damn! I’m glad these are my problems! These are the best problems I’ve ever had (If you don’t count the first time my parents made me cut the fat off of my own steak!).

I hope this extra long entry makes up for my lack of writing anything for a month, but the God’s honest truth is that my computer wouldn’t work for a month and I got discouraged and depressed. I thought it was a goner. I can’t believe I didn’t realize that it just needed a rest. Anyway, if there’s anyone out there who is thinking about getting rid of their old computer, don’t just throw it away! I could use a back-up one in case mine gets shagged out again. Remember, God helps those who help themselves. almost as much as he helps those who help Gino. HELP!

t sure is true that the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club is more than just a place to drink. I was wondering the other day if that were true for other licenced public houses, and, since I never go out anywhere else because of my crippling agoraphobia, social anxiety, and gruesome disfigurement, I thought I would ask around. Well, from what I could gather, with the exception of Crazy Mike, the people who come in to the Yacht Club during daylight don’t really “shop around” or “play the field” or whatever you call it, and in a surprisingly high number of cases this loyalty sprung up from one positive encounter here, at the EAYC, or a lone negative episode elsewhere. It’s amazing how many people told a slight variation on one of two stories. Story one: “I went to bar X and there was hardly anyone there, but the bartender just stood watching TV or eating chicken wings, and finally I left, disgusted, and came here where I was served promptly, despite Hippy’s attempts to get the bartender to serve someone who hadn’t even sat down yet. Story two: I came into the Yacht Club one day instead of going to Bar X where I usually go and I got waited on immediately and then shot the shit with the bartender who was super friendly/ funny/ sexually stimulating and so I have come here ever since.

Now, as tempting as it is to toot my own horn (my horn being the Yacht Club’s horn, since in this instance I am representing the bar and everyone who works there) and claim that all non-Yacht-Club bartenders are thoughtless and inconsiderate, I am more inclined to think that maybe the day that our future regular first encountered them, they (the enemy bartenders), were just having a bad day. (I know, I know, I am not sticking up for them or anything. God knows, if you choose as your occupation making people happy and comfortable the very least you can do is acknowledge their existence and see if they want something to drink.) But say I (now speaking only for myself) was to get up on my high horse and proclaim my virtues and mock other bartender’s shortcomings (instead of offering constructive advice such as put a little effort into at least seeming that you care which I could then back up by pointing out that the first ten people in the Yacht Club every single day, again with the exception of Crazy Mike, are either homeless people wanting to use the bathroom, or people looking for a job, your job.) what I would inevitably discover, almost immediately, is that every afternoon, The Five Spot, The Porter, and El Myr are filled with people who came into the Yacht Club and were ignored by GINO, not to mention that they would all be wearing t-shirts attesting to their experience, and, of course, Hippy would be with me. Now, I don’t mean to come off terrified and cringing (as the general manager makes a lot of money to cover those responsibilities) but, whenever I get up on my high horse I am instantly rewarded with a trip to nightmare world. I would, however, be willing to bet that if anyone donned a disguise and went around doing empirical research, that I would at least tie anyone else in the neighborhood for most attentive. I can hear you laughing, but bear with me. I have traits that set me apart from the rest of humanity. First of all, I am honestly, genuinely and maybe even a little sadly, disinterested in television (and not the way everybody says they are). Secondly, I don’t eat. And finally, I am absolutely certain that Thomas Pynchon is going to walk in The Yacht Club someday, and I don’t want to miss him. And since nobody knows what he looks like (he satisfied my need for a mysterious hero when Kiss took off their make up), I have to assume every man woman and child who comes in could be wearing a clever disguise. And, truthfully, there is a fourth reason, and I have buried it way at the bottom of this already-too-long paragraph in the hopes that not many people would read it upon publication and that it would get around more by word-of-mouth at first, thus softening the belly blow I am about to deliver, and that is that my personality is, in fact, dubbed. It isn’t actually my personality that you encounter when you enter the Yacht Club. It is more of a homogenized blend of several notably personable celebrities from the 19th and 20th centuries. Yes, it’s very expensive. No, I won’t tell you where you can have the procedure done. And yes, I think it is responsible for my perceived sexual attraction to small, shiny objects.

Speaking of which, I was talking to Hippy the other day and he was telling me about this series of books by Spider Robinson called Callahan’s Cross Time Saloon which not only is the most profound, postmodern example of time-traveling plagiarism I’ve ever encountered, but also birthed the most fun question since “If you were on a desert island, what blah blah blah would you yada yada yada?”

What’s your favorite fictional bar? (Support your local post office or lose Saturday delivery forever! Send your replies to: 1768 Pennington Place, Atlanta GA 30316)

One of my favorite Yacht Club extracurricular activities, and it turns out that many others love it as well, is the gingerbread-trailer-park contest at Christmas in which contestants purchase a beer-case-sized lot and build a trailer out of edible materials. This is one of many brilliant, fun ideas conceived by Chantelle and the Grateful Gluttons. We have done it three years in a row now, and, while far from being bored with the concept, I shot around the idea of supplementing the trailer theme with that of building gingerbread bars. More specifically, challenging people to recreate their favorite fictional watering holes entirely from edible material. The first two people I asked about it gave such howling resounding negatives that I all but forgot about the notion. Then, in an oddly twisted variation on a game I like to play called “Get them to think it was their idea” I was talking to three totally different people at totally different times about their favorite fictional bars when, with as little manipulation from me as possible (considering my programming) they all hit upon the idea of a contest to build models of their bars. All I’m saying is, if people are going to build models anyway, they might as well make them edible and give the poor sods in the trailer park somewhere to get a tasty beverage, among other things.

To be continued . . . .

The question I have been asked most often since I took over writing this online “log” from Robert Holland in May is “Hippy, why can’t you just interface your thoughts with the cloud? Why do we have to wait days, or even weeks between entries? Why can’t we enjoy a ten minute read of new stuff every evening with our tincture of laudanum?” To which I respond (after going over my answer with Michel and Meredith) that, first of all, laudanum is a tincture of opium, and as far as I know you can’t have a tincture of a tincture, and second of all, what was the question again?

From where I’m lying the problem is that people like Steve Jobs (and to a lesser extent anymore, Bill Gates) are paid tremendous amounts of money to function (as long as their health holds) as shunts or resistors between what could be built and what is actually built and marketed to you, the gorging, lazy schlock of whiney consumers who stand in line to buy a new I-phone because it has an “app” that makes it feel like your finger is being nibbled by a virtual Koy when you touch the pretty picture on the screen. Forget that you can’t get reception if you are holding the device in the bottom left-hand corner . . . what do you think it is, a phone or something?

Let me tell you a little story. In August of 1996, I was sitting at home playing solitaire on the brand new, top-of-the-line computer (this badboy had a one gig hard drive!) my mother had bought me for Christmas when the phone rang. It was a Mr.Chang, and he asked me if my roommate Daryl Habberstad was in. When I told him, “no” he left a message to the effect that he had gotten his company together and wanted Daryl to come out to San Francisco, along with their other MIT dropout buddies and get to “chopping wood”. When Daryl came home after a long hard evening of waiting tables at Bones restaurant I beckoned him out onto our patio, shared a smoke with him, and then gave him the message. We then spoke about how ridiculous it was that your television, telephone and internet were three different things.

When I woke up he was gone . . . as in, on a one-way plane to California. He left his clothes, books, records, pets, girlfriends, respirator, everything. Anyway, the possibility-timeline for phone/internet/TV was 1998 at the latest (I fucking thought of it and believe you me I am no genius) but where did that leave all the snails actually making stuff? Comcast, Bellsouth (at the time) etc? In the ensuing years they made billions of dollars off high def, highspeed cable, and now the grand finale of your raping . . . 3-D TV. Had I taken a fifteen year technological hiatus then, I would be coming out of it now with the ideas I had in 1996 only a year in the future. Brilliantly they foresaw that and made having a cell-phone as important as having a driver’s license.

And now for something completely different, for those of you on a spiritual quest. Shortly after Daryl going off to San Francisco, I was moving into a house that was under construction. I ordered a salad to be delivered from Savage Pizza. When it arrived they had no silverware, and, after tipping the delivery person handsomely, I asked for some. He had none. I asked if maybe on his next run he could bring me a set. I was told no. Fast forward 15 years. Into the Yacht Club comes a harried young man. “I am on a delivery for Savage Pizza, and I don’t have any to-go silverware, can I get some from you?” “Of course you can!” I don’t know what instant means, but I know what karma is. (And no it wasn’t the same delivery person . . . sheesh) C’mon people, act right! Be nice! Don’t be a mopey pathetic loser who will swear that their obsessive compulsive actions dictated that the barrel of the pistol be placed in their mouth just so.

In summary (and it turns out that a summary is from the Latin Sum which means everything but was most specifically used by Plato and Socrates to mean “here is what I would have said in plain words if I hadn’t been beating around the bush trying to make palatable something that I knew you were going to choke on) to paraphrase Sponge Bob, “Hold your peanuts! I have come to reveal . . . the truth! They say that truth and honesty will be rewarded by trust and forgiveness. Well, I’m here to prune the branches of deception from the tree of life . . . to shave away the unkempt sideburns of deceit from the face of truth! Mother of pearl!!!”

Starting on July 19th there will be available a knuckle crableg plate! For $5 you can get one crab leg and all the bread you can eat! WOOT!!! Now go spank yourselves and say ten Hail Marys.

Because of how I’m about to talk about other people, as if I were some disembodied, authoritative expert, I will level the playing field by admitting that last week I lost my pants. They were on one second, gone the next. That’s how superior I am to you. Anyway. . . .

I have this friend . . . no, customer . . . no client. I have this client who comes into the Yacht Club about five times a week. He has a very unique . . . I hesitate to call it a problem. It doesn’t seem like a problem to me, but he presents it as a problem, so let’s just call it a problem. His problem is that he has an overwhelming feeling that he’s supposed to be doing something really important. His is just one of many psychological quirks which have been openly discussed with me by drinkers at the bar over the past decade, and I will be coming back to it later, but first I want to mention a few others that I believe may be related. And these are all real, you can be assured, as anyone who knows me will attest that I am not only constitutionally incapable of lying, but I also have a terrible imagination.

The first “similar condition” is one which afflicts quite a few of my clients, though not the one who feels he is supposed to be doing something important. It is the feeling that one is famous. Exacerbated by drugs and alcohol, this sensation becomes more pronounced upon entering the Yacht Club and intensifies as the crowd grows and last call approaches. And, although I would not presume to suggest that the Yacht Club makes you feel like a superstar (I’ll leave that to the eternally absent wits in the T-shirt design department) I am not above breaking into the Cheers theme song and pointing out how nice it is to go where everybody knows your name (unless you’re famous, which kind of messes that theory up.) A few of my pseudo-fame-afflicted clients have confided to me that when they go out to other bars they still feel like they are famous, but in disguise!

Another related condition, and probably the most frequently mentioned, is the sensation that one is in a movie. This is the one I can most relate to, as I frequently feel like I’m in a movie if I am out in public with headphones on. I’ve often wanted to suggest to the people who naturally feel like they’re in a movie to wear headphones into the Yacht Club. I bet it would be like being in one of those wild 3-D movies like Avatar.

More than anything, these descriptions of feeling famous or of being in a movie remind me of textbook accounts of paranoid schizophrenics who feel that someone is out to get them, but without the unpleasantness. And if schizophrenia is a mental illness, what would you call the condition my original client had, that of having a strong inclination that you were supposed to be doing something great for mankind? At first I thought maybe megalomania, but upon further questioning (subtle, of course!) I gleaned that my client had no desire to conquer anyone, nor was there any need for fame. In fact, he said that the feeling that he was supposed to be doing something very important and helpful did not include even a need to be recognized, in any way, as the person who did “this thing”. I still don’t totally understand why he sees this as a problem, unless it’s that every day he wakes up and realizes he hasn’t done what he should. He’s in for a rude awakening if his secret drive ever vanishes.

Aside from being just innately fascinating these case studies may be useful to you should you ever be in a conversation with someone who seems distracted or even a little bit snooty. They may see you as just another autograph hound, or member of the papparazi.

There are many happily-married, wonderful women out there whose husbands are simply no longer interested in them. To meet them, go to ashleymadison.com. (That’s an actual commercial Ross and Roy and I saw while watching the Braves game Friday night)

Procrastination Hodgepodge Blues (5-20-10)
(Or: How I’m going to get back at everyone who has blown past me by living forever.)

Sheesh! Sorry I took a month to write this installment of the weekly log entry, but every time I got half way through, something would happen that made me thoroughly disgusted with the topic I had chosen, or something else would come along that I felt was infinitely more fascinating and I would scuttle what I was working on and start over. That would be OK if there was ever an end to the interesting new things, but I work at the Yacht Club and there’s a demanding new topic every friggin’ day, sometimes every hour!

First I wanted to write about the advent of baseball season, and that entry started like this: Yay! It’s baseball season!

I started writing very late at night on Tuesday, April 20th when I got home from the first Braves-Phillies game. I wanted to share with everyone my joy at how my dear, dear friend Randal took me to that game and how we sat in the seventh row right behind the Brave’s dugout. And I wanted to share my excitement while it was still fresh in my mind about how the Braves were down by three runs in the ninth inning with two outs (almost everyone but us went home) and how Troy Glaus (who had been struggling and who was being mocked by disloyal fans) hit a two-run homer and how then, Jason Heyward, the wonder-rookie, hit another home run which sent the game into extra innings. And how then, in the tenth inning, Nate McLouth (who was doing even more poorly than Troy Glaus) hit a walk off homer to win the game!

I should have just taken what I had written that night and given it to Tommy (plenty more on him at a later date) to post on the website (since I can’t do it myself as I am on a five-year technological hiatus). But instead, over the next few days I tried to get fancy and slip in some other stuff and create some sort of masterpiece, and in the meantime the Braves went on a nine-game losing streak and I became disinclined to submit the work.

Then I was going to write about the tour of Fairy homes but I got bogged down in the brilliant idea of using a cursive font so that the log entries would look more spontaneous and, well, log-like. But a much better word for cursive font would be illegible, which turned out to be a moot point anyway as they won’t load onto the web page (thank God). Anyway, the tour of fairy homes came and went.

Then I was going to write about my sweet little kitten, Owen Meanie, who was struck down with a lightning fast illness called panleukoapnia which killed her in about 15 hours and I was going to emplore everyone to get their pets immunized against it and make everyone aware that their was a really cool place in Avondale called Animal Project (404-292-8800) where you can borrow traps to trap feral cats in your yard and get them fixed and immunized for next to nothing and then let them go again. But that was too depressing.

Then I was going to write about the evil new parking company called Park Atlanta which is a private company hired by Shirley Franklin to ticket cars in Little Five Points without the Neighborhood Association’s or the Business Association’s input. And I was going to enlighten you about the thirty day moratorium on the meters which you do not have to pay right now until they can reach some sort of fair agreement, and when I say fair, I mean as in there are no parking meters in Virginia Highlands or East Atlanta so people shopping there don’t feel compelled to go into the depths of the neighborhood to park, thus wreaking havoc on the parking situation of the local residents.

Then I was going to write about the movie Big Mama’s House III, and the 48 hours of shooting they did in Little Five Points recently, which, if you extrapolate from the time spent filming the McDonalds Spicy Chicken Sandwich commercial in L5P last year means there could be as much as six seconds of Little Five Points in Big Mama’s House III. It’s probably already out on DVD by now.

So now, because life at The Yacht Club is coming at us so fast and furiously I am going to stop procrastinating and come right out and tell you that, starting in June, the Yacht Club is going to have ALL YOU CAN EAT CRAB LEGS EVERY TUESDAY NIGHT!

Or I could tell you that the Octo-mom has become a regular customer because she can bring her kids in and smoke. (But that would be a lie, and I never lie.)

Or, I could tell you that Ross and Roy finally read the short story The Day The Yacht Club Was Gone in which they are featured as main characters. (But that would also be a lie.)

Or, I could tell you about my favorite customer’s and co-worker’s mind-boggling family histories, but A) I would never commit such a gross breach of faith, and B) the histories are so jaw-droppingly surreal that you would just think I was lying.

Or, I could tell you about Comcast’s latest weasel schemes to squeeze money out of the Yacht Club, but I wouldn’t want to give you a negative impression of huge, evil, money-grubbing monopolies.

Or, I could tell you about Glen Lopez’ line of gift cards made from photos he’s taken while zipping around in his turbo-charged wheelchair with his faithful canine companion, Ranger. The cards are available at Van Gogh’s gift shop located at McLendon & Clifden and feature photos of Little Five Points. If you’ve ever dressed as a gnome, chances are you’re in one. Some of the cards have famous witticisms or quotes from philosophers on the inside.

Or, I could tell you about the Japanese couple who were married by a robot.

Or, I could tell you about the link that scientists have found between Attention Deficit Disorder and a common pesticide. (Did you know pesticides, including Off and Raid were neurotoxins?)

Or, I could tell you about how Rich has quit smoking so that he won’t be contributing tax dollars to Obama’s healthcare plan (who’s zooming who?).

Or, I could tell you about the late-night conversation I was stuck in the middle of between Hippy and Troy about the nature of God’s will and how I was poo-pooed when I suggested there might be life on a planet around one of the hundreds of billions of other suns in our galaxy, not to mention life in one of the hundred billion other galaxies visible from Earth. (For those of you who get off on zeros, that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 other suns visible from Earth that might have planets with life.)

Or, I could tell you about how Ross and Roy called me in the middle of a Braves game and coaxed me into going outside to watch the International Space Station fly overhead and how it was blazing with reflected light from the sun and how, with my binoculars, I could clearly see the wings (solar panels).

Or, I could tell you about how Caleb and I started a mini-farm in my yard and how everything we planted is growing because we let the seeds listen to the They Might Be Giants song, Photosynthesis, off their album Here Comes Science. And then I could tell you that physical exercise is an excellent antidote for depression and I could add that the best I have felt in eight years, ten months and twenty-two days was today, after tilling the soil, tending seedlings, and dealing with a nest of venomous snakes, when I jumped into bed with a white Russian, made with heavy whipping cream (the height of decadence, don’t try it) after taking a long, hot shower and realized I wouldn’t need to smoke cigarettes in order to fall asleep.

Or, I could tell you about the significant look Hippy gave me when he told me that the author who was doing a book signing at the Yacht Club had, for years, written a silly blog and then written a “real book”, and how I agonized for days wondering if there was any connection between this and Tommy’s thinly veiled threat to turn my blog into a “real blog”.

Or, I could just Babylon and on without ever imposing any sort of structure to my writing and, in a way, recreate an extremely realistic facsimile of the Bar Log, which, inexplicably, people are always wanting to read.

But if I did that, I would never become one of those hyper-motivated people who are immune to mood swings, not to mention the common slings and arrows of fortune which precipitate them (the slings and arrows) and then I would never get to sit back in a vast leather armchair aboard my customized Boing 747 and look out the window at the billions of human ants being herded around by coarse police officers and I would never get to wear a tailored Armani suit and pour out three fingers of two-hundred-year-old brandi as uniformed serving people clear away my barely touched plate of lobster and filet mignon.

Yay! It’s baseball season! Last night the Braves were losing 9 to 1 but still won in the ninth inning with a rally that culminated in a walk-off grand slam home run! Thanks for the second chance, God!

Gino,
Zurich, 1929

Gino’s Entry 3-22-2010

[Subtitle: Roy's Story- ED]

It was a daunting and melancholy task to read this year’s fiction contest submissions, the topic being what it was. Of the six hundred submissions however, only a handful were over eleven words long, and half of those were disqualified for plagiarism. Fortunately the judges all have degrees in literature, and the attempts to pass off War and Peace, Moby Dick, and Ulysses, were detected, though we were still impressed that someone took the time to write them out by hand. The winning story, as you will see, adds a bit of science fiction flare to the possibility of a world without the Yacht Club, as well as a poignant familiarity with the bar’s customer’s and staff. It’s almost as if it were written by someone who works there. . . .

The Day The Yacht Club Was Gone

[this is Scary -WitchDoctor-ED]

By Narcissus Hughes

The handsome, intelligent, well built bartender with the excellent sense of humor arrived at the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club at 9:30 am as he did every Saturday morning to make sure the bar was ready to open at noon; to put the boat in the water between regattas, or the car on the track between races as he liked to think. It took quite a beating on Friday nights and another on Saturdays, so it is only fair to add wisdom to his catalogue of virtues. He stood with his sensuous mouth half open, a mouth so many beautiful, nubile, wealthy women wanted to kiss. His right hand was raised a little higher than his waist and forward about ten inches holding a key which should have been about to enter a keyhole and unlock the door of the bar. But the keyhole wasn’t in the door. In fact there was no door. Nor was there a wall. The Euclid Avenue Yacht Club was gone.

Although he was famous throughout the city of Atlanta for his unshakable cool and grace under pressure, Xeno, the bartender, moved back from the non-door and let loose a stream of obscenities and curses directed mostly at poor old God (who may or may not have been blameless). Only five minutes away from his first cup of coffee after a long, hard Friday-night of drinking! Also it seemed pretty certain he was out of a job, not, oddly, due to any gross negligence on his part; it was just unlikely anyone would pay him to stand in a deserted alley. But the worst part of this already terrible, terrible moment was the realization he would have to call the owners and, if he figured out how, the police.

He took a deep breath and stepped backwards ten paces into the middle of Euclid Avenue, surveying the city block, but nothing looked out of place except that the Yacht Club was completely gone.

Xeno took his cell phone from his pocket, conjured the owner’s number, then closed the phone and returned to the sidewalk as a two-ton liquor-delivery truck hurtled past. When the dust settled he realized with a sudden clarity that time was not of the essence. It wasn’t as if a smash n’ grab had occured and every second the Yacht Club’s brand new flat -screen HD TVs or the (empty) cash register were getting farther and farther away. He rationalized thusly: The owners really loved the bar . . . there was nothing they could do about its disappearance . . . they would find out soon enough anyway . . . they deserved a couple more hours (at the most) to live in blissful unawareness on this exceptionally beautiful spring day. Nor did it really seem like a job especially suited for the Atlanta Police Department, despite their diverse areas of expertise and special training. Also, having had no coffee he was in no mood to be ridiculed.

For an eternal two minutes Xeno stood paralyzed, waffling between the two plans he had devised, one being do nothing, the second being gather as much help around himself as possible. Jack Bauer wasn’t in his cell phone directory so he decided to just go through it alphabetically, keenly aware that noone whose number he had was specifically trained for situations of this nature, but surely their combined brain power and talents were at least comparable to anything he would be able to scare up on the hated internet, the virtues and capabilities of which so many otherwise respectable and intelligent people droned on and on about ad nauseum. Anyway he started with Allen and Amanda. After hanging up with Jim McNamara, who was on his way, angry and armed to the teeth, a car drove up and skidded to a stop in the middle of the street. Randall Bailey jumped out, leaving the engine running and the door wide opened. As if this were a pre-arranged cue, Allen came running up, followed by Crazy Mike and Chicken Boy. Donald rode up on a bicycle with a case of cold Budweiser in the large basket between his handlebars. Jeffrey the Tiny Monkey arrived in his cruiser and started handing around Dixie Riddle Cups full of Tito’s vodka. New Zealand Lindsay Long and Celia “seal yer eyes” Rice, on their way to open up Rag-O-Rama, an outlet for feminine hygeine products down the street, did double takes when they saw the empty space where the Yacht Club used to be. Catching sight of Xeno, about whom they had both been plagued by sexual fantasies since their early teens, they drew up rein and joined the crowd. Within a half hour lawn chairs, blankets and beach umbrellas appeared along with pinic baskets laden with fish, loaves of bread and bottles of water and wine. Ross and Roy scribbled out physics equations on legal pads. Colleen elbowed adoring young women aside and presented herself before Xeno to ask, “Wasn’t it just last week we were watching that report on the Gamma Ray Burst?”

* * * * * * * * * * *

“Cool! I’ll turn it on!” Xeno said into the phone and then hung up. “Roy! That was Meredith. Turn on CNN! Do you still have the clicker?”

“I don’t know,” Roy said looking at the remote control in his hand.

“She said a Gamma Ray Burst was about to hit the moon!” Xeno yelled down the busy bar. “Handle it!”

“Gamma rays?” Roy asked, pointing and pushing tiny buttons.

“Holy shit! That’s right! I forgot,” Ross said, snatching the remote away from Roy. “Remember that Neutron Star going super about seven years ago?”

“Oh yeah,” Roy said.

“Well, It was eight light years away.”

“So, in a year we’ll be able to see it?” Jim McNamara asked.

“Maybe right now,” Ross said, looking up at a super-serious Wolf Blitzer reporting from the Situation Room. “Some idiot calculated that a Gamma Ray Burst could pass between the moon and Mars.”

“Gamma Ray Burst On Moon Imminent,” The closed captioning said. “Live Footage From International Space Station.”

“This is going to be just like that tsunami hitting Hawaii,” Roy groaned.

“Or not hitting it,” Xeno said. I wonder where that thing did hit. . . .”

“Dart of intense gamma radiation to hit moon at 4pm”.

“A dart!” Donald exclaimed. He had been making his way to the bar from the dart board trying to watch the tv at the same time and was amazed when Xeno put a beer into his hand without him asking. “If only I could play darts the way you tend bar,” Donald said.

“You’d be the best dart player in Atlanta,” Tommy and [Chantelle-ED-
WD] said in unison.

“Savage celestial shot targets Earth’s solar system.”

“Is that the thing that’s supposed to create a black hole?” Crazy Mike asked, gesturing for another gin and tonic.

“No,” Xeno said, serving it up. “The black hole thing is in Switzerland.”

“No!” Rich screamed, feeling no pain. “That’s the particle accelerator! I’m an engineer!”

“Choo choo!” Xeno said, placing a bottle of Pilsner Urquel in front of Rich.

“Xeno! Attend me!” Jim McNamara said, having finished his beer almost a nanosecond ago. “I’m also an engineer, Rich. And the only black hole around here is between your ears!”

“Choo choo!” Xeno reiterated, placing a can of Schlitz in front of Jim.

“Barfight!” Army Michael yelled, deflating the lethal situation.

“Quiet! Quiet!” Allen shouted. “I think the moon is breaking up.”

“I’m having deja vu,” Roy and Xeno said together.

“Gamma Ray Burst energy could exceed output of our own sun over its entire 10 billion year life.”

“That’s a booty of energy,” Randal said.

“Too bad we can’t harness it,” D&D Bill said.

“Tightly focused beam to come from Sagittarius constellation like deadly archer’s arrow.”
[we are all dead now - ED-WD]

“What would happen if that beam destroyed the moon?” Dr. “Diver Down” Chad asked as he finished putting a couple stitches in Mike Bogan’s foot.

“It would be even worse than if it destroyed the Yacht Club,” Bogan said.

“Shut up, Mike,” said Kim Novak.

“Aren’t you guys supposed to be in Iowa?” Chef Jon asked.

“There was too high . . . too high of a chance the Gamma Ray Burst could hit us there,” Bogan said.

“We came back for the end of the world . . . or the moon, or whatever,” Kim said.

“Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) strike on moon could affect earth”

“What’s everybody watching on the boob tube?” asked Marty the Plumber as he arrived with Chicken boy in tow.

“There’s a special news report on the effects of the Yacht Club getting hit by the Gamma Ray Burst,” Xeno said, setting out beers and shots.

“No there isn’t!” Roy said, his physicist sensibilities aghast at this untruth.

“Mankind would have to struggle to adapt and survive.”

“See?” Xeno said.

“I’d have to say Xeno’s right on this one,” Marty the Plumber said.

“The proof is in the pudding,” Xeno said.

“We would have to grapple with a radically altered environment.”

“My God! Xeno’s lie has become the truth!” Leonard said.

“Yikes.” Roy said amidst a chorus of dismay as several people raised their drinks to toast.

“Let me get another Guinness before the Yacht Club gets zapped,” Sioux Ellen said.

“Maybe you should all get another drink while you still can,” Xeno said, starting her Guinness.

“On the house?” Guatemala Mark suggested.

“Nope. And now that I know I have a finite supply of product I think it only fair that be tipped in advance.”

“That’s going too far,” One-eyed Bob said.

“Not to mention that it’s pure evil,” Leonard sighed. Grudgingly everyone checked their drink levels and ordered more, even several people who still had plenty. As Xeno busied himself filling orders, several more patrons entered the bar and each received an update on how the news was preparing the world for the possibility of the Yacht Club being Gamma Rayed. Even Roy joined in, adding an almost scary level of credibility to the explanations.

“Crabs would be disoriented.”

Everyone toasted.

“Sloths would find it increadingly difficult to mate.”

Xeno, swept up in the apocalyptic atmosphere, poured a shot of Coke into a Jagermeister cup for himself.

“Everything would be a mess.”

“Yay!” everyone cheered raising their drinks again.

“It would be like a giant roller derby.”

“Yay!”

“The world would be much more hoatile than it is.”

“Yay!”

“Boo!”

“Shorter life spans.”

“Boo!”

“Human beings could evolve into monsters like something straight out of a science fiction film”

“Boo!”

“It could conceivably be an extinction event.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

The police arrived about an hour after New Zealand and Seal yer eyes tried to rip Xeno’s pants off. They promptly cordoned off the alley where the Yacht Club had been the day before with yellow police tape while E.T. looking men in HAZMET suits meandered around picking up rocks with tongs like the kind Yacht Club bartenders used to place wedges of fruit on the rims of glasses. They also scooped various quantities of sand and dust into tiny zip-loc baggies, for which there is no bar-life analogy. The scientists and cops eventually crowded the regular customers out right about the time the Yacht Club would have opened for business. Across the street, Xeno fashioned a crude megaphone from a rolled-up Creative Loafing and addressed the crowd.

“Everybody! At the count of three close your eyes and pretend this didn’t happen!” Xeno, bless his heart, was overly fond of children’s fantasy movies such as Matilda and School of Rock in which this technique would have set the world right. “One . . . two . . . three!” Sadly, the Yacht Club was still gone when the crowd opened their eyes. “OK!” Xeno cried desperately through his Loaf, “Evidently someone peeked, so we have to try it again.” A massive groan went up from the crowd, and there was murmuring that this plan might not work.

“I want a Yacht Dog!” D&D Bill yelled.

“A Sizzlin’ Steak!” Randall screamed.

“My second Rumplemintz!” from McNamara.

“Galley Burger!”

“Hippy’s homemade pies!”

“I miss the bell!”

“The Window Table!”

“Curling!”

“My dear, dear friends,” Xeno pleaded.

“Chilimac!”

“We’ll have to watch horrible flat-screen TVs!”

“What about Halloween?”

“Where are we supposed to go?”

“What are we supposed to do?”

“Why, God, why?”

* * * * *

On a cold, windy, overcast winter day . . . January 11th, 2012 to be exact, three gray figures made their way through the ruined wreck of a slum, formerly a thriving, eclectic neighborhood known as Little Five Points. Where once a colorful assortment of urban campers bartered spontaneous poetry in exchange for a cheap meal . . . where wealthy, rebellious suburban teens had pilgrimaged to find sacred, rare parts for their custom skateboards . . . now only a handful of shadowy outcasts peered furtively from broken windows like feral cats waiting for unwary prey to cross their path.

The three figures stopped in front of the dark facade of buildings where the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club used to be. Appraising the faded tattered police tape which flapped ineffectually in the eddies of unnatural dust devils, the three stooped beneath it and made their way to the heart of the haunted vacancy. Tiny tornados darted hither and thither creating a distinctly vacuous and obscene atmosphere.

“According to my calculations,” Ross said, “it’s less than a millimeter in diameter.”

“Listen,” Roy said, gesturing with his hands as if he were trying to demonstrate how big a fish he’d just caught was. “It will still gobble up at least a thousand atoms in the first year . . . and then it will double every year! You have no idea how much it’s going to consume!”

“Two thousand atoms the second year?” Xeno offered. “Four thousand the third?”

“The difference between the Yacht Club and a tiny black hole really depends on perspective,” Ross said.

“We need an irony snob.”

“Maybe if we could divert enough energy from that transformer that powers the American Apparel sign we could create enough seismic torque to leverage the Yacht Club out of the tiny black hole,” Xeno said. The look of disgust he received from Roy was priceless.

“Wait,” Ross said, looking at the power lines and scribbling in his legal pad. That actually might work.”

“Really?” Xeno said.

“Of course not!” Ross said and smacked him in the head. “This isn’t Space 1999, its suck-ass real life and there’s no Yacht Club!.”

“This totally blows.”

That The Yacht Club had become a black hole was an irony not lost on its previous customers, many of whom still felt inexplicably drawn to that twilight alleyway. During sad times they came to forget, happy times to celebrate and share. And sometimes they would congrgegate in groups of three or four, sitting crosslegged in the dirt of that filthy alley and reflect on what a bitch it was to try and fill an empty place in your soul with a black hole.

THE ENDGino’Gino’s Entry 3-22-2010

It was a daunting and melancholy task to read this year’s fiction contest submissions, the topic being what it was. Of the six hundred submissions however, only a handful were over eleven words long, and half of those were disqualified for plagiarism. Fortunately the judges all have degrees in literature, and the attempts to pass off War and Peace, Moby Dick, and Ulysses, were detected, though we were still impressed that someone took the time to write them out by hand. The winning story, as you will see, adds a bit of science fiction flare to the possibility of a world without the Yacht Club, as well as a poignant familiarity with the bar’s customer’s and staff. It’s almost as if it were written by someone who works there. . . .

The Day The Yacht Club Was Gone

[this is Scary -WitchDoctor-ED]

By Narcissus Hughes

The handsome, intelligent, well built bartender with the excellent sense of humor arrived at the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club at 9:30 am as he did every Saturday morning to make sure the bar was ready to open at noon; to put the boat in the water between regattas, or the car on the track between races as he liked to think. It took quite a beating on Friday nights and another on Saturdays, so it is only fair to add wisdom to his catalogue of virtues. He stood with his sensuous mouth half open, a mouth so many beautiful, nubile, wealthy women wanted to kiss. His right hand was raised a little higher than his waist and forward about ten inches holding a key which should have been about to enter a keyhole and unlock the door of the bar. But the keyhole wasn’t in the door. In fact there was no door. Nor was there a wall. The Euclid Avenue Yacht Club was gone.

Although he was famous throughout the city of Atlanta for his unshakable cool and grace under pressure, Xeno, the bartender, moved back from the non-door and let loose a stream of obscenities and curses directed mostly at poor old God (who may or may not have been blameless). Only five minutes away from his first cup of coffee after a long, hard Friday-night of drinking! Also it seemed pretty certain he was out of a job, not, oddly, due to any gross negligence on his part; it was just unlikely anyone would pay him to stand in a deserted alley. But the worst part of this already terrible, terrible moment was the realization he would have to call the owners and, if he figured out how, the police.

He took a deep breath and stepped backwards ten paces into the middle of Euclid Avenue, surveying the city block, but nothing looked out of place except that the Yacht Club was completely gone.

Xeno took his cell phone from his pocket, conjured the owner’s number, then closed the phone and returned to the sidewalk as a two-ton liquor-delivery truck hurtled past. When the dust settled he realized with a sudden clarity that time was not of the essence. It wasn’t as if a smash n’ grab had occured and every second the Yacht Club’s brand new flat -screen HD TVs or the (empty) cash register were getting farther and farther away. He rationalized thusly: The owners really loved the bar . . . there was nothing they could do about its disappearance . . . they would find out soon enough anyway . . . they deserved a couple more hours (at the most) to live in blissful unawareness on this exceptionally beautiful spring day. Nor did it really seem like a job especially suited for the Atlanta Police Department, despite their diverse areas of expertise and special training. Also, having had no coffee he was in no mood to be ridiculed.

For an eternal two minutes Xeno stood paralyzed, waffling between the two plans he had devised, one being do nothing, the second being gather as much help around himself as possible. Jack Bauer wasn’t in his cell phone directory so he decided to just go through it alphabetically, keenly aware that noone whose number he had was specifically trained for situations of this nature, but surely their combined brain power and talents were at least comparable to anything he would be able to scare up on the hated internet, the virtues and capabilities of which so many otherwise respectable and intelligent people droned on and on about ad nauseum. Anyway he started with Allen and Amanda. After hanging up with Jim McNamara, who was on his way, angry and armed to the teeth, a car drove up and skidded to a stop in the middle of the street. Randall Bailey jumped out, leaving the engine running and the door wide opened. As if this were a pre-arranged cue, Allen came running up, followed by Crazy Mike and Chicken Boy. Donald rode up on a bicycle with a case of cold Budweiser in the large basket between his handlebars. Jeffrey the Tiny Monkey arrived in his cruiser and started handing around Dixie Riddle Cups full of Tito’s vodka. New Zealand Lindsay Long and Celia “seal yer eyes” Rice, on their way to open up Rag-O-Rama, an outlet for feminine hygeine products down the street, did double takes when they saw the empty space where the Yacht Club used to be. Catching sight of Xeno, about whom they had both been plagued by sexual fantasies since their early teens, they drew up rein and joined the crowd. Within a half hour lawn chairs, blankets and beach umbrellas appeared along with pinic baskets laden with fish, loaves of bread and bottles of water and wine. Ross and Roy scribbled out physics equations on legal pads. Colleen elbowed adoring young women aside and presented herself before Xeno to ask, “Wasn’t it just last week we were watching that report on the Gamma Ray Burst?”

* * * * * * * * * * *

“Cool! I’ll turn it on!” Xeno said into the phone and then hung up. “Roy! That was Meredith. Turn on CNN! Do you still have the clicker?”

“I don’t know,” Roy said looking at the remote control in his hand.

“She said a Gamma Ray Burst was about to hit the moon!” Xeno yelled down the busy bar. “Handle it!”

“Gamma rays?” Roy asked, pointing and pushing tiny buttons.

“Holy shit! That’s right! I forgot,” Ross said, snatching the remote away from Roy. “Remember that Neutron Star going super about seven years ago?”

“Oh yeah,” Roy said.

“Well, It was eight light years away.”

“So, in a year we’ll be able to see it?” Jim McNamara asked.

“Maybe right now,” Ross said, looking up at a super-serious Wolf Blitzer reporting from the Situation Room. “Some idiot calculated that a Gamma Ray Burst could pass between the moon and Mars.”

“Gamma Ray Burst On Moon Imminent,” The closed captioning said. “Live Footage From International Space Station.”

“This is going to be just like that tsunami hitting Hawaii,” Roy groaned.

“Or not hitting it,” Xeno said. I wonder where that thing did hit. . . .”

“Dart of intense gamma radiation to hit moon at 4pm”.

“A dart!” Donald exclaimed. He had been making his way to the bar from the dart board trying to watch the tv at the same time and was amazed when Xeno put a beer into his hand without him asking. “If only I could play darts the way you tend bar,” Donald said.

“You’d be the best dart player in Atlanta,” Tommy and [Chantelle-ED-
WD] said in unison.

“Savage celestial shot targets Earth’s solar system.”

“Is that the thing that’s supposed to create a black hole?” Crazy Mike asked, gesturing for another gin and tonic.

“No,” Xeno said, serving it up. “The black hole thing is in Switzerland.”

“No!” Rich screamed, feeling no pain. “That’s the particle accelerator! I’m an engineer!”

“Choo choo!” Xeno said, placing a bottle of Pilsner Urquel in front of Rich.

“Xeno! Attend me!” Jim McNamara said, having finished his beer almost a nanosecond ago. “I’m also an engineer, Rich. And the only black hole around here is between your ears!”

“Choo choo!” Xeno reiterated, placing a can of Schlitz in front of Jim.

“Barfight!” Army Michael yelled, deflating the lethal situation.

“Quiet! Quiet!” Allen shouted. “I think the moon is breaking up.”

“I’m having deja vu,” Roy and Xeno said together.

“Gamma Ray Burst energy could exceed output of our own sun over its entire 10 billion year life.”

“That’s a booty of energy,” Randal said.

“Too bad we can’t harness it,” D&D Bill said.

“Tightly focused beam to come from Sagittarius constellation like deadly archer’s arrow.”
[we are all dead now - ED-WD]

“What would happen if that beam destroyed the moon?” Dr. “Diver Down” Chad asked as he finished putting a couple stitches in Mike Bogan’s foot.

“It would be even worse than if it destroyed the Yacht Club,” Bogan said.

“Shut up, Mike,” said Kim Novak.

“Aren’t you guys supposed to be in Iowa?” Chef Jon asked.

“There was too high . . . too high of a chance the Gamma Ray Burst could hit us there,” Bogan said.

“We came back for the end of the world . . . or the moon, or whatever,” Kim said.

“Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) strike on moon could affect earth”

“What’s everybody watching on the boob tube?” asked Marty the Plumber as he arrived with Chicken boy in tow.

“There’s a special news report on the effects of the Yacht Club getting hit by the Gamma Ray Burst,” Xeno said, setting out beers and shots.

“No there isn’t!” Roy said, his physicist sensibilities aghast at this untruth.

“Mankind would have to struggle to adapt and survive.”

“See?” Xeno said.

“I’d have to say Xeno’s right on this one,” Marty the Plumber said.

“The proof is in the pudding,” Xeno said.

“We would have to grapple with a radically altered environment.”

“My God! Xeno’s lie has become the truth!” Leonard said.

“Yikes.” Roy said amidst a chorus of dismay as several people raised their drinks to toast.

“Let me get another Guinness before the Yacht Club gets zapped,” Sioux Ellen said.

“Maybe you should all get another drink while you still can,” Xeno said, starting her Guinness.

“On the house?” Guatemala Mark suggested.

“Nope. And now that I know I have a finite supply of product I think it only fair that be tipped in advance.”

“That’s going too far,” One-eyed Bob said.

“Not to mention that it’s pure evil,” Leonard sighed. Grudgingly everyone checked their drink levels and ordered more, even several people who still had plenty. As Xeno busied himself filling orders, several more patrons entered the bar and each received an update on how the news was preparing the world for the possibility of the Yacht Club being Gamma Rayed. Even Roy joined in, adding an almost scary level of credibility to the explanations.

“Crabs would be disoriented.”

Everyone toasted.

“Sloths would find it increadingly difficult to mate.”

Xeno, swept up in the apocalyptic atmosphere, poured a shot of Coke into a Jagermeister cup for himself.

“Everything would be a mess.”

“Yay!” everyone cheered raising their drinks again.

“It would be like a giant roller derby.”

“Yay!”

“The world would be much more hoatile than it is.”

“Yay!”

“Boo!”

“Shorter life spans.”

“Boo!”

“Human beings could evolve into monsters like something straight out of a science fiction film”

“Boo!”

“It could conceivably be an extinction event.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

The police arrived about an hour after New Zealand and Seal yer eyes tried to rip Xeno’s pants off. They promptly cordoned off the alley where the Yacht Club had been the day before with yellow police tape while E.T. looking men in HAZMET suits meandered around picking up rocks with tongs like the kind Yacht Club bartenders used to place wedges of fruit on the rims of glasses. They also scooped various quantities of sand and dust into tiny zip-loc baggies, for which there is no bar-life analogy. The scientists and cops eventually crowded the regular customers out right about the time the Yacht Club would have opened for business. Across the street, Xeno fashioned a crude megaphone from a rolled-up Creative Loafing and addressed the crowd.

“Everybody! At the count of three close your eyes and pretend this didn’t happen!” Xeno, bless his heart, was overly fond of children’s fantasy movies such as Matilda and School of Rock in which this technique would have set the world right. “One . . . two . . . three!” Sadly, the Yacht Club was still gone when the crowd opened their eyes. “OK!” Xeno cried desperately through his Loaf, “Evidently someone peeked, so we have to try it again.” A massive groan went up from the crowd, and there was murmuring that this plan might not work.

“I want a Yacht Dog!” D&D Bill yelled.

“A Sizzlin’ Steak!” Randall screamed.

“My second Rumplemintz!” from McNamara.

“Galley Burger!”

“Hippy’s homemade pies!”

“I miss the bell!”

“The Window Table!”

“Curling!”

“My dear, dear friends,” Xeno pleaded.

“Chilimac!”

“We’ll have to watch horrible flat-screen TVs!”

“What about Halloween?”

“Where are we supposed to go?”

“What are we supposed to do?”

“Why, God, why?”

* * * * *

On a cold, windy, overcast winter day . . . January 11th, 2012 to be exact, three gray figures made their way through the ruined wreck of a slum, formerly a thriving, eclectic neighborhood known as Little Five Points. Where once a colorful assortment of urban campers bartered spontaneous poetry in exchange for a cheap meal . . . where wealthy, rebellious suburban teens had pilgrimaged to find sacred, rare parts for their custom skateboards . . . now only a handful of shadowy outcasts peered furtively from broken windows like feral cats waiting for unwary prey to cross their path.

The three figures stopped in front of the dark facade of buildings where the Euclid Avenue Yacht Club used to be. Appraising the faded tattered police tape which flapped ineffectually in the eddies of unnatural dust devils, the three stooped beneath it and made their way to the heart of the haunted vacancy. Tiny tornados darted hither and thither creating a distinctly vacuous and obscene atmosphere.

“According to my calculations,” Ross said, “it’s less than a millimeter in diameter.”

“Listen,” Roy said, gesturing with his hands as if he were trying to demonstrate how big a fish he’d just caught was. “It will still gobble up at least a thousand atoms in the first year . . . and then it will double every year! You have no idea how much it’s going to consume!”

“Two thousand atoms the second year?” Xeno offered. “Four thousand the third?”

“The difference between the Yacht Club and a tiny black hole really depends on perspective,” Ross said.

“We need an irony snob.”

“Maybe if we could divert enough energy from that transformer that powers the American Apparel sign we could create enough seismic torque to leverage the Yacht Club out of the tiny black hole,” Xeno said. The look of disgust he received from Roy was priceless.

“Wait,” Ross said, looking at the power lines and scribbling in his legal pad. That actually might work.”

“Really?” Xeno said.

“Of course not!” Ross said and smacked him in the head. “This isn’t Space 1999, its suck-ass real life and there’s no Yacht Club!.”

“This totally blows.”

That The Yacht Club had become a black hole was an irony not lost on its previous customers, many of whom still felt inexplicably drawn to that twilight alleyway. During sad times they came to forget, happy times to celebrate and share. And sometimes they would congrgegate in groups of three or four, sitting crosslegged in the dirt of that filthy alley and reflect on what a bitch it was to try and fill an empty place in your soul with a black hole.

THE END