Between Business Trips and Boudin

It’s been a busy week here at the Deconstruction. Earlier this month, after a six-month labor strike, I resumed my lucrative career as an uncredited web-based copywriter for a home improvement product which shall here remain nameless. Consequently, I had to drive down to Atlanta Tuesday morning for a daylong meeting with my boss, his wife, our webmaster and a guy from Akron, Ohio who showed up in a jacket and tie to show off product samples and explain the process of powder coating anodized aluminum. I’d tell you more about this fascinating subject, but that might spoil next month’s Fable. It also might get me fired.

I’ve also been out and about a bit more than usual this week. Normally, I try to keep a low profile, of course, but last night, on the recommendation of my Free Times colleague Tad Trencherman, the wife and I headed up I-77 for the grand opening of Smoke, a barbecue and boudin joint masterminded by Columbia provocateur and full-time Plowboy Tom Hall, and Hall’s partner in crime, Dan Huntley. While we were there, chowing down on smoked oysters and hand-processed Cajun sausages — and otherwise swilling ice cold beer by a  burn barrel — the wife and I even got our picture snapped by the local paparazzi.

Of course, I was sort of surprised to see my bearded mug pop up over at the Anne Postic’s Shop Tart blog this morning– partly because I thought I was being more discreet last night, and partly because I don’t read the Shop Tart.

That’s not a knock, by the way. The Shop Tart does what it/she does very well, and if the unconfirmed gossip I’ve heard is true, it/she is about to rack up some well-deserved awards. As blogs go, it’s just not my cup of meat. Ever since Sex and the City went off the air my interest in Manolo Blahniks has waned severely, I guess.

For the record, I was at one time a fairly devoted reader of Mrs. Postic’s other blog, which kept me abreast of parenting trends and otherwise reminded me why I’m glad to be childless. When that blog finally flat-lined back in June, however, so did my interest. I think I speak for a lot of local men when I say I wish that other blog would come back.

But anyway, I digress.

What I really logged on to say was that there’s a brand new Fable out this week. That’s right, between my business trip to the ATL, my brush with boudin madness and my sudden unexpected celebrity, I forgot all about the latest column, which is guaranteed to bring you down for the fall season, or at least remind you of your own mortality. And if you don’t like it, I don’t know . . . go shopping or something.

Life’s Biggest Question

Where can I find the print version of Free Times?

I'm in there somewhere, if you want to click.

Normally, when a reader sends me a question like this I send it directly to the FAQ section, where I either answer it honestly, answer it dishonestly or don’t answer it at all, depending on my mood and whether or not I’ve recently received a freelancer’s check.

This particular question, however, has come in with such baffling frequency that I finally decided I need to address it right here on the homepage, effectively ending the discussion. Since its inception, after all, the FAQ page has consistently averaged the least daily traffic of any page on this site — less, even, than the dreadfully embarrassing collection of bathroom limericks I recently threw in the Dumpster.

So then and again, and without further delay, the question, definitively answered…

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it six-and-a-half times: You can pick up a copy of Free Times at most Columbia area restaurants and bars, or from the large purplish vending machines you see scattered around downtown. Copies appear magically every Wednesday morning and disappear quickly, especially during grilling season and when the local animal shelter needs to reline its litter boxes.

If the current economic situation has made dining out an unaffordable luxury, however – or if social anxiety precludes straying too far from the house in search of a large purplish box – you can also find copies in a range of other locations, many of them so close to home you won’t even need to change out of your dressing gown. For a partial rundown of such locations, click here.

Wherever you finally do decide to pick up your copy, though, make sure you get there before the building manager at Limbo Tower shows up and takes them all back to the building’s boiler room downtown. I can’t prove this, but from what I’ve heard, the super over there soaks the disassembled pages in a solution of all-purpose flour and mop water then uses the resulting paper mâché to patch flood-damaged walls, and otherwise to repair the elevators.

Greetings from Partly Cloudy Northwest Indiana!

Okay, so not really. I’ve actually been back in the Capital City since 1:37 Monday morning, when I tumbled into town on a cloud of paint fumes and roadside coffee — and I’ve been sprawled out from exhaustion ever since.

We painted my parents' basement and rebuilt a wall, but all we got was this lousy postcard.

But I really was in Northwest Indiana this time last week — and it really was partly cloudy, at least by the time the wife and I emerged from the freshly-painted basement.

We were up there doing the job I promised to do in last month’s Fable, and which we grossly underestimated. Not only was painting the basement and kitchen more work than we thought it would be; brushing past my parents while they sipped tempranillo and showed each other slide shows of their recent international travels — meanwhile stepping over a bound copy of my brother’s dissertation while I tried to edge the ceiling without dripping on his blue books — may have inflicted irreversible nerve damage.

For going on three days now I’ve been trying to unclench my fist, which is perhaps permanently twisted around the phantom handle of a putty knife. Meanwhile, the primer that dried under my fingernails may be there until New Years.

In fact, I passed the first half of this week on the Internet, searching out information about painter’s wrist and solvent toxicity, and I’m devoting the remainder of the week to researching the possible link between long-term joint compound exposure and pronounced lethargy.

And yet it’s not all fun and games here at the Deconstruction. This being the last week of the month–and today being Wednesday–I’ve also been trying to come up with a clever new way to herald the publication of the latest Fable, which landed in the recycling bin sometime early this morning. What I finally came up with was the pale blue postcard in the upper left, which like every other postcard I’ve ever purchased didn’t go out until after I was already home.

Sorry about the delay, but I couldn’t find a stamp.

Dog Days and Oldsmobiles

It’s the middle of the night, September 1st, and here at the Deconstruction the windows are open, the removable screens jammed in, the patio door pulled as wide as it will go. The ceiling fans are spinning, of course, but the air, at last, is off. The crickets and cicadas of summer may still be at it, but they won’t be much longer. The heat has finally cracked.

Obviously, it won’t last, this sudden hint of cool weather. Tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, temperatures will soar back into the 90s and the humidity will envelope us once again. It has to. This is South Carolina, after all, and I am a modern-day Job.

Indeed, sometime later this week the sun will likely hurl a blazing hot comet of its own infernal design directly onto the house, incinerating everything in its path and leaving only a wisp of smoke, a pile of ash and the chassis of my father’s rusted-out Oldsmobile, which hasn’t left the driveway in almost a year. Because death would be the easy way out — especially that kind of death, so quick and painless — I’ll somehow crawl from the wreckage with third-degree burns and no eyebrows.

But none of this will happen tonight.

Tonight, as I stretch out on the couch and feel the cool air drifting through the house–as I listen to the last chorus of summer in the trees and tall grass out back, and from the tiny creek at the end of our street where the frogs bellow and groan–I only want to enjoy it. That, of course, and to remember the sunscreen in the morning. I’ve no doubt tomorrow will be a scorcher.

Apologies, On the House

Yesterday afternoon my brother called. He didn’t have a reason, really; I think he just wanted to talk baseball. And while he may have been motivated by a subconscious desire to rub my face in a cardboard platter of congealing ballpark nachos — his Cards are headed for the playoffs at this point, while my Cubs are, well, still the Cubs — I mostly took the call for what it was: a friendly What’s Up from the guy who used to let me tag along to every Wiffle Ball game he and his friends ever played when we were kids.

And yet there I was at the kitchen pass-through, the latest Free Times spread out on the Corian counter, my own smirking face looking up at me from the box above an article in which I criticized my brother for being both brainy and lazy. And there, a few feet away on the coffee table, was my laptop, my last insensitive post about my brother glowing like a cardinal sin. I shifted the phone from one ear to the other and closed the paper on my own reflection, but that only made me feel like a bigger heel.

I’m not saying he’ll come through and pick up a brush when the wife and I are up there next month; most likely, he’ll be too busy grading papers and prepping his classes. I’m only saying he’s my brother, and when it comes to criticizing lazy braniacs, maybe next time I should look in the master bathroom mirror, which continues to reflect a significant portion of this house’s ongoing disrepair.

Oh well. If he does indeed read the latest Fable, and if it drives a crowbar through the fragile drywall of our fraternal goodwill, maybe I can spread a little spackle along the rift and sand down the edges. I’m not saying that will solve everything, but it should at least delay the house’s collapse.

~

Speaking of spackle, I should also apologize to the gang downtown, who, in fact, did post the new Fable yesterday. You can read it here. It wasn’t up when I checked around seven a.m.–that’s true– but then, neither was I. At that point, I imagine we were all on our first cup of coffee still, and I know from experience that it can take a mighty long time to post just about anything, especially pre-caffeine.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before

There’s a new Fable out today in Free Times. It won’t be posted here for at least a fortnight, but you can pick up a hard copy at diners, bars and fine filling stations all over town, yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah, etcetera…

The State I'm In

I don’t want to sell this month’s installment short — I spent damn near an hour on the thing — but when it comes to announcing the arrival of my latest travails every four weeks here at the Deconstruction, well, sometimes it gets a little old, not to mention depressing. I feel like my life is one giant feedback loop predicated on the notion that I don’t know shit. Or, as postmodern philosopher and Nobel laureate Yogi Berra once quipped, “It’s deja vu all over again.”

And yet, ironically, that’s what the new Fable is actually about…in a way.

See, having honed our home improvement skills patching and painting walls here in Columbia, the wife and I recently agreed to drive up to my folks’ place in Northwest Indiana and help them patch and paint a few more. We haven’t gone yet, of course — we’ll load up the jalopy with brushes, edgers and cheap domestic beer sometime in September — but it’s definitely a go. After all, somebody’s gotta do it, and it ain’t gonna be my brother…even though he lives right there in my parents’ house and doesn’t pay rent and last I checked didn’t have any debilitating physical ailments like psoriasis or TMJ that might rule out the lifting of a seven-ounce paint roller. In fairness, he does suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but then, don’t we all?

And that brings me full circle. Sometimes, I guess, I get tired of trying to be funny and/or philosophical. Sometimes I just want to be useful. Unfortunately, I am a man of limited physical means and narrow intellectual ones. As a comedian, meanwhile, I’m sort of hardwired to repeat myself, kind of like a cast member of Saturday Night Live.

Oh well, I tell myself. You play the hand you’re dealt. And anyway, I need to stop complaining and just do my damned job, right? Besides — there’s a new Fable out today in Free Times. It won’t be available here for at least a fortnight, but you can pick up a hard copy at diners, bars and fine filling stations all over town.

~

NOTE: In the true spirit of deja vu, the gang downtown has decided not to post this month’s Fable on the website — at least not yet. So unlike last month, August is apparently no time for instant gratification.

If, however, you’re just dying to read something new by Yours Truly, you can check out my review of the new Pat Conroy book, also in this week’s FT. Be warned, it’s not very flattering. Also be warned, the book is even worse than I make it sound. I would have said more but, well, unlike Mr. Conroy I work on a strict word count.

Gather Ye Eggplants

So it’s late August now, and the garden here at the Deconstruction is finally starting to whither. Yes, the poblano plant has mysteriously begun to yield its first fruit of the summer–three tiny peppers that appeared on the vine last week, and which I hope will eventually be big enough to stuff with pork picadillo–but everything else, it seems, is either dying or dead or has returned to the soil altogether.

Four out of five recently harvested Romas were rendered inedible by end rot, and the rest of the tomato crop appears to have succumbed to the ravages of something dreadful called Late Blight.

This time last year I probably would have told you Late Blight had something to do with the poetry of Robert Herrick, but alas, no–the fungal plant disease is apparently the real deal. I’ve recently learned, in fact, that it was the culprit in the Great Irish Potato Famine of the 19th century, which while a contributing factor to the immigration of my ancestors to America, is hardly something that branch of the family celebrates, not even if there’s Guinness on tap.

In my case, the disease I’m calling Late Blight (whether it truly is that or not) has drained the color from the once-verdant leaves of my Early Girls and Better Boys, and curled them, tip to stem. Initially, I thought maybe I wasn’t watering enough or that global warming was simply heating things up a little faster than anticipated, but due to my well-established paranoid streak and too much time spent reading agricultural websites online, I’m now convinced my problems are more pathological than I previously believed.

For the record, apart from the aforementioned end rot and a little bit of splitting around the stem, the tomatoes themselves are thus far essentially fine. But they’re also fewer and a great deal farther between, and I am simply not predisposed to expect a sudden onset of vigorous growth this late in the game.

Indeed, the other day I made what may be my final sauce of the season: three small fruits broiled in the oven then mashed into a concoction of cannellini beans, garlic and fresh basil. The finished dish’s deliciousness owed as much as anything else to the fact that it might be the last such dish I will enjoy until I plant again next spring. And if my worst fears about Late Blight come true, these may be the last tomatoes I harvest for years and years to come, and perhaps the motivation for me finally packing up the family heirlooms and moving back to Ireland.

What really bothers me, of course, isn’t the passing of the season or the browning of the leaves or even the possible onset of an invasive fungus that could potentially contaminate my soil for decades and eventually wipe out every tomato and potato from here to Tipperary. What bothers me is the wasted fruit, the once-ripe-now-rotten bounty I sometimes find myself tossing, untouched, onto the compost heap by the fence. A sickly tomato may spoil my dinner plans, but a wasted one spoils my appetite.

And that’s the irony, isn’t it?

Why, just the other day I was at the kitchen sink when I noticed the small Japanese eggplant on the window had turned soft and wrinkly under the magnified light of the heavenly lamp as it shone down through the glass. I had been meaning to season and roast the poor little fruit as an appetizer for a week and a half, and while it was still suitable for a sauce, perhaps, or maybe even a small side of baba ganoush, it was well past the point where I could simply split it lengthwise, dress it with olive oil and pop it in the oven.

And so, rather than do the sensible thing–i.e., get out the roasting pan and make the most of what remained–I left the decaying fruit to decay even further, effectively solving my problem through neglect and denial.

“In a few days time,” a conspiratorial voice at the back of my head whispered, “the damned thing will be beyond use for anything. Then you can take it out back and toss it without guilt.”

That’s a completely irrational rationalization, of course–especially since I will ultimately feel just as bad about throwing out what has to be thrown out as I do throwing out what doesn’t. I know this from experience. Unfortunately, I don’t often learn from my mistakes and anyway, irrationality is what I do best. It’s why I’m writing a blog post right now instead of pulling up contaminated tomato plants or preparing eggplant stew. And it’s why this evening, or possibly the next, I will sigh when I finally add to the compost heap what could have been a delicious midday snack.

You Want the Truth? I Can’t Handle the Truth!

Three or four hundred times a day my wife accuses me of exaggeration. She doesn’t just do it to my face, mind you. She tells our friends, our acquaintances, her co-workers, the bar staff at the Bitter Bastard, the neighbor, the neighbor’s Chihuahua, the Chihuahua’s fleas, Hamlet’s father—essentially, anytime she can undercut one of my narratives by offering her version of “the truth,” she does.

Indeed, after reading this month’s Fable my wife took out a loan against the house to finance a series of full-page ads in the New York Times enumerating the countless falsehoods and boldfaced lies to be found not just in the latest column but in every story I’ve told since I was seven. Item # 319, which will run sometime in late 2014, clears up any confusion regarding my hairline, which she graciously describes as half-full, though by that late date she may need to submit a last-minute edit. Item #1—which, assuming the check clears, should run a little sooner—addresses the soft spot in the floor just outside the hall bath, which she contends is nowhere near as rotten as I’ve made it out to be.

Maybe so, quite possibly, and perhaps…but whatever.

Point is, another Fable has fallen from the tree. And while I may play a little loose with the facts—it is a fable, after all [see definition below]—the contractors have played a great deal looser with the floorboards underfoot. And anyway, when it comes to hyperbole, I’ve done worse. A lot worse.

Truth be told, this installment’s pretty doggone accurate, right down to the Sartre allusion (which I ran past my brother, a professional head-scratcher with the PhD to prove it) and the 18-pack of Charmin (which I didn’t run past anybody). Perhaps as an acknowledgment of my recent move toward a higher journalistic standard, my editor even decided to put me online this week. Have a look. And when you’re done, hurry back. I finally put up last month’s fable, which is also and equally true, in its way.

~

According to Merriam-Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary:
FABLE : a fictitious narrative or statement: as a : a legendary story of supernatural happenings b : a narration intended to enforce a useful truth; especially : one in which animals speak and act like human beings c : FALSEHOOD, LIE

Forget the Chickens, There’s a New Fable!

Don't shoot, Dane! Have a sense of humor!

Never mind the old adage about counting unhatched chickens. The real advice—the true, sage, Natural World wisdom—ought to grow from the organic garden, not the henhouse. Muddle your mint before it withers in the sun of a single June afternoon, perhaps. Pick your tomatoes before they fall to the earth and get devoured by slugs. Try not to tick off Mother Nature with a snarky column about how well your garden is doing when you know perfectly well She knows you don’t know squash, I mean squat.

That’s right, the new Fable came out this week, and while it’s hopefully tasty enough, it was probably plucked from the vine about a week prematurely. As a result, it suffers from the root rot of arrogance and the terminal blight of optimism. Trust me when I say the garden’s doing nowhere near as well as it was when I turned in the piece to my editor.

I would have told you about all this sooner of course but, well, I’ve been distracted.

For one thing, I had to crank out an arts preview for last night’s Colonial Center performance by comedian Dane Cook. I know, I know—“arts” preview? “Comedy”? Dane Cook? Hey, I don’t generally get to pick my assignments. Rather, they pick me, and then I stumble around the keyboard trying to find humor in the mundane.

I also got a little distracted this week by the whole Mark Sanford affair. See, not an hour before Sanford’s press conference bombshell I received the least expected, most paralyzing phone call of my semiprofessional career. And from whom, you ask? What sort of caller could possibly take my mind off a Free Times double-feature built around the seriously unfunny business of vegetable gardening and a frat boy raconteur? Only The New York Freaking Times.

That’s right, the Old Gray Lady herself rang me out of the blue Wednesday morning to ask if I’d like to try my hand at a short op-ed about the latest political undoing—roughly sixty minutes before the doing was officially undone. Needless to say, I about vomited at the opportunity. And when Sanford took the mic to announce that, no, he wasn’t humping the Hippie Trail naked or even getting Botox injections in the Buenos Aries but that, in fact, he’d been humping somewhere else, much further south of the border, my nausea tripled.

The problem, of course, was the caveat. The thrill of getting a call from the most renowned newspaper in the world comes quickly undone when it is followed by two of the most dreaded words in the freelance game: “On spec.” For while I knew the odds of getting my piece into the paper were slim, especially considering the 24-hour deadline, I had little choice but to plow forward anyway, writing what I was 90% sure would end up on the cutting room floor. It’s the nature of the business. You can’t even count those kind of eggs—you just assume they’ll be rotten—and yet you stay up all night staring at the glow of the incubator.

The Times might still publish the seriously unfunny piece I cranked out about Mr. Sanford’s Big Adventure, and if they do, being the still-nauseated freelancer I am, I’ll throw up a quick link. If they don’t—and at this late juncture, on the heels of the Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson deaths, never mind the ongoing trouble in Iran, I suspect they probably won’t—I’ll toss the piece in the Dumpster so the two of you can read it. After you finish, you can call one another up to laugh behind my back about why I ever thought it might run in the first place.

Anyway, the new column will show up here in a couple weeks.  If you can’t wait, go read the print version. Meantime, I’ve got to step outside and see what else has died prematurely on the vine.

The Perils of Freelance

File Under: Editorial Bruising

Maybe I need to stop tweaking the folks downtown about not putting the column online.

Yesterday morning I opened the latest Free Times to see if the design department had done anything to mitigate the enormity of my head in the accompanying author pic only to discover that not only was my brow as prominent as ever, I’d also been summarily taken round the editorial woodshed by a hacked-off typesetter with an antipathy toward compound-complex bellyaching.

Without going into too much grammatical detail or pulling down the style book, I’ll just say this: after I signed off on the proofs, some meddling somebody rewrote my initial sentence in such a way that I now look like a syntactically-challenged eight-year-old with a big vocabulary but zero idea as to how to use it.

Not only did the fellow have it in for me, apparently; he also knew exactly where to hit— and just how hard—to make sure he left a bruise.

I can’t prove my words were refashioned as retaliation for anything, of course, but it would make sense. I freely admit to being a bit temperamental, and I’ve been on their collective case about not archiving the column for months now. With the editor-in-chief out of town on production day, I’m sure the temptation to push my buttons was overwhelming.

Well, congratulations. The buttons have been properly pushed. Now, anybody that picks up a copy of this week’s paper while stopping off for a Big Gulp will wonder why they let a linguistic Neanderthal like me have a newspaper column in the first place—and there’s not a whole lot I can do about it, save scrape my knuckles across the keyboard and mutter under my breath.

To be fair, after I fired off a hasty pair of letters to the editor, I was somewhat consoled by an assurance that the potentially malicious edit would be undone in the online edition. I got a round of heartfelt apologies from both the section editor and the editor-in-chief, whose hands, I’m quite sure, are entirely clean. But the explanatory gloss that, well, “shit happens” just didn’t quite wash. And anyway, no offense to either party: when it comes to repairing the version online, I’ll believe it when I see it. The print edition hit the streets over forty-eight hours ago, and the online companion has been up almost as long, yet I still only see two archived Fables, the most recent dating back to February.

The one thing I can do, I guess, is publish the correct version of the column here at the Deconstruction. Technically, I’m not supposed to put content up for at least a fortnight; it’s in the freelance contract, and breaking that contract could jeopardize my employment and get the plug pulled on the column itself. But “freelance” and “contract” are kind of contradictory terms in my book, which is why I never signed the damned thing in the first place. Last time I saw it, it was still sitting on my desk, buried under the stub from my last $35 check and a deflated party balloon leftover from the official launch party–a balloon, I might add, which now looks suspiciously like a hollowed-out scrotum.

Anyway, the column I’m prematurely posting here is, to my mind, an entirely different creature. Unlike the confusing word jumble in the racks and boxes all over town this week, this one’s written exclusively in English.