an early spring

Punxsutawney Phil didn’t see his shadow; apparently we’re on the verge of an early spring.

Just as well, Phil. Looks like you’re about due for the same fluoride regimen that my dental hygienist, Diana, has recommended for me. In fact, Phil, if you’re not busy on the 20th, you can come with me to Dr. Hamamoto's office; Diana is very open-minded, and I’m sure she’d be happy to do some pro-bono work on the right rodent.

Like most other small furry animals, I make a concerted effort to hibernate over the winter (with exceptions granted for dental visits). It’s safer and warmer to just hibernate. Thus I view spring with a mix of mild apprehension and guarded anticipation.

And sometimes I sneeze too.

I’ll have to re-emerge from my own burrow. Shit. So much to do before I can venture out in public.

Phil’s lucky. His fur is thick and glossy. His wardrobe is timeless. His contact with the outside world is mediated by handlers. I’d wager that the only thing he did to prepare for his 1995 appearance on Oprah was to decimate the goodies in the green room. Without a second thought. Without remorse. And without thinking that Oprah would reveal his greed in front of a live studio audience. He probably shit on the green room sofa too. Handlers take care of matters like that; they smooth things over.

Phil’s a natural celebrity, a furball without detractors. No scandals besmirch his record. He’s a groundhog with a loyal following and the power to control the weather. If you really want to halt global warming, talk to Phil. And don’t take your SUV with you; he’s been known to shred the upholstery and pee in the cup holders. I'd take public transportation if I were you.

He’s sufficiently intimidating that his handlers wear gloves.

Taking an example from Phil – the less contact you have, the more fabulous you become – I’ve very much limited my interactions with the so-called outside world (that is, anything outside of a ten-foot radius of my laptop, which is permanently stationed on the dining room table amidst a sea of newspaper clippings, lists, books, magazines, papers, advertising circulars, and unseemly crumbs and sandwich crusts).

Much like Phil, I’m worried that if I poke my head out, someone big will grab me around the midsection, put me out-of-doors in the cold, and expect something profound from me.

Best to hide in my burrow and stay out of touch

I’m careful to refrain from answering the tantalizing offers in my email, like the one I received from Ashley today that offers me an early peek at the thrilling “New Black Book of Accounting Professionals 2007 Edition.” No nude underage teenies for me. Buh-bye journal paper to review. So long, message from my company’s IT department telling me I have to install updates or be disconnected from the network.

Once you’ve replied, they know you’re in there. Being disconnected is no threat.

And the US Mail? Destined straight for the narrow intake port of my Fellowes Powershred Model 120C-2 (with several notable exceptions: hamster photos from Susie and Oregonian clippings from Sara – these only enhance my hibernative bliss).

Certainly it’s best to ignore all communiqués – major and minor, serious or spammy – from the outside world while I’m trying to hibernate.

Winter media should be pull, not push.


Memorandum

To: Cathy
From: The Outside World
Subject: We know you’re in there

You are not alone. Not only do we know you’re in there; we heard you fart. We know what you’ve been thinking about when you stare out the window at the smudged San Francisco skyline. We’ve implanted electrodes. And we know you’ve been drinking cranberry juice straight from the bottle. Didn’t you notice the new sensor array on the top shelf of the refrigerator? But we love you anyway.

We do wish you’d brush your teeth every morning. Just a bit of advice from those who care.

The outside world? Who needs it! As Divine/Edna Turnblad (may she rest in peace) would say: “Could you turn that racket down? I'm trying to iron in here.”

Or in terms Phil and I can understand (since neither of us is prone to iron anything): “Could you turn down that techno music on your iPod? I’m trying to hibernate in here.” I can sometimes hear music all the way from Castro Street.

So, wouldn’t you know it? As the hibernation season draws to a close – as I struggle to make the most of these last days of sanctioned seclusion – the other day I received the most disquieting magazine offer in the US Mail:

Obit magazine.

You can think of it as People for dead people. Us for the six-feet-under set. In Style for the recently embalmed or soon-to-be scattered.

I find it somewhat morbid. Are they hoping that the recently deceased won’t care as much about maintaining their images as the still living do? Do they trust that the dead will be less litigious? Does an end to the story make fact-checking easier?

It’s not that I’m unaccustomed to specialty publications: I can see the virtue in American Window Cleaner Magazine, for example, or the Oaksterdam News. The former features articles like "The Dangerous Facts About Horizontal Lines" and the latter is a periodical devoted to issues central to the lives of cannabis devotees: What happened to the channel changer? Who ate the last of the Doritos? [Note: Merely joshing. The latter has substantive articles about medical marijuana, including some by my old friend and award-winning journalist Bruce Mirken.]

Indeed, I think of such publications when I prepare for a P. Phil-style emergence from my increasingly burrow-like domicile by paying a visit to Evert so he can re-style my unruly mop. Evert usually has good magazines, but today he’s somehow down to a couple of Peoples, an oldish Details that I’ve already read, an In Style that scares me with its wardrobe and diet ideas, and a Jane.

I’d rather read American Window Cleaner Magazine than People, but am relieved that Evert has neither a Obit magazine, nor a Goodbye! The Journal of Contemporary Obituaries. Who would’ve thought there was a whole niche market in obituaries? And just when I had gotten over being appalled at the new New York Times video obituary feature.

Somehow user-generated content loses its luster when it’s an obit.

I would’ve thought that there are a lot better things to gossip about with Evert than dead guys, but Anna Nicole Smith apparently popped off today. In a Florida hotel room yet – fodder for tabloids to come, and no doubt cover material for the high-minded Obit magazine. After all, the New York Times, who referred to Ms. Smith as being “almost preternaturally blonde,” was right on top of the story.

Evert, Lyn (his receptionist), and I immediately cottoned to the TrimSpa. It’s gotta be the TrimSpa, doesn’t it? She was just 39.

What’s in TrimSpa anyway? I immediately went to their website to find out and discovered this.

I don’t suppose they’re particularly anxious for anyone to review their list of active ingredients right now. Judging from recent appearances of Ms. Smith on TV, TrimSpa has some psychoactive components similar to that old stalwart, Phenobarbital.
Yes, Anna Nicole was the living embodiment of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls:

They drummed you out of Hollywood, so you come crawling back to Broadway. But Broadway doesn't go for booze and dope. Now get out of my way, I've got a man waiting for me.

But her hair always looked swell.

Mine looks better now too, not unlike Punxsutawney Phil’s lush winter coat. Evert still refuses to give me a mullet or make me go spontaneously blonde though; he believes it will reflect poorly on him.

I’m ready to emerge from my burrow now. Whenever it stops raining, that is.

What are you doing?

By now we’ve all heard just a little too much about Twitter.

Questionable wisdom, breaking news, hot gossip, and vicious rumors are served up continuously in easy-to-swallow 140 character doses.

What is Andy Dick doing? What does Anderson Cooper think? What did Oprah eat? And where’s my remote control?

Let’s chalk up the phenomenon to the death of the global attention span. Time to click on the x, close the application, and go on home.

Even though its promoters (who are legion and rabid) have credited Twitter with all kinds of feats great and small—from promoting democracy in Iran to improving customer service on kitchen appliances in Poughkeepsie—it’s really not all that.

Here’s the secret: there’s something icky about Twitter.

The kids have sniffed it and turned away. Sensible people try it for a week and abandon it, baffled. Corporations, carnival barkers, and ambitious spammers are drawn to it like voracious meat bees to a hamburger patty at a Labor Day picnic.

So I should’ve known better. And at first I did.

I started off slowly and with all due skepticism sometime in 2007: a few tweets lamenting my commute on 101; several documenting workplace HVAC anomalies; and a couple more rhapsodizing the crunchy goodness of Cocoa Puffs. Then some random salvos from a conference or two. A few non sequiturs and literary allusions dribbled forth. And of course I resorted to a bit of harmless name dropping just to demonstrate that even if I’m a consummate nobody, I do rub elbows with the important nerd elite.

Bob Kahn says that the Internet is still pretty fragile, I wrote in June, 2008.

See what I mean about the name-dropping? Utterly shameless, except that you probably have no idea who Bob Kahn is. Some people credit Bob with inventing the Internet even before Al Gore did.

The view of Cape Cod evokes Spalding Gray & the neuroses specific to a happy WASP childhood, I burbled later during that same Woods Hole boondoggle.

What would Charo do? I asked on August 21rst, 2008, apropos of nothing.

My tweets were sparse—maybe a tweet per month—and tentative.

Then I went quiet for six months.

Unfortunately, the next time I tweeted—a seemingly innocuous tweet to the effect that I was heading to the cold & soggy mothership in Redmond—the habit took hold. There was nothing special about the tweet; but I had crossed over an invisible threshold, a one-way portal.

Tweeting is like smoking. The first time you try it, you get the twirlies and it’s all you can do to keep your lunch down. So you try it in secret a few more times. It’s still not pretty, but you stop feeling like you’re going to toss your cookies. After awhile, you can do it at parties, striking an awkward pose with a cocktail in the other hand to loosen you up. Replace that cigarette with an iPhone and you’re ready to tweet.

Yes, it gets easier, but it seldom gets better. An amateur smoker lights the filter end of her cigarette. She takes a hard drag; an ember falls; and she sets fire to her lap. She blows smoke in her date’s face.

And an amateur Tweep twitpics cute photos of the cat. Or chirps about a yummy sandwich.

There is little more embarrassing than being unable to sustain a proper vice.

But then, without knowing when or how it happened, an amateur becomes a pro. A smoker lights the next cigarette off the butt of the last one, inhaling as smoothly as if she’d been born with a Winston affixed to her lip.

And when Twitter takes hold, a Tweep issues a steady stream of connected tweets all day long. Good morning, Tweeps, she says upon awakening. Have you made coffee for me yet? And she brackets the day’s tweets with a Good night, all y’all. If I go to bed right now, I’ll get 5.5 hours’ sleep.

Sure, neither smoking nor tweeting is a pretty habit, but there’s something to be said for doing it right.

And that’s more or less what happened to me. It took awhile, but Twitter caught me unaware and became an ugly, ugly habit, dictating who I hung out with and what I did in my spare time.

You wonder why I haven’t blogged in the last two months? All my efforts have gone into Twitter. It’s like scouring grout. Time-consuming. Unfulfilling. Thankless. Compulsive. Soul-destroying. And utterly engrossing.

Some days are fine. Topics arise organically out of what I'm actually doing: Say you just had your teeth cleaned. How long would you wait before you had your lunch? I mean, hypothetically.

A witty conversation about flossing might ensue. One of my so-called followers might offer to meet me for lunch. I might learn something new about dental hygiene.

Other days are bleaker. It’s not that nothing's happening; it’s just that the real events of the day aren’t suitable fodder for consumption by the @1nOnlyMrFamous or Mlle. @Sharkdoctor. So I'm forced to come up with preposterous tweets like restaurant names (The Bacon Grotto) or non-events (I’m procrastinating as fast as I can) and darkish photos of port-a-potties (When I take a walk late at night, I realize just how many portapotties there are in the neighborhood).

They ring hollow. They have no hook.

Then about three or four months ago, I turned another corner in a devastating direction. I started taking my followers’ actions personally.

“I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to delete you from my Twitter list,” Sara told me.

“Oh, no. Of course I don’t mind.” My heart was beating just a little faster. “Did I say something offensive?”

“No, no, no. You just post too much. I open my Twitter page, and all I see is you,” she said.

Of course I did mind. I minded a lot. I felt rejected. But I knew what she meant; I’ve had the same feeling. I open my twitter feed and all I see are the tweets from a few tweeps who will remain nameless (I'm certain they know who they are). The infrequent tweeters are lost under the musings of those with twitterrhea.

I mentioned this problem to Gene. “Why don’t you use Tweetdeck?” he asked and proceeded to show me the application and his own complicated strategy for sorting his friends from his foes.

“Hey! That’s pretty cool,” I said to him, but to myself I thought, Wait a minute here. That app takes up THE ENTIRE SCREEN. Does Gene have a Twitter habit too?

I know without asking that the answer was yes. Gene has fallen down the Twitter hole.

It’s a sharper descent than you'd think.

Right after Sara gave me the ol’ heave-ho, I’d become frustrated with Gene (his own tweets seeming to me to have been posted automatically by an ambitious bot interested only in promoting his recent blog posts) and I had unfollowed him. Unfollow. It’s one click. Much, much easier than letting a ringing phone go to voice mail or routing someone’s email into the dead letter box.

Gene wrote me not long after that asking me if I’d deleted him by accident.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him what had happened (beyond a lame explanation that involved words like app and bot).

Reader, I re-followed him.

I had apparently taken Sara’s rejection rather too hard to successfully unfollow a friend myself.

But wait. It gets worse. When the pretty and popular @Princess_Holly told her numerous followers that @JackGrayCNN was hilarious, I felt a twinge that I first incorrectly ascribed to gas.

He’s hilarious? HILARIOUS?

She didn’t say that he works for Anderson Cooper and so might have a scoop on breaking news: a twister in Eunice, Missouri or a kitten flu outbreak in Shoelace, Arkansas. Nor did she say that he’s young and attractive (judging by his profile photo he is). Nor did she say he's a hip Manhattanite, and we all do hang on to the pronouncements of hip Manhattanites.

No. She said he’s hilarious. And @Princess_Holly is the indisputable queen of the Twitters.

It's not gas. It's jealousy. I’m so jealous that my vision clouds from an uncontrollable surge of adrenalin.

Hilarious.

@Princess_Holly herself is exuberant. Tweets flow from her iPhone all day. I can’t believe she has time to do much else. She tweets while she’s driving (WTF? School starts and traffic goes to shit), while she’s eating (Yum! I love pizza!), while she’s shopping (Someone in the Apple store could use some iDeoderant. Big time! Gag!), while she’s working (Triscuit party in my office in 15 minutes! by my "office" I, of course, mean "belly"), and while she’s watching TV (Kevin on Top Chef reminds me of Yukon Cornelius from Rudolph the red nosed reindeer. That's all).

My first impulse was to control my jealousy. I played along with @Princess_Holly’s directive to follow @JackGrayCNN for awhile. He’s mighty darned funny, I told myself. Shoot. The guy has over 500,000 followers. He’s got to be funny.

Then I grew critical. Okay, fella. I’m waiting for that belly laugh, that ROTFLMAO guffaw.

Breakfast always tastes better with mint chocolate chip ice cream, he tweets.

I’m still waiting. I’m a harsh judge when I’m jealous.

Interested to hear what Chris Brown has to say for himself. His interview with Larry King @kingsthings starts momentarily on CNN, @JackGrayCNN tweets.

Oh, for godssake. It’s not even a scoop. Even my detested satellite TV provider can give me that much information. Chris Brown. Larry King.

News at 11. He might as well have tweeted news at 11.

“SUSPENDERS,” I shout with Tourette’s-like conviction at my Twitter stream. “Larry King wears SUSPENDERS.”

@JackGrayCNN sends a link to a video of a Saint Patrick's Day news story about a leprechaun sighting in Mobile, Alabama. On September 2nd a leprechaun story just doesn’t have that swing. I feel vaguely embarrassed as I watch the neighborhood interviews.

As everybody else’s tweets roll by, my mood makes a gradual transition from jealousy to dejection.

I probably just don’t get it. Maybe I’ve been out of the pop culture mainstream for too long.

I vigorously click on @JackGrayCNN’s unfollow button.

Better yet, I tell myself, not only will I unfollow him; I’ll block him. Then he can’t follow me either.

If you want to feel better about yourself, I’ve found that it helps (just a tiny bit, I admit) to BLOCK a celebrity with a large number of followers.

Take that, @aplusk. BLOCK. Now Ashton Kutcher can NEVER follow me. Never, never, never. Take that, @aplusk! Take that! You can’t read my brilliant tweets. You can’t even see who I follow. Ha!

And this behavior seems to be emblematic of what’s wrong with me. I’m taking Twitter way too seriously. Whatever hole it’s filling in my life should be investigated because it is sure to be both deep and wide. I mean, I'm in worse shape than those people who post forty tweets per day. I’m worse.

Much worse.

I came to this stunning realization the other day. There I was, in the midst of a gaggle (a goggle?) of my co-workers at the Dodgers-Giants game. Chandu, who had just carefully wiped his hands off after eating garlic fries and a crabmeat sandwich in rapid succession, was sitting on top of his copy of The Wall Street Journal to keep his nice trousers clean. Doug was wearing a fancy Giants cap I had never noticed him wearing before. Rama was watching the game intently too, as if he really cared about what was happening and who was winning. The interns were at the other end of our group, in a tight knot, drinking beers and perhaps even whooping and shouting.

Despite any apparent incongruity between them and the other fans in the centerfield bleachers, they all seemed to be having the time of their lives.

Mark and I were not having the time of our lives. We huddled at the end of the row as the evening fog swirled around us. We could feel the crowd’s intensity grow as darkness descended and the Giants’ score slipped. And slipped.

I was at the ball game. THE BALL GAME. A game involving projectiles, dangerous-looking fans, and super-sized players hopped up on human growth hormone. I was at the ball game why?

Yes: why?

As I typed I've gotta start taking steroids. They really seem to work into the Twitter input window, it became absolutely clear to me that I was at the baseball game simply to have something to tweet about.

As the score slipped further, the crowd’s mood seemed to change. In the course of an inning or two, it had gone from sweetly rambunctious to belligerent. The guy right behind us began to heckle Manny Ramirez, #99, evidently one of the Dodgers’ star players.

The crowd was receptive. On the heckler’s first try, which in some way impugned Manny Ramirez’s masculinity, he got a big laugh.

Manny Ramirez did not look like a drag queen to me, as the heckler’s yell implied. Not at all.

I aimed my Blackberry's camera at a cotton candy vendor old enough to be a Walmart greeter. I caught a vast span of the heckler’s nose in the photo instead.

“Drat.” I muttered. The vendor, spry for his age, had scampered further up the bleachers. I shot a photo of some miffed-looking fans across the aisle.

The guy behind us yelled about Manny Ramirez again.

Another laugh, although this time it was more half-hearted.

The guy behind us roared louder, this time adding something vulgar about Mr. Ramirez's use of a feminine hygiene product. He was reaching. You could tell he was running out of jibes.

Manny Ramirez and tampons. I winced. The heckler might’ve gone too far. The heckler’s fans, such as they were, got quieter.

The corners of Mark’s mouth were turned down. The shouting six inches from the back of his head was beginning to get to him.

I twitpic'd the miffed-looking fans across the aisle.

The heckler’s cries became less specific, less organized, but even louder.

What happened next confuses me slightly, because I was looking at my Twitter stream rather than attending to the game.

Something happened on the field, something exciting. One of those baseball things. A run, perhaps. Maybe two runs. The guy continued to yell into the back of our heads. He’d given up the femininity theme, but he was still awfully darned loud. I was typing frantically on the Blackberry’s chicklet keys.

All of the sudden, Mark turned around and roared at the guy behind us, “Would you SHUT THE FUCK UP! You’re screaming in my ear.”

On second inspection Mr. Loud Voice did not appear to be a thug, but rather a sloppy-drunk twenty-something guy who probably had a day job developing firmware or writing reference manuals for routers. He must’ve outweighed Mark by a good seventy-five pounds of hard fat and sinew.

He yelled back, “You’re in the fucking bleachers at a baseball game, not at the opera! Get a fucking grip, dude!”

I started to sweat in spite of the chill foggy air. Now this was something to tweet about!

Another play. The crowd stood up. The crowd sat down.

We continued to stand.

I knew what was happening by now. Mark and I have been together for a long time. Something very much like this, you can be certain, has happened before.

Now the heckler was pissed off. If we had been in a normal situation, he would’ve just been indignant, perhaps miffed. But we were at a sporting event and the air was full of testosterone, Miller Genuine Draft, and garlic fries.

“WOULD YOU FUCKING SIT DOWN!” the heckler screamed.

A small look of satisfaction crept across Mark’s face, “IF YOU FUCKING SHUT UP.”

The heckler shifted on the bleachers to see around us and continued to yell.

Mark and I standing together don’t make much of a wall. Really we don’t. No matter how much we call ourselves lard-asses, we’re actually both quite small. Many of the fans in the bleachers were bigger than both of us together.

I envisioned Dodgers and Giants fans uniting in a lynch mob to snuff the effete snobs who’d had the nerve to tell them to quit yelling in the bleachers at a ball game.

I was becoming too nervous to tweet.

“Maybe we should leave now,” I said to Mark, “It doesn’t look like anything’s going to change score-wise.”

The score was 9 to 1 in favor of the Dodgers. Giants fans streamed out of the ballpark, heading for the Muni stop.

I couldn’t resist. One last tweet: Eighth inning. I'm rooting for the seagulls now. Dodgers up 9 to 1. Everybody's leaving except those too drunk to walk.

“Okay. Put your phone away. Let’s go,” Mark said. He looked slightly relieved.

“Let’s leave this guy to his screaming. I’m cold.” I said.

Muni was jammed. We were on an N bus, which doesn't make the closest approach to our house, but instead dumped us at Duboce Park. But I was relieved to be away from the baseball game, away from the big dangerous baseball fans, back in my own neighborhood.

Why is it that every time I ride MUNI, the first thing I do when I get home is wash my hands? I tweeted after we got home, having learned exactly NOTHING from the experience.

Nothing. My group went to a baseball game and all I got were 16 entirely mediocre tweets.

I scrolled back through my baseball game tweets. I had told @meganwinget the thought of a moist bacon bra even now makes me urp up those garlic fries in advance of actually eating them. And I had told @leroyfishhead GO ROIDS! The score is now 6-1. I bet neither of them will ask me to do a toast at their respective weddings. The game proved to be nothing but a non-constructive distraction from basic tweeting.

What’s worse, through that entire traumatic misspent evening, I only gained one follower, @drunkjournalcom, who dropped me shortly afterward like the ugly girl in a round of speed dating.

And this brings me back to the crux of the problem: I pay way too much attention to the ebb and flow of my followers.

Want to break my heart? Drop me. Unfollow me. It’ll work every time.

When my followers number goes down, I’m crushed, and I immediately expand the list to figure out who might have dropped me. I’m praying that it’s a spammer—I don’t work too hard to eliminate the spammers when they sign up to follow me because the boost they give to my numbers feels so good—or a stranger, and not someone who knows me. Then I speculate on what I’ve said recently that has moved someone to unsubscribe.

I know I can be offensive.

I follow a headline service called @BreakingNews. It’s mostly good for keeping up on obits and natural disasters, stories where the headline tells you all you need to know. I’m old enough that I don’t want to know the cause of death (it could happen to me!) and neurotic enough that I don’t want to know the particulars of the disaster (it could happen to me!).

Just the fact, ma’am. I just want one fact.

That way, I can be the first to know. And even though I seldom retweet the items, subscribing to a news feed makes me feel so current.

Right after Michael Jackson’s death hit the Twitter feed, I had the temerity to tweet that for the last two decades he’d been the product of clever taxidermy. Several followers disappeared right away. Then I started reading the tsunami of tweets that were appearing in my Twitter window.

Michael Jackson was apparently a vital part of many Tweeps’ childhoods. Now they were openly weeping over the loss. An important cultural icon of my generation was gone. Tweeps were Moon Walking. Tweeps were playing Thriller. Tweeps were dancing to Beat It. Tweeps were singing Billie Jean.

Who knew?

I erased a half-written tweet and deleted the one I’d already posted.

Shoot. There goes my ‘how are you related to Michael’ cheap shot.

But it’s probably worse to be boring than offensive.

Then I recoil in horror as I ponder that particular nugget and realize what it means.

Did they delete me because I’m BORING?

Oh no!

Of course! It’s much worse to be BORING than OFFENSIVE. Truman Capote knew that. Andy Warhol knew that. Even that poor anorexic pedophile Michael Jackson knew that.

Instantly, I scroll back through my tweets.

OMG. OMG.

I break out in a sweat. Every neurosis I have nurtured for these many years has been brought to the surface.

I need to say something interesting RIGHT NOW.

Or…

Maybe I should give up and join Facebook instead. You don’t have to be interesting on Facebook. You can just join and connect.

I can join Facebook and admit to myself why I was not invited to my own high school reunion (this in spite of the fact that at the time of the reunion, if you searched for Rolling Hills High School reunion, the very first hit on Google was—and is—my blog).

I’ll just sit quietly and wait for invites from my high school friends, from junior high frenemies, from my 4th grade BFF Susie Pendleton (who recited A.A. Milne’s poem Disobedience with me in front of Mrs. Savage's class) and from Cheryl Parana (whose mother had carpeted their house with stunning white shag that needed to be raked, an exotic care regimen that I instantly appreciated). Surely some of these people—people who would quickly dispense with me on Twitter, people who wouldn’t stop for a chat if we met late at night at Safeway—would friend me on Facebook.

They’d friend me. Ah, that sounds much less threatening than follow. Friend.

In Facebook, no-one cares if you’re boring. You just have to be friendly.

If I promise not to say anything, will you be my friend?

wherein I meet Ben Katchor and Jacob Kornbluth

By some quirk of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, Bus Line 24, I arrived a full 20 minutes early to see Josh Kornbluth interview Ben Katchor at the Jewish Community Center.

Ben Katchor live and off the page! Josh Kornbluth live and on purpose! All this, and dessert too. It's no quirk that I arrived early.

Since I was alone, I was able to secure a plum seat in the middle of the 4th row. I’m not sure why it’s important to sit close to the stage; it’s not like you’ll get a hand up to dance with Bruce Springsteen or Oprah will toss you the keys to a BRAND NEW CAR. Nope. Not going to happen. Still, there’s something exciting about being in the 4th row.

The auditorium was almost empty when I took my seat; being so early made me feel over-eager and squirrelly. I busied myself by filling out the survey the usher had handed me when I wandered in. How did you find out about this show? Ah. That’s easy. They didn’t keep it much of a secret. That’s how I found out about it. I filled in the bubble next to ‘Postcard’ with the miniature golf pencil the usher gave me. I was buzzing in anticipation of the show; it was all I could do to color inside the lines.

Ben Katchor live. How cool is that?

C110 seemed like a really good seat, a seat with a clear view of the two big chairs set up for the interviewer and the interviewee. I concentrated on the survey. How many events have you attended during the last 12 months? After some reflection, I lied. It’s embarrassing to admit how seldom I leave the house. Unless you count my trips to the market. But isn’t going to the market an event of sorts? For me it is. I exed out my original answer of less than 6 and colored in the greater than 24 bubble.

Why does my survey look so messy?

The audience began to file in. So where was that really tall guy going to sit? Keep going. Keep going. Keep going: I willed him to keep going. He sat down directly in front of me. I knew it! Not a chance that I’d be sitting behind one of the countless short wide Jewish ladies who smelled of Nivea and secured used Kleenexes up the sleeves of their cardigans. Nope. The Bill Gaines look-alike—a compact fire plug of a man—took a seat three to the left. The neurotically thin Yoga ladies who were season ticket holders? They weren’t sitting in front of me.

No, I was sitting behind the tallest man in the room, and next to a young blond spiky-haired guy who awkwardly held a skateboard to his chest. You could tell he was thinking, “What are all these old Jewish people doing here? This is about comix.” He sat nervously, as if the whole audience was going to turn around and yell at him not to skate on their sidewalk and to pick up the trash.

It was exactly the audience that he—and I—should have expected.

Then the two men, Ben Katchor and Josh Kornbluth, walked out. The audience, which was surprisingly quiet for hard-of-hearing older Jewish people, became even quieter. The man in front of me sat up even straighter. He was probably 7 or 8 feet tall and had unspeakably good posture. I shifted in my seat, trying to look around him.

I’ve seen Ben Katchor before; it was when he was touring in the wake of his MacArthur Foundation genius award (which, incidentally, is taxable). That time he was reminiscing about the golden age of museum cafeterias. It’s true: museum cafeterias have become too good. I often go to the Berkeley Art Museum’s Café Muse just to eat the sustainably grown Raw Vietnamese Mushroom Salad with Cilantro, Scallions, & Almond Vinaigrette. I don’t even look at the museum’s exhibits. I eat lunch and leave. Someday I hope to be satisfied by just reading the menu.

Ben Katchor was right.

I squirmed in my seat again, trying to get a good look at the setup on the stage. The skateboarder made his best effort to shift left and get further away from me.

I’d forgotten how much Ben Katchor looks like Mark Bernstein. He looks a lot like Mark Bernstein. Surprisingly so.

Josh Kornbluth looked even less like Ben Franklin than I’d remembered. Perhaps it was the red socks that were bunched up at his ankles; I never picture Ben Franklin wearing red socks. (I still think Josh Kornbluth looks like Jay Sherman, who might well wear red socks with failing elastic).

Using a Sharpie, I wrote on my Muni pass: perhaps JK is a BK character. That would work. Josh Kornbluth looks drawn, as if he’s jumped off of the page of one of the Weekly Strips. The one about the chiropodist, perhaps.

His experience as a talk show host has served him well: Josh Kornbluth is a fine interviewer. He asks good questions and mostly gets out of the way and lets Ben Katchor talk.

I could listen to Ben Katchor talk as long as he felt like talking. That’s how good he is.

The first piece he reads is about modern apartments, about a man who moves every year so he can live in ever more up-to-date surroundings. The same mythical Eastern European movers transport his furniture year after year. One of the movers has a hernia, but nonetheless is able to horse the man’s grandfather’s delicate antique armoire out of the back of the van into the next of the series of more improbably-modern apartments.

Until…

The man finally goes digital and no longer has belongings to move. In the final frame of the story, the irrelevant armoire is hefted into a dumpster. Done and done. Gone digital.

My feet are dangling. If the springs in a theater seat are sufficiently strong, the seat begins to fold up on me, so that I’m folded in half, as if caught mid-crunch. My mini-backpack forms an uncomfortable lump between my top half and my bottom half.

It is then—after a particularly restive series of shifts and folds, peering around the 8-feet-tall guy and fighting against the theater seat spring—that I begin hearing voices. Well, not really hearing voices like a schizophrenic person but rather, hearing voices like someone has their radio on. Yes, there is a muted voice of a radio commentator. How rude!

Who on earth is listening to the radio? Is it feedback from someone’s hearing aid?.

At some extreme point in my contortions, my ear is in close proximity to my mini-backpack. Aha! That’s the noise: it’s my own MP3 player. I must’ve pressed the ‘on’ button by accident. Those tiny tinny voices are from the Slate Political Gabfest. With great discretion, I put my hand inside my backpack and turn off the player. Ben Katchor must not discover that I’ve disrupted his reading with my $39 earPod. Shoot.

The second piece is even more arresting than the first. It is about condiment packets and how they are replacing the more human-scale shared service containers that preceded them. The sociable metal creamers have given way to personal handfuls of Mini-Moos; the mustard jar has been superseded by mustard packets with an unimaginably small amount of condiment within.

Not only are the packets an unrealistic size (how many for the average hot dog? 10?); they’re also uniformly difficult to open. One wrong move and a Mini-Moo will give you a creamy facial—a Mini-Moo money shot, if you’re in the mood for an obscene tongue twister. The ever-inventive Mr. Katchor suggests that young men will rent out their packet-opening services—they’ll accompany you into a restaurant, and will open all of the necessary condiments for you.

With such help on call, you can go wild. Five tubs of syrup cascade down your short stack! A lavish squiggle of catsup ornaments your fries!

Such a good idea. Condiments are certainly a topic I can warm to; I think about them a lot. In fact, there’s not much in our refrigerator except a wealth of condiments: Uncle Chen’s chili garlic sauce; Aztexan Habanero Supreme hot sauce; Hoisin sauce; Tiparos fish sauce; Heinz Catsup in the ultra-large bottle with the customized label; Safeway Spicy Brown Mustard; and other bottles and jars too numerous to list (although I’m very tempted to alphabetize them).

The condiment shelves are packed. Packed! A comic about condiments is very nearly perfect.

But really, I can’t object to the packets on any but aesthetic grounds: I was recently saved from impending starvation by a stray peanut butter packet that I’d stashed in my suitcase. I was in a hotel room, late at night, in a strange city, and I came upon this miracle cache of peanut butter. I scrabbled around in my briefcase until I found airplane pretzels. Pretzels and peanut butter: Is that not a complete meal? It is. Most food groups are adequately represented. It was kind of like the original Hanukah, except with peanut butter and pretzels instead of oil.

But I digress. Being in the Jewish Community Center with all these little old Jewish people (and the 9 foot tall man sitting in front of me) is clearly having an effect.

The Crumb Trap is the title of Ben Katchor’s third story. It is about the New York Department that goes from apartment to apartment (an entire building in an hour!), emptying toaster crumb traps. After a sufficient portion of the city’s small appliances had been emptied—saving residents from potential toaster-fires and cockroach invasions—the crumbs are sorted and used for different functions. Some are fine abrasives; others are Thanksgiving filler; still other crumbs are fed to the city’s songbirds.

Really his ideas are quite practical. I greatly admire them.

I wish I had ideas like that. I could’ve listened to lots more stories.

But the ‘in-conversation’ format has one unfortunate characteristic. The part where the author speaks is always too short, and the part where the audience asks questions is always too long. I’m not sure why they let the audience ask questions at all. Josh Kornbluth already asked questions, and he did fine. The audience will not do fine; they are bound and determined to ask stupid questions.

Some of the questions are like Jeopardy questions: they’re the answer in the form of a question and they’ve only been asked because the asker wants to demonstrate that he’s actually met the celebrity before. Or that the question-asker is a minor celebrity in his- or her own mind. Yuck.

Did I hear someone ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” Someone must’ve. It’s as if you could subscribe to ideas like you would the Harry & David Fruit-of-the-Month Club. In January, you get 12 Royal Riviera Pears and a half-dozen good ideas about, say, small appliances.

All too soon, it is over, and we must shuffle from the auditorium as a bovine group. Shuffle. Shuffle.

On the second floor, there is a reception and the author will be signing books. It is a Jewish Community Center. I know that a proper reception cannot be conducted on an empty stomach. And I am right. There are crudités and macaroons. Brie and celery sticks (nature’s dental floss!). Petits Fours and cheese balls. People are milling around, eating compulsively and talking volubly.

And Stacey’s has set up a table. Forgot to bring a book for the author to sign? You can buy one from the nice lady.

I find myself buying a book: Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District. And edging my way through throngs of older Jewish men and women eating reception food (“oooh. Did you try the macaroons? I wonder where they bought the macaroons? So moist!”) until I got to Room 209. There were only a few faithful fans in line when I got there, real comix-lovers. Odd looking men and women with bulging backpacks and stacks of books. Not just one or two books that they’d purchased at the Stacey’s table, but big hulking stacks of books. As if they’d brought half their home libraries for Ben Katchor to sign. Anthologies that already have other signatures in them. Everything they could think of.

Book signings are horribly awkward. It’s like making small talk at a party if you’re not out to get laid, but just trying to make benign conversation with strangers. Just words to fill the dead air and demonstrate you’re a teeny bit smarter than the neon tetras in the aquarium you’re standing next to and a teeny bit more appealing than the decrepit old family dog that has wandered into the room. At best, you leave without the need for an apology.

When I reach the front of the line, I start out poorly, haltingly. I allude to something he’d admitted about his books, about how they were almost too much to be taken in all at once. It seems like a stupid opening line when you’re asking someone you admire to sign a just-purchased copy of their book. He frowns.

Quick! Must say something else. Must redeem the conversation. Because I do read his comics on the web, I ask him about his web site. He is momentarily pleased and says he put it together himself—and that it’s nothing. That he used to be a typesetter.

Ben Katchor is gracious; he draws me a small cartoon guy in spite of the non-conversation we are having. I console myself: this is a transient blip in his day, and even though he’s really smart, there’s no way he’ll remember his brief encounter with me.

Up close, he still looks like Mark Bernstein. In some hard-to-quantify way.

Does he know Mark Bernstein? He might know Mark Bernstein. Yeah. He could know Mark Bernstein. Mark Bernstein gets around.

I stop myself before I ask him. Phew. That was close. It is something my mother and I do, this looking for momentary cosmic alignments—shared friends, shared schools, shared towns—but many people are less crazy about that kind of coincidence.

And just like that, my turn is over. My chance to make a positive impression has evaporated. Ben Katchor has drawn a little cartoon guy for me to puzzle over; I have thanked him; and now I shuffle out of the room, back toward the food tables. The signing line has grown long while the first few of us have had our turns. I am still flustered.

Maybe it is because I am flustered that a guy with a hand held video camera, a nice one, approaches me. Now I will say something stupid and it will be immortalized. Bits that’ll come back to bite me. A sudden panic grips me; I am beyond flustered. Yet I’m drawn to the camera.

We all want to be celebrities. We can’t help ourselves.

“Hi,” he says. “I’m Jacob Kornbluth, Josh Kornbluth's brother. Is it okay if I ask you a few questions? I’m making a little documentary about Ben Katchor for Josh’s TV show.”

If I were smart, I’d realize that this is the guy who co-directed and co-wrote Haiku Tunnel. This is a professional and he’s not making a home movie. But I’m not smart. And not only have I already missed a critical cue; my mind is rapidly going blank. The microphone in my face is making it worse.

Jacob Kornbluth doesn’t look at all like Josh Kornbluth. For one thing, he’s got a disarming smile; Josh Kornbluth seems to have gotten all of the frowny angst and Jacob Kornbluth has that easy-going charm. He’s cute. For some reason, the way he introduces himself makes me think he doesn’t really do this for a living, that he’s just come along because he hasn’t got anything better to do on a Monday night in May. That he’s doing this as a favor for his brother.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Walk away! Walk away! Run! Dive under the macaroon table! Hide among the crudités! Camouflage yourself as a wheel of Brie! Act inert!

Jacob Kornbluth starts asking me questions about comics, and I am immediately sucked into a mammoth mental vacuum. Any problems I have remembering names when I’m on the spot are exacerbated and I give him absurd answers, answers that he won’t even have to take out of context to make me look foolish. For some reason, the only artist I can remember is R. Crumb; I can’t even remember Aline’s name, even though they draw comics together in The New Yorker, comics I read again and again. I can’t remember that Mary Fleener went to PV High and surfed at the same beaches I knew. And what about Julie Douchet? And Daniel Clowes? Why can’t I remember a single name of the artists I like? Why can't I come up with any details about their ouvre?

I can’t even come up with Art Spiegelman’s name. I once started a whole project because of a piece Art Spielgelman did about the New York Public Library’s picture collection.

The wall outside my college dorm room had an S. Clay Wilson panel that Adam Melch meticulously copied from a Zap Comix. Surely I could’ve come up with ONE two sentence anecdote about comics.

Jacob Kornbluth is asking me easy questions but I can’t answer them. Good god! Do I really have no favorites in the comics world? Do I really have no favorite Ben Katchor comic? I listen to words coming out of my mouth that even I don’t believe.

At the last minute, I remember the Ben Katchor story I like about the chiropodist, although I say “podiatrist”, which makes it less funny and makes me seem like less of a fan. It’s not my favorite either, but at least it’s something.

I flinch even now, embarrassed to recollect my performance in front of the camera.

I am so NOT ready for my closeup.

Now I wish I’d even said, “I can’t remember a darned thing. My blood sugar must be low.”

Instead I grab one of the moist macaroons and shove it in my mouth. I have clearly seen too many Twix commercials, but it works. Jacob begins chatting with the lady standing next to me and I flee.

In retrospect, I think all he was looking for a fan. Someone who would say that they were a fan. I don’t even think he was looking for a ‘good’ fan, one of the fans who memorizes whole stories and can quote ad nauseam. He was just looking for someone who’d say something admiring, something interesting and not too stupid.

I did none of the above, even though I admire Ben Katchor’s work a great deal.

I’m hoping I’ll end up on the cutting room floor.

I walk out of the San Francisco Jewish Community Center into the May night. The reading has newly sensitized me to the odd window displays and neon signs on California Street. Pregnant mannequins look less like pregnant mannequins and more like a small army of Nicole Richies shoplifting basketballs. Ben Katchor has changed what I see, just as any artist worth his or her salt should.

I get on the Number 24 Muni bus and head back across town.