Here’s an excerpt I wrote about BAD ACCORDION music, taken from an unfinished short story. The main character, after a late evening of crazily sampling many other fast food restaurants in the dead of night (a spoof of John Cheever’s The Swimmer), arrives at his final destination and waits for his order at a Mexican drive-thru. The problem: In the late hours, when business was slow, the cooks used to play dance music at deafening levels, which almost always included the accordion. This character detests the accordion.
Some scenes are marked as still unwritten.
By Word Rubble
Another New Year’s Eve bash had hit the shelves, made its seasonal appearance, and promptly reached an expiration date. The festive debris of noisemakers, confetti poppers, and surprise regurgitations on startled partygoers, all packed away until the next auld lang syne thawed them out.
Thankfully, my resolutions to gain weight, spend frivolously, and become a binge drinker were still going strong. My resolution to stop being a compulsive liar, however, remained a challenge.
With the year barely started, I was already bored. Bored with being bored, in fact–so bored, I considered playing connect-the-dots with roadkill along highway 95, just to map my descent into madness.
My boredom was boundlessly unbounded, an abyss of banality, like a Möbius strip of nothingness, forever returning to the same point of utter tedium—much like this paragraph you’re reading.
At my most extreme, I might stare out the window for hours upon hours. A totally harmless endeavor—unless, of course, the window belonged to my neighbor, which made it breaking and entering.
But I suspect even acts of forced entry and the unauthorized rummaging through of every sock drawer in my neighbor’s house—mismatching each pair with the most ghastly, uncoordinated colors imaginable (stripes and polka dots, paisley and plaid)—would be no match for the insatiable and unquenchable depths of my boredom.
In my partial derangement, bouts of boredom felt like little dress rehearsals for death. Those moments where life as you know it ceases to function—or at least you wish it would.
Over time, I even made a study of boredom—took notes, formed theories, and nearly launched a doctoral thesis titled Terminal Tedium: A Journey Through the Spleen of Existence. My research included an extensive field guide of life’s most dull events, catalogued like curiosities in a museum of malaise. These dress rehearsals are insidious thieves of time and sanity alike, fast tracking you into epic levels of boredom. In the following examples, notice how your life force, achingly and pathetically, leaks out of your body as you read these passages, as if your boredom is a “post-mortem purge.”
~
Exhibit One: The Last Five Minutes Before Summer
Those final few minutes of class waiting for the last bell, where desperate eyes track the second hand—unaware that, for cruel reasons governed by ‘a watched pot never boils,’ its movement is only detectable with time-lapse photography. Madness ensues as the school clock reverts to a past life as a sundial. Mayhem unfolds as the student body rebels and summons a wormhole to skip ahead to the start of summer vacation—only to crash land in kindergarten, where the biggest hurdle isn’t algebra but surviving nap time without wetting their pants.
Boredom is cruel; kindergarten is crueler.
Exhibit Two: Your App Will Open in 4.6 Billion Years
Then there’s the terrifying prospect of the dreaded hourglass or that spinning beach ball on your computer, taunting you with its diabolical glee, where you realize you might wait anywhere from a fraction of a second to billions of years—your computer having inadvertently left its space-time continuum to open an app in a galaxy far, far away. So far, in fact, its light won’t reach Earth before the sun goes nova, scorching your planet into a blackened shard of cosmic toast—and you, you no longer care, because mercifully, you no longer exist.
Exhibit Three: The On-Hold Symphony
Of course, nothing’s worse than being placed on hold and forced to endure canned music so artificially sweet that prolonged exposure—spanning the entire evolution of Western music from medieval chants to Justin Bieber’s aural atrocities—could induce a diabetic coma, or, worse, the horrifying realization that you’ve been on hold so long your great-grandchildren inherit your phone and finish the call for you.
Exhibit Four: Pancake Pete and Gridlock Gore
Or worse still, getting stuck in traffic, where the endless parade of cars ahead stretches so far you could leap from one to the other and span an entire continent—or even interstellar space. The hours blur all together as nothing stirs. Not even a flicker of brake lights. The roadkill below looks like the same flattened prairie dog passed three hours ago—or was it three days? You name him Pancake Pete, and with your stomach growling, you wonder if he’s still edible—maybe with a little syrup… maybe with a LOT of syrup.
Exhibit Five: Your Only Escape is Death
But nothing compares to the undisputed apocalypse of one of the most horrifyingly dull, stake-through-the-heart pursuits. Worse than a night at the Overlook Hotel, more terrifying than a lap dance from the split-pea spewing demon in The Exorcist—the DMV. A bureaucratic black hole where registration slips and sanity goes to die, and where paper cuts reign supreme as workplace fatalities. This unholy chamber of doomed souls is the truest definition of the living dead. It’s a place of such soul-crushing magnitude that even the Grim Reaper takes a number there—and WAITS.
And thus concludes our field guide to terminal tedium. We now return to what the author of this episodic farce considers a sensible plotline. For the record, you are welcome to laugh in derision at his hopeless folly. We now continue the story.
~
With no DMV in sight to spice up my boredom, I had to settle for other ways to lose my sanity–what little remained.
Continuous clicks on the remote—my sole form of exercise in those days—brought little relief.
Reality TV, for instance, defied the whole point of watching television in the first place. TV once offered an escape from the drab monotonies and existential despair of everyday existence. Nowadays, you watch someone folding laundry for 30 minutes and that’s groundbreaking entertainment. I half expected to see a show about solving word problems, those maddening thieves of joy that rudely derailed us from our otherwise blissful ignorance in school.
Then, as if on cue, the highlight reel announced that very thing.
Coming up in next week’s episode: Mortimer and Hazel have the weekend free and want to paint the fence. If Mortimer can paint the fence in 5 hours, and Hazel can paint it in 3, how long until they realize they’re painting the wrong damn fence? (Estimated time: 1 hour and 53 minutes).
Even better, I thought: an hour and 53 minutes they could’ve spent feeding stray cats, sheltering the homeless, or strapping the inventor of the word problem to the outside of a nuclear missile. Then launching him into space, Slim Pickens style, and nuking him from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
I finally concluded all forms of reality TV should come with a disclaimer:
WARNING: The following program contains scenes with graphic, unrelentingly tedious, watch-the-paint-dry, cleaning-out-the-lint-trap-in-your-dryer levels of boredom. If you are prone to obsessively sorting loose change, have been caught awkwardly mumbling irregular conjugations, and feel a strange urge to wander through a crowded shopping mall with a weed whacker—offering to trim the unruly nose hairs of startled customers (I mean, Christ almighty, some of those hairs were the length of the Alaskan pipelines)—then seek other programming immediately.
I was on the verge of Googling, “Can Boredom Be Fatal,” when I landed on a PBS program called “Playing the Accordion for Friends and Family.”
“Fantastic,” I fretted to myself. “My boredom officially has no mercy.”
An elderly gentleman hosted the show, wearing a sport coat that looked like it hadn’t been fashionable since the Kennedy administration and a peculiar tie featuring stalks of artichokes tumbling into a bowl of ranch dip. He performed for a family seemingly held hostage in their backyard, who looked more stunned than entertained, and perhaps were plotting their escape. At the end of his number, the host turned to a teenage boy. “Next time you’re at the beach, son, play this little ditty for your sweetheart.”
I recoiled. “Oh, that’s wretched,” I muttered at the TV. “Take a guitar to the beach, with its mellow, woody sound and instant babe appeal, and you’re practically guaranteed a moonlit frolic. Haul a thirty-five-pound accordion onto the sand, which even on a good day sounds like a snoring hippopotamus with a bad head cold, and you’re signing up for a lifetime of solitary nights and spunk-stiffened socks stashed under the bed.”
I clicked to the next channel. A commercial for Sonic Boom—a gastronomical grease pit slash fast food nightmare—blared its ugly theme song, an ear-piercing circus galop featuring a piccolo and, God forbid, an accordion, deviously designed as a siren call to the barely conscious viewers watching late-night TV, those canna-cravers turned munchie monsters. I cringed as a facepalm-worthy parade of dancing wieners with cartoon limbs and idiotic faces flailed across the screen, trailed by anthropomorphic hamburger patties and french fries that paralytically pranced and twitched like recipients of a lobotomy gone horribly awry.
Regrettably, the food at Sonic Boom was widely known for tasting like cardboard, but the displays of ice cream, cinematically captured in sugar cones, milk shakes, sundaes, and other rapidly melting concoctions, looked surprisingly creamy and decadent. Perhaps a perfect antidote for boredom, I considered. What could possibly go wrong?
In hindsight, perhaps I was more excited than I should have been, but undeterred, I dashed to my car in anticipation of filling a void in my life—what I thought was boredom, but often felt like something more. Not a pit of despair, or the disorienting regret of waking face-down in the musty armpit of a bowling alley strumpet from the night before, but a void left by something missing, something lost. All I knew was I wanted it filled right away. Not later, not when the stars were aligned, but at that precise moment. And I wanted it at light speed. Preferably faster.
On the road, traffic was agreeably agreeable, with just enough distance between cars to weave around the slower ones, shouting “road hog” with a defiant fury as I swerved past them, their headlights shrinking in my rearview mirror as I attempted to break the sound barrier in a used Toyota Camry. But despite this hustle and bustle, this Sturm and Drang, this post haste infatuation with reaching my destination in an all-out effing hurry, I discovered there’s an unwritten law not cited in any physics books: the cars I just burned rubber around, that I flashed rude gestures at, that I accosted with poorly timed profanity with my windows rolled down, will inevitably reappear at the next traffic stop, and slowly, uncomfortably, alarmingly, they’ll all pull up alongside me. It’s life’s way of saying, ‘Remember us, asshole?’ Especially the car with the flashing red lights that suddenly lurked behind.
INSERT SCENE WITH COP
INSERT OPENING SCENE AT SONIC
INSERT CONVERSATION AT SONIC
“I’d like a Sonic Blast with Oreos,” I said, enunciating every word to avoid confusion.
“What size?” came the robotic reply from the speaker.
“Medium,” I said confidently.
“So, a medium shake?”
“No,” I said slowly, as though explaining to a child. “A Sonic Blast. With Oreos.”
A long pause. “Sir, our blasts require some sort of ingredient as a base.”
“You mean ice cream?”
“Yes.”
“Well, of course I want ice cream! Vanilla, please.”
Another pause. “Is the order on the screen correct?”
I glanced at the display. “It says M&M Blast. I wanted Oreos.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t change the order once it’s on the screen.”
“You mean I have to pay for something I don’t want?”
“Yes.”
“Dude, are you nuts?”
“Did you want nuts on your ice cream, sir?”
By this point, my blood pressure was approaching critical levels. After several rounds of negotiation and a call to the manager, I was assured that my order had been corrected to an M&M Blast without the M&Ms. Which, I was told, would contain Oreos.
When the carhop finally brought my ice cream, I peeled back the lid to find… vanilla ice cream. No M&Ms. No Oreos.
INSERT FASTFOOD RESTAURANT ODYSSEY. Grant stops at 6 fast food restaurants on his way home.
INSERT GRANT’S ENCOUNTER WITH PENELOPE at TACO DIABLOS. HIS LAST STOP
INSERT GRANT WAITING FOR HIS FOOD. THE STORY ENDING.
As I awaited my cheese quesadilla, anticipating gooey gobs of hot, melted cheddar wrapped in the seductive sheath of a corn tortilla, an intolerable strain of music suddenly assaulted my ears through the drive-thru window. The cook must have brought a boom box in for after-hours listening. For me, it was an agonizing din, so unbearable, so wretched, so unbelievably wrong that each note struck with blunt force trauma — the uninvited clamor vomited from what’s often mistaken for a musical instrument. Namely, that oversized harmonica some people call the accordion.
I was not a fan of the rusty squeezebox. I believed there should be a special place in hell reserved for the inventor of that nightmare. It had always been my opinion that the only good accordion was one that had been backed over multiple times by a bus. To my ear, the accordion aurally depicted the final death throes of some pathetic creature caught in a wood chipper.
It’s not that I hated the instrument, per se. I just hated my life whenever I was within earshot of one.
Worse than the thumbscrew, worse than a thousand cuts of death, if the accordion had existed in the middle ages, it would have been used by the Spanish Inquisition as a medieval instrument of torture; the musical equivalent of being drawn and quartered.
The Grim Reaper himself—who back then ran a thriving business plying his trade to the mass exodus of souls rapidly reaching room temperature during bubonic plague outbreaks—would have seen the obvious life-snuffing efficiency of the accordion. Those exposed to its death rattle dropped like the swollen gunny sacks of oxygen-guzzling riff-raff that they were (now worm food), undeniably and reliably dead before they hit the cobblestone streets.
But even in modern times, a rousing rendition of Beer Barrel Polka, as played on the accordion, could still bring grown men to their knees. There was indeed something sinister about the torturously cheerful quality of accordion music: also the musical equivalent of diabetes. It was a Bob Ross painting of spring flowers in Auschwitz; it was the Dalai Lama waterboarding Himalayan tourists.
Breaking my discordant reverie, Penelope — a girl who somehow took my breath away — ebulliently emerged from the window, leaning forward with a gaze of consolation. “My apologies for the delay. We’ve been swamped tonight. But not much longer. “
“While you’re here,” I replied. “Is there any way you could turn down that music?”
“How’s that?” she said, cupping her ear toward me.
I leaned out of the car window, and with a raised voice, replied, “I said I can’t stand accordion music.”
Penelope nodded, looked back at the cook, and then slowly turned back to me, shrugging her shoulders in reply.
At that moment, the music suddenly increased in volume by half. The cook’s apparent retort to my request. It was deafening. I felt disrespected. I thought of leaving. As far as I was concerned, accordion music unleashed on unsuspecting ear drums was an act of aural terrorism. But I leaned forward again, and deep from the briny depths of my Davy Jones locker of nautical treasures, I vociferously recited, nay, bellowed my contempt at the cook:
“To the last, I grapple with thee! From hell’s heart, I stab at thee! For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!”
A couple of diners in the restaurant, their eyeballs nearly ejected from their sockets, gawked in my direction, tacos in hand, mouths agape, frozen in disbelief. Penelope, with one eyebrow raised, stood silently, appearing somewhat tentative yet amused. Then she laughed.
“You okay, captain, or should we call a whale for backup?”
I slouched in my seat, embarrassed. Perhaps my Melville obsession was excessive.
“By the way, my father plays the accordion,” she added with a playful smile. “It’s not so bad. Most people just use earplugs.”
Out of curiosity — and genuine annoyance — I craned my neck forward to glimpse the cook working in the back of the restaurant, the big zero responsible for the God awful caterwauling that blared out the window.
A young latino man stood at the grill, lightly bobbing his head to the irksome two-step of the music. Looking lean and muscular in an embroidered grease-smudged western shirt, his cowboy hat tilted forward with an air of virility, a bottle of Corona in one hand—he was the heir apparent to total badass.
What the fool didn’t realize was when coupled with the emasculating cock-a-doodle-doo of the accordion, its clunky keys and squawking bellows merrily molesting the air with a soul-crushingly sappy oom-pah-pah, the status quo of this badass downsized into something more milquetoast and effeminate, like he had pulled his underpants over the outside of his pantalones. His strength of self-reliance, gone. An Aztec warrior, now a Disney princess.
I surprisingly felt despair for the budding muchacho at the grill. Why, oh, why, did our youth throw away their lives this way? I wanted to shout, “An accordion is not an escape, it’s a trap! Just say no!”
Meanwhile, as the music droned on, and with no signs of stopping, I wondered when the fight-or-flight syndrome might kick in. When you’re stuck in line and the music is painfully abhorrent (AKA some inconsiderate pendejo is playing an accordion), I began to worry that, in an act of desperation, I might suddenly lose my cool, slam my foot on the accelerator and launch several thousand pounds of Toyota Camry, from zero-to-sixty, in the suicidally limited confines of a fast food drive-thru.
Thankfully, the cashier then arrived with my meal. Penelope, still with that inclusive smile, leaned out the window and handed me the bag. “Here’s your quesadilla, sir. Have a good one!”
I thanked her and dropped the sack in the adjacent car seat.
That first whiff of the food, however, was the harbinger of an additional problem, the musical equivalent of another fine mess. I wasn’t sure if it was the ill-advised medley of seven previous fast food stops or the nauseating wail of the accordion, but the gluttonous orgy had apparently mixed everything together into some sort of microbial casserole. In other words, the gastric upset left me feeling like there was an old license plate rusting in my gut.
The first sign of alarm came from the cashier, her huge-socketed eyes engulfed in terror. She knew from the sour expression on my face that a fast food refund was imminent. Then, with hell-bent propulsion, like the after-effect of a lighted match tossed in an open sewer, my gaping mouth stretched into a cavernous yawn, and with a heave-ho, the contents of my stomach went south, projectile style.
Gallons of pre-chewed food, bubbling like cascades of molten lava, gushed down the side of my car, across to the drive-thru window (which the cashier, in reflex, slammed shut), and splattered onto the pavement below. It was X marks the spot. Seven fast food potlucks one too many, followed by an unwanted sidewalk pizza delivery, with extra bile and spew.
Yes, unbelievably, from the bowels of my digestive sewer, and in front of the girl of my dreams, I had expelled a McYuckaroo®, the flagship product of my gastric secretions, in foamy and foul technicolor.
The girl of my dreams, however, now flashing the clichéd pallor of green around the gills, teetered as if desperate to regain her sea legs, before thrusting her window open just far enough to toss a fistful of napkins toward my car. I liked to think this was her Cato falls on his sword moment—a willingness to endure hardship for a greater cause, despite my reverse peristalsis of what now resembled partially chewed Mexican chowder, extra chunky style..
And yet, against all odds—and perhaps with a pinch of desperation, I still asked for her number. The sheer temerity of my request may have seemed one part reckless determination and two parts clueless wonder, but what did I have to lose? That the number later connected me to a local pest control company did not dampen my resolve in the slightest.
Quixote had his windmills, Ahab his whale, and I had the Acme Pest Control hotline. Perhaps after 666 more late-night trips to Taco Diablos—and barring a restraining order—I’d finally secure Penelope’s real number, the holy grail of my interminable odyssey.
At least it beats connecting the dots with roadkill on highway 95.
by 