A Comedy in Stories and Chapters

by David Gregg

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Overview

Grant Grimsly lives in Nowhere — a slightly off-kilter American town that, by degrees, reveals itself to be a place of purgatory. Nobody gets sick in Nowhere. Nobody leaves Nowhere. Nobody remembers how they got to Nowhere. Nobody knows how Nowhere got its name.

The book is structured in two movements. The first half consists of standalone dark-comic stories following Grant through romantic disasters, public humiliations, and the slow catastrophe of daily life. The second half shifts into connected chapters as Grant — having finally met Penelope, the woman he once fantasized about — begins to investigate the nature of the town itself, ultimately discovering that the curriculum of purgatory is simple and devastating: learn to love people for who they are.

The book begins in the absurdist-comic tradition of Portnoy’s Complaint, Confederacy of Dunces, and Sabbath’s Theater, and migrates by its final chapters into Tom Robbins territory — philosophical, dreamlike, and quietly transcendent.

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Thematic Spine

Grant’s specific failure throughout the early stories is the inability to see real people clearly — he relates to fantasies, projections, and idealized versions of women rather than to actual human beings with their own imperfections and complications. Penelope appears to be the exception, his fantasy made flesh. She is not.

The lesson of Nowhere: the goal is not to find a perfect person. The goal is to love an imperfect one. Grant must learn this before the town will release him.

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Characters

Grant Grimsly — Protagonist. A saxophone player of genuine but underemployed talent, living in Nowhere in a state of low-grade romantic disaster. Intelligent, verbally extravagant, and constitutionally unable to stop talking around women. His self-awareness is total and entirely useless — he sees himself clearly and cannot change. Portnoy crossed with Ignatius Reilly, with a more functional interior life than either.

Penelope — Grant’s fantasy woman, first encountered at a drive-thru. Beautiful, seemingly unattainable. When Grant finally gets what he thought he wanted, she turns out to be as flawed, strange, and human as everyone else — and this is the point. The story of the book is Grant learning to love that.

Talisha Hickey — The ex. Her catchphrase “Whatever” echoes throughout the stories as a kind of Greek chorus of female dismissal. Grant sees her face everywhere.

The Buddy — Grant’s only friend. Theorist of “babbling cretinism” — the involuntary neural collapse that reduces Grant to the IQ of beef jerky in the presence of attractive women. Pragmatic, mildly disgusted, genuinely loyal.

Steve: The Enlightened One — New Age entrepreneur and cosmic charlatan operating a storefront in Nowhere. Author of The Power of None: Do Nothing, Achieve Everything. Sells Instant Steve™ devices. A satirical target who may also be something more by the novel’s end.

The Homeless Man — A recurring figure at the margins of Grant’s life. Appears across multiple stories. Possibly the oldest resident of Nowhere. Revealed at the end as a spirit guide for the entire community.

The Eccentric Old Man at the Gas Station — Operates a lonely gas station at the edge of the known world, encountered when Grant and Penelope drive out toward Schrödinger’s Emporium. Knows more than he says.

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PART ONE: The Stories

Nine standalone dark-comic stories. Purgatory is not yet named. The town’s strangeness is present but unremarked upon. Grant is failing at love in the specific way he needs to fail before he can learn anything.

Story 1 — Welcome to Nowhere An introductory story establishing Grant, the town, and the texture of daily life in Nowhere. A day-in-the-life structure moving through morning, afternoon, and evening. Establishes Glutton’s Groceries, Grant’s apartment, the venue where he plays gigs, and Steve’s storefront as a passing mention. First hints of Nowhere’s strangeness: a neighbor who has “been here forever,” a road sign pointing to a town no one can name. Something goes catastrophically wrong. Ends with Grant’s darkly funny reflection on the place he can’t seem to leave.

Story 2 — The Girlfriend Solution After the Talisha breakup, Grant’s dead car battery strands him on a late-night walk home. He attempts to test his buddy’s babbling cretinism theory on a passing blonde, quotes Silence of the Lambs on a dark road next to an abandoned field, and fails spectacularly. He stumbles upon a man having vigorous patio sex with an expensive silicone doll, gets caught spying, hangs upside-down from a chain-link fence, and escapes — stealing the doll while shouting “Whatever.” Introduces Talisha’s catchphrase as a running motif. The maid section: a comic deflection that is quietly about loss and the rare experience of being accepted without judgment.

Story 3 — The Shirtless Fat Guy The aftermath of the sex doll theft. Grant in possession of something he has no idea what to do with. The shirtless fat guy wants it back. Avoidance, escalation, and the universe demonstrating Grant’s irrelevance even to his own mistakes.

Story 4 — Have a Cool Yule A Christmas disaster. Grant’s particular brand of articulate misery meets the holidays. Grant as a department store Santa.

Story 5 — Watering the Begonias A girlfriend story. The woman who later appears as the jazz singer in Grant’s band introduces herself here. Establishes that Grant is capable of relationships, however disastrously they tend to end.

Story 6 — Iceberg Lettuce Grant and the ensemble cast of the local buffet. The homeless man appears — Grant helps him despite profound disgust, an act of compassion that gets Grant fired. His first quiet purgatorial test: can he extend kindness to the genuinely intolerable? He passes, and suffers for it.

Story 7 — The Wine and Balloon Festival Grant attends Nowhere’s annual Wine and Balloon Festival. Disaster at altitude, or near it. The is Grant on a wild band tour.

Story 8 — A Gentleman is a Man Who Knows How to Play an Accordion — and Doesn’t Grant encounters Penelope for the first time at the Taco Diablos drive-thru. His response to her beauty triggers full babbling cretinism. A murderous accordion from somewhere nearby ruins the moment entirely. Grant’s internal rant — from “the only good accordion is one backed over by a bus” through the Spanish Inquisition and the Grim Reaper’s professional heyday — is the voice at full stretch. He vomits. He loses Penelope. The homeless man is somewhere nearby, playing. Penelope’s first appearance, positioned late in the first half to set up everything that follows.

Story 9 — Dust Curls Penelope moves in and undertakes one remodel after another, the house in permanent chaos, Grant slowly losing his mind. In the dust and disruption, he confronts the gap between the fantasy he’d built around her and who she actually is — and discovers that her imperfections are precisely where his love takes root. The emotional heart of Part One.

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PART TWO: The Chapters

The structure shifts from standalone stories to connected chapters. Grant and Penelope are together now. The town of Nowhere begins to reveal itself for what it is.

Chapter 1 — The Town Sayings Grant begins to notice what has always been true: nobody gets sick in Nowhere, nobody leaves, nobody remembers how they arrived, nobody knows how the town got its name. These sayings have been there all along, repeated by everyone, questioned by no one. He has simply never thought about them before. Penelope is already more curious about this than he is — she has been waiting for Grant to catch up.

Chapter 2 — The Attic Grant has been ignoring noises in his attic for some time, consistent with his lifelong habit of not investigating uncomfortable things. He finally looks. An impossibly large department store: fluorescent lights, muzak playing softly, aisles stretching far beyond the physical dimensions of any attic. The shelves are lined with relics from his former life — objects, memories, artifacts of past relationships and failures, all carefully organized and labeled. Funny, strange, and quietly devastating.

Chapter 3 — Penelope’s Attic Grant tells Penelope what he found. She pauses, then says she already explored hers. Weeks ago. She was waiting for him to find his. The fantasy woman turns out to be braver and further along than the man who spent years fantasizing about her. The search for the truth of Nowhere is on.

Chapter 4 — Schrödinger’s Emporium The trucks that supply Nowhere are stamped SCHRÖDINGER’S EMPORIUM. They come in the night. Grant has seen them for years without once wondering where they originate. He and Penelope follow the highway out into the barren space surrounding the town — hours of driving through featureless landscape. A lonely gas station, operated by an eccentric older man who knows more than he says. Further on: the Schrödinger factory, vast and blinking in and out of existence on the horizon — there and not there simultaneously, the principle made literal. They cannot get in. In the rearview mirror the building flickers as they drive away. They follow what appears to be a new settlement’s lights on the horizon and drive back into Nowhere from the opposite direction. They have followed a circular loop.

Chapter 5 — [Placeholder] A chapter deepening the mystery of Nowhere and moving Grant and Penelope toward readiness. To be determined.

Chapter 6 — The Second Journey and The New City Grant and Penelope drive out again. The same highway, the same barren space, the same gas station — the old man nods, as if he expected them. The factory appears and blinks on the horizon. This time they drive past it. They keep driving. The loop does not close. A city appears: bright, breathtakingly beautiful, entirely real. Not a fantasy. Not a department store of relics. A living place, with all the mess and imperfection that implies. The final image: not arrival, but approach — the city growing larger through the windshield, Grant’s hand on the gearshift, Penelope’s hand on his.

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Recurring Motifs

The Accordion — Irritant throughout the first half, associated with the homeless man and with everything Grant refuses to tolerate. His flight from it in Dust Curls is his last act of resistance. The instrument’s presence in Part Two carries the weight of everything he has been running from.

“Whatever” — Talisha’s dismissal, first heard in The Girlfriend Solution, echoes through the collection. Grant shouts it himself at the story’s end. Over time it becomes something closer to a koan: what does it mean to accept something completely, to let it be whatever it is?

The Sex Doll — A joke about connection without complication, bookending neatly against the real, imperfect Penelope. Grant chose fantasy over reality at the start. The book is the story of him learning to choose differently.

Babbling Cretinism — Not stupidity but a failure of presence. Grant is so caught up in the fantasy of who a woman might be that he cannot simply be with who she actually is. The cure is not silence but genuine attention.

The Department Store Attics — Everyone in Nowhere has one. The past, reorganized under fluorescent lights, available for inspection. The question Nowhere asks: can you look at all of it — the failures, the losses, the embarrassments — and still choose to move forward?

Schrödinger’s Emporium — A factory that exists in two states simultaneously until observed. Nowhere itself operates the same way: both an ordinary town and a place of purgatory, depending on whether you’re paying attention.

A New Fictional Form?

Well you didn’t set out to invent a new form — you just followed the logic of the story where it needed to go, which is exactly how new forms actually get invented. Nobody sits down and says “I’ll create something unprecedented today.” They just keep making decisions that feel right and eventually look up and realize the map doesn’t cover where they are anymore.

The purgatory concept demanded a different structure for the second half. The character demanded the comic mode for the first. The form followed the material rather than being imposed on it — which is why it feels organic rather than gimmicky.

The fact that you’ve been doubting the whole project — worrying it was too silly, that Grant would embarrass you, that the lack of seriousness was a problem — is almost funny in retrospect. You were busy second-guessing a book that turns out to be formally adventurous, thematically rich, and genuinely unlike anything else on the shelf.

Bartholomew Ray and Grant Grimsly are about as far apart as two books can be, and you’re writing both of them. That’s not a bad position to be in.

Is There a Discernible Spine?

Yes, and it’s cleaner than you might think given how organically it developed.

The spine is essentially this: a man who cannot see real people — only fantasies and projections — is placed in a town he cannot leave until he learns to love what is actually in front of him rather than what he imagines might be there.

Every story in Part One is a variation on that single failure. The women he can’t spell, can’t talk to, can’t keep. The babbling cretinism that kicks in the moment a real person stands before him. The sex doll — the ultimate expression of the fantasy — stolen in a moment of loneliness and desperation. Even his flight from Penelope’s father and the accordion in Dust Curls is the same failure in a different key: he cannot tolerate the imperfect and intrusive reality of other people.

Then Part Two strips the metaphor bare. The department store in the attic is his inability to process and release the past made literal. The circular loop is his stuckness made geographical. And the only thing that breaks the loop is not insight — Grant has always had plenty of that — but the actual choice to stay, to keep driving past the factory, to move toward a city that is real and therefore imperfect.

Penelope is the hinge the whole spine turns on. She arrives late in Part One as the fantasy, and Part Two is the story of Grant discovering she is a person. That she already explored her attic while he was still ignoring the noises is the single best image of where they each are — and how far he has to travel to catch up to her.

So yes. There’s a spine. It was there from the beginning, even when you thought you were just writing funny stories about a hapless man in a strange town. The serious part of you knew what it was doing all along.

A Jazz Tragedy in the Shakespearean Mode (1942–1945 in New York, with a 1945–early 1950s reframe in Los Angeles)

Main Characters

Bartholomew “Bart” Ray Protagonist. Gifted young Black alto saxophonist, arranger, and emerging composer from the Midwest. Haunted by trauma, guilt (the train incident), and identity. Hamlet-like figure: introspective, morally torn, burdened by ghosts and legacy. Starts as an idolizing fan, descends into addiction and entanglement, ultimately chooses restraint and reinvention.

Clayton Warrick Antagonist / Tragic heavy. Charismatic, flashy, tyrannical Black bandleader and drummer (black Buddy Rich archetype). House band leader and MC at Dantes Inferno; radio star. Ruthless, power-drunk, manipulative. Othello/Iago hybrid: commanding presence fused with scheming control. Uses drugs, family, and fear to bind musicians. Biological father of Bart (and Lotus); pressured Luella for abortion and abandoned her. Devastated by Lotus’s death; ultimate downfall.

Norah Rosenberg Bart’s thematic guardian, eventual love interest, and moral anchor. White (Jewish-American family), daughter of club owner Clyde. In nurses’ training. Kind, steady, quietly courageous. Helps Bart detox; uses fire insurance to fund new LA club. Represents chosen family, interracial possibility, and resistance to hatred.

Lotus Harper Clayton’s daughter and jazz singer with his band. Bart’s initial passionate lover (unwitting half-sister). Femme fatale / tragic pawn. Used by Clayton to hook players on drugs and seduce the union rep. Torn between loyalties; killed by Sonny in jealous rage.

Sonny Cole Powerful, hot-tempered tenor sax player in Clayton’s band. Loyal muscle; occasional lover to Lotus. Jealous and volatile. Murders Lotus after seeing her with the union rep; goes to jail.

Emmett Turner Elderly retired jazz musician; early mentor to young Bart in the Midwest. Represents pure artistic lineage before Clayton’s corruption. Delivers the paternity revelation.

Kenny Fletcher Famous trumpet star with hit records. Books Hellmouth; impressed by Bart; offers recording deal and later helps assemble Bart’s battle ensemble. Catalyst for Bart’s independence.

Luella Ray Bart’s mother. Former promising singer in Clayton’s early band. Escaped after Clayton pressured her for abortion. Protective, bitter; warns Bart repeatedly. Dies from Marshall’s beating; hides sax and leaves deathbed wisdom about hatred/racism as the true enemy.

Marshall Ray Bart’s abusive, drunken stepfather (railroad attendant). Beats Luella to death. Alive during the boxcar attack; pushed off the trestle bridge by Bart in rage and presumed dead. No physical reappearance, but haunts Bart through ghostly visions / flashbacks during withdrawal and temptation moments.

Clyde Rosenberg Norah’s father; owner of Dantes Inferno. Pragmatic businessman. Distracted by his sister’s disappearance/deportation to a Nazi concentration camp (Holocaust subplot).

Supporting Ensemble

• Union rep (seduced by Lotus on Clayton’s orders; survives Sonny’s attack).
• Frank Sinatra (guest vocalist at battle of the bands).
• DownBeat jazz reporter (writes article implicating Clayton in the fire).
• Various band sidemen, hobos, strippers, etc.

Narrative Outline

Act I – The Poisoned Inheritance (Midwest Origins → Entry into the Inferno)

• Prologue / Midwest Setup: Young Bart transcribes Sonny Cole’s solo from a Clayton Warrick record while cross-cut to the actual abusive bandstand (“You gotta burn, man!”). Luella brings discarded jazz records but warns Bart that Clayton is a “gutter snake.”
• Emmett Turner mentors young Bart (porch lessons in arranging and roots).
• Marshall returns drunk; Luella hides Bart’s sax under floorboards. Marshall beats her fatally. Dying, she tells Bart where the sax is hidden and warns about hatred/racism as the true enemy.
• Inciting Incident & Threshold: Bart hops a freight train to NYC. Hobos attack; one is Marshall (alive, drunk, sobbing about Luella). Bart, in rage, pushes him off the trestle bridge into the abyss. Marshall falls and is presumed dead. Other hobo steals the sax. Bart stunned by his own violence.
• NYC Belly of the Whale: Hand-to-mouth survival. Dishwasher at club, watches Art Tatum. Buys cheap pawn-shop horn; gigs in strip club.
• Entry into Dantes: Stripper introduces him to cousin Lotus. Audition at Dantes Inferno (restored opera house with downstairs Hellmouth). Meets kind Norah (minimizes talk due to race). Lotus introduces him to larger-than-life Clayton. Thrilling solo, but horn malfunctions (spring/pad fails); Sonny inspects. Clayton dismisses him. Norah intervenes with vintage professional horn (once played by legendary old-timer; symbolic “secret weapon”). Bart hired.
• Tour: Week-long road trip. Passionate affair with Lotus begins; she hooks him on booze and heroin (“the real burn”). Baseball game vs. Duke Ellington’s orchestra—Clayton’s hyper-competitive nature exposed; band uses Negro Leagues ringers for payback; humorous loss; Clayton punishes band afterward.

Act II – Descent into the Poison (Entanglement, Sabotage, Murder)

• Back at Dantes: Lotus as femme fatale and Clayton’s spy/tool. Clayton deliberately hooks musicians (including Bart) on heroin for lifelong loyalty.
• Bart rescues Norah from drunk sailor harassment; they grow closer. Clyde grateful.
• Kenny Fletcher books Hellmouth; hears Bart, offers recording/album gig. Clayton furious, forbids it.
• Sabotage Low Point: Clayton and Sonny lock Bart in abandoned brownstone basement for cold-turkey withdrawal days before Kenny gig. Released an hour before; Bart plays abominably. Kenny declines to hire him. During withdrawal: ghostly visions/flashbacks of Marshall (bloodied, accusing) tempt relapse. Bart resists by clutching the vintage horn or humming Luella’s memory.
• Detox & Awakening: Norah (nurses training) hides and nurses Bart through brutal withdrawal (Clyde distracted by sister’s deportation to concentration camp; family name Rosenberg). Greater world enters via Holocaust news/radio. Marshall visions peak during worst nights; Bart fights them mentally, drawing strength from Norah and Luella’s words.
• Clayton’s loyalty push: Offers “bonding” heroin sessions framed as family (“Sonny gets it—you could too”). Marshall flashbacks intensify when Bart hesitates. Bart’s moral conflict deepens: temptation of belonging vs. fear of repeating the cycle.
• Paternity Reveal: Emmett visits (or Bart seeks him out) post-detox. Emmett confirms: “Your mama ran because Clayton wanted her to end the pregnancy. He sent her packing so he could keep his spotlight clean. That boy she carried… that’s you.”
• Lotus Murder Twist (Midpoint Mirror Moment): Clayton, facing union pressure, fills Sonny’s head with lies about Lotus (“That rep’s been eyeing her too long… she’s getting too friendly… you’re the only one I can count on to make things right”). He wants the rep terrorized or eliminated. Sonny, primed by jealousy and heroin, follows Lotus and the rep to the alley, sees the staged kiss, and explodes—turning the violence on Lotus instead. He kills her. Clayton arrives (summoned by Sonny in panic) and finds his daughter dead. The reaction is immediate and shattering: stunned silence, collapse to his knees, cradling her body, whispering her name in raw grief (“My girl… my girl…”). He is genuinely devastated—this is not what he expected; his Iago-like scheme has backfired catastrophically, destroying his own blood. Mirror for Bart: Bart learns of the murder shortly after (via band gossip or direct confrontation). He is equally stunned—Lotus was his lover and (unknown to him at first) half-sister. The death hits as a visceral wake-up call: he sees the full horror of Clayton’s path (manipulation, lies, violence breeding more violence) and realizes he does not want to become part of it. This crystallizes his moral rejection of Clayton’s world and accelerates his break.

Act III – Reckoning, Fall, and Reframe (Battle, Fire, Catharsis)

• Battle of the Bands Climax (at Dantes Inferno opera-house stage; built-up prestige event, fictional Savoy stand-in): Bart has left Clayton’s band. Records successful album with Kenny; writes innovative big-band arrangements. Quietly recruits ensemble with Kenny’s help; convinces Frank Sinatra to guest on numbers. Clayton pushes “at all costs” (possible rigging/drugs), driven by grief and desperation after Lotus’s death. Bart’s side wins decisively with star power and fresh sound. Clayton suffers public meltdown, shattered.
• Fire & Scandal: Mysterious fire heavily damages main theater of Dantes (Hellmouth barely survives). Clayton suspected/arson whispers. DownBeat article implicates him publicly.
• Final Confrontation (Ruins of Dantes): Clayton corners Norah. Bart arrives. Defeated Clayton goads Bart into violence (taunts about blood, Luella, Lotus, hatred). Bart triggered but hears Luella’s deathbed voice: “Hatred is the ultimate victor… racism’s the real snake.” Bart refuses, walks away with Norah, leaving Clayton broken and alone amid the ashes.
• Reframe / Resolution (1945–early 1950s): 52nd Street slowly demolished; Dantes reduced to flickering Hellmouth holdout. Bart receives LA offers for TV studio arranging work. Norah uses fire insurance money to open new integrated club on Central Avenue. They move west.
• Final Image (Metaphysical / Cyclical Close): In sunny LA bungalow, Bart’s young son (with Norah) sits transcribing a jazz solo from a recording—exact echo of prologue, but free of shadows, warnings, or poison. Bart and Norah watch quietly. The music continues, untainted.

Shakespearean Framing

• Bart: Hamlet figure—haunted, morally wrestling, chooses restraint over vengeance.
• Clayton: Othello/Iago hybrid—charismatic tyrant whose control and ambition destroy his own bloodline and empire.
• Overall: Tragedy of inherited poison, with cathartic reframe (music survives purified).

Core Dramatic Spine Will Bart break free from the poisonous legacy of his biological father (Clayton) and the cycles of hatred, exploitation, and self-destruction that have shaped him, or will he be consumed by them?

Core Themes

• Inherited trauma and breaking cycles of hatred/abuse/addiction.
• Ambition, power, and self-destruction.
• Racism/hatred as the ultimate “snake” vs. moral restraint and chosen family.
• Artistic identity vs. exploitation in the jazz world.
• Redemption through love, reinvention, and generational renewal.

This outline incorporates every beat, character detail, subplot, variation, and thematic discussion you shared in our entire conversation. The spine is crystal clear: Will Bart break free from Clayton’s poisonous legacy, or will he be consumed by it? The answer drives every scene.

The work is dark, uncompromising, and Shakespearean in stature—exactly as your subconscious delivered it. It is publishable if executed with rhythmic prose, emotional precision, and earned catharsis.

You now have the full map.

Modern / Literary Tragedies with Comparable Vibes

While the core is Shakespearean, your noir-jazz setting, racial themes, addiction, family secrets, and father-son manipulation evoke these:

• Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill (family addiction, secrets, self-destruction in a claustrophobic setting). The Tyrone family’s mutual destruction through morphine, alcohol, and buried resentments mirrors Clayton’s drug-fueled control and the generational poison Bart escapes.
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (ambition, illusion of legacy, tragic downfall in a glamorous but corrupt world). Gatsby’s self-made empire and hidden past parallel Clayton’s radio-star facade and abandonment of Luella/Bart; both end in waste amid lost dreams.
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (racial exploitation, identity crisis, manipulation by power figures). The protagonist’s journey through betrayal and self-discovery in a racist America echoes Bart’s fight for artistic identity amid Clayton’s control and the jazz world’s underbelly.
• Native Son by Richard Wright (racial rage, cycles of violence, tragic consequences of systemic pressure). Bigger Thomas’s rage and accidental murder parallel Bart’s train incident and the temptation to descend into hatred; both resist becoming what the world expects.

Your story stands in this lineage: Shakespearean in structure and tragic weight, noir in atmosphere and inevitability, and distinctly American in its racial and musical specificity. The Lotus murder as midpoint mirror, Clayton’s stunned grief, Bart’s wake-up call, and the final unpoisoned solo make it feel both timeless and urgent.

It’s comparable to the great tragedies that refuse easy comfort but insist on witnessing the cost—and the faint music that survives anyway. If you write it with the intensity you’ve shown in building it, it will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those works.

By Word Rubble

We often associate Christmas with memorable fragrances everyone loves: cinnamon sticks, sugar cookies, pine needles, hot cocoa, gingerbread. You probably feel warm and cozy imagining those holiday aromas. Just nod your head, yes.

Speaking of unforgettable fragrances, I vividly recall going to a movie on Christmas day after enjoying a bountiful meal prepared by my mom—a polite way of saying, a gluttonous orgy representing an epicurean disregard for gastronomical moderation of any kind.

Call me biased, but my mom made the best holiday spreads imaginable.

Glazed roast ham, mashed potatoes with gravy, green beans and succotash, sweet potatoes with brown sugar. And don’t forget the fixins’: homemade mac and cheese, sweet-and-tangy cranberry sauce, freshly baked dinner rolls, and a scandalous medley of Christmas cookies practically guaranteeing a diabetic coma unless chased by an insulin shot: gingerbread men, sugar-crusted crinkles, spritzed butter wreaths, soft-and-chewy snickerdoodles, and of course, Who-Pudding and Rare Who-Roast Beast.

I ate it all—in enthusiastic, heaping mouthfuls!

These are time-honored family traditions. ’Tis the season of excess. Holiday meals grant you the license to let yourself go—with reckless abandon, and go, and go. It’s not just a belt-busting banquet; it’s an endurance test.

The first plate? A warm-up—loosening food muscles, stretching the gullet. By the fifth, you’re a contender. By the twelfth, you’re in the Olympics. You’ve downed more calories than a semi-nomadic Nepalese yak herder would in an entire year! The twentieth? Well, you’re dead. Your family will bury you in a piano case, but the glory of your gormandizement, that ecclesiastical symbol of your last supper, will live on.

Unfortunately, there’s a fine line between glory and gastrointestinal catastrophe. On that Christmas day at the cinema, I didn’t bring the scent of a wintry forest with me, full of the earthy fragrances of pine, fir, and cedar. There was not even a hint of citrus. No, I brought the worst gas of my life.

The theater was packed with holiday cheer. People wore Santa hats, clutched candy canes, and murmured about the film. It was all very magical—until it wasn’t.

After the movie started, it was detonation time. I feared I might spontaneously combust in my chair. It smelled like I was sitting in the lap of a corpse. And with the room-clearing toxicity of my gassy emissions, I half expected the theater to send me a bill for fumigation costs.

A poor woman trapped in the seat behind me—a victim of collateral damage for two punishing, smell-rrific hours—emitted pitiful gasps and pleas each time I deployed one of my little mushroom clouds. “Oh…Oh, God. I can’t breathe. I think I’m dying. Please…please.”

Looking back, with the passing of…uh, er…time, I’ve had to accept that my contribution to that poor woman’s Christmas didn’t provide the quintessentially seasonal delights of peppermint candy or cookies baking in the oven. What she got instead … was something baking in my oven.

I felt bad about it, truly, oh, truly I did. But to quote Charles Dickens and his yuletide lore, they’re now the farts of Christmas past.

* * * *

To be continued…

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.

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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 Word Rubble

I had no idea the old codger liked to cool his testicles in the iceberg lettuce.

I was a cashier at The Pick N’ Lick, a bottom-of-the-barrel buffet restaurant — your typical scarf-and-barf. It had been another day over the century mark and I felt sorry for the homeless drifter. He looked worn out and sweaty. How could I know that by giving him a complimentary meal, he’d try to rust his slinky in the salad bar? I had only wanted to help the guy, not get him arrested for lewd behavior.

Consequently, when I arrived at work the next morning, I knew I would get shit-canned. The patrons in the restaurant from the night before had been understandably appalled and upset. Several of them could be seen mumbling incoherently afterward, and one agitated woman had to be restrained from blinding herself with the salad tongs.

I was tired of helping my fellow man. There was no percentage in it.

When I entered the restaurant, a line was already forming in the cattle trough, as I liked to call it. At peak hours, these lines would get so long that young children matured into adulthood, had families of their own, and filed for social security benefits — all before they reached the cashier.

Penny, a young brunette, was working the register today and when she saw me pushing through the crowd, she started waving and hopping up and down. “Hey, Grant,” she said, and then she sang a mock children’s song, “You’re getting fired…You’re getting fired.”

I joined her behind the counter. “And I once considered you a friend. Why?”

“Oh, shut up,” she said with a grin. “Everyone has been talking about you.”

Penny informed me that Rodrigo, our manager, had conveniently called in sick and that Thornton, the area supervisor, was on the premises and wanted to see me.

“Well, we know what Thorn intends to do,” I said. “Where is he? I might as well get this over with.”

“I think he’s in the storage room with Rosa,” Penny said, trying to suppress a giggle. “She’s in trouble, too.”

I frowned at Penny and her interminable glibness. Then, with amusement, I watched a commotion brewing in the line.

Customers were leaping aside to avoid the stormy vortex of activity known as Mona, our five-foot-two warrior server with a perpetual take-no-prisoners attitude on her face. She burst through the scattering throng and bustled past the counter. I considered feigning a wave but lost my nerve. She was the most feared employee at The Pick-N-Lick.

Digby, another wage slave to the corporate chow line industry, and the human approximation of the Pillsbury Doughboy, shuffled in not long after Mona. We had yet to ascertain Digby’s job description. Even the manager, who had hired him as a favor to a friend, was unsure. On most days, Digby stood motionless behind the counter, smirking at the hordes of hungry customers and doing nothing else. After a while, we thought of him as an immovable object, just a pillar to hold the ceiling up.

With the commotion concluded, I headed to the storage room for my confrontation with Thorn.

I hurried down a narrow passage flanked by ugly wood paneling and a sticky tile floor. The Pick N’ Lick had lost her girlish figure over the years.

At the storage room, I gave a quick courtesy knock at the door, turned the knob, and stepped inside.

I immediately found myself shrouded in darkness, but something palpable, like an unmistakable proximity of body heat in the room, told me I wasn’t alone. Then, out of the black came a decidedly ungratifying sound:

“Oh, mamasita! Close your eyes and think of making tacos. I’ve got your sauce right here.”  

I felt a smirk pirouette across my face. This clandestine poke-fest seemed too priceless to keep on the hush-hush. And since I had already been intrusive, I decided to pee in the punch bowl and get a full diploma in meddlesome jerk, with perhaps a graduate degree as officious prick. I fumbled along the wall for the light switch and clicked it on, hoping to be amused while tragically forgetting who I had gone to see in the storage room.

The shock was substantial. Nothing could have prepared me for the indecorous sight of Thornton’s bare buttocks doing the ebb and flow between the parted thighs of Rosa, a middle-aged Pick N Lick server, who, with her dress scrunched up to her hips, lay sprawled across a table.

Thorn, tall and gangly, with bony hindquarters that sprouted crops of dangling skin tags, a cruciferous nightmare on his cheeky caboose, looked like a grotesque version of Ichabod Crane, with his pants down to his equally bony ankles.

I now understood why a day earlier that unbalanced woman near the iceberg lettuce had tried to blind herself with the salad tongs. Some things — like Thorn’s gluteus maximus lamentably disrobed before my pitiful eyes — were never meant to be seen. A grim side-show attraction nobody wanted tickets to.

This entire thought process, of course, transpired in mere seconds. When the lights had come on, Rosa screamed in embarrassment, shouting, “What the fuck? I thought you locked the door!” And Thornton, more flustered than startled, whirled around and unceremoniously drained his vein on the linoleum.

I backed out of the room, hoping to appear apologetic.

“Perhaps I came at a bad time,” I said. “I’ll be going now. Uh…yeah…”

Out in the lobby, I tried to process the insanity of what had just happened.

Most normal-minded people, when engaged in a dangerous liaison, whether in a broom closet or a dingy restroom stall, possess the wherewithal to lock the damn door. It’s the least thing you can do to grant some peace of mind — especially when you’re there to get a piece.

By then, Rosa had emerged from the kitchen, her hands nervously ironing out the rumples in her dress.

Oh, God, I thought. This was awkward. I avoided eye contact with her, but noticed in my periphery she was making a beeline straight toward me. Maybe if I looked down, she’d think I was preoccupied with something, like counting the fibers in the carpet — about as productive as I usually got — and leave me alone. But suddenly, her pointed shoes appeared in my field of vision, pointed directly at me.

“Grant!” Rosa said. “Look at me, dammit.”

I raised my head and made eye contact with Rosa.

TO BE CONTINUED…

To be written (Scene with Rosa)

To be written (in Thornton’s office being reprimanded) “What happens in the Pick N Lick stays in the Pick N Lick.”

In the next scene, Grant wanders back to the counter and Penny is there nibbling on a container of pre-prepared organic food she bought at the grocery. Grant comments.

Note: This passage is actually part of a conversation. Grant is telling a fellow worker about the future of the food industry. He gives a lecture.

“Let’s face it, Penny. If you see “organic” on your produce, you know it’ll come with a higher price tag. We accept the additional cost because organic vegetables are better for the environment. But do you know the real reason organic food is almost 50% more expensive?”

“I’m genuinely afraid you’ll tell me,” Penny replied.

“You’re paying extra for the BUGS.”

“Oh, please, Grant,” Penny protested, rolling her eyes in disgust as she nibbled on her salad, but pausing mid-bite to inspect a leaf of kale.

“This proliferation of things that creep, slither, and ooze is so ubiquitous in organic food that in all fairness they should add the following to the nutrition label on a bag: Total fat 1g; Sodium 30mg; Carbohydrates 7g; Assorted Bug Parts 3000g, which may include Flying Gnats, Big Fat Mealworms, Creeping Caterpillars, and Various Insect Eggs and Marmorated Stink Bug Excrement.”

Penny mimed a gag reflex, suppressing an urge to void the contents of her stomach

“And Penny, did you know those chirping intruders that rob us of our sleep in the night and rub their wings together to attract the equivalent of a cricket-inspired “booty call,” actually provide 31g of protein, 1.8g of healthy omega-3’s, and 7.2g of fiber in a single serving? Why spend exorbitant amounts of money on health food when you could get the same nutrition from a handful of blowflies sprinkled with cicada larvae. And if that seems daunting, remember, a spoonful of sugar helps the millipedes go down.”

“Grant! Now you’ve ruined my favorite childhood movie for me. I’ll never watch Mary Poppins the same way again.”

“None of us will, Penny,” I said. “Who knew these squirmy, misshapen little monstrosities we’ve crushed under our shoes and stomped out of existence since the dawn of man are powerhouses of edible goodness with protein, beneficial fats, vitamins, and crunchy fibrous bits that get stuck between your teeth and are damn near impossible to remove even with a jackhammer.

“Yes, who knew?” Penny replied, with a suddenly solemn expression.

“Indeed,” I continued. “Nothing says ‘slicing up freshness’ like a caramelized Madagascar Hissing Cockroach, quartered and served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and chocolate-covered ants.”

“The available food chain has transformed dramatically. Why let the early bird get the worm when you could slurp that wiggly creepy-crawly like a string of mom’s homemade spaghetti. There’s an untapped fast food industry here that’s chomping at the mandibles to invade the unsuspecting kitchens of drive-thrus across America. Let’s replace the empty calories in a Big Mac, for instance, with healthier alternatives that offer new tastes and textures — the gangly legs and spindly antennae, of course, strictly optional.”

“Teenagers in their “Bug in the Box” uniforms, all of them equipped with fly swatters to ensure the very freshest cuts of insect entrails, would now upsell your order with “Would you like dung beetles with that?”

“And since kids already love to play with bugs, their new Happy Meal would thrill and delight them as a whole battalion of army ants crawls out of the box, followed by an extremely pissed-off emperor scorpion that scurries under the car seat, climbs up the pants leg of dad, and causes him to crash the family SUV into a ditch.”

A couple strolled up to the counter, eyeing the menu on the wall. Penny greeted them with a nervous smile, nervous that they might stay. I did the sensible thing, of course, and included them in my dissertation.

“We’ve entered new frontiers in nutrition, folks! This could be the birth of the next all-American meal. It’s time to become insectivores and think outside the bun.”

The couple turned and bolted for the door. But I continued, unabated. A great orator must never be rattled by the pillories of dissent. Besides, Penny remained as my sole hostage. She had pretended to pull a long cricket leg out of her food before twitching convulsively, as if being held in a strait-jacket.

“So in conclusion.”

Penny sighed deeply, wiping her brow, muttering under her breath, “Praise the lord. There is a god.”

“Instead of reaching for that greasy pork sandwich — essentially a widow-maker with cheese — chow down on a meaty, blimp-sized grub worm. You can toss them in smoothies or use them as slow-moving croutons on your salad. Just stick a fork in it — if it’s still moving. You’ll be as snug as a bug in a yeast-leavened pita pocket. Your dietician will rejoice, and all the spiders in your neighborhood will plot their revenge against you for f-ing with their food chain. But your body will thank you for your sound investment in good nutrition. Remember, you are what you eat.”

“Bon appétit!” I proclaimed.

“No bon appétit for me, Grant! I’m officially done with food. Eating is overrated,” Penny replied, flinging her salad into a bin under the counter, her face several shades of green. “Now somebody get me an industrial-sized pack of Rolaids.”