Category Archives: Random
Ballad of the Hot Dog Man
The Hot Dog Man stands down the street from the Hobo Chiropractor, practicing his legitimate business of selling students hot dogs. Each year, students from active political alliances ply the school for healthier options, for vegetarian entrees, for clean facilities, and for a balanced meal plan. Meanwhile, the hot dog man roosts in a plastic fold-up lounge chair, hawking hot dogs for $2.00 a piece. For $3.50, you can get a deal: a hotdog, a bag of chips, and a soda.
Each morning, he arrives on the corner, his hotdog cart rattling behind his truck. Attached with a hitch, it bounces into each pothole, threatening to collapse. A picture of a hotdog displayed in bright colors on its side, the cart stands on a small raised area, the resident chiropractor crouched on the steps below. He pops open his yellow umbrella and sits in its shade. Students approach throughout the day, haggling for drinks or plastic-encased mystery meats.
I often wonder about hotdog man, whether he lives a solitary life. Does he love hotdogs or does he see this enterprise as purely business? When did he decide to open a hotdog stand near the College of Charleston, and what great racket has he tapped into now that he is selling his meat via transportable cart? Does he have a hotdog wife (Hot Dog Woman) with whom he has had little hotdog babies?
On Sunday afternoons, does he grill up delicious, fresh hotdogs and serve them to his Oscar-Meyer-obsessed relatives?
My theory is a darker one, on that can only be proved by shining a light into his childhood. In my venerable imagination, this hotdog paladin began his quest with The Hamburger Incident…
Five years old, Hot Dog Boy has grown up in Brooklyn his entire life. One day while drawing chalk dragons on the cracked sidewalk, a lunch cart rolls by. The children rush the cart for their lunches: pizza and hotdogs and hamburgers and fries. Behind this vender stands a great billboard exclaiming “Best Hamburgers East of 87th Street and West of 89th!”
This superimposed over the biggest burger he has seen in his life. A juicy patty dripping grease, the tomatoes still wet with condensation. The lettuce green and crisp. The bun steaming and slightly browned.
While Hot Dog Boy stares up at the sign, waiting to order his food, a terrible gust stirs down the street. The sign topples, the boy crushed underneath. Three hours and four hotdog venders later, they drag the boy from under the sign. Forever scarred.
Now he sells hotdogs in protest, settled into his chair under the yellow umbrella. Waiting patiently for the day to use his hotdog finesse to strike out the wicked reign of hamburgers. To one day rule the street-food world. First, hamburgers will fall, then falafels and rotten sushi, powdered crepes and single-sliced pizza, roasted nuts and gyros, kebabs and burritos, tacos and Panini. One day only the Hot Dog Man will remain.
Should You Give Birth to a Writer…
So you think your son or daughter or older brother is a writer? Is he or she exhibiting signs of seclusion, spending an inordinate amount of time reading literature, or making hieroglyphic and mysterious marks in a notepad of any kind? It is possible that a writer might have been born into your family, which can sound quite shocking at first.
Either, you’re not sure if you’ve been gifted a genius or should you rush the little scribe off to the orphanage immediately.
After all, writers’ lives are spotted with calamity, and rather he/she be a supposed orphan than you soon die of cholera and he/she become a true orphan. That’s what happens to writers’ families right? They’re always being murdered or killed in storms or dying of some Victorian-era disease.
Don’t fear. There are simple steps you can take to usher the scribbler onto glory without being inflicted by biblical plagues or suffering sudden and coincidental depression. Remember, you’re dealing with a crazy person. As in, someone who hears voice in his/her head, someone who maps out entire separate lives “for the fun of it.”
Certainly, do not take this task lightly. Writers are given to madness, bouts of emotions only word-minced poems in middle school will fix, and terrible vices ranging from alcoholism to drug abuse to Wikipedia surfing. It ain’t no easy path to hear the incessant scribbling of pen to paper, like the hand is making a bad dash for life or limb. The pendulum swings ever closer down, slicing at the knuckles as the modern-day quill moves.
Simply, allow them their crazy.
Let them scream through the house, sobbing because a character died (in the most epic way, but still).
If the door is closed and fingers whizz at the speed of antelopes, do not interrupt with trivial stories or requests to clean the
dishes. The writer is a violent creature, prone to creative paroxysms of rage when wrenched from the writing process. They may attack when called upon, caught up in the carnal need to tell stories. Seriously, blood could be spilled.
And indulge them their rants, their vast explanations. Before writers can ever make a story make sense to an audience, we must make it make sense to ourselves. Ignore us if need be, but pretend to listen like an overpaid therapist. Allow the writer to think aloud all his craziness, he’ll eventually shut up and begin writing again.
He will ask for your advice. Probably best to lie to him and tell him you don’t know diddly squat about writing or books, though your opinion might be good or bad. Writers are brash, foreign people who won’t really take your advice or criticism seriously. And if you scrutinize a character, remember that for the writer, the character is a real person and– “how dare you? She has feelings!”
But most of all, let him fail and fail again, and let him climb the grueling ladder of learning to tell stories, from the mechanics to the finer methods of sustaining suspense in a story about stationary sea crabs. Every writer fails at writing, but those that give up there don’t become writers. They become people who wish they had become writers. So encourage them no matter what drivel they produce, because eventually they’ll churn out something decent and then later on something incredible. Only with time can a person understand life and death, the only two things a book can be about.
Seriously, don’t freak out. They’ll write weird stuff, but they’ll probably end up fine unless, you know, they don’t. But a lot of people don’t end up fine, and that’s most people, so maybe they’re doing better than we thought. If you have any inclination to help them, give them your favorite book and leave it at that. The universe, generally a fan in my opinion of human success, will do the rest.
Resume For A Job You Don’t Want
Education
2005 B.A. in Art History, Phoenix University
2006 A Week of Yoga Classes
Perfected the “breathing position”
Job Experience
June 2005- August 2005 Entrepreneur
Operated and financed a local-run Lemonade Stand
- Manufactured lemonade
- Sold lemonade
- Hand-painted signs
November 2010-February 2011 Beer Brewer
Operated homemade brewery
- Manufactured Eagle Tears Brew beer, an All-American corporation
- Financed beer brewery from parents’ basement
- Did I mention it’s made of Eagle Tears?
March 2011-Present Couch Model
Volunteers at local Rent-a-Room modeling furniture
- Displays how one might look laying, sitting, sleeping, standing, or dancing on couches
- Acts out daily functions of potential couch users
- Test-runs furniture to insure safety about damage, bullet holes, wine spills, etc.
Related Experience
September 2005-October 2010 Sociological Research
Lived as “homeless” and “impoverished” as well as “unemployed” for sake of personal sociological research
- Life experience
- Educated in the “University of Harde Knocks”
- Can carve weapons from nearly any piece of trash
- Expert scavenger
March 1997 Grew Beard
First person in Freshman class of high school to grow facial hair
Talents
Burps ABC’s
- Once performed for Mrs. Harris’ first grade class during recess
Can Beat Mario World 3 in Less than a Day
- For reference, call Tommy Hulligan. He didn’t think I could do it.
Connections: Strings
I have been pondering the strings that tie us together, the things that bind us and keep us together, how we affect one another, one human to another.
We’re a lot like thumbtacks on a pegboard, each of us tied with many strings that connect us to all the other thumbtacks on the board we call life. Of course, we’re all moving, so the strings are tightening and getting loose and stretching, changing colors, length, thickness. Our relationships change as these strings do; the connections evolve over time.
And everything we do, we’re sending sound waves along the strings, pulling them and changing them. Once we change one of the strings, we change other strings, the ones that everyone we’re connected to holds. Then other strings move, shift, change because of our changes meaning we’re all affecting each other, and in different ways, we’re all connected. Somehow, we are all connected via this mass network of strings criss-crossing the globe, and with the advent of the internet, e-mail, Skyping, Facebook, we find more and more strings.
The connections may not be particularly strong, but they’re there. We are changed by all of the people we have known, seen, and heard of.
These people: we’ve met, we’ve inspired, we’ve loved, we’ve read novels by, we’ve despised, we’ve broken bread with, we’ve battled against, we’ve drank with, we’ve prayed over, we’ve bumped into on the street, we’ve taught, we’ve tripped, we’ve enlightened, we’ve made love with, we’ve fed, we’ve stared at in public but never actually spoken to, we’ve known more than we can know anyone else.
Just reading this on the outskirts of the internet, you are tying off a string. My thumbtack to yours. And maybe this is just wishful thinking, but maybe these strings keep us sane, alive. Because with the board changing so often, the pegs all moving, we could fall off, slip from our places. Fortunately, we’re tied together, part of this huge safety net.
It is the people in our lives that keep us from falling.
The Case of the Missing Roommate
Moving to college in only a few days, my future is a mystery, but right now, the biggest mystery: who will my roommate be?
When names were released by the college, I sat in a large room the morning of orientation with forty other future Cougars from the College of Charleston. They announced that room assignments had been posted, and quick as The Flash, thirty nine students whipped out IPhones to check their status, high-fiving each other for being on the same floor, comparing Facebook profile pictures of their roommates. Hour later, once I retrieved my laptop, I checked up on my roommate’s status.
Would he be a juggling circus performer? Maybe a foreign student who spoke six different languages? Maybe someone with the same literary lilt as myself?
No. All I got was “Name Undisclosed.” Which means that my future roommate did not wish to share his contact information. Which meant I will not meet him until Move-In Day, this Friday. Now, if my roommate reads this, Hello. Welcome to my blog! Even though your identity is anonymous, you will be semi-famous now, at least as famous as you can get on the Internet.
I ain’t any Sherlock, Dupin, or Marlow, but it appeared that I had a mystery on my hands. So I grabbed my dog Scooby, jumped into the Mystery Van, and… Well, really, I took to the internet.
And all of my detective skills I picked up from reading countless Batman comics proved null, so I shall just have to wait and see.
But there is something oddly romantic about the unknown, the mysterious. Surely who my roommate is will not prove as startling as the fact that the Butler killed his mistress, only really it was her nephew wearing a prosthetic Butler mask! No, I won’t act like Nancy Drew traipsing around in a plaid dress to discover the truth. The mystery remains… until this Friday.
If we’re being honest, isn’t that the entire point of life? Mystery. I was primed months ago to speak and meet this person with whom I’ll be spending about nine months of my life with. Maybe he’s a convict or a movie star’s son. A relative so some great political world leader? This mystery man is just one of the cruxes we face moving on.
We are, after all, entering college. And despite what our siblings and older friends tell us, college will never pan out exactly like we think it will. Which is good because sometimes I wonder if I will be kicked out first semester. My entire lifestyle will likely change, being just another mystery to pursue.
So just as we are eager to know what happens in the next episode of our favorite dramas, we look forward to the next episodes of our lives, always lingering on those cliff-hung “To be continued’s….”
On the Subject of Cats and Poets
I have heard poets tend to like cats as if for a wordsmith, keeping a feline companion has become a glaring cliche.
I read this perplexing article, which prompted me to respond.
I do not particularly like cats, despite the fact one has made a home out of my room. It is not so much that I own the cat, but rather, we co-inhabit the same area, a fact she too is not at all fond of. She forces her way in each night and perches on the windowsill, unblinkingly watching me sleep. Whenever I wake up in the dead of night, she stares at me intently as if daring me to close my eyes again, to let my guard down. Most nights, I suspect she is plotting her revenge for times when I have locked her outside in a rain storm. I try to exclude her, to leave her in some other, empty room, but she has claimed my bed as hers, my desk as hers, my clothes as her personal, extra-comfy throne.
However “cat people” came into being is still a mystery to me. I understand why someone might love a dog, who shows owners endless, unwarranted affection. Cats, however, disdain their owners. They are lazy and as tedious as taxes. They live to spite your efforts with a critical, demon eye. There can’t be much dignity in owning a pet who, in her eyes, owns you.
But there has been talk from Petrarch to modern day spinners that poets prefer the company of cats, as if we share their prickly self-obsession, their self-preening, egotistical ways. They do not demand respect either, but they expect it. I would certainly not allow Blake’s Tyger to lounge in my windowsill nor would I tolerate any of Poe’s black cats worming their way across my path. If one crossed the road, I would speed up to kill it before its bad luck infected me. And if I were Alice, utterly loss in the fantastical dreamland of my own adolescence, I would never act so kindly to the Cheshire Cat who seems to take great delight in confusion and disappearance.
Cats are not muses, cannot properly inspire anything but mutual distrust, especially when they swat your feet with sharp claws or when you kick them sharply in the gut. So I simply do not see why writing and cats should mix. I do not keep company with Crookshanks or Fritz or even Garfield. Jerry the Mouse might as well drop anvils on all their heads as well.
There is not much left to say on the subject, and I’m quite unsure why I brought it up in the first place. There is a common phrase, “There is more than one way to skin a cat.” And if you don’t know why someone would want to skin a cat, you obviously have never owned one.
PURE. EVIL.
Guest Blog: Tolerance (Or Lack of) On Social Media (Part 1)
{The following post was authored by Aiken High School’s valedictorian and my good friend Will Victor. He will attending Duke University next year to study Math and Computer Science. He is a juggling enthusiast, teenage philosopher, and all-around good guy. This post reflects his views on several recent topics, but mostly of the recent backlash of the topics.}
When I sign on to my Facebook, I feel as if I have stepped in to a time machine. The room rumbles, and the walls crumble. My computer disappears, and I am standing in a place I wish I would never be—“no man’s land.” Yes, I’m standing in that horrible land of barbed wire and detonated mines situated directly between the trenches of opposing armies in the onslaught of the great World Wars of the Twentieth century.
Above me fly missiles of menacing memes, and to my left fiery flowcharts flash facts as if to say, “Back-off! I’m right—you’re wrong!” I begin to ask myself, “Why am I here? All I wanted was a bit of compromise…”
I feel that this has become the territory of the modern moderate. While the left and the right retreat farther into their respective war trenches, secretly developing new weapons of cyber assertion (such as memes, flowcharts, and videos), the middle of the road becomes ever more a place of “no man’s land.”
The territory of compromise and peaceful discourse that is located exactly halfway between the right and the left has turned into a burning, exploding warzone filled with barbed-wire extremism.
Over the past six months, my Facebook mini-feed has changed drastically. What used to be stories of my friends’ families home for Christmas has been replaced by bands of liberals berating Chick-fil-a for its stance on gay marriage, and conversely, millions of requests from conservatives pestering me to “go to Chick-fil-a on August 1st to support a godly business.”
Indeed, I feel that almost every post on my Facebook has to do with someone arguing that he or she is right, and that the other group of people is certifiably insane for thinking otherwise. If one is opposed to gay marriage, then he or she is a bigotrous homophobe, and if one supports gay marriage, then he or she is a moral relativist heathen.
The thing that I find interesting in the whole situation is that no one uses facebook to actually change their views on an issue. No one compromises. No one humbles themselves. In fact, I would argue that on the overwhelming whole, the information that is shared through social media is so biased that most of it just polarizes people even further. The trenches keep getting deeper, the left moves farther left, the right farther right, and the abyss which separates the two gets so clouded with smoke from exploded word bombs that those of us who are left in the middle can’t see far enough to decide which side is winning.
{For part 2, tune in tomorrow and in the mean time, share your thoughts below.}
Sample: Anti-Chik-fil-A ad
Dog Days of South Carolina
For those who not live here in South Carolina or in the South, we experience a lot of heat in the summer. So hot a cannibal needs not to cook you when he approaches you on the street, since all of your organs have been fried, your meat browned to perfection. So hot you cannot use body spray lest you become combustive outside. So hot– well, you get the idea.
When the heat index spikes well over a hundred degrees for several days in a row, we finally feel summer arrive. Before, we enjoyed the cool upper nineties, a brief respite of solid heat for those of us like me who do not have air conditioning in our cars. On such days when I don’t go to work, we try to avoid driving. With the windows down, the wind blasting me. Every stop light is a fresh Hell to suffer through, the heat a pressing claw on your neck, drawing sweat like blood from your body.
It is not so much that there is high humidity but instead a wall of heat that passes through the atmosphere. An army of heatwave-fisted boxers punching you in the jaw again and again.
What we do on these days, we try to stay at home. Turn on fans to sit in front of with a book. We drink water, or at least in the South, sweet tea which is considered more nutritionally valuable by merit of having magical Southern powers. Yesterday, a Saturday, the movie theatres were so packed out, lines formed well onto the street, around the block. Inside waited cool salvation for the masses who are willing to shell out twelve dollars for the air conditioning– and some Pixar movie or a film about a potty-mouthed stuffed bear.
I made the mistake of going swimming at noon on Friday and suffered for it, dipping my body into a body of water that the sun had already rose to boiling temperatures. It’s so hot, Facebook friends from Maine or California complain, the temperatures there rising into the eighties. And here, the sun is a cruel fixation of summer, the indelible monument of the South, forever hovering above our heads. Wielding life and death, light and darkness, heat and exhaustion and cloudless sky.
Heat is a Southern tradition we cannot escape any more than slavery or the tendency to stretch our vowels. During deer hunting season, first time hunters smear their faces with blood; in the summer, the sun replaces blood with sweat and drenches not just our faces but our bodies. The discomfort of sweat is something you get used to, though. Even the rivulets of liquid sloshing in your armpits, perpetually streaming down our back, glistening on your chest. Sweat becomes a new skin that leaves us sticky, wet, and rancid.
It has not rained for more than three weeks, despite a tropical storm blowing near our coasts. The storms shuffled around our city, flooding Florida, sprinkling Georgia. But here, the land is dryer than Gizmo the Gremlin before he belonged to an irresponsible teenager. And each day, he hope for a downpour. Something so torrential, the pine limbs snap. Something so powerful, the buildings shake in the wind. Even if we fail to venture into the storm, we pray for the end of the heat.
Already it is hot, and it must only get hotter.
Tuesday Musing: Sprite Vanilla Review
Upon a recent visit to Firehouse Subs (at which this was my third time eating, and my third time enjoying the food), I found that they had outfitted their restaurant with one of those cool, new soda machines that spurts out hundreds of different soda. From every Fanta imaginable to every Coke ever sold, you can drink it from this machine. When I began to fill up my drink (either Dr. Pepper or Root Bear), I decided instead to venture beyond my taste bud safety boundaries.
Under the Sprite category, this enigmatic machine offers the original Sprite as well as its diet counterpart, but includes other previously unknown-to-me flavors such as cherry, strawberry, grape, peach, raspberry, orange, and VANILLA. I am very fond of Vanilla Coke so I tried Sprite Vanilla.
It tasted like straight-up vanilla extract mixed with cough syrup. The sort of taste you expect to be reminiscent of Polyjuice Potion or the like. Maybe a draught to put you into a deep slumber for years so you can enter the Matrix? I don’t know.
Do I suggest trying it?
Nope.
