No mayo for me, thanks [woof]

I put on my blue fuzzy bathrobe as the LED lights on the electric clock read 5:30 a.m. East Coast time. My body thinks it’s back in California; subtract three hours and my cerebral cortex says it’s the middle of the night. I can’t sleep.

My mother is awake, preparing for the day. I stumble into the brightly lit kitchen, blinking. The dog is here. He’s a blonde Labrador retriever named T.J. His full name is Tigger Junior, if you want to be formal about it. He’s a fat-ass dog, about twenty pounds overweight. His vast dog posterior blubbers wobbily from side to side if you gently push it with your tube-sock foot, and he will loll up at you, drooling, sainting you within his canine religion.

Mom is making four sandwiches, two cheese, two turkey. “H’maam,” I say, blinking. My head is spinning.

Mom says, “Good morning, you didn’t have to get up.”

“What are you making all those sandwiches for?”

“Well, two are for me, and two are for the dog.”

“Which two are for the dog?”

“The cheese sandwiches.”

Om mane padme om, om mane padme om. I cannot comprehend, for I am washed in waves of jet lag. A bastion has been crossed, a river divided: my mother now makes sandwiches for the dog. Shantih shantih shantih.

Talk with your doctor or pharmacist

I didn’t take the blue diamond pill. I palmed it and took it home.

Being the ever wise and analytical one, I looked it up on-line first. Side effects include headache and facial flushing. Fine, this sounds like my normal morning routine.

The Internet also suggested that you buy 100 mg doses, cut them in half, and have two 50 mg doses. Hey, I’m frugal. I got a small serrated knife out of the kitchen drawer, put the pill on a small plate, and sawed away at the pill. Now I have two pill halves and a little pill dust.

I ate one half of the pill and licked the pill dust for good measure. I then sat down quietly beside my wife on the couch.

Five minutes, fifteen minutes, thirty minutes passed. My wife asked, “Are you feeling anything?”

“My nose itches,” I said.

I got hungry, so I made a sandwich. I then ate the sandwich. I then returned to the couch, where I previously sat.

I was expecting some sort of diabolical sign, perhaps some sort of manic ringing in my liver or the sudden desperate need for orange juice or something, but as far as I could tell this wasn’t happening. We continued to watch Queer Eye For the Straight Guy peaceably.

Finally I said, “Perhaps it’s not working.”

Finally she said, “Perhaps let’s go to bed.”

And we went to bed. At this point, sex broke out.

And I have to inform you that, while it was good sex, it wasn’t particularly acrobatic or abnormal in any specific or mentionable way. “It was good sex,” my wife informed me, “but, it was not, in any way, Viagrific.”

Now, based on the type and amount of unsolicited commercial e-mail I get, I am guessing there are about four hundred million flaccid guys in the US who need to get a little blue diamond pill to straighten things out.

I am, apparently, not one of those guys.

Hell, I dunno. Perhaps I should have taken the whole blue pill.

Now the first thing you know, old Jeb’s a millionaire

Establishing shot: the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. The high-speed, glass-walled elevator rockets upward, bearing a square-jawed businessman (me) and my amiable Japanese friend and boss, Nozawa. As the elevator shoots past the sixth floor, we accelerate to thirty feet per second, to two hundred and fifty feet above the glass ceiling. Nozawa turns around, sees the world spin away from him, and utters a single syllable: “Oh–”

As we leave the elevator on the twenty-fifth floor, he confides, “Frankly talking, I don’t like height.”

In my room, with the curtains open. The LA foothills, burning red and gold on the horizon behind the skyscrapers. I imagined swimming pools and movie stars, and thought of Heather, somewhere on the skyline. I called her on the cell. She’s moving into her apartment; she recently bought four hundred dollars’ worth of groceries, only to find the gas hasn’t been turned on, so she can’t cook any food. “We’re having fish tacos,” she said. “I had kind of a breakdown from moving all my stuff, but I’m better now. Over the past hour and a half, I’ve assembled a lamp,” she said. “I’m very proud of myself.”

I had dinner with Nozawa at the steak house at the top of the Bonaventure. We talked about our families. “My father was born in 1930,” he said. “He was eleven during the World War Second.” I looked over a couple tables and saw a middle-aged academic fellow tapping on a laptop. I recognized the software he was using. He was writing a teleplay.

Nozawa and I checked out of the Bonaventure and visited several potential customers: game publishers, producers, and assorted rock stars. The LA fog burned off early in the afternoon, so I pointed at our rented Mustang and told Nozawa, “I have an idea.” I took the convertible top down and drove him down 405 to San Juan Capistrano. California put on her best urban face for us, with palm trees and golden hills and blue skies and open carpool lanes. Nozawa smiled the entire time. Toward the end of the trip, he announced happily, “I have never ridden a car like this before.”

There are some incredibly beautiful people down here. In San Francisco, video game developers are all staffed by standard-issue geeks, dressed in blue jeans and freebie pre-printed T-shirts. In Los Angeles there is a very high percentage of day-job actresses working as HR people and receptionists and the like in game development companies. The rules of Mendelian inheritance cannot permit so many blonde people to exist in such a diverse population.

Flight back, 8:00 pm tonight. The plane was nearly empty. I guess people remembered where they were two years ago before deciding not to buy tickets today.

The monkey chased the weasel

About a year ago I applied for work at Leapfrog, a maker of children’s electronic toys. I and about 400 other overqualified candidates were shoehorned into a tiny conference room for a group interview. At that time I was interviewing for a composer position, so they told me to arrange “Pop Goes the Weasel” into four voices for a general MIDI instrument. I ended up working elsewhere but I ended up writing the best arrangement you’ve ever heard of Pop Goes the Weasel. Twelve kilobytes, baby!

Gratuitous Arab abuse

In times of political and social upheaval, through generations of whitebread Americans, there’s one surefire way for movie companies to make money: stereotype racial minorities into “bad people” and “good people.” Since I’m too busy playing Devil May Cry 2 to finish my movie script treatment, I present this script for a movie trailer. Check it out, Warner; check it out, Sony. In this political climate, it’s guaranteed to make you a hundred million domestic.

Won’t guarantee the overseas market though.

Bouncing and behaving

My wife has discovered her hair. For fourteen years, by Amanda’s own admission, she’s maintained the same hair style — long, straight, with a subtle natural wave, down to the middle of her back. She frequently receives compliments on how pretty it is. Amanda goes to get a haircut, usually at Supercuts, every four to six months. Then, two weeks ago, we had the Conversation:

“Well, sweetie, I do like your hair very much, but it is a tad long.”

“Yes, perhaps I do need a trim. I’ll have an inch or two taken off.”

“Actually, sweetie, it’s just that your hair has gotten to a length that it’s not very flattering to you –”

“I’m not willing to spend thirty minutes in the morning making myself look the part of the well-maintained chick. It’s just not worth it. I want to shower in the morning and go to work. Can you not accept that?”

“You’re misunderstanding me. All I’m saying is that your hair is a tad long –”

Amanda and I really don’t disagree very often, but this somehow escalated into an Issue. She refused to even consider a hairstyle which made her invest more than a few minutes in the morning to maintain, and she thought that I was demanding such a hairstyle.

Then I sent her to Dee Morrissey at Studio Nove. Dee is the hairdresser in residence at the Hillbarn. She tweaked my boring shit-brown locks into the racy curls of the Undead Hot Lover from Hell when I played Dracula there. And she tweaked out Tiffany Cherevko’s straight blonde tresses into wild, elegant twists of gold. Dee’s definitely your hair connection.

Amanda came back, looking a bit chastised, with a smooth and fashionable straight cut, correctly layered. Dee had decided to curl her hair a bit at the front with a curling iron. Amanda cautioned me: “It’ll never look like this again. I’ll never invest that much time to make it look like this again.”

Then something happened. My wife, somehow, jumped on the Hair Bandwagon. That weekend, she went right out and bought hot curlers, conditioner, de-frizzer, de-bouncer, some bouncer in case the de-bouncer de-bounces too much, and a funky super professional hairspray.

Before we partied on Saturday night, she spent half an hour in the bathroom straightening her hair — she came out looking slick and lovely.

And last night, she spent an hour of quality time with her hair in curlers. When she pulled them out, in her white loose tank top and bare midriff, I flashed back to being seven years old and watching Valerie Bertinelli on “One Day At A Time.”

She’s my wife, you know. I don’t really give a shit whether her hair is long or short or straight or curlicued whatever the hell she does with it. I love her. She is the one.

But, you see, there’s this little thing. When I was seven years old, I fell in love with Valerie Bertinelli.

Office Bar karaoke night

What kind of man doesn’t want sex?

Picture this: you drive to your typical B-grade karaoke dive, and as you stride in the door you’re surrounded by your good friends. They’re actors and actresses. These actors are partying with you on the Saturday night of a three-day weekend. They know you well and you know them well. There are high-fives and deep hugs. The red wine is cheap and plentiful; someone throws down a credit card for a round of drinks, and the bottles and glasses go around and around.

Someone pulls out a bottle of blue diamond pills. “You can get ’em on-line without a prescription,” he screams happily into your ear as he presses one into your sweating palm. The music is hard and loud as people are becoming brave enough to take over the microphone for their own karaoke faves.

And there are, my friend, women.

These women are actresses; they take care of their bodies, they know how to smile, and tell jokes, and laugh, and dance. When one redhead sidles to the bar, there is an instant of body contact between you two that makes you wonder just how many Mai-Tais she’s had — or whether she might be completely sober. And as you watch the women dance they begin to hold one another. It starts as a joke — my, we’re behaving in a downright lesbian fashion, how novel! — and then it changes into something else, something darker, when they realize that the Men are watching them very closely. Now there’s another group of two, grinding and laughing loudly in the center of the floor; the men whistle appreciatively. Now the men do an improvised karaoke number; their shirts come off as they gyrate and sweat. The women scream happily, ironically, for the instant choreography of the drunken men, and the subwoofer pounds the beat as you dance, kick kick kick, and the women begin to gyrate.

Here I interject:

Something is going to give, my friend. Irony and cool detachment will fail. Too much estrogen in the air, too many chemicals in the blood, too many tens of thousands of years of human evolution overdriving your cerebral cortex.

You are going to have to make a choice.

Let us proceed.

A woman sidles to you, sweat running from her bare shoulders. And her hand touches her moist throat and her eyes make polite contact with yours, and then they make impolite contact, and then the unspoken note hangs in the air, the fundamental frequency of the human race, implacable, unstoppable: touch me, kiss me, hold me, fuck me.

Now what kind of man is going to drive home alone?

What kind of man?

A married man, that’s who.

The Byrd weight loss plan

By the end of 2001, I weighed 207 pounds and hated the shape of my body. Today I weigh 180 pounds and am still in the process of losing weight. I don’t starve myself, I don’t abuse myself, and I haven’t used drugs in order to accomplish this weight loss.

There is a billion dollar industry in the United States built on the dreams of fat people to be thin. Turn on any late-night television and you’ll see endless commercials for weight-loss chemicals and sit-up machines and cross-trainers and a bunch of other bizarre stuff. Intuitively you probably know that all this stuff either doesn’t work very well or doesn’t work at all. So why do these companies remain in business?

The fact is that it’s very easy to make money off people who want to be thin.

It’s very easy to make money based on people’s dreams. Everyone in the United States wants to be thin and beautiful. Look on any magazine stand and you’ll see very thin, very healthy-looking beautiful people. They have perfect teeth and perfect bodies. The part the magazines don’t show is that these models spend a major part of their lives preparing their bodies to look like that! We see the results and we don’t see the process.

And here’s the key difference between my process and whatever other fad diets or pills or powders you’ve taken in the past…

You didn’t pay anything to read this.

I’m not going to try to sell you anything. I don’t want your money. I don’t want to make a fifteen-percent commission off anything. Send your money to someone else!

The unifying theme of all modern fad diets is that they charge fees for fancy caffeine pills or concentrated juices or bad medical advice. I’m not going to charge you anything, ever, not now, not in the future, for this information.

Consider that the next time you pay good money to fail on yet another fad diet.

The modern American diet is steeped in fats, from the pounds of French fries we consume to the chocolate shakes and fried chicken and cheese pizzas. Fast food is a terrible source of fat in the American diet and, on my plan, you’re going to have to be damn careful when you eat out to count fat. It IS possible to eat out, but it’s going to be necessary to count everything you do.

Here are the key elements to my plan:

Exercise moderately six of seven days for at least forty-five minutes.

Track all your protein, fat, carbohydrate grams, exercise, and daily weight in a daily personal log.

Eat when you get hungry, not after. Five or six small meals a day is reasonable.

Emphasize protein, track carbohydrates, and eliminate fats.

Reduce or eliminate alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs to “one per week.”

Lose weight slowly but consistently, one or two pounds per week.

Deal correctly with guilt.

If there is a heaven

If there is a heaven, bright with light and love,

Complicated dances, Christmas every day,

Angels holding hands, a permanent parade,

Heaven is a silent prison without you

If there is a hell, awash in fire and pain,

Loss and misery, regret for life unlived,

Writing on our bodies naming all our crimes,

Hell’s a golden garden if you are with me

I miss you, I love you

If I live a life, and these two hands grow old

Crossing lines and years appearing on my skin,

More and more, although they seem my father’s hands

Young they’ll ever be if they run through your hair

I miss you, I love you

Wheel! Of! Fortune!

I received the call from Mandy this morning. Monica called to say that Chris was in the hospital. From my new work desk in San Francisco I called my brother’s cell phone and Monica answered. She asked, “How are you doing?”

I asked to speak to Chris. I asked him, “Where are you?” He thought for a moment and said, “Minnesota.” I asked him, “Where in Minnesota?” He responded with a string of syllables.

“Don’t… not good,” he eventually told me.

Monica told me not to visit. She also told me to manage my parents. “He’s really doing fine,” she said. “Tell your mom not to worry about him, or make a scene.” The nurse told her that it’s most likely encephalitis, a swelling of the brain tissue caused by a viral infection. Many people recover from it, but the damage is permanent to some.

I called Mom. I called Dad. They decided to fly out to see him.

I decided to fly out. Why I decided to fly to Minnesota I’m not sure. I have the vague idea that my purpose is to protect him from my parents.

I told my new employer. The trade show this week is the most important one of the year. He was gentle. “You make time with your brother as required,” he wrote, in perfect clipped Japlish.

I sit in terminal B in Las Vegas at midnight. Slot machines and cool air and tired old women in NASCAR jackets. Too much noise to rest. My next flight leaves in an hour. I don’t know Minneapolis.