Wide-eyed

Today I met someone who promised I would see, in the near future, his skateboarding injuries. He was wearing pants, but tomorrow (or some day thereafter) he would wear shorts and his scars would be exposed. He asked hypothetically (and in a broad way) if I ever suffered a skateboarding injury. I have, and I'll share it with you.

When I was young someone — probably a grandparent — gave me a banana yellow all-plastic skateboard for Christmas. I was late learning how to ride a bike, so this thing was an utter mystery. It stayed, for the most part, in my closet. Then, one morning, on some warped sense of a whim, I took it outside to play.

We had a mature tree in our front yard, but not terribly tall. I could reach the lowest limbs without jumping. What I did was this: I lodged the front wheels of the skateboard in a cross of limbs and then hung on with all my weight. I tried climbing my feet up the trunk gripping nothing but the end of the skateboard. It worked for a while. Of course, not forever. I dropped to the ground, my back hitting first followed by the rest of me.

It was the first time I'd had the wind knocked out of me. It so happened my father emerged from the garage and came over to see why I was lying on the ground. The look on my face must've approached sheer terror. Someone had stolen my lungs. My nose and mouth stopped working. The life, not the wind, had been knocked out of me.

He picked me up and carried me into the house and laid me on the couch. My mother rushed over in a fit and I explained breathlessly what had happened. Then they calmed down and my father explained it would go away. He opened the curtains over the couch for more light. And then. My mom. She. Freaked. Out. Way out.

"Why'd his eyes do that?" she panicked. "They're shrinking!"

My father had no idea. It was crazy talk.

I'd seen something on Sesame Street about the pupil. I asked my father to open and close the curtains and asked her if my eyes changed. She was mystified. I told her the colored part of your eye expands and shrinks to accomodate more and less light. Big Bird or Ernie or some other Muppet explained it to me.

I felt better. A sense of the usual returned. With my breath came family and Sesame Street and the dusky yellow glow of those curtains in the middle of the day.

Later that year I plugged a house key into an electrical socket.

They Don't Pay You Enough?

Check this shit out:

Not so long ago (in cosmological-chronological terms) I was paid a paltry sum of money (plus one dollar) to sit in a glass-enclosed room beside a telephone and answer people's questions. The questions were of the technical variety, although I found myself dealing with all types of conundrums, including threats on my life and metaphysical dilemmas.

Some examples:

Somehow a call was cut-off halfway through my answer. I knew the genteman's name and city, so I phoned directory assistance. As I was put through I felt quite full of myself; this was customer service going the extra mile, to be sure. An elderly woman answers and I jubilantly asked for the man by name, as though he'd just won the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.

There was a pause. A long one. The kind of pause that comes from the person beside you on the bus when you belch in their face and ask for a breath mint. That kind of pause.

"My husband passed away three months ago," she said.

I never did reach that guy.

Once, my answer so infuriated the caller he threw the receiver on his desk (it makes a distinct clattering when they did that) and began cursing me out from across the room. It was fun to listen for awhile. He had quite a mastery of the "sailor's dialect."

One caller complained about all the damn Asians taking jobs away from god-fearing Americans. I told him he should write the editor of his newspaper. He told me I was soft on the issue because the CEO of our company was Asian. (His last name was Lee.) When I explained our CEO was an American, he only opened his maw further and let more bile spill out. Then I told him the CEO was Irish, and when he asked for proof, I asked how many Asians had red hair and orange freckles. Strangely, I feel slightly racist for this. I mean, couldn't there be one Asian out there with these features? And couldn't he or she grow into a CEO position? Still, compared to the caller, I feel pretty open-minded.

I met Phil Katz of PK-ZIP fame once during this job. He was a mousy guy. His name should've been Phil Mouse. It should've been called PM-ZIP. Unfortunately, this sounds like an aid for a woman's cycle.

I never answered questions from animals or infants. That would've rounded out my experience there.

The executives liked to buck the morale of the phone bank by saying we were the "eyes and ears of the company."

Someday eyes will be harvested for organ donations. Ears though? Just a fold of skin and cartilege.

An Apology:

The management of Placemats of the Future™ profusely apologizes for the prior entry (titled "Decade of Greed"). The shoddy content of this entry shocks us greatly. The writer has been sacked and the typographer has been banished to the fourth plane of Hell.

We admit the entry contains the following horrific elements:

• Topic(s) of mainstream culture;
• link(s) to recent articles published on the WWW (World Wide Web);
• cozy nicknames of person(s) and/or personage(s) the writer was neither acquainted with nor introduced to (i.e. "Slatesters");
• an essay-like feel, including a traditional punchy, in-your-face conclusion;
• wordy adjective-filled sentences, particularly in put-downs;
• generational hubris;
• a general ranting tone throughout the entire piece.

Of course, there are points to this piece we are proud of. The writer could've succumbed to the traditional blog mechanism of simply listing daily hyperlinks for perusal, or chosen a truly mundane topic, such as favorite coffee flavorings or Seinfeld-like "You ever notice how people ... ?" musings.

Oh yes. The damage could've been much greater.

Our ten thousand monkeys have been flogged and their typewriters re-inked. Thank you.