Good Youngman Brown

Untouchable, Bitch

2012-01-30T09:52:00.000-05:00

At work, I get a half-hour break every two hours or so.

During breaks, all casino employees are pretty much required to go to the break room, which is connected to the cafeteria.

The break room is really a series of rooms, so while I might not have a choice of where I go during my breaks, I still get a choice of where I want to spend my thirty minutes in the confines of those few rooms.

I can go on the outside deck, which is above the Atlantic City Boardwalk and overlooks the ocean. I typically only do this on my first break during my 6:30AM shifts, and watch the sunrise* with a cup of coffee.

*It is not as poetically unmanly as one might think**. The smell of food in the morning makes me nauseous, so I need to go outside to get fresh air.

**But I cry anyway.

I can play a game of pool. It costs a dollar, though. And I am terrible at pool, so it would most likely take more than half an hour to complete a game.

Or I can watch television. There are many televisions throughout the rooms, each one broadcasting a different channel.

None of the stations can be changed manually, or at least not to my knowledge. One day I was touching every button on one of the televisions to try to watch the Flyers game. A Mexican janitor was reading a newspaper in the room. Without looking up, he told me that the televisions are controlled "upstairs.”

Although the break room is upstairs, "upstairs" is the term that everyone seems to use as a general reference to security – the inscrutable eye-in-the-sky whose inner workings and power are an enigma that even we don’t fully understand.

It is just one of the ceiling's testicles... that watches you.

So if I want to watch something different, I have to become my own nomadic remote control. To change the channel, I must change rooms.

One room has ESPN. I typically skip this room, however, as I have usually memorized early-morning Sportscenter after watching it all morning in the empty Poker Room.

Another room has Spike TV. Usually, a CSI-esque show is playing. I either get to see the first half of the episode (in which somebody is murdered, a loved one cries about it, an obvious person is brought in for questioning, and then one of the doctors or cops does something “shocking” to promote out-of-the-box thinking) or the second half of the episode (in which they do some more questioning and autopsies, the obvious person who was brought in for questioning is also killed, and then they figure out that the murderer is the original loved one who cried in the beginning (who inevitably confesses it all right there in the interrogation room, offering some warped justification)).

Another room has CNN. But I avoid knowing about the world as much as I can.

Believe it or not, the room I have been spending the most time in recently is the Lifetime room.

Between episodes of Reba, Will & Grace, and The New Adventures of Old Christine, I vaguely take note of the commercials featuring images of tampons, NuvaRings and Patrick Dempsey. You know, vagina things.

I typically go through the commercial break in a daze, as none of the commercials really apply to me.

I’m not interested in joining Weight Watchers (not even when Charles Barkley is able to formulate a sentence about how it worked for him).

Sorry, Olay. I already love the skin I’m in (Whenever I hear “Love the Skin You’re In,” I always think: “Love the Skin Urine,” which has connotations that really creep me out).

And don’t even get me started on Grey’s Anatomy. Years ago, I watched the first season, and I’ll be damned if I watch one more second of Ellen Pompeo being an emotional, self-destructive lunatic, Katherine Heigl being Katherine Heigl, or Patrick Dempsey being, as I said before, a huge vagina.

"I am going to act sad in this scene. No, sexy! No! Sad! SEXY!"

I don’t know why I sit there in the Lifetime Room, wasting away my valuable break. The sitcoms that are played in the early morning hours have nothing meaningful to add to my life. And my brain takes a short vacation during the commercials, barely noticing anything on the screen.

But then this commercial came up:

Now, this is the kind of movie that I had heard is the only kind of movie that Lifetime plays – movies about unfaithful husbands who beat and/or murder their wives. And I get that. It is what works for them. It is something that piques the interest of its target demographic.

That’s not what irks me.

What angers me is the commercial itself. Does this really sell?

Do women watch this because it incorporates a wife-killing sociopath played by the oh-so-versatile Rob Lowe wearing an atrocious-looking mustache? Or do they watch it in spite of this?

Do they tune in because they need to know if she lives to see the garage door fixed?

Or do they watch it to see if he really is “untouchable, bitch.”

Is it the way that he says it? In such a cocky and self-satisfied manner that he completely ignores a comma: “I’m untouchable bitch.”

Do women see this, the one line he utters in the commercial, as a challenge? Do they let out a unified, “OH NO HE DIDUNT” as they set their TiVos?

I need to know.

For I fear that it is only until I understand Drew Peterson that I will finally understand women.

Or perhaps I will not understand women until I understand the people that make the movies and commercials for Lifetime Original Movies.

I beg of you, o women of the world.

I am opening the garage door of my heart to you. Please grant me the wisdom to comprehend your infinite mysteries.

Please, help me to understand.

Bitch.

-Youngman Brown

My Eye: Part III (Thanks, Ladies)

2012-01-25T05:00:00.000-05:00

Part I -- Part II

My dad showed up three hours later, and we set off to the eye doctor. I was now able to open my eyes for longer segments of time without wanting to die, but only while wearing my darkest pair of sunglasses.

Once we got there, I had to fill out two pages of paper work. Naturally.

Fortunately, it was no longer a breathless Baywatch type of scenario, but more of an I’m-on-the-top-of-Mount-Everest-and-its-constantly-much-harder-to-breathe type of situation. Honestly, it was much harder to endure listening to the people on The Chew talk about puddings as I waited for half an hour with my eyes closed.

“Youngman Brown?”

I opened my eyes to see a woman holding my chart, beckoning me to follow her. I stood up and walked towards her.

“Wait, Linda,” said one of the girls behind the desk. Then she whispered something to Linda, which I could not hear. Apparently, your other senses don’t become super-heightened.

Linda told me to take a seat in the waiting room again, which worried me. I heard muffled discussions taking place behind the desk and saw my folder being passed around, which also worried me.

Ten minutes later, Linda called me back up to the desk. Two other ladies stood there with her as she informed me that my insurance would not, in fact, cover my visit to their office.

I took off my sunglasses. I gazed at them with teary eyes, explaining that I was referred to them specifically by my insurance. I went on to describe my morning and how I found myself in their office. I might have added a puppy-dog face. But it was one of those rare puppy-dog-face moments where it was a real, true, and genuine puppy-dog-face.

It was just one of those days.

When I was done, they looked at me as if I had just recounted The Notebook, Titanic, and the first five minutes of Up all at the same time. If they had a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, I’m certain they would have offered me a spoon.

Then they went to bat for me.

They got back on the phone with my insurance, passing the phone around and taking turns frustratingly attempting to communicate with whoever was on the other line.

There was conversation about routine check-ups versus emergencies. I took the opportunity to explain to them the fact that the representative from my insurance did not laugh at my joke earlier that morning when I told her that I could not open my eye and that it certainly was not a routine checkup.

“You aren’t going to let us help one of your customers in need?” Linda asked, angrily. “This young man needs help!”

Go Linda.

By the end of the debacle, the doctor himself was standing in the lobby, listening to what was going on. He had no other patients to attend to.

Dejectedly, Linda finally handed me the phone after going as far up the chain as she could. The representative informed me that the closest place I could go was either an hour south or an hour west to a different eye doctor.

And that, my insurance representative told me, was that.

It isn’t in my nature to make a scene, and I was tired anyway, so I handed the phone to my dad, who was eagerly awaiting his opportunity to voice his displeasure.

Then we ventured west.

* * *

Every month, when I get my credit card statement, I say “Holy shit, someone must have stolen my credit card!”

But then I see that the high balance is once again due mostly in part to my monthly health insurance payment.

While it is always a relief that my credit card did not get stolen, it is still a monthly double punch to the gut. One, that I don’t have a full-time job that pays for insurance. And two, that I am leaking such a large amount of money every thirty days for something I never use.

So it felt especially good that my insurance came through for me the way that it did when I finally needed it.

When all was said and done, I finally got to see an eye doctor just before 6 PM – twelve hours after this terrible day started.

Her office was five minutes away from my parents house.

I’m not sure exactly what the medical term is, but apparently as I took my contact out the night before, I pinched away some of the protective coating from my eye.

Don’t worry, though. I didn’t lose my eye, as my mom foreboded.

My eye is completely fine now, except that it does this weird thing where it tears up when I hear “Someone Like You” by Adele. It is very strange that it happens every time, but it is undoubtedly a side effect of my scratched eye.

It also hurts when it happens to see Nicholas Cage’s acting or when it accidentally catches a glimpse of Snooki in general.

But I’m fairly certain that everyone shares in that particular pain.

-Youngman Brown


Quick! Give me a toothpick! Oh God it hurts!

My Eye: Part II (Thanks, Dad)

2012-01-24T00:03:00.000-05:00

Missed Part I? Click here to go back and catch up!

My dad called me a couple hours later to see how I was doing.

I was doing the same: not well.

He told me to schedule a doctor’s appointment. He was going to leave work and drive two hours to take me to the eye doctor, seeing as I lived in a ghost town and also could not drive myself – me being blind and all.

I was touched. A tear of joy/pain/gratitude/my eye’s self-survival fell from my eye.

All I needed to do was schedule an appointment. The only minor problem was that I couldn’t go to my normal doctor since I was currently out of the area, as I was currently staying in New Jersey. My insurance is based in Pennsylvania, but has a fairly far-reaching network, allowing me to go to a doctor in New Jersey.

It was all still a pretty simple task. Here’s what I needed to do:

1) Locate wallet.

2) Pull out insurance card.

3) Call number on back.

4) Write down details of doctors near me which my insurance covers.

5) Dial these numbers, set appointment.

Oh, and also:

6) Call out of work.

These six straightforward tasks were unquestionably the hardest set of affairs I have undertaken in at least two years. I don’t mean to sound like a little bitch, but (insert stuck-up toddler whine) it huuuuuurrrrt.

Each task required me to open my eyes, although generally for one second at a time. I also required a break after each mission, which typically consisted of me collapsing face-first onto my bed, burying my head in pillows and sheets, and making low-pitched guttural sounds. After the pain subsided and I developed enough courage, I bravely moved on to the next undertaking.

It felt like a rescue scene in Baywatch. You know, where David Hasselhoff or Pamela Anderson dive beneath the surface to search for a drowning victim.

"Don't worry, CJ. It's not your fault that you are so buoyant.
The body will eventually wash up, just like our careers."

They scour the murky water, only to be forced to resurface for fresh air. They do this a few times, until the victim is finally spotted. Oftentimes, though, (in my memory, at least) the victim is not just floating there, but is in some other form of peril aside from being lifelessly devoid of oxygen. The drownee is either stuck under a heavy board, handcuffed to a sunken pirate ship, or caught in the bear-hug of a giant affectionate starfish. Whatever the case, it required Mitch or C. J. to only be able to accomplish a small amount of work with the limited amount of oxygen they received with each breath.

All in all, it took me about ten to fifteen minutes to finally set an appointment. The not-so-nice lady from my insurance gave me the phone numbers of three eye doctors within thirty minutes of me. When I double-checked to make sure that these doctors all fell under my insurance plan, she asked if it was for a regular check-up. I jokingly told her that I couldn’t open my eye, and that I did not believe that fell under the umbrella of “regular check-up.” She didn’t laugh, and that upset me. But either way, my insurance covered it, so long as it was not a regular check-up. [Continued...]

Onward to Part III!

My Eye: Part I (Thanks, Mom)

2012-01-23T00:30:00.000-05:00

Last month, before going to bed one night, I felt a slight discomfort after taking my right contact out. There was very little pain, but just enough that I said something along the line of “owchies!” and took note of it before going to sleep. Nothing out of the ordinary.

I woke up at 6AM and could not open my eye, which was not ordinary.

I actually couldn’t open my left eye either. When I forced my left eye open to try to see, it felt as if a thousand piranhas were eating away at my right eye.

My eye!

It was not pleasant, to say the least. I said many things, much much worse than “owchies!”

I ran back to bed, wrapping a blanket around my head (so as to escape any form of light) and, naturally, assumed the fetal position.

I laid there for a while, but when tears streamed out of my eye, I actually turned on the light (voluntarily dealing with the pain it produced) in order to verify that it was water coming out of my eye and not blood.

It hurt that bad.

Being not quite sure what the hell had happened to my eye, and equally unsure of how to proceed with my life, I did what any independent twenty-six year old male would do.

I called my mommy.

I remembered that my mom scratched her cornea with a tree branch while raking leaves. I figured that she would be the best person to call in such a crisis. Plus, she’s my mom. And there’s nobody better to provide comfort in trying times than your mother.

Or so I thought.

I was tired, confused, and frightened, so my memory might be a bit groggy, but after explaining the situation, here is her to-do list diagnosis.

“Don’t scratch it…”

No problem. It doesn’t itch.

“Put a warm washcloth on your eye…”

Already done!

“Don’t use the washcloth on the other eye in case it is an infection…”

Okay, good tip. This “infection” word worries me, though. Heh heh.

“If it is an infection, you’ll need to get an antibiotic…”

Okay… still not liking this whole infection talk, mom… starting to worr-

“…Or else you could lose your eye.”

I understand that my mom was only trying to help, but at this point in my morning, I don’t need to hear the worst possible outcome of my fresh, brand new ailment.

It’s like when I go to the movies, I don’t need somebody to tell me the fact that the main character could die. This is something that I know is possible. When you randomly put this idea in my head, it kind of ruins the movie for me, ya know? Is he going to die now? How about now? I wonder if a bomb is going to go off now. At the end, when the character dies, I am disappointed that I wasn't surprised. But when the character lives, morbidly I am equally disappointed.

Of course, I will never be disappointed to not lose my eye. But the point I’m trying to make is the fact that my mom gave me a wonderful prescription and directions, but the warning was something that was entirely unnecessary and not well received.

So I hung up with her, my dad promising to call from work to see if I felt better in an hour or two.

I laid in bed, warm washcloth strictly segregated to the right side of my head.

I laid there, eyes (obviously) closed. Thinking.

Thinking about my eye, and how much I loved it. Wondering if it knew how much I loved it. Wishing I told it I loved it every night. Devoting myself to telling it how much I loved it every night henceforth, so long as it survived this catastrophe. Wondering if my left eye would pull this same shit out of jealousy, should I only tell me right eye that I love it every night.

I thought about how much better I felt about the whole situation before picking up the phone.

I thought about the ticking seconds that I was wasting, just laying there.

I was seeing some weird black and white shapes, laying there with my eyes closed. But even more clearly I was able to see things with stunning clarity and recollection. I saw Future Youngman, fifty years from now. I was an old man with an eye patch, and there were small children running away from me in fear. Future Youngman raised his fists to the heavens, cursing Past Youngman (aka Present Youngman) for laying there in a bed when he should have been running to the doctor.

Then I saw all the eye deformities that I had seen at the Mütter Museum, where I had gone two weeks before on a date. The Mütter Museum is dedicated to medical oddities, and contains pathological and anatomical specimens as well as wax models of other deformities. The section, which I was vividly seeing again in my mind shows fifty or so eye deformities. Here are some:

Photo: Mütter Museum, tourismplacesworld.blogspot.com

The toothpick-in-the-eye (bottom, center) is the one I thought of the most, because it was the way I currently felt.

The one good thing about thinking about the Mütter Museum was that for about one minute I didn’t think about my eye, or potential lack thereof. Instead, I thought about the fact that I am doomed to fail in the dating world because of the fact that I take girls on dates to museums that display grotesque medical deformities.

So that was a nice reprieve. [Continued...]

Onward to Part II!

There Goes the Harvest (A "Poem")

2012-01-17T00:02:00.000-05:00

Crop circles:
Merely graffiti
From unruly
Punk aliens.

If I Should Die Before I Update

2012-01-13T02:05:00.000-05:00

A little while ago, I wrote a post about a girl from my high school who died, and how her Facebook page lived on. Essentially, her friends and family continued to write on her wall (and still continue to do so), and I found it to be an intriguing concept. I concluded that if and when I die, I want someone to change my Facebook status to reflect the fact that I am dead.

Many of you might have thought me to be macabre, and perhaps I am.

But apparently I could have made money off of it. For whatever reason, I didn’t have the foresight to actually turn my morbid idea into a real product, like I have tried to in the past.

It is called the “If I Die App,” and is pretty simple.

Load the app on Facebook.

Write a message or make a video saying farewell to the world.

Pick three friends that you trust to confirm your digital will.

Not only is it a simple and practical idea, but it is pretty much exactly what I thought of a year and a half ago.

The only difference is that I would have taken an entirely different (See also: better) marketing route.

It is very apparent that they weren’t really sure what mood they wanted to put forth in their “commercial,” which is an odd juxtaposition of thoughtfulness, sagacity, and heartlessness.

While the product seems to take itself seriously, its oddly harrowing jokes and cartoons can lead anyone to think that it is actually a gag.

“You’re probably thinking to yourself: I don’t remember scheduling* an appointment with death anytime soon,” the voice-over dude says. “And you’re right. But so is death: Right… around the corner.”

*Note that he pronounces it sheduling, which is creepy in its own right.

Not only is this an exceptionally sad attempt at clever word play, but it is also the point at which I assume most potential users decide that they are not going to try it out. It is the If I Die App’s greatest failing.

You see, death is just like fruitcake. It is unpleasant, scary, mysterious, and hard to swallow.

Just because humor is added to the fruitcake, it doesn’t mean it is going to magically taste better. And like fruitcake, the idea of death is a heavy, voluminous weight we all keep in the refrigerators of our souls, never quite brave enough to consume or able to digest.

I do still stand by my assertion that in our ever-expanding socially technological world, it is a good thing to have a digital will. Additionally, I am still keeping my plans intact for what I want to happen with my Facebook account after I die.

But nowhere in my plan do I attempt to make jokes. I don’t try to get cheap laughs. And I certainly don’t use awful word play.

The only changes I desire are omissions. The only addition is my status change:

That, I believe, says enough.

Like in most of the things I write, my intention is just to tell it the way it is.

The great thing about the way it is, though, is that it is usually funny if looked at in the right light.

That is the only message I could possibly leave behind.

See for yourself.

If you watched the commercial, and were confused or turned off by its haphazardly themed message, I still challenge you to try it out.

It is not until you are actually sitting there, attempting to think of what you want to write as your posthumous message to friends and loved ones, that you will see how incredibly difficult of an undertaking it is.

Once you are aware of the fact that this message will actually be seen once you are dead, you might realize that you aren’t quite as funny as you might think.

Seriously, try it. Comment here and let me know your thoughts.

And if I should die tomorrow, just know that I love you all. Especially my followers.

Wow, I’m really starting to sound like Jesus.

-Youngman Brown

How To E-Mail A Professor

2012-01-12T10:02:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I read a post from J Ben Deaton titled, "How to E-mail A Professor (And Make Them Want to Help You)".

In the article, he describes how students should write an e-mail to a professor in a professional manner. It is advice that should certainly be heeded:

If you want to get awesome help, here is how to write a professional email to a professor:
Write a descriptive subject line.
Write a salutation: “Dear Mr. Deaton” or “Dear Ben” is great.
Give some succinct context. “I’m a student in your MW COE2001 course. I’ve been working on the homework and am stuck on problem 3.14 (on page 56). I’ve tried methods A, B, and C.”
Ask a clear question with a direct call to action. In other words, make it obvious what you want from me. Do you want to set up a meeting? Do you want a pointer on how to set up the moment equilibrium equation?
Thank me for my time. I’ve got plenty on my plate, so this is common courtesy.
Sign your full name.

This is a great list.

That is, if you are a student who actually wants help.

But what about the student who doesn't actually want help? What about the scholar who simply wishes to get around doing the homework?

Fear not. I am here for you.

If you would much rather opt to show up to class the next day, armed only with a surefire excuse as to why you are empty-handed, here’s the e-mail you should send:

Write a descriptive subject line. This is very important. Make sure that you barely include any details about the actual situation, while including many words having to do with shopping or sex. Think: “Teacher? Click Now For Free $50 Staples Gift Card!” or “Hot Young Schoolgirl in your Inbox.” This is your first line of defense in making sure that the e-mail gets sent, but doesn’t get seen. When offering your excuse in class, encourage the professor to open up his spam folder. When he asks about the subject line, simply state that finding an answer was so important that you desperately wanted to grab his attention with promises of gift cards. Be sure he knows that the gift card is off the table since he did not respond in a timely manner.
Write a salutation: “Hiya!” or “Yo prof!” will suffice.
Give a succinct excuse. Describe a fake problem or ailment using two words or less. Everyone knows that a liar gets caught up in too many details, so keep it short and sweet. “Car broke,” “Apartment burnt,” or “Diarrhea explosion” are good starting points.
Ask an unclear question with an impossible-to-decipher resolution. In other words, make a vague statement that clearly demonstrates everything and nothing at different analogous times. See what I did there? No? Good. The key is to sound intelligent, dense, and emotionally unstable, all at the same time. The importance of this step is that it serves as a backup plan in case the teacher is dumb enough to think he can get a Staples gift card or lonely enough to check out the “hot young schoolgirl” in his inbox. Since you aren’t smart enough to figure out the answer to the question, it is likely that you are also incapable of generating an intelligent question to ask. This is why you must talk in circles and come to an impossible-to-decipher resolution (IDR). To determine if you’ve written an acceptable IDR, you can use your dumb roommate as a litmus test. Say, “Read this and tell me if it makes sense.” If he has to read it three or more times to come to the conclusion that it does not make sense, then you’ve got yourself a great IDR.
Thank the e-mail service for its time. Literally hundreds of e-mails are sent throughout the world every day. It is important to thank the people at Gmail or Yahoo! Mail for providing this free service, and allowing you to get out of your homework. It requires tons of manpower for them to read every single e-mail sent every single day to determine which e-mails go to your spam and which go to your inbox. Take a quick second to thank them. Your good manners and thoughtfulness might impress your teacher.
Sign your stripper name. As if you didn't already.

Follow these easy steps, and you will be getting out of homework in no time.

You’re welcome.

Actually, don’t thank me. Thank Hotmail.

-Youngman Brown

P.S. I understand that you are lazy. I am lazy, too, so I know. But if you require extra help and reach out to a teacher, and they grant you that extra help (responding to e-mails, setting up meetings, giving you an extension because of your explosive diarrhea...) make sure you take the time to thank them, and let them know that you appreciate them going out of their way to help you. They don't have to. But in my experience, they always want to. That kind of inherent kindness is something that you should be envious that you don't possess, but at the same time thankful that it is given to you.

Wait for it....


Ahh... there it is. The sweet nectar of knowledge.

I Hate My Neighbors: Part II (Stomp Stomp Armageddon)

2012-01-10T10:00:00.000-05:00

"Wahhh! Why must my childhood be ruined by Nicholas Cage movies?"

Read I Hate My Neighbors: Part I (Kaboom).

Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump…THUMP.

Each morning, in my groggy state of wake, I sleepily envision one of my little next-door neighbors running down the steps, really working on her form.

It makes sense. Being in the Witness Protection Program, she is unable to join any extracurricular activities at school.

This is her gymnastics.

She gets to the third-from-last step, then leaps high into the air and does a half-lutz triple-axel thunder-dive. Sticking the landing, she raises her arms in the air like a Y, smiles, and then rotates ninety degrees and reestablishes her stance and smile.

“A wonderful display of gymnastics,” that male gymnastics commentator says in my head as I drift back to sleep. “We will just have to wait and see what the judges score for this talented, young, home-schooled New Jersey native……….”

KABOOM!

Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump…THUMP.

Sometimes, she forgets things upstairs and gets more chances for a perfect score.

As I lay there, tired and enraged, I wonder if they are trying to punish me for something. I think about my daily coming and goings and try to imagine what I sound like on their side of the wall. I mean, I thought I flushed the toilet quietly the night before.

* * *

I’m sitting there, in that movie theatre, no longer by myself. I’m trying to pay attention to what is happening on the screen, but my eyes simply insist on working their peripherals.

Shoveling popcorn into his mouth. That is what this guy is doing. Right there next to me in this huge theatre. Shoveling popcorn into his mouth and making throaty noises as he attempts to use his larynx to dispel some stuck kernel shells.

He’s all settled into his seat, hunched down and legs spread like he is a woman at a gynecologist. If he wasn’t in my personal bubble before, he certainly is now.

That is when his wife and two daughters enter the theatre. His wife sits down on the other side of me, leans over, and asks what she missed.

He answers in full detail.

Previously, I was too busy paying attention to him, so I am interested in catching up on what I missed, but I am distracted again: his daughters have sat directly behind me and are kicking my chair whilst talking on their cell phones. To each other.

* * *

Two months ago, it was one of the girl’s birthdays.

One night, there were many cars outside and many children next door.

One of her presents was Dance Dance Revolution – a video game in which the players dance to coordinated moves. On my end, however, it is Stomp Stomp Armageddon.

Fortunately, the family’s obsession with this game (and it was an obsession) only lasted about a month before they moved onto phase two of RYMBL (Ruin Youngman Brown’s Life).

Their newest tradition, which is perhaps the worst of them all, occurs on Sunday mornings.

They blast music. From 11AM until 2PM, like clockwork.

As tired-eyed Petack asked during his visit: “Are we invited to the Sunday morning rave next door?”

However unbelievable it might be that such a massive amount of thunderous club music could be the setting for anything other than drug-induced merrymaking found typically at a rave, I have determined that it is something else entirely. It is cleaning day.

During the silent reprieve offered for a few seconds between songs, a vacuum can sometimes be heard.

That’s right, their music is amplified to a volume that is able to clearly be heard while standing on the other side of the house with a running vacuum in hand.

How loud could it possibly be, you ask?

I have documented it for you below:

As evidenced above, they played the music so loud that I was able to successfully tag a song using Shazam.

Through a wall.

* * *

The movie is about halfway over, but the girls have grown tired of it. They are running around with sparklers, but the parents don’t seem to notice. Instead, mom and dad are lost in the movie, she to my left and he to my right. They are holding hands, imprisoning me with a human lap belt.

Inexplicably, one of the girls has found a gun and begins shooting the screen.

BANG BANG BANG!

The projector shoots beams of light through the bullet holes to the wall beyond.

KABOOOM!

The other little cherub giggles as she blows the smoke from the rocket launcher perched on her shoulder.

She has destroyed the first few rows of the theatre.

A bit of smoke from the rocket launcher enters my lungs, and I let out a tiny cough.

Offended, the mom and dad turn to me, saying, “Shhhhhhh!”

“Sorry,” I whisper, then slink into my chair, embarrassed.

* * *

The moment I tagged the song through Shazam is when I realized that no clan of human beings could possibly be so inconsiderate without actually hating me for some reason.

Perhaps they are simply just angry about my presence. Nobody else lived on the entire street last winter, and they must have grown accustomed to it. But the fact that I go about my day-to-day life like a Ninja makes me wonder what, exactly, I do that must bother them so much.

They never hear me make a noise. Ever.

He is quiet. Too quiet.

That is what they think as they peek through their blinds and see me tip-toeing up the stairs. They look at each other and realize that they have been made. The Witness Protection Program has failed them. Clearly, someone taking such care to make so little noise is not someone who is striving to be a courteous neighbor, but someone who is attempting to avoid detection.

Whoever they are hiding from has found them, they must think. And I was hired to keep an eye on them. They hate me for it, which is why they make so much noise…

Yep, this is the only possible explanation.

But on the other hand... maybe they are just assholes.

-Youngman Brown

I Hate My Neighbors: Part I (Kaboom)

2012-01-09T14:33:00.000-05:00

My neighbors’ door goes KABOOM.

It is unfortunate. I mean, a door is supposed to go SLAM, right?

Theirs doesn’t, though. There are two distinct syllables to this earth-shattering ear-bombardment: KA and BOOM. It is clear as day.

Or night. Whenever it is that they are slamming the door.

For the life of me I can’t figure out the physics of it. I mean, if the BOOM is the actual slamming of the door, then what is the KA? And if the KA is when door bangs shut, then what the hell is the BOOM?

I think about it a lot.

* * *

I am currently living at my parents’ beach house in Sea Isle City. It is close to Atlantic City, which is where I am currently working, so it makes a lot of sense for the time being.

During the summer, Sea Isle is a bustling beach town, full of families and partiers alike. It is harder to find a parking space during a weekend in the summer than it is to find the point in seeing a movie featuring Katherine Heigl.

My thoughts exactly, Katherine.

But I am coming to learn that Sea Isle is a ghost town during the winter. Very few people live here year round.

In fact, I drove down my street today. It appears that besides my parents’ house, only one other residence is occupied on my street from the beach to the bay.

Guess which one it is.

Ding ding! You guessed it! My neighbors!!!

And the extra-special-super-awesome detail about my parents’ beach house is that it is a side-by-side!

I mean, what are the chances that out of the some 200 houses on the five blocks, the two occupied dwellings are only separated by two inches of wall?

Pretty cool, huh?

To compare, it feels as if I went to the movies by myself. Twenty minutes into the movie, a man waltzes into the empty theatre, looks around for a while, then sits directly next to me.

Topical, right?

But it is not just one man living next door to me. There are four of them. The dad, the mom, and two girls. If I had to guess, I would say that one is eight, and the other thirteen.

And while they might not have any care in the world for how much noise pollution they create, I try to be a very thoughtful neighbor.

For example, I take special care to be quiet when returning to my house late at night. I neglect to use the remote lock button on my key to lock my car door so as to avoid the beep! that the car makes when doing so. Instead, I lock it by actually inserting the key into the door and turning, as they did in olden times.

I tiptoe up my outdoor stairs, making sure not to stomp. Once I reach my front door, I pull out my cell phone to light up my keychain. As I find my house key and ready it for insertion, I take special care not to jingle my keys.

Once inside for the night, I am always mindful of my neighbors. I am as quiet as possible in everything I do, even when putting ice cubes into a cup.

As I lay myself down to sleep, I smile a little bit as I envision the people of the world tranquilly enjoying their peaceful slumber.

A few hours later I am awakened by the early morning hustle and bustle of my neighbors as they prepare for their day.

Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump…THUMP.

That is the sound of one of the little angels as she runs down (most) of the steps, electing to jump from the third-from-bottom stair.

* * *

The thing about my neighbors is that I never see them.

I have been living here for five months and have seen them three times. That is not an exaggeration.

I first saw the dad on the day of the freak earthquake that hit the east coast. During the first five seconds of the quake, I obviously thought it was just them running around like usual. But when the chandelier began swaying back and forth and I could literally see the house itself swaying, he and I ran outside at the same time.

The second time I saw one of them was when my buddy, Petack, visited me for a weekend. As I went outside to greet him and help him bring in his bags, the dad was sitting on the steps, texting or something.

The third interaction occurred when I said “hello” to the two girls on my way to Wawa one afternoon as they were walking up the stairs with schoolbags on their backs.

And that’s it.

Anything else I know about them comes from the constant clamor that they make.

Because of the fact that they are so frequently heard but so scarcely seen, I am confident that one of two things is happening.

One: They are dead (See: Dream House, The Others, Stir of Echoes, and tons of other movies with essentially the same plot for more details on this theory).

Two: They are in the Witness Protection Program (Think about it: They live in a ghost town. They never leave the house. And I have no clue where the nearest school is).

Despite whatever humorous take I might take on this option henceforth, I am actually very serious in saying that there is actually a good chance that they might really be in the Witness Protection Program. And for the sake of simplicity, I will use it as my working theory for the remainder of this post.

Click here for Part II.

-Youngman Brown

Red and Blue: An Ode to Kim Jong Il

2012-01-03T00:06:00.001-05:00

“Breaking News,” the TV said, interrupting whatever crap I was watching.

“We are getting reports from North Korea,” the reporter said. He then said a bunch of other stuff about North Korea. Specifically about Kim Jong Il. But he didn’t say what the breaking news was.

“Be dead,” I said. “Be dead, be dead, be dead.”

North Korea scares the shit out of me. Mostly because Kim Jong Il is a scary dude with some potentially scary firepower. Like Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il was evaluated to be antisocial, paranoid, sadistic, narcissistic, schizoid, and schizotypal.

And he had nukes.

So when the newsman told me that the dictator was, in fact, dead, I did a fist pump, assuming that the world was a safer place.

But then I caught a glimpse of his son and heir. And I also saw this video:

video platform video management video solutions video player

I’m realizing that my FONK (Fear of North Korea) is not about a leader – some crazy dude with nuclear weapons. He is a part of it, sure, but a dictator is only as strong as the masses he controls.

It is about a country that separates itself from the world. It’s about a mindset.

Actually, mindfuck is a better word.

I don’t know about you, but it makes me shudder. It is the kind of situation in which World War Three happens. When you see people crying to the point of collapse on the streets at the sight of the funeral procession of narcissistic dictator who leaves a quarter of the population in poverty, you have to wonder are they acting in such a way out of fear, or are they really, actually fucking sad?

There is no way for us to judge. There is no way for us to know.

* * *

One of the random things I think about a lot is a hypothetical experiment that should never be conducted. It goes like this:

A baby is born. It is put into a room. The kid lives there for his entire life, locked in this room.

The thing about this room is that it is all red.

The walls are red. The floor is red. The furniture, the lights, his clothes – all red.

The only thing that is not red is his body -- his skin, hair, eyes. But to get around this, he is forced to wear these red Cyclops-looking glasses, which he wears every day. This ensures that anything the boy ever sees is red.

He is properly fed, educated, and groomed. People come in to provide social interaction with the child (wearing red, of course). He is given red toy trucks to play with. He is given red crayons and red paper to draw on.

This is his life, year after year.

On his sixteenth birthday, however, he is given a special present.

His captors tell him to close his eyes, and they bring in a birthday cake. They take off his glasses, and tell him to open his eyes.

He opens his eyes, and gazes upon a blue birthday cake.

This is what the cake might look like.

What happens?

Does he cry tears of joy upon seeing what must be the most beautiful thing he has ever seen? Does his brain explode out of sheer shock?

But the most important question, and the question that intrigues me the most, is whether or not the boy had any concept of Blue before this very moment. Does the human brain come installed with the knowledge of the color wheel, even when the eyes are exposed to only one of the primary colors?

The point I am trying to make with my diabolically cruel hypothetical experiment is the notion of not being able to grasp, understand, or even comprehend things that are completely outside of everything you have ever known. From birth, North Koreans are taught to conform, while segregated within a country that allows absolutely no outsiders. What, then, can be their expected reaction of the outside world?

I would assume that Blue would be a welcome change for someone living only with Red. Being from a multi-colored world, I would also presume that Blue is something that should be a part of any Red-dweller’s life.

But Red is the only thing that person knows. They were raised on Red, and Blue might be some scary shit to them, just like the thought of living in a world that is completely dominated by Red is scary to me.

And that is why North Korea scares me so much. It is not the fact that there is a lineage of crazy-ass dictators with nuclear weapons. It is not even the fact that the country is inhabited by seemingly brainwashed citizens. These are important dynamics, obviously. But the reason it scares me so much is the fact that because of their isolation there is no way for us to understand their mindset. And more importantly, there is no way for them to understand ours.

It is one challenge to attempt to show someone the concept of Blue.

It is another challenge entirely when you can’t even get into the room.

-Youngman Brown

If you have time and wish to be more scared, watch the National Geographic special, Inside Undercover in North Korea. It is pretty compelling. At the very least, it will make you happy to have Blue in your life.

Have a great day!

Pilates Guest Post

2011-12-29T21:10:00.001-05:00

Hope that everyone's Christmas and other holidays were awesome.

I had the very exciting honor of doing a guest post for one of my favorite bloggers, The Simple Dude. If you like my blog, you should definitely check his out. It is undoubtedly funnier.

The post I wrote is about being the only guy in my Pilates class back in college and my misadventures in attempting to woo one girl in particular.

Check out the post by clicking here.

-Youngman Brown

What I Decided to Write About on Christmas

2011-12-25T02:42:00.000-05:00

I feel obligated to begin today’s post with a warning. You might not want to read on.

I made a promise to myself a long time ago that I wouldn’t write about what I’m about to write about. It is something that affected me deeply for years, and I’m not quite sure I have ever gotten over it.

I am sure that not too many children frequent my blog, but if there happen to be any little eyes reading this… STOP RIGHT NOW. This will affect you more deeply than The Exorcist. If you must continue reading my blog, go read my posts about Penis, Erections, or Hardcore Gay Porn (yes, feel free to click, they are harmless), JUST DON’T READ THIS.

* * *

I needed to talk to my mom about something important. I was eight, and among the changes I was going through were changes in my brain – changes in the way I thought about things. The world was changing around me so quickly that it was dizzying, and I needed parental guidance to get my feet planted on some kind of solid foundation.

I was just nervous, not really sure how to word the question, or whether I wanted to know the answer at all.

Finally, one day as I was driving with my mom, I took a deep breath and just asked it:

“Is Santa real?”

I made sure my seatbelt was secure, and braced myself for impact.

She took a few moments to figure out how to proceed. Then she said, “Well, do you want to know the truth?”

“No,” I said.

She had already answered the question with her response. And the fact that I was asking shows that I really knew the answer deep down. But I still didn’t want the truth.

Ignorance is bliss and stuff.


Best picture I could find for reenactment purposes. Tee-hee-hee. Photo: Saidaonline.com

You see, Christmas was a big deal to me when I was a kid. I used to literally count the days for two months or so.

I colored pictures of Santa, weeks in advance, then left them under the tree for him.

I colored them so well. I even colored on the white paper with the seldom-used white crayon, just so that he knew how well I knew his uniform.

On Christmas morning, I would think about my illustrations. I would wonder which one he liked the best, hoping that perhaps one of them was hanging on his refrigerator.

Even after learning the truth about Santa, Christmas was still more than just a day to me. It was an experience.

It was about searching for my hidden presents in every square inch of the house, then cursing my parents for either being the best gift-hiders ever or for not buying me presents that year.

It was about knowing that I would go to my Aunt’s house on Christmas Eve and see my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

It was Christmas songs playing in the car as my parents drove us home, me pressing my forehead against the window as I peered at the sky, still kinda looking for Santa.

It was about that nervous anticipation as I thought about the next morning, wondering how long it would take me to fall asleep.

It was about waking up at an inane hour, then desperately attempting to wake up my parents so that I could collect my spoils.

Finally, it was about trying to pace myself as I opened my gifts in order to make the affair last as long as possible.

Nowadays, when visiting my parents before Christmas, I sleep in the guest room. It is the same guest room where they store all of the wrapped gifts that they have bought, including the ones for me.

And that is really what it is all about. It is why Christmas, as well as life, is so different now that I am older. The presents are right out there in the open. There is no mystery.

But here’s the thing: there are still a lot of other great things. Christmas is just a different experience.

It is about sleeping in a guest room where your presents are stored, knowing that your parents still love you enough to buy you presents and also to provide a guest room for you to stay with them.

It is about knowing that I will go to my Aunt’s house on Christmas Eve and see my Grandpa, aunts, uncles, cousins, and cousins’ children (aka more cousins). Note that nothing changed about this one, except for (sadly) some subtractions and (wonderfully) some additions.

It is about the same Christmas songs playing in the car as my parents drive me home, me pressing my forehead against the window with a happy buzz going from my Uncle’s Coors Lights.

It is about falling right to sleep, and hoping that my parents let me sleep in on Christmas morning.

Most importantly, it is about seeing the same wonder of it all through the eyes of my nephew, cousins, and other children, as they excitedly open presents and be merry.

So if you are like me and somewhat melancholy that Christmas has become something less marvelous than what it used to be, just try to remember what is really important. I realize that this is not a new lesson, but it is still worth being said.

Merry Christmas, and Happy Whatever-You-Happen-To-Celebrate to everyone! I really appreciate all of the support that all of you give to me, simply by reading, commenting and sharing the things I write about.

Want to give me the best Christmas present ever? Please, become a follower,

me on Facebook, and/or share with friends. Each takes only a click.

Love you!
Youngman Brown

Laundry Existence

2011-12-20T21:27:00.000-05:00

I’m not the kind of guy that puts the extra clean sock into the drawer until its mate is found.

I’m the kind of guy that puts the extra sock back into the hamper. Through this process, the odd sock is trapped in this endless cycle of laundry, where it will be washed into eventual nothingness, I assume.

I feel bad for this poor, unwanted sock who wants only to serve his function in life by warming my feet, yet knows only the purgatory of my hamper, washer and dryer.

But that is just the way my system works.

You see, with me there is no such thing as Laundry Day.

It is more of a Laundry Existence type of scenario.

First of all, I rarely fold my clothes. Just ask any of my previous roommates, and they will all tell you the same thing. I put clothes in the washer. When they are washed, I move them to the dryer, hit the timer, and then hit “start.”
That’s it. No more steps.

The step I purposely ignore is one that makes me shudder: Folding clothes. It just seems so awful. Like, I have to fold and pile all of it? Really? No thanks, I’d rather not have to physically account for each and every item I own. Then, I’m expected to figure out where to put them in the drawers. I mean, what if there is not enough drawer space?

And forget about hanging things.

Ugh.

It’s not just the act of putting the items of clothes on the hanger. I also have to button all of the buttons so that the collars of my collared shirts don’t appear as if they are desperately trying to bend, curl, and flower out. And I’m not even going to get into the damage done by the hangers themselves. So many of my favorite shirts have fallen victim to the dreaded shoulder nipples that inevitably form as a result of those stupid hanging contrivances.

Now, if I think of it, I will take some items out and fold them. But I am only talking about the big ticket items: t-shirts or dress shirts. Anything that I wear on my outermost layer in which people will make fun of me if it is wrinkled.

So how do I avoid folding clothes? It’s very easy, actually. I simply don’t do it.

“The best clothes drawer is the dryer.”

–Youngman Brown

I want that to be written on something hard. Preferably stone or marble.

I simply leave all of my shit in the dryer until one of two things happen. Either I need one of the items (this happens every morning), or someone else needs the dryer (in which case I simply move the items to a laundry basket). Typically, however, if I hear the washing machine running, I will preemptively move my items out of the dryer so as to not delay the other person. And considering that I currently live alone, the system has been pointedly great.

How, one might ask, with such a lazy, messy, and pathetic system, do I know when it is time to actually do the wash?

The answer is simple. I have a special pair of underwear.

They are a plaid pair of blue boxers, and they let me know that the following day is laundry day, for I never wear them if I currently have any other clean underwear at my disposal.

I call this special pair of boxers “The Closing Ceremonies.”

The Closing Ceremonies serve the same function as the pink lines that you sometimes see on your receipts. No, they aren’t there for decoration to make your receipt look prettier. They are there to tell the cashier that register tape is about to run out.

By my nature, I am a procrastinator, so this whole last-pair-of-boxers-alert is the cherry atop the sundae of my Laundry Existence. They force me to finally do my laundry.

* * *

So there you have it. That is the basic structure of my Laundry Existence. It’s a pretty great system, if you really think about it.

Except for one thing.

Today, my washing machine broke.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I just so happen to be wearing The Closing Ceremonies.

The Laundromat is closed. And I have to be at work at 6:30 tomorrow morning.

I believe that my only solution is to stop at Walmart tomorrow morning to add some new boxers to my collection. The question becomes, what do I wear on my way?

Perhaps it is my imagination, but I swear that I can hear a tiny delighted laughter coming from my hamper.

It’s the kind of laugh that might very well suit a sock puppet.

-Youngman Brown

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It's fun to watch the counter go up by one. Trust me.

Unintentionally Flirting With the Elderly (A "Poem")

2011-12-07T10:42:00.001-05:00

[I]
I frightened an old Asian lady
In a crowded mall –
I witnessed her sneeze
From forty feet away.

[II]
A few seconds later, a few feet closer,
I caught her eye.
The mall was loud;
I mouthed “God bless you.”

[III]
But the sneeze was long forgotten;
Her eyes grew wide,
She quickened her pace
As she sped past me.

Ameri-bleh Recovery

2011-12-02T21:15:00.001-05:00

Just wanted to quickly offer an apology and possible means of recovery from the state of depression that my last post might have left you in.

This song always makes me feel better, no matter what. Kids are awesome. M83 is awesome.

It is important to ignore the video. Unless you want to get motion sickness. All it shows are clips of someone driving up a curvy, snowy mountain roads. It was the only video I could find that features the entire song.

Although now that I have told you exactly what happens in the video and not to watch it, I'm sure you will watch it all the through, thus distracting you from the complete awesomeness of the song.

Raconte-Moi Une Histoire by M83

Ameri-bleh

2011-11-30T11:00:00.000-05:00

I saw an online advertisement last week, asking people to “Pledge to Shop Small." It was the first I had heard about this new “Small Business Saturday,” in which consumers are asked to ignore their primal impulse to save money, which they voraciously set free on Black Friday. Instead, they are asked to catch their breath from the previous day’s mayhem and set forth once again, all in the name of stimulating the economy.

Armed with the money that they triumphantly saved the day before, they are now expected to “take one for the American team” and spend it on stuff sold in local stores, even though it might be more expensive.

Aside from the counter-intuitive timing of it all, I get it. It makes sense.

And I thought about doing it – or at the very least making a pledge to do it, as the advertisement asked me to.

But then I just thought, bleh. And decided not to.

The bleh is more than just the general laziness that I personally endure day after day. It is a broad-spectrum, all-encompassing bleh having to do with the state of everything. More specifically: the country.

I’ll insert here the fact that I don’t know, nor do I pretend to know, much of anything about economics or politics. I know the basic gist about how the United States got to be in the economic shitter only as far as how it affects me personally. See: Bad Graduation Timing. See also: Unemployment Fail. It was actually the catalyst for me starting this blog in the first place.

But aside from the basic facts about the economy fed to me via late night monologues, when it comes to actually learning about what is going on, I typically opt to just say bleh and change the channel or flip the page.

It is not because I don’t care to know or because I am too lazy to try to figure it out. It’s all simply just… too much.

What does it all mean? When extremely large figures are spewed at me alongside extremely negative words, my brain just shuts down. When I hear words like recession, debt, or deficit occur in the same sentence as a number that requires four commas, my head instinctively does this thing where it almost indiscernibly shakes back and forth. It does it partially to express my displeasure in hearing such an atrocity, but also to shake up the words as they enter my ears so that my brain won’t make sense of it. It is some form of Darwinian self-preservation mechanism wherein my brain makes a preemptive strike to not allow soul-crushing realizations to come to fruition.

On the surface it appears as if I am just sitting there, slightly shaking my head. But inside my brain, it is as if there is a little man sticking his index fingers into each ear and chanting “LALALALALALALALALA” because someone is trying to reveal who got eliminated on Dancing with the Stars before he gets the chance to watch it on Tivo.

The state of the country is simply not something I wish to fully grasp.

The fact that I am afraid of fully grasping it is something I only just came to terms with when I realized that I was too lazy to pledge to shop at local stores.

It is weak, I know. But it all just feels too big. I feel as if the campaign is too small to fix the problem, and that my effort is too small for the campaign.

And forget about talking to others. My ignorance-is-bliss mentality doesn’t really bode well for having a dialogue with other human beings about current affairs.

I asked myself, “When was the last time you talked about the economy?”

The conversation I came up with was more of a general combination of every conversation I have ever had about the economy, and I’ve outlined it for you here:

Other person: “Hey Youngman, how bout that economy.”

Me: “Bleh.”

And then I will roll my eyes and flip my hand in the air, as if to say “God, I’m so over talking about that subject.” Sometimes I might even actually say those words or something more along the lines of “Don’t even get me started.”

Which is fine, because I never get started.

* * *

Sometimes, I try to wrap my head around infinity or eternity. I close my eyes and imagine space going on forever and ever and ever. Or I imagine an eternal afterlife that keeps going and going and going and going and going -- and then I am suddenly jolted with a split-second comprehension of the mind-blowing incomprehension of it all, which is coated with a distinct sense of sadness and fear of the unfathomable unknown.

I get the same jolt of emotions when thinking about the enormity of the economic quandary.

It is sad, really. I am a part of the generation that is supposed to collectively band together and figure out a way to get us out of the situation. And here I am, too lazy/scared/overwhelmed to take the time and effort to fully comprehend the problem itself.

But at the same time, I didn’t participate in any of the snipping in this castration of the economic system of the United States of America. And I have no clue what I can provide in such a situation, aside from a band-aid. Though, I am fairly certain that misses the point.

But if I do get around to it, then fine -- I pledge to buy the band-aid at a local store.

You’re welcome, America.

Why I Shouldn't Inspect My Food (A "Poem")

2011-11-23T22:04:00.001-05:00

Fast food burgers
Taste very different
When the bun includes
A ketchup fingerprint.

Blood Work Makes Me Grimace

2011-11-16T14:55:00.000-05:00

I haven’t been doing too well on the dating scene recently. A few dates, but nothing really came out of them. While the first dates seemed to go fairly well, the conversations were rudimentary, and the connections made were fleeting.

I got some action today, though.

Let me explain.

I went to the doctor earlier in the week to get a flu shot and a checkup. Since there is a history of diabetes in my family, he instructed me to get blood work done. Fine.

Today, as I was waiting in the diagnostic lab’s waiting room, I noticed that the referral sheet that my doctor gave me had my phone number wrong. I made a mental note to address this issue as an extremely large black woman rumbled into the room. She was holding a clipboard and wearing all purple. I mean, she was big. And the fact that she was wearing what seemed to be purple sheets definitely made her comparable to a relatively popular television commercial character mentioned in today’s title.

She stopped in the middle of the room. “Youngman Brown…” she bellowed, looking at me, the only patron.

“Y-yes?”

She turned her head and nodded toward the desk. “Take a seat at the desk, baybee.” Though the desk was only five feet away, she looked at it forlornly, as Gatsby might look at the green light across the bay.

It wasn’t until I was in my seat at the desk that she finally began the journey to her seat. This offered me a moment to take note of the tidiness of her desk. It wasn’t necessarily extremely neat, but there was a perfect line of ten or so cups of the same size, all holding different items. Upon further inspection, I realized that these cups were actually clear green cups which were meant for urine specimens. The cups all still had that broken white sticker on the top lip.

While it was thrifty of her to use these cups, I found it extremely disturbing for some reason. Here is a line of cups, meant to hold people’s urine. Instead they were holding thumbtacks, rubber bands, and candy corn.

Even though they are unused specimen containers (I assume/hope), I still know what they were supposed to hold. And what they were supposed to hold is not something that I eat or drink. It’s the same reason I would never eat fresh grapes from an unused diaper. It’s the principle. And that is enough for me to plan my excuse in case she offers me candy corn.

No thanks, I’m trying to watch my weight. No. Better not broach that subject.

No thanks, I never really liked candy corn. No. Don’t want to offend her choice of candy.

No thanks, I just ate. Perfect.

She finally made it to her seat and, out of breath, asked, “You haven’t eaten anything in the past twelve hours, right?”

There went my candy corn play. I had to fast for half a day. “No, only water.”

“Good.” She put one of her empty green cups down on the table sideways and rolled it towards me. “Go fill that up. The bathroom is over there.”

“I thought it was just blood work,” I said, wondering if I had any pee ready to go.

“Urine, too, baybee.”

I stood up. “Oh, before I forget, they have the wrong phone number on that sheet.”

She clicked a pen. “Okay, gimme your new digits,” she said with the first smile I had seen out of her.

I gave it to her, then went to the bathroom. I managed to produce a sample and waited in the room across the hall, as per her instructions.

I waited for a long time. Ten minutes, perhaps. When she finally ambled in, she collapsed in the chair to my left.

“Left or right arm?” she asked, breathing heavily. Fortunately, I am right handed, because I don’t think I would have had the heart to make her stand back up just to sit in the seat to my right.

She put a rubber tourniquet on my (bulging) bicep and began to do her thing.

Now, I don’t have a problem with needles or giving blood at all. I just can’t look at the needle going in or out. Nor can I look at a vile filling up with blood that I know is my own. So I turned away during the whole process. It took a minute or two, and then she said, “Okay.”

I said, “I’m good?” as a way of signifying that the coast was clear to look. I turned my head and looked down at my completely numb hand to see that it was covered in what can only be described as … her boob.

“Oh, you’re good,” she said, looking at me, “Baybee.”

The “baybee” didn’t strike me as abnormal, but the look she gave me told me that my accidental groping was no accident. She made direct eye contact, and I noticed a slight pursing of her lips. She essentially winked at me without actually winking.

I know you are asking how significant of a feel I copped. The answer is significant.

I’ll put it this way: if her breast was a mound of clay, you’d be able to use it for my left handprint on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Or for the visual learners:

Either way, it wasn’t quite the answer to my prayers I was looking for in regards to “connecting” with that special someone.

“Thankyoubye!” I said as I power-walked the hell out of there.

Flustered, I pressed the wrong button in the elevator. I rubbed my forearm and hand, not to get the circulation back, but for some darker, more tragic reason. My belief in cooties was reaffirmed.

As I got into my car, I was troubled with new anxieties.

I wondered about the status of my phone number. I imagined her scribbling it down onto a tiny piece of paper, putting it into a urinalysis cup, and locking it into her desk.

More importantly, however, I wondered what would happen come the day that I might need to get my sperm checked.

-Youngman Brown

How to Confuse Strangers (A "Poem")

2011-10-13T22:32:00.004-04:00

[I]

Approach someone random,
Act panicked (not insane), say
“Excuse me!” – catch your breath,
“But what year is it?”

[II]

Jubilation or horror
Are two options;
Either way, the stranger's
Response must shock you.

[III]

Stare in awe at the sky
As you run away.
Make sure to jump back
At the first car you see.

Yell "Free Money!"

2010-10-21T06:44:00.005-04:00

At the poker tables, bad beat stories are often shared. In typical big-fish-story fashion, the details are often distorted, allowing the teller of the story appear to be the helpless victim of a complete buffoon who had “no business” being involved in the pot in the first place. In the narratives, the teller played perfectly while the maniac played like a fish. Lost coinflips become lost one-outers. Typically, the teller fails to mention key details such as the maniac having top pair to go along with his flush draw.

It hurts me to listen to these stories. Like, physically hurts. For one,
it is mentally draining to dwell on bad beats. Players often complain, saying that nobody in the world runs as bad as they do. Among other things:

[x] Their opponent’s flush draw always gets there.
[x] Their opponent always hits their miracle two-outer to give them a set on the river.
[x] Their opponent manages to hit a gut-shot straight draw on the river.

Allow me to insert a fact here that most of my poker-playing comrades tend to
forget. Say Player A gets it all-in with pocket aces versus Player B’s pocket kings. All of their money is in the middle with no more poker to be played and five cards to come out. Player A is going to win 80% of the time. One out of five times, though, he is going to lose. He is supposed to lose 20% of the time. Putting this into monetary terms, if both of these people put $100 into the pot, that is a $200 pot. Player A has 80% equity, meaning that he has an estimated value of $160 in the pot. But 80% of the time he is going to get all $200 and 20% of the time he will get zilch. So when he scoops the pot, he technically got lucky and ran above his expected value.

But to most players, they just know that they got it in with a dominating hand, and lost when they were supposed to win, and that eats at their brain. It isn’t their fault, but rather a cognitive bias, which is hard-wired into humans’ brains. It is called loss aversion. In general, people want to avoid loss more than we want to acquire a gain. As a result, losing $100 makes us feel much more unhappy than winning $100 makes us feel happy. It can lead to some pretty nasty things, such as blindly chasing our losses or continually pining over the hands that made us “unfairly” lose our money.

It is why many people swear that online poker is rigged, saying that the software continually gives the bad players whatever cards they need so as to keep them in the games. The truth is that more hands are dealt per hour when they are playing online, therefore they see more bad beats. They conveniently forget about the times that they are the ones who get lucky. It is easy for these players to rationalize and blame their losses on a rigged game or terrible luck, and not come to terms with the fact that they are playing with a flawed strategy in which they are expected to lose over time.

What really bothers me about these stories is that the crazy hand that the person is telling me about has happened to me hundreds of times, and I have experienced far worse beats. When I play online, I typically play 24 tables at a time. I play anywhere from 8,000 to 15,000 hands of poker a day. I am probably seeing more hands of poker a day than these idiots see in a month, year, or lifetime, so the beats I take are far worse and much more frequent.

It is frustrating, then, when I have targeted the idiot who is sitting to my right. I am just waiting for my moment to take his money and he starts blabbing to me about some bigger idiot who took his money in what he calls the suck-out of the century. I patiently endure his verbal torture until I pick up three of a kind versus him and whaddya know -- he hits his flush on the river, saying “Sorry” (which is the dumbest and rudest thing you can say. If you are really “sorry” then give me my money back). He stops telling me bad beat stories and five minutes later decides that its time for bed. I don’t see him as he walks away. Instead, I see the chip rack in his hands. In it, my chips are floating away, wondering what they did to deserve their new owner, and what a cruel and unfair world they live in that their previous master didn’t have a chance to win them back.

The donkey at the table gone, I decide to ask for a table change and I am granted my wish. As I settle into my new seat and unstack my chips, I shake my head. “You guys won’t believe what just happened to me at my old table…”

* * *

Bad beat stories aren’t the only embellished stories that are swapped at the tables. By our very nature, anything that comes out of a poker players lips is bullshit. In the game, a player is trying to sell his hand, so it would make sense that exaggerations would spill over into other banter. The unfortunate thing about poker players’ banter is the fact that it typically revolves around one thing. Poker. This can get quite boring as the same stories are told and retold. Each time a story is recycled, however, it typically has a different flare. Some new detail is added to make the story sexier to prove that the teller has all the inside info.

It is because of this whisper-down-the-lane tales of lore of the Atlantic City casinos that I don’t play at the Taj.

Last summer, there was a stabbing at the Taj Mahal over a blackjack seat. A few months later, someone shot one of the employees in the head. This summer, someone was kidnapped in the parking garage and later found dead. These are facts, but every time they are recounted, new details are added to make the scenario more ominous. I sometimes wonder why, instead of sitting around poker chips and a deck of cards, the ten of us aren’t around a campfire in the woods with the storyteller beaming a flashlight up into his face.

While the Taj certainly has the worst reputation in terms of safety, I generally aim to stay away from any of the casinos that are located in the actual urban area of Atlantic City. I typically play at Harrah’s or the Borgata, which are not only closer to our house, but are much safer in my judgment.

There is one unavoidable obstacle that will sometimes force me to venture into the city. Each casino has a progressive jackpot, called the Bad Beat Jackpot. If a player loses with four-of-a-kind or better, the loser gets 50% of the jackpot, the winner of the pot gets 30%, and the rest of the players at the table who were lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time split the other 20%. Many players will play at whichever casino’s Bad Beat is the highest. If the jackpot really inflates (Think: $700k), that particular poker room becomes a mad house.

When this happens, I am forced to play there. Not only is there barely any action at the other casinos, but it is so easy to make money at that casino that it is almost criminal. Players will put heaps of money into the pot with hands like 3-7 of spades, a terrible starting hand, but one that has the potential to hit a straight-flush. Players will be so blinded by the dream of hitting the Bad Beat that they will forget about the constant stream of cash that they are basically donating to everyone else at the table. When the Bad Beat is so big, it is considered a mortal sin to not head over to this zoo.

* * *

Recently, the Bad Beat Jackpot was very high at both Caesars and Ballys, which are directly next to each other. I couldn’t get a seat at Caesars, so I decided to see how long the waiting list was at Ballys. It is approximately a thirty second walk via the boardwalk, so I didn’t think I would encounter anything terribly dangerous.

However, halfway to my destination, a seemingly homeless man came up to me in what can only be paradoxically described as a brisk stumble. His eyes were glazed, but they had a certain fire in them. He was clearly high on something.

As he approached me I immediately assumed that this man was going to kill me.

His first words were unexpected:

“I love the cops, maaaaan.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Me too.”

“I mean, they’re here to protect us, maaaaan. Like, they get up in the morning, and they get up, and they get up. They just get up and they go to work. They get up and go to work and protect us. That’s what they do. Protect us.”

I began inching away.

“Yea, its good to be safe. And there are so many of them,” I hinted. “They’re everywhere.”

At that point, he had tears in his eyes. He looked up to the heavens, and extended his arms.

“Do you ever wonder if we’re doing what we are supposed to be doing?”

A fair question.

“Who, exactly?”

“Us, maaaaan. Peeeeeeople. What if we’re just here doing the wrong thing, maaaaan?”

I glanced towards the doors of Bally’s. My sanctuary, only a few yards away.

“Oh yea I dunno, man. I’ve really got to get going.”

“Give me a hug.”

“No thanks.”

“What? I’m not gonna hurt you man.”

“I’m good. I’ve really got to get going.”

“Shake my hand, bro. We’re in this together.”

I hesitated, cowardly assuming that shaking this man’s hand would start a series of events that would end my life. Instead of shaking his hand I offered a pathetic wave that was my form of a white flag.

“I love you, man,” he said.

“Same,” I said, as I literally ran away. I looked back to see him staring up at the sky. For answers, I assume.

* * *

Later that night, I left Ballys and went back to Caesars to retrieve my car (this time using the indoor skybridge). Because of my earlier encounter on the boardwalk, I felt uneasy as I walked through the parking garage. Walking behind me were three men. They were probably business executives heading to their car after a great weekend. But in my imagination, they were either thieves, murderers, or rapists who had targeted me and were following me through the dark parking garage as they salivated over my wallet, car, and all-too-alluring body.

I made it to my car and quickly shut the door. Feeling unsafe, I locked the doors. However, in my haste I opted to lock them using the remote lock on my keychain. This is not standard procedure, apparently, because it made my car alarm go off.

Now, I didn’t even know that my car had an alarm. So imagine my surprise and confusion as I sat in the driver seat, unable to figure out how to turn it off. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw one of the men glance over his shoulder towards me before getting in their car and driving away.

I finally got my car to shut up and I drove off without further incident. But I started thinking. What if that was not my car? What if I were the car thief? I mean, I got into a car, it started beeping loudly and its lights flashed, and they continued to do so for half a minute before I disabled the alarm. It looks a hell of a lot like I am trying to steal that car. And those three guys just drove away?

Then I started thinking about anytime I hear a car alarm go off. In the middle of the night when a car alarm wakes me from my sleep, I don’t spring into action to look out the window to try to catch a glimpse of the perp. No. I wonder how long it is going to take the owner of the car to turn the alarm off as it cycles through its various stages of annoying, carnival sounding, ear-rapings. Not once have I thought that the car was being stolen.

* * *

I read somewhere (or maybe I heard it at the poker table) that if you are about to get raped, you have a better chance of someone helping you if you yell “Fire!” rather than “Rape!” I assume that the reason is that people feel more equipped to throw a bucket of water on a flame rather than on a man.

But I think the real reason is that people don’t want to be embarrassed. In a potential good Samaritan’s mind, there are many bad results for himself if he intercedes in a possible raping. For instance, the “raper” and “rapee” might know each other. They could be a couple for all he knows! Perhaps they are having a minor fight, and the girl yelled “Rape!” to get a rise out of her boyfriend. Another way of saying “Fuck you,” if you will. Or perhaps they are a couple who enjoy role playing and rough sex. I mean, these are just two possibilities, but there are tons of possible scenarios rather than an actual raping. Wouldn’t it just be so embarrassing if our potential hero went next door and inquired as to whether or not she was being forced to have sex against her will. Can we say “Awkward?” Talk about an elephant in the room!

And what if the rapist is much bigger than him? What if the rapist beats the hell out of him? Owch! What if the rapist beats the hell out of him and then rapes him too! So many variables. At least with a fire, you know it is a fire and that a fire extinguisher will put it out. But there are no rape extinguishers. It’s simply not worth the potential embarrassment or broken bones, our would-be hero decides as he turns up the volume of The Legend of Bagger Vance.

* * *

I can make fun of our gutless hero all day, but in reality, I possess some of the same qualities. Last week there was an Amber Alert for a kidnapped child. I heard a description of a car earlier in the day, a dark blue Malibu. While driving on the Atlantic City Expressway later that night, I saw a Malibu. I wasn’t sure what color it was, and I took note of the license plate number, which seemed vaguely familiar. I was in no way certain that it was the car, so I drove the rest of the ten minutes to my house while repeating the license plate number aloud over and over, so as not to forget. When I got home, I looked up the description of the car to find that the car I had seen was not one that was imprisoning a helpless child.

But what if it had been? I would have wasted ten minutes that could have sent the police to a much more specific search grid. Why did I need to fact-check before calling in a tip? I thought about it for a while, and the honest answer is that I did not want to be embarrassed. Although for what, I am not sure.

Why do we have a hesitation to spring into action until we are certain that our action is wanted, needed, or acceptable? What happened to shooting first and asking questions later? Why do we try to stay out of other people’s plights, but talk about it so freely at the poker table?

Perhaps it is a cognitive bias similar to loss aversion. The risk of being wrong scares us more than being right makes us feel good. Either way, society’s unflinching knack to not flinch when staring at someone else’s danger or misfortune is something that should be changed. The advent of the car alarm was a sad day for carjackers. But they can stay in business because we opt not to turn and look. Instead, we roll our eyes and plug our ears.

* * *

I can’t help but think back to my drugged up friend on the boardwalk. I think he might have really been on to something and maybe if I were to meet him again I could let him know just that.

“I love the cops, maaaaaan,” he’d say. “They’re here to protect us.”

“It’s a good thing,” I would tell him, “Because we sure as hell don’t protect each other.”

“Give me a hug,” he would say again.

Then I would say, “No.”

Sorry. I can’t even justify that in my hypothetical scenario.

“Shake my hand, then, bro. We’re in this together.”

The druggie has a point, although I am not sure it reflects the point that I see. I look into this fanatic’s eyes and wonder if he would stop someone from stealing my car. I question whether he would spring into action if he heard someone I love yell, “rape.” I even speculate as to whether or not he would say “sorry” after beating me in a hand of poker.

But I can’t determine whether or not he would do any of these things. All I see is an outstretched hand that is attached to a peculiar coke-head who wishes to make physical contact with me.

There are alarms going off in my head, but these alarms I ignore as I reach out my hand. Because crazy as he seems, he is right. We are in this together.

Digital Will

2010-06-30T18:20:00.003-04:00

A girl from my high school died. While crossing the street at the Jersey shore, she was struck and killed by a car.

She was one of those girls who had everything going for her. She was beautiful, compassionate, and talented. She was also a far better writer than I will ever be.

We were not friends, per se. She was two years younger than I. We shared one class together (if Choir is even considered a class). We also shared a handful of mutual friends. I did happen to see her a month or so before her untimely death. She came up to the ice cream store where I still worked, after a decade.

“Oh my God, you still work here?” she asked, echoing the words of so many other people I know.

“No, I just wear the uniform and scoop people ice cream for fun.”

She offered a sarcastic, yet cheery laugh, then said “I’m sorry.” It was unclear to me if she was apologetic for asking an obvious question or if she actually felt sorry for my life situation.

The rest of the conversation consisted merely of
her conveying which kind of ice cream she intended to eat, followed by me telling her how much said ice cream cost. Money/ice cream exchanges were made successfully, and she went on her way, saying “Nice seeing you!” I thought briefly about the fact that in high school I should have asked her out on a date. Then, I didn’t think about her until she died.

As I said, we were not friends. We were, however, Facebook friends.

Facebook was the way I found out about her death. I received a text from one of the only people from high school that I actually keep in contact with, asking if I had heard about Casey. Immediately, I whipped out my iPhone and jumped onto my Facebook App, ready to navigate to her profile.

The first page I am taken to when I log onto Facebook is my News Feed page. It basically shows me what my friends are up to, whether they updated their status, became friends with someone else I know, or broke up with their significant other. The most recent events are at the top. The News Feed page essentially forces you to be a stalker, coercing you to be in-the-know of the going-ons of your Facebook friends (or at least the ones who frequently update their status).

When I logged on to check out what Casey was up to, my News Feed page was inundated with status updates from countless people, saying “RIP Casey” or “OMG so in shock, I love you C.” The details of her passing were still unknown to me, but the knowledge of the event itself spread like wildfire. Newspapers would write about Casey’s death in the next day or so. Extended family would be called the next day, perhaps. But anyone who was a mere acquaintance, like myself, already knew.

This is the power of Facebook. This is the power of technology.

* * *

For my Senior Seminar in college, we had to do a “thesis.” I put quotations around the word because it really wasn’t a thesis. Our professor was both lazy and inept. The assignment itself fell more so under the category of “experiment.” More specifically, “middle school experiment.” See also: “dumb.” And: “a waste of time.”

I am referring to the same category of educational endeavors as what every fifth grader is inevitably forced to do when they are given a Dixie cup of dirt, a seed, a watering can, along with some real estate on a window ledge. Then, they are then asked to do something with these materials so that a plant is formed. MacGyvers in training.

They are told to make a hypothesis and after thirty days, they are forced to make a brainless write-up, which includes their original hypothesis, the procedure, variables, results, as well as an introduction and conclusion. The general lengths of such write-ups had to be three to five pages, but were almost always one and a half pages of double-spaced, run-on sentences accompanied by one and a half pages of giant, unnecessary charts, tables, and graphs. It generally resulted in something like this (random bullshitting and unnecessary charts and graphs omitted).

Introduction
Hello. I am going to plant a seed.

Hypothesis
It will grow into a plant.

Variables
Rainy days. Forgetting to water it. A faulty seed.

Procedure
The seed was put in dirt. The dirt was watered every day.

Results
The seed grew. Here is a chart that shows its height.
[Insert chart with an upward, diagonal line]

Conclusion
I was right. Bye.

This is the basic framework by which my senior “thesis” was based and the overall scrutiny that it underwent. The assignment was to analyze any aspect of technology by making any form of experiment that dealt with that technology, and making a similar write-up. My (joke of a) “thesis” was aimed to “reveal how completely connected people are to Internet social networks and to show that people opt to use technology to contact each other rather than face-to-face communication.”

To do this, I simply changed my Facebook status to read, “Packing up and moving out on Friday. Please stop by and say goodbye.” I left this as my status for 24 hours, during which time I stayed in my room (mostly) and recorded who contacted me and the method that they used (phone, instant messaging, Facebook, etc.). I did not respond to anyone until after the 24 hour period was over (except for the people who physically came to me or incessantly called, to whom I divulged the truth, swearing them to secrecy).

When all was said and done, 89% of the people who contacted me did so through some form of text-based technology (text messaging, Facebook messaging or wall posts, or instant messaging).
For those of you who don’t know, 89% is quite a large portion.
Here, let me show you:

Hopefully that makes things more clear. I find it to be a visually stunning representation of the facts. It definitely contributed to me getting an B+. Although, I would have probably gotten an A if I had included this:

Or this:

The fact of the matter is that only a handful of people actually came to my room or called me.

In my hypothesis, I predicted that 90% of the people would contact me through some form of text-based technology rather than interpersonal communication. What I did not predict was the volume of people who would actually make some attempt to contact me, whether to say goodbye, to inquire as to whether or not I got kicked out of school, or distrustingly wondering if I was pulling a prank. I admit that it felt good to have so many people concerned about me. But it is also somewhat disconcerting to witness how incredibly quickly such news spreads. I received my first instant message two minutes after changing my status. At the end of the 24-hour period, it had become common knowledge that I had been kicked out of school, with the most popular reason being that I had gotten into a fight with the professor who had given this very assignment and for whom my distaste was fairly well known.

It is a frightening notion that information can spread at such a rapid pace and with such waning accuracy. Wildfires are hard to put out once they start spreading.

But that is what the world has become. Connected. Choosing to live in it makes life much easier, but it also adds unseen responsibilities and unique situations that Casey’s death made me begin to consider.

* * *

Something that struck me was the fact that countless people had written on Casey’s Facebook wall with personal messages written directly to her. “Casey, I can’t believe it, I am so sorry,” etc. As a Christian, I am more apt to direct such messages to friends and relatives who have died through quiet reflection and prayer, not via Facebook wall posts for the public to see. I do understand the idea of memorializing loved ones, but there is something about this form of direct-condolences to the deceased that just feels misplaced and macabre.

I then began to wonder what would happen to my Facebook account when I die; how long would it survive me? More importantly, what would I want to happen to it when I die?

I quickly came to the conclusion that I would want it to be closed and/or destroyed immediately, whichever is most realistically possible. Here’s why: I simply don’t want a virtual dossier that is readily available to a world that I am no longer a part of. I am sure that there are pictures of me that one could argue could be incriminating. I am also sure that some of my (guy) friends have written wall posts that one who doesn’t understand our humor could argue makes me appear to be gay (Think: “I can’t wait to come to your beach house for your birthday and snuggle”). I am also sure that some of my favorite bands, movies, and television shows will be utterly unpopular in a few years time (See: 3 Doors Down, Big Brother, Old School). There will be nobody to defend those incriminating pictures, my (very hetero) sexuality, or my taste in media. The fact of the matter is, I don’t want my life to be digitally stuck in time. I don’t want my profile to remain a stagnant fixture of dullness, with the prospect of obtaining new friends an impossibility due to the inactivity on my end of the internet. I’d rather it disappear entirely, forcing all of my friends and loved ones to go back to their own memory banks when thinking of me, which I am certain will paint me as a much cooler person.

I also began wondering what would happen to my poker accounts. While I regularly cash money out of those accounts, I still have thousands of dollars in there. If I were to suddenly die, I am sure that my parents would be able to get all of the money out of my bank accounts, but I don’t foresee them knowing the names of the sites that I play on, let alone my usernames, passwords and pin numbers. On top of all that is the fact that I do a great deal of poker staking online. People from around the world stake me, paying for my buy-ins to some of the bigger tournaments by literally transferring me the money. If by some miracle my loved ones were able to figure out my usernames and then guess the pins and passwords in order to obtain my poker funds, how would they know to send my backers their rightful funds?

I also considered what would happen if there was some sort of mystery surrounding my death. What if I am murdered, and the police need to hack into my computer in order to see with whom I had been chatting with online so they could be clued in on possible suspects? Although my browsing history is generally tame, I wouldn’t be completely against the notion of a close friend going in and clearing it out. Additionally, I have a Microsoft Word document saved to my Desktop, where I write ideas. It is kind of a stream of consciousness type of thing. I quickly jot down ideas and/or quotes that I envision a fabricated character speaking. The problem I have is if I write down an idea for a girl, say, being interested in a guy, I can’t just quickly write down what is going on in her head, I have to put “she said” or “she thought” afterwards, because I am afraid that if I die, someone is going to go into my computer, read the thing, and think I had some homosexual thoughts. Here’s an example, straight from that document: “‘He was zoning out until a commercial came on that asked ‘hemorrhoidal discomfort?’ and his head snapped up. I guess that’s the moment where I knew he wasn’t the one,’ [she said].” Or, perhaps, something that runs through the head of a fictitious murderer: “My lip quivered as I imagined her blood pouring from her throat to the ground.” These are not quotes that I want people to assume came from my diary.

And then I thought about you, faithful Youngman Brown reader. How would you know that I had died? How would you know that I hadn’t abandoned you? How would you know to stop clicking “Refresh,” in the hopes that a new update would suddenly appear, and that you could once again breathe?

And that is when I realized that I need a Digital Will. Technology’s capabilities that allow us to have a digital personality equipped with digital responsibilities obligate us to tie up the loose ends when we die. We essentially need a caretaker who has all of our pertinent digital information.

* * *

Yesterday, I handed my father a manila envelope, with all of my usernames and passwords to all of my various bank and poker accounts. I also gave him instructions on how to log onto my staking site to find out who to transfer funds to. I also gave him the password to give my blog one final update saying that I died. Morbid, I know, but after posting this piece, how could I not?

I also handed my best friend a manila envelope with the passwords to my social networking sites and instructions on what to do. Instead of closing my Facebook account completely, I decided that the better option would be to clear out all of my personal information and photos, except for one in which I look strikingly handsome. Then, he is going to change my status to “Dead.”

My hypothesis is that 90% will try to contact me through a digital means, such as my Facebook wall, while the other 10% will use some alternative means, such as a séance.

-Youngman Brown

Learn more about Casey and donate to the Casey Feldman Memorial Foundation at CaseyFeldman.com.

Bob's Son

2010-01-03T15:30:00.001-05:00

Apparently, my parents are moving.

They actually announced that they were going to move when I began college five years ago. Our current house is too big for their liking, they say. It is true. With both of my sisters moved out and me attempting to find any possible way to afford to move out, there are too many rooms, too many things to clean. Also, they want a house with fewer stairs because they are getting “old.”

They are nowhere near immobile and I do not foresee them having any issues climbing stairs for the next twenty years.

What is most amusing to me is the fact that their beach house, with which they are perfectly content, requires them to walk up twenty steps just to get into the house, then another fifteen to get to their bedroom level.

The fact that they have not found a new house is something that doesn’t really surprise me. They have two basic criteria for the choice of their next house (at least criteria that they say aloud): it has to be a rancher, because of rancher’s inherent lack of staircases, and it has to have a two-car garage, because of two-car garage’s inherent ability to house two cars. I know that their
standards go much deeper, however, and that even the slightest imperfection turns a perfectly fine rancher into an unlivable dwelling. The kitchen requires too much work. Or, the garage, while very spacious, opens up to a small driveway. Or, one of the closet doors squeaks. Or, the overhead fans spin counterclockwise. Or, the doorbell only goes ding instead of ding-dong.

You know, the basic stuff.

I have not-so-secretly rejoiced in their failures to find a new home, not just because this is the house in which I have spent my entire life. Not because I have had countless joyful memories between the bricks that have surrounded me for 23 years. And not because moving would require me to say goodbye to a life I once knew.

I just don’t want to have to box up all my shit.

I have a lot of shit.

As I said, though, I didn’t have anything to worry about due to my parents’ indecision. That is, until very suddenly, my parents decided to redo the kitchen. This was a red flag.

“Youngman, we are going to redo the kitchen,” they said one Sunday night.

“Mmm hmm,” I said.

“We want the house to look nice when we start to show it.”

“Okay.”

“You should start to clean up your room and pack up some of your stuff so that your room looks presentable.”

“Okay.”

Two weeks later, we had a new floor, countertops, sink, stove, and refrigerator. I suddenly knew the feeling that old people with arthritis and healed broken bones get when it is going to rain soon. A storm was coming in the form of realtors and potential homeowners.

And so, I began the long process of boxing up all the stuff in my room.

I did it fairly haphazardly. My room was a mess, so the boxes were destined to be filled messily. Instead of being packaged categorically they were boxed by sections of my room. Whatever fit. Trophies and ribbons mixed with books and shoes. Old shirts and sweatshirts put together with knick knacks and paddy whacks.

I was just finishing up “Southeast Corner of Room” when I came across my senior shirt from high school. Senior shirts were simply shirts that were made at the end of Junior year. The front read, simply, “SENIORS” and the back was a custom moniker or epithet that each individual upcoming senior got to pick. Some had some very creative names. John Ball’s shirt read “BALLS DEEP.” Matt Botta: “BOTTA BING.”

I went with “BOB’S SON.”

My dad taught at my high school.

All four years. He was there. At the most socially stressful time in a young person’s life. Right there. In the same building.

A decade or so prior, I attended kindergarten at the same high school. Back then, it was the coolest thing to have your father come in and play Rubber Ducky on the piano for the class. “Your dad is the coolest,” the other kids would say.

In high school, they would say, “Your dad is a dick. He gave me a detention.”

Our house would get egged. That always hurt, especially when my dad would spend countless hours powerwashing it off.

I always defended him. I would complain to my friends about my dad not letting me go to a concert or some other insanely unfair and unjust form of parental imprisonment. But when one of my friends complained to me about a bad grade, I wouldn’t hear it. “Well, did you deserve it?” I would ask, eerily echoing the words and tone generally used by my father.

It was a tough life: high school with one of your parents in attendance.

I found that the best way to cope with it was to embrace it, hence “BOB’S SON.”

And it did have its rare perks. If I ever needed help with any math homework, he was right there in the same house, and would not only help me get the right answer, but help me to understand all the concepts involved. At school, if I forgot to bring my lunch, I had my own personal ATM sitting in Room 213. One time, he even signed a hallway pass for me to go home so that I could drive home and pick up a paper I had left sitting in my room. This was a strange aberration from a very by-the-rules kind of guy.

Unfortunately, the drawbacks vastly outweighed any benefits. Especially senior year, when I had the pleasure of taking Calculus with the only teacher who taught the subject in the school. Who was that, one might ask? Let’s just say that a parent-teacher conference could be held inside my teacher’s brain. Unless he wanted to talk to my mom.

As I said, my dad was a very by-the-rules kind of guy, so he made sure to randomly call on me when I wasn’t paying attention. He was also the provider of my first and only detention, for being late to class one day. It worked out fine, because my car was in the shop and I had to wait for him after school anyway to hitch a ride. But seriously, dad? Two weeks before graduation you smear my pristine disciplinary record?

I also had to deal with indirect criticism from other students in regards to my successes. I got an A in Calculus. I am sure that most of my peers asked, “How could he not?” I ask the same question, but for a different reason. How could I not do well in a class where I have no possible option of hiding a test score from my parents or being able to not do my homework? If I failed the course, I certainly would have been failed. And grounded.

At graduation, four awards are given to seniors for their academic achievements and involvement in school activities. I was honored with the most prestigious of these awards. Thank you, thank you. You can stop applauding and read on.

Afterward, my dad relayed reports to me of some parents complaining that I won because of him, as if he was the one who made the decision. There was a whole committee of faculty who voted on the recipients of these awards, and my dad made sure he was not one of them.

That was probably the worst part of having my dad as a teacher at my high school -- the feeling that my hard work in class and my involvement in the school meant nothing, and the only reason I was recognized for anything was because my father pulled my apparent inept ass above the ranks.

While I felt as if I was burdened with a lead weight for my four years of high school, in hindsight they offered me with a real glimpse into my father’s life. Now I know, all too well, the shit that he has to deal with day in and day out, both from administration and from the little devils that are America’s future. Now, out of school, I can certainly relate to him better, considering the bond that we shared.

For my dad’s birthday one year, he got one of those catalogues where you can pick one or two things. He probably would have preferred cash, but this was the scenario he was presented with. He picked walkie-talkies. The good kind that can reach two miles and have different channels.

One Mischief Night, he took one of the walkie-talkies and parked his car down the street. I took the other and parked my car across the street in our neighbor’s driveway. Our goal was to catch the eggers in the act. He made it clear that we would only get their license plate numbers or their descriptions. But I had other plans. I would chase them down in my car and beat the shit out of them. Then perhaps make them climb a ladder and lick the egg off of our siding.

Of course, that was the one year that nobody came to defile our house.

I still loved that night.

I figure that once my parents finally move out of their “too big” house, it should make everyone’s lives easier. The little shitheads, for one, won’t have to throw their eggs as high. But Bob, in his old age, won’t have to reach as high to powerwash the mess off or climb any ladders. Either way, all he needs to do is tell me a license plate number.

Bob’s son always has his back.

Unemployment

2009-06-01T01:13:00.002-04:00

When you enter my house through the basement, there is a freezer. On it is one of those mini dry-erase boards that we got years ago from a failing pizzeria. It was free, but the catch was that their logo was prominently displayed smack-dab in the middle of the thing, making it difficult to read any message one might choose to scribble on it.

This board has been clinging to that freezer for a decade now, and while it permanently haunts us with the memory of the now-extinct pizzeria, a seasonally changing message can always be seen on it. My mother adopted it as her way of updating the status of our immediate family or world around us.

“Welcome home Chrissy!” it would read during my sister’s college’s winter break.

“Merry Christmas 2000!” it said, two thousand years after Jesus was born.

“Congratulations Youngman! The world awaits you!”

This, after I graduated.

A year ago.

Today, it still says the same damn thing.

Apparently the world has not been holding its breath.

Anyone who has read
the previous entries of this blog knows that I have not had much luck in obtaining a job. I have been led on, screwed over, almost scammed, ignored, and rejected. Rejected, mostly.

Today, I got a new kind of rejection. Unemployment.

No, not the sobering realization of your jobless status upon receiving your first unemployment check.

No. I was denied unemployment.

I am unemployed and got rejected for unemployment.

I suck.

It is one thing to be a year out of college and not employed. But to not even be able to fully embrace my status as one of The Unemployed is just wrong. I am living in some kind of weird middle ground -- not skilled enough, apparently, to get a job, yet evidently not in a situation where my joblessness merits any form of help from our government. Thanks Uncle Sam.

I hereby consider myself a resident of Youngman Browntown, where I am president. I would tell you more about this magical place, but in Youngman Browntown I am also my own boss, and I just sent myself home early for the day.

Bad Dentistry

2009-05-11T18:23:00.009-04:00

Like most Americans, I have always been afraid of the dentist. It is not a vague fear of the entire “experience” of the dentist. I take great care of my teeth, and have never had a cavity. I have had baby teeth pulled. I have had my wisdom teeth taken out (by Dr. Wank, who gave me a shirt that says, “I Got Yanked by Wank.”) I went through all of the orthodontics and have had braces, spacers, retainers, and even that ridiculous night brace. While these experiences were not necessarily pleasant, I still went through them relatively unfazed. My dentist, orthodontist and even Dr. Wank were extremely friendly fellows.

You might be confused as to why I have a fear, or even if it is real. I assure you, it is very real. And it has a name.

Hilga.

Hilga was a bitch of a hygienist that I had the unfortunate luck of meeting as a young boy. Since the first time I sat in her reclining torture chair, I have had nightmares. Nightmares of her coming into my room late at night, wearing black latex and ripping my teeth out.

I’m not sure what her real name was, but Hilga seemed like an appropriate name to coin for her. More specifically, Hilga the Horrible. The Goddess of Pain.

Hilga was one of those perfectionists who cleaned her victim’s teeth out a little too well. Whether she did it for her own fulfillment or because she was trying to impress the dentist, I am uncertain. What I do know is that when she was done, my entire body would be sore and sweaty from clenching during the entire cleaning.

As I previously stated, I have never had a cavity, so clearly I had done something correct in terms of dental care up until that point. Yet, Hilga was able to find even the minutest traces of plague, extracting it with that pointy scraper thing. She would even scrape my gums with that sharp torture device, producing a large amount of blood. Often times, in her fervor, she would miss and literally stab me. Tears welled up in my eyes, but I couldn’t wipe them away with my bib, as it was already soaked with blood.

The worst part of a session with Hilga was the brushing. In my previous experiences at the dentist, the bad tasting paste was generally laced with some kind of flavoring such as mint, bubble gum, or cherry. Hilga never offered such flavorings. Shit-vomit was her only flavor.

Another aberration from the good ol’ days of dentistry was the fact that Hilga didn’t let me rinse. Previously, I had been permitted to rinse the bubble gum tasting paste out of my mouth four times during the cleaning, once for each quadrant. Hilga finished my top left and moved right on to the top right, and then went directly to the bottom. All the while, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to puke, choke, or faint.

I lost a piece of my innocence that first day that I met Hilga. And I haven’t trusted hygienists since.

Perhaps that is the reason that I waited over a year to visit the dentist, once being knocked off of my parents’ dental insurance.

* * *

Sitting in the waiting room of Dr. Saul's office, I nervously awaited Hilga’s familiar voice to call my name. I pretended to read ESPN Magazine, but stopped when I saw a picture of a toothless hockey player. Would my mouth look like that after today? I mean, how much scraping can a tooth withstand before being chiseled to nothing?

“Youngman Brown?” It was a man’s voice. A very large man. “This way, please.”

At first, I felt relief. Relief that I wouldn’t have to endure the pain that only Hilga could provide. While this man was built like a linebacker, he had a friendly voice, and I could tell that he would be kind to my pearly whites.

I had no idea that I would be experiencing a completely different kind of torture.

“Not working today?” he asked. I already didn’t like him. I am still bitter and embarrassed about not being able to find a job.

“Nah,” I said, hopping into the chair.

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“I just graduated,” I semi-bluffed. “Still looking for work.”

“You and the rest of the world. What are you looking for?”

“I got a degree in Digital Media. So anything with graphic arts.”

“You know what you should do? You should become a heli-logger.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh my God, man. I just saw it on the Discovery channel.” He shoved a plastic piece into my mouth for x-rays. “These loggers cut down trees and then they lift ’em out with a helicopter.”

I raised my eyebrows in feigned interest, but wondered what that had to do with graphic arts.

“It’s like the number-one most dangerous job,” he explained. “More fatalities than in Deadliest Catch.”

He was not selling this job very well. “Thatch crachzy,” I spit.

“Seriously, man. Google that shit. H-E-L-I-hyphen-L-O-G-G-E-R.”

“Okay.”

“Did you catch The Unit last night?” he asked, as if this is a standard question to ask strangers.

I shook my head. “Uh uh.”

“Oh man, really good ep. Hulu that shit. Do you watch House?”

I shook my head again.

“Oh man, that’s a great show. You’d eat it up, man. It’s not like any of those other doctor shows because he is just such an ass. Like, he doesn’t give a shit. Real smart, too.”

This hygienist is just standing there, leaned against the wall, talking to me. Ignoring the fact that I have had a plastic piece clenched between my teeth for a few minutes.

“You look like more of a family guy.”

I assumed he meant “Family Guy guy,” and I shrugged, then tried, “I don’t watcsh Foxch schows exschept Twenty-Four.”

“Eh, I don’t watch that shit.” He put the lead jacket on my chest and started the x-rays. Apparently, I had hit a nerve with the mentioning of 24, as if he just had a messy break-up with Jack Bauer. From that point on, he literally did not say a word except for “open” and “bite.”

As he began violently cleaning my teeth, I had unsettling flashbacks to Hilga the Goddess of Pain. He poked and prodded, scraped and scratched. It hurt. And I swear to God, his eyes were glaring, not at my open mouth, but right back into my eyes. I feared that one of his metallic torture devices might find its way to the back of my throat, rendering me incapable of screaming for help when he inevitably decided to kill me.

And then there was clapping. Clapping and singing coming from the hallway. It was one of the receptionist’s birthdays.

My bulky hygienist stopped cleaning my teeth to yell, “No cake for me!” and then, turning to me: “Oh man, bro, I just had the biggest lunch. Like if you weren’t in that chair, I’d be napping right now, no lie.”

He was back.

“Seriously, I went to that Thai place down the street. I got chicken noodle soup. Man, but the bowl was huge. This big.” He held an invisible bowl in his hands for me to see, approximately a foot and a half in diameter. “It had huge pieces of chicken. So I ate that up, and that wasn’t enough for me, so I got a cup of rice. Bro, they brought me a family size and I ate it all. And now all I wanna do is sleep.”

I offered an impressed nod. “Like aftuh Thankshgiving dinnuh.” There was one of those Sucker tubes in my mouth, making it quite dry.

“The other night I was at the bar, telling this nutritionist that I wanted to drop down to two-sixty. I was actually trying to score, but whatever. She’s like, ‘How much do you weigh now,’ and I told her three-forty and she goes ‘Oh my God, you must have a really high calorie intake,’ and I go, ‘Yea I do.’”

I began discovering all the different noises that I could make with the Sucker, simply by moving my tongue to different parts of my mouth.

“Man she was hot. But I’ll tell you something man. Before my lunch break, there was some girl sitting where you are sitting. You wouldn’t believe it. Blonde. Twenty two. I swear to God, bro, if she were fourteen days older."

I had no idea what that last part meant, but I nodded, knowingly. “Schweet.” Finally, he resumed his job and continued cleaning, giving me the silent treatment once again.

“We’re done,” he said, taking my bib off and exiting the room. I coyly got out of the chair and made my way to the front desk, where the mass of a man stood, eating a piece of birthday cake. “You should come every six months,” he said, more of a statement than a suggestion. Then he walked away.

“That’ll be seventy-five dollars,” the receptionist informed me. “Would you like to schedule your next appointment?”

“I’ll have to call to schedule, once I take a look at my calendar.”

I don’t have a calendar, and if I did, it would be completely blank for November. I knew that the next time I would go to the dentist wouldn’t be until the next time I had some kind of unbearable pain in my mouth. These checkup visits to the dentist always left a bad taste in my mouth.

-Youngman Brown

Easter Rising

2009-04-13T22:42:00.004-04:00

Last year, I didn’t give anything up for Lent. My college didn’t serve meat on Fridays, so I suppose that could be seen as a sacrifice, albeit one that had nothing to do with personal surrender. This year, however, I decided that I really needed to offer up some form of self-sacrifice. That is why I gave up late night fast food.

This might sound like a diminutive forfeiture, but I assure you it was not. I have come to find that online poker is a nine-to-five job, in that the worst players are playing from 9PM until 5AM. Think: Europeans. Think also: Drunk Americans. Because of this, it makes sense that my sleep schedule is somewhat askew. If I go especially deep in a tournament, or if I find myself sitting to the right of a complete donkey in a cash game, I am forced to continue playing, despite my tired eyes. Often, my head will hit the pillow at the same time that my parents’ alarms force them to grumble their way around the house to start their long days at work.

I usually wake up somewhere between one and three in the afternoon, at which point I eat a breakfast of either a bowl of cereal, a pop tart, or a sandwich. My parents, walking in the door after a full day at work, say “Good morning, Sleepy,” apparently in reference to one of the Seven Dwarfs. Around six o’clock, I join my parents for dinner. According to my stomach, however, that meal was called “lunch.” My stomach (whose name, incidentally, is Grumpy) begins getting quite restless around midnight, and the snack food we have around the house is generally not to his liking. Can you blame him? I mean, it is dinnertime for him. So I take the little bugger out for a late night fast food run and that is that.

Fulfilling my Lenten vow by taking those late night expeditions out of the equation meant that for forty days the beast known as Grumpy was not tamed. In turn I, myself, was quite grumpy. It truly was not a small thing to let go, as it forced me to truly be aware of the sacrifice during many of the hours that I was up.
I also made another promise to myself during Lent. Instead of making a pilgrimage to the Golden Arches, I made more trips to church. I do attend mass every Sunday, but during Lent I went to church on all the biggies. Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday: if the day of the week has a capitalized word in front of it, I was there. In addition, I also persuaded myself into attending The Passion Play at my church.

In a nutshell, the Passion Play is the twelve Stations of the Cross acted out by seventh graders. The Passion of the Christ meets Sesame Street. The play itself required no acting skills whatsoever. The children simply went through the motions of the stations of the cross. Even the spoken words were taken care of, as they were bellowed out over the microphone by the male CCD teachers. As far as acting was concerned, all the little actors had to do was make hand gestures, always as if explaining something. It is a very well-organized and somber production. But at the same time, when some parents are clandestinely videotaping their little Mary Magdalene, it loses some of its solemnity. Some of the actors being scolded for giggling also has a similar effect. I can’t blame them, though. After all, a decade ago I was one of them. Rather, the One.

That’s right. I, Youngman Brown, was Jesus in the Passion Play.

* * *

On the day that roles were being handed out, I had my sights set on Pontius Pilate, but my wishes were swiftly brushed aside as our teacher nominated me for Jesus. I politely said “no thanks”: the role had its obvious responsibilities, but it also involved a certain degree of nakedness. Back then, I was hesitant to take my shirt off at the beach, let alone the middle of a church. Nobody wanted to see my pale, seemingly malnourished body.

“I think that I would make a great Pontius Pilate,” I tried.

“You are just being modest,” our teacher said.

I thought of the marble Jesus hanging in our church. It revealed a relatively muscular man, equipped with pecs, abs, and even those oblique muscles that women seem to love. Jesus was a carpenter after all.

“I think David would make a better-”

“You are Jesus.” Whatever that meant, it didn’t make a difference. She had already washed her hands of the matter.

* * *

So there I hung, a thirteen year old, shirtless and scrawny rendition of our Savior. The church was silent as my body hung limp -- I had just offered up my spirit, and was trying desperately to appear as if I was not breathing. It was a very difficult task without a shirt. Making it even more difficult was the fact that I was clenching my abdominal muscles together, hoping that my weekly regimen of situps would be noticed by at least one of the onlookers. I fear that I did not make a convincing dead man, especially since I was so skinny that the audience could probably see my heart beating. Either way, all that was left to do was take me off the cross, lay me in Mary’s arms, throw me into the tomb, and then, viola! I’d have risen from the dead, fully clothed once again. The falling, crucifying, and dying was over, and it wouldn’t be hard from here on out.

Or so I thought.

Picked as the Virgin Mother was the only other CCD student in my class that also went to my high school. We shared this bond, but I also had had a crush on her for four years. Guard #1 took me down from the cross and laid me in her lap, at which point “Gentle Woman” was played and sung by the Children’s Choir. It was the most somber moment of the Passion Play. Nay, a representation of the most somber moment in recorded history. She was the depiction of a mother, grieving at the death of her only child. I was the depiction of Jesus Christ who just died for mankind’s sins. And all I was doing was praying.

Praying that I didn’t get a boner.

It’s not an erotic position, per se: my head in a girl’s lap. That was not the reason for my fear of the firm. It was Jim Ruplee’s fault. Jim played Guard #2, namely, the guard that strips Jesus of his clothes. During rehearsal the night before, as Jim guarded my dead body on the cross and Mrs. Pellis, the director, announced that I would now be carried to Mary’s lap, Jim whispered, “Don’t get a boner.”

Like I said, it’s not an erotic situation and I am also not a hornball. But, let me ask you, faithful reader: what do you do when someone tells you there is a spider in your hair. Do you freak out? Do you feel other spiders on your body for the next few minutes? It’s exactly the same. Well, not exactly the same, but I hope you get the idea.

* * *

I listened over the choir and heard sobbing coming from the audience. People were praying, contemplating the significance of the sacrifice made by a man who died for their sins two thousand years ago. And I was wondering if Guard #1 plopped me down with my pelvis facing the congregation on purpose. Judas.

I couldn’t adjust myself. I mean, I was dead. I couldn’t take a peek. There was a spotlight on me for Christ sake.

The choir sung on and on. Gentle woman, quiet light…

I was wearing white mesh shorts. If given a list of things one should wear to disguise a hard-on, white mesh shorts would be down there with thong and cellophane. I could only hope that perhaps the congregation’s eyes would be more attracted to the “Champion” logo than my other inconsistency.

As “Gentle Woman” finally finished its fourth and final verse, I thanked God. I didn’t care how big it was (or how big it would ever get for the rest of my life, for that matter) so long as this moment was finally over.

But then the guards flipped me on my back onto a makeshift stretcher and put a white sheet over me in order to carry me to the “tomb.” I realized that this probably made the situation even worse as I thought back to many a morning, waking up on my back, looking down and saying, “Oh hello there.”

* * *

Whether or not my subconscious made me pitch a tent that night is not up for debate. The only thing debatable is how much was built up in my mind and how much was built up in my shorts. There are many factors to consider, such as lighting, angles of limbs, and people’s general ignorance for such things. It wasn’t something I could look down to check. Nor was it something I could ask my parents about afterwards. It is one of those things, I am guessing, that every young boy goes through. Sometimes, you simply can’t control it.

Its name is Happy, after all.

One day, perhaps, it will be downgraded to Bashful.

-Youngman Brown

Pop-Ups

2009-02-13T15:39:00.008-05:00

While circumnavigating the world wide web yesterday, I received one of those dreaded pop-up advertisements. This one offered me a glimpse of “young hotties” from my town. This isn’t the first time I have seen advertisements that are zip-code-specific, but nevertheless it is still somewhat disconcerting that they know the general area I live in (from my IP address, I assume). Either way, I didn’t give much thought to the pop-up. I simply took swift notice of the aesthetics of the bikini-clad “young hotties” that definitely did not live in my town, and clicked the X.

And then something happened.

I have found that clicking the X occasionally brings up another pop-up, which in turn leads to another pop-up. But this time was different. An
extremely perplexing alert popped up. I have documented it below.

This alert had really presented a tough dilemma for me. I was quite sure that I wanted to navigate away from the page – that was not the issue. The issue was that queer middle line.

It was so subtly worded. It did not say “IF YOU CLICK “OK” YOU WILL BE TAKEN TO XXX GAY PORN.” Instead, it simply let me know that if I wanted to avoid gay porn, I just had to click “Cancel.” I’ve never really had to avoid gay porn. I mean, it hasn’t jumped out of the woods into the middle of the road
as I speed down the highway. To the best of my knowledge, gay porn has never been anywhere near me. Until now, that is: according to this alert, it is just a button click away. Thankfully, someone at the “young hotties” page was looking out for me, not wanting to expose me to XXX GAY PORN. So, at the cost of staying at the “young hotties” page, I clicked “Cancel” and decided to regroup.

I tried to click the X again, only to offer the same alert. “Cancel.”

Again, I clicked the X, hoping that pop-up banners had to follow some “three strike” law, but alas! The same alert. Clicking the X to this alert was the same as clicking “Cancel.”

So there I was, stuck staring at the “young hotties” that were not from my town, and I swear to God, I could see their smiles getting bigger. They knew they had me trapped, imprisoned by my fear of what clicking “OK” would implicate. Ensnared by the fear of becoming “that guy” who waived his option to avoid hardcore gay porn.

I began to wonder if this pop-up having a permanent home on my desktop would really affect my daily activities on my computer. It didn’t take up that much room…

* * *

I know that you are thinking, “Youngman Brown, why are you making such a big fuss about this? Just click “OK” and close whatever window happens to pop up.”

I understand this. And I wish to ensure you that I am not a homophobe. The reason for my stubbornness is the same reason I am always stubborn: hypothetical situations.

I picture myself in the not-so-distant future in front of a crowd of people, all of whom are gorgeous women who closely resemble the “young hotties” from my hometown. I am handcuffed to a chair, and there are wires and sensors on my arms, hands, and temple. I am sweating bullets; I have never been given a lie-detector test before. The proctor of the test is Salma Hayek, and she is wearing a sexy police officer uniform, for whatever reason.

“Your test consists of only one question,” she says, sexily. And then, “your answer will determine whether you pass or fail.”

What will happen if I pass the test, I am unsure, but I have a feeling it involves Salma and one or more of the “young hotties” in attendance. I am also unaware of what will happen if I fail the test, but I have a feeling it involves castration.

“Are you ready for your question?” Salma asks.

“Yes,” I lie.

“Very well. Your question is…”

But I already know what the question is: “…Have you ever looked at gay porn?”

There is a long pause. Too long.

“Well, it’s funny you should ask. You see-”

“YES OR NO!?” Salma hits me with a whip. I don’t know if I love it or hate it.

“If I could just explain-” Another crack of the whip. Salma wants an answer.

* * *

The ending to this story that I desire is for me to give a resounding “NO,” let Salma uncuff me, and then let whatever happens happen. But this could never happen if I click “OK.”

Somewhere, someplace, there is a dossier on Youngman Brown:

[x] Has been to Jamaica
[x] Has hazel eyes
[ ] Has looked at gay porn

Even if this report is only in my mind, I would rather not have that last one checked off.

But I also don’t want to be continually reminded that girls that hot are nowhere near my town. And I also know that while I may have issues, this should not be one of them, and that I should just man the hell up, click “OK” and move on with my life.

So…

I hover my mouse over the “OK” button, do a mental countdown, squint my eyes as if looking at an eclipse, and click the mouse button.

And now I’m gay.

Just kidding.

In all seriousness, I clicked “OK” and the pop up went away, no gay porn popped up, and instead of forgetting about it and moving on with my life, I wrote a blog post about it.

Domain Disaster

2009-01-09T04:06:00.008-05:00

I sometimes daydream about going back in time. With the exception of riding a dinosaur, the purpose of my journey almost always has something to do with making money.

Of course, my initial idea is typical: going back andwinning the lottery on a particular day. That, however, usually involves me being on the news, everyone knowing that I am rich, and me losing friends. I would need something that kept me out of the public eye.

Perhaps the simplest idea I have had is spending a day back in the early ’90s and registering websites for all the big name corporations with the plot to sell them at a later date for millions of dollars once the internet boomed like a supernova. Microsoft.com, mcdonalds.com, abc.com, etc. I can picture the faces on the guys at one of the first domain name registrars:

“Looks like Coke decided to join the world wide web,” one bored intern would say as a beep from his computer wakes him from his daydream and notifies him that cocacola.com was just purchased. Subsequently, the same user, this LilYoungmanBrown from Pennsylvania, United States, proceeds to single handedly buy 200 more domains in the period of a few hours.

“Say, Rick?” the intern asks, “Just who is this Barack Obama? And is there a Hilton in Paris?”

While for obvious reasons I cannot go back in time, I did finally attempt to put this website-purchasing plan into action a few
weeks ago. Andy Samburg released a new digital short on Saturday Night Live with all the hilarity and popularity potential as Lazy Sunday and Dick in a Box. It can be viewed below:

I had already scrambled to my laptop and logged into GoDaddy before the short had even finished airing. Within minutes, I was the proud owner of JizzedInMyPants.com. This would be my legacy. I was sure of it.

The next day, I set up a week long auction on Ebay, sure that come Monday, it would be the hottest video on the internet and that it would sell for $10k at the very least. I even offered free shipping.

Unfortunately, in my haste to buy the site as quickly as possible, I overlooked the fact that the first verse is sung in Shakespearean present tense:

Mainly your fault from the way that you dance
And now I
Jizz in my pants
Don’t tell your friends or I’ll say your a slut

It matters not that most of the rest of the song is in past tense. NBC had already bought JizzInMyPants.com, of course, and because of a simple past/present/future clause failure, I have essentially lost ten bucks. More importantly, however, I have lost the hope that I can make thousands of dollars by doing virtually nothing.

The only silver lining in this whole mess is for you, my faithful Good Youngman Brown readers: JizzedInMyPants.com will take you directly here, if that is easier for you to remember and if you aren’t embarrassed to have that in your browsing history.

Bookmark it if you’d like, because I am fairly certain that any other attempts to turn that web address into an entrepreneurial conquest would result in me getting involved in the porn industry.

I’m just not ready for that.

-Youngman Brown

Self Conscious Evaluation

2008-12-03T20:15:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, I decided that I wanted to work at a book store. I made the traditional Are You Hiring? calls to the three closest locations to discover that the furthest one away was the only one hiring. So be it.

The online application consisted of the standard employment questions that required me to dig through stacks of papers to find the phone number and address of past employers. There was, however, a 100 question self-evaluation, where I had to completely agree, agree, disagree, or completely disagree to statements about myself.

I consider myself a tidy person:

[ ] Completely agree

[x] Agree

[ ] Disagree

[ ] Completely disagree

When one job is finished, I look for more work to do:

[x] Completely agree

[ ] Agree

[ ] Disagree

[ ] Completely disagree

Other people often annoy me:

[ ] Completely agree

[ ] Agree

[x] Disagree

[ ] Completely disagree

They should have included a 101st statement:

My responses to the previous 100 statements were mostly lies in an attempt to tell you what I think you want to hear:

[x] Completely agree

[ ] Agree

[ ] Disagree

[ ] Completely disagree

It was a harder experience than one might think, attempting to
determine my responses in regards to what I am actually like versus what I would be like while working. I actually giggled as I described myself as a hardworking, tidy person who is not annoyed by stupid people. Many of the questions gave me pause, such as the infamous “I am overqualified for this job,” which is an obvious eeny meeny miny mo response.

But the question that really made me stop and think was:

I don’t care what people think about me:

[ ] Completely agree

[ ] Agree

[ ] Disagree

[ ] Completely disagree

I sat and wondered. First, about which box the book store would have liked me to check. Do they want to know if animated individuals are willing to suppress their enthusiasm so as to not scare customers away? Or do they wish to cultivate such characters to get the customers “excited” about books? Do they want a gothic poet laureate to hide her tattoos from fellow employees? Or should she express her individuality in the workplace?

There were too many scenarios. Too many possible wrong answers.

I then started thinking about whether or not I actually do care about what other people think about me. Of course, I always say that I don’t care. But how much weight can that carry when I have sat for five minutes wondering what a book store might think of my responses to innocuous questions?

Then I thought back to my middle school cafeteria.

My dad is pretty much the epitome of frugal, always electing to buy the generic brand items to save some cash. This included the store brand juice boxes, which were included daily in my lunch. This wouldn’t have been so bad if the generic brand of juice boxes didn’t picture these little cute fruit men. Apples, oranges, and strawberries equipped with hands, feet, eyes, and gaping smiles. The small army of fruit men occupied the entire surface area of the juice box and appeared to be dancing and celebrating, as if to say, “Hey everyone in the cafeteria! Look at me! I’m a smiling humanoid fruit and happy to be alive! Yippeee!”

Upon sitting down for lunch, I promptly opened my paper bag, always keeping it standing upright and close to the edge of the table. Then, I quickly placed the juice box between me and the paper bag, so that nobody could see that I promoted tiny dancing fruit men. Usually, I sucked down its contents before I even started eating my sandwich, leaving me parched for the rest of the meal.

Then, I would look across the cafeteria at James Savage. The name just screamed “cool,” I know. I’m not sure what his lunch consisted of, but every day he had two Squeezits. Squeezits were the king of the realm of lunchtime juices, completely abandoning the contemporary idea of juice in a box. That’s right, they came in six-packs of plastic, squeezable bottles. The bottles were shaped like cartoon crazy faces, but there was a striking difference between his lunchtime refreshment and mine – his were advertised on television. Therefore, they were more expensive. And cooler. And he got two. Everyday.

It wasn’t fair that I had to veil the contents of my lunch, while he could hold his up high like a trophy, and probably take any girl in the sixth grade to first base if he wanted. But such was the life of a middle-schooler.

Today, with a limited cash flow, I am all about saving a buck or two and will frequently buy generic brand products. But back in middle school – forget about it. If you wore sneakers that were anything but Nike or Adidas… well, you simply had to prepare yourself for ridicule. No Jansport school bag? Might as well just carry your books to school. No Starter jacket? Gear up for a cold winter. Oh, and your Starter jacket better represent a good team. Or at least have cool colors.

The only upperhand I had on my peers was with my pencils. As a teacher, my dad obtained an endless supply of Dixon Ticonderogas. “Ohmygosh, Johnny has a Papermate pencil!” I would jeer, “It’s not even a Number Two!” There wasn’t much we could make fun of Johnny Sang for, except for the fact that if you put a period after his name, it would make a logical sentence, so I got my shots in when I could.

I was always looking for my next pencil-less victim, always listening for the snap of a point. I would point, laugh, and then usually gave the victim a fresh Ticonderoga so they could avoid further embarrassment. My arrival as Johnny Appleseed of the pencil world lasted longer than it should have, perhaps, but it did earn me some friends while taking the SATs.

I realize that my self consciousness was not limited to just middle school, and some forms of it exist today. For example, I always feel like a shoplifter when I leave a clothing store empty-handed after having tried on some merchandise. I feel the urge to put my empty hands in the air as I walk out, or offer the too-friendly greeter an explanation that “the jeans weren’t my style” as he wishes me a good day. I continue onward into the mall, feeling his eyes still on me, searching my body for an abnormal bulge in my jeans where I must surely have tucked away an unpaid-for t-shirt. I literally feel guilty for a crime that I have not committed.

In reality, he didn’t think twice about me as he continues to fold clothes and daydream of what he will do when his shift ends at 5 o’clock. It is all in my head, this thought that the world revolves around me. The thought that I am the only customer who would walk out of American Eagle without a bag of newly purchased clothing and a receipt. The thought that one type of pencil will make you a superior scholar than another. The thought that the comfort of a shoe comes second to the name that appears on the tongue.

It is ridiculous, really, the fact that I am 23 and still have a desire to be liked. To please other people. Although I wish to outgrow it, I know that it is a part of human nature, and I am sure that some of my self-conscious habits are shared by many other people. One day, I am sure I will reach the point where I am above all of that, but until then:

I don’t care what people think about me:

[x] Completely agree

[ ] Agree

[ ] Disagree

[ ] Completely disagree

Asterisks

2008-10-28T16:09:00.007-04:00

I love to play online poker, but I recently realized how much of a different person I become when things don’t go my way. Here is the chat log, verbatim (screen names changed):

Dealer: marids11 (button) showed 10cQs and won ($170.60) with a straight, Nine to King
Seat 9: Youngman Brown showed KhKd and lost with three of a kind, Kings

Youngman Brown: aslkjflaskjf
Youngman Brown: WTF
Youngman Brown: you call all the way down with a ****ing gutshot?
Youngman Brown: what a ****ing donk
marids11: hehehe ul
Youngman Brown: unlucky my *** you idiot
Youngman Brown: you just called your entire stack with a 4 outer
Youngman Brown: I hope you get herpes.

The anger that flows from me is justified because this guy deserves to get verbally assaulted and that is a “bad beat” in any poker player’s book. What is surprising to me is my choice of ammunition.

Herpes? It’s not only mean, but it’s so… specific.

On the virtual poker table, I have
been called almost every name in the book, as I have shelled out my fair share of bad beats. People have wished for me to die, or for me to kill myself. People have said, “fuck you,” “fuck off,” and “fuck that.” I have been told to fuck myself and I have also been told to fuck my own mother.

But nobody has ever wished a venereal disease upon me.

I am not sure what incited me to summon the VD. Perhaps it is the Pokerstars chat logs, which ingeniously weed out and replace almost all of the curse words with an equal lettering-amount of asterisks.

I must give the creator of the software credit, however. It can even asteriskcise parts of words. For example: “asshole” = “***hole.” It knows when to lay off, too. For example: “assume” = “assume,” not “***ume” as you might assume it would be. Genius! During one session, I tested the software to the brink, in order to discover which words were virtual poker-appropriate and which words failed the test. Imagine my virtual tablemate’s confusion:

Youngman Brown: assuage
Youngman Brown: Charles ****ens
Youngman Brown: shittimwood
Youngman Brown: assassinate

Some might consider this a waste of time, but in my adventures through the dictionary, I learned some very interesting things. Did you know that a Dick test is a test to determine susceptibility or immunity to scarlet fever? Or, that “bitch goddess” is an actual noun, meaning material or worldly success?

I mean, it is great that I am able to talk about the wood of the shittah tree, but what happens when my poker discussions shift into dialogues about the central themes of David Copperfield and we cannot even utter the author’s name!

There are, of course, ways around the all seeing eyes of the poker chat police. A simple space bar will suffice:

Youngman Brown: go ahead and bet you little *****
Youngman Brown: b itch

It is never manly, however, when you initially forget to input the space bar, and you have to clarify to your opponent exactly what you think he is.

Perhaps all the censorship is why I wished an eruption of blisters on the skin of my opponent. However, even if my angry wishes came true, he would still probably call my bets all the way down to the river, herpes and all. So until I figure how to get a 9% underdog to fold, I suppose I will just go eat shi t and die.

The Giza Pyramid Scheme

2008-10-16T23:13:00.000-04:00

This is a really shitty time to be a recent college graduate. Included in my current slew of unfinished books are The Secret and Think and Grow Rich, both of which stress the importance of positive thinking. But with the economy the way it is, it is all too easy to become a pessimist. As I see the stocks plunge and jobs being dropped, I can’t help but grow anxious for one particular job to become vacant – Bush’s. I’m sure he’s quite ready to retire as well. Perhaps he should take a hint from bin Laden and hide in a cave to escape the jobless masses, who are rightfully pointing the finger at him.

Or, like me, giving him the finger.

In my quest for a job, I can’t even count how many resumes I have sent out. What’s worse is the fact that I don’t even hear “We got your resume,” let alone, “Come in for an interview.” It’s insanely frustrating.

To apply for one particular job, I needed to post my resume on Yahoo Hotjobs. I heard nothing from that potential employer, of course, but the very next day I got a phone call, asking if I had ever thought about selling insurance. Of course, I hadn’t, but at this point I was eating up any opportunity that came my way, even if it had absolutely nothing to do with my major. Or my minor. Or my interests in general. In fact, this was the kind of job

that I watch my favorite characters on The Office dread and make fun of from week to week.

My schedule was all clear every day for the foreseeable future, so I figured I would at least check it out. Equipped with a pen and a pessimistic attitude, I sat in a cramped conference room with an array of various job-seekers of all ages and I impatiently waited to hear about the insurance industry.

“How would you like to make six figures within two years?” asked a man in a suit, as he walked through the door. He was off to a good start, in my opinion.

“Here at Giza Insurance [name changed], it’s up to you how much money you make.”

“One hundred percent commission?” a skeptical woman asked, pointing at the brochure that he handed out on his way to the front of the room. “So there’s no salary?”

“That’s the best part!” He whipped out a marker and drew a dollar sign on the dry-erase board.

“This is your earnings.” I was with him so far.

He drew a horizontal line under the dollar sign. “This is the floor, or the salary that most companies would give you.” Drawing a horizontal line above the dollar sign (which represented my earnings, in case you forgot), he explained that “This is the ceiling, which is the maximum you can make at another company.”

My earnings were trapped! Clearly, they had nowhere to go if I went to another company. What was I to do?

The presenter erased the line below the dollar sign. “Sure, there is no salary,” he explained, then smiled broadly, “But here at Giza Insurance, by taking away the floor we also take away the ceiling.” By golly, he had liberated our earnings with the help of an eraser!

He drew one more thing, and now the dollar sign was accompanied by an arrow that reached to the top of the board. “Here at Giza, there is no cap to the amount you make.”

* * *

His primitive sketch opened my eyes a bit to what was going on. I thought back to a night in my senior year of college. After a night of baseball and beer, three of my roommates and I went to a nearby diner. It was 2AM, and we were alone, except for a long table of about twenty people across the diner. Their attention was fixed on a man in a suit, happily saying something.

“What are they doing here so late?” I asked the waitress. “Some sort of motivational speaker?”

“No it's one of those pyramid schemes,” she explained.

“Yo, I’m gonna go ruin that dude's plan and tell ’em all they’re bein’ duped,” my buddy said.

“Don’t!” she said. “Please don’t! Every week there’s new ones and they get all excited and leave a big tip.”

“What idiots,” I said.

* * *

What idiots, indeed. But here I was, two hours into Giza’s presentation, and I was completely sold. I knew it was essentially a scam, yet they had thrown around such amazing numbers and earning potential, that my mouth was salivating for money. They handed around copies of bonus checks, some totaling $30,000. And those were given quarterly. I had become convinced that I could make it. I could be the best insurance salesman ever and get an exponentially increasing paycheck from bi-week to bi-week.

The next day, I was called and asked if I would be interested in coming in for an interview. I excitedly agreed, and for the few days before the interview, I daydreamed of all the riches I would bring in with my newfound career aspirations.

Looking back on it now, my naiveté amazes me. In researching the company online, I found complaint upon complaint from former employees of Giza, who described their own experiences of unfulfilled promises of high income from the company. I brushed it off as disgruntled employees looking to vent, and searched and searched until I finally found a few positive reviews, which reassured me almost completely.

God even tried sending me a sign, allowing me to notice the tiny words: “Results Not Typical” at the bottom of a Jenny Craig commercial.

* * *

When the interview finally came, I voiced a few of my concerns to Shane (who would be my “Team Leader” and who would also get a percentage of my sales). I told him that some of the former employees had left negative reviews online, and I was concerned that I wouldn’t make enough money to support myself, especially in the first few months.

Before he could offer a full explanation, I actually chimed in and offered an excuse for him:

“But you know, most of them were from other branches, and most people who post on those sites are ones who are looking for somewhere to vent,” I offered, and followed up with: “You wouldn’t see someone who is having a great experience looking for somewhere proclaim their great experiences.”

What the hell was I doing?

The “interview” continued with more pleasantries exchanged, and unlike other interviews that I had been on, it seemed that he was sucking up to me just as much as I was sucking up to him. Through our conversation he found out that I had been to the Atlantis in the Bahamas for a poker tournament. The next five minutes consisted of him telling me how they send people on trips to places like the Atlantis and how easy it is to be sent there. Then the next five minutes were spent discussing poker being an integral part of his upbringing.

“Are you an Eagles fan?” he asked, then high-fived me when I responded in the affirmative.

I mean, I was getting sold. He is a proven salesman, and he was clearly selling this “job” to me and I was letting him.

From the outside, it is easy to scorn these pyramid schemes and wonder how people can be dumb enough to invest their time and money at the lower levels of them. But when you are sucked in and become part of the recruiting process, it is amazing how easy it is to get sold by the proven salesmen who sit at the apex.

I am glad I stepped away from the “lucrative opportunity” offered to me, but it is disheartening to go back to the grind of applying for jobs and not hearing a single word back. Money is going to be tight for the next few months. All I can say is, thank God that Chukwu Godwin e-mailed me from Africa and is allowing me to send him $5,000 and in return will wire $2 million to my bank account!

It’s a good thing I check my Spam, otherwise I would be broke in a few months.

Real Privacy

2008-10-15T18:23:00.002-04:00

One of my biggest guilty pleasures is Reality TV. I am not sure where my fascination began, but I think I can blame it on my ex-girlfriend, Annie, who forced me to sit down and watch The Bachelor. I know, I know. Why waste time watching a chauvinistic guy date multiple trashy and desperate women in one of the corniest situations imaginable. Such were my complaints. But like most other reality shows, it hooked me, and now I’m that guy that doesn’t miss an episode of the gayest show ever.

A far superior reality show, however, is Big Brother. For those who might not know what the show is about, think: the pointlessness of The Real World combined with the competitive structure of Survivor. Basically, it is just CBS picking the most insane and emotional individuals they can find and locking them in a house for three months and seeing if anyone kills each other. Last one standing gets half a million and the rest get their insecurities broadcasted to millions of people. By going on the show, you are agreeing to be at the mercy of CBS, who will edit you in the way they deem fit. You will be turned into the hero or the villain of the summer, depending how they think it will affect ratings. People’s lives have literally been ruined due to bad experiences on the show.

And I can’t wait to go on.

I am convinced that I already would have been on the show were it not for my aforementioned laziness. The application is fourteen pages long.

When I was
fifteen years old and watching the first season of Big Brother, my mom walked into the room and after sixty seconds told me to “turn that crap off.” I didn’t turn it off, and neither has she. The show is in its tenth season, and she hasn’t missed an episode since. It is just one of those addicting vices that is hard for anyone to turn away from. Each season, there is usually one normal person in the field of crazies, and it is hard not to tune in three times a week (yes, three) to see if he or she gets screwed over.

Even though she is a fan of the show, my mom is completely against me becoming a contestant. While I am convinced that I would come out with the same morals and values I had going in, she is not so convinced.

“I won’t watch it if you go on,” she tells me. This, I believe. Instead of watching me undoubtedly performing all kinds of heroics and making her proud, she would opt to not tune in and instead wonder if I was embarrassing her by canoodling with a girl under velvet sheets for all of America to (mostly) see.

Of course, if I were chosen for such a show, I would do everything in my power to not embarrass myself or my family. But why do I have an utter lack of concern for my complete loss of privacy? I don’t even think it’s about the money or even the fame. I just think it would be a fun experience.

That’s pretty sad, right?

I realize that I don’t have that much privacy in my everyday life, anyway. Nor do I care. I am fairly candid in my daily interactions. I am generally not timid about anything I say, do, or believe. And if I needed that protective shell, I certainly wouldn’t blog about my personal life.

Or have a Facebook account.

I remember reading an article about how many members of the Facebook community were up in arms because of some new technology that essentially mined through the profiles to determine relevant advertisements to be displayed. To them, it was a breach of privacy.
But I am perfectly fine with it. I don’t mind advertisements for my favorite bands or authors that many people have never even heard of.

Listen to Muse? Facebook asks me. Fan of Sedaris?

Yes, and yes! Facebook, have you been reading my diary?

While the advertisements have been mostly spot-on, I have noticed a few glaring inconsistencies recently: Meet Gay Singles, I am told.

My profile still says that I am “Interested in Women.” I double checked.

So what gives, Facebook?

They must have taken deducing certain things into their own hands. Perhaps it has something to do with The Bachelor being listed under my “Favorite Shows.” I’m not sure.

This erroneous marketing is somewhat disconcerting for me, but I am still okay with it. Yes, I divert my glances away from the shirtless, muscular, and evidently gay man that is pictured in the advertisement. And I also ignore the glaring grammatical errors in the advertisements. Looking for love? It can be hard to find one. But otherwise, I don’t mind it. As long as Facebook doesn’t advertise to other people something like Youngman Brown is Looking for Gay Singles, then I don’t really care what they put on my own screen, no matter how off-kilter or ridiculous the ads are. Hopefully someday soon they will be displaying ads for Big Brother with a stupidly grinning picture of my face for all of the Facebook community to see.

Millennials

2008-10-06T00:15:00.000-04:00

My father recently called me a millennial. Confused as to whether it was good or bad to be called such a thing by a parent, I inquired as to the meaning of his compliment/accusation.

“What are you calling me? A flower?”

“I was watching Dateline and they had an interesting piece on millennials. I think you should give it a watch.”

Ah, it all made sense.

Whenever one of his usual primetime programs isn’t on (Think: Boston Legal, Ugly Betty, etc.), my dad always turns to whatever else is on, rarely letting me or my mom get a chance to watch the Phillies game. Dateline or Sixty Minutes would almost always suffice, with whatever was being reported on being compelling enough for an hour of his time. Evidently, Dateline had reported on millennials. Whatever they were.

“I sent you the link, if you’d check your e-mail every once in a while.”

Slightly behind the times, my father is now armed with dated knowledge of technology, and has mastered the art of Googling videos and forwarding them to his closest family and friends. Tiny
Christmas presents offered all year long, twice a week. Generally, I skim the subjects of such e-mails, always wary of wasting my time by reading warning messages dealing with my e-mail account becoming “inactive.” I must forward such e-mails to ten people, lest my account become inactive!!!

I have become well-versed in what subject lines constitute spam, worthless jokes, and various other bullshit scams and generally elect to skip over them rather than delete them. This has left my inbox inundated with thousands of e-mails. The last time I logged in, I had 8746 “new” messages.

I knew that my father electronically mailing the video to me coupled with his mentioning of it aloud meant that his suggestion to watch it wasn’t merely a suggestion, but a homework assignment. Taken back to the days in high school when I actually had my dad as a teacher (a blog article in the near future, I am sure), I knew how much weight homework assignments carried.

So I complied.

After scouring through the vast array of pointless unread messages still waiting for spring cleaning (three years worth), I found the link to the video titled “The Millennials Are Coming,” and was incensed with what I watched.

According to Dateline, the basic premise of millennials is this: Millennials are the internet generation. People born between 1980 and 1995. They are extremely tech-savvy and are always using the latest gadgets and devices to help them get things done faster and more efficiently.

Seems like a good thing to be considered a millennial. I should be proud that my father called me by such a title, right?

Not so much, evidently. We are a bunch of brats, says Dateline, in so many words.
“It’s our way or the highway,” is the mantra tagged to us millennials. Employers can’t be harsh or tell us that they are disappointed in us. They must schedule our work day around our yoga class. We are so used to childhoods of trophies and positive recognition that we are completely unprepared for the cold realities of the workplace.

Even though we are incorrigible snots, employers need to find ways to “deal” with us and appease us. Rightfully so! I mean, we do know how to use all of those complicated computer-machines, after all.

Dateline claims that there are more unfilled jobs than millennials to fill them, so we are a hot commodity. If an employer gives a young employee a hard time, that employee can simply move on to a different job where the next boss will “adore them.”

Yeah, right.

My unemployed ass is getting kicked by potential employers, not kissed.

For this and many other reasons, the piece is offensive. It refers to millennials as an “epidemic” and as “extraterrestrials.” We are like a virus that is spreading, it seems, and we are so much different than the people that already exist in the workforce that clearly we must have come from another planet.

And who is to blame for the so-called millennial epidemic?

Mr. Rogers.

That’s right, the sweater-vest wearing, shoe tossing, preacher who told all of our preschoolers that they are special. You are special and you are special, and even you are special. “And for doing what?” Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow asks. My answer: “Who cares?”

Mr. Rogers was one of the few remaining wholesome shows. How can you put down a man who devoted his life to teaching children virtuous lessons? I remember crying the day he died, even though I was in eleventh grade. I even wrote a eulogy for him as a writing assignment. Mr. Rogers had acted as my third parent. He imbedded constant positive messages in the psyche of millions of children and taught them the simple message that It’s Okay To Be You. Do kids have to do something to deserve that?

Yes, I may fit the mold of a millennial. I still live at home as I search for a job and continue to write. My mother even does my laundry (This, however, is due to the fact that I broke the dryer and she doesn’t trust me).

But I consider myself quite independent and far from what some evening news program would categorize me as. I am tech-savvy, but modest. Not all people born between the years of 1980 and 1995 are cocky and in constant need of flattery by employers in order to produce results.

I can’t help but feel a sense of loss as PBS recently took Mr. Rogers off the air. I suppose that is one way to eradicate the epidemic and protect the world from the freakish extraterrestrials that are millennials. We took the place of the baby boomers. Who will take our place? The economy further failing, I envision a bleak future filled with pollution, corruption, and…. Teletubbies.

Perhaps if people start picturing that kind of a world they could begin to lay off the millennials.

-Youngman Brown

The "Millennials Are Coming -- CBS Video

E-mail me with comments (only positive feedback will be read!)

Penis

2008-09-23T23:32:00.000-04:00

Growing up, I spent all of my summers at the Jersey shore. While writing the standard “Have a great summer!” in my yearbook at the end of the school year, most of my peers would vocally portray their jealous hatred of my good fortune to be able to spend a full three months at the beach. I shrugged my shoulders, generally, telling them to make sure they contacted me if they were lucky enough to be able to get down there for a week’s vacation.

Inwardly, though, I was the envious one. I was the outcast – forcibly shipped off in the Station Wagon to spend a summer away from my friends, only to hear whimsical whimperings of what was “the best summer ever” on the first day back at school.

“I got to go to the beach every day,” I contributed. It was a lie. It took entirely too much effort to prepare for a day at the beach, with the getting changed, and the multiple applications of sunscreen, and the preparation of the cooler with all the drinks and food, and the hosing of the sand off of your body afterwards... it was all simply too much. But my classmates didn’t need to know that I despised my summers at the shore and I was content with them envisioning me splish-splashing my glorious summers away.

* * *

The fondest memories I have of summertime were my trips to the Cape May County Zoo. It was free to the public, yet my family only went once a summer. By the time I was twelve, we stopped going altogether, but I still fondly remember happily scurrying around the zoo like the monkeys behind the bars.

Darting away from my family, I ran to the first thing I saw: the black and white striped phenomenon known as the zebra. A horse with a design. Big deal. For some reason, though, I sprinted ahead of my family, desperate to see the animal up close. Parting the sea of human observers, I stood, mouth agape, looking at the creature boringly munching on hay. Turning back to my family, I excitedly yelled, “Mom! Look at how big his penis is!”

Let me just insert a three part parenthetical comment in my defense: I was six; I had just learned names of certain anatomical parts; and it (the muscle in question) was at my eye level. Needless to say, the sea of human observers parted the rest of the way, as offended mothers quickly shooed their children away to see other, less-endowed creatures.

But why should mothers feel the need to hurry away their children? Why was my own mother so embarrassed at my vocal observation? And why, in the course of retelling this story, did I feel the need to interject with a three-part defense for myself? I mean, it did have a big penis. Six-year-old-me simply stated a fact. Is it the vision of a male animal’s anatomy that is the call for concern? The hairy sight of animals in their smelly natural habitat? I don’t believe so, because the mothers were perfectly content watching elephants lift their tails to unload a ground-shaking pile of yesterday’s chow.

If it is not the sight of the Twig and Berries that makes people uncomfortable, then perhaps it is the actual mentioning of the word itself.

Penis.

It does have a certain ring to it. Whether or not it is a nice ring, I am unsure.

I can’t help but recall another story that my father recently brought to my attention. It was around the same time in my childhood, when, walking through a department store, I had my hand down my pants.

Embarrassed, my dad asked me what I was doing, and I offered the straightforward explanation that I was “adjusting my penis.” To me, there was nothing embarrassing about it. I was uncomfortable for whatever reason and a quick maneuver or “adjustment” solved the problem, akin to tying my shoe if the laces came undone, or fixing my hair if it got into my eyes.

So when does this word transform from nothing but a location on the body to an unmentionable combination of five letters that sends giggles through our grammar school classrooms? When did “The Penis Game” come into existence, where middle schoolers take turns saying the word louder and louder in a public place, until someone is too “chicken” to scream it? What about the word makes us turn our heads nervously, like at the eerie sound of an old door slowly creaking open? Peeeeee---eee---ee---nnnissssss.

In middle school, I prided myself in my ability to Cry Penis louder than all other participants. “Penis” was my battle cry. If there were a Member’s Only club, I would be President. I must admit, however, that I have deviated from that innocent six-year-old who was unafraid and unembarrassed to say the word. The Penis Game would sometimes pop up in college, but by that point I had lost my edge, always wondering if someone was within the reaches of my yelling who would think less of me for yelling that word.

I suppose that being embarrassed is nothing to be embarrassed about. It is simply human nature, after all. Someone who isn’t even slightly taken aback by mentioning of that odd word must clearly not be as refined as the rest of us. Right?

I sometimes wonder if this animalistic mentality might not be such a bad thing. Putting myself in the zebra’s position, I realize that I probably made him smug.

“Mom!” he hears a little boy yell, “Look at how big his penis is!”

He goes on eating his hay, pretending not to have heard. But really, he is thinking, “Thanks for noticing, kid,” and wondering if it was loud enough that the Lady Zebras heard the news that he is hung like a horse.

"My Job"

2008-09-21T00:09:00.001-04:00

As I get out of the shower at 4:30 AM, I come to the realization that I am living, as my father put it yesterday, “an unhealthy lifestyle.” You see, for the past three weeks, all I have basically done is sleep and play online poker. I no longer exercise. “The gym costs too much” and “The dumbells that I have aren’t heavy enough” are my excuses. While the first excuse is true, the second is a stretch. It should be edited to say “The dumbells that I have used to be too light when I was in shape.” I prefer to ignore such trivial details, however.

The fact of the matter is that I currently have two main activities and they both take up a great deal of time. And while poker cuts into my time to sleep, I try not to let sleep cut into my time for poker.

“You should start looking for a job,” my dad also tells me, but right now poker is my sole means of income. At least until “my job” starts.

Let me explain.

* * *

I was very involved at my college. One of the organizations I was in was basically a group of delegates who went to various alumni receptions to schmooze with varied alumni in the tri-state area, telling them how great the school still is. As a Delegate, I became close with the president of the school. Upon asking me what I wanted to do with my future, I told him that I had no distinct plan. He informed me that there was a new job opening at the school to work on the website, doing both graphics and writing. Not only did this fit my major (Digital Art), but also my minor (English).

“You know, as president, I have some say in what goes on around here,” is what he said, followed by, “Talk to Tim and do all the interview crap, but the job is yours.”

That was May.

So, assuming that I was golden in my future plans, I inquired about the job. Tim (who is the head of that department) said that he was finalizing the job description and would get back to me. In the meantime, I figured I would spend my summer at my parents’ beach house at the Jersey shore. When I hadn’t heard back from Tim for a few weeks, I went back to scooping ice cream at Marita’s, where I had worked since I was fourteen (and also where I had officially quit at the end of the previous summer, assuming I would have a real job the following year).

“Just until my real job starts,” is what I told Marita.

On June 27th, nearly two months later, I finally heard back from Tim. He had finally completed the job description, after two months of slaving over the fine details, I’m sure. He graciously forwarded me the one page PDF file.

I applied, sending him my resume and a tremendous cover letter, which basically illustrated how perfect I was for the job and how perfect the job was for me. I cc’d it to the president of the school, so that he knew I was heeding his advice. I then patiently waited for a phone call from Tim to tell me when I should come in to start work.

I waited until the end of July. Tim called and said he’d be “very interested” in me coming in to talk about the job. Even though I had waited an additional month to hear back from him, all doubt was gone, and I wondered if I should bring a bottle of champagne with me.

On August 5th (the day after my 23rd birthday), I made the three-hour drive back up to school for a ten minute interview, which basically consisted of Tim reviewing the bullet points from the PDF file he had e-mailed me.

He then told me that they were opening the job up to the public. Awesome.

Disappointed that the job that “is mine” was being advertised in the papers, I made the three hour drive back to the shore to scoop some more ice cream.

Labor Day came and went. To her delight, Marita got a full summer out of me. Back at my home in Pennsylvania, I was in an awkward spot, waiting to hear about “my job.” I was not really doing much with my life, as aforementioned, sleeping and playing online poker.

Finally, the phone call came on September 19th, a month and a half after my interview. Tim told me that I had all the skills required, which was good news. They decided to go with a different candidate, however, which was bad news. In conclusion, he thought that I was going to do great wherever I landed, which was good news. Two for three in the good news column. That’s a pretty good phone call, I’d say…

So, two big middle fingers to my alma matter and to Tim for wasting four and a half months of my life.

* * *

Now that “my job” is presently “another candidate’s job,” the future is wide open for me. Finally unignoring my father’s advice to look for a job, I scour through Craigslist job postings for writers in New York. I find one posting: “A layup for a sharp witted comedy writer.” It appears to be right up my alley. All I have to do is send some writing samples: “your blog, perhaps, or whatever you think best demonstrates your style.”

What can I send them?

My blog? No. Too newborn. The first entry is only halfway done.

Perhaps I could send them a piece I wrote about the bar scene at the Jersey shore? No, the world is not ready to witness that insanity.

I know! The hilarious piece I wrote about the word “penis.” Nope, that one is fully written in my mind but only one page of it is on paper…

* * *

While a writer is something that I say I am, it is not entirely true. Sure, it is something I strive to be, and I believe I have a certain knack for it, but I am simply too lazy to officially hold the title of a writer. I’m a wannabe. I conceptualize many different stories and ideas. I dream up characters, settings, situations and dialogues. But when it comes to actually starting and finishing an idea on paper, I opt to watch episodes of The Office or Late Night with Conan O’Brien (the one that comes on an hour and a half later than the normally scheduled Late Night with Conan O’Brien and is usually a few months old).

My inability to complete a project is a part of my personality, and most likely stems from the same ineptitude that allows me to currently be in the middle of five novels (Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King by Michael Craig, Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay, and Choke by Chuck Palahniuk). Three months ago I started a full feature screenplay. I wrote twenty pages in two days, and haven’t touched it since. Last month, I wrote five pages of a character-driven novel. Character-driven, because there simply is no plot. And of course, there is that damned unfinished essay about the word penis which is a page long and thus too short -- The article is too short, not my…. nevermind.

Anyway, that’s why I started this blog. It’s not really for you, but for me. Sorry.

I figure that if I have an audience who is willing to take the time to read my rantings, I will feel compelled to sit down and actually rant. A blog is evidently something that writers are assumed to have, so if I am going to really be a writer, then what better place to start?

Well, I suppose writing my penis piece is a better place to start, so that I can send that in and maybe get a job…

Shit, I’m going to go do that. Penis Article to follow.

-Youngman Brown