Diary of a Dragon Boy

Middle school is tough for everyone. Amid a cocktail of hormones, oozing facial blemishes, and freakishly tall girls, any given guy will look back on his time in grades six through eight as being the most uncomfortable years of his life.

Some dudes tried to cope with their own staggering awkwardness by adopting the cool skater persona and rolling into school on their longboards, their hair shaggy and unkempt. Others went for the misunderstood, emotional look, sporting graphic T-shirts of bands you have never heard of and even longer, more-unkempt hair. But regardless of the stereotype he tried to fit, the typical middle school boy took solace in observing the newly budding middle school girls.

            I recall hearing conservations in the locker room before gym class that hashed out all of the foulest musings of the pubescent male psyche on the opposite sex. My classmates spared no detail as they articulated every lurid facet of their elaborate yet grossly anatomically inaccurate fantasies. But while the other boys were discussing the finer aspects of the female form, I was preoccupied with a very different type of fantasy.
            By my twelfth birthday, I had read and re-read The Lord of the Rings at least eleven times and could speak conversational Sindarin. I was obsessed with swords, and elves, and anything that involved Level 60 Paladins. My Friday nights likely would have been devoted to Dungeons and Dragons, if only I had had friends to play it with. So while my classmates tried to mask their awkwardness, I lovingly embraced mine.

            Instead of striking up conversations or playing pickup football along with everyone else during the lunch period at school, I sat on a picnic bench in the far corner of the courtyard and wrote down my ideas for my own fantasy world in a dog-eared composition notebook. I drew maps of ancient kingdoms and wove tales of heroes involved in daring quests and epic wars. This was, of course, completely socially unacceptable in middle school, so my classmates would often treat me to atomic wedgies, wet willies, or a dive-bomb farts just as I was opening my mouth to eat my sandwich. Most often they ran up and stole my “diary” and then proceeded to read it aloud to a table of laughing girls.
            “‘And lo! Thaddeus drew forth his pulsing, throbbing blade and smote the scaly black hide of the dragon. “Stand down, you fiend!” he vociferated.’ Holy shit, Dantzler, you will never get laid.”

            But I was not one to be so easily discouraged. I continued to write for hours each day, and eventually I conceived of an idea for a trilogy of full-length novels. After a long sixth grade of hardscrabble writing and editing, I at last finished my first draft of the first volume, which I titled “The Sword of the Dragon Master.”

            My mind immediately turned to the multi-million dollar publishing deals, the movie rights, the fame, and the women that were sure to follow. I could already envision myself at age thirty, after having starred in, written, and directed all three film adaptations of my books, when I would put my arm around my supermodel wife, point out the back window of my mansion to the pool boy and laugh about how he used to kick my ass in middle school.  

            Once the manuscript was hot off the family printer, I drummed up a list of the top publishing houses in the country and sent out dozens of copies for their review. I was certain that each of them would immediately jump on the opportunity to pick up the next New York Times #1 Bestseller, and I waited for them to vie for my attention. Then my dreams were slowly crushed, one by one, as the rejection letters came rolling in.

             Within two months, I had received enough rejections to paper a small room. I reasoned that each of the publishing companies was simply not prepared to accommodate the massive spike in demand that would arise when my novel hit the shelves, and so they politely declined to pursue a deal until they could increase their capacity. I was determined to get my magnum opus to my future adoring fans somehow, and so I asked my parents if we could publish the book ourselves.

            My father agreed to finance the publication, under the condition that the money would come out of my college fund. This was fine with me, since I knew that with this small investment I would recoup my losses in a few days, and soon I would be so rich that I would never even need to go to college. I sought out a local vanity press the next week and contacted one of the representatives there. She agreed to publish my book for the low, low fee of $2200, plus a mere $6.50 for each copy printed and a modest 50% of profits. It was a deal forged in the fiery chasm of Mount Doom, but I accepted. After all, I would need to sell only 1,258 copies at $10 apiece to break even.

            After I had secured a publishing contract, the next big step was to find an illustrator for the cover art. My budget had taken a sizeable hit, so I decided to be economical by soliciting the aid of my middle school art teacher, Mrs. Jaworski. I went to her at the beginning of lunch period and asked her to paint me a dragon to the best of her ability. When I arrived at her classroom at the end of the day, she handed me a painting that she had clearly slapped on the paper in the last half of her smoke break. The dragon could best be described as a shriveled string bean with wings. That, and it had a giant penis. My middle school art teacher had painted a massive shlong on the dragon that was intended to go on the cover of my young adult novel.

            Despite the fact that the dragon on the cover was now hung like a moose and the book was still chock-full of typographical errors, I went through with the publication, and in six weeks a box full of copies showed up on the front steps of my house. Now all I had to do was to sit back and let my charisma sell the book for me.
            I placed a sign-up sheet for book orders in the hallway at my school, hoping that my classmates would be kind enough to support my burgeoning career as a writer. When I checked the list at the end of the day, I was thrilled to see that the book had already received overwhelming patronage. The most encouraging detail was that the vast majority of the orders came from students outside of the middle school. No matter how many times I combed the school directory, I was unable to find such names as Harry Balzac, Dick Bush, Heywood Jablome, and Craven Morehead. And for some curious reason, each of these students had ordered exactly 69 copies.

            After those first several bulk orders, sales proved to be modest at best. I was patient, because I knew that the other students would be buying the book in droves once they realized that it was the single greatest advancement to literature since the printing press. I scheduled school-wide book signings, and I would sit outside in the courtyard during the lunch period with a stack of copies and calligraphy pen as the other students would laugh and pelt me with Little Debby snacks.

            After several weeks of this, I established enough of a reputation to earn a high-profile exclusive interview with the local non-profit community newspaper which local grocery stores gave away for free. I went to the office one Tuesday morning and sat in a dimly-lit cubicle with a bored-looking graduate student who asked me my name, the title of the book, and what the book was about. He did not bother to write any of these things down.

            A month later, a tiny article was printed in the bottom corner of the back page announcing the recent release of a science fiction novel entitled The Sword of the Dragon Monster, by local teenaged author Willy Daniels. The article did absolutely nothing to improve sales, for obvious reasons, but it did bring about one particularly significant breakthrough.

I received a call later that week from the librarian at a private school across town. She expressed interest in having me come speak to the students there about writing and the publication process. I told her that I had mild to intense stage fright, but she assured me in a silky voice that I would be presenting to a very intimate group of no more than twenty or thirty 7-year-olds, who would all be thrilled to hear about dragons. I knew, of course, that I had absolutely no qualification to give advice on writing or the publication process. I accepted in the hopes that a bunch of rich private school parents would give their bunch of rich private school seven-year-olds enough money to buy a bunch of books.

The morning of my presentation, which was scheduled for 9:00, I rolled out of bed at 7:30 and realized that I needed something to enhance my presentation. I sat down in front of the computer, and in fifteen minutes I compiled a half-assed PowerPoint presentation about my storybook rise to literary success.

I dressed in high-water khakis and an oversized red collared shirt that I had borrowed from my cousin. As I stepped out of my mother’s blue minivan into the parking lot, with my briefcase in one hand and my father’s laptop in the other, I felt like a big shot. Here I was, a celebrity author, about to give my first official presentation and kick off my book signing tour. By the end of the day, I would have every second grader at Mason Preparatory School in the palm of my hand. I walked into the school as instructed and met with the librarian.

“It’s such a pleasure to have you, Willy,” she said upon meeting me. “I can’t wait to read The Sword…of the…the...your book! I’m a closet writer myself, and I’m just so impressed by you people who take the initiative to see your work published!”

            I rolled my eyes. Surely this woman could not write half as well as I could, or she too would be on the rise to the literary stardom and bestseller lists that I was destined for. I took some slight offense to the pejorative phrase “you people,” but I assured myself that it was merely a gaffe, and that she had actually meant to say “accomplished and highly-esteemed novelists like yourself, oh Great One.”

            She talked for a little while, and I nodded at every third comment with my eyes glazed over. Just as she had finished a long-winded discourse on the benefits of the Dewey decimal system, she made a comment that caught my attention.

“Well, we are just so excited to have you here with us today that we thought we might try to share you with more than just the second grade.”

“Um…I’m sorry, what?”

“We are just so excited to have you here with us that we decided to share you with more than just the second grade. What, you didn’t think we would let our seventh and eighth graders pass up on an opportunity to see someone their own age who’s written a book, did you? We’re going to have you present in the auditorium in front of the whole school!”

            At this point, I meant to say something along the lines of the following:

            “I am afraid that I am not able to comply with your request, as it violates the verbal contract established at sixteen hundred hours, the twenty-first day of April in this, the year two thousand and five Anno Domini.”

            But instead, all I could muster up was something like “Habubufuufffffffffffff?”

            She touched my scrawny little arm and smiled sweetly.

            “Oh, don’t worry, Willy, they’ll love you! I’m sure everyone in the audience will be just as supportive, thoughtful, and mature as any one of your closest friends. Now let’s get in there and get you set up!”

            Luckily my khakis were pretty dark, because I suddenly felt like my intestines were filled with battery acid. I stumbled along, stupefied, as the librarian took my clammy hand and led me to the auditorium. Once on the stage, I watched her hook up my laptop, along with my sorry excuse for a presentation, to a four hundred square foot screen at the front of the auditorium for everyone to see. My mother patted me on the back and told me that there was no reason to be nervous, because all of these children were my age and would understand my creative talent. The school’s intercom system crackled to life, and a woman’s tinny voice echoed in every hallway, classroom, and lavatory on campus:

            “Good morning students! Today we have a special surprise for all of you! Local author Willy Daniels will be giving us a presentation about his fantasy novel The Sword of the Dragon Monster. He’s even agreed to sell you all signed copies! All classes, please report to the auditorium for the next hour.”

            As the students filed into the auditorium, I tried to crack a smile and wave to some of dorkier kids, but my face was bleach-white and my forehead was covered with perspiration. They all pointed at me and tried to hide their snickering as I debated to myself whether it would be more embarrassing to puke all over myself and faint in front of five hundred people or to soil myself and faint in front of five hundred people. No matter what, I was probably going to be burning my clothes by the end of the day.

            And then I saw them. Middle schoolers. People my own age who would be forced to sit through the next hour listening to me talk about my dragon book. Even if I survived this day, I would forever have to live in fear of the roughly one hundred teenage guys who would now kick my ass on sight if they ever came across me in public. 

            Then, finally, all five hundred students in the school had taken a seat in the auditorium, and five hundred sets of eyes were all fixed on me, the Dragon Boy. The headmistress stood and shook my hand and introduced me before taking a seat in the front row. I looked down at the headmistress, and she nodded at me to begin my presentation. I stepped up to the microphone and cleared my throat.

            “Um…uh…th-thank you. That was….uh….that was a very….uh…a very nice introdiction, I mean introduction…”

            A few sniffles could be heard from the crowd.

            “Well, uh….my name’s Will…uh, Will Dantzler…and I’m here to…uh….talk to you about my book, the, uh, The Sword of the Dragon Master.”

            A coughing fit broke out in the back row.

            “Well, uh, as you all can probably…ff…gather, my book is about, um, dragons. Now, uh, I’m sure you all know this, but, uh, dragons are pretty cool! Except for the fire part, right? Right? Hahahaha!”

            Silence.

            “Right, well, uh, who here likes dragons? Huh? Go ahead! Don’t be shy! Let’s see some hands!”

            One first grader slowly began to raise his hand until the third grader behind him socked him hard between the shoulder blades, and he crumpled with a whimper.

            “Wow, that’s uh, that’s really great,” I shouted, my heart sinking. “All of you folks in the back row really like dragons! Yeah!”

            The kids in the back did not, of course, actually have their hands raised, but I needed some shred of support to fall back on. Any of the guys in that row who had girlfriends were surely dumped that very afternoon.

            “Now, uh…”

            “Nerd!” somebody whispered in the front row.

            “Yeah, so, uh, I have a presentation here for you all. So, um, yeah. Here we go!”

            At that point I realized that the laptop was not even turned on.

            “Um, yeah, so, my laptop is off. I guess the moral of this story is to always be prepared, huh?”

            “Loser!” someone cough-shouted from the audience.

            “Right, so, I think I might wait until it turns on before I put in my CD. For whatever reason, it starts acting all funny when you shove something in there before it’s woken up.”

            At this point, actual laughter ensued from some of the middle schoolers.

            “Right, so, while we wait for that, uh, uh….I guess I’ll read you an excerpt.”

            I had not planned to read an excerpt from the book, so I turned to a random chapter. It would seem that after I had written about nine different battle scenes, I could have flipped to one of them, but instead I landed on the chapter where the grizzled old mentor explains to the young hero the proper method for filing a dragon’s claws or some crap like that.

            Finally, the computer heated up, and at that moment I realized how truly awful my presentation was. It was mostly empty slides peppered with default clipart and animation. Fortunately, nobody much paid attention, since it was that boring.

            Finally, the headmistress cut me off around the two hour mark and opened the floor for questions. The students had none, of course, and they gave me a truly pathetic round of applause. It was more than I deserved, really.

            Following my lukewarm reception at Mason Prep, I realized that I was simply not cut out for a life as a professional writer, and I threw in the towel soon after that. A pile of unsold books still remains in my attic as a monument to my brief foray into literature. Occasionally my mother will give one away to some poor, unsuspecting child, but mostly they serve as paperweights and kindling for the fireplace. Nonetheless, those friends that I made in high school and college still cherish the copies that they can dig up on the internet, because the books remind them that, in comparison, their own middle school experience was not so bad. After all, they could have written a novel about dragons.

You Gonna Eat That?

               On any given weekend night in Charlottesville, more than one thousand students will enter a New York-style delicatessen on the Corner called Little John’s.  At first glance, it looks exactly the same as any given greasy-spoon in a college town, but most of the people at UVA can remember with stunning clarity the first time they ate a Little John’s sandwich and how they fell in love at first bite.        
              While their sandwiches are the stuff of legend, the folks at Little John’s also offer several other items that cater to the tastes of a generally inebriated college crowd. The counter is stacked with hundreds of baked goods, from cookies to triple chocolate cake, hermetically sealed in shrink wrap. These confections have a reputation around town for being somewhat of a gamble, because you can either luck out with a mind-bendingly delicious baked treat that satisfies every last bit of your drunken cravings, or you can get stuck with the unsold item from three weeks ago which tastes even worse when it comes back up for round two.

                My friend Mark once took that gamble late on a Friday night when he bought a chocolate muffin to complement his Reuben after a group of us had come in from a night out. After a few bites, he started to notice something strange about the muffin’s consistency. He was chewing on something tough and rubbery, and as he pulled the muffin away from his mouth to investigate, a long, dirty shoelace unraveled from between his teeth.
                We all sat there silently for a while, staring at the thing that had just come out of Mark’s mouth. It lay on the table coiled in a wet, brown lump, like a tapeworm or some other terrifyingly huge parasite that comes out in your stool. Then, before the shock of seeing a shoelace come out of a muffin had completely worn off, Mark gingerly picked it up with two fingers and very calmly brought it to the attention of the cashier.
                “Excuse me, sir. I would like a refund for this muffin, given that it contained an old shoelace.”

                The cashier barely looked up from what he was doing, as if shoelaces in muffins were commonplace.
                “No refunds. We get those from the bakery downtown. After you buy it from us, it’s no longer our problem.”

                Mark dangled the shoelace in front of the man’s face, just to make sure he got the point.

                “But I almost ingested this.”
                “Honestly kid, I don’t give a flying shit about what you did or did not ingest. It could have been worse. Some girl last week got a hearing aid in her brownie. Now get that shit out of my face. No refunds.”

                For me, this exchange really begged the question of how these items were ending up in baked goods. A misplaced hearing aid was almost plausible, given the combination of a half-deaf baker and gravity. But the shoelace was tougher to explain. You would think that even the most idiotic muffin man should have been safe against the possibility of accidentally putting footwear in the mix. But you never know what is going to show up in your food.

                In high school, my classmates had a daily competition at lunch to see who could find the grossest thing in the hot lunch. The school didn’t have a cafeteria, so all our meals were catered by a family-owned Italian restaurant in town. The owner and his wife came to school every day and set up in the commons by the gymnasium, where they served vile concoctions that hardly resembled Italian food. Worse than the food were the surprises we found in it. Students commonly pulled clumps of hair out of their lasagna, or bit down on a fingernails lodged in the tomato slices. One girl I knew ended up chewing a discarded piece of bubble gum in the pizza, and another discovered a used Band-Aid under the cold cuts on her sandwich.

                Given the frequency of these repulsive discoveries, most students opted to pass on the school lunches. Consequently, the industrial-sized boxes of condiments and sauces provided by the administration often went unused, so the boxes began to get stacked on top of each other, forming mountains of ketchup, honey mustard, and sweet n’ sour sauce. The students were quick to notice, and soon every male in my school was filling his pockets with sauce packets that were to be put toward sinister purposes. Some were used to smear lockers and door handles with frothy, oozing mixtures, while others were placed under the toilet seats in all of the restrooms to coat the legs and undergarments of hapless defecators with ketchup. But the most popular idea, by far, was to throw them at people.
                By the end of my freshman year, the lunch period became reminiscent of trench warfare. We ate lunch on the gym bleachers, where the older jocks sat on the top row and sniped underclassmen with 80-mph condiment packets as they walked by. On some days, several of them teamed up to bombard the nerdiest, weakest kid in school, who just so happened to be me.
                Ultimately, I became the preferred target of the junior-varsity football team, who pelted me from twenty yards away while they shouted taunts in guttural, broken sentences. I didn’t mind at first. Really, I was just glad for the attention. The hard plastic edges of the packets left angry red welts all along my face and my neck, which I tried to pass off as hickies when questioned about their origin. Obviously nobody believed me.

                All of this continued on a daily basis until one afternoon in November.  This particular day was a T.A.G. Day, standing for Tasteful Appropriate Garment Day, when the normally uniformed students were allowed to wear whatever their heart desired as long as it did not violate any of the 115 dress code rules that were strictly enforced by the faculty. The girls were told that they should avoid any outfit that would make Mother Theresa blush, but after being forced to wear skirts and knee-length argyle socks all year, many of them did what they could to unleash their inner skanks on those T.A.G. Days.

                They perfected the technique of quickly adjusting their low-cut tops to make themselves look temporarily modest when the principal walked by, only to let the same tops slip back down to reveal generous cleavage whenever they strutted down a hallway full of gawking guys. A few girls were too slow to evade the watchful eye of the faculty and were sentenced to covering themselves for the remainder of the school day with an XXXL white T-shirt which said in enormous black lettering “I AM IMMODEST.” Amanda Saunders, my high school crush, was fortunately not one of those girls. On this day she was wearing an exquisitely cut designer blouse. It flattered her, to say the least. 
                Amanda sat next to me in Spanish freshman year and served as a constant distraction. She would occasionally laugh at my jokes, and she actually seemed to find my dorkiness endearing. Day by day, I worked to build up the confidence to someday ask her out.
                On that fateful day in November, I picked a seat on the bleachers that was just far enough away from Amanda that I could inconspicuously check her out throughout the lunch period. She sat surrounded by her posse of fawning admirers, allowing me to shoot furtive glances in her direction every so often without being noticed. Compared to my usual lunchtime experiences, this was making for a fantastic day.
                Then, inevitably, I heard a familiar whooshing sound, followed by the biting sting of a packet of barbecue sauce nailing me in the temple. Several more of them peppered my body in quick secession. I sat there for a moment, looking down at the packets that were now lying in the lap of my Wal-Mart jeans, listening to the jeers of the football team and the laughs of onlookers, my face turning redder than the barbecue sauce.  And in that moment, something stirred deep inside me. It was something bestial, something defiant. I was not going to allow these troglodytes to taunt me anymore, especially in front of Amanda Saunders.
                I stood from my seat on the bleachers and looked over at the group of my assailants, who sat about twenty feet away. Setting my jaw, I locked eyes with their ring leader, Thomas Billingsley, the captain of the Junior Varsity team. He was still laughing, and I wanted so desperately to wipe the grin off his face. I gripped one of the packets of barbecue sauce in my right hand and drew myself up as tall as I could stand. I wound up and whipped my arm forward in a grand, sweeping arc, aiming for the bridge of his nose.

                 The second the packet left my hand, I knew something was wrong. I had forgotten to follow through with my throw, and instead of sending it whizzing at Billingsley’s face, it went hurtling off at a twenty degree angle. My eyes followed the long, arching trajectory of the packet as it sailed over three rows of bleachers, but I did not need to watch, because I already knew where the cruel hands of fate were sending it.
                As if in slow motion, the packet collided with Amanda Saunders’ cheek and burst open on impact, spraying barbecue sauce across her face and drenching the front of her white blouse with globs of red.

                The entire gymnasium went absolutely silent. Even the JV jocks swallowed their laughter as eighty pairs of eyes went from my horror-stricken face to Amanda, who sat wide-eyed and open-mouthed, as if in shock. My heart raced rapidly, and I suddenly wished that one of the light fixtures in the ceiling would collapse and put me out of my misery.  No such luck, and several agonizing microseconds passed while I waited to see how Amanda would react.

                Words cannot possibly express the terrible scream that escaped Amanda’s lips in that moment. My closest description would be ‘sub-mammalian.’ She shrieked for about five solid second before turning her gaze on me, her eyes narrowing to slits.
                “Will…” she hissed. “Paper towels……now.”

                I sprinted to the bathroom and returned with a roll of paper towels. Then, with the entire school watching, I proceeded to dab at the stains on her blouse, inadvertently groping her breasts in the process. She shrieked again and pushed me away from her before running out of the gym in tears.

                Needless to say, my hopes of getting her to go out with me were fairly shot at that point. Amanda ignored me for several weeks following the incident and then transferred to a more elite school the next year, so my relationship with her ended with a wayward packet of barbecue sauce. Part of me still wishes that I had never thrown that packet. If fate had shined on me that day, I would have just choked on something gross in the school lunch. Where’s an old shoelace when you need one?

The Pitfalls of Linguistic Laziness

Language skills are, like, you know, dying.

Late American author David Foster Wallace once quipped that “listening to most people’s public English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails.” And while that sentiment might strike a chord with the average high school teacher, the vast majority of American English speakers remain oblivious to the atrocities that are being committed against our language with startling frequency. Careful attention to the spoken word in nearly any non-academic setting will reveal that many rules of usage and syntax are often bent, and that all the rest are ignored completely.

 Unlike Mr. Wallace, a self-styled Grammar Snoot who took serious offense at dangling participles and misplaced hyphens, I can turn a blind eye to the sign in the grocery store that reads “10 Items or Less.” I barely even notice anymore when a friend asks me if I want to go to the game “with Matt and I” or uses “comprised of” when he means “composed of.” And I can even listen to my sister talk about “laying out on the beach” without correcting her or thinking less of her as a person. But there is one offense against usage that I find so egregious, so mind-numbingly common in our culture, that I refuse to tolerate it any longer.

Despite the aforementioned rules of usage and syntax, two generations of Americans think it perfectly acceptable to insert the word ‘like’ indiscriminately into conversation. A given person between the ages of 3 and 30 is liable to say ‘like’ once every ten seconds while speaking. If you doubt this statistic, I recommend that you find the nearest teenager talking on a cell phone and start counting. You will find my estimate to be very conservative.

‘Like’ has become the all-purpose filler word of choice for the current age. Careless tongues pepper it into speech wherever there is space: one moment it is an adjective, then the next it becomes an adverb, then a preposition, then a conjunction, and then parts of speech which were hitherto nonexistent. It is now commonplace to hear someone introduce quotations with the word ‘like,’ as in “she was like ‘…’ and then I was like ‘...’ and then he was like ‘...’” and so on. These habits subvert all previously established meanings and uses of the word and replace them with the following two tenets: Do you struggle when trying to summon the correct word in speech? Use ‘like!’ Would you prefer to say a lot of words, but you don’t have many thoughts to accompany them? Use ‘like!’

Not unlike a pox on the English language, ‘like’ has crept into our everyday idiom, slowly wasting away the collective articulation of the populace and reducing an entire nation to employing the verbiage of Valley Girls. It pervades the entertainment industry, news outlets, and even professional settings. Worst of all, it has rendered countless individuals unable to express their thoughts precisely.

Take, for example, the sentence “I have a master’s degree in communication.” Compare this to the decidedly more ambiguous sentence “I have, like, a master’s degree in communication.” If you say that you have “like” a degree in communication, then you are not saying that you have a degree in communication at all. You are effectively saying something entirely different. Perhaps you have something akin to a degree, but you do not in fact have a degree, or you simply would have said so. This is a silly example, and I sincerely hope that no accredited university would confer a higher-level degree on someone who would use the second sentence, but it illustrates my point. If you use ‘like’ like a lot, you don’t like sound all that like intelligent.

Equally irritating is the tendency to replace ‘like’ with ‘you know.’ Even though this might mask the irritating recurrence of ‘like,’ do not be deceived. It is simply a variation on the same stall tactic. I am appalled by how often I hear something along the lines of “I just, like, decided to, you know, [action verb] and, like, you know...” No, sorry. I don’t know. Perhaps you might care to complete your thought, and then we can determine what I do and do not know.

 But all hope is not yet lost. With careful attention and effort, any English speaker can help to combat the spread of this dialectal disease. If you simply focus on not using ‘like’ as a filler word, you will find that the habit is actually quite easy to break. Rather than saying ‘like’ to buy time or to fill empty space in conversation, simply say nothing. Initially, it will seem awkward to find yourself suddenly bereft of a catch-all pause word, and you will certainly be tempted to slip back into the pattern. But after a few weeks of being ‘like’-free, you too will begin to notice the maddening regularity with which everyone around you uses the word. You might not yet be on David Foster Wallace’s level of Snootitude, but at least you will give that poor Stradivarius one less nail to pound. 

All Aboard the Bandwagon

Would anybody care to jump on the Denver Broncos bandwagon with me? There’s plenty of room, especially now that Tim Tebow is in New York.

Ever since I first learned of the existence of the National Football League, I have been a fan of Peyton Manning. As any football aficionado will tell you, the guy is a walking playbook with a rocket arm and old-fashioned home-grown charm. He reads any defense like a map, threads the needle against even the tightest coverage, and can rattle off more audibles than an auctioneer during his forty-second pre-snap routines. So when Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay announced in March of this year that Manning was to be released from his contract, I naturally had a small identity crisis. This was the organization that Manning had led to eleven playoff bids and two Super Bowl appearances during his fourteen-year tenure, and the same team that I had pulled for since the tender age of seven.

What am I to do now with just two months left before the first kickoff of the season? I rooted for the Colts during the best of times (a crushing victory over the Chicago Bears in Super Bowl XLI) and the worst of times (the 2011 season featuring a sidelined Manning and a 2-14 record). Should I stick with my guns and watch a burgeoning new roster helmed by Andrew Luck, the most celebrated rising NFL quarterback since Manning himself? Or should I abandon my team and follow the four-time league MVP to the Mile High City?

While pondering this momentous decision, I have contemplated the role of the bandwagon fan in the intense and often unforgiving crucible of competitive sports. We all know the bandwagoners. Following any major sporting event, they will invariably flood every known social network with updates proclaiming allegiance to the team that is currently holding the trophy. An alarming number of those friends on Facebook who last year waxed poetic about the Packers and the Mavericks are suddenly fans of the Giants and the Heat. Even in my hometown in coastal South Carolina, where most people have never seen ice, much less a game of professional hockey, I saw dozens of Tweets following Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Finals from acquaintances who proclaimed themselves fans of the Los Angeles Kings.

To most actual die-hard sports fanatics, bandwagoners are, of course, anathema. No self-respecting devotee of the Kings, who waited nineteen years to play in a Finals pairing and forty-six years to win their first championship, will sit idly by and watch as hockey ignoramuses from the Deep South try to lay claim to their long-awaited success. For true fans, following a team is about more than just winning. To them, fandom is about sharing in every facet of an organization’s performance, from the highest highs to the lowest lows. They stick with their team even when they are down and out, so that when fortune finally does smile on them, seeing that championship banner hoisted up in their home arena is that much sweeter. And because of the bandwagoners, those true fans can no longer content themselves with simply cheering for their favorite teams. They must sound trumpets and shoot off flares to rise above the noise of Tweets and Facebook statuses and announce that they have in fact been fans all along.

 But surely I, who have legitimately felt the pains and ecstasies of Colts fandom, am not in the same category as those bandwagoners who invite the derision of avid sports nuts. Am I? Is it so wrong for me to remain loyal to the quarterback who first sparked my interest in football? Even the impassioned Colts disciples who line the stands of Lucas Oil Stadium will readily acknowledge that it is the house that Peyton built. Must I remain forever a supporter of the same team to avoid scorn from the sports community?

At long last, my conclusion is a resounding no. In an age in which players display no sense of fidelity to their teams (see LeBron James and “The Decision” or Albert Pujols’ egotistic departure from St. Louis), and teams display no fidelity to their fan bases (see the Seattle SuperSonics’ move to Oklahoma City and similar musical chairs by franchises), I can think of no reason for fans to hold each other to the standard of never changing allegiances ever. At the end of the day, professional sports exist purely for the purpose of entertainment. Yes, it may be admirable to be entertained by the same organization for an extended period of time, but ultimately I see no harm in switching loyalties, as long as the switch is done tastefully.

In the end, taste is what differentiates a bandwagoner from a fan in transition. If you recently announced to the world that you are a huge fan of Webb Simpson following his U.S. Open victory, please do not proclaim your undying support for the golfer who lifts the Claret Jug at next week’s Open Championship. If you hail from Boston, you have no business spouting how much you love the Yankees, no matter how good their record is coming out of the All Star break. And if you live in Philadelphia, please do not walk outside sporting Eli Manning’s jersey and a Super Bowl XLVI Champions cap. Certain lines are simply not meant to be crossed, even if it is just a game.

Come football season, I will be watching Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos on Sundays, and in the privacy of my own home I will cheer at every touchdown and groan at every interception. And if by some miracle they take home the Lombardi Trophy, I may even do a victory dance in my living room. But I certainly won’t be Tweeting about it. 

You Get What You Pay For

                The summer before my senior year of high school, I descended into a nearly perfect state of laziness and slobbery. I would wake up every day at noon and then sit around the house eating junk food and watching daytime television, only to repeat the process the next day. After about two weeks of this, my mother became so disgusted by my slovenly demeanor that she demanded I either immediately look for a job or remove myself from her household.

                Several of my sister’s friends had recently landed jobs docking boats at the local marina, so I showed up at the docks one day to ask for similar work. I was greeted by a salty, sun-bronzed man, probably in his mid-fifties, who identified himself as the dock manager. When I told him that I was seeking employment with his company, his chapped upper lip turned up in a sneer.

                “You got any experience piloting yachts, son?”

                “Uh, no sir.”

                “Well, that don’t help me none. You strong?”

                “Not particularly, no.”

                He shook his head before spitting a truly exceptional loogy through the gap in his teeth.

                “Well, son, I don’t pay folks to come out here and fuck around. I suggest you ‘seek employment’ elsewhere.”

                When I relayed this information to my mother that afternoon, I expected her to let me off the hook for having at least looked for work. But I had no such luck. She demanded that I find something to do, even if it did not involve compensation, and she pointed out an item in the classifieds seeking volunteers at the local teaching hospital.

                I showed up at the volunteer office the next morning dressed in my best coat and tie, expecting a lengthy and competitive interview process leading up to a coveted position among healthcare’s finest. Once there, I was instructed to fill out some light paperwork, which asked me simply for my name, date of birth, home address, and cell phone number. I was then called into a cubicle, where a young man in a T-shirt glanced over my paperwork for about five seconds before asking me when I could begin work.

                “Wait, don’t you need to interview me?” I asked. “You know, to make sure I’m qualified?”

                “Qualified? You’re a volunteer, dude. We’re not exactly picky.”

                “Well what if I was a sociopath? How would you know?”

                He raised an eyebrow.

                “Are you a sociopath?”

                “Well, no. ”

                “Fantastic. When can you start?”

                I was then issued an extra large red T-shirt with VOLUNTEER written across the back, along with a keycard which granted me entrance into nearly any building in the two-block hospital complex. My first assignment was to the post-anesthesia unit, where I would presumably be helping to care for and transport very groggy patients.

                The following day, I arrived at my assigned unit without any training or even the slightest idea of what I was supposed to be doing. The post-anesthesia ward was a massive room, probably one hundred feet across, divided by curtains into twenty stations, where nurses monitored humming machines while administering to patients in collapsible beds. I approached the nurses’ station in the center of the room, where a bored-looking receptionist sat, head down, apparently writing something outside my view. She did not bother to look up as I approached. I stood there for over a minute, waiting for her to address me, but she continued to write without paying me any attention.

                “Uh, excuse me…” I began after another minute had silently elapsed. I looked over the counter to see that she was tracing her hand on a pad of paper in her lap.

                “Can I help you?” she asked without taking her eyes off the pad of paper.

                “Um, yeah, my name’s Will, and I’m a volunteer assigned to this unit.”

                “Mhm,” she mumbled. “You can go ahead and start working if you want to.”

                 Although horribly unprepared to do anything of value, I proceeded to walk around the unit, which seemed to have quickly come to life. New patients were wheeled in on stretchers from the OR by med students, and the nurses rushed to attend to the new arrivals. As I walked by one nurse who was standing over a patient and busily adjusting his medical dressings, she looked up at me and snapped her fingers.

                “You, come over here and check his vital signs while I work on his bandages. Then when you’re done, go get a foot pump and hook it up to the battery on his bed.”

                I stared at her for a moment, dumbfounded. I had no idea how to do any of that.

                “I’m sorry, can you explain?”

                “I said check his VITAL SIGNS, then go GET A FOOT PUMP and HOOK IT UP.”

                Oh, of course. Apparently yelling the exact same command was now the equivalent of explaining. This same process occurred about twenty times that day, in which I would be woefully ignorant of standard procedure and a nurse or a technician would chew me out accordingly. I screwed up the setup of a patient station so badly that one doctor turned to me and held up his arms.

                “Jesus Christ, kid, did you even make an effort here? What the hell are we paying you for?”

                I indicated the word VOLUNTEER on my T-shirt. Seriously, what did they expect from free labor? You get what you pay for.

                By the end of the day, I seemed to have things somewhat figured out. I still screwed up, but mostly in ways that were not particularly life-threatening. While checking one patient’s vital signs, I apparently messed up the electronic thermometer and announced to the nurses’ assistant that his body temperature was 63 degrees Fahrenheit, and somehow this went unnoticed. At another station, I accidentally kicked over the receptacle for the patient’s external catheter, leaving a very large puddle of strange-colored urine on the floor. I managed to walk away surreptitiously before I could be blamed. When told to sterilize the stretchers after use, I merely brushed them off with a single sanitary wipe and prayed that the next patient would not contract a staph infection or meningitis.

                The next day, one nurse had apparently noticed my complete lack of competence, as she quickly assigned me to assist the receptionists in the OR waiting room. Once I arrived, the two receptionists on duty decided that the additional labor provided a fantastic opportunity to take a lunch break and immediately left me in charge.

                “There’s not much to it,” one of them said over her shoulder as she left the room. “The OR runs on a pretty strict schedule, so the nurses will take care of the patients for you. Really all you have to do is answer the phone if it rings, tell them to hold, then transfer them to the main information desk. Oh, and make sure the coffee pot stays full.”

                Baffled as to why it took two full-time employees to sort of answer the phone, I dutifully monitored the coffee levels for the next hour as the receptionists rapped up their break. I realized then that while the dock manager at the marina had not been willing to pay people to “fuck around,” the people here sure were. Either that, or that coffee must have been freaking amazing.

                Back in the anesthesia unit, I started to gain my bearings over the next few weeks and the yelling subsided somewhat, but consequently expectations of me skyrocketed. I was required to know the names of all twenty nurses on duty, and the roster was never the same two days in a row. I had to be able to tell Val from Valerie, Maureen from Marlene, and Kat from Kathy. I had to differentiate between Jen who hated being called Jennifer and Jennifer who hated being called Jen. There were three Sarahs, two Marys, and four Beths. And while I had to memorize all of these peoples’ names, for whatever reason they could never remember mine, even though it was quite clearly displayed on my name badge. Instead, they merely referred to me as ‘volunteer’, as in “Volunteer, be a doll and go clean out these bedpans for me” or “Volunteer, do me a favor and insert this suppository into Mrs. Jones’ rectum.” Some of the more cordial nurses took it one step further and called me ‘Mr. Volunteer.’

“Oh, please,” I would joke in response, “Mr. Volunteer is my father.” For various reasons, this joke never got a laugh, or even a smile.

During down time, I was forced to make awkward small-talk with patients, and I quickly found that these exchanges were made considerably more awkward by the more-than-slightly revealing nature of the OR gowns. One elderly man either didn’t notice or didn’t care that he wasn’t wearing undergarments as he propped up his legs, and he proceeded to engage me in a conversation about high school sports as his pecker stared me down for a full twenty minutes. I also learned the hard way why bikinis are generally not popular among the older age demographic. Some of those sights still continue to haunt my dreams.

Even those rare conversations that were untainted by shameless nudity proved to be more than I could handle. For whatever reason, many patients delighted in showing off their puss-oozing sores and lacerations, and others had no greater joy than to regale me with the exciting recent developments in their colon or bladder. And then there were those occasional gems that just left me speechless. One exceedingly corpulent woman with gapped teeth looked up at me from her cot and winked seductively.

“Oh, you remind me of my youth, back when we drank straight whisky and sucked off the boys down by the beach.”

I struggled not to gag.

My interaction with the patients proved most meaningful when I actually played a role in their care. A nurse called me over to her station one day to assist her with a middle-aged man.

“Now, Mr. Volunteer, I’m going to need you to restrain Mr. Matthews here as I insert a urinary catheter into his penis.”

Mr. Matthews and I both looked at her, wide-eyed.

“What?!” we shouted in unison.

“Ready, on 3! 1-2-3!”

I barely managed to grab hold of Mr. Matthews’ in time, and he nearly threw me across the room in his attempts to throttle the nurse, his face horribly screwed-up in pain.

“There, it’s almost all the way in. Now Mr. Matthews, I’m going to need you to stop struggling. Are you feeling alright?”

I turned to glare at her, aghast. You’re inserting a huge piece of equipment into this poor man’s equipment and you dare to ask if he is feeling alright? What the hell is wrong with you?

Another of my glowing moments of patient care came when I wheeled an elderly woman from the post-anesthesia unit to her hospital room. After making sure she was comfortable, I smiled cheerily and wished her a speedy recovery. She instantly burst into tears.

“The doctor told me there ain’t going to be no recovery,” she wailed. “He said this is the end!”

“Oh…” I croaked. “Well have a…nice…day.”

The following afternoon, I was told to go retrieve the same woman for a post-operation meeting with her doctor. Knowing that she more than likely did not care to see me, I opened the door slowly and quietly and stuck my head in. Apparently she had just finished up with the bedpan, because her gown was wide open the back, revealing her posterior in all its glory. At this point I yelled, she yelled, and I sprinted out of the room. Now I had not only made her weep bitterly, but I had also walked in on her bare-assed. Our relationship deteriorated fairly quickly thereafter.

One morning as I was coming in to work, I noticed that one of the trashcans in the central courtyard had erupted in flames, likely due to a carelessly discarded cigarette. Doctors and technicians rushed by busily without seeming to notice the six-foot-tall fire that had broken out mere yards away from the children’s burn unit. I rushed into the main lobby, where I shouted to the security guard on duty that there was a fire.

“Oh, it happens all the time,” he said, barely glancing up from his morning paper. “It’ll probably just burn itself out. No need to worry.”

I threw up my arms in panic.

“There is a massive conflagration right next to the children’s hospital,” I exclaimed. “Why is this not an issue?”

                Five minutes later, after frantically searching for someone who cared, I ran out into the courtyard to see that the fire had burned itself out.

                During my last week at the hospital, all of the security guards took one afternoon off to throw a party for a retiring coworker, and the volunteers were expected to pick up the slack. I was stationed at the front desk, where I was to direct visitors to their proper destinations while maintaining constant vigilance against possibly dangerous individuals.  This whole concept seemed ludicrous to me, because I imagined that a truly dangerous individual would hardly be threatened by me, a scrawny sixteen-year-old. Sure, I could point him in the direction of the main elevator, but I had no means with which to forcibly subdue him.

                About an hour into my shift, I pink-faced man burst through the door, holding the hand of a woman who was doubled over in pain. She looked to be about fifteen months pregnant.

                “Maternity ward!” he shouted at me desperately as they ran to the elevator.

                “Fifth floor!” I shot back.

                It was only after the elevator doors had closed that I remembered that the maternity ward was in fact on the third floor. I was sure they would figure it out eventually.

                Another hour went by, and several loud gasps could be heard from passersby as one man entered the lobby. His right arm was horribly twisted and mangled, with bones protruding through the skin in several places, as if he had gotten stuck in some machinery. He walked up to the desk and asked me in a very calm and even voice if I could please direct him to the emergency room. Here this man was, his arm mutilated beyond comprehension, and he was talking as nonchalantly as if he were discussing the weather. I, on the other hand, was panic-stricken by this man’s condition.

                “Out that door and to the left!” I shouted in a high-pitched voice. “First door!”

                Even as panicked as I was, I still wanted to try to help this guy.

                “Can I get you a wheelchair or something?”

                He looked me in the eye for about three seconds as he cradled his arm, his face blank, before saying, “You know, for some reason I don’t think that will help my problem.”

                Everybody has to be a smart ass.

                On my last day of work, I was told to take a released patient out to her car. As I was helping her get out of the wheel chair, she pushed me away and performed the most melodramatic fake fall I have ever seen. Her knee barely touched the concrete and she immediately let out a horrible scream.

                “Help!” she shrieked. “I’ve broken my leg!”

                I rolled my eyes. And the Oscar goes to…

                “I’ll sue!” she shouted. “It’s all your fault! I’m suing you and this hospital for all you’re worth!”

                Just for good measure, she added, “And I’ll have you fired!”

                With that, I stood up tall and held my head high.

                “I’m afraid you can’t have me fired, ma’am,” I said with pride. “I’m a volunteer.”

                Later that day, I returned to the volunteer office to tender my resignation to the young man in the cubicle. As I handed in my badge, I beamed brightly at him.

                “Enjoy the tort suit!” I said, and for a brief second I glimpsed the most excellent look of shock and confusion on his face as I left the office.

                On my way out to my car, I saw black smoke rising from one of the trashcans in the courtyard. I just shook my head and kept walking. 

Kicking Off This Blog

If you were lying awake tonight thinking "I wish I had just a speck more of Will Dantzler in my life," then congratulations! You're in luck! This will be the first of several specks of me, in blog form.

Click the "Dantzler Stories" tab for amusingly awkward tales from my life.
Click the "Opinion" tab for slightly less amusing articles from my brain.
Click the "Other Stuff" tab for random bits of stuff.

To get things started, I have included one post in each category. Enjoy!

Vintage Dantzler (c. 2008): How I Imagine a Conversation Between Two Girls at My School

Gorgeous Girl #1: Ugh! I hate all the guys at this school! They're all such tools!

Gorgeous Girl #2: Me too! Except for that one guy....Will Dantzler. He's so dreamy!

Girl #1: Like omg! I totally know, right?! It's like he's the only boy who understands us! I want to marry a man like him, but he's so far out of our league!

Girl #2: Be that as it may, we can still gaze wistfully at him. He's just so adorable! I love his noble, Roman-esque nose and his chiseled, rippling physique! I have to try so hard to keep myself from looking at him all class. 

Girl #1: I know what you mean! He's just such an interesting person. Yesterday in English, he used the word chthonic correctly in a sentence and my heart melted! 

Girl #2: Today in theology he told the funniest joke! Who was the best financier in the Bible?

Girl #1: I don't know! Who?!

Girl #2: Noah. He was floating his stock while everybody else was in liquidation!

Girls #1 and 2: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Girl #1: Will's just so sweet and sensitive, not to mention a phenomenal athlete. Did you know he's on the football team?

Girl #2: Yeah, but I heard mean old Coach Cantey wouldn't let Will play because he's just too darn good. They had to give the other teams a chance, you know?

Girl #1: Yeah. I also heard that Will created a highly complex and developed fantasy world of his very own and that he was once able to speak Elvish!

Girl #2: No way! That's soooooo hot! The other day, I saw him pump ketchup into the front pouch of his hoodie. He was so cute while he ate it in math class that I couldn't tear my eyes away!

(Dim-witted Thug approaches Gorgeous Girls #1 and 2)

Dim-witted Thug: Grunt! Me heard you talking about Will Dantzler! Me bigger and stronger than him!

Girl #1: You're just jealous of how dreamy he is and how much better he is at life than you are!

Girl #2: Yeah! He could easily outsmart you as well as overcome you in any contest of athletic ability! And now that he bought Master Kim's "Teach Yourself Kung Fu" video collection for just $14.99 he could quite certainly kick your sorry posterior! Now withdraw, you fiend!

Dim-witted Thug: Grunt! You right! Me just jealous of how awesome him is. Me go ask him to come to me beer bash on Friday. Him so funny him life of party!

Girl #1: Golly, I wish Will would ask me to the prom! I've already turned down fourteen other guys because I've been holding out for him!

Girl #2: Me too! I've already turned down seventeen! You know, I can't stand being without him for another second! I'm going to go ask him to run away with me!

Girl #1: Not if I ask him first!

(Gorgeous Girls #1 and 2 promptly engage in a mortal cat fight)

REALITY

Girl #1: Who's that weird guy who keeps staring at us?

Girl #2: I don't know. I think he's that loser who wrote the book.