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.

Independence Day, and Remembering the Heroes of the Past

If you are anything like the typical American, you will spend tomorrow out in the sun, preferably near the closest body of water, clad in some combination of red, white, and blue. At least two of your meals will consist of hamburgers and hotdogs (and maybe a good domestic beer), and you will conclude the day by watching a fireworks display, all in honor of the 236^th anniversary of our Founding Fathers’ declaration of independence for these United States.

We are quick to recognize the bravery and fortitude of those men who established our nation, and rightfully so, but amid the parades and pyrotechnics we often forget an equally important event which shaped the narrative of the United States. On this date in 1863, two American armies clashed outside of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for the third consecutive day of hostilities. Those three days marked the bloodiest single battle in American history, resulting in 50,000 casualties between the two forces, including 8,000 dead. Each of those casualties was sustained by an American and inflicted by an American. They were all men who went to war to fight for their ideology on both sides, and it is not difficult to imagine that many of them heard the exhortations of our Founding Fathers ringing in their ears as they took up arms to defend their notions of liberty.

Gettysburg was the strategic turning point of the eastern theater of the American Civil War and is considered by many to be the high-water mark of Confederate efforts to gain independence from the Union. The aftermath of that bloody encounter would ultimately touch the life of every American, U.S. or Confederate, black or white, freed or enslaved. It would stem the tide of the most devastating conflict our country has ever seen, one which claimed the lives of more than 620,000 soldiers. Of that number, 260,000 men died for liberty from the Union, and 360,000 others gave their lives to preserve the liberties established through Union.

In 2012, one hundred and forty-nine years after the guns fell silent on Cemetery Ridge and rain washed the blood-soaked fields of Gettysburg, we would do well to remember the lesson of the men who laid down their lives there. It is a lesson that those survivors of the war knew too well. Many returned home to lands ravaged by combat and hunger, where nearly a quarter of a generation of young men had been annihilated. They witnessed firsthand the horrific consequences of partisanship, and they hoped that those consequences would leave an indelible mark on our nation, so that her people might never forget the dire repercussions of division.

And yet today, the mark left by the Civil War seems to have faded from memory as partisanship remains a familiar aspect of the American identity. From divisive debates on the state of our government’s sovereign debt to backlash against tax cuts and decisions on health care legislation, we the people appear to have forgotten that a house divided cannot stand.

Amid times of political strife and tension between socioeconomic groups, we Americans can gain from remembering the sobering horror that those soldiers faced on the field of battle in 1863. They drank the bitterest dregs of disunion, and by their bloodshed they reaffirmed that we are, and forever shall be, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

So as you eat your hamburger and drink your cold domestic lager, listen carefully to the roar of the fireworks, and perhaps you might hear the rumble of artillery fire rolling across the fields of Gettysburg, and below it the exhortations of our Founding Fathers ringing in your ears.

The Squirrelpocalypse

                When I was fourteen, I made the mistake of watching The Exorcist right before going to sleep on Halloween night. I had thought that by this point in my life I would be mature enough to handle a cheesy 1970s horror film, but clearly I was not. I was, in no uncertain terms, scared shitless. As the October winds howled outside my window, I lay trembling in my bed, clutching a crucifix in one hand and my catalogue recreation of Sting from The Fellowship of the Ring in the other, as if a knockoff Elvish blade would do me any good against the unadulterated fury of Satan. And as I looked into the blackest corners of my room, where even the cheery glow of my nightlight couldn’t drive away the terrors of the dark, I kept expecting to hear a death rattle in my ear or to have oozing, rotted hands spring up from under my bed to drag me down to hell. 

                Suddenly, I heard the rafters creak overhead, and I let out a whimper that would have made a four-year-old girl ashamed. It’s just the wind. It’s just the wind. I rocked back and forth in a fetal ball, assuring myself in a high-pitched whisper that there was nothing to be afraid of, my fingers clenched tight around my dorky weapon. The creaking grew louder, and my whispering increased in pitch by an octave or two. Then there was a massive thud as something came crashing down in the attic, followed by the frantic scampering of clawed feet on the wooden floor. My stomach descended into my lower intestine, and in that very moment I learned that “scared shitless” was not necessarily an accurate idiom.

                Even as frightened as I was, I knew that I had to act quickly. If the spawn of the netherworld was indeed in my house, then I would need to head it off before it decided to backwards crabwalk down the attic stairs or projectile-vomit green slime all over the walls. I leapt out of bed with gusto, crucifix in hand, and ascended the pull-down staircase into the darkness of the attic.

                I regretted my decision immediately. Here I was in pitch-black darkness, dressed in nothing but my boxers, and potentially dealing with malevolent supernatural forces. Clearly I had not thought this one through. My bowels did a back flip when I heard the clatter of claws across the floor behind me. I whipped around and squinted into the darkness, holding the crucifix in front of me.

                “The power of Christ compels you!” I shouted in a high, cracked voice. If that possessed little girl from the movie showed up, I was prepared to bless that bitch into submission. I heard more clattering somewhere off to my right, this time followed by a strange squeaking sound. Then the scampering noises drew closer, and I felt something big and furry and wet crawl across my bare foot. I screamed like a little girl at the top of my lungs, dropped the crucifix, sprinted down the attic stairs and ran straight into my father. He was not amused.

                “Damn it, Will, why are you yelling like your dick’s in a blender at two in the morning?”

                “Demons! In the attic!”

                 After deriding me for being an idiot and then openly questioning my manhood, he explained that he had been hearing things upstairs, and he suspected that some sort of animal had gotten in the house. Curiosity got the best of me, and I followed him back up to the attic to see whatever it was that I had encountered.

                He turned on his flashlight and did a quick circuit of the attic before letting the beam fall on the far corner, where rested a large heap of a gray, lumpy substance.

                “Well,” he said, “judging by the size of that pile of shit, I’d say something has been up here for a while. Probably a rat or something.”

                He took a few steps toward the prodigious load of excrement, I suppose to further examine it for his own purposes, and about ten or fifteen furry lumps suddenly shot out from the darkness and scurried up and over the rafters toward the ceiling. There in the roof was a gaping hole, about the size of a football, through which the lumps scampered into the freedom of the night.  My father just stood there, mouth hanging open, looking at the massive hole that had been gnawed through his biggest investment.  And in that moment, I could see the seeds of hatred being planted. Thus began my father’s lifelong war against squirrels.

                I have heard various estimates of the size of the squirrel population in Charleston County, but all of the numbers fall somewhere between three or four million. That’s roughly ten squirrels per person. Not only are they everywhere, but they’re also horny little bastards, constantly churning out a new generation of baby squirrels, who will someday live to wreak havoc on every power line and the façade of every house in the tri-county area.

And for whatever reason, they love my back yard. Whether it’s the abundance of acorns or the copious amounts of birdseed left out by my mother, something about the Dantzler property lets the squirrels grow fat and reproduce to their hearts’ content. At nearly any given moment, I could look out of the window and count as many as ten of them basking in the sun, claiming my yard as their own. Every now and then they would look up at me, their cheeks comically swollen with acorns, my acorns, and I could imagine them saying in unbearably cute little falsetto voices, “Yeah, and what are you going to do about it?” Occasionally one of them would follow this question with something derogatory like “asshole” or “shithead,” and that would just put me over the top.

As my father and I discovered on that fateful Halloween night, the squirrels soon reached the point where they were no longer content with their conquest of the yard and decided to annex our attic. My dad, always the handyman, had patched the gigantic hole in the roof by the end of the week, but this did little to deter our rodent friends. By the end of December, they had gnawed their way back into the warmth of our home, where they littered the attic with their droppings and made constant noise during the night with their frenzied copulation and general goings-on.

My father made the motion to kill all of our attic invaders systematically with baited rattraps, but of course my mother and sister would have none of this idea. They pleaded with him, begged him, told him to have a heart. After all, the squirrels didn’t know any better. They were just trying to find a warm place to live for the winter, and they had just as much of a natural right to this property as we did. As repulsed as he was by the idea of animal rights, my dad humored them for a while. He bought a spring-loaded cage made of steel wire, which trapped the squirrels in solitary confinement after luring them in with a piece of cheese. From there, my dad merely had to carry the unwieldy 20-pound apparatus (complete with a live, very freaked-out squirrel) down two flights of stairs from the attic, where he could release the captive varmint into the wild to seek a life of happiness and self-fulfillment.

For various reasons, this method hardly proved to be effective. In fact, the have-a-heart trap almost seemed to egg the squirrels on. I think they began to lose respect for us as an opponent when they realized they could quite literally shit all over our property and we would do nothing to stop them. But by the time the third hole appeared in our roof, my father had had enough. The straw that broke the camel’s back came when one of them chewed through a wire in the wall and electrocuted itself. The squirrel managed not only to knock out the power to the television just as Clemson was staging a last-ditch drive in the fourth quarter of the Music City Bowl, but it bequeathed to us the parting gift of its rotting carcass, which remained lodged in a cavity in the wall and stunk up the house for a solid two weeks. Upon discovering the source of the power outage, my father let loose a long and very colorful string of swear words before vowing to reclaim our house by any means necessary.

The following week, I returned home from school one day to find my father standing over a long, thin package which lay on the kitchen table.

“What’s that?” I asked, noticing the slightly crazed sparkle in his eye.

He looked down at the package, and his mouth curved into a smirk.

“This, my son, is the Remington .177 caliber Air Master rifle, the most powerful pellet gun on the market.”

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye.

“You’re not planning on using that on the squirrels, are you?”

“I most certainly am.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“Son, laws were written for the good of man. And what we have here is the ageless, primordial war between man and beast. If we give them the benefit of our so-called ‘laws,’ then we’re merely admitting defeat. Besides, it’s only illegal if we get caught.”                           

I had to admit, his logic was impeccable.

From then on, the war against the squirrels became somewhat of a passion of my father’s, if one can be considered passionate about killing small animals. Often times he could be seen leaning out of an upstairs window, rifle pressed close to his cheek, quietly and systematically sharpshooting squirrels off of a telephone wire or a tree limb like a skilled assassin at work. On his good days, he could pick off two or three from a group of five before the others even noticed that their comrades now lay inexplicably crumpled on the ground, twenty feet below them. On his rare bad days, he might only mortally wound his quarry, after which he would sprint out into the yard, weapon in hand, with the noble intention of shooting the vermin at point-blank range to end its suffering. It was on these days that visitors to our house were occasionally greeted with the sight of a grizzled, middle-aged man charging them with a rifle as they came up the driveway.

My sister took great pains to assure her friends that her father was not insane, even if he did run around brandishing a weapon and shouting about squirrels. Although she succeeded in convincing people that her family did not suffer from any form of acute bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, she still had a difficult time explaining why our dad did what he did. After all, there were few activities that were quite so singularly redneck as attempting to hunt squirrels in the back yard. At this point, we were merely a small step above the fellow in a stained tank-top in line at Wendy’s who bragged about the twelve-point buck that was now strapped to the hood of his F350, or the beer-guzzling behemoth at the gas station who bellowed into his mobile phone something along the lines of “Bo, Ah just caught the biggest Norwegian yellow-finned tunar.” Furthermore, we now had to live in constant fear of being discovered by the public. I kept expecting PETA to land a helicopter on our yard and douse our house with red paint, or the local paper to run a cover story on “Deranged Local Man Found Guilty on Multiple Animal Rights Charges.”

                But my father was not one to be discouraged by accusations of being a sociopath or a hick. He went right ahead with his merciless slaughter of the squirrels, sometimes to the point that I feared he was getting carried away. There were days when he would mow down as many as five or six in one sitting without feeling the slightest twinge of remorse for his adorable victims. I, in contrast, would imagine squirrel mothers gathering their twenty children, only to tell them between mournful sobs that daddy didn’t come home tonight. From there, I would picture the future generations of troubled squirrel youths, whose delinquency and angst were merely the result of growing up in a fatherless household.  

                It seemed to me that even squirrels, as tiny as their brains were, would be able to pick up on the fact that my yard was no longer safe for their kind. I thought maybe a brave veteran might crawl back to his home to decry the evil deeds of his murderers with his dying breath, or perhaps a smarter squirrel, possibly an academic or a renowned public servant, would notice that forty or fifty of his closest friends had not returned from their most recent foray into the Dantzler property. “Hey guys,” he would say to his cohorts, “I’m starting to think that going into that yard might be a bad idea. You know, seeing as nobody ever comes back. Ever.” But no such luck. They kept on coming, and my dad kept on shooting them as quickly as they could come.

                For a while, my dad faced the problem of disposing of the little squirrel corpses. At first, he tried putting them in the trashcan along with the everyday garbage, but the constant stench of a half-dozen decomposing rodent bodies quickly convinced him that this might be poor planning. Later, he tried tossing them into the marsh behind our house, but this too proved to be more trouble than it was worth when every dog, cat, raccoon, and bird of prey in a two-mile radius descended on our yard for a free lunch. Finally, as he found himself running out of viable options, my father resorted to storing the bodies in the kitchen freezer until he could find a more permanent solution for them. There, nestled between the Eggos and the Häagen-Dazs, the squirrels would stare back with wide, lifeless eyes, their tongues hanging out of gaping mouths, sometimes their bare entrails exposed by massive wounds.

I eventually grew used to the macabre presence of our new guests, but the same could not be said for my mother and sister. They would sneak downstairs in the middle of the night for some ice cream, only to be greeted by the sight of a squirrel clinging to the Rocky Road in rigor mortis, and they would subsequently flip a shit at maximum volume.

                As dedicated as my father was to eradicating the squirrels, he of course enlisted my help. It was my assigned task to guard the yard when he was at work or out of town. At first, I nearly couldn’t bring myself to harm the pesky critters. I rued that our home had been invaded by animals that were so incredibly Disneyesque. If our yard had been overrun by substantially less cute animals, such as snakes or rats, then I would have had no problem taking them out. But whenever I trained the crosshairs on a squirrel, I always felt slightly guilty about gunning down one of Uncle Remus’ forest friends. 

And when I finally shot, my victims looked up at me in their final moments, their breath shallow and panicked, hearts pounding, eyes flashing wildly, and they would seem to say,

“Will! You monster! Why? Oh, why? I have not deserved this! All of those times I called you ‘asshole’ were merely in jest! Oh, please, spare me!”

And I would say,

“I’m sorry. You eat my house.”

Then they would say something noble and Shakespearean with their final breaths, something along the lines of “Commend me to my kind lord; oh, farewell!” Then I would give them to the neighbor’s dog.

After a while, I started to grow weary of squirrel hunting, mainly because it struck me as an activity that the Antichrist would probably enjoy in his youth. And to a certain extent, my father and I had been the Antichrist to those squirrels. We had waged an exhaustive and merciless war on them. We had begun the Squirrelpocalypse.  

Eventually, after my father’s kill count had climbed well into the upper two hundreds, there were simply no squirrels left to eradicate. They had somehow gotten the picture, and they no longer inhabited our back yard. The roof remained intact for a full six months, and my dad finally decided to hang up the gun.

To this day, there remains a sort of unspoken treaty between my father and the squirrels. They agree not to chew any more holes into the attic, and he agrees not to blow their brains out. Every winter, when the newest batch of delinquent squirrels hits the scene, I can see his eyes wander fondly to the corner of the garage, where lies the Remington Air Master, just waiting for its next victim. But I am content to know that I will most likely never shoot another squirrel, and I sure as hell won’t ever watch The Exorcist again.