Phutatorius

So the bank is all mad at me now because I filled up my safety deposit box with ground beef a month ago. They complain that it took almost a week to trace the source of the smell, and ultimately one of the tellers went faint on Friday afternoon and they had to hospitalize her — this in the middle of their biweekly payroll deposit rush. As it turns out, the woman in question had been living with an untreated heart murmur — probably for years. The simple truth is, this teller could have infarcked at any time, and had it happened on the job, the bank would have been on the hook for big-time worker's comp money, instead of the three dollars of smelling salts and subsequent $100 ER consultation that managed to identify the problem before it was too late. So I don't really see why they're coming at me asking that I reimburse them for their "losses."

And another thing: there's nothing at all in the safety deposit box contract that says I can't load up my drawer with perishable food items. The contract does say they can't bring in blasting caps and blow my private box open and look inside. Well, it doesn't say anything about blasting caps — but it makes quite clear that nobody except me and my approved signatories is authorized to access the contents of my lockbox, by key or any other means. That simple principle is what makes a safety deposit box a safety deposit box, and not just some metal container that some SWAT team can blow to smithereens whenever it wants.

The beef in that box was Grade A Top Choice ground chuck — and, more importantly, it was all I had left of Old Marguerite, the sainted Guernsey heifer that found me when I ran astray of a third-grade field trip and manged to pin my right arm under a boulder in Custer State Park. I survived on the milk of that cow for five days while investigators waited — with thumbs "indisposed" — for my disappearance to ripen into a genuine "Missing Persons" case (ask 'em to blow up a bank safe, though, and they'll be over in five . . .).

The posse of ranchers who traced Marguerite's fugitive hoofprints to my boulder allowed me to take her home. Over the next twenty years that animal stood by me, steadfast, in more times of trial than I care to recount. The Wife and I shared a glass of her milk at our wedding. And when dear old Marguerite passed away, I only wanted to keep some part of her, some token by which to remember and honor her . . .

What — freeze her, you say? Unthinkable, sir! Marguerite was always overly sensitive to cold. A room temperature treatment was in order, and I wanted my keepsake locked away, protected from the grave-robbers who would track down this animal's reginal meat and sell it to the Fan Club on eBay. And yet, who would have envisioned this ending? Marguerite's charred vestiges scooped out of their (now-penultimate) resting place by a HAZ/MAT team, with samples sent to a lab for testing . . . see if your pathologists, when their analysis is complete, do not step forward and announce not only that Marguerite's meat is disease-free, but that even at a cellular level, there is evidence to suggest that no nobler or more loyal animal ever walked this Earth.

Until that report issues, I await the bank's apology.

From the "My Wife Would Never Make This Mistake" Department:

Out last weekend with friends at a bar in Philadelphia — a bachelor party in fact, God bless the groom — and a woman struck up conversation with several of us at the end of a narrow corridor crowded with people. "I wish I were Wonder Woman," she announced. "That way I could just fly my invisible plane to the other side of the room."

I hear this sort of statement all the time, and it's time I dealt with it, because it reflects a fundamental conceptual misunderstanding of invisibility. An airplane that is invisible still takes up space. That is, its invisibility does not make it easier to get through or around a crowd. You might be able to go over that same crowd, but in a room with ten-foot ceilings, that's not really a consideration. This woman was clearly confusing invisibility with intangibility (definitions provided). Wonder Woman's airplane was invisible — you could not see it, but other than that it had all the characteristics common to airplanes, such that if you tried to maneuver it around inside a populated room, you would invariably thud some heads, spill some drinks, and rouse the tough guys by the bar into "You got a problem?" postures.

Not to mention that, as I pointed out to this woman before she walked briskly away,

"You'd still have to have at least an airstrip or something cleared for you to land that thing." Friends of mine nodded their heads in agreement.

Now that I think about it, there was probably a reason why she wanted to be on the other side of the room.

It's been too long since I last posted. Thing is, I've got nothing to write. I mean, really — nothing.

With great power comes great responsibility. Spider Man or Superman or somebody said that. Maybe it was Clark Kent's dad (it certainly wasn't Dubya's). I don't know who said it first, and I don't care. The point is that as time passes, it becomes increasingly difficult to muster posts that meet the exacting quality standards here at Phutatorius & Co. And every minute of every day I carry the weight of my responsibility to my readership on my shoulders. When I go a week or more without gagging up a blogworthy Chestnut, I feel that my blogger's burden could well break my back.

All this is my own damned fault. I did it to myself. Over these last seven months I have painted myself into a corner. I started last July with the classic tabula rasa — the Phutatorius you know now did not exist. He was an Entity TBD who would grow to become anything I chose. And grow he did. Over the last 80-some-odd posts there has emerged a distinctly Phutatorian sensibility: gripping, provocative, titillating, disturbing.

If the pickings here have been slim in recent weeks, it is only because I will not post a Chestnut to the blog that I have not thoroughly vetted and established as Phutatorius-worthy. Now don't get me wrong, people. There are thoughts ringing around in this head all day long (except between 9 and 5 on weekdays). Some of them seek out other thoughts, venture cheeseball pick-up lines, find some by-the-hour hotel room where they can get it on with one another to form ideas. Those ideas land in the hopper and I rifle through them: Hm. Is this really the stuff of Phutatorius? Does this rise to the level of what the public expects from me? And if so, does it play with the format? That is, if I went ahead with a post, would it be consistent with what my audience of twelve has come to know — and believe in — as PHUTATORIUS?

What, did you think Chestnuts grew on trees?

It's a lot of pressure, people, and I'm starting to understand why all the divas end up in clinics after their fourth albums.

The question remains: how do I fix this? Change of format? Snappy new web design? Dancing girls? Actual content? Whatever I decide, I pledge this to you: I am committed to this enterprise for the long haul.

I don't see why I couldn't make a living naming corporations. I read the billboards, I follow the securities fraud docket — I know what's hip:

Ecoblast, accufarm, InfoSurp, byteRite.

I think I have a knack for this. But for the occasional spondee, it's really just dactylic syllable-cramming, right? With maybe a strategically applied bit of hyper- or hypo-capitalization — for style's sake (see e.e. cummings). I should note as well that I also have a background in classical and Norse mythology, if you want to go that route:

Phobos Ltd., Ragnarok Industries, Sarpedon & Co., Typhon Health Care.

And for you car manufacturers, I'm also working up a list of proposed model names, a medium that I find peculiarly amenable to the jargon of literary theory:

Toyota Collage, Chevy Hermeneutic, Kia Phenomenon, Dodge Discourse.

All these names spun off the top of my head. I tell you, my brain is just chock-full of sophisticated-sounding names for corporations and products. Write me with your depressingly naive business plan or design specs of your unmarketable product, along with $19.95 (cash is fine, though I prefer money orders), and I'll custom-select a business-saving beauty from the 6000+ entries already on my Excel chart and send it off to you straightaway.

Just sprung ahead yesterday morning — happened while I slept, of course, and I didn't feel a minute of it. I'm sure that's by design, so the time change doesn't "inconvenience" folks, but I have a better idea:

Give everybody a week to spring ahead, and let 'em make the jump whenever they damn well please. Who wouldn't want to show up to work an hour late all week long and tell the boss, "It's cool, man — I just haven't sprung yet?" Then 4:00 comes on Friday afternoon, and wham! you skip ahead to go-home time, sparing yourself sixty minutes of tedium and the coffee cup another hour of pencil-tapping.

Or suppose you go into McDonald's, craving a Big Mac, and the guy at the counter says, "It's ten o'clock, sir. We're only serving breakfast." Oh, yeah? Well you can shove your Egg McMuffins where the sun don't shine, pal, because I've just declared it lunchtime. SUPER-SIZE ME!

Suffering through travel delays? Plane or train not due to depart for another fifty minutes? Hit that spring button, baby, and you'll be instantly in the air/on track and closing in on your destination.

Here's one: somebody actually thought you'd enjoy going to the Symphony (the nerve!). You can use the hour in your pocket to make this snoozer of a Handel program half as long. Along those lines, the strategic planners among us who happen to have our yearly physicals scheduled during Spring Week can fast-forward through the more, er, awkward parts of the examination. And all you Guinness Book of World Records aspirants trying to set endurance marks (sleep-deprivation, balancing on a bicycle, jumping rope) can get an hour's leg up on your competition.

In short: who wouldn't jump at the chance to flummox Father Time once a year? Sure, there are a few logistics to work out — chiefly, keeping a record of each person's timekeeping so the bullshitters among us (you know who you are) don't try to spring more than once. Easy to fix. The government sets up a website — the usual login/password kind of deal — so that when you feel the itch to spring forward, you play your chit to the Central Server, and your spent hour is on record for anyone to see. No computer handy? Call in from your mobile phone!

Once America gets going on this, you can bet Flexible Fall Back is next. So make those October massage appointments now, because for a week that second hour is free for everyone: What do you mean, you're "done?" It's still only three o'clock by my watch. Get back to the hot oils.

The Aforedescribed Idea and all renderings, variations, toutings, vigorous defenses (with and without resort to gunplay), depictions, embodiments, Power Point presentations, and exaggerations thereof are the lawful property of the Phutatorius Idea Bank™. All rights reserved.

Here's something I wrote a while ago about a friend of mine, back before I settled down. Somewhere along the line I lost track of Lola. I wonder what she's doing now:

I have a friend named Lola. She has brown hair and brown eyes and a five-inch needle that spring-loads out from under her right middle fingernail and retracts into her hand on command, into a tendon sheath reaching from her fingertip to the center of the base of her palm where it connects to the wrist. A disinfectant anti-viral fluid bathes the needle, wire-like, inside the hand, where it bends and curls easily whenever she flexes fingers into a grip — around the steering wheel of the car she drives without headlights, around the cold copper doorknob of a target's apartment in the wee hours of morning, around a kitchen knife tilted at his throat as she commands him to silence, to a grim acceptance of the inevitable.

When she opens her hand the fine, crystal-tipped metal shaft snaps back into straightness under her skin. With a cotton-ball soaked in rubbing alcohol she swabs around her man's tearing eye — extra careful with her work on these professional matters. It is surgery, after all. As the poor shaken soul (had it coming, of course) trembles in his kitchen chair, she softens, sings to him that old Celtic song about the tree-elf's first love. It's the one her grandmother taught her, the ballad she sings in the pubs to cheer me up after she's told me for the thousandth time that she won't go home with me. All this makes up her ritualistic preparation of her patient-victim.

Lola would hardly approve my representation of her. She detests my melodrama, the whining, the emotional appeals I make to her when I'm five or six beers deep — probably because she has to hear so much of it during the workday: she doesn't gag her victims because it contracts muscles in the face and makes the needle's entry more difficult. At times, when I know I've annoyed her, I fall back into line at the thought of a correction from her. Not the usual cajoling or "come off it" from one good friend to calm another, but instead a neural invasion, a literal mind-changing: she steps up to me, runs fingers through my bangs and down the length of my face, stopping to tweak my nose with a flirt. A tap on my chin signs to me (duly initiated into her mysteries) that she's done me, projected into and withdrawn from my brain. Depending upon the intensity and depth of her needle-scratch I'll struggle to piece together subjects and verbs twenty seconds later, or I'll be on the floor, completely disconnected, muttering, possibly scratching at my face like schizophrenics I've seen in movies, jacked completely out of the system, for better or for worse.

And Lola would be long gone out the door, on the next bus or train, and my last coherent thought — my last effected assembly of neural transmissions of any consequence to mind, body, heart — would be that with her needle-swipe she had told me, for the final time already, that she won't be going home with me.

Lola says she will never turn on me like that, but it's her casual, almost unnoticeable way about it that I find disquieting: a casual dance of her hand across your face — oh! did you cut yourself shaving? — and she's already switched out her needle, inserted it, just under the top eyelid, whipped a smart incisive arc across the left frontal lobe with her metal prosthesis, and pulled out cleanly, sheathed her weapon. So quick, so precise, so skillful, you don't feel or know a thing, because she never cracks a single visible vessel during the procedure, and she doesn't strike any nerve she doesn't instantly kill.

She toys with me at parties, picks a single target, tells me she'll do him/her while I watch, challenges me to catch her:

"I can get under Clarkie's Oakleys, she promises. Keep an eye on me."

Three times she's there and back. When she's with him I don't dare blink. It's so like her to watch me, to time her assault when my eyelids are down, and by the time I have my guard up and posted again I will have missed her attack. Back at my side a fourth time, she smiles as Clarkie steps out of his corner, wanders off to throw up.

"Just now — when you fixed his tie," I tell her. "I saw his eyebrow flash up, twitch a little. That was when you got him."

She shakes her head, sets her drink down on its host coaster. "Hardly. He's been down twenty minutes now. I got him when I borrowed his cell phone. Right at the end of London Calling, before the stereo started with this miserable folk rock."

"Down twenty minutes, and you've been playing me all this time? When you used Clarkie's phone . . . ?"

"When I pulled the antenna up," she says, sparkling. The closest I've seen her to happy — well, around me, anyway. Always so outspoken about economy, of course she was going to bag him on her first trip. Yet she was still able to make sure I didn't catch her. All the time while she worked him for that cell phone I wondered to distraction who it was she needed to call so badly. In shambles, my mind could think of nothing else — certainly not our bet.

"Not only did I miss you doing it," I gush, "but I still can't read the difference off Clarkie."

"Nobody will until Monday morning — maybe not even then," she jokes. Clarkie steps out of the bathroom with dribble on his chin, repeats the word lactose until he's handed a cocktail napkin. He bites off a corner, tucks the rest into his shirt and slumps back in his corner. Directionless.

At home alone I find a message on my answering machine:

"It's 10:26 and I've disconnected Clarkie. I'm looking across the room at you, standing up against the wall eating hors d'oeuvres by yourself, wondering why I can't ever bring myself to go home with you . . ."

I can hear "Revolution Rock" behind her, loud enough that the Clash's heavy bass boom and horn arrangement almost break up her giggling transmission.

"Your eyes say you're still waiting for me . . ." She seems to trail off — she gets quiet for a second. "Your eyes are still waiting for me to start and finish him. If I'm right you owe me twenty bucks."

I erase the tape.