I finally delivered my keynote speech at the
Brewster Society convention — that was Wednesday — and I got back to my desk this morning after a day of travel to find more than the usual amount of Hate Mail stacked on its right corner.
Some of you might know that after the
brouhaha with Jerry Lewis, I brought in some consultants from McKinsey for an audit of our mail-sorting procedures here at Phutatorius & Co. McKinsey's work culminated in a stirring multimedia presentation, the likes of which I had never seen — dazzled by the
strobe lights, disco balls, and an appearance of the LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLE Guy, I had no qualms about reimbursing their $40,000 in expenses. In that presentation the McKinseyans recommended that I sort my Fan Mail pile into two sub-piles. These piles are called Support Mail and Hate Mail.
I should note straightaway that there was some discussion about leaving Fan Mail as a pile whole unto itself, and simply adding a separate Hate Mail pile. But I told McKinsey that "fan" is really short for the word "fanatic," and the word "fanatic" absorbs not only those who support me, but also the Morley Safers and Pierre Trudeaus of the world who write me weekly and call for my summary execution. "In that case," the consultant said, rolling his eyes in a manner that suggested I
wasn't paying him $400 an hour for his advice, "we'll recognize both Hate Mail and Support Mail as Fan Mail, but still sort these two
subspecies of Fan Mail into separate piles."
As a result, the Hate Mail goes on the right-front corner of my desk, and the Support Mail on the left, and by glancing quickly at the
relative volume of mail in the two piles — what? did you think I actually
read this stuff? — I can get a fair idea of my current standing in the world. That guy at McKinsey called it the "Stacking Index." I know, I know —
Stacking Index. LAME, I know, but the way he said it, with the bottle rockets firing out the side of his electric guitar, it sounded cool at the time.
And when I got back from the Brewster Society convention this morning, I took one look at my Hate Mail pile and gasped. Hate Mail stacked so high it was pressed up against the dropped ceiling, displacing one of the tiles (a pigeon somehow got up there, too, flew right up into the hole while I was gone, and the flapping up there all the time is annoying as hell.). In fact there was enough of it — and it was heavy enough — that my desk is tipped on three legs just holding the weight.
I have asked my interns, who actually do read this stuff, what all this Hate was about. They tell me that the bulk of it is the same complaint:
ya're not posting enough, ya bastid.
Well, people, I'm writing now. And I'm asking you to give a busy man a break. I can't be all things to all people all the time. It's not every day the Brewster Society comes calling, and it's not easy to sit down and write a twenty-minute speech about kaleidoscopes — particularly when you don't have the funds to commission a backing band, strobe lights, and the LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLE Guy to draw attention away from the lack of content in your presentation. I didn't even have a damn kaleidoscope for a prop.
So will you cut me some slack, people? I want to see my Support Mail pile rise by at least a foot within the week, or you might just find your good Phutatorius on strike through the holidays. And I tend to have some
good stuff during the holidays.
Marital strife ensued this weekend, when I went on
craigslist and traded away the Wife's Horn-Of-Plenty to the Smithsonian for a flat-panel HD-ready television and a brick of M-80s.
I had no idea what kind of grief I would be getting for this. Apparently (and I never knew this until after I sold it), the Horn-Of-Plenty was a 1200-year-old heirloom, bought from some hard-up Druid in the English Midlands forty-odd generations ago. According to the Department of Agriculture, it is one of six extant, scientifically proven
Cornucopiae in the world today — and the only one not currently owned by Horn Hobbyist and Hoarder
Rue McClanahan.
That's what I
didn't know when I cut the deal online. What I did know about this particular Horn-Of-Plenty was that it dispensed cooking oil. Not wine, not beer, not balsamic vinegar, Uranium-238, frankincense, myrrh, or any other substance that we could sell out the back door of the apartment for a decent profit.
Cooking oil. Now if we were in the restaurant business, we might have some use for a bottomless, inexhaustible supply of cooking oil. But we're not. In fact, the Wife and I have been so on-the-go in recent weeks that we've had to eat out or order in most of our meals. And what we do eat, we're not going to cook up in corn oil, which is what this Horn-Of-Plenty has been serving up ever since the economy went to shit in '01. Back in 1999, during the dotcom boom, the Horn was running over with extra virgin olive oil — a lot healthier and better-tasting oil than the cheap Mazola we're getting these days.
Granted — an infinite supply of
anything is nice to have. Granted, granted, fine. Score a point for the Wife on that. But that is only half the issue: we simply don't use the Horn-Of-Plenty enough to justify the inconvenience of keeping it in the apartment. I mean, it's three feet long from rim to point, it won't fit in any of the cabinets, and it leaks
everywhere. You have to lay it flat on the kitchen counter
just so, or it will dribble out cooking oil until you fix it. The Wife tried hanging it from the ceiling last year, just before we went to bed, and overnight it literally flooded the apartment. I woke up at 4 a.m. to go to the bathroom, and I found myself ankle deep in corn oil. And don't even try slapping a lid on it or stopping it up with paper towels: it will back up and blow like a fire hose.
Simply not worth the hassle, I say, even knowing what I know now about that Horn-Of-Plenty's historical and sentimental value. Look — I've got two ALDS games to watch tonight on the new flat-panel, and an assload of firecrackers to light and throw out into the street between innings. And sooner or later the Wife will come around to my thinking here. She doesn't always, but this time she will because deep down she knows I'm right. All it will take is one episode of
Gilmore Girls in HD, and she'll be speaking to me again. I guarantee it.
