Earth to stand-up comics: don’t change the lyrics to a well-known song and sing three verses of it to your audience.

Funny how some things seem evident to the fed-up audience member, but, even after years of repeated failure, the perpetrators of such crimes against hilarity refuse to deviate from, or even acknowledge their tired and humorless ways. The 8-minute 1-joke sketch is another example, and there was once a time when the last half-hour of Saturday Night Live was rife with such lapses of judgment (I can’t speak for it now as I don’t watch that show anymore, but something tells me it’s very much the same). Even as a kid, I remember getting furious when SNL stretched what should have been a 2-minute chuckle to an agonizing 8 minutes. “Don’t they know?” I would wonder. “Aren’t they self-aware?”

Well, if there’s one thing that life has taught me it’s that no, the theys of the world do not know, and they are most certainly not self-aware. Which is not to say that individual people don’t “know” and are not self-aware, but the word “they” implies a group, and there is no such thing as a group that knows, or one that is self-aware. (If they were, they wouldn’t be in a group.)

So when I see some comic perform a song that they’ve changed the lyrics to, their predicament strikes me as so ignorantly hopeless that I just want to take them to the vet and put them to sleep, or flush them down the toilet of the comedy club john. An 8-minute go-nowhere sketch is a little more understandable – it has to be that long to fit in the show (although why they can’t use two 4-minute sketches – oh wait, that would mean coming up with more material, now I get it), but what kind of person sits down to think up their comedy act and says to themselves, “I know what I’ll do. I’ll sing Hang on Sloopy, but I won’t use the real words at all – I’ll replace them with humorous ones that I’ve devised! It will be fantastic because everyone knows the tune and what a joyful surprise it will be when they discover new words with jokes mixed in! Self, you are a comic genius!”???

And then when they start writing their junk-drawer jokes, they discover the song has inspired a lot of “material.” Enough to sing not just one verse, or even two, but the entire song with maybe a bridge mixed in!

What they carelessly neglect to consider is all the stress and aggravation and sadness their tired antics engender. Because we all have enough stress in our lives that we shouldn’t have to endure 4 minutes of alternate lyrics to My Boyfriend’s Back on Pride Weekend.

And you may be picturing some fabulous heyy boy crazing it up to that song, and if it were I might be inclined to be good-natured about it through my irritation, it being Pride and all. But no. It was some unfunny woman with a lot of “fag friends” (a phrase she repeated until it felt like she was slapping my ears with it) and an evident, if misguided, affinity for singing her jokes.

Did I mention she was Asian? Yeah. She sang about that too.

The one truly enjoyable moment, however, came when I turned around to look at the rest of the audience. When I get offended by the quality of a performance, the thought that someone else might be enjoying what is clearly a hack-job makes me want to screech and holler like an autistic kid at the barber. Gazing back across their faces, however, it struck me that had I not known what was going on onstage, if I had to just guess based on their expressions, I might have thought they were witnessing a snuff play – one that purported to be funny, but just when you least expected it, the producers came out and murdered the lead actress right in front of everyone. In that moment, I felt a kind of camaraderie with the rest of the audience. Most of the time people will laugh at the lousiest of jokes because the rhythm suggests the punchline has arrived and that laughter is appropriate. But other times not even the most polite or the tritest-humored can bring themselves to laugh. Sometimes you’re just aghast, and you have an instinctual knowledge that your fears are true, that this first refrain is the first of many, and that there are two verses and a bridge to go.

If you ever solicit a cute Friendster and are waiting for a return message, and you keep checking Friendster because you think maybe Friendster forgot to email the notification or that it somehow got filtered to junk mail, even though you told your email long ago that Friendster mail is Not Junk, then yours (and mine) is a fool's errand.

Hi. I’m Matt. I’m Friendster Poison. Here’s a funny profile I came up with that makes believe that all I eat is candy. Poison. Here’s a charming and starry-eyed profile from the perspective of a hapless lover looking for someone to melt his adoring brain. Poison. Here’s a succinct profile with an honest and reasonable “Who I Want to Meet.” Poison, Poison, Poison.

I’m not sure where I’m going wrong with all of this, but it occurs to me that there are about a hundred (3) ways I could be screwing up.

The Pictures.

I think my pictures are pretty nice all around, but I have a beard in one and not in the others. Might that not be some sort of simultaneous turn on-off depending on how a person feels about beards? Because one thing is certain – when you meet me I’m not going to look like both of the pictures. I’m either going to have a beard or I’m not. It’s a risk if you feel strongly for or against beards.

The other problem with my pictures is I put up some of my friends’ South Park renderings of me because they’re pretty funny and flattering in opposite ways. My friend Jeff made me one that has me looking totally cool and I have a huge sword in my hand. It never occurred to me until now that that humongous weapon might be a turn off to some Friendsters. The other was made by my friend Culley and in it I look completely strung out and pasty, a beer in one hand and a teddy bear in the other, and what is clearly a joint in my mouth. Oh, and I’m also wearing a nightgown. Yeah. There’s not much to say about that one except that it’s gotta go. (Although I have to say, if you look at the picture – the genius thing is in the fact that my teeth are clenching so hard and the cap is still on the bottle – it’s like I’m too fucked to even open the bottle – as though I have just been holding it like that for a few hours and it’s warm, yet I can’t bring myself to open it or put it down. And what reasonable person wouldn’t want to date a Friendster who looks like that?!)

The Messages.

Okay world, I give the damn hell up – what, oh what, am I supposed to write in an initial message to these ever-loving stupid Friendsters? Because whatever the answer is, it evades the likes of me.

I have tried the one line “let me know if you’re interested” route. I have tried the “you’re so cute it gives me pause” route, but I try to keep it pedestrian enough – you know, to cut through to the crux of the thing without a whole lot of language. I have tried the “I noticed this stupid thing in your profile and I love that movie from childhood!” route.

Time after time, message after message, I’m coming up all zeros.

And no matter how okay a message may seem before you send it out, if you get no response, to re-read what you’ve written is an exercise in how to indulge in self-hatred most vile, for all the things you thought would surely win her over become irrefutable evidence that you are a stupid stupid idiot, and that no one would ever want to go out with a stupid person the likes of idiot you.

Which brings me to the real reason I think I’m Friendster Poison.

The Chronologically Simultaneous Hopeless Blog Rants.

I only go shopping in the Friendster galleries when I’m sitting alone on a Friday night worrying about how I will look back on the end of my youth as a time when I didn’t go out on many dates, or at least not many that warranted a second date, and in my panic, I try to get a Friendster girlfriend immediately. And also when I’m feeling alone and hopeless, I really like to write about it, to wrap myself up in the special warmth that only misery can provide, and indulge in the thoughts that are as a gray sky against a scorched earth, where the skeletal remains of all that I once held as beautiful now achieve a different beauty altogether through the horror of their lingering ghostly presence. Oh, how I do love to wax despair. (Because the best words are the worst ones, after all.)

And what do we do when life gets us down? Duh. We blog about it.

And of course, I only begin sending these Friendster messages out right after I’ve posted something gloomy, perhaps the slightest bit tawdry, and totally self-indulgent on this site. Which I’ve linked to from my Friendster profile.

And somehow, in the moment, it does not occur to me that I should either make a new post or remove the link, if only for a little bit, if only until the girl likes me and I have something cheerful to obsess about on my blog. No. I think crazy thoughts like – well, I was sad when I wrote post in question, and if she reads it she’ll probably understand that I was sad, we all get sad, and maybe she will appreciate my readiness to strip myself vulnerable before the world, will recognize me as a brave soul and a passionate one, and right there we have two good qualities mixed in with all the gloom and melancholy, so it cancels out, right?

--

Recently my friend Jillian was giving me advice on how to speak to women, and how to go about getting people to like you. She seemed to suggest that strangers do not get an innate sense of how good a person you may or may not be, and that initially it is advisable to make a good impression. To, in her words, “put your best foot forward.” I looked at her like she was crazy and a moment later the skies parted. That one expression – such an oft-used one as to rank up there with the most abused of all clichés and I never even considered it.

Not for a second.

I hardly think it appropriate for America’s Peanut Farmers to use the subway as a forum for notifying the public of the ideas they’re currently throwing around. I mean, it would be one thing if they had come to a consensus, but as it stands, it’s clearly in the brainstorming phase. Someone should let them know that bringing the public in on this level of discussion only confuses things.

Because what are we supposed to call it now? Protein and Jelly or Peanut Butter and Jelly? For that matter, are we to start referring to peanut butter as protein? That strikes me as weird and confusing. Unless we’re going to start calling protein something else, but I don’t think America’s Peanut Farmers have that kind of pull. I don’t think they have any pull at all, for that matter. They farm peanuts. That’s the stupidest nut.

“No, Matt, peanuts are a great nut!” you cry. “I love how salty they are! Sometimes I even lick the shells!” you say. Well it’s clear that you’ve let APF Propaganda wash your brain squeaky clean because the only thing peanuts are good for are lining the floors of dive-themed bars and making me puke. Perhaps if they invented a peanut-fusion reactor that would power our automobiles or enable us to travel through time, I would hold the peanut in higher esteem, but that day is a long ways off (they’re still in the prototype stage, according to Wired.)

I might think the poster could be a way for Peanut (Protein?) Farmers to communicate if they are not a well-organized group, like some kind of public message board, but I don’t think too many peanut farmers ride the subway. And with the price of advertising, it would probably make more sense to find a better way to communicate, like by phones or the internet.

Maybe it’s some kind of secret-society code and they’re not Peanut Farmers at all. It makes total sense. I mean, what’s a communiqué from Peanut Farmers to Peanut Farmers doing in the subway? It’s very suspicious. Maybe it has something to do with the DaVinci Code. Not that I would know. I don’t feel like reading it.

I’ll tell you though, that Protein and Jelly has a nice ring to it – peanut butter is okay and all, but the butter part sets off alarms in my vanity-obsessed late-twenties brain. Protein is the stuff of lean muscles and healthy lifestyles, butter makes me drowsy just thinking about it (although if the choice is butter or margarine, you better pick butter because margarine is murderous poison! Trans fats, people!) Yeah, I could really go for a protein and jelly sandwich.

Which is where the Peanut Farmers went wrong in this scenario – here they’ve utilized public advertising space to send vague memos to their New York constituents, when they could have used the same exact poster as an advertisement! Think about it – it totally works as an ad.

But I guess when you’re a Peanut Farmer you can’t see the forest for the trees – all you’re focused on is resolving this “what to call peanut butter” conundrum. It’s easy for me to see it with a fresh eye and an air of objectivity. I have no stake in the popularity of the stupidest nut.

I swear, as soon as you decide you hate someone, that’s when you know they’re with you forevermore, you might as well just forgive them and marry them (but of course, once you stop hating and start loving them they’ll probably desert you).

One night I was at the laundromat and there were no free dryers. I had one already, but had three additional wet loads. I saw that this other guy still had one wet load, (what an awful expression but there is no other), but that all his other clothes were in dryers. Then he went outside. I thought about it for a few minutes, playing out all the potential repercussions of giving up my dryer, trying to resist doing a nice thing for someone but then eventually deciding that I had nothing to do, and that I lived right next door after all (it has never been my habit to wait in the laundromat), and I would like it if someone did that for me.

So I went outside. He was on the phone. I assumed a non-combative (if wuss-like) demeanor, and I made a motion to him suggesting that he pause his conversation for just a moment because I had something to tell him, something wonderful, I was the bearer of welcome news, the Samaritan sent to deliver him from 32 minutes he could spend elsewhere, doing anything he could imagine, perhaps dedicating it to a loved one or making his dreams come true!

He noticed me. He looked insulted. Pissed. “I’m on the phone.” And he continued his conversation.

O for a instrument never before invented, one that I would call “bludger,” light and aerodynamic, yet dense and so unyieldingly solid, that I could effortlessly collapse the bone structure of my choosing with one triumphant blow.

As I turned away, thinking something along the lines of ‘you idiot, I was going to do something nice for you and you lost out,’ (which felt oddly and uncomfortably like an unrequited lover proclaiming that so-and-so lost out on a great person), I got a lasting image of the bastard in my mind, one that I would get used to, because as I said, once you start hating someone they’re with you forevermore, in front of you at the deli, walking down the street with their girlfriend, and what a crime it is that they should know love.

He was a little taller than me and a little bigger than me with a roundish nose and a long face. I couldn’t tell if he was Hispanic or Greek. Maybe he was Hispanic and just unshaven. I don’t know. I have always been lousy at guessing ethnicity and ages of children. He also had glasses and pin eyes that looked a little too small, even magnified under glasses. He exuded a macho air combined with a certain stupidity that made me immediately curse the entire male sex, and the putrid hormones that make them the intolerable fucks they are. Maybe some people can’t judge a book by its cover, but stupid is as stupid looks, and this guy was the guy; Cancun for senior week, Natty Ice by the case, and inviting you into his bedroom because he just learned More Than Words on the guitar and he wants to play it for you.

Those glasses made him look so infuriatingly stupid that I would have given anything to have my bludger at the ready, that I might have known the pleasing sensation of the hollow yet meaty thud of his eggshell skull. I wanted it like I was an antsy kid at Christmas, and his broken head and scrambled brains were the hot toy of the season.

Maybe some night when I see him (because I always, always see him), I could unveil my trusty bludger and smash his doofus head in good.

I’ll have to invent this bludger first, but it’s probably worth it. No one would suspect me, after all, because no one knows I hate him like I do.

Except all of you.

Mum’s the word, kay?

(smashy smashy)

My roommate David refuses to consider my hypothesis that the glasses we bought at Target were shoddy on a molecular level and are now biodegrading as we use them, releasing potentially dangerous mineral molecules into our drinking water, and affecting the taste of the water in those glasses noticeably.

Because here’s what I’ve noticed: water tastes one way when I drink out of anything that is not these Target glasses and a different way altogether when I drink out of these glasses. It’s gritty and minerally, reminiscent of the sparkle-dust that abounds on basement floors. That, and salt water. All in all, I’m concerned that each sip is a sip closer to cancer or disease, and I want to get to the bottom of it.

The thing is, right when you immediately pour the water, it’s fine. But 10 seconds later the salty-grit taste is there, and I think that is because the glass is releasing molecules. Simple!

But David won’t hear it. He is also a little sensitive about it. I think it’s because he bought the glasses and maybe he thinks I am criticizing his choice in dishware. Which is totally crazy. This is about all of our safety, not aesthetic bickering.

“Do you know how long it takes glass to biodegrade?” David asks.

Of course I do. Forever. That’s what makes this whole thing so weird. “No, professor Google. How long?”

“One thousand years.”

“So?”

“So somehow you think that this glass is biodegrading 999 years ahead of schedule?”

“First of all we have had the glasses for 3 years and who is to say when they were created? They could have originated–”

“No they couldn’t.”

“Well the gap of time is a little less than 999 is all I’m saying. Plus, maybe Target cuts their glass with something else at the manufacturing stage in order to reduce costs, and maybe that glass additive is what’s biodegrading.”

“Glass doesn’t have additives.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“No you’re not.” (He couldn’t be.)

It does, however, seem that I may have confused glass manufacturers with drug dealers, and what works nicely for one is not necessarily feasible for the other. It might be, though. I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve studied enough to do a comparative analysis of drug dealers and glass manufacturers. I’m just obsessed with particles.

It’s also possible that I’m dead-on, and that the longer my roommates refuse to believe me (my other roommate Terry balked at this notion as well), the greater the damage done, for there is an insidious poison in our blood that only increases with each glass of tainted water we consume.

But some people just refuse to accept hasty and outlandish speculation as probable truth. But I can’t say I blame David. Believing in the things I believe in starts one down a dangerous and paranoid path. Because if our glasses are biodegrading and killing us slowly and insidiously, then what’s next?

Maybe our wi-fi equipment is giving us untold cancers or our iPods are mutating our palms. And those earbud headphones? They’re probably changing the shape of our ears and in 20 years all we’ll have is hideous tumors, and remember how we used to hear out of those lumps? For that matter, remember how we used to hear?

“Maybe what’s going on is that the detergent is getting trapped in the bubbles. See, the glass has those bubbles all on the outside of it and it puckers the inside of the glass outward. Maybe the detergent residue gets left behind inside those puckers and then gets into the drinking water, thereby affecting the taste slightly. Alarming.”

“I thought it was because the glass was biodegrading,” David says, all smirky. He’s a real elephant when it comes to remembering.

“No, you made me feel stupid about that. I’m proposing this as an alternate hypothesis. I mean theory.”

“It’s not a theory if you have absolutely nothing beyond an insane hunch to back you up.”

“Hypothesis then.”

“There’s no difference in taste!” David asserts.

Ah ha. Now we’re getting to the crux of the argument.

“Yes there is,” I counter. “I’m sorry you don’t notice it, but I do. I notice these things.” It’s true. I do. Don’t make the mistake of arguing with me about minutiae. It’s literally all I think about.

“Maybe it’s just different to you.”

“No. Not just to me.”

I swear, basically every time I think back on the things I say and do it gives me a brain tumor. It washes over me in a wave of actualization and I stumble and wince, trying to fold myself once, twice, folding myself in half again and again until I might disappear in the face of the memory of all the stupid things I say and do. I embarrass myself. I willingly submit to passionate impulses at the worst times. I am an expert at misrepresentation. I am alone, and the more alone I become, the louder I scream in the depths, the harder I scrape on the mucky walls, and any time I see the light of day it is with the knowledge that this is but a reprieve, and I make a desperate plea to an unsuspecting world in the form of the passionate pursuit of love most true.

All I need is a name or a face and after a moment of superficial reflection I’ll come upon a moment, a time I obeyed an unfortunate impulse, and it will echo through all the unfortunate impulses I obey and obey, hitting me like a vacuum to the guts, one minute I’m fine, the next I’m doubled over, imploding in the face of all the foolish things.

O, for a transcript of my life that I could edit and republish, scrapping everything that belongs in the heap as though it never happened, no one knowing or ever having known all the things I would have them forget. Problem is, if I had such a transcript, I wouldn’t be content to eliminate just my private humiliations. I would demand more and more, anything I remembered with any amount of discomfort would disappear with a click of the DEL key, and all that would remain would be Christmas mornings, the time I hit the winning run, and the highlights of my time with my ex.

I would keep the day I met her. When I saw her in the dark of a freshman party, looking irritated the way she loves to look, and as I looked at her all my notions of any words such as beauty, girl, perfect, and all their endless synonyms converged in the physical manifestation of everything I had ever wanted.

I would keep the disinterest in her voice when we met. It was that disinterest that became my calling.

Or maybe I wouldn’t have to delete everything I wish I could, if I could simply turn to the moment in the transcript when we met and read on from there, just so I could live it all again, and having lived it twice, perhaps I would forgive all that was to come – the respect I lost for all the world, the God I killed by calling it void, and the busy schedule of unevents that would comprise my jury-rigged life.

Life has a way of teaching misguided lesson after misguided lesson. If you’re me, at least. I look back on the things I believed and the passions I succumbed so readily to and with such appropriate timing, and I marvel. Because every now and again I succumb to a passion here and there, but the result is always so disappointing, the misguided lesson so loud and clear that each time I humiliate myself in the name of passion it brings me one misguided lesson closer to the last time I will make such a mistake, pushes the raw power of unrestrained emotion that much further up into my cranial prison of logic. And it is at once a testament to the power of the human brain and a tragedy of how I’ve wasted mine that I devote such energy to the formidable prison I have created.

Some days I wonder if there is any hope of undoing it, or if I’m destined to continue this convoluted and heady path, at the end of which I will stand exhausted over nothing, and I will look back on all the years and shrug my shoulders in a “so what” what will come as the only fitting period to the sentence I’m writing day in, day out.

And when I think of that night I met her, the pain in my chest is at the ready and I can feel a world of tears just a membrane away, and I can see that my cranial prison crumbles in the face of that which I truly care about, of that which is more than a fevered impulse, and I don’t know if it promises a hopeful future or a past I will never survive.

A few weeks ago I saw an egg in a bag lying on the subway stairs. I took note of it because it seemed totally gross and totally not surprising at the same time. It just struck me as typical. You know. New York. Egg in a bag. What do you when you get tired of carrying your egg around in a city like New York? You throw it on the ground.

Of course, I feel like whenever I see something like that, or some kind of liquid in a container on the sidewalk, I always assume the most disgusting explanation I can possibly conjure. A brown liquid in an iced tea container most certainly isn’t iced tea, it’s definitely some kind of organic fluid that some crazed asshole drained in there and left as a present for the world. I wasn’t sure what was up with the egg in the bag. It looked relatively normal. Maybe a person laid it.

The weeks went by and I forgot about the egg entirely.

Then the other day I was riding the subway in, trying in vain to appear as though I wasn’t checking the entire subway out (it’s a male instinct, it’s hormonal, I think they did a study), and I happened to look directly across from me and what do you know, I saw none other than:



He was eating it up, feasting on his disgusting little egg, and not just eating it, but peeling it dry. The fucker was peeling a hard boiled egg on the subway and eating it. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like peeling a hard-boiled egg is enough of a hassle when you use water, I can’t imagine doing it dry. I would think you would get pieces of shell all over the egg and in your mouth, not to mention your fingers would be glazed with eggy stankness, and speaking of which, don’t eggs smell like sh–

And that’s when I got a whiff of it, the bubble-farts egg stench filling up the air like the entire subway was this jerk’s covers and he was just farting away, farting his hideous egg-farts, stinking up the bed and not letting anyone else come up for air. The bastard. I couldn’t believe he was sitting there eating that egg like that. I thought about trying to catch his eye for a second so I could frown at him, but then I realized that I would probably punk out when it came time to look mean and I decided to take a picture of him instead. I think he knew what I was up to because he put it away shortly after I did it. Earth to world: you eat eggs on the subway, I take pictures of you. Plain and simple.

I have to say, he wasn’t what I expected initially of the egg bagger. He just looked like some guy my age who was getting his daily dose of eggs, and no one told him that eggs aren’t an on-the-go food. No one told him that he should eat eggs in well-ventilated areas. I mean, why would you eat eggs on the subway? The subway is so gross I’m loath to eat a Power Bar on it, for fear of smelling the air while I’m swallowing my food. But Mr. Bastard, it seems, likes the taste of egg while savoring the aromatic delights of organic decay. Amazing.

Listen, it’s possible that I’ve been in the dark all the while and everyone takes eggs with them places and eats them on public transportation. I don’t know. It’s a fast-moving world. I don't pay attention to much, I just listen to my iPod. It was probably not the same person I saw eating the egg that left it on the ground, so there are at least two people doing it (although the person who left the bag didn't necessarily eat anything, of course maybe they had two and only wanted one). If that is the case, however, if eating eggs is in public is some kind of hot thing to do, then consider me the grumpy old codger, complaining about the new ways and the egg-eating teens, reminiscing about the good old days when the kitchens were for eating and the subways were for crapping.

“What’s that smell?”
“Bleach.”
“That’s not all.”
“Drano.”
“What did you do?”
“What makes you think I did something?”
“What did you do?”
“I had to wash the cat box.”
“Wash the cat box? Why is there standing water in the tub? No…”
“I told you I had to wash the cat box.”
“You didn’t.”
“What?”
“Tell me you didn’t.”
“Didn’t what? Something tells me I did.”
“You washed it in the tub?”
“Yes.”
“The cat box.”
“Uh huh.”
“In the tub.”
“Yes.”
“Why did you do that? What would possess you to wash the cat box in the tub?”
“Where else am I supposed to do it?”
“I don’t know, but not the tub.”
“No, I think you can.”
“That’s where we shower. That’s where our bare feet go. I mean, clean bare feet and cat litter…frankly, I’m getting mad that I have to explain this to you.”
“You should relax.”
“No. What happened?”
“The water won’t go down.”
“You didn’t...did you just pour the litter down the drain?”
“No! Of course not! What do you take me for?”
“…”
“I emptied the litter first, okay?”
“All of it?”
“I thought I got it all.”
“What do you mean, thought? The litter box is blue, litter is gray, it doesn’t blend in!”
“I guess I didn’t really inspect the box before I put it in the tub. Is that so bad?”
“Yes! So bad is exactly what it is!”
“Don’t worry. There’s nothing to worry about because I’m going to fix it!”
“You better clean the tub.”
“I’m going to.”
“You better do it right. Not just half-assed.”
“I will!”
“Do it twice.”
“Maybe.”
“No, I’m sorry, please do it three times.”
“No!”
“You have no room to argue! You put poop and pee in the tub!”
“Oh come on. We live in a city. There’s poop and pee molecules everywhere.”
“I know! The bathtub is the one place of sanctuary!”
“No way man. Those molecules are in there too.”
“Yes, now that you've put them there!”
“Okay listen, don’t worry, I’ll put the situation right. You’ll never know I did anything, okay?”
“You better.”
“I will.”
“I assume you understand that I need to shower before tomorrow.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“Come on!”
“I’ll do my best! This is not going smoothly! Would you mind plunging some? My arms are weak from plunging so long.”
“How long have you been plunging?”
“Few hours.”
“A few hours?”
“Four. Four hours.”
“How much litter is in there?”
“I think a lot. It’s pretty…solid.”
“How much progress have you made?”
“Progress?”
“Gimme that!”