Bring on the Mustard!

When I was a kid, my parents had an LP* of country and western music, and one of the songs on it was titled: Too Old to Cut the Mustard. Mustard being an extremely soft substance, I imagined anyone too old to cut it must be very, very old and frail indeed. However, I have recently learned that:

a) the “mustard” in question was most likely derived from a slang cowboy expression, the proper mustard, meaning the genuine article, which is in itself a bastardization of the military phrase passing muster indicating achievement of a certain standard

and

b) the word “cut” was used in the sense of to cut a fine figure or to cut a dash, another slang term dating back to the Georgian era, meaning: to have an attractive appearance.

A re-examination of the song lyrics indicates they were probably intended as a lament to the waning sexual attractiveness of the singer.

I like my juvenile interpretation better, but cannot deny, as I myself descend into the increasingly challenging depths of senior status, that the original etymology gives the saying too old to cut the mustard a dreadful ring of truth. Since it is impossible to turn back the clock (a lovely analogue idiom, soon to become, in the digital age, as quaintly incomprehensible as mustard cutting), I have resorted to the next best strategy in my fight against decrepitude: preserving a inner fiction of youth by ignoring the outward signs of aging. In other words, I’m putting all my ego eggs into the you’re-as-old-as-you-feel basket.

Although the ratio of grey to brown has long since tipped decisively in favor of grey, my hair still appears fairly dark when it’s wet, so as long as I only look in the mirror to comb my hair immediately after my morning shower, I can ignore the dry reality. Fortunately I’m quite short-sighted, allowing me to avoid noticing my wrinkles by the simple expedient of not putting on my glasses until after I’ve combed my hair. Gravity is taking its inevitable toll on fatty tissues—with which I have become annoyingly well-endowed—but wearing loose, oversized clothing makes me feel deliciously petite. Best of all, a summer of extreme walking has proven that while ballerina fluidity is well beyond my abilities, doddering won’t be a problem for a few years yet. I’ll never fold myself back into the yogic pretzels I achieved in my youth, but a sprightly step goes a long way toward creating an internal illusion of flexibility.

Of course, that’s all it can be, right? Just an illusion, precariously maintained by avoiding confrontation with the truth. Maybe so. But in light of my experience last Wednesday, maybe not.

I was leaving the library at the end of my volunteer shift when Kelly, who co-ordinates children’s programs, flagged me down. She stood just outside the double doors of the auditorium, her gorgeous cascade of dark curls topped by a tilting cluster of gaudy paper flowers. Her cheekbones were flushed with exertion. Behind her, a throng of pint-sized party-ers dashed, screaming and squealing, around the knees of a few supervising adults. Just looking into that whirlwind of activity was exhausting.

“Hey Brenda!” Kelly shouted over the soprano babble of over-stimulated toddlers. “Are you busy?”

Having just spent half an hour complaining to the library technicians manning the information desk about the dearth of activities lined up for my afternoon amusement, I could hardly claim to be otherwise engaged. “No-o-o,” I drew out the syllable with a long, hesitant vowel. “Do you need some help?”

“Fantastic!” Kelly turned and pointed to the far side of the auditorium where a line-up of carnival style games had been assembled. “Could you take over for Colleen? Just for an hour or so? Please?”

Well of course I could, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to. One of the primary ploys in maintaining the illusion of youth is never placing oneself in a position of comparison. But taking note of Kelly’s slightly desperate expression, I mastered my reluctance. “Sure,” I said weakly and waded into the swirling melee of energetic urchins.

Colleen made no attempt to hide her relief as she handed me a plastic pail full of Ping-Pong balls. She thanked me profusely, then pointed to an arrangement of red and blue plastic tumblers glued to a cardboard platform. “Each kid,” she instructed me, “picks a color, then gets three chances to toss a ball into a cup of the same color. Prizes are in the bowl.” She indicated a container on the floor at her feet filled with brightly colored somethings. “Make the kids pick up the balls, or your back will be killing you,” she warned as she waved good-bye.

To the left of my pitch, one of the library pages was supervising a game involving the dropping of old-fashioned wooden clothespins into milk bottles. To the right, a game played by tossing rolls of bathroom tissue through a toilet seat mounted vertically on stand was in progress. Ahead of me, stretched a line of waist-high contestants, eager to try their pudgy hands at tossing Ping-Pong balls into colored tumblers.

 “Step right up, ladies and gentleman,” I began my patter, then stopped to duck as a poorly aimed roll bounced off the edge of the toilet seat and came flying directly at my head, eliciting a shower of giggles from my audience. “Three balls! Three chances to win! Who wants to try?”

 “Me! Me! Me!” A frilly pink rug-rat at the front of the line waved her sparkly wand in the air.

I handed her a Ping-Pong ball and asked her to pick red or blue.

“Wed” she said decisively and made her first throw in a clumsy but exuberant overhand that caused the ball to bounce off the floor, sail over the tumblers, ricochet off the back wall, and hit me on the hip before it rolled off toward the center of the room.  Completely forgetting Colleen’s advice, I scrambled to pick up the ball before some unwary child stepped on it and turned an ankle. The girl’s next throw, delivered in an identical manner, took a freakish bounce off the back wall and miraculously landed in a red tumbler. “Yay!” she squealed, waving her wand with eye-endangering enthusiasm as she grabbed a prize from the bowl.

And so it began. I squatted to get on eye-level with diminutive contestants as I explained the rules. I chased errant Ping-Pong balls around the floor, but soon gave up on even attempting to dodge flying rolls of toilet paper, much to the amusement of the children waiting to take their turns. I celebrated with the victors as they chose their prizes and  commiserated with the defeated, encouraging them to come back later and try again. Which many of them did. A trio of tiara’d princess wannabes giggled their way through the line several times to collect a complete set of press on tattoos from the prize bowl. Another of my regulars was a laconic grade-schooler whose destiny in the major leagues was clearly foreshadowed by his uncanny ability to pitch his Ping-Pong balls into the same blue tumbler on every throw. One of the youngest participants, more interested in chasing than throwing, toddled precariously around behind the pitch, pouncing on balls that missed the tumblers and returning them triumphantly to the pail.

Kelly eventually sent over my relief, but by that time I was infected with the excitement of the party and waived him away.

Children normally view the elderly with a kind of detached politeness, as though we are too frail, or possibly too boring, to play with. But during my two hour stint as a Carney, the kids treated me like the best part of the game. They taught me all the names of the trading cards in the prize bowl (now forgotten) and we performed a (not very scientific) experiment to prove the superiority of the underhand toss, during the course of which we identified a miraculously lucky Ping-Pong ball that dropped into a cup with amazing frequency (although not every successful toss resulted in a prize, since the ball appeared to be colorblind). They talked to me the way they talked to each other, proudly showing off art projects, buttons and prizes, inviting me to admire their sparkly dresses or spiffy running shoes. I felt accepted, like an over-sized member of the gang.

Then suddenly, the party was over. Children coagulated around their parents and drifted toward the auditorium doors, chattering and laughing like parakeets as they moved on to the afternoon’s next adventure. I stood alone at my pitch, clutching the pail of Ping-Pong balls, feeling strangely elated. I thought: Okay, so I’m grey.  And flabby. And by now, my wrinkles probably have their own wrinkles. But when it comes to playing with a bunch of kids, by golly, I can still cut the mustard.

As the last of the children left the room, the library staff hauled out big, black garbage bags and began the herculean task of returning the auditorium to a pristine state. I watched them for a few seconds, then followed my playmates out the door. Cleanup is what grownups do.

*

*Those of you born in the final decades of the last century will be unfamiliar with the term LP. It stands for long-playing microgroove recording, an antique form of analog sound reproduction that fell into disuse in the late 1970’s when cassette tapes, which produced better quality sound, became universally available. A cassette tape is a … oh forget it.

Caveat Pedestris

Disclaimer: This post contains extremely strong language. In consideration of my readers with delicate sensibilities, I have asterisked out most of the letters in all cuss words involving sexual acts or organs. Hopefully enough consonants remain to give you at least a flavor of the conversation described below.  

I’m a fairly timid person when it comes to physical danger. You’ll never catch me bouncing  around at the end of a bungee cord, or leaping out of an airplane with a few square yards of thin silk between me and certain death, or scaling a sheer rock face with a couple of crampons and a bag of chalk. I go to great lengths to keep my exercise safe and sedate. Never run when you can walk, that’s my motto. Or at least it was until yesterday. Now I know that even walking can be a life-threatening activity.

Ambling along the main road into town yesterday, I came to a small side street just as a cherry red half ton truck approached the intersection on my left. It was a two way stop. Expecting the truck to at least slow down at the corner, I stepped confidently off the curb, then leapt quickly back up to the safety of the sidewalk when it became apparent the driver had either not seen the stop sign or had decided the instruction on it did not apply to him.

The truck sped out of the side street and crossed three (miraculously empty) traffic lanes on the main road before veering sharply to avoid colliding with a low-slung black sports car traveling in the fourth lane. Both drivers slammed on their brakes and powered down their windows.

“F***k**g freak!” yelled the old man in the truck, his face as red the paint on vehicle.

“What the f**k is wrong with you, man?” shouted the young man in the sports car.

Clearly unsatisfied with this response to his opening remark, and perhaps believing he was protected by the size of his truck and his advanced age, the old man upped the expletive ante. “Get off your g**d**n phone when you’re f***k**g driving, you f***k**g c**t!!”

The young man opened the door of his sports car and unfolded approximately six-and-a-half feet of Rambo-style muscle, formidably displayed in spandex bicycle shorts and a cutoff T-shirt, from the driver’s seat. Still clutching his cell phone, his jaw pushed forward with belligerence, he strode toward the truck bellowing, “You senile old fart! You could have killed me!”

My sentiments exactly, I thought.

Color faded from the old man’s face. Apparently deciding that neither his truck nor the birth date on his driver’s license constituted adequate protection from an angry giant, he stomped down on the gas pedal and peeled off down the main road. Still watching the young man in his side mirror, he ran a red light at the next intersection, causing a massive cacophony of horns and squealing brakes, but (miraculously) no actual collisions.

As he walked back to his sports car, the young man pressed his phone to his ear and began excitedly describing his near-death experience to the person on the other end of the line. Still talking, he folded himself back into his car. Steering with one hand while he continued to talk into his phone, he swerved across the three (miraculously still empty) traffic lanes and entered the side street I was once again attempting to cross.

I leapt back up onto the curb as the sports car whooshed by, missing me with inches to spare, then waited until there were absolutely no cars anywhere in sight before scurrying across the street.

I Want To Be Like The Dalai Lama

I have been avoiding Twitter. As a writer, I feel anything worth saying needs more than 140 characters to be said properly; attested by the length of this sentence which, with the addition of this final clause, is 204 characters long. As a reader, I find other people’s attempts to squeeze meaning into such a severely compressed medium utterly confusing. Then last week, while conversing with two friends who recently took a social networking course, I realized my Twitterphobia has led me to the brink of what could be an irreversible mistake.

When I started programming back in the dark ages, computers were so simplistic that universities did not bother to offer degrees in the subject. Most of my early co-workers picked up rudimentary programming skills while obtaining a degree in physics, or mathematics, or in one case, while taking a first in Classics at Cambridge. They then proceeded to learn whatever else was needed while on the job. Nowadays, it is impossible to get a position as an Application Engineer without a degree in Computing, and that’s a good thing, because the technology is well on its way to joining particle physics and neurosurgery in the category of subjects so complex they require the equivalent of a PhD just to wrap one’s head around the terminology.

As I listened to my friends expound enthusiastically on the topic of Twitter, I realized social networking is rapidly approaching a similar complexity barrier that will make acquisition of its fundamental concepts impossible for the untutored. Concerned that if I waited much longer to acquire the basics, I’d be so far behind the curve I’d need to acquire a bachelor’s degree in social media just to tweet (and such a degree already exists at one online university), I reactivated my four year old Twitter account, with the intention of developing my remedial social networking skills in the same way I learned to program computers: by copying the techniques of the pioneers who had gone before.

The first step in any learning process is to define one’s motivation. When I learned to program, it was because I’d watched the programmers where I worked hanging around yakking in each other’s cubicles while drinking coffee, and I thought, That’s the job for me! - a misunderstanding that was only corrected when it was too late to back out. Similarly, it wasn’t until, halfway through the initial draft, I realized my first novel was complete crap and decided to study writing. So, why would I want to social network?

First, I considered the social aspect. Merriam Webster defines social as: marked by or passed in pleasant companionship with friends or associates. I only have two friends/associates on Twitter right now, and if I want to talk to either of them I can just walk down the street. Even if more of my friends join in future, I know their phone numbers and email addresses, and quite frankly, I find those mediums much more pleasant than learning to decipher cryptic messages full of hash tags and at signs.

That left me with the networking aspect. Merriam Webster defines networking as: the exchange of information or services among individuals, groups, or institutions; specifically: the cultivation of productive relationships for employment or business. Now this made more sense. As a novelist, which is a very solitary occupation, I could easily see the benefit of cultivating productive relationships to exchange information.

I signed up to follow my publisher, an industry publication called Publisher’s Weekly, and few writers and industry pundits I admire. Immediately my Twitter screen filled up with obscurities such as:

RT @IGN Arrested Development: Season 4 began filming today and @BatemanJason provides the first photo from production! http://go.ign.com/N0BJ9D

"Broken Harbor got started because my husband & I had mice." #TanaFrench talks inspiration & thriller #writing: http://bit.ly/NohSMp.

.@bestbuy do u sell falcons or any other birds of prey?

I'm getting a pack of #MOO cards because I've got Klout - thanks to @overheardatmoo! You can too, just click here: [redacted in the interests of preserving your eyeballs]

WAKE is only $4.50 for 3 hours on Amazon! Hurry! RT like the wind!! http://www.amazon.com/

And the only tweet I initially understood:

I feel about a million times better than I did yesterday. Word to the wise: Don't accidentally eat bad clams the night before starting a tour

Believing I’d misunderstood the concept of “productive relationships”, I began clicking on all the blue stuff to find out what was going on. It soon became apparent that my definition of “productive” was correct, but my definition of “relationships” was too broad. All but one of the links I followed quickly devolved into an attempt to sell me something. While the relationships were clearly productive for the tweeter, productivity for the tweetee seemed conspicuously absent.  The one exception was the advice on clam consumption, which I fully intend to follow should I ever go on tour.

After scrolling through fifteen screens filled with similarly thinly disguised marketing ploys interspersed with the occasional informational tweet like the one about the intestinal side effects of bad shellfish, it became apparent that unless I was willing to invest endless hours in building a following and devising ancillary content to trick my followers into buying my books, social networking, at least on Twitter, was not worth the learning curve for me. Then I thought about His Holiness the Dalai Lama, a dude so cool and spiritually enlightened he would never dabble in something as commercial as online marketing.

HHDL, as he affectionately refers to himself in the third person, is on Twitter. He tweets once every two or three days, for a lifetime total of 812 vaguely inspiring messages about things like the importance of affection, the futility of violence and the posting of his latest webcast. He has 4,849,913 followers to date (which seems a bit paltry, given the number of practicing Buddhists in Thailand alone) and follows no one himself, making his Twitter presence more like a platform building exercise than any serious attempt to develop relationships.

Compare HHDL’s stats to those of the highly commercialized Yoko Ono at the opposite end of the Twitter spectrum. She tweets three to fifteen times a day, giving her a much higher tweet count than HHDL, although to be fair, most of her tweets are retweets or picture postings and have a mechanical quality that suggests some form of automation, which doesn’t indicate any actual intent to develop relationships either. At the time of this writing, Yoko has 2,772,660 followers and follows 871,440(!) people herself—including Bob Smith, “just a random guy from a random town”, who joined Twitter 18 hours before I began researching Yoko to promote an app called Rage Of Bahamut.

Here are my conclusions about social networking so far:

1.    The name is misleading.

2.    It is a lousy informational tool for me because I haven’t the patience scroll through pages of cryptic marketing tweets for the occasional gem of advice.

3.    It is a lousy marketing tool for me because I haven’t the patience to follow thousands of people in the hopes they will follow me back, then develop ancillary material to convince them to buy one of my books. 

To my mind the only tweeter worth emulating is the Dalai Lama. One obscure tweet every two or three days? No problem. I can handle that. Now all I need is a topic to pontificate on.

What was that you said? Motivation? Oh yeah. That too.

July is Blog Touring Month

The Elusive Mr. McCoy released on July 3^rd, and as a result, I'm blog touring this month.

While not quite as glamorous as a real book tour—no first class air travel, no five-star hotels, no minibars stocked with twenty-five-year-old scotch, no gauntlets of adoring fans stretching pleading hands across the linked arms of buff police officers lining the sidewalk between my limo and the entrance to…

Oh sorry! Got a tad distracted there. Where was I? Okay, I remember. Take two:

While not quite as glamorous as a real book tour, blog touring has two advantages:  

1)   I will have opportunities to use all kinds of material I could not put into the book.

2)   I will meet people from all over the world and none of us have to get out of our jammies.

It is, however, much more demanding than my normal lackadaisical, whenever-I-feel-like-it approach to blogging, so this is the last post you’ll see here until August, by which time I should be recovered. If you really have a need-to-read, the tour schedule is posted on my webpage, and links will go up on my Facebook page as the tour blogs come out.

Until August.