All posts by Benjamin Talbot

Welcome to my world. It has been over ten years since I started blogging, and the blogosphere has swelled from a market for self-journalists to a market for anyone with cute pictures to share. My blog site had this same name, except it was on a different blogging platform, or blogform, or platblog; whatever it's called now. I've started this blog to share stories with someone like you. So now you've entered here, the end of the space-time continuum, where braggadocio has no place. You won't leave as the same person, not at least for a couple of minutes.
Short Stories

Sugar Attacks

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Last night, I sat with my parents in one of my favorite restaurants, eating my favorite cheeseburger, watching the World Series in the bar when I had a full-blown panic attack. The cause was unknown, as always, which differed from an anxiety attack.

An anxiety attack would’ve been, for example, if I opened an email from my bank or got a phone call that told me that my account had been compromised. There would come a flood of heart palpitations and shortness of breath.

But in the restaurant, it occurred with no rhyme or reason. I felt like I was going to pass out. My heart started beating rapidly. It was like an adrenaline shot of panic. My fear was that I would die, but my worst fear in that moment while I was eating the cheeseburger with my parents at the table and people around me was that I would freak out in front of everyone, that I would have to be carted away to a hospital. I couldn’t swallow each bite of that half-pound meat and bun and tomato and lettuce and onion without drinking more water, or else I would’ve choked. All the while, I kept my cool around them and pretended nothing was wrong. They had no idea. It was a fight or flight response as they called it. I chose to fight instead of flee by telling myself, “Bro, it’s only a panic attack. You’re not dying. It’s totally harmless. It’ll pass. You’ll get through this.”

And I did, once we left the restaurant and went to get ice cream at our favorite parlor. I swore ice cream was the cure for most maladies. Whenever I ate ice cream or burgers or pizza, all my worries melted away. All my troubles passed in those moments.

I knew they were bad for me, but at the same time, there was nothing greater than bliss ever since I went to rehab and came out the other side sober.

I’d been a sugar addict. I remember my first day without a drink. I began hunting down sugary snacks like an ant in the rehab center, eating candy bars, ice cream sandwiches, anything I could find in the kitchen.

And it has continued that way for the six years that I’ve been sober. Sugar is a tricky devil, unlike a burger or a pizza that filled me up. I gained weight from sugar and never felt satiated.

After ice cream last night, I still hadn’t had enough, so I drove to a Circle K after Game Two of the World Series and bought a bag of sour Starburst gummies and a pack of four Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups before going to bed, and it still wasn’t enough. I wanted more, although I went to sleep satisfied.

I praised anyone who went on a low-carb diet. I lasted for a year with it after going three days without a single carb, eating meat and vegetables and nothing else for seventy-two hours, and my body went through ketosis. That was where it told me that it didn’t crave sugar, and it craved meat. By that time, my body felt lighter, more energetic. Almost every day, I would go to In-N-Out Burger and order the double-double protein style, which was a two-patty burger with lettuce as the bun without fries.

But my body was a delicate instrument because all it took was for me to see a guy walking past me eating a slice of pizza, and the other half of my brain missed that. I wanted a slice so badly that I became weak and bought a slice for myself. My delicate instrument broke. Now I craved pizza all the time. I hadn’t been on a true low-carb diet since my twenties.

My cousin’s wife whom I’d never met before but seen pictures of to where she looked skinny didn’t eat anything white. That obviously included milk and certain cheeses. But there must’ve been other foods that were bad for her that weren’t white. But her point was most things that were white were loaded with carbs. It was a good starting point for anyone who wanted to go on that diet.

It was like quitting smoking. Sugar was just as hard to defeat as nicotine. I couldn’t imagine life without sugar. But once upon a time, I couldn’t imagine it without alcohol, and there I was, six years sober thus far.

What would be left without sugar?

I had a friend who ate constantly. He couldn’t go a day without junk food. When my other friend mentioned to him that he’d been fasting, my friend said, “Fuck that. Food is my wife.”

My sentiments.

Non-fiction

Halloween Season

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I sat in Thursday’s team meeting, and my manager started the icebreaker by wanting us to share our favorite Halloween movies. Did she mean horror movies or movies specifically about Halloween? All sorts of different movies came to mind, and a lot of them were obscure. But I didn’t want to mention them to the rest of the team. Lucky for me, someone else went first. My manager picked her after she said her favorite was Hocus Pocus. Maybe it was another movie, but I immediately recalled one starring Bette Middler, where she played a witch. But I didn’t think it could’ve been the same movie. It didn’t seem too popular. The person she chose piggybacked off what my manager said and agreed that Hocus Pocus was her favorite Halloween movie. And the person after her agreed. What the hell movie were they talking about?

I came up with a movie to share by then. But it wasn’t Halloween III, the first one that came to mind. Halloween III was one of the strangest horror movies I’d ever seen because it didn’t even have Michael Myers and never came close to any of the other sequels in the Halloween franchise. An evil mask manufacturer made masks that pulled children into a trance and killed them. I wasn’t sure if it was a John Carpenter film. It couldn’t have been. The movie was too low-budget, and the soundtrack was just a couple of notes from a synthesizer. But I watched it a lot as a kid when it was on HBO. For some reason, I loved bad horror movies. It might’ve been what screwed me up for good: all that childhood trauma after watching one bad horror film to the next.

It wasn’t Cannibal Holocaust either, which was the most despicable horror film I’d ever watched. My friend in West Hollywood at the time invited me to his apartment after a Cypress Hill concert at the now-defunct House of Blues and didn’t tell me anything about the movie except that it was notorious. By the sound of the title, I wasn’t enthusiastic to watch it. Cannibals were never at the top of my list. The film was made around 1980 and took place in a country in South America–maybe Brazil. While we were watching the movie, my friend told me the cast and production crew had to sit in front of a jury because it was believed that there were actual murders in the film. The film was shot with a real cannibal tribe in whatever country. That was a fact. They also slayed a turtle in the film from what I could remember. I missed the scene because I was drunk and had to puke in the toilet.

In the living room, my friend said, “Oh, that’s just horrible.”

I flushed the toilet and came back out. “What did I miss?”

“Yo, they just decapitated a turtle.”

I didn’t tell him to rewind it.

It had been banned in over forty countries. My friend could only get it on VHS because it wasn’t even available on DVD. Mind you, this was circa 2007. I’d never seen a gorier film. When we were watching it, my friend had nothing else to eat in his apartment than fried fish sticks. I was so hungry that I would’ve eaten anything. He microwaved them and served them with ketchup. There was more than enough blood in the film. I couldn’t stomach the soggy fish after they’d been nuked or bear to look at the ketchup for too long because after watching the cannibals do their thing, I started looking at the fish sticks like they were human fingers. Me being high at the time didn’t help the situation either. Somehow, I made it through the film, but I haven’t been the same person since then. The soundtrack continued looping in my head. There would be no second viewing of it for me. But my friend admitted to watching it again when I wasn’t there.

Needless to say, I didn’t bring up Cannibal Holocaust at my team meeting but instead lied and said my favorite Halloween movie was the Charlie Brown cartoon, whatever the name was.

“My favorite Halloween movie is Charlie Brown’s A Very Pumpkin Christmas.”

Someone in the group corrected me and said it was called It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. So then the team thought I was wholesome, which I wasn’t. But imagine if I’d brought up Cannibal Holocaust. There was no way.

Non-fiction

Awful Music

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I went shopping yesterday at the outlets near Morongo Casino in the desert, where the windmills spun to the wind, and it was mighty windy outside. I wanted to buy a light jacket for the fall. It was getting cold in the mornings when I woke up before the sun rose each day to go write somewhere, and I needed something to wear that kept me warm enough.

So my mother and I headed to Vuori, an Italian clothing store, and searched the racks. I couldn’t get over the music they played in there—not that I went there to listen to it. Maybe it wasn’t so much the music but the volume.

Since before my birth, music had always played everywhere except for hospitals. Imagine if they played Daryl Hall in there while your father was dying from rectal bleeding.

Daryl Hall wasn’t playing in Vuori but some kind of music without a genre. It was similar to a fan blowing but much louder and of the same emotional intensity as a fan. It was nothing. I heard a YouTuber describe today’s music as being more like mood music than anything, meaning it was less about the emotional pull of a song but more of something to play in the background while you’re doing homework or cleaning the kitchen or folding your clothes. All the songs blended in with each other to where I couldn’t tell when one song ended and the next song began. It was all the same woman singing to fake drums, synthesizers, with too much echo, too many fancy effects in the studio to hide the blemishes of a droning singer and notes that didn’t resonate. It was astonishing that I even noticed the music. Usually, I tuned out because it was so monotone that it blended with the walls like beige. People actually enjoyed this music. I ended up buying a mustard yellow windbreaker, the best way I could describe it.

I was at my team meeting on Thursday morning and had to listen to my supervisor give us news. And during our icebreaker, she asked everyone to share their dream jobs when they were kids.

“Ben, it’s your turn,” she said. I was the first one up.

“I don’t know,” I said. “A baseball player? Robert, your turn.”

Raquel said she wanted to be a professional singer. Our supervisor told us Raquel was putting out an album and that she was a great singer. Raquel didn’t say much about herself and her singing, but after hearing her voice, I could picture her sounding like the music in Vuori.

But I no longer kept track of contemporary music, an old-school chump like me who never listened to the Gen-Zers who called things “mid.” I learned that from reading comments on social media from potential Gen-Zers, meaning something was mediocre. Maybe they didn’t know what mediocre meant. Judging from their illiteracy, I thought they didn’t. So they used slang. Well, the music I heard in the clothing stores was mid, and I was beginning to think all music was mid these days, except for Jerry Cantrell, whose music was always incredible. I gave the Vuori soundtrack credit for not drawing attention to itself like someone who wore a swimming shirt at a beach, except when it was being played at an excruciating level where I couldn’t hear my mother talk.

Speaking of which, I sat in Coffee Bean where they played Rick James’s “Superfreak” at a high volume. I could’ve been wrong, but Rick was singing about a prostitute. Maybe Coffee Bean based everything on interpretation.

Non-fiction

The Internet is Undefeated.

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I read somewhere on social media that the internet was undefeated. It came from a post where someone exposed a football fan who roamed the streets of Baltimore and beat up random fans of the other team. His buddy recorded him doing such a heinous act. The one who assaulted them was obviously drunk and possibly hopped up on other drugs as well, maybe cocaine, maybe bath salts, only if he was biting necks or something, so I doubted it. He was wearing a football jersey and stood well over six feet in the video, a big man, and started attacking people wearing jerseys for the other team on a sidewalk.

It was a short video, under a minute, and at the end, he looked into the camera, flexed his biceps, and said, “I don’t lose.”

What a monster, I thought. I read the comments, which was why I went on there. It was entertaining to read from the dregs of society, most of which were illiterate. All of them attacked the perpetrator in the video as if they were on a moral high ground. They went as far as finding the perpetrator’s name and where he worked. Some of them contacted his employer and showed the video. The employer ended up firing him and posting a message of their own, saying he no longer worked for the company and that they didn’t stand for such behavior.

The police used the video as evidence for his arrest. Thousands of people called him all sorts of names in the comment section and wrote things such as what was going to happen to him in jail and how his life was ruined, and that they would beat his ass if they ever saw him.

But I had to wonder, how many of those people were hypocrites? How many of them committed battery themselves? A good percentage I believed. Only they weren’t caught on camera. Only a fool who was intoxicated in public would do such a thing. When the video was rolling, I bet his friend was drunk too. A lot of those people thought the man who shot the video should be punished. I guessed they were right. Actually, this sort of behavior, drunk people wandering around and assaulting others at sporting events, went on long before this incident and long before camera phones were invented. But these people treated it like it was a new occurrence.

Anyway, the perpetrator’s life was ruined. He got what he deserved, and so on. But I didn’t saint those who attacked him online. A lot of them were probably just as despicable.

Non-fiction

Writing Groups

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I’ve belonged to a writing website for over four years but don’t go there anymore. The website has a forum where members post questions. The same individuals who answer them back each other up against any outsider who makes a comment.

I’d posted comments on there and received no responses like I was in a cave. It offended me, but I wasn’t surprised. These groups work this way. Those same members post in all the threads like the only thing they do is sit online every day and answer questions. I’d gotten snide answers before from those herd members and chosen not to join them. I just posted my work on that website for feedback, most of which was bitter and meant to be discouraging. There are resentful people who just want to destroy others because they themselves have been destroyed.

I joined a Facebook writing group for laughs and read their roasting when another member posted a chapter of their work. There are usually over a hundred comments from other members. Ninety percent of them trash the work and call it amateur. They say they hate it without giving any constructive criticism. If they do, it’s in a condescending tone. I don’t know why writers choose to post their work on Facebook. That should be the last place to share anything online. The aforementioned website would be a better option for those trying to get feedback from anonymous people. Not that the website is anything supportive for writers. I wanted to change my name on the website. My goal was to hide my identity, but the administrator wouldn’t let me because of bullshit reputation points. I didn’t understand the reason for them other than I hadn’t participated enough to earn the points. My real name is still on the website. I wish they would allow me to change it.

There’s a member on the Facebook page who posts a few sentences a day of what the other members call word salad. His posts never make sense, such as, “The advocacy of my benevolence is maladroit obfuscation.” Those sentences ramble on like that, and members roast the writer for posting them, calling him an idiot in their own words. I would feel sorry for the writer if I didn’t feel like he was trolling everyone. Wouldn’t he get the point by now? I think he’s brilliant if that’s his motivation. It would be fun just to post examples of word salad to these assholes and make them believe I was serious. I’m going to do it. I’m going to start posting such passages to them for feedback just to fuck with everyone. What do I have to lose by trolling these bitter Facebook writers who cut people down when looking for publishing advice?

Most of the time, all I read are responses from writers trying to discourage other writers from looking for agents or publishers because they’ve failed and they want others to fail to feel their misery. I implore all aspiring writers not to join those Facebook groups. They’re nothing but toxic. I also implore them to stay away from actual writing groups outside of the internet. They’re going to run into people in real life who want to discourage others as well. The only difference is it’s a lot easier to be an asshole online, so they’ll hold back like someone who wouldn’t hit someone in person but act vitriolic toward them behind a keyboard. In other words, they’re cowards. I don’t associate with such online behavior.

I scrolled through X yesterday and found a post where an older woman shared a photo of herself at an NBA game. She was proud to be there, so she innocently showed it to the public, and a bunch of people responded with how ugly she was. I knew it was coming before I even read the comments. A lot of hurt people are out there who just want to spread hatred because it’s too deep inside them like a splinter. I remember long ago, my therapist at the time called it aggression. That sounded too vague to me. Of course it was aggression, but what was the root cause?

The only solution is to remove these social media sites. That’s it. There’s no other way. If we eliminate them, the world will be a better place. After all, weren’t these sites geared towards teenagers to begin with? Now adults use them to market themselves. If they’re not doing that, they’re just hurting others, these people who’ve never grown up.

Now the presidents are participating in the same immaturity: Democrats cutting down Republicans and vice versa. Imagine if our first president, George Washington, had X. Would he have stooped so low?

There’s also the shocking display of illiteracy. I can’t speak for past generations, but these new generations appear as if they were never taught how to write in school. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read posts and comments from those who use such ignorant grammar as “should of” instead of “should have”. What are teachers doing at school these days? Just letting their students run amok in classrooms and never disciplining them to sit and read something for God’s sake? It’s only going to get worse. I’m astounded by the degree. The movie Idiocracy should be assigned viewing at all schools.

As for these online writing groups, those people are well-educated more often than not. But like I said, too many are out to hurt other people rather than help them. With that being said, I won’t forget the few who’ve guided me in the right direction.

Non-fiction

On Boredom

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I’ve been in a phase where nothing interests me lately. Even past interests have become a huge bore. I can’t explain anything, such as the symptom where I lose my breath–what I call a phenomenon. Every night after work, I leave my apartment and go for a walk downtown for an hour and a half. When I come back, the sun is down, and my legs are spent. Whenever I take a shower, I’m short of breath when I wash my hair, like I’d run a marathon. Not to mention, when I get up too fast, I get dizzy. My doctor has tried to wean me off some medications. I’d been taking too many for too many years, and I believe these are withdrawals. Medications are a bugger. I looked up bugger in the online dictionary, and one definition is a person who penetrates the anus in sexual intercourse. Well… there you go. The dictionary folks don’t hold back, do they?

Maybe the medications are a bugger if they’re the cause. If not, I don’t know what to say.

Anyway, in the middle of October, when all I have to look forward to is football, my therapist suggested I pick up a hobby. I don’t have enough. When it comes to them, I think of crocheting or some shit like that. There’s a store called Hobby Lobby. On the outside, the store looks like the size of a Walmart. I’d never been inside one and never planned to. I asked my therapist what the hell was in there, and she confirmed it was what the name implied. Not that I took her advice seriously, like I never do, because she’s not that great, but most aren’t. Once a week, I have to sit for fifty minutes with her over a telehealth session, and after the first ten minutes, I run out of things to say. Her insights don’t help. So I asked her how her weekend went to kill the time before the fifty minutes were up. She’d driven with her boyfriend, whom she called her partner, to Bakersfield to watch the car races, and she also ate barbecue instead of going out to eat. What a boring way to spend her days off. I’m always eager to go out eating rather than eat someone’s cooking if they’re not a professional chef. If there’s one hobby, I eat at restaurants. I should be a food critic.

Anyway, I can’t kill the boredom, which is here to stay. Bukowski once wrote, and I paraphrase, that all excitement is either illegal or too expensive. Who can argue against that? After all, who wouldn’t dig a night of illegal street racing? After attending traffic school, I learned you could serve up to six months in jail for participating in such a hobby. Not that I plan to. In the Rodney Dangerfield movie Easy Money, he sat in the living room with his wife and expressed his boredom. She said whenever she was bored, she would take up knitting. “Why don’t you knit me a beer?” he said. I could vouch for that.

Boredom kills. Maybe people die not from old age but from boredom. They just get too bored and die. Too many laws have set the stage for people to be bored. You can’t do anything anymore. I sit in a coffee shop where a sign out front says NO LOITERING, NO SOLICITING, NO PANHDANDLING. Shit. What can you do? You can’t even stand outside of a coffee shop anymore. A few minutes ago, I stood out there and felt like I was doing something wrong, just existing. So I came back inside and sat where I was.

Some people like camping. I went camping when I was eighteen and visited Chicago, if you could call someone’s backyard a camping trip. Still, we set up tents. Wouldn’t that have qualified? I’d come to see my long-distance girlfriend. She’d dumped me right before I got there, but I saw her anyway for the first time from California. She fooled around with her new boyfriend in front of me in the tent. At least I could escape to a lake behind the house, which also justified it being a camping trip. Ever since that time, I’d never been in the mood to go camping. Besides, I hate mosquitos and bears.

Non-fiction

On Owls and Wrestling

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Not an hour ago, I woke up. Now in the desert, I sat on the patio with gusts of wind hitting me and the sun rising. An oversized cockroach scurried under my table. I hoped it wouldn’t crawl onto my shoe. The thing was as hideous as all cockroaches are. They’re completely harmless but so ugly that people stomp on them with no sympathy, even when they’re living things. They don’t care. They would rather not see something so disgusting coexist on this planet. Why did God invent cockroaches?

I could understand an owl. Last night at the Dodgers game, one swooped down on the field of play. On the radio, the announcer mentioned it.

“Did I just hear that right?” I said. “An owl is at the Dodger game?”

“Rick Monday must be losing it in his old age,” my father said.

If there was, how was an owl able to feed himself at the game? Owls are nocturnal, but still, you would think one would keep away from a massive crowd, even if it landed on the field away from them. Owls hunt for mice, so there might’ve been mice in the stadium.

“There was a time when I was working for the county,” my mother said, “and we had to tear a building down, but we couldn’t because a barn owl was inside it. I went and chased it out anyway.”

My mother would’ve broken the law because of the World Wildlife Federation. I only know about it because the acronym is WWF, the same as the World Wrestling Federation before it became the WWE.

As a kid, I used to follow wrestling heavily. My favorite wrestler was Rowdy Roddy Piper, although I barely saw him wrestle. For whatever reason, NBC or USA Network never showed him wrestling. I loved his outfit. He was supposed to have hailed from Scotland, but when he was interviewed, he never spoke with a Scottish accent. It was always more of a New York accent. Either way, he always wore his white T-shirt with his plaid kilt and played the bagpipes through his entrance to the wrestling ring before he disrobed to his wrestling underwear, whatever they called it, along with his wrestling boots. His muscles glistened under the lights overhead. Wrestlers were always ripped with tanned skin as if they went to the tanning salon every week, and they were almost always hairless except for George “The Animal” Steele, an old man with pasty skin and hairy shoulders. He used to eat turnbuckles in the wrestling ring. Word got out that he used to teach high school science, I imagine not for too long. You never know. Some of us quit teaching and end up wrestling in front of millions of maniac fans. George and Rowdy Roddy Piper are both dead now. Hardly any wrestlers make it to old age.

Non-fiction

The Same Old Expectations

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An old friend, who hadn’t reached out after two cold years, had actually texted me last week unexpectedly to check on me. Coming from him, it’s always been unexpected. And how was I doing? Well, not too good. But I didn’t tell him. Instead it was the usual: Oh, things are great. All I wrote was confirmation that what another friend I hadn’t talked to in years had said about me was true: that I’d gotten tired of LA and moved to Palm Springs in February.

Life is a whore, he wrote.

I didn’t argue against that. In all honesty, my heart leaped in surprise to hear from him. All that time, he’d written me off like most old friends had done. That’s how friendships work. People grow apart.

He’d written to me that another friend of ours, a woman whom I hadn’t thought about since probably 2007(?), had married a gay man, which didn’t make sense, but okay. For some reason, he’d brought her up.

In the summer, he’d announced on social media that his apartment had burned down, but he didn’t mention that to me in the text. All his fans, since he’s a quasi-celebrity, had written their condolences to him in the comments. I never wrote a thing. Like I said, he’d written me off, so we weren’t on the level of communication. But an inkling was still there that he would write to me at some point.

Well, he did. This week, he presented me with an opportunity after he’d been given money to open up a business. One of the arms of the business, as he called it, was publishing. He’s been looking for writers to send him short stories for a sci-fi/horror anthology. If my stories were good enough, he could make a collection of my own, and he would pass them on to an editor to polish them up.

When it comes to opportunity, I jump with joy, but also my nerves catch on fire. What if I can’t produce up to his standards? The pressure tightened around my throat. I even started to panic. That was Thursday night after the football game when I heard from him.

The next morning, I wrote him back before the sun rose and congratulated him. How cool it was that he’d been given that opportunity. I thanked him for reaching out to me. Even though horror and sci-fi aren’t in my wheelhouse, I said fuck it. I would give it a shot. If it sucked, he would let me know, and we would look for ways to improve it. What have I got to lose except more hope? You know what they say about expectations. Actually, I don’t know. What do they say? All I know is expectations are a real bitch. They get me in trouble and usually end in colossal disappointments. I expect the world out of my fortunes, and more often than not, they turn to shit in comparison.

He shared the titles of some of the stories he’d conceptualized. They sounded like Flaming Lips albums. If you’re familiar with that band, you would know one of their albums is called Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. I was filled with doubt after reading the ones he’d sent me. How could I accomplish writing anything near his standards with such epic titles? But again, what do I have to lose except hope?

Non-fiction

A Week Without a Brain

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I watched the game last night. The Atlanta Falcons played the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Atlanta celebrated their former quarterback Matt Ryan and inducted him into their ring of honor. He spoke to the crowd at halftime when his old team was trailing by seven.

But the second half told a different story. Just when I thought the Buccaneers were about to jump to a commanding lead, the Falcons came back somehow. I was sort of watching the game while scrolling through my phone. Not that offense bores me, but it gets too monotonous to see no defense. In the second half, both teams kept scoring. I like a little defense to add suspense.

Anyway, with around two minutes left, the Falcons were down 30-27 when their quarterback, Kirk Cousins, threw an interception to Buccaneers linebacker Devin White to seal the game, or so I thought. All the Buccaneers had to do to leave with the victory was drain the clock and force Atlanta to call all their timeouts.

On a third down, after the Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield handed the ball off to his running back, there was a penalty against Tampa Bay that pushed them out of field goal range. With around a minute left, they had to punt on fourth down back to the Falcons, all because the referees completely missed a facemask penalty from one of the Falcons defenders that would’ve caused an automatic first down for the Buccaneers. All the Bucs would’ve had to do was kneel a few times until the clock turned to zero.

What ended up happening was Kirk Cousins received the ball again and had one more shot to tie the game, and that was exactly what he did after he marched his team to midfield. A strike to wide receiver Drake London put them in field goal range. With no timeouts, the offense rushed to the line of scrimmage and was able to spike the ball with only a second remaining.

But the kicking team wasted too much time to set up and suffered a delay of game penalty, which shoved them back five yards, making the field goal attempt harder. It was payback after getting away with the facemask penalty. Yet and still, Younghoe Koo booted the ball between the uprights and tied the game at 30. They went to overtime.

On the coin flip, Baker Mayfield called for tails, but it was heads. As you would’ve imagined, the Falcons defender elected to receive. So with all the momentum, Kirk Cousins marched his offense down the field again. Right after a big gain, receiver Drake London got hurt from a collision and had to be pulled out of the game. A backup with the last name of Hodge (I didn’t know his first name) so far had only one reception. On the very next play, Cousins, with his record-breaking five hundred-plus yards in the air, connected with Hodge down the middle. It was a simple ten-yard route. Hodge shook off his defender and jetted to the endzone. No one on that porous Buccaneers defense could catch up with him, so he scored the game-winning touchdown. The Falcons had come back and won, 36-30.

The teammates jumped all over Hodge and celebrated behind the endzone. In only the fifth week of the season, it was like they’d already won their Super Bowl. And in the locker room, they sprayed each other with what appeared to be champagne. It was like they were the Yankees after winning Game 7 of the MLB World Series. I believe it’s never a good sign for a team to celebrate this early when so much more football meeds to be played. It makes me worry about the Falcons. Will they be as competitive down the stretch? Something tells me no.

Non-fiction

My Latchkey Years

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I grew up as a latchkey kid with television on my brain. My parents worked and wouldn’t come home until after five at night. Most days after middle school, I would entertain myself with cartoons and sitcoms.

My favorite show was Batman from the sixties on what was called then The Family Channel. I don’t know if it’s around anymore, the channel that is. I’m sure the TV show, because of Batman’s popularity, is syndicated somewhere. I watched all three seasons since that was how long it had lasted. My favorite villain was The Riddler, played by Frank Gorshin. He wore green tights with black question marks and a pink mask over his eyes. He would send riddles to Batman and Robin to give clues about what crimes he was about to commit. For every episode, there was another villain, and the Riddler was featured in the first one.

Out of all three seasons, the Joker, played by Ceasar Romero, appeared the most. I remember the episode was in the third season when Batman and the Joker competed in a surfing contest. It was so long ago that I forgot why they would do such an asinine thing. They surfed in full clothing–Batman in his cheap costume and the Joker in his purplish-pink suit–and they rode surfboards in front of a green screen of an ocean that couldn’t look any more fake.

My favorite Joker episode was when the Joker managed a bank to steal money of course. While he was managing it, he disguised himself under the alias W.C. Whiteface. Even when Batman and Robin visited the bank, the Joker still wore his makeup and purplish-pink suit, and yet somehow the dynamic duo didn’t recognize him because the Joker referred to himself under the alias. In a chase scene, after they discovered it was really the Joker, Batman ran after him in an alley outside the bank, and the Joker hid inside a police car and put a policeman’s cap on his head. While he sat in the driver’s seat, Batman and Robin stopped to ask him where the Joker went, completely fooled by the Joker wearing the policeman’s hat in full makeup, and the Joker told them he went thataway and pointed in the direction behind the car. And so the dynamic duo continued running that way. Eventually the Joker would be caught and sent to the Gotham City penitentiary by the end of the episode, but it didn’t erase the fact that the caped crusaders still fell for the Joker’s ruse in the cop car.

I memorized all of the Batman villains on that TV show and even bought a book that summarized every episode. Some of the villains were just downright goofy, like Egghead played by Vincent Price. His head was shaped like an egg, and he would say things such as “Egg-celent” or “Egg-xactly.” That was all he really did–nothing special.

In another episode, King Tut, played by the actor Frank Bruno, hypnotized Batman and made him dance “The Bat-Usi,” which was a typical sixties dance move where Batman grooved to what I believed was surf rock, but I could be wrong. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed most of the episodes for as corny as they were.

Speaking of corny, pretty much all the shows I watched in my latchkey years were exactly that. Almost every afternoon, I would watch Saved By the Bell. It didn’t matter how many reruns came on. I would watch them again and know exactly what was going to happen. In case you’re not familiar, it was a sitcom that took place at a high school, and none of the jokes were funny. That is, I never laughed once. Maybe some people did, but not me. I think I watched those shows just because I had a crush on the cheerleader Kelly Kapowski, played by Tiffany Amber-Thiessen, whom some people might know from the show Melrose Place, which was a spinoff of another corny show that I watched back then: Beverly Hills, 90210.

I don’t watch TV anymore, but I’m still a latchkey kid in the body of an adult, it seems. Maybe someday, I’ll revisit those shows on YouTube or somewhere, but it’s doubtful.