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.
Non-fiction

Led Zeppelin or The Beatles?

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Yesterday, I gave my reasons for choosing Pink Floyd over The Doors. But what about Led Zeppelin versus The Beatles? Nine out of ten people, I would bet, would choose The Beatles, but I’m one of the ten percent who thinks Led Zeppelin is better. Since ten years old, I’ve been a Zeppelin fan.

In his bedroom, my older cousin in North Carolina played Led Zeppelin IV for me. At the time, in the mid-eighties, he was about fourteen, and I was about ten. I remember he played “Stairway to Heaven,” and the song put me in a trance. After hearing it, I started buying every Zeppelin cassette at the record stores. Although I began with Led Zeppelin IV, I moved on to Led Zeppelin II and Led Zeppelin I and every album up to Physical Graffiti.

As I sit here in my late forties, I believe Led Zeppelin I is their best because of its heavily bluesy influence. Fundamentally, in some form or fashion, the blues had influenced every rock band, although Zeppelin experimented with other genres.

Not until my late twenties did I really dig into the Beatles catalog. Before then, I’d only known them from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which I really enjoyed, and of course their early years when they wrote “Twist and Shout,” which I never got into. My friend who was a die-hard fan burned me a CD of The White Album and Abbey Road. He swore by The White Album, but I thought Abbey Road was a more cohesive work, while The White Album was more of just a collection of songs. Nothing against it, but I thought “Birthday” kind of ruined the vibe because they used to play it at Chuck E. Cheese when I was celebrating my birthdays as a young boy, so I always associated it with those times.

But in my twenties, I was still impressed by their albums, such as Rubber Soul and Revolver, just as much as I was with Led Zeppelin’s discography. I’d been more involved with heavier rock, and Zeppelin became a big influence. The Beatles were more of a pop band, which didn’t detract them from how great they were and the fact that they dabbled in psychedelia and many genres. Me personally, I would stick with Zeppelin, but not by a lot. Their best work outdoes The Beatles best work.

Non-fiction

Pink Floyd or The Doors?

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This morning, I listened to music on my iPhone on shuffle mode, and a song played from Pink Floyd. It was an instrumental track from Dark Side of the Moon that had me asking myself which band I prefer: Pink Floyd or The Doors? Since I own a fair amount of Pink Floyd albums and maybe one or two Doors albums, the question wasn’t too hard. In fact, I don’t even think it’s close. It’s Pink Floyd by a mile. Nothing against The Doors, but I just thought they were weird for the sake of being weird. Maybe if I’d lived in the sixties and experienced them when they were still around, I would’ve enjoyed more of The Doors. But as a child of the eighties who discovered them at my aunt’s house in Central California when I was about eight years old, I looked at The Doors in a different light.

In the mid-eighties, I lived in Pittsburgh, and to see my relatives, my parents flew with me out to California. In her living room, my aunt had a large stack of vinyl records below her silver turntable. Of all those records, if I could remember correctly, she included the first Doors album along with LA Woman. At that age, I thought “Break on Through” was groovy. In its entirety, I listened to the first Doors album, and the record was scratched and crackly when it spun beneath the needle on the turntable. It played like a children’s album on acid. Appropriately, the last song was called “The End.” Jim Morrison did his thing with his spoken word poetry about nothing except psychedelic imagery, and it spooked me. I must’ve been too young to listen to that record, but it still intrigued me for how scary it was. My aunt let me keep it with a stack of other records such as The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I really enjoyed that one, and The Doors album grew on me the more I listened to it. Although I couldn’t say what they were about, both albums told somewhat of a story.

And then around that age, I visited my older cousin in North Carolina. He collected cassettes, not vinyl, and introduced me to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which was even weirder than The Doors but a different kind of weird, a subtle weird. Once again, when my cousin played it for me, I was too young to understand the theme of the album. Not until I was in my twenties did I find out from a friend that it was about how time and money both drove someone insane. It was an intriguing concept, I thought. By then, I came to appreciate Pink Floyd more than The Doors.

For a good reason, after about fifty years, Dark Side of the Moon is still on the album charts. Now, in 2024, it reached number one again in the UK. How incredible. In fact, it could be considered the greatest album of all time, which makes me wonder why Pink Floyd isn’t mentioned among The Beatles or Rolling Stones. Maybe their catalog wasn’t as impressive. After all, the Syd Barrett years were too weird for me, far too psychedelic to the point where they were unlistenable. My friend said that Syd purportedly went on an acid trip and never came back. Many years later, he visited the band at their studio, still tripping. By then, Roger Waters had taken over as the lead singer, and they dialed back their weirdness by a lot to make their music more inspiring.

With that said, other than Dark Side of the Moon, Meddle was, for the most part, an enjoyable listen, except for the twenty-three-minute song “Echoes.” Wish You Were Here, which was about the absence of Syd Barrett, fatigued my ears with its long tracks. Animals and Atom Heart Mother were too conceptual for me, and The Wall was only good if I was in the right mood. Otherwise, the album sounded too bipolar.

But if I had to compare their discography to The Doors, I would say it was much more impressive. Although LA Woman was cool, nothing from The Doors came close to the depth of Dark Side of the Moon. I was never quite a fan of Jim Morrison howling all the time, and The Doors always used too much organ. His poetry sounded too pretentious, while Roger Waters, who co-wrote most of the lyrics for Pink Floyd, struck a chord in me.

I don’t remember what I did with my aunt’s records. My mother may have sold them at a garage sale or thrown them out. But still, I appreciate my aunt for giving them to me. They were some of the best gifts of my childhood. Maybe I should’ve kept them. At least, years later, my friend would burn a CD of all of Pink Floyd’s MP3s, although something about vinyl would’ve made those albums better keepsakes.

Non-fiction

Werewolves

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Yesterday, I went grocery shopping to pick up unsalted butter, ground beef, tortillas, sour cream, carbonated water, and peanut butter cups. It was a quick visit. When I went to the checkout lane, the bag boy (or bag man, because he looked much older than a boy) said, “Sir? I can help you at the next lane.”

It took me a second to realize that he meant me, which was great because there was no line there. So on the conveyor thingie in the next lane, I placed all of my items, and the bag man got behind the register.

He said, “Hey, handsome.”

I shot him a look, and he looked back at me, waiting, and there was a long, awkward, uncomfortable pause.

I said, “Hi,” and never thanked him. My reaction had been instinctive. To mediate the situation and quiet the awkwardness down, I began smiling and acted friendly towards him–but not too friendly. My headphones were around my neck. He started checking out my items–beep, beep–and glancing up at me, and I tried to avoid eye contact.

“What’re you listening to?” he asked.

“I uh, what?”

He gestured at my headphones.

“I, uh, don’t know.”

“Music? Podcasts?”

“Uh, yeah. That.”

The exchange went longer than I’d hoped. Through the sensor, I scanned my grocery card for a discount and dropped it to the floor out of confusion. Also, I fumbled my phone before using it to buy everything through the ATM pad. Still, he kept looking at me.

“How many bags do you need?” he asked.

“I, uh, don’t know.”

Then I saw the bag I’d brought inside. “Oh yeah. I brought this.”

When it was time to get out of there, I rolled the shopping cart towards the exit with a feeling as if I’d stolen something when I didn’t. I decided to leave the awkwardness back at the checkout lane.

At about three in the morning, I awoke with a pain on my tongue. For a week, it has been hurting. Last Saturday, when I bit down hard on it, it started bleeding, and the damn thing still hasn’t healed. All I do is aggravate it with my teeth. I can’t stop. At least to numb the pain for fifteen minutes, I use a product called Kanka in a small bottle. It’s a liquid that tastes like tree sap.

Anyway, in the middle of the night it’s at its worst. I thought about werewolves and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I visited YouTube on my MacBook. When I opened the lid, the screen appeared without a login. How strange. I would always need to use my thumbprint or password to log back in to my laptop. But this time, it bypassed that. So to see if the login would activate, I kept opening and closing the lid, but it wouldn’t. For MacBook repairs, I searched online but I didn’t get a firm answer to the problem. Instead, I let it slide and went to YouTube. Since I kept thinking about werewolves, in the search box I typed “werewolves,” and a bunch of results came up for horror movies all from the eighties, when horror was at its cheesiest, and clicked on a scene at the end of a movie. With the cameras rolling, a beauty contestant accepted her award on stage and suddenly turned into a werewolf. It horrified me. Usually, werewolves don’t scare me, but the makeup was so hideous that I couldn’t help but be disturbed. Not that she even looked like a werewolf but more of a pig person with a pink face and a sort of piggish snout. Whatever it was, it kept me awake all night. But I wasn’t as worried about pig people attacking me in bed as I was about reality. Who has room for monsters when real life is ten times the horror movie?

I stayed in bed, wide awake, until I crawled out at about seven o’clock in the morning. If I could paste the movie scene to this blog, I would, but I also don’t want to get in trouble. What if I get sued because of some lame horror movie from the eighties? I’m not sure what I’m allowed to do on here. A long time ago, I had a blog that I took down because the content was too embarrassing, and I’d posted a picture of a street sign on there. I think it was a STOP sign but I’m not sure. Anyway, the photographer who’d taken that picture sent me an email in which he asked me to delete it or else he would take legal action. Ever since then, I’ve become too cautious to post anything like that again. I just stick with my words. The world is full of werewolves.

Non-fiction

Traffic School

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For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking the course. It’s an online comedy school, and none of the jokes are funny. Quite honestly, I’m trying to get through it as quickly as possible, so I’m not even stopping to read the jokes.

The representative whom I talked to over the phone said I didn’t have to take it all at once. In other words, I could read a chapter here, a chapter there, and take a break between each day. For about a half hour at a time, I’ve been reading it before doing something else. So far, it has instructed me not to drive drunk, to watch out for pedestrians, to coast along wet streets and not slam the brakes, to watch out for my blind spots, to drive behind a reckless driver rather than in front of them: common sense stuff.

At the end of each chapter is a three-question quiz. Never have I taken an easier exam. I thought it would be harder. The hardest part is to read through each chapter because they’re brutally long and painfully dull.

Now I’m reading about street signs. In case I didn’t know, it said a STOP sign is red and octagonal and that a YIELD sign is white and triangular with a red border and the word YIELD in red in the middle. I can’t wait for that quiz.

At the end of the last chapter, one of the questions was:

Drunk driving is______.

a. illegal

b. fun

c. safe

d. all of the above

Most, if not all, of the questions are about as hard.

At the bottom of every quiz, it asks me to write the answer to one of my security questions, to prove I’m human I guess. To be honest, those are the most difficult of all. For whatever reason, I’m always forgetting the answers to them. Why do I have such a hard time remembering what my favorite rock band is? I guess because I have so many that I forgot which answer I’d given at the beginning of the course. Nor can I ever spell my mother’s maiden name correctly. And I don’t have a favorite pet name because I’ve never had a pet. I had to make one up which I couldn’t remember. Why do these organizations think every person has had a pet? Shouldn’t they consider weirdos like me?

But whatever. I have until late October to finish the course. If I don’t complete it by the deadline, my insurance will skyrocket.

Non-fiction

It Ain’t Like the Old Days.

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On the curb in front of my apartment, I sat this morning, minding my business, with my headphones on, when from my left, a dude wearing a plastic helmet rolled past me on one of those motorized unicycles with no handles. How the hell was he able to balance himself going down the road on that thing? While I figured I would’ve eaten shit, somehow he stayed upright all the way down. That’s how I know that I’m stuck in the future, when I see those things, whatever they’re called. Maybe they just label them motorized unicycles because that’s what they are.

But yeah, here I am in the future. Thirty years ago, I never would’ve predicted civilians would be transporting themselves on things like that. They also get by on electric bikes, which I don’t understand the concept of. They’re somewhere in between a scooter and a regular bike. Are they for people who are too lazy to pedal a bicycle but not daring enough to ride at the speed of a scooter? Since I’ve never ridden one of them, and probably never will, I ask God why he has put pedals on an electric bike if no one has to use them.

There are also electric skateboards, which I understand. If I were to ride a skateboard, I wouldn’t want to propel it using my other foot. Instead, I would stand on it and have a motor propel me forward. A dude I see nearly every day, who’s about my age, maybe ten years younger, rides one. Whether he’s his son or a nephew, a boy who looks about seven years old rides it with him down my street. The boy hangs on to him by his leg. It’s absurdly dangerous, but he keeps on doing it. One of these days, the boy will fall off and injure himself badly, maybe even be maimed.

But it’s the future. There’s no present anymore. People aren’t satisfied with regular skateboards or regular bikes, etc. But the unicycle is a new one. Those were outmoded a hundred years ago, I thought, but somehow, they’ve made a comeback. Some weirdos ride along the sides of business streets on those things, sometimes without a helmet. And then teenagers ride those razor scooters that can speed up to twenty miles per hour, and they’re not wearing helmets either. It’s Mad Max world, which I’d never predicted would arrive in my lifetime.

The only thing I did predict when I was just a boy, around ten years old, was that everyone would get their own television channel. But I’m not completely accurate with that prediction because their channels aren’t yet streaming on TV services–but maybe they will at some point. There is such an invention as YouTube, where anyone can broadcast themselves. People make a living now, putting themselves on camera in their laptops and releasing episodes of them just looking at me and expressing their thoughts about anything. Some of these folks are actually entertaining me with their personalities, not all of them but some. How I didn’t predict the internet, just everyone having their own channel, I find it strange that I could predict one thing and not the other.

It’s hard to imagine what will come next as I use my phone to pay for coffee. People can now upload their driver’s licenses to their smartphones. How’s that going to work? Our social security cards are coming next. We’re slowly being sucked into our phones. Sooner or later, we’ll physically be trapped inside them. People will wonder what happened to Grandma Felicia. She’ll be stuck inside her phone with the rest of her information.

Non-fiction

Nothing.

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Nothing is more discouraging than having nothing to say, nothing to do except stare out a window at a coffee shop at listless people on a Tuesday morning. I took the week off from work, thank God, but I’m still thinking about it and what shitstorm I’ll come back to next Monday. But why worry now? Just enjoy the time off.

The coffee shop is crammed with customers. I waited twenty minutes for my coffee, and my cheese Danish was cold. It’s not really a coffee; it’s espresso with hazelnut syrup. I hate hazelnut usually, but they make it better here.

There’s nothing today except writing and walking. I’ll walk for five miles in the afternoon and listen to a podcast about football.

It’s that time of year again. I watched two games last night. One of them was a blowout from the first quarter, so I switched to the other game, which was, on the other hand, sort of competitive. The Washington Commanders upset the Cincinnati Bengals, who were a seven-point favorite in Cincinnati, mind you. The Bengals have a shitty defense, or at least no pass defense, so the rookie quarterback of the Commanders, Jayden Daniels, tossed it all over the yard on the Bengals and put up over thirty points by the end of the game. He’s playing like the rookie of the year so far, the Heisman Trophy winner who looks much better than the media darling Caleb Williams who was the first overall pick in the NFL draft this year.

Many experts had predicted that the Cincinnati Bengals would go to the Super Bowl because of their elite quarterback and wide receiver, but that doesn’t include their trashy defense. How will they beat anyone with that? Now they’re 0-3 with a narrow chance of making it to the playoffs. Statistics show that an NFL team has a 3-4% chance of getting there. It will take three more weeks before the Bengals make it back to five hundred even. That’s a long way away. My team, the Steelers, are 3-0 and could be 6-0 by the time the Bengals get to 3-3. I don’t like Cincinnati’s chances as of now, but you never know in this league.

There were many upsets over the weekend. I still can’t believe the Carolina Panthers, who were winless before Sunday with the Red Rifle at quarterback, who used to be a Cincinnati Bengal by the way, who got up from the couch and put on his uniform, beat the Las Vegas Raiders. He threw for over three hundred yards, 319 yards precisely, and three touchdowns. That’s damn impressive. The Raiders must not have watched any tape of the Red Rifle. He’s an old quarterback whom no one had expectations for. Not that I’m predicting that the Panthers will make the Super Bowl, let alone the playoffs, but it just proves that it has been an unpredictable season so far.

I would’ve never expected a 0-3 record for Joe Burrow and the Bengals. Maybe the so-called NFL experts should focus more on defenses and running games because those are the foundations of any football team from high school to the pros, instead of looking at teams based on how talented their quarterbacks are. But we live in the age of fantasy teams, where fantasy player points count over the actual X’s and O’s.

Anyway, the football week is over now. I’ll drag my feet through Tuesday and Wednesday before another football game on Thursday night between the Cowboys and Giants. Yawn. Both teams bore me. I’ll wait six more days before Sunday when the other games start and won’t know what I’ll do with myself until then besides getting a haircut before going back to work next week. The barbershop can’t be too crowded on a Tuesday. I’ll wait and see this afternoon after a five-mile walk in the heat.

My apartment manager invited me to a meet-n-mingle tomorrow night at the apartment complex. I don’t feel like going because I don’t socialize much, being rusty and all around people, and I get uncomfortable. It’s not that I don’t like them, but I just have no words, and I end up listening to someone ramble on about themselves, and I’m only partially listening, and when they ask me a question, I don’t have an answer because my mind was somewhere else in the first place. Staying inside will be better while meet-n-mingle is going on. Maybe I’ll visit for twenty minutes before moving on. She said the corporate people will show up too, as if I’d been anxiously waiting for them. What would I want with the corporate workers of this apartment complex? It wouldn’t matter if I’d never met them.

Non-fiction

Universal Time

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I awoke to the clock glowing in the guest room of my parents’ house at five in the morning, and it said the same time on my Apple Watch. I just know it’s an Orwellian world when there’s universal time, apparently with all the clocks around me. Those minutes change together between my work laptop and my iPhone for example. That’s a dangerous sign. Who’s controlling it? Who’s syncing the clocks with the same time?

It’s not everywhere though, thank God. For example, the clocks don’t match on the stove and microwave in my apartment. But what if they did? What if my appliances were online with clocks on them? There are stoves and microwaves out there that people can control through an app on their cell phones. They just have to sync them with the universal time. That’s an uncomfortable thought.

What happened to the days when no one had the right time, when a person couldn’t give it to me on the street? He would be a few minutes off. It’s not disturbing like now, such as how Google sends me articles on its news feed based on my interests. Google knows that I’m a football fan and feeds me information about the teams on its app. Google knows more about me than most people do. Even my parents don’t know as much about me as a fucking search engine does. And humans control search engines. God doesn’t. I would feel more comfortable if the holy spirit ran the internet over an evil tech nerd who hides his name.

But anyway, I drove to my parent’s house and saw a walker in their living room next to where my father sat in his leather chair, I thought because of his back pain, but instead he’d been having vertigo for almost a week. That would’ve driven me insane. I couldn’t imagine him living that way. He’d seen multiple doctors and was tested with MRIs and CAT scans. He’d seen neurologists and heart doctors. One of them told him to take vitamins. Another doctor told him to close his eyes and the vertigo would go away, but it didn’t.

What kind of quacks is he seeing? And they’ll bill him thousands of dollars. What a joke. What corruption. Doctors are overpaid to do nothing. My mom thought they didn’t know what they were doing, but I believed they did. They just didn’t want to deal with my father because his medical problems were too complicated. He has suffered from migraines his whole life, and no one has been able to cure him. And now he’s getting a handful of migraines each day, which I’m sure only worsens the vertigo.

He didn’t even join us for dinner. I went with my mother to a burger restaurant with a Hawaiian theme. I ate one that tasted like In-and-Out Burger, with Thousand Island dressing, lettuce, tomatoes, and onions. I hadn’t been to that restaurant in over ten years, and I remembered the burgers were supposed to be bigger, although I bet they’d jacked the prices. How typical. My mother didn’t eat a burger, though. She had a strawberry salad, which sounded gross because it came with chicken. I can’t see myself eating strawberries with chicken, let alone with lettuce and balsamic strawberry vinaigrette.

The waiter came to our table wearing a face mask four years after the COVID-19 pandemic. He took our orders through a digital tablet, unlike most restaurants where the waiters had to memorize what everyone wanted. He just easily touched the screen, and the orders were probably transmitted to the kitchen.

My father stayed home, and he ordered something for us to pick up for him. He’d texted Mom and said he wanted a sandwich called the Toucan, which came with chicken and teriyaki sauce. My mom and I thought it sounded gross. There was something that made me sick about teriyaki sauce going with bread, like putting rice in a sandwich. I don’t think anyone has ever done that. Then again, my father has a strange taste. I always knew him that way.

I sat with them in the living room after dinner and watched a film called The Whale, starring Brendan Fraser from The Mummy movies, who looked as if he weighed over four hundred pounds for the role. It had to be makeup and CGI or something. There was no way he weighed that much in real life.

But anyway, as we watched the film, my father asked me, “Why do you have a bandaid on your head? Did you hurt yourself?”

I appreciated his concern, except I didn’t have a bandaid on my head. What was he talking about?

My mother even said, “What bandaid? There’s nothing on his head.”

“Oh,” he said. “It must be the glare.”

What glare? It was nine o’clock at night. It had to be his vertigo. I was too bothered by his visual hallucinations to watch the rest of the film, so I went to bed, hoping he would feel better the next day.

Non-fiction

Ouch

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I bit my lip last week when I was asleep. I’d never done that before. I mean I’ve bitten my lip dozens of times in my life, but how does one bite his lip in his sleep? I heard the crunch even while I tripped over a white cloud and awoke immediately and felt the sting of a bitten lip. I tasted the blood leaking from the bite and knew, “Oh man, I’m going to feel this for several days now.” And I feel it still, sure enough after a week of my teeth chewing on it. Why do my teeth chomp on it constantly rather than letting it heal for God’s sake? Not only that, but I’ve had a canker sore near my upper lip for even longer, and it’s healing finally.

Not to mention, sores have been appearing on my nose and forehead for the past several weeks. My dad kept telling me that it was skin cancer.

“Go to a doctor right away,” he was saying.

My mother and I thought he was ridiculous. I chalked it up to stress which can do mysterious things to my body.

I don’t get hurt usually. I’ve never broken a bone in my forty-seven years, never put myself in the position unlike other people who injure themselves a lot. My mother wouldn’t let me play football when I was a boy.

“You’ll break your bones,” she would say, and she could’ve been right.

I went downhill skiing once and kept falling on my ass. I couldn’t stay upright when I slid down the snowy hill. I told myself this is the last time I’m doing this, and I’ve never been back. How could anyone enjoy it? Some people live for skiing. Some people don’t mind getting hurt. Some people get in many car accidents.

I panic at the thought of rear-ending someone on the highway at seventy miles per hour, the damage it would cause, how much I could injure those in front of me. So I keep both eyes on the road, my hands at ten and two, and not let things distract me, although I’ve done so in the past. I remember texting people on the highway, going past the speed limit. My thumbs pressed the keyboard on the screen while my knees steered the wheel. I stayed in my lane somehow after becoming quite skillful at driving from being a delivery driver for many years. That was just about everything I was good at. If there’s one thing I can brag about myself, it’s that I’m a hell of a driver. How can I drive so well that fast, keep my eyes on the road while reading text messages on my phone? I’ll go through phases where I’m scared in disbelief at how I could drive for several miles without even looking in front of me. Maybe I was looking actually but I never remembered. What a scary thought. It’s like driving home and forgetting how I got there.

I’ve done that too, like entering a room and forgetting my reason. It takes about five minutes until I realize why. I’ve been doing that since I was a child and always wondered about the phenomenon.

But anyway, I keep biting the sore on my lower lip as if it will make it heal when I’m making it only worse. It sucks when I’m eating food and my teeth crunch down on my lip, which happens every now and then. I wish there were a protector like a muzzle I could put on my lower lip and prevent that from happening.

Non-fiction

Icebreakers

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My department holds meetings every Thursday morning, and at the beginning of every meeting, my team lead asks me and the rest of the team a question for an icebreaker to ease the tension (or try to). She asked what TV show is our comfort food, and the question was difficult because I don’t watch TV. I haven’t for decades except for NFL football, and the season lasts for only about five months out of every year. I don’t watch any programming anymore other than that because it influences me negatively. So I struggled for an answer, but I heard the other team members.

One of them, a grown man, brought up an anime series. Someone should eventually grow out of anime if there’s an appropriate age for that. But now that I look back, my college roommate watched it as well. I’d never heard about anime until he entered my life when I was twenty years old. Nothing against him or my coworker (he’s a nice guy)(they’re both nice guys), but why do people enjoy that stuff? I never understood it. The animation is poor, and I don’t get what’s going on. It reminds me of those old Speed Racer cartoons, where the characters remained still while their lips moved when they were talking.

When it was my turn, I gave them a somewhat honest answer, even though I lied. I said NFL football, which was true, and felt judged because no one before me had brought up sports of any kind. But I also said that I liked to watch YouTube, which was also true, but that I watched clips from Beavis and Butthead, which was a lie. I watched it religiously as a teenager but not anymore. No one laughed after I said it. There was dead silence. I worried, with how strict my company is when it comes to ethics and conduct, that I would be written up for saying the word “butthead.” But no one complained. I had to watch an ethics and conduct training video yesterday as part of the company’s policy, and I was already behind in my work, and that video that lasted an hour only pulled me further behind.

I can’t remember what other TV shows people brought up for the icebreaker. I didn’t know about a lot of them. One of the women brought up Law and Order. People still watch that show surprisingly enough. It appeals to me as much as anime, and I understand the appeal just as little. Whereas only kids should watch anime, only old people who stay in the house all day and play crossword puzzles out of the newspaper to keep their minds busy should watch Law and Order. The woman looked young, maybe late twenties. Then again, I don’t know what shows are popular now. The majority watches streaming services, not network TV, because network TV is lame. It has always been lame, nowadays especially. But how would I know if I don’t watch television exccpt for when football is on. The networks show ads for their programming, so I get to see what the next episode of Survivor will be. I can’t believe that shit is still on (the same with The Bachelor). People must be viewing it.

I stopped watching television a few years after college, so about 2003, with the promise to stop watching it like a diabetic who needed to stop eating sugar. It was only toxic to me. I used to catch myself sitting on the couch for too long, and I would feel like a bag of powdered donuts. When I would look in the mirror afterward, I would see a bag of donuts as well.

Hopefully the next time my team lead gives us an icebreaker, it’s a question I can feel comfortable answering. Most of them don’t. I don’t feel any better afterward.

Non-fiction

Memorabilia

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I’ve kept a small corkboard for over twenty years with a paper on it that has withstood time. It’s a contract to myself that says, and I’ll paraphrase: I, Benjamin Talbot, shall write every day for the rest of my life until the day I die. And I signed it at the bottom with a black pen. It’s a miracle that the paper has remained on that corkboard with a thumbtack and that the paper hasn’t torn all the way throughout the years. But it has stains on it, wherever the stains had come from. They look like blood, sort of how dry blood would appear: a light brown blotch that I could’ve mistaken for coffee on the white paper. But how would I have spilled coffee on it in the same fluke as if I’d spilled blood on it?

The corkboard is in my apartment in Palm Springs. It’s in the kitchen next to my work desk, which I never sit at. It used to hang on one of the walls of my Hollywood apartment.

My friend at the time, in my twenties, came in one afternoon and saw it hanging there and said, “Wow. Look at this.”

I told him that it was a contract that I’d written to myself.

He read it and said, “You signed it?”

“Yessir. That’s my signature.”

“Where’s the date?” he said.

Oh shit. I’d never dated it. All signatures should come with a date. I didn’t even think of that. I smacked myself on the forehead. There’s no sense in composing a new contract now. I’ve signed it already. What’s done is done. How hastily I’d typed it out and printed it from my desktop computer back then, way back when printers actually worked and didn’t break down on me all the time. Oh well. At least the contract is still there, and it reminds me of my daily goals.

But it isn’t all that’s on the corkboard. I tacked a black-and-white photo of the one Ernest Hemingway above the contract. It’s of old Ernie, in about his fifties, standing in what appears to be the woods, grinning in a suit with both hands in his pockets. I hold that photograph near and dear after finding it in a Hemingway book that I’d bought from the Iliad Bookstore in North Hollywood. The book is called The Nick Adams Stories, which is a collection of shorts based on his character Nick Adams, who fancied fishing and camping. Most of the stories I’d read, you would guess, were of Nick Adams doing those things. The stories were pretty bland, very slow. Not much happened from beginning to end. Nevertheless, I respected his writing style enough to read his biography. How could anyone cram that much information about a person in one volume? Someone did. I found it interesting to find that photo in a book I’d bought for about two dollars, but I discovered a lot of incredible gems at that bookstore.