Category Archives: Fiction

Fiction, Non-fiction

Buzzwords

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funny lightbox with popular text slang lmao
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At my first job after college, my supervisor told me that I needed to be more proactive. Now, I’d learned plenty of exotic words in college, but proactive? Isn’t that a shampoo? I’d never heard my professors add strength and conditioning with that word, and now this professional was using it for reprimanding.

It was a buzzword for the time. For the next several years, I heard it everywhere. Of course it gave me flashbacks to that traumatic moment in the office. Any word can do that, which is what makes a word so powerful. What one word does to one person does nothing to someone else.

One buzzword I hear a lot today is expectation. My company uses it ad nauseam:

It is an expectation that you follow this SOP, or else there will be corrective action.

Somehow the euphemism, corrective action, sounds more threatening than termination.

We will take action in correcting you.

Those are just a few words I’ve heard over the years that have triggered fear in me, but some other words have triggered disgust. One of them in the last five years that I’ve heard far too often is the word transparent.

“Benjamin, I’m going to be completely transparent with you.”

Transparent? Why can’t you just say clear?

But the addition of two more syllables tries to make the person sound more intelligent than he is. Ever since the first time a supervisor said it to me over a Zoom call, the word has made me squeamish.

And then boom. I started hearing it everywhere—on television, on podcasts—or reading it online. The phenomenon grew its legs. It’s yet another buzzword I hope will die soon.

Another buzzword today is pushback.

Yet another supervisor used it:

“Sometimes a caller will give you pushback.”

Pushback? Why can’t you say “confrontation”? Who came up with this word? The Oxford English Dictionary says its earliest use was in 1901. Except its connotation was different from resistance until the 1940s.

So how did it rise to prominence now?

The word itself is a compound, in which a verb “push” and an adverb “back” are squeezed together to form a noun: pushback. He’s pushing me back as if I were pushing him to begin with.

Didn’t Orwell warn us about the use of nominalizations? Not that “push” and “back” are most commonly nouns, although they can be. The trend today is to pile nouns like they’re pancakes to label something, as if two nouns aren’t enough such as: cancel culture, hustle culture, content creation, engagement farming (one of my least favorites), and SOP, which stands for Standard Operating Procedure. Okay, so it’s a procedure, I get that. A procedure that operates, as opposed to one that doesn’t. Oh, and it’s a standard type of procedure that so happens to operate. How about just calling it a procedure?

As annoying as they are, words like “pushback” or”doomscrolling” are at least digestible compared to the ludicrously tall and syrupy stacks of pancakes known as: public health emergency preparedness, social media influencer marketing, artificial intelligence machine learning, supply chain management, customer relationship management, or work-life balance.

Eons ago, aside from the technological jargon, people usually communicated with one noun and modified it with any number of adjectives—preferably just one. But today it has become the norm to keep the nouns piling. By the third noun, it’s unclear exactly what the thing is anymore: like with artificial intelligence machine learning. At least artificial is an adjective to describe intelligence. But then we get to a machine which is described as intelligence, and learning, which is described as machine. What if we called it artificially intelligent machine-like learning? Or instead of public health emergency preparedness (which makes me wonder why it isn’t preparation) preparing for an emergency in public health. There. Rather than make it one complicated thing, perhaps turn it into a gerund phrase.

I don’t know. It seems this trend is the result of failure to articulate. The landscape is sounding more robotic than ever. When it’s impossible to articulate something, just add more nouns. I’ll be transparent so that there won’t be any disconnect (yet another one of my least favorite buzzwords) when I say that people struggle to express themselves these days.

If we were to transport ourselves to the era of Henry James, we could listen to him express his satisfaction with the steak he ate last night.

“It tasted quite succulent, with its juices oozing from its blood-red center; for it was tender on the inside, yet crispy on the outside.”

And that’s brief, coming from James.

Whereas today, the same steak could be described as:

“Dude, I had like the most awesome steak last night.”

“Really? What was so awesome about it?”

“It was just, like, so awesome. The best steak I ever had. Words can’t even describe how awesome it was.”

My point exactly.

I’m guilty of it too. Attention to detail has been zapped by television and mobile phones and overall sensory overload to the point where, yes, words can’t even describe anymore.

“Just take my word for it, it’s awesome.”

And what would this topic be without the inclusion of literally, and when it’s used improperly, more often than not of course? It’s as prevalent on social media as it is outdoors. You’ll read comments such as: I was so hungry, I literally ate the whole menu.

Uh-huh.

Another egregious word that brings out the valley girl in us all is actually:

“I’m actually very happy for you.”

As if we assumed she wasn’t.

Even academics can abuse this word unconsciously.

A phrase we can retire is: “What in the actual fuck?”

“What the fuck?” is fine; I use it every morning.

But “in the actual” is a mystery. Here we not only question the fuck, but we also explore the interior of the fuck. Not a carbon-copy fuck either. The actual fuck.

You can throw legit into the disposal as well. I read a comment this morning from a woman who said, Every time I tell a stranger I’m an attorney, they legit don’t believe me.

Forget, for a second, that she used the wrong pronoun (a subject for another blog). I guess, in this sentence, legit is a replacement for really. But she took it further and used the adjective as an adverb, when she could’ve just written legitimately. You ask me, I would’ve stuck with really, but only if it were really necessary. Maybe, in her circle, only the cool people use legit.

At the top of the list, though, the worst current offender of all buzzwords in my ears is cringe. Please go away. Anything these days can be cringe-y. And yes, people throw an arbitrary dash before the Y. Or, sometimes if a person isn’t in the mood to use the Y, nor is he in the mood to use it responsibly as a verb, he’ll call something like a bad movie cringe.

“That new Marvel movie is, like, so cringe.”

Rather than saying the movie made him cringe, he makes the verb an adjective. If I didn’t know any better, I would’ve thought it was the movie doing the cringing. Thankfully my common sense is in order.

So those are my nominees for the worst current buzzwords. If there are some that I forgot to list, please add them to the comments.

Fiction

Notes From a Book Festival

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An author, Benjamin Talbot, sitting at a table with his book 'Periscope City' displayed, using a smartphone, surrounded by promotional materials.

I was sitting at a desk that was covered in black cloth with my own book on display in front of me. Balloons with colors to signify which genre were tied to the chair of each of the forty some odd authors who’d come to present their books. Mine was lime green for fiction. Out of everyone, I seemed to have been the youngest. It was surreal. I was gonna sit all day and wait to leave.

One of the fiction writers, before the festival began, approached my table and sniffed my book out without picking it up. “Hmm,” he said. “I like the concept.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He walked back to his table across the way.

The festival started at 10 am, and the public entered the conference room where our tables were set. One by one, they would step up and get a feel for my book, then look at me. I got uncomfortable. Please go away.

All the while, they were giving readings at the other end of the room behind a black curtain. Each one was narrating chapters from his or her book through a microphone. From what I could sense, hardly anyone was sitting in there.

When the author sharing my table came back from taking a piss, I asked him, “Are there any people sitting at the reading?”

“Yeah,” he said. “There’s people.”

He didn’t look too assuring.

Wamp wamp wamp was all I heard through the microphone. I remained seated at my table and looked back at authors who were sitting at their tables looking back at me, looking away. Those glum faces. No one buying.

And I was supposed to pitch the importance of my book. I’d read through it so often that it was like a story I’d regurgitated too many times to too many people. Like when a friend or relative would say, “Hey Benjamin, tell him what happened at the grocery store yesterday.” Since yesterday, I’ve dished it out a dozen times. A baker’s dozen would’ve carried less flavor than the first telling. So I try to rush through it and feed them only the crucial ingredients, leaving out the quirky ingredients, which may have tickled the listener’s taste buds. It tasted that way after countless revisions. Whenever someone asks me how I can make out when a story is finished, I tell him when I hate it.

The woman who sat at the table to my right told each person who walked by about her historical novel like a pro. I didn’t do that. Most people would pick my book up from its stand, get a whiff of the cover and the back before setting it down and moving to the next table. So this is how a festival works. We sit there with our piles of books and watch the people sample our covers before they walk on.

The woman to my right came up and asked to look at mine. I gave it to her. She went back to her table and opened it to a random page.

Oh, man. How unsettling when someone near me was reading my book, as if she were reading my lab results. I thought, My god, I’ve made a mistake by writing this.

I’ve had other uncomfortable moments, like ten years ago, when a homeless man at a coffee shop kept begging to read a memoir I’d been working on. He twisted my arm enough to where I let him read it.

The next day, when I saw him, I asked him what he thought, and he told me that he hated every page, that he couldn’t make it past page forty. I never spoke to him again.

The woman returned with my book and said she wanted to buy it. Uh, what? My first sale in person. I couldn’t believe it. It sounded as if I were selling her an empty shoe box. She paid me cash, and I gave her change. And then she wanted my autograph. Oh, please. I signed it with my not-so-handsome handwriting. And after I gave it to her, I realized I’d forgotten to write the date. You’re supposed to write the date.

Then up came another writer, a memoirist who said he was interested in reading it. He wanted to pay with his card, so I used my point-of-sale to make the transaction. He walked away with the book. My second sale. No other sales after that. I ended up buying his book, too, at the same price as mine. I broke even.

The turnout wasn’t the greatest. Each of the forty authors of different genres was called into the reading room at specific times in the day. They called mine at 1:30 pm. I didn’t want to go because there weren’t enough people behind the curtain. The organizer approached me and asked me to go over there.

The person in control of the readings spoke to me like an umpire for a boxing match:

“No muttering, no reading for longer than five minutes, no words you wouldn’t use on prime-time network TV. When your time is up, ask if there are any questions. Got it?”

Yeah, I got it.

I entered the curtained room. Five people slouching in their chairs were listening to a novelist mutter his story into a thin microphone at a black podium. It was more of a group counseling session than a reading. I couldn’t follow his story because of how much I was itching. Oh, how I didn’t want to be there.

When he was done, someone else left, so the audience was down to four.

Next went an elderly woman. She was too short for the microphone. Her hands were trembling as she was reading from her book.

As she was reading, I was standing in the back where I could see around the curtain. A lady with her schnauzer pointed at me from there and told me to come over to her, so I did.

“When’re you going up?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s like two people ahead of me.”

“I’m interested in reading your book. Will you please let me know when you’re up?”

She walked away with her schnauzer.

I wondered how she was expecting me to flag her down. Was I supposed to announce it through the microphone? “Attention, you, middle-aged woman with the schnauzer, I’m reading now.”

I waited through the next one giving his reading. He was the one who’d liked my concept without turning a page, a New Yorker telling his tale about New York. His story might’ve been appetizing if I wasn’t feeling too awkward to digest it.

The boxing umpire approached him when he was halfway through his story and gestured with the old blade-across-the-throat to wrap it up. He stopped mid-sentence and gathered his pages before leaving the podium with his walking cane.

So I was up. Oh boy. With four people in the room. I went up there and said to myself, Okay, get this shit over with.

My elbows pressed into the podium as I leaned into the microphone, and I opened a copy of my book to the correct page. I had no words to introduce myself with other than, “Hi, my name is Benjamin Talbot. This here is a collection of short stories called Periscope City. It takes place in a town full of loners.”

The quartet stared at me before I began the first sentence.

“Ice cream is my abusive husband.”

I worried that the organizer would’ve pulled me because of my uttering the word “abusive.” Maybe it was too taboo for prime-time, but she let me stay up there. “He smacks me around like I’m a dirty girl.” I also breathed from the same paragraph the word “sadomasochism.” The piece, although meant as humorous, smelled of serious since no one chuckled. So which is worse? Bombing in front of four hundred people or four people? Something tells me the latter. The odds of laughter would be lesser. Plus, my parents were in the “crowd”, which made it all the more stale. They didn’t matter. They were the only ones laughing as if it were canned laughter. But I wasn’t gonna die up there.

I survived to about the third page, close to the middle of the story, when I had to wrap it up and close the book in the middle of a sentence. It was time for Q&A.

“Questions?”

Nothing.

Then one of the listeners asked me something, but I forgot. It may have had to do with where I’d come up with the characters, as if I’d discovered them at a factory. My memory has repressed whatever my answer was.

So I thanked everyone and rushed from the podium. The organizer pulled me aside with a question of her own.

“Is every story in the first person?” she asked.

“Yes, they are.”

“It must be pretty hard to write that way.”

“It is, yes.”

I hurried out of the room and returned to my table. Whew. That was brutal. I could breathe when it was over.

The lady with the schnauzer had never shown up to my reading, but she came to my table and looked over my book. And every time someone would do that, I avoided eye contact with him or her. My collection of short stories was a product that I was selling at a convention, but it was different from a vacuum cleaner in that it was made from the depths of my soul; not with screws, hoses, and plastic. With a vacuum cleaner, I would’ve described how it sucked up the particles from a floor without feeling such critical judgment. It’s put to practical use, whereas my product is for entertainment? If they had questions of what it was about, I could’ve given them a brief answer, a sentence or two. But I wasn’t like the woman to my right who kept telling each person, “It’s won two awards. It’s about dyslexia and domestic abuse.”

I was supposed to sit there until four, but by three o’clock, there had been only two sales, and they were both from other authors. I felt the obligation to buy theirs out of respect.

The lady with the schnauzer said she was quite interested, but she said she bought her books only online. I wrote my name, my blog URL, and my email on the back of a random business card and gave it to her. I don’t believe she’ll buy it, but that’s fine.

I left with the bitter aftertaste of what the purpose was. I didn’t connect with anyone. The woman to my right had mentioned that the LA Book Festival was going on that same day. How much better would that festival had been for my book? That’s if they would’ve allowed me to come there as a vendor. They may have been all filled up. And how expensive would it have been for an author to be there? Maybe next year.

I lugged my cardboard box full of books to my car. It started raining. The festival had been held inside a library, as opposed to last year, of all places, at a senior center, or so I learned. To call it a festival was misleading. A festival has the air of thousands of people, which maybe they’d expected, while this attracted a few hundred through the course of seven hours.

Anyway, it was an experience nevertheless, something to write about.

Fiction

An Interview I Had With Authors Electric

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This month, I was delighted to be interviewed for the website Authors Electric, where we went over my debut short story collection Periscope City and my perspective on loneliness, how it influenced the book and such.

Please visit the website to read the interview: https://authorselectric.blogspot.com/

Fiction

Lost Forever.

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As a writer, have you ever lost your work forever? I’ve lost many drafts because of faulty computers. At one point, I was a Windows guy, going through them, destroying them—not the works, the computers. They were pieces of trash. Nothing against Bill Gates, but there was a reason why they cost so little and why Macbooks cost so much. I could buy a Windows computer for under five hundred dollars, and I did many times.

One day, at a coffee shop on Wilshire, I left my laptop—I think it was a Dell—sitting on a magnetic table where people could charge their phones. I was talking to a friend there. He’s not a friend anymore, not after what he said to me. We stood outside, smoking cigarettes next to my car, and he said, “Ben, you should give up being a writer. Find something else to do.”

I said to myself, “You’re over, pal. I don’t need you and your negative vibe in my way.” But I never told him. I just kept the anger inside and never went to see him again.

When I went back to my computer, the screen wouldn’t turn on. I pressed keys and kept pressing keys. The panic button in my nervous system had already been depressed. I kept jabbing away, but the screen wouldn’t turn back on.

“What’s wrong?” my shitty friend said.

I thought, “Shut up and get out of my way.”

The laptop made no sound and was completely dead. It was like the magnets in the table had somehow overpowered it.

I took the computer to the mall, where there was a Windows store, but they couldn’t help me. The people were useless. They stood around in their collared shirts and told the customers to wait all day to be helped. That or they flat-out ignored them. I was flat-out ignored, and my computer was dead.

They finally brought it to the back, where I guessed a computer laboratory existed, and I waited around for an hour for them to come back out with it. The lady in the collared shirt who was helping me returned with my dead laptop. She didn’t even tell me what was wrong with it. Instead, she began trying to upsell me for a more expensive computer.

All the work I’d saved on it was lost forever. That was my last Windows computer. After that, it was all Mac computers.

This was before the real advent of cloud services when I drained laptops. Now, I need to worry about losing any work as long as the cloud is synced up. But anyway, I lost several things that day: a friend and the last draft of my screenplay and novel. No wonder I’m writing about it. My heart still aches.

Fiction

Rage.

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I got up this morning, took my shower, brushed my teeth, put my clothes on, and dashed out of my mother’s house before she could say good morning at 5:30 am. She wanted to talk to me, but I slipped out to the garage, where my car was parked because I didn’t want to be annoyed.

I drove along Jefferson Street towards the coffee shop, and an angry red Prius cut me off. Come on, Brother. I drive a Toyota, too. We should be family. But this person must’ve been a morning drunk because he or she was swerving in my lane, and a red light was ahead, and they zoomed right through that intersection. Go on ahead, Brother. Break the law. I’m waiting right here for it to turn green. I crawled closer to the crosswalk, and it turned green when it was activated by my movement.

I made it to the coffee shop by six a.m., the only one in there besides the workers.

“How can I help you?” the barista asked.

They hadn’t lined the breakfast sandwiches on display, so I got a little worried.

“Where’s the breakfast sandwich with the English muffin?” I asked.

“Sorry, sir,” he said, “but we don’t put them out for display anymore.”

“Oh, so you do have them.”

“Yes, we do.”

“I’ll have one of those and a cold brew. Thank you very much.”

He warmed it up, I paid my bill with Apple Pay, which I always use in case the Romanian mafia had infiltrated the touchpad, and he handed me my breakfast.

I ate the egg sandwich with bacon and used only half of the muffin to stay an inch closer to my low-carb diet, even though I should’ve ditched the other half, too. But oh well. I love English muffins too much.

Now I sit outside in the wind. A pesky fly keeps landing on my forehead, and I keep swatting it away. It’s insistent on ruining my morning. I think that jerk in the Prius has possessed that fly. Either way, I’m very annoyed.

I have to take my car in for maintenance today at 9 a.m., and I know it’s gonna take all day for them to work on it because that’s what car dealerships do, especially with a car like mine, which is a mess inside, and the outside is full of dirt. A co-worker who had a cousin who worked as a car mechanic at a dealership once told me that they take their sweet ass time with dirty cars and work on the cleaner cars first. Makes sense. Who wants to work on a dirty car? It would be like a server not serving a table full of dirty people. They would rather serve the cleaner people.

But anyway, it’s a Saturday, so who am I to complain?

Fiction

Poetry

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I need to read more poetry, such as Cummings, Dylan Thomas, and Robert Frost. I’ve read Milton’s Paradise Lost, which was a difficult read. I had no idea what it was, but I respected his use of verse. I also read The Preludes by Wordsworth, which was another difficult one, but not as much as Milton’s.

A young woman interviewed Billy Collins on a show on Youtube, and he was being rude to her. I’ll paraphrase him. He said young poets today haven’t read the essentials like the works I mentioned above and that they needed to devote 10,000 hours to reading poetry, which sounded a bit excessive to me. He also said they needed to learn iambic pentameter. They write bad poetry and post it on Instagram.

I can agree with what he meant by what they’ve posted there. It’s not the best poetry, and it feels rushed, kind of how I’ve rushed these blogs, but at least they’re trying.

I’ve tried my hand at poetry by writing a sonnet every morning, but I wouldn’t dare show it to anyone. They’re like my journal entries…just for me. It would be pompous and careless and irresponsible to post those poems. I’m better off keeping them private than upsetting the masters, dead or alive, by showing them on Instagram or some other social platform.

What is poetry anyway? I know it’s expression, but there are so many types of it. Most poetry these days is free verse. Contemporaries said to hell with verse. “We’ll break the rules and make our own.”

That’s lazy to me.

Then again, I prefer classical paintings over impressionistic paintings. You can’t convince me that Monet did better than Da Vinci.

I remember memorizing Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” I forgot it because it was too complicated. It was a villanelle, a form that was invented in Italy during the Renaissance. The rhyme scheme is intricate, not the simpler ABAB, CDCD, et cetera. I’ve written a few villanelles, but like I said, I won’t show them to anyone. They’re too embarrassing. They’re stashed somewhere in my piles of legal pads which I journal in every morning. I throw those legal pads out after a while, although it’s painful to do. It’s like throwing old clothes away that I might need later. They hold a sentimental value, but those villanelles were just something I was fooling around with.

I wanted to take a poetry class at a community college but couldn’t find one. You would think they would offer them if they offered arts and crafts classes. But oh well. I guess I’ll have to learn on my own like I have with everything else.

Fiction

Snails

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I feel as slow as a snail this morning after getting out of bed. I wear a shell to protect myself from danger but mostly from stress and criticism. But I wear no tentacles, and I’m losing my eyesight, although my nose drips mucus. I don’t hang around in gardens or forests too often either, but I couldn’t move any slower today.

When my parents used to live in the old house where I grew up, I would step on snails. They would crunch under my shoes, and I would feel bad for them. Those snails had a long twenty-five years ahead, but not anymore. My mother didn’t mind because they were feasting on the plants in her garden. I could see their secretions across the walkway when I would venture toward the driveway.

I read about snails and found that they’re hermaphrodites who trade sperm with each other. I’ve never seen a snail’s egg before. What do they look like? What kind of birds, mammals, and insects feast on them? I know that humans eat them, but I’ve never been to France, so I’ve never eaten escargot.

Sometimes I want to hibernate when it’s too cold or estivate when it’s too hot. I’m fascinated by the nautilus designs on their shells. They’re attractive animals to me. I want to own a snail and feed its herbivorous appetite. It would live in a small tank with plants all around it. I would call him Sam.

Where I live now, I don’t see any snails. I guess the plants aren’t made for them. What a shame. Maybe the next time I see one, which could be never again, I’ll capture it with a napkin and take it home. I’ll stick it in a jar and feed it lettuce.

But anyway, that’s all I have to say about snails.

Fiction

Maintenance Required.

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It flashed on more than a week ago after I’d started the ignition. MAINTENANCE REQUIRED SOON on my odometer. It stared me in the face whenever I looked down on it, and it kept staring when I looked away. My car is run by a hard drive now. I thought it could’ve been an error. Sometimes cars, these days, need a system reboot. But no. It stared at me and kept staring on the day before Memorial Day. And I had a long trip ahead of me up north for several hundreds of miles.

Then yesterday, as I was driving back to Palm Springs, and the message was still staring at me, it changed to MAINTENANCE REQUIRED. VISIT YOUR DEALER. So now I was expecting my vehicle to break down at any moment. This was a desperate time when I had to use the bathroom. I hadn’t gone before the trip, and I had to go then, but I decided to hold it in. It was a three-hour drive through Tehachapi, the countryside where no bathrooms existed, and I thought I could do it the whole way, but nope. I considered pulling over to the shoulder and going in the bushes since I was stuck in California farmland. Yes, it was the middle of nowhere. I’d never had to go that badly.

And the message was staring me in the face. With hundreds of miles to go, it couldn’t have come any slower.

I finally gave in when I reached Lancaster and pulled off at an exit, desperately searching for a bathroom or somewhere that would let me use it. I found a teriyaki restaurant, pulled into a parking space, dropped my keys, had trouble picking them up, and rushed inside there, praying they would let me.

A sign on the door said RESTROOM IS FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY.

I had to make myself a customer, so I ordered a small Pepsi. At least the young woman behind the register in that small town was fast with it. I used my iPhone to make the purchase and poured the cup after I filled it with ice, in disbelief since I was panicking and didn’t have time to pour ice into the cup. What was I doing? What was I thinking?

In order to use the bathroom, I had to use a key. My stomach was swelling. That was how badly I had to go.

So I politely asked the young woman, “May I use the bathroom, please?”

“Sure.”

“Thank you.”

She pulled out a white measuring spoon with a key attached to it.

I hurried to the men’s room. It had only one toilet, no urinal. I think I spent about five minutes just going, not knowing where that desperate urge had come from because I usually could control my bladder.

When I was done, I returned the key to the young lady and got out of there with the soda in my hand, but I still felt the urge to go. It fascinated me.

And when I turned on the ignition, I prayed that the message would go away, but it remained. MAINTENANCE REQUIRED. VISIT YOUR DEALER. I pictured myself on the shoulder of the 14, with my hazard lights on, just standing there with a broken-down car, waiting for a AAA truck to pick me up in a strange town. But where would it have taken me? It was Sunday. What dealership was open on a Sunday?

To end this on a happy note, I made it home safely. I never peed my pants, and my car never broke down—the way I figured it would. But you really never know.

Fiction

An Uncommon Night

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Last night was the one-hundredth-year celebration of the Greek Orthodox church in my hometown. I showed up with my parents and my aunt and uncle from the east coast. All of our relatives from that town came to celebrate, including my uncle from near San Luis Obispo.

We stood inside a banquet room, talking, gossiping, and eating appetizers like hummus, pita, kalamata olives, and feta cheese. I mostly ate because I didn’t know anyone there besides my relatives. They were busy talking to strangers, and I was shy around people I didn’t know. I’m socially awkward like that.

Not too long after we got there, my uncle from near San Luis Obispo began shaking as he stood at a table. People noticed him, so they hurried over to help him. He’s in his seventies, and he carries a cane for his bad knees. I knew earlier there was something wrong with him by the look of his blue nose. Actually almost his whole face appeared blue. I thought he might’ve been drunk because he liked to drink. People tried to help him from shaking. They even brought a chair over for him to sit in, but he collapsed and fell to the floor, passing out. Everyone gathered around him and watched him.

We called 911 to come pick him up. The fire truck showed up not ten minutes later because the fire department was only a few blocks away. They pumped his chest, broke one of his ribs, and hooked him to a monitor. His vital signs were okay, but I heard later that his heart had stopped. It was tragic watching him on the floor because I’d never seen him that way.

The firepersons rolled him on a stretcher to the nearest hospital, although my uncle was protesting not to go. He’s the type of person who says he’s fine even when he isn’t.

After they carried him away, the festival went on. There were about two hundred and fifty people who’d shown up. The price was a hundred dollars a plate of Mediterranean food. We sat at round white-clothed tables. My favorite cousin sat next to me. We’re the same age. Of course the main topic of discussion was my uncle. I was still shaking after what had happened. It could’ve been a heart attack, or it could’ve been a panic attack. I know after years of experience with anxiety. But after I heard from my father that his heart had stopped at some point, I realized no, it wasn’t a panic attack.

I looked at my cousin and told her, after she said she couldn’t believe everything, to get used to it because now we’re old enough to where people close to us are going to start dying or ending up in hospitals just like my poor uncle. She agreed.

But the festivities continued as if nothing had ever happened. It was strange. The Greek dancers started dancing in a circle. We ate Greek chicken, lamb, more pita, more hummus, and drank more wine. I thought about my uncle for the rest of the time I was there and about what I’d said to my cousin.

My mother sat at the next table over with her sisters, and I kept looking at her, thinking someday I’d have to take care of her. She’s fine now, but she’s in her late seventies.

“When my mother goes,” I told my cousin, “it’s over for me.”

And I meant it. My mother is my world. It was a morbid celebration. No one expected that someone like my uncle would collapse, even with a lot of elderly people there.

The older I get, the more I’m preparing for funerals and hospitals. I didn’t dance. I just ate. The food was excellent. Now it’s Sunday morning, the morning after the festival. I’m still full from the chicken, lamb, and baklava, and I’m wondering about my uncle and whether he’s still at the hospital. I’ll drive back home today, a three-and-a-half-hour trip back to Palm Springs, and tomorrow will be another workday. But I’ll keep him in mind.

Fiction

It’s Just a Job.

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I’ve hated all of my jobs in adulthood except for one when I would deliver for restaurants when I was in college. That one was easy. We used walkie-talkies back then. The dispatcher would tell me to drive to a restaurant to pick up food, and I would deliver it, no problem. That job lasted all but a month.

Other than that, jobs have been hell. I was a substitute teacher for two years, and the kids wouldn’t sit in their seats after I’d told them to. They paid me eighty dollars a day to supervise the classrooms at those schools. I gave up hope of ever becoming a teacher. It took a certain person to do that.

I also applied through a temp agency when I was living with my parents right after college because no one was hiring. They set me up with the weirdest job. I had to file medical records in a trailer right out front of the hospital in the small town. They stuck me with a kid who was about nineteen years old. He was a thug. I was about twenty-three, twenty-four. I can’t remember.

The manila folders in which the papers were kept were so old that they were dry and sharp. I would get papercuts along the edges, and I would bleed on the folders. Not to mention the kid would try to fight me.

“What are you, a p****y?” he would say. “I’ll f***k you up.”

I would just keep my eyes on the medical records in that trailer and try not to engage with that punk. The job lasted for only two weeks before I turned that scumbag in to the temp agency, and I quit. I remember there were bandages on my fingertips after doing that miserable job. That was about as blue-collar as far it went.

When I moved to Los Angeles from the small town, I went with what I was good at and took up another restaurant delivery job. It was flexible, like most jobs in the service industry. I got to choose my hours, and I would write in my spare time (or attempt to write). It wasn’t easy driving through Los Angeles through all that traffic. I still get post-traumatic stress over the thoughts of some of those nights. Or maybe they were just bad memories. I don’t know.

There was one night when the transmission on my Honda Civic was failing, and I was at the edge of a cliff near Mulholland Drive after delivering sandwiches to some rich guy in Beverly Hills. When I released the parking brake and turned on the ignition, the car began rolling backwards towards the cliff, and I slammed the brakes. In order not to fall off, I had to punch the accelerator quickly enough, or I might’ve died. I closed my eyes, counted down from three and punched it just in time to where I could safely drive up the hill in that guy’s driveway. It still keeps me up at night.

Restaurants hated me when I came in to pick up food, especially the takeout people, because I didn’t tip them. Maybe I should’ve, but it was against company policy. But I dated some of those takeout women. It was unethical, but this was at a time when it was still socially acceptable. Now that that’s been taken away, I’m sure people are still doing it behind the scenes.

When I got good enough at my job, they promoted me to dispatcher. So then I was just a part-time delivery guy. I made more money delivering orders, but it was safer to sit in the office and listen to a guy singing loudly in the dispatch room. It was in the other room from the call center, which was all women with a man as the supervisor. They would take calls from angry customers and check the status of our drivers to see how close they were.

The call center was like a nursery, but the dispatch room was like a bar. Eighty percent of the dispatchers were high when they came in to dispatch. I wasn’t one of them. I always came in clean.

The guy who sang all the time was a movie buff who directed short films on the side. He’d spent over fifty grand on a short that lasted five minutes. Most of the money he’d spent was used on a crane to make a sweeping shot in one of the scenes.

The other dispatchers made fun of him behind his back. I felt sorry for him for spending all that money on such a wasted film.

But anyway, the dispatching job lasted for over ten years. People came and went obviously, and years went by too fast. Most of the drivers were either Brazilian or Bulgarian. They would speak in their native tongue to each other in the same room. I had no idea what they were saying. They were probably teasing us or saying bad things about us because we were forcing them to drive everywhere in town and not making them enough money. This was before the advent of cell phones as wallets. So, we drivers had to copy the customers’ credit cards using receipt paper and a mechanical object that I couldn’t name. Yes, those were different times before Steve Jobs took over the world.

Do I miss them? Well, I miss the partying or the self-medicating–depending on how you perceive the traumas I went through.

But one thing I do know. When people ask me, “How do you like it?” My job they were asking about. I would say, “It’s just a job.” In other words, I didn’t take it seriously, and it wasn’t who I really was.