RIP, Leonard Nimoy

On February 27, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories5 Comments

There are many, many pictures of Mr. Nimoy being shared on the Internet at the moment; I would genuinely like to think I found the WTFiest of them all.

I’ll be honest: I would not, three days ago, have described myself as either a big Star Trek fan (although I’ve had my moments) or a big Spock/Nimoy fan. So I have a lot of trouble explaining why, when I found out this afternoon that he had passed, I had to shut my office door for a few minutes because I was struggling to hold back tears. You are a mean, nasty, vicious motherfucker, February, and I will quite glad to see the end of you.

A TRUE TALE: The worst date I ever had

On January 26, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories13 Comments

large I don’t recall who I was talking to, but I was on Twitter not too long ago and talking to a few someones about dating. We started one-upping each other about the worst dates we’d ever had. I won, with this story, and it was requested that I give further details at some point in the future. Having nothing else to talk about at the moment other than writing, and suspecting (as I do) that y’all may be tiring of reading about other words I’ve written, let’s tell a story about a bad date.

(The picture is relevant, for reasons I’m not going to reveal.)

There was a time in which I was doing a lot of online dating. I was– and I’ll admit my grasp of the timeline here is a bit fuzzy– either in grad school or in between grad schools, and had discovered that Chicago had a high enough population density that finding potential dates through Match.com or whatever the name of the service Salon was using at the time was actually not too terribly difficult, even for someone with my, shall we say, nontraditional approach to personal beauty and somewhat suspect hobbies.

Point is, I found some sites that were full of women that weren’t too picky about appearances so long as you were interesting. Turns out I can do that. It was Nirvana. I wasn’t dating a lot, but going out with 2-3 different women in a month wasn’t exactly unheard of, and compared to the entire rest of my dating history I felt like Casanova.

At some point, I got really mercenary about the “exchange lots of emails” part of the process, though. One or two, and then if you were interesting I was looking for a phone number and a date somewhere public. I managed to attract the attention of a cute redhead, which was like the promised land as far as I was concerned. I have always, my entire life, been hugely into redheads, and redheads have never ever wanted to have anything to do with me. In fact, truth: this date I’m about to describe was the only date I’ve ever had with a redhead. I love them. They don’t love me back.

(My wife is a brunette. Occasionally I get on her to dye her hair. I got her into a reeeal deep auburn at one point; it’s as close as I’ve gotten.)

Right, so: This particular young lady made a request of me that, at the time, I found reasonable. She asked that I not bring my cell phone along with me on the date. Now, this was way before smartphones, and in fact it was long enough ago that the fact that I had a cellphone was still at least somewhat notable. Nowadays, there’s no way that I comply with this request, and in fact I’ll find it a bit creepy. Back then? You don’t want me to bring my phone? OK, sure. I left it at home. The plan: dinner, movie, “we’ll see.” Typical, right?

She’d picked a restaurant near where she lived, which was on the north side of town. Chicago’s easy enough to get around in that it’s difficult to get lost, but it was still in a part of town I was unfamiliar with. Dinner was… weird. We spent most of the meal arguing and taking shots at each other, in a way that felt like funny banter about 90% of the time and 10% of the time just seemed sorta bitter and mean.

Then, as we were paying for the food (strictly Dutch, by the way,) she wrote something down on a piece of paper and handed it to our waiter. He gave both of us a weird look and moved on without saying anything.

“What was that?” I asked.

“My number,” she said. “He’s cute. I’ve been in here before.”

Now, at this point, most guys would have left, and it might be some sort of a commentary on my own self-confidence that I didn’t immediately end the date. However, one thing I’d definitely learned about online dating? Is that sometimes you go on a date for the date, and sometimes you go on a date for the story. And this had just catapulted itself firmly into “good story” territory. And she had a little twinkle in her eye that told me I was being tested somehow.

So. We ain’t married, right? I just met you. Give dude your number, I don’t give a fuck. It’s not like we didn’t meet online; I know we’re both seeing other people.

On to the movie!

Which was a little film by an independent filmmaker that both of us had heard of but neither of us knew much about named Darren Aronofsky. (Ooh, wait, this means I can date the date!)

The movie? Requiem for a Dream. Which is totally the best date movie of all time.

(Admission: It’s possible it was Solaris, which was in 2002, and not RfaD, in 2000. The Solaris date was godawful too, and I’m pretty sure I remember who that was with, and it wasn’t this girl. But I’m having doubts right now. Not big ones. Pretty sure it was Requiem. And Requiem’s definitely funnier, so let’s go with that.)

As we left the theater, we were joking about how terrifyingly inappropriate a movie we’d chosen, and one of us– I think it was me– started joking about how this had to be the worst date either of us had been on. And we started comparing stories about shitty dates, while on a shitty date, and walking back to the car. Like, trying to one-up each other, and come up with dates that we’d been on that were shittier than the one we were on.

In other words, the vibe was really weird.

And then she asked me if she could borrow my phone.

“I didn’t bring my phone. You told me not to, remember?”

“Oh,” she says. “I was going to call my friends and see where they’re at tonight.”

I raise an eyebrow. Interesting.

“Well, we could go back to your place and just call somebody from there, and then head to wherever they are,” I said.

“Oh, you’re not going. Would you mind giving me a ride, though?” That twinkle was back in her eye; this was another test.

As it turned out, I did mind. I took her back home, of course; I’d picked her up, so it was the proper thing to do, but I declined to deliver her to the next part of her evening. The weird thing is that we both sorta shrugged it off; it’s coming off as astonishingly rude as I’m writing this, but remember that this was a blind date and this chick didn’t know me. She’d made plans with her friends after the date. That’s not actually a terrible thing, especially pre-cell-phone where otherwise I could have just taken off with her and nobody would have noticed for a couple of days. Presumably they’d had something set up if the plan rapidly became I MUST BRING THIS MAN HOME AND BONE HIM IMMEDIATELY, but it’s not like I could get mad about it.

Sadly, there was not a second date. I did email her again, mostly out of curiosity about how she’d actually thought the evening had gone without me there. It’s weirdly meta, right, joking about how shitty a date is going while you’re on the date, and we’d already set up this weird bantering/picking on each other vibe, so… were either of us serious? I have no idea. I didn’t get a kiss at the end of the night, but the hug was a couple seconds longer than it needed to be. Was that good? No fuckin’ clue.

And that’s the worst date I’ve ever been on.

Addendum: When this popped back into my head a few weeks ago or however long it was, I looked her up. She’s got an extremely uncommon name, and is in fact still using some of the online handles she was using back then, which I still recall on account of the date being memorable. She appears to still be single and is now a hot redheaded librarian. I will not be sending her a link to this post, although I admit I’m curious as to whether she remembers the date as well as I do.

REBLOG: Outer space revisited

On January 12, 2015January 12, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories1 Comment

Okay, I know I literally JUST SAID I wasn’t posting more than once a day for a while, but there’s absolutely no way I can pass up reblogging this amazing story.

Green Writing Room

I recently read my first Sci Fi book… at least I think it was the first, and yet… in a life of reading I must have read one before and anyway it was listed under adventure, and I am always up for that. I enjoyed Skylights very much and reviewed it on Amazon. I read it because I have become interested in the author Luther M. Siler via his blog and happened to read the opening of this book which gripped me. It is set in the future, but starts in a schoolroom as the assembled children are watching the launch of the Challenger in 1986.

However, I had forgotten, I have been to space before, nearly thirty years ago. Our youngest daughter decided, age four, that she wanted to be an astronaut. So we made her a space ship. Here are the engineers at work.For christmas that year she…

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About that wedding…

On January 6, 2015January 6, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn StoriesLeave a comment

So this is a new thing. I’ve never come home from a wedding wanting to do research before. My cousin’s new bride is Lebanese, and her entire family are Melkite Catholics. The wedding woke up every last bit of me that used to be a religious scholar, and I walked away all kinds of full of questions. The ceremony was split fairly evenly between English and Arabic, which was already fascinating enough on its own, and the full name of the church is the Melkite Greek Catholic Church– and there was Greek in abundance all over the church itself– despite the fact that it is an Arab Catholic church.

There is history here, and I must learn it. I managed to wedge my way into an interesting conversation with the deacon at the reception, only to get called away by the distribution of wedding cake and Lebanese baklava, which caused me to ask my cousin all sorts of questions about the Melkite position on polygamy. Needless to say, I did not manage to acquire a second Melkite wife to make baklava for me. These are an interesting people, and I wish to know more of them.

So, yeah: the reception. The reception started off with what I would call typical reception music; the newlyweds walked into the hall to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck, which I approved of greatly. Maybe twenty minutes into the dancing, the DJ abruptly veered into what initially felt to me like Arabic pop music, but probably wasn’t, because her entire family immediately knew what to do about it. This was awesome, especially when the oldest, fattest dude at the wedding proceeded to manage to get every Lebanese woman at the reception, as well as most of the younger white ones, dancing in a circle around him while he cut a rug worthy of BB King in his prime– at which point he broke the circle and dragged my only-barely-willing cousin and his new bride into the middle of it so they could dance around them instead. Dude was amazing. Sadly, I wasn’t able to get good footage of him, because while my iPhone can handle darkish rooms for pictures, video with bad lighting just isn’t happening.

The song after the Arabic dance music? Yeah!!! Which was also hilarious.

Then there was this dude. I love this dude, just for rocking that suit:

The jacket matched the pants perfectly and was positively Zoot-suit like in its length. I didn’t get a chance to talk to this guy much but he is my favorite. Well, my second favorite, after that other dude.

Ten minutes on Christmas Eve

On December 24, 2014December 24, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories4 Comments

I am out running errands. I am doing this despite being horribly sick because I am a misanthrope and believe society deserves plague, and also because I need the shit I’m doing done and not all hanging over my head going ha ha ha, you haven’t done us yet and I know ferdamnsure I’m not getting anything done tomorrow. None of the errands I’m doing are remotely Christmas Eve-related; I could have needed to do them any day of the year, but it just happens that I’ve chosen to get them done now.

One of the tasks is to get a bunch of dead CFL bulbs to Lowe’s, which has a recycling station for said bulbs in its entryway. (Sidenote: Do I just not remember how often the old bulbs burned out? Because these things really don’t seem to last any longer than the old ones did. Screw ten years; I know I’ve replaced every bulb in the house at least once or twice since we moved in here.) (Second sidenote: WordPress does not think “sidenote” is a word, and insists on replacing it with “sidetone,” which is definitely not a word.)

Anyway. I’m dressed neutrally; I can tend towards the shabby on weekends, but I’m wearing my nice leather coat and a leather hat, so I figure I don’t immediately scan as broke-assed as I usually do on the weekends, but I’m also not exactly in fashion plate mode; it’s not like I’ve come from work and I’m wearing business clothes or anything. As I’m walking toward the entryway to Lowe’s I see a person who initially scans as either crazy or homeless or both standing in the entryway. She’s asking everyone who comes in if they have a cigarette that she can borrow and everyone’s saying no and avoiding her in the way one typically does when approached by the crazy and/or homeless in public.

(Another sidenote: I got used to this when I lived in Chicago, but it’s extremely rare in South Bend. I know that there are homeless people in this town, but panhandlers, especially in retail spaces, are vanishingly uncommon. So the reaction she’s getting isn’t entirely surprising.)

Anyway. I prepare myself to tell her I don’t smoke (true) and realize that I have a couple of loose dollar bills in my pocket and am in the process of deciding whether I’ll give them to her when she… ignores me. She’s asked every person who walks in. She says nothing to me.

Huh.

Well, okay; I put my CFLs in the recycling bin (they have to be individually bagged and put in one at a time so this takes a while) and then cut through the store to exit through the proper exit rather than exiting through the entrance, which I suppose would have been perfectly fine.

I enter the store behind two grandmotherly-looking black women who, importantly, are pushing an empty cart, generally a signal that you intend to buy something. I am trying to accelerate to cruising speed and have nothing in my hands. There is precisely one greeter standing in the doorway, a white woman of perhaps thirty years of age, who walks right past the two black women to make eye contact with me and ask me if I need help.

The two women stop dead in their tracks. I say no and then look over at them with what I sincerely hope is a did that shit just happen? look on my face. I mean, shit, you couldn’t just do some sort of generic “Welcome to Lowe’s, does anyone need assistance?” and direct that shit to everybody? And not to be stereotypical while I’m accusing somebody else of racism but I suspect the two elderly women pushing a cart just might be slightly more in need of assistance in the home improvement store than the middle-aged dude. Maybe.

The situation ends without anyone raising a ruckus; I nod apologetically to the two women, not sure what the hell else I might do short of causing a scene, and they continue on their way and I head for the exit. You have to cut through the checkout lanes to get out of the store. There are two people sitting on chairs just past the registers, and I cannot explain this any further other than to say I notice them in a way that I didn’t notice many other people as I walked through the store. They… maybe look familiar? I guess? A bit? Or maybe not.

And then the gentleman of the couple looks right at me and says “Hi, Steve.”

Now, in this scenario, let’s pretend that “Steve” is my real first name, which it isn’t, and let’s also pretend (this part is true) that I go by my middle name, and not my first, and that no one anywhere actually calls me Steve. And I swear to you that this guy says Steve in the exact same tone that a girl who had a one-night stand with someone who later found out that he’d been lying about his name might say Steve if she ran into him at the bar again later and wanted to embarrass him. Like, “I know this isn’t really your name, you asshole, and I’m calling you that to draw attention to this fact.”

It… uh… takes me a bit by surprise, especially since these people are vaguely familiar but not enough that I have any idea who they are, and double-especially because of the weirdness of addressing me by a name that no one calls me. I stop. I stare at them, a no-doubt extremely quizzical look on my face.

And then Steve, who was directly behind me, and not expecting me to suddenly stop in my tracks, runs into me, and he apologizes at the very second that the man’s wife figures out what has just happens and breaks into laughter.

“You must be Steve too,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Sorry.”

“Merry Christmas,” she says.

I consider replying Happy Holidays, and then it hits me that given the last ten minutes that might lead to some additional nonsense, and say Merry Christmas to her too and leave the store.

I’m, uh, not gonna go back to Lowe’s for a while.

In which I tell a ridiculous true story

On December 14, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories10 Comments

Gnat_1_(FFXI) So there’s a bug in my room.

I mean that literally. Not “there are bugs in my room.” I think there is a bug in my room. As in one.

It’s not a scary bug. It’s a little bitty thing, like a midge or a gnat or something like that, some little black flying thing that’s way too small to be an actual fly but otherwise acts like one.

The problem is it’s immortal.

I have to read before I sleep, right? It takes an exceptional level of exhaustion to get me to simply hit the sheets and try to go to sleep. My wife, however, is very much not like that; my wife can be dead asleep within ten seconds of pulling the covers up. What this means in practice is that for the last six-years-and-change of my life I’ve been doing a lot of reading with a booklight after she’s fallen asleep.

There is only ever one bug. I have never seen more than one.

It only comes out when I’m reading. I’ve never seen it during the daytime, and I’ve never seen it when the lamp by my bed is on. Only when I’m using my booklight.

And it lands on my book, then flies away, then lands on my book again, then lands on my booklight, then I get annoyed and kill it. How do I know there’s only one, and it’s not flying away and another, suspiciously similar-looking bug is then flying over to me? Because when I kill it, it doesn’t come back. I’ve never had to kill two. And I’ve never seen a second one after killing the first one.

Until the next night. It takes 24 hours for the resurrection process to complete, I assume. And then that same one bug will torment me again, while I’m trying to read, until I kill it.

This has been going on for months.

I’m not crazy.

I swear.

What I’ve been doing the last couple of days

On November 27, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories8 Comments

Lots of schools do food drives this time of year, generally trading a canned food item for some sort of prize, like a dress down day or a homework pass or something like that. My school is no exception. The difference is that my school turns around and gives that donated food right back to our own families rather than donating it to a food bank. We pulled together 54 boxes of donated items in all; I h ave no idea how many items in total but you can get a sense of how many from the picture. A couple of our employees spent a couple of days sorting everything out and trying to make sure that what was in each of the boxes was roughly equivalent, and on Tuesday a few of us drove to a meat market in Buchanan, Michigan and bought 54 turkeys, one for each of the boxes.

I spent most of yesterday with our librarian, out distributing packages to our families. We went out in pairs, most teams going to 10 or 12 houses. The librarian and I had a double run and hit 21.

It was… sobering. I’ve lived in this town for most of my life and taught in its public schools for the last eight years, and I’ve always known that there were pockets of severe poverty throughout the town– hell, I’ve talked about the effects poverty has on our kids any number of times in any number of venues. But this was the first time where my job for a day was literally to drive around and find out where my kids live. Our principal, at one of his houses, was greeted at the door by a man with a gun in his hand. The librarian and I didn’t have that, but we did have one house that we didn’t leave food at on account of the place looked like it had been abandoned for years, only to get back to school and discover that, yes, that was the right address and more than one of our students still live there.

I can’t properly describe how bad this place was. Suffice it to say that my job today was to drive around and deliver donated food to families who are poor enough that they need such assistance. These people, as you might expect, don’t exactly live in beautiful, well-maintained homes. Nonetheless, the rest of the houses were mansions compared to this one. There is no way they have electricity or heat. They didn’t have knobs on the doors, for God’s sake. The front door was held shut by a padlock. The librarian looked in a window and said that the place was full of trash. I got back to school too late to do anything about it, but I’ll be calling DCFS on Monday. I have to.

Across the street was what looked like a $300,000 house. Literally exactly across the street.

We got back to school in time to discover that three of our kids were being removed from their father’s home, also by DCFS. It is absolutely the best decision for everyone involved.

Be thankful for what you have, folks.

#Nashville: Final food post

On November 8, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, Stories5 Comments

So we decided to go to Jack’s Bar-B-Q last night. Me and four of my colleagues, packed into my rental car which, as it turns out, does not have a middle seatbelt in the back seat. Whoops. Nashville in general is a horrifying tangle of highways, right? It’s confusing as hell. And downtown Nashville at first did not appear to have much going for it. Until we hit the neighborhood where the restaurant was:

Oh. So this is where Nashville’s nightlife is. And there was some sort of major concert going on tonight, so there were millions of people out– look at the upper left of the picture to see the size of the crowds on the street.

Eventually we found a spot in a parking garage and left. Then my boss pointed out the door we’d walked through:

This door has no external handle. Once it’s closed, you can’t get back through it. Because it’s secret, you see. So we were gonna have to figure out another way to get back to the car on the way home.

Finding Jack’s wasn’t hard, and the live music blaring from literally every door on the block made waiting in the holy-shit-people-are-you-kidding line worthwhile. The reason finding Jack’s wasn’t that hard is that the line extended out the door and halfway down the block.

(Not pictured: a hundred people behind us.)

Once we got inside I saw this sign, which I post here, and also on Facebook, without comment:

Right before we got our food, I turned around and took a picture of the line behind us, which hadn’t exactly gotten smaller. Remember, this gets outside, turns right, and goes on for another couple hundred feet:

Now, a genuinely weird, if oddly convenient, thing about this place: their service was slow as hell, which partially accounts for the length of the line– but also meant that finding a table wasn’t terribly difficult, because people were tending to eat and go.

I got a combo platter again. Brisket, sausage, and pork shoulder, plus a piece of something called “chess pie” at the recommendation of my assistant principal, who grew up in Tennessee:(*)

Apparently something happened to my eyes when I had my first bite of chess pie. I want to marry chess pie. The barbecue was goddamned delicious as well. Even the cornbread in the corner, which doesn’t look like much, was pretty good. The food made the endless wait well worth it.

And then we went to the Parthenon. Which doesn’t seem like a sentence that I should be ending an article about barbecue with. Did you know that Nashville has a full-size replica of the Goddamn Parthenon? Because it does:

The food made the trip worth it.

The end.

(*) True thing: spellcheck just tried to tell me that “Tennessee” was incorrect, the little wiggly line not going away until I removed an S. I double-checked, feeling that perhaps I’d lost my mind, and fixed the spelling back to how I’d had it to begin with. Weird.