1/25/05: January Whine

I hope this poor bastard doesn't have any plans before April.

Last few days I've been feeling a little bit overwhelmed. Asking myself questions like, "What the hell am I doing wasting all my time with this here blog thing?" It's not like it comes flowing out of me like gold ore*.  I put so much time into this thing, for such meager results, that you'd be embarrassed for me if you knew just how much time I'm talking about.  I'd say I've averaged about five hours of sleep a night over the last year or so, and a large part of that is that I'm staying up bungling my little heart out.

I wind up tired at work, unable to concentrate.  When we brainstorm, I never come up with any good ideas.  I never read books anymore. I walk around in a day-long coma, completely uninspired. Remember when you were 22 and every day you had 100 brilliant thoughts that led to grand plans that you never followed up on? I never even have the thoughts anymore.  What ideas I do have are simple and obvious, and my execution is clunky and disorganized. 

Like yesterday. I wanted to say something nice about the Great Johnny Carson passing away, and it turned into, "Carson die. Me very sad. Leno real bad man."  Who the hell needs that?  Does the world really need one more joker wasting his and other people's time with that kinda shit?

Well, maybe. Especially when you throw in all the fun games and stuff we provide.

The funny thing is that in many ways I've never been happier in my life.  And I guess I need to admit that part of that is the satisfaction of making something every day (besides a good poop). And I love getting feedback from those of you who donate eight to ten minutes of your day to reading the crap that I work so touchingly hard on. So the bungling will continue, at least through our two year anniversary, which is coming up in about a month or two.

As bad as my Carson eulogy was, it was better than Pathetic Dick Cavett's. On Aaron Brown tonight, in the middle of a rambling anecdote, he actually said, "Carson was a notoriously bad drunk." Charles Grodin jumped in with, "Take it easy, Dick. You're being too kind."  Good old Grodin. His Letterman appearances in the 80's remain some of my favorite talk show memories.

I can't remember a time when two teams were dominating their respective sports simultaneously the way we're seeing it happen right now. Of course, I'm talking about the New England Patriots and the Boys team from Real World/Road Rules Challenge. As much of a master technician as Tom Brady is, Dan from the Boys team is every bit his equal as a leader.  And Dan's words while toasting his hayseed teammate Theo were among the most inspiring in the history of the Challenge:

"Theo...I dunno...I just got a couple things to say about you, Theo...you are a unparalleled mind, and, y'know...you're my best friend, and that's all I can really say about you."

How do you lose when you've got that guy on your team?  Answer: you don't. And sure enough, the Boys continued their season-long rout of the Girls on Monday night by snatching the grand prize in the final challenge, probably setting the women's movement back about 8 weeks in the process.

We spoke of Johnny Carson yesterday, and today we speak of Johnny again.  Just plain Johnny this time. Perhaps you remember Johnny. He was our advice columnist who left almost a year ago to the day under some pretty uncomfortable circumstances. We'll admit it: just like the early 90's, when Carson had lost a couple of mph off his fastball**, we felt that our Johnny was no longer providing the kind of product that our readers have come to expect.  And just like NBC did with Carson, we forced our Johnny out.

Johnny was a pro, and he left without a scene.  Here's our description of his dismissal (from 1/27/04).

"I always said that we were a family, all in this together, and when it stopped being fun, we'd shut the whole thing down forever. In the end, that all turned out to be bullshit. That's why I am here to tell you that there are some major changes afoot in our offices, starting with the immediate and permanent dismissal of Johnny, who's been writing his little-read advice column in this space since day one. His page visits were dwindling faster than the chances of finding WMD in Iraq, and ultimately we didn't really trust the advice he was giving out anyway. Our accounting dept. calculated that he was costing us $.79 a month in web space, and that's $.79 that we feel could be spent better elsewhere, like an extra sheath of coffee cups or a pocket pack of kleenex. Johnny took the news like a man - he said he never expected to be here this long to begin with, and he thanked us for the verbungle.com painter's cap we gave him as a farewell offering. The guy always had class; I'll say that for him. The only time he let his pain show is when he turned around in the doorway on the way out, pointed at the whole room and said, "Verbungle without me is like corn flakes without the milk." I've got thick skin and I understand the man's anger, so I just nodded and gave him a sappy little salute. Our best wishes to him in his future endeavors."

Since the cornflakes comment, we haven't heard a word from Johnny.  Sure, we heard the rumors: he was down in Key West with Jimmy Buffet, drinking way too much tequila and spending way too much money at the dog track. Then somebody would say they heard he was in New Orleans, sweeping up at Tipitina's. At least two of his ex-wives said he had contacted them, looking for money and saying he couldn't understand why it hadn't worked out between them. We wished the best for Johnny, but we also expected the worst.  So we made no effort to track him down until today, when we got this almost desperate request from a reader:

"This is going old school, and even though I don't see him on this here site no more, this one's for Johnny, if that's possible. My problem: I can hear my neighbors humping at night, the girl makes the worst moans, if my girl sounded like that I would get limp and angry, which would force me to kick her out of my bed. What's the proper way to address this? Is it like someone playing their stereo too loud? please help
-Limp N'Angry"

This was clearly a serious problem and needed to be addressed. And we looked around the office several times before finally deciding we had nobody here qualified to handle it.  We needed Johnny. So we decided to track him down. Our Human Resources department had a Tampa address on file, and when I called the number a woman answered. When I told her we were looking for Johnny, she said, "Yeah, well let me know if you find that cocksucker.  He owes me $85."

After that, I tried Johnny's emergency contact, his mother Isabel, who's now close to 100 years old. She said she had spoken to Johnny a couple of months ago, and gave me a New Mexico phone number.  She said he had been working with a highway repair crew all over the Southwest. We were encouraged by this information, except that every time I mentioned Johnny's name, she'd say, "Oh, you mean Little Willy." She'd then start singing the song "Little Willy" by Sweet, and she'd say, "I love that song, don't you?"

I called the New Mexico number and spoke to a man named Vince, who was the foreman of a construction crew based in Albuquerque. I told him I was calling from verbungle.com and looking for Johnny, our former advice columnist.

"Of course I know Johnny," Vince said.

Reassured, I asked him if he had a number where we could reach Johnny.

"No, I mean, I don't actually know him know him," he said.  "I mean, I know him from reading his advice column on verbungle.com. It was always one of my favorites."

I was stunned.  I thanked Vince for his readership and was about to hang up, when he said, "You know, I kept reading him for a while after he left verbungle and signed on with amarillo nights, but it just wasn't the same, so eventually I stopped. As far as I know, he's still writing for them."

Again, my hopes climbed, and again they were crushed when I visited the site and realized that, in another coincidence of Austerian proportions, there was indeed a second advice columnist named Johnny, using the clever column name "Ask Johnny," working on the world wide web.  Vince had just assumed it was the same guy. 

For some reason, I emailed Amarillo Nights anyway, I guess just as a goof, and asked if they knew where our Johnny was.  To my surprise, they replied within ten minutes.  Here's their email:

I wasn't surprised that Johnny was staying in the best hotel in Amarillo. He always seemed to find somebody willing to foot the bill for whatever mess he got himself into. Of course, his next mess usually stemmed from trying to pay back the person who had bailed him out of his previous mess. I don't know how he handled the stress, but I guess some people need that kind of anxiety to feel alive.

I called the number and asked for room 226.  They asked me the guest's name, and I said, "Johnny."  The clerk told me to hang on while they transferred me to the manager's office.

"Hi, this is Jane. I'm the manager. Johnny checked out a couple of weeks ago," she said. "Is he in some kind of trouble?"

I could already tell that she had been the one this time. Once I assured her that I was an old friend, she came clean and admitted that Johnny had sweet-talked her into giving him a free two-month stay at the La Quinta, which she had ended only because the regional manager was starting to get suspicious about why room 226 had gone unrented for so long.  I don't know what he promised her, whether it was a cut of some deal he was working on or maybe even a long-term relationship. I didn't want to ask. She told me she hadn't spoken to him since he checked out, but that he said he'd be back in a couple of weeks.

"Did he leave a number?" I asked, doubting that he would.

She said that he did leave a number, but he made her promise not to call unless it was an emergency or if it was "the guys from that website calling with a job offer." I felt a little less than honest doing it, but I told her that I was calling from verbungle.com, and indeed I did have some work to offer him.

"Get the hell out of here," she said. "You work at verbungle? What's that like? I love their stuff, especially the reader challenges.  Why'd they stop doing those?"

"I dunno," I said, kind of embarrassed. "People didn't seem that into them.  Did you ever respond to one of them?"

"Yeah, one time I did," she said. "I was the one who said I used to flirt with men in the 7-Eleven parking lot when I was underage, so they'd buy me beer.  See, that's dumb.  Mostly I just liked reading other people's responses."

"Yeah, well, maybe we'll bring it back," I said.

"You know, that's what first attracted me to Johnny," she said. "When he said he used to work at verbungle.com.  I just thought that sounded so glamorous. I had been a huge fan of verbungle since the beginning. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I never really liked his column. I didn't care, though. It was like being with a rock star, listening to him tell all the stories about the bullpen and the arguments at the staff meetings and all the drunken exploits at the holiday parties.  It seemed like such a fun place to work."

I was kind of relieved that Johnny didn't hold a grudge about his dismissal, that he was able to look back fondly on the early days here at verbungle.com.  And I felt kind of proud to have been a part of it myself.  I took the number and thanked her for her time, and I promised I'd ask Johnny to call her as soon as he straightened a few things out. 

It turned out to be a pager number. I entered my number and waited. When I looked down at Johnny's file, I noticed that the pager number was right there on his employee information sheet all along.  I could have just paged him straight away.

Ten minutes later, my cell phone rang.  It was Johnny, and he sounded terrible.  Crazed. Angry. Confused. 

"Who the fuck are you and what the fuck do you want? Clock's ticking," was the first thing he said.

"Johnny, it's Hans Bungle," I said.  "From verbungle.com."

"Kerfuffle.com?" he said. "What the hell is that?"

Even after I got him to say the name right, he claimed he had never worked here and he had no idea who I was. I couldn't tell if he was just being difficult or if he was really that far out of it.  I calmed him down just long enough to ask him Limp n' Angry's question about the moaning girlfriend.

He paused for a second, and then said, "You tell Limp n' Angry that Julie's gonna keep screaming and I'm gonna keep doing the things that make her scream. You got that? If he has a problem he can get some earplugs or call the police or come knock on my door and take his chances.  You tell him that, OK?"

"Um, OK," I said.  I wasn't sure if Johnny was just being a smartass, or if he actually thought he was the one living next door to Limp n' Angry.  And the way things were going today, I couldn't be sure that he wasn't the one making all the racket.

"You done with me?" he asked. "Mr. Fuffle or whatever your name is?"

"Yeah, Johnny, that's it. Thanks for calling back."

There was a pause, and then he said, in a completely lucid voice, the voice I'd heard so many times over the years, "By the way, I was right.  You're just a bunch of motherfucking cornflakes."

Then the line went dead.

Hope that helps.

New cartoon coming tomorrow.

* Yes, I realize the process of extracting gold ore is actually probably very painstaking, but I am not backing down from that analogy.
** Note that I resisted the temptation to use the expression "jumped the shark," going with the equally tired expression "lost a couple mph off his fastball."  Please use similar restraint in your everyday lives.