A cop pulled me over on my way to work this morning.

“You aren’t wearing your seat belt,” he said after approaching my window. “Did you just forget?”

“No officer, I was raging against the machine using the only mechanism available to a 40-year-old middle-manager in an SUV,” I replied but not really.

The little finger on my right hand still hurts, more than a week after I bent it backward in a sledding accident. I am beginning to think I should see a doctor. But, when they ask “reason for visit”, I don’t know if I can bring myself to say “pinky”.

Also, if it atrophies and falls off, I am totally going to tell people I was in the Yakuza. This possibility is factoring into my decision more than it probably should.

I was sitting at the table and surfing the web when I remembered that I had been making coffee. Trying to determine the cause of the delay I glanced across the room and saw that I had neglected to turn on the burner. As I rose and walked over to the stove I noticed that I had also forgotten to put the kettle on the burner. As I lifted the kettle to do so I discovered I hadn’t put water in it yet. As I was filling up the kettle from the tap I became aware of the french press sitting on the counter nearby, half-full and warm. It was then that remembered that I had, some ten minutes prior, made coffee, let it steep, poured myself a cup, added milk and sugar, and placed it on the table next to the laptop, where it currently resided.

So, yeah. That kind of morning.

I am an occasional storyteller at Seattle’s A Guide to Visitors and, late last year, participated in one of their “Best Of” shows. Shortly thereafter I was contacted by B. Frayn Masters, who asked if I would come to Portland and for a similar event that she hosts, a series I knew nothing about called Back Fence PDX. Because Frayn and I have been friends for twenty years, and because I am magnanimous to a fault, I agreed to lend my star-power to her adorable little show, with its audience of presumably no more than a dozen people, composed entirely of family members and devoted friends of the storytellers.

The theme of the evening was “Our Bodies, Ourselves”. Frayn and I spoke several times by phone regarding my story and, in perhaps our third conversation, she mentioned the venue, the Portland Center Stage. “We don’t usually have it there,” she told me, “but we had to get a larger theater for this audience, considering its size.”

“Oh really?” I said, mentally revising my attendance projections to a score or more. “How many people do you expect?”

“Well, the first 800 tickets were gone in a few hours,” she replied, “although we’ve got some more in reserve.”

Oh. Oh my. I have never done anything in front on a crowd even a quarter of that size, outside of anxiety dreams.

Fortunately I arrived onstage very well prepared. By which I mean that the storytellers received complementary beer, and I helped myself to several before it was my turn in front of the horde.

Another storyteller was a gentleman by the name of Arthur Bradford. Ten years ago Mr. Bradford made a small independent film called “How’s Your News”, which I loved and raved about on defective yeti. And Authur remembered this because, at the time, my review was one of the few accounts of his movie available on the web. It was a total moment, he and I realizing all this as we chatted before the show.

I had to go on stage immediately after that performance. Sucks to be me!

The last story of the evening was told by Lauren Weedman, who’s like a bigshot fancypants real life actress, with an IMDB page and eveything. If you watch only one of these videos it should be this one, unless you suffer from Sudden Onset Laughter Induced Death Syndrome, in which case avoid.

I went to a concert. One of the roadies was nicknamed “Whitey”. I know this because, while he was working on the stage between sets, someone in the back of the venue shouted “Hey Whitey!” and every single person at the Built to Spill show turned around.

1. Walk briskly to cafeteria at lunchtime.
2. Purchase large salad and roll.
3. Eat roll while walking back to office.
4. Throw salad away untouched at the end of the work day.
5. Find self inexplicably hungry in evening and order pizza.

It really works–in January alone I got rid of nearly 8 pounds! Of salad!!

I went to my 7 o’clock dental appointment this morning, only to discover that the hygienist assigned to me was AWOL. The rest of the staff was fluttering around in a panic without her. Finally the actual DDS came in to take care of me, but he lacked many of her core competencies, foremost among them the ability to make distracting small talk while scraping tarter. His opening gambit was, “So uhhhh … So uh how is, how is summer treating you so far?”

Speaking of terrible openers, “if I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?”–a classic pickup line that has been successfully deployed exactly zero times in the history of mankind–has been slightly reworded (presumably to avoid charges of plagiarism from Larry Dallas) and pressed into service as the chorus of this new and dreadful pop song:

I look forward to the other singles from this album, including “Should I Call You in The Morning or Nudge You?” and “Do You Want to Go Back to My Dorm Room and See My Record Collection But You Know if You Don’t Want to That’s Totally Cool (ft. Timbaland)”.

(And no, this is not kneejerk hatin’ on Britney Spears–the track is well and truly awful. Even this song is better, by an order of magnitude. And anyway, I didn’t even know Spears was the artist until I went looking for the video on Youtube. My default assumption was Weird Al.)

On my morning commute I got stuck behind a “Seattle Muffler & Brake” van that was going like 45 on the freeway.

YES YOUR BRAKES ARE AMAZING I GET IT!!

I spent Halloween this year as I have many others: sugar-high and wide awake in bed, staring at the ceiling until 4 AM, and vowing to rid the world of the evil geniuses behind Banana Laffy Taffy. That stuff seriously needs to stop existing. The first nation to weaponize Banana Laffy Taffy will have its boot on the throat of the world.

Prior to that we were at the home of our friends on Capitol Hill, as has become our tradition in recent years (2008, 2007). They live in the epicenter of a three block area that kind of goes nuts for the holiday, giving out obscene amounts of candy, larding their homes with decorations, and even setting up special attractions such as “Haunted House!” and “Dude Dismembering Other Dude with a Chainsaw on the Front Lawn!” (Protip if you decide to do DDODwaCotFL: using a real chainsaw makes for great sound effects, but also leaves your entire home cloaked in a incapacitating cloud of gasoline fumes. That’s still less toxic than Twizzlers, admittedly.)

Squiggle went as a fireman.

I wanted to dress as something that would go along with his outfit, but– okay if we were talking in person, this is the moment where I would shout “not a dalmatian!” because you’d be opening your mouth to say “dalmatian” and I only wear my dalmatian costume to Special Conventions, thanks.

I considered going as a burning building, but I was worried people would get the wrong idea (although it probably would have been fine, so long as I wasn’t clutching toy airplanes in my hands). Then I considered going as a “In Case of Emergency Break Glass” box. Then I realized that it was 5:43 PM on October 31st and we were late for our friend’s house.

In the end I decided to go as Sexy Technical Writer. All I had to do is wear my work clothes.

We took Squig trick-or-treating for about an hour, threw him in bed, and then manned the battlestations for the remainder of the evening. Overall we had somewhere in the vicinity of 1500 visitors, as evidenced by this photo in which you can make out nothing whatsoever:

Lots of witches this year, perhaps to compensate for Christine O’Donnell’s loss. Lots of Iron Men. Lots of pre- and post-adolescent girls with kitty ears and whisker facepaint. In fact, the latter was in such abundance that I’m going declare “cat” to be “not even a costume anymore”. Halloween Cat Costume joins the ranks of Christmas Target Gift Card as the hallmark of someone who’s not even trying.

Fortunately, there was no shortage of unMAZING costumes as well. This was my favorite:

Here is an eyeball. And a board game.

This girl had both a beautiful costume and a comical series of mishaps while on our porch. She accidentally dumped out some of her candy, and then accidentally dumped out the rest of her candy while bending over to retrieve the previously dumped candy, and the whole debacle culminated in her ripping off her own arm after ensnaring a claw in a giant artificial spider web. Imagine The Little Mermaid as directed by Lars von Trier.

I dislike the trend of young girls dressing as sluts for Halloween. That said, I am perfectly fine with them dressing as S.L.U.T.s.

Here is Shaun White. And his snowboard.

These kids showed up on the porch and I said “are you John F. Kennedy and Jackie O?” and they said “yes”.

That happened exactly one time, by the way: where I thought (but wasn’t sure) I knew who a youngster was supposed to be, and hazarded a guess, and was right. Every other time I’d be like, “are you Harmony from the Bugaloos?” and the kid would roll her eyes and deign to inform me that, no, she was some tertiary character from book 9 of a 21 novel fantasy/anime/horror/romance series for young adults that I had never heard of, after which I would promptly die of old age.

Wait. I take that back. There were a few other kids dressed in recognizable (to me) outfits:

This group played “Let’s Get Physical” on a Walkman the size of a briefcase and performed a jazzercise routine for our benefit. We gave them all the remaining candy and some wine coolers.

All and all another successful year, if success is measured by the number of candy wrappers I pulled out of my jacket pocket during a work meeting the following morning. (Seriously, I was like a magician producing scarves.) And if I start now, I can probably complete that burning building costume in time for Thanksgiving. Good times.

Over on reddit, someone asked users to recount their “best one-liner moments“. This is easily mine:

I was in a high school humanities course, and the philosophy instructor was talking about the “essence” of things. For example, he said that a clock which stopped telling time could no longer be considered a clock, because the telling of time is the “essence” of clockness.

After giving a few more examples he plucked an empty paper cup from his desk, ripped out the bottom, and held it aloft. “What about this?” he asked the class. “Is this still a cup? I would say not.”

To which I replied, “I’m sorry, but I just don’t think your argument holds water.”

Pretty much the pinnacle of my career as a smartass.