My dead friend Gary used to call it arbitrary use of inconsequential authority. I call it working with assholes.

At nine this morning, the PR office approved my new site design. I made a couple of their arbitrary changes, knowing full well that once they saw them in action, they'd hate them. I sent the design off to be made real.
At two this afternoon, the PR office called to say they'd changed their minds about the morning approval and wanted everything different.

My boss called the PR boss, who wouldn't take his call, and left for the day without calling him back. Her flunky couldn't say what was wrong or unacceptable with the design except that I'd done it.

Later in the day I received another call, from someone much higher up the food chain. Based on a misunderstanding of what they were looking at, I was told to remove all the links from our site to the on-line baby photos. The argument was made that we have a hard enough time keeping our babies safe from baby-napping without putting their little pictures on the web.

Yep. Potential baby-nappers shop for babies on-line, I guess.

To steal one of my favorite Dilbert lines: Rats cry when they hear about my job.

I'm off to make myself a slushee. I have a little kid-type ice shaver, and I'm going to make one in my favorite flavor: martini.

Chin chin, sweeties.

Someone asked about an item on my 100 Things list: they wanted me to tell the whole story about the night I met P.J. O'Rourke in a bar.

Let me set the stage. It is March, 1977, and I am living in New York City, in the Village, to be exact. I have just turned 22. This is the opening night party for what will become, for a time, one of the hottest night clubs in the city, The Lone Star Cafe. There is a sizable contingent of Texans living in New York at the time, enough that the New Yorker makes up an acronym (TINYs: Texans Living In New York) and many jokes for/about them.
The Lone Star is at the lower end of 5th Avenue, and sports on its roof a 10-foot sculpture of an iguana, complete with red neon eyes. Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys will become the unofficial house band. I will meet BB King and Lucille there. I will see and hear most of the best country/rock/blues bands of the day. My girlfriend and I will personally cause the cut "Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goal Posts of Life" to be removed from the jukebox because we will play it over and over and over and laugh ourselves sick each time.

But that's all in the future. This is opening night, and they are throwing a Texas Independence Day Party to introduce the bar to the city. And I am there, wearing, what is for me, my casual uniform: a Hawiian print shirt and a pair of army fatigues. I'm drinking shots of Cuervo Gold and backing them with Dos Equis Darks. I am slightly drunk and very, very jolly.

I see, across the room, one of my personal heros. There is PJ O'Rourke, editor of the National Lampoon, one of the best and the brightest of my generation. He is tall and handsome and arguably the funniest person I have ever read. He has not yet become an apologist for the Right Wing. I am going to meet him. I just need to think of an opening line that would be worthy of his genius (and mine).

I go up to him, poke him gently in the ribs with my beer, and say "Hey! Who are you and what are you doing with PJ O'Rourke's face on the front of your head?"

He looks down his patrician nose, from his great height of six-foot and change and says "I AM PJ O'Rourke. What do you want?"

I say, quoting PJ, as a matter of fact: "Lick you all over for a dime. C'mon PJ, say something funny."

What he said was "Get the hell away from me." So I did.

I ended up talking to a man who was a writer for the Atlantic Monthly (I think. There had been a bit more tequilla and beer by then.) We were brilliant. The banter and rapier-like wit between us was worthy of the best odd-ball comedy of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. Or Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. He finally said, rubbing his cheeks, where they hurt from having laughed so long and so hard, "You are the funniest woman I have ever met in my life. You need to meet my friend, because he's the funniest man I know. Hey! PJ, come over here, I want you to meet this girl."

PJ still didn't find me amusing "We've met." and took George and left.

Somewhere around 3 in the morning a guy tried to sing the Texas A&M fight song. He was thrown out into the snow by a very angry mob of UT alumni (HOOK 'EM HORNS) and the doors were locked behind him. I had found my neighborhood bar.

PS: there's still time to vote on my BlogMadness entry "Back Home."

Several years ago, my then-boss said to me words that have remained seared on my brain. She said them in front of witnesses. She said:

"I don't want you to come to this meeting. Nobody wants to hear what you have to say. You're only going to tell us what we are doing wrong. This doesn't have to be done right, it only has to be done."
Today I had to go to that same person's office and talk to one of her flunkys about the same topic that she didn't want to hear about then. The bulk of my conversation went like this: "I really couldn't say." "I don't know the answer to that." "Really? You'll have to talk to my boss about that."

Believe it or not, that was good on my part because what I really wanted to say was: "I'm not about to stick a hand into that tar baby. There's no fucking way I'm touching that topic with a ten foot pole." "Why would it be any of your business?" and "Fuck you and die a slow, lingering death. You are an incompetent bitch working for an incompetent idiot bitch and you have absolutely no clue about anything."

Then I came back and sat in my boss's office for twenty minutes and cursed like a sailor for having had to suffer through the meeting. I am a foot soldier in a turf war and just because they're losing, that doesn't mean that the other party isn't going to inflict casualties and damage wherever possible.

No wonder I had a feeling of dread all week.

I came home and sat in the big comfy chair and listened to the rain on my roof. I finished a book. I drank hot tea. I played with my dog. I'm feeling much better now, thank you.

Sixteen stories below my office window is the elevated rail system known as MetroRail. There is a station there. There is a train in the station. Below the train is a body. Whether she jumped or was, as speculated by the guards, "sucked under" the train is anybody's guess.

Train service has been halted. The news helicopters circled for half an hour or so, making a racket and hoping for a glimpse of body, of blood, for the early news.

The train doors are open. The guards and police and EMTs are wandering up and down the platform. The fire rescue vehicle is long gone. The rubber neckers are not.

Because my window overlooks this scene, the guys from the offices across the hall have been coming in all afternoon, offering opinions, watching for any movement or body bags.

Vultures against the glass, alas.

I woke this morning to a general feeling of unease. Malaise. Free floating anxiety. I'm waiting for my phone to ring with bad news.

I don't know why this is, but I've been off balance since last weekend when I went to visit the 'rents. My father is disappearing, but my mother has already left the building.

She denied ever being "that woman's mother." That woman being me.

She knows that my father is "the man who takes care of [her]" but not what his relationship is.

She is blind in one eye and can't see out of the other.

She barely remembers how to eat, or walk. She can't follow a simple order, like "pick up your foot."

I have to go back this weekend. Do I know how to show myself a good time, or what.

BlogMadness

I won the first round, and the excellent SeaDoc is in the runoffs. I begged shamelessly and repeatedly for votes in the first round, and although, to judge by the other division scores, I wasn't the worst offender, the judges made bad tsking sounds over that. I feel guilty, and I don't even know if the rant was directed at me. But, well, it's a cultural thing. Guilt? I got it.

Nevertheless, I will note that I'm in an elimination round, and would deeply appreciate any and all votes I might get that would allow me to keep playing. Again, I'm #18, the entry is Back Home, and I'm up against an Open Letter To Atari.

Thank you. And if you can't feel it in your heart to vote for me, would you just sign the guest map?

Sounds like a Monty Python skit, a little bit, doesn't it? Sort of a cross between the Spam skit and the Gammy Leg/Eat Me First skit.

But it isn't. I was used to seeing Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen's names in my in-box because I'm subscribed to Sony's music service, and whenever there's another "essential" release, they let me know. I hate to break this to them, but I have all the essentials, just not on one CD... except for the one I cut myself out of my collected works. But I digress.

I've given up all hope that one day one of those sent-by Bruce or Bob messages will actually be from one of them, but I still get a little fantasy thrill when their names pop up.

Madonna, on the other hand, has no business knowing my e-mail address. So imagine my surprise when she wrote me (personally, I'm sure) to tell me why she's supporting Gen. Wesley Clark. Her rather imaginative capitalization and punctuation aside, there was nothing there for me to see. I read the missive from morbid curiosity, and then sighed, thinking "THAT ought to just be another nail in his political coffin." and sent her note to the trash.

But celebrity spam seems to becoming a trend. The past two weeks have seen me get a note from Michael Douglas (he's against guns and for joining the NRA Blacklist -- and a little too late on that one, Mikey, I signed up months ago), and William H. Macy & Felicity Huffman (who appear to be married and sharing an e-mail addy) suggesting that I do more to support Roe v Wade. How does Bill know what I've been doing, anyway? And why is my contribution up for debate?

Celebrity e-mails, another curse of the computer age.