at a loss

I am truly at a loss for inspiration tonight. I feel compelled to continue this experiment and accept the place where I am, describe it, muck in the muck of it.

I went to the NaBloPoMo site to check on the writing prompt of the day. The question: What has been the happiest moment of your life thus far?

Really?

Oh my.

First of all, I’m a little low tonight, so a prompt about the happiest moment, not my favorite topic suggestion.

Second problem: I have a tiny teeny issue with decision making. So the idea that I could plunk down tonight and pick out one moment as the top shining moment? Are you kidding? I’m going to give myself a brain aneurism.

Not really.

There’s an optimist and a pessimist.

Wait, I’m not telling the joke right.

There’s this set of twins, an optimist and a pessimist. Have I told you this joke before? This team of psychologists doing a study puts the pessimist in a room full of every toy imaginable and tells him he can play with whatever he wants and they’ll be back in a little while. The optimist is put in a room with a big pile of manure.

The doctors check on the pessimist first. He’s still sitting in the same spot, hasn’t touched a single toy. Why? He explains, “I knew eventually you would come back and take all of this away from me so I decided, why bother.”

They go to the other room. There’s manure everywhere — on the walls, the ceiling, and in the middle of the pile is the optimist, digging like mad. “What are you doing?” they ask him. He answers, “With all this shit, there has to be a pony in here somewhere.”

This was more digression than illumination. What I meant to say was that an optimist would look at the prompt as an opportunity. It doesn’t have to be THE BEST MOMENT, just pick something good from your life and go. My pessimist says it HAS TO BE the best moment and I can’t decide that right now.

And even though I’d like to go optimist and write about a moment, I can’t help going pessimist meta and looking at the construction of what is starting to feel like quite a mean and/or evil topic.

If there is a happiest moment, doesn’t everything else pale? That’s kind of sad.

Or do we just go with the obvious ones: proposal, wedding day, birth of child.

What does the happiest moment feel like that is different from the just happy or happier moments?

What makes that leap from -er to -est?

Not to be a total pain in the ass about this, although I am intent on being a total pain in the ass about this (there must be a donkey in here somewhere), why is the value judgement valuable? I’d love to tell a story, any story right now.

Instead I have to think about what weight I give to a story, if it wins or not.

This is exactly the kind of Eeyore/Shleprock thinking I have been debating hiding from the 6 or so of you who read this blog.

One of the happiest moments of my life was the first time a feature story I wrote was published in the local alternative-weekly newspaper.

I’m too tired to do that story justice tonight. These are the fragments: I pitched the story by accident, over a bagel and cream cheese in the break room of the newspaper where I’d gotten a job selling ads because I just didn’t know how else to become a professional writer except to put myself in a building where people wrote stuff and that day the editor of the paper overheard me describing my friend’s new job to someone else. My friend was going around Southern California dressed as a giant slice of pizza, giving away prize money, as a wacky promotional campaign for the California Milk Advisory Board. John, the editor, suggested I get in touch with CMAB and do a ride-along with the Northern California actor-in-a-pizza-suit and write about it. And I did.

Best. Day. Ever.

Since I’ve already written that story in its entirety, I’ll just post a link where you can download it to read at your leisure: Cheesy 11-14-97.

If you would prefer an excerpt, here’s the part where I describe how he puts on the massive costume:

We park the van and the preparations begin. First he has to change into his special red tights, yellow satin-sleeved shirt, shiny yellow gloves, and massive yellow Converse hi-tops (size 13) with Real California Cheese logos. Then he goes around to the back of the van, pulls up the rear window, ducks inside—bending over at the waist, slides the cover off the costume, dives into the tip, and in one fluid motion slides the slice backward out of the van and forward up over his head. He’s exposed from the knees down and his arms and face look like errant pizza toppings. One heart-level pepperoni slice has been replaced by the Real California Cheese symbol. He’s probably five feet wide at the crust, eight feet tall, and about two feet thick, covered in foam, satin, and felt, pepperonis, green peppers, olives, and mushrooms. One more RCC logo adorns his back/crust, just in case he’s approached from behind.

It’s a wonder of nature watching Joseph maneuver this enormous mass through doorways, into elevators. Once the costume’s on, he’s all business, his walk as brisk as his accent. I get that feeling again that Cheesy is really a New Yorker (blasphemy). I have to run to keep up. As we pass by, people have one of two reactions: either they openly stare, usually with a half-smile and some kind of comment: “You look delicious!” says one woman. “So do you, honey!” Cheesy replies and then immediately reprimands himself for besmirching his wholesome image; or they pretend not to notice, averting their eyes as if he were some kind of unfortunate atrocity (“That poor boy, it’s not his fault he was born in the shape of a slice of pizza”).

The part that isn’t in the story is how the actor also worked a visit to a strip club into our itinerary, had me photograph him in the pizza suit with a gaggle of semi-clad strippers, and how we took the film (this is how long ago this was) to a 1-hour photo and had two sets of prints made (remember “double prints”!) so I could have one set to keep for myself.

Not the brightest move on his part.

I was delighted that I was getting such colorful material to include in my big story.

The most surreal aspect of this event was that I have never before or since been inside a strip club. Much less a strip club in an industrial-ish part of Sacramento, at lunchtime. The girls were all your heart-of-gold types, young and friendly. One asked me if I was there to audition.

A few days later, pizza-guy ended up admitting to his handlers that this field trip had occurred and they basically freaked out. He called and begged me not to include it.

We had a meeting at the newspaper, me and the senior editors, to discuss whether or not to publish the strip club part of the story. We decided that if he had been a famous actor, we would have used it. But since he was just some guy hired to walk around in a pizza suit, his misbehavior wasn’t really newsworthy.

So the dairy people kept their wholesome rep. I alluded to the unsavory behavior in the story and pretended that we didn’t follow through. And somewhere in my archives, I still have those photos. The best part of the roll actually isn’t the Slice and the ladies. It’s a picture of me, in the parking lot, taking a turn posing in the giant slice-of-pizza costume.