One Ninety-Two, Where Are You?

Well, it's finally happened. After months of holding steady, (what some might call "festering stagnation"), I lost another follower.

Where, oh, where did I go wrong?

This, of course, is inevitably what happens when you don't blogvertise, when you don't blogket, when you don't netblog or tweet or slit the slitted sheet on which you sit.

One day random Wednesday, some funky chick in Morgantown, West Virginia or wherever wakes up, looks at her blog roll and says,

"My Masonic Apron-- what the fuck is this cock?" and she hits "Un-Follow."

Un-followed. I have been unfollowed. The blogging equivalent of "De-friended."

Zoinks. That's a real kick in the cyberballs.

The thing is, though, it isn't really. When I look and see that I have (now) 191 followers, I laugh. Because, really, I don't. You know me and my obsessive ways-- I check the stats of this blog daily, because I'm curious, still, even after all these months and these 780 posts or whatever it is. I'm curious about peoples' reading habits. I would say maybe, maybe twenty to twenty-five different individual people read this blog regularly.

191 followers? Please.

I'll not deny that it's an ego boost to look over there on the righthand side of my screen and see all those avatars supposedly representing people who actually read my blog, but I know it's a falsehood. A long time ago, when I was a twenty-something, "My Masonic Apron" was the Featured Blog for some month on 20sb, and an assload of people all-of-a-sudden started "following" my blog. But I don't think it would be unfair to say that most of them do not read it anymore. I wonder how many of them did to begin with. When something's deemed fashionable, the shocks on that bandwagon get awfully worn.

That this blog was ever fashionable, even if it was in a small, fleeting way, still to this day kind of blows my mind. It's antithetical, of course, to the very principles and ideals this blog was founded on, and I do recollect myself becoming a little bit of a blog whore in those days when I was trying very hard to gain readers. I would hit up random peoples' blogs and do what I despised people doing to me: I would read five or six of their posts, make witty comments and hope they would follow me. So that, you know, I could dominate the world and shit while wearing a studded, vinyl face-mask and pink patent-leather chaps.

I tried to remain loyal to the blogs that I found during that period in my life, but most of those bloggers have since stopped blogging and, if they haven't, I've stopped being interested. Now, I read maybe three blogs. I've grown apathetic. I've grown... old.

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me when I get unfollowed, and, if I'm surprised by any aspect of it, I expect it's mostly surprise that a person would actually expend the effort to un-follow me as opposed to just stop reading. I'll admit that I harbored a minimal delusion that I would somehow hit 200 followers before I'd written my 1,000th post, but I don't think that's going to happen. Readership has reached a very modest plateau, and, without putting myself out there and being a rocked-out-with-my-cock-out blogwhore, there is no way new readers will hear about My Masonic Apron, and I'm kind of okay with that.

Speaking of the 1,000th post, that seemed to me to be a good, ceremonious place to shut it all down as I was thinking about such things. As I mentioned, I'm about 220 posts away from that milestone, and I haven't quite decided about what I'm going to do when the odometer rolls around. I guess where I am in life at that point matters somewhat-- will I have more to say that I haven't already said four or five different times in slightly different, more-or-less neurotic ways in previous posts. I know I've repeated myself here a hundred times, and I don't very much care about that. But the fact remains that everything must have an end, and I'm finding myself at one of those times where I'm wondering what the point is.

As I suspect former follower 192 was probably wondering a little bit, too.

A Erranding We Shall Go

"Everybody does it," my wife said last night as we were chatting.

And, no, she wasn't talking about licking ecstacy pills out of a 20-year-old girl's innie on the floor of a nightclub. She was talking about erranding at work.

My wife is an intinerant speech-langugage pathologist. She goes traipsing about to children's homes and store-front daycare facilities and, if you think she can resist the temptation to hit up a fabric store in between appointments, well, then you just crazy, girl.

"One of my coworkers came into the office from seeing clients yesterday carrying bags from Pathmark, which she then put in the work refrigerator until she was ready to go home."

I guess we do all do it. Efficiency experts and corporate Hitlers call this practice "Time-Theft." There was a funny "The Office" episode about it, and it involved stopwatches, fornication, immunity, peeing in soda bottles, and Outback Steakhouse gift certificates. Obviously, it was an episode of the American "The Office."

I steal from my company all the time, and I don't feel bad about it, because my company steals from me. What does it steal? My time. Oh, and my soul, my will to live and procreate, my good nature and countenance, and the best years of my life. So, bearing that in mind, would I feel even the slightest bit guilty about, say, blogging from work?

No.

Why?

Because I work in an office for eight, sometimes nine-and-a-half hours straight without any proper, prescribed lunch break. Is that legal? I don't think so. But I am expected to work through my lunch, with my boss constantly yammering into my ear until I develop tinnitus or aural herpes, mindlessly shoving forkfuls of salad into my mouth while I manage spreadsheets or attendance lists or compose worthless emails.

So, I blog from work-- and IDGAS.

Totes.

I can remember, though, the first time I did a personal errand on work time, and I was practically shitting myself.

Greg and I were working the ambulance together on one sunny June day back in 2005. Greg was a huge black man with puffy, scruffy facial hair that looked phony, but wasn't. He spoke in a gruff voice, but he was actually very kind. He taught me how to drive an ambulance, even though I was supposed to have learned, you know, in a class. He really taught me. Greg had two cellphones clipped to his belt-- one for "family" and one for "bi'niss." Sometimes, while I'd be in the back of the truck tending to a patient, Greg would simultaneously conduct family affairs on one phone, bi'niss relations on his other phone, and handle the EMS radio, all at the same time. It was like watching a circus act, or a symphony conductor at work. Amazing. One of Greg's daughters had become Muslim ("I don't get it-- but if she happy, who cares?") and he would gruffly answer the phone when she called, "BAGEERA?! SALAM ALEKEM!"

Anyway, on this warm June day, Greg decided that he needed a new swimsuit, and he drove the ambulance to the parking lot of JOMAR, a huge discount clothing store for peeps in the hood. I needed a new dress shirt, but I was petrified about going in. I mean, after all, I was on the clock.

"Should we tell dispatch where we are?"

"Man! Are you crazy? Naw!" he said to me, his eyes bugging out of his head, "Everybody does this-- this is the way it is."

And then it hit me: this is how they can get away with paying us $11.00-an-hour for busting our asses schlepping 400-pound comatose bastards around Philly-- because they know that, during downtime, we're picking up our laundry or mailing our letters or going food shopping. As long as we're not in another county or time-zone and as long as we can be reached on the radio, I guessed that it was anything goes.

And so I bought two dress shirts and a tie. For $11.00. One hour's work, and thank you very much.

Two of my other partners on the squad, however, had slightly different ideas about on-the-clock errands.

Tom was a paramedic in his early forties. Coming to work to start his shift on time was like a disease to him, and he avoided it in the way that a germaphobe touches doorknobs with Kleenex and sprays Chloraseptic onto cabinet handles. I only worked three shifts with Tom in my time at this company, and, during each of these shifts some sort of errand or personal recreation was included.

Shift 1: On suspicion that his wife was cheating on him, Tom drove me, in our ambulance, 28 miles away to a hospital in Delaware (where his wife worked) to stalk his wife and see if he could get a look at her suspected lover's vehicle. Tom was driven to this action by his son's statement, "Mommy's boyfriend drives a Mazda Tribute." We saw two Mazda Tributes in this hospital's parking lot.

Shift 2: While not really an "errand," Tom hopped into our truck half-an-hour late for the start of his shift and threw a basketball, a towel, and a change-of-clothes into the ambulance. Ever play "P-I-G?" he asked me. It sounded to me like a game Laura Ingalls Wilder would have invented. "No," I said. He drove us to a basketball court. We played. I lost. Pig.

Shift 3: "We've got to go to Camden," Tom said as he put the ambulance into gear. "Why?" I asked. Tom looked at me and his face twitched everso slightly. "Traffic court." Tom parked the ambulance near the municipal building in Camden. This was a place where you not only kept the windows up and the doors locked, but you prayed in several different tongues that you would go home with no unnatural holes in your face.

"Be right back," Tom said to me. He took the keys to the truck, and the radio. He came back an hour-and-a-half later. His hair was all fucked up, he was covered in sweat, and his pupils were the size of pinheads. He smelled like a German Olympic team's locker room.

"We've got a call," he said, hitting the lights and the siren. He must have driven 80 miles an hour the entire way back to Philly-- illegally, I might add. I was sure I was going to die, and was almost disappointed when I didn't.

"I'm not working with that guy anymore," I said to my supervisor the next morning, "ever again."

"Don't worry about it," the supervisor replied. Two days later, Tom was fired for stealing over $8,000 worth of gas on the company Sunoco card.

For all of Tom's peculiar erranding, my partner Mitch, though, takes the cake and pawns it. Mitch was always being threatened with litigation, termination, extermination-- anything that ended in "ation" really. Consequently, he was always in need of a buck. As a medic, he made double what I made, but half his money went to child support, so we took home the same amount each week, which was sad for both of us. One day, in need of some fast cash, Mitch, 300 pounds and resembling a shaven yeti, turned to me and said,

"We gotta go to my place and take care of something."

He always wore mirror-tinted sunglasses and not seeing his eyes scared the bejompers out of me.

He told me to back the ambulance up to his front door, "so no one will see what we're doin'." It was 6:30 in the morning. As I put the ambulance in reverse, the "BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!" warning signal that alerts playing schoolchildren that an ambulance is about to run them over rang out into the chilly morning air.

"TURN THAT MOTHERFUCKIN' COCK OFF!" he roared at me. And I did.

I sat in the driver's seat of the truck for maybe fifteen minutes. I heard his front door shut and I looked in the side mirror and saw him carrying two very long objects, wrapped in blankets. I distinctly saw a muzzle sticking out from one of the blankets. Oh, good, I thought, so this is how my life is going to end. At least I know. It was almost comforting.

"Get out of the driver's seat," he told me. And I gladly did.

"I need some fuckin' money-- the landlord's after me, so I'm selling some of my guns."

Some?

"Rifle and a shotgun-- should get me some decent cash."

And he drove us to a pawnshop and he went in through the back door. Mitch was a back-door kind of guy. 10 minutes later, he came out with a wad of cash in his ground-chuck fist. He lunged into the truck and shut the door.

"Three-hunnert," he said to me in his trademark Cro-English, "not fuckin' bad, eh, bitch?"

When it came time for me to get Mitch fired, I read up on Pennsylvania law and EMS statutes. Who would have thought it was a felony to transport firearms inside of an ambulance?

Time-theft, though, ain't even a misdemeanor. Bitch.

The Cake Up My Ass

It all started when my shoelace broke off in my hand.

I mean-- shoelaces are supposed to be like cockroaches, right? Indefuckingstructable. Especially on a pair of Doc Martens that I haven't even owned for four months. Obviously the shoelaces on Doc Martens are not impervious to fat, acid rain, gluten, locusts, etc, etc.

Then, my car wouldn't start. To be more accurate, the key wouldn't turn in the ignition. At all. I was fulfilling one of my sworn duties as a non-profit lackey, going to Staples and purchasing a huge box of Avery 5160 mailing labels-- easily one of my least favorite errands, and, when I got back inside my car, the key wouldn't turn. I took the key out. I put the key in. I jiggled the steering wheel gently at first, then I shook it like it was a paint can and I was the MAB mixer. I fucked the ignition lock with the key like I was an epileptic on PCP, but it would not turn. I called my boss to tell her what was going on and to let her know that I might very well be late returning to the office.

Then I called Soly, my often irate, unpredictable, sixty-two-year-old Israeli mechanic. His younger, harder-to-understand Chinese employee, Jack, answered the phone. He told me to jiggle the wheel.

"I did that, Jack. Do you have any other ideas, please?"

He passed the phone off to Soly without even saying "hold on" or "goodbye" or "no."

"Do you have a hammer?" Soly asked me. I laughed. Who, besides Bob Villa, wouldn't laugh at that question.

"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LAUGHING AT?" Soly screamed at me, "Do you have a goddamn hammer or not?!"

"NO!" I yelled back, "I do NOT have a hammer. I do NOT DRIVE AROUND WITH A HAMMER IN MY CAR!"

"Okay, okay" he says, feigning that he's offended. "Are you wearing shoes?"

I resisted the urge to laugh again.

"Yes, Soly. I am wearing shoes."

"Are they good shoes?" he asked. It was sixty-five degrees out and I was boiling inside this car.

"They're good shoes. They're Doc Martens, in fact, with a broken shoelace," I replied.

"WHAT?"

"Nothing, they're good shoes."

"Okay," he said, "take one shoe off, and beat the key into the ignition. Four or five times. Hard-- not hard to break the key, but hard."

And so I took off my shoe and I beat the hell out of the key. I felt a little ridiculous doing this in the middle of the Staples parking lot, but I did it because Soly told me to do it. If he had told me that dressing up like the Queen Mother and singing the Chinese national anthem while sticking my finger up a fish's asshole would start my car, I would have done that, too.

Do fish have assholes?

And, don't you know-- the motherfucking car started.

"Okay, goodbye," Soly said after hearing the car turn over.

"Wait, wait, wait," I protested, "there's no 'goodbye' yet. Is this going to happen again?"

"Probably," Soly said.

"Well, what the hell do I do when this happens again?"

"Same thing. You obviously have magic shoes."

When I got home from work, I found that our computer had been completely assraped by a Trojan virus. I'm blogging from work. (Shhhhhh!)

Then, on my smartphone, which suddenly seems very smart when your CPU is sitting in the back of your car that often refuses to start, I received an email from a woman named Lisa. The subject line was "20sb featured blogger."

I knew that, on March 8, she wasn't already telling me that I'd won. I knew it was more bad news. But I opened it anyway. Here's what it said, word for word:

"Hello, Mr. Apron!

I'm Lisa, the founder and chief admin of 20SB. I just want to make sure that you realize that the high number of females who have been featured isn't some sexist ploy. Only 14% of our members are male, yet by my last count, 25% of our featured bloggers are. Our list of featured bloggers represents some very diverse demographics, and I'm super proud of that. But also- each featured blogger was voted for by the community at large in a process that's as democratic as democratic gets!

-Lisa

ps. I'm not sure how you decided that insulting everybody who has previously been featured is the best campaign plan, but hey, do what you gotta do."

Well, that was pretty much the icing on the cake of a day meant to be lubed up with poisoned icing and shoved up my ass by a waiter named Babyfucker Jones.

Lisa, I don't know who the hell you are, but my computer and my car and my goddamn fucking shoelace are all broken, you know what I mean? There's earthquakes in Turkey and Chile and Haiti and Karl Rove is an asshole and the polar ice caps are drowning the polar bears or whatever, and I'm really not terribly interested in the statistics of how many members of 20something bloggers have penises and how many have vaginas. I don't know who you think I've insulted or how, but, if I've insulted anyone who was a featured blogger before, I'm very sorry.


It's funny, I know of at least one former featured 20sb bloggers who is a follower of my blog, and that's Lilu, and she's pretty hard to insult. So, Lisa, Chief Administrator of 20sb, the site that you're "super proud" of-- perhaps you ought to ask people if they're insulted before presuming that they are, and then taking time out of your day to insult and offend someone else who takes at least an hour out of every day of his life to share some creativity and humor with a very tiny chunk of the world. And I'll tell you something else, if this is the kind of hypersensitive horseshit that goes on in the 20sb world, then the last thing I would want is to be featured on that site.

You may notice that I've removed the link including Paris Hilton's admittedly hot and overfondled tot that was used as a link to vote for me for this supposed "honor." How silly of me to forget for a moment that the reason I blog isn't for recognition or accolades, it's to make other people happy.

Thanks for your email.

Newsbites

This is, unfortunately, going to be a very quick and short post, because I am due at my sister's apartment soon. I am to bring coffee and breakfast for both of us. This is the price we uncles pay for wanting to see our cute, new nephews. Remember that.

While I'm not generally in favor of restrictions on the media, I do think it should be illegal for any television news organization to report on a story that features a video clip shorter than three seconds-- five when played in slow-motion.

My wife and I this morning suffered through a four-minute interview piece (and two 10 second teasers) about the baby carriage falling under the train (and miraculously, no one got hurt!) and the clip was played, honest-to-God, approximately twelve to fourteen times. I wish I could say exactly how many times it was aired, but it was a little difficult to keep track. It was played while the mom was talking, because we can't possibly be asked to look at a static image of some non-airbrushed, non-celebrity talking for fifteen seconds without being shown grainy video of her running after her child's carriage twice in seven seconds. And we certainly can't listen to Matt & Meredith banter about it together after the interview's conclusion without seeing the video again.

Twice.

The long and short of it is: news organizations, if you can even call them that, should be banned from reporting these non-stories that would never have made the news in the first place if they weren't caught on video tape to begin with. If they can't use the video clips responsibly (i.e., maybe showing it once, for Christ's sake) then they shouldn't be permitted to report on them at all.

And, for the love of God-- no more cars-driving-into-peoples-houses stories either, please. And no more bungee-cord jumps gone awry, or "routine traffic stops" gone awry, no more wild animals attacking people, no more celebrity nip-slips, no more children falling down wells, no more dogs falling down wells, no more children catching baseballs and throwing them back onto the field, and no more fucking Hfucking1 Nmotherhump1.

Please.

No more.