Up My Conch

Some people think I’m a snob. And, maybe, they’re right. After all, I haven’t worn a pair of overalls since I was four, I don’t say things like “How you’s doin’?” and “I gots fitty cent,” and “I enjoy watching Dr. Phil,” and I’ve never driven a car with rust accents, spinners, or a confederate flag license plate.

I’ve also never eaten at Red Lobster.

You can’t get away from their commercials though. They’re insidious and infectious and invading one’s subconscious. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched a “Red Lobster” commercial and viewed a powerful hand crushing a lemon slice, sending orgasmic spritzes of juice hurtling towards an unsuspecting lobster tail or succulent shrimp piled high on a bed of fluffy rice.

It’s sealicious.

Be that as it may, however sea-ductive (okay, I’ve got to stop that now) the commercials may be, I’ve never been moved to enter a Red Lobster. They’re… around, sure, and I loves me my Sebastian legs, but, for whatever the reason—attribute it to snobbery if you must—I’ve abstained up until this point.

No one’s ever said, “Hey, Apron-fucker, let’s pile into the Volvs and head on over to Red Lobster.” Of course, I’ve never said that either.

Sometimes, I feel guilty about this… call it avoidance of Red Lobster. I mean, what’s the fucking problem? I like seafood. I like reasonable prices. There really shouldn’t be any reason why I wouldn’t go there. Is it the chain-ness of it? No. Chain-ness doesn’t stop me from lustily mouth-fucking a #7 at McDonalds on certain inauspicious mornings.

Maybe it’s the feeling that seafood is somewhat more… special? That it shouldn’t be reduced to some corporate formula, passed down to dozens and dozens of restaurants nationwide?

Why not?

When we were younger and smoother, my parents used to take us all out for dinner maybe once a month at a restaurant called The Little Inn. It wasn’t terribly far from our house, and it was mainly a place that catered to the hearing aid/diaper population. Elderly men would take their wives there to indulge their social security checks and enjoy the waning hours of their autumn years by sleepily sucking down some lobster bisque. The men would dress in impossibly-hued green blazers the shade of astro-turf and the ladies wore Mennonite-style floral dresses and purple hair was the order of the day.

Oh, and there were fucking animal heads and guns on the wall. Lots of guns. Lots of heads.

You’d think that dead deer and fucked-up fowl taxidermized and staring at you would freak one out as an eight-year-old child, but it didn’t bother me in the slightest. I greedily wolfed down surf-and-turf like it was nobody’s business. Inevitably, there would be sibling squabbles, which eventually got so heated that we were banned from returning. Banned, of course, by my parents.

Maybe having never been to Red Lobster was due, at least in part, to the Little Inn Effect (“LIE” – ooh!) I might very well have been… conditioned, in a way, to believe that seafood was something that ought only to be consumed at tables dressed in starched white whilst being stared at by dead… voles, or whatever the fuck those things were on the walls.

Yesterday, though, in honor of my birthday, my Red Lobster cherry was popped. By my father. At 12:05pm, I arrived for our lunch date at a park located down the street from the hospital where I work, and, as I got out of my car, I noticed my father standing by a picnic table, and on it were two enormous take-out containers. As I walked up to him, I artfully inquired,

“What the fuck is all this shit?”

“Red Lobster, Mummy. You can choose which one you want—shrimp scampi or shrimp jambalaya.”

And so, two tall, dark, handsome Jews sat in the park together, on the younger one’s birthday, eating seafood from Red Lobster. And, you know what? It was fucking great. Those cheddar biscuits? Amazed my balls off. My father, who must have been in a nautical frame of mind yesterday, remarked,

“I asked your sister if she wanted to come to lunch with us, but she said, ‘no’, which is okay, because she has been so fuckin’ up my conch lately.”

Bottoms Up. To Life. Up My Conch. Happy Birthday. I love you.

Help Me

As someone who used to work the streets as an EMT, who spent seventeen months of his life, day in and day out responding to calls for assistance-- you'd think I'd be more accustomed to the concept of asking for help.

I'm not.

Asking for help makes my skin crawl. It makes my ass sweat. It makes my eyes dart around like I'm on drugs. It turns me into an angry, frustrated, defeated bastard.

This morning, my wife and I were to pick up a vintage enamel-top kitchen cabinet to, well, put shit in (because we have lots and lots of shit) and we weren't sure it would *ahem* fit in my wife's Honda Fit.

"I'm going to call my coworker who has a Honda Pilot (a mammoth SUV inside of which we could park three Honda Fits) and ask if she'll drive us to the thrift shop to pick it up."

Cue: exasperated sighs.

Cue: resigned shrug of shoulders.

Cue: downcast eyes and forlorn expression.

What the fuck is my problem?

I don't know.

Sometimes it's about inconveniencing people. Sometimes it's about pride, and fearing that I'll look stupid or incompetent. Sometimes it's about admitting that I can't do something for myself. I would be a very bad quadraplegic.

I'm especially bad at asking for help at work. Ironically, I learned the most about asking for help during the time I was an EMT. When it came time to transport a 400+ pound patient, I was often the first voice on the radio calling for another unit to assist. More than anything else, I learned what it is like to depend on partner. And I found that I liked it.

Sort of.

After leaving EMS and entering office culture, I immediately erected walls around myself. When it came to PowerPoint, I fought my way through it blindly until my wife took me by the hand at home and helped me see the light. Spreadsheets were frustrating and mail merge fuckign label wizards almost drove me off the edge.

I can remember my first real job after college, working at a different non-profit-- I was put in charge of creating a template for a massive data collection project. I agreed to undertake the assignment without having any knowledge of what was expected of me. Two days before the thing was due, I had absolutely nothing to show. Harried, trapped, and at my wits end, I burst into the Program Coordinator's office, shut the door, and had a panic attack.

She was a decent, hard-working, German woman-- 6'1" with a bald spot and a fan of bulky snowflake sweaters and pictures of cats wearing clothes. She saved my ass in a very big way. And I learned that asking for help is not always a bad idea, and that it's probably best to ask for help before you start experiencing difficulty breathing.

In a CPR class I took once, the instructor said that more men die from choking than women because men 1.) think they can get the stuck piece of food out by themselves and 2.) don't want to create a scene.

"If a woman's choking in a restaurant, she'll generally stand up and start flapping her arms or banging on the table. Men, though, a tough ass bastard will stand up and quietly go to the bathroom. And, usually, he'll die there. One time, I was at Red Lobster and I heard coughing at the next table over, and then this guy went real quiet and left the table. I followed him into the bathroom, and the sonofabitch was lying on the floor, totally blue."

"Did you save him?" asked one eager student.

"Fuck no-- he was dead!"

I'm still largely incapable of asking for help when a mail merge is giving me agita, but one thing is for sure, if I'm at Red Lobster and a piece of tail gets stuck in my windpipe, I'll play a fucking Sousa march on my dick to get your attention.

Oh, who the hell am I kidding? I wouldn't be caught dead in a Red Lobster. You know that.