Acceptance of Excellence

We eagerly rush from one meeting room to another. We are earnest and attentive. We are expected to be.

The course is Acceptance of Excellence. The motivator has been on Oprah. 'Nuff said. He tells us to visualize, optimize, upsize, categorize, fantasize. We only see him on tape, but he looks prosperous and there is a panel of eager and attentive fledglings amidst the potted plants. 

You create a sight picture then you fix items within your new context, like sales, salary and benefits. You are ever so much more successful than you believe. Most never realize their potential, and realization is a state of mind, after all.

He is an ex-football coach, our motivator. He never mentions his record. We assume it's excellent. 

Our business is selling ice cream. Our location is a summer tourist island. Our sales go up with our expectation and visualization after Memorial Day, and then we lose our focus around Labor Day. Every year it's like that. We spend our winter in meetings, mostly. How can we fix this attitude of ours? Why do we allow ourselves to wallow in the pit of despond?

Our recovery of Acceptance of Excellence rudiments takes six months. Come next Memorial Day, sales go through the roof. It's because in December we were ever so slothful and disbelieving. Also, some skipped the motivation seminars, and not all the chairs were filled at the optimizer meetings. 

But can you imagine how it would be were we not Expecting Excellence? It would be flat the whole year. We are so fortunate to have found our motivation. Now if we could only find out why we lapse so consistantly each fall.

Heart of Darkness

The news cuts away to someplace called "The Heart of Darkness." I listen, and it is not further located on any map.

A pretty lady in cammie gear speaks seriously to us before a backdrop of dense jungle. A tribe, she says. Not hunter/gathering, but planter/migrant, which means they place seed in the ground then leave.

Another tribe is more the hunter/gathering paradigm. They find fields which have been planted and abandoned. Then they harvest. Then they eat.

The planter migrants are extremely emaciated, whereas the hunter gatherers are definitely not.

We see a still shot of an obese native, chomping on an ear of corn.

The migrants captured a monkey, she tells us. They handcuffed him in front with a stake behind his back placed horizontally with both arms looped around it. Then they sent the monkey to the hunters.

From the studio: How big was the monkey, Felicia?
Felicia: Somewhere between a chimp and an orangutan.

Immediately the gathering tribe released the monkey. It did not, however, run off into the jungle, but it hung around. We figure it only wanted to see what would happen.

From the Heart of Darkness, this is Felicia, returning you to our studio ...

They Come In

I have a nice private room in a dorm atmosphere, but that is changing. There is in-coming.

They come in all the hours of the day and night. They stand and sit and discuss it in knots and they move all around. Some of them set up in my own room, and they make demands. For how can we even dress with you here? one exasperates.

Some of them are a network. A Christian network. The sect is called Carpe Diem*. They are all about in white robes, and then four of them are arrested. The news reports they have bilked an elderly man whose room they had taken over into signing over all his worldly goods. After all, they say, it's the way of the Lord, us meek should inherit.

Still they come.


* In Darkly Dreaming Dexter the title character Dexter mistakenly translates carpe diem as meaning `complain in daylight.'

Warming Trends

I am walking now. Someone is walking with me. She says, what will you say? This suggests, I will soon be talking.

I consider. They say walking the walk is the reality, while talking the talk is only bragging. That suggests a progression. Well, I'm already walking, and I didn't have to plan for it. So what do I need to study talking for?

But I look for a loose scrap to fill in notes. A magazine subscription request. I turn it over to see is there white on the back.

I think of Marilyn. She invented walking, in the movie Niagara. Long takes of her moving away from the camera. Walking scenes. I'll bet she didn't need more than one take on each of them, but I don't know. She sure needed plenty of takes on talking scenes; in Some Like It Hot she wore out her co-stars by messing up takes, some 70 in a row sometimes. That may be a record. For 70 clapboard snaps, she'd walk up and say, like, "It's Sugar, me."

Chaplin said the camera should be still. The only reason you move a camera is to film walking, and walking isn't dramatic. I wonder if he ever saw Niagara.

I am expected to introduce my new play. It's to be performed by a high school. I'm no longer in high school. I wasn't aware I would have to speak tonight. Isn't the play supposed to address itself?

Well, no. At least, I hope not. The play is about the fallacy of faith. There is a scene where guys out on the Chosin Reservoir are very cold, then they are glad, because their hands and feet are starting to warm up now. They can't feel the cold, then they can't feel anything. It's a light-hearted comedy, and nobody will catch on, so I'll just tell them it's all about global cooling.

Nobody ever knows anything. I used to worry about that, but I soon warmed to the idea.

Behind the Counter

I am on the wrong side of the counter.

It's a fast-food joint. I am training. It is presumed I know something. I am pretending to be a transfer who only needs catching up with local procedure. Maybe I'm writing an article on the life of a burger flipper.

Someone is showing me. Here is this, and there is that, and, watch out, it's hot. All this product goes in this cage and this other sits over here. A bell rings. That means that over there is cooling past where it should in relation to this over here.

It's all unrecognizable. What is all this "product"? I can't ask, or they'll realize I don't know. Which is the point of asking, but it means I ain't qualified if I don't know. Dumb is it's own retard.

This is Lifer Slim here. He's telling me about that over there. He's the that over there go-to guy. A lifer is over the age where you are only passing a summer. The kids laugh at them, and the lifers retaliate by making them do stuff. Slim is a nice one, though. You can tell the kids like him. He sits over on the counter out of sight with his lunch. (Brought from home, I note.)

The young girls set the tone. The customers like them and so do the lifers, so the boy kids do too, because the girls generally brighten up the place and everybody smiling is better than everybody not.

So it goes.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to mime acts of others, although it all makes no sense to me.