Day One

Saturday, Jan. 20, 2018

Today is so boring. The internet isn’t working. No one’s internet is working. Neither is the TV.

That’s not exactly true.

The radio says the internet is fine. It says it’s just parts of the internet like Google and Facebook and Netflix. So none of the important parts of the internet are working, not even Twitter, and neither is the… I don’t remember what it’s called. The thing that sends you to the websites you want to go to. I can’t even sneak any porn, because porn isn’t working, either.

Supposedly, if you know how to tell your computer to go directly to the website you want to go, if it’s one that is working, something about ports or something, your computer will do it. Because the Internet works. For local stuff mostly. But who even knows how to do that sort of thing.

Which means the internet is broken.

Technically, the TV works, too. If I choose the antennae option, I can watch the local stations. Except they’re all fuzzy because we don’t have an antennae. No one has antennaes. Why would anyone have an antennae? Old people maybe. There’s nothing on local channels anyway. Who even watches those either?

Old people.

My dad is mad because there was no paper. No newspaper. Because no one gets newspapers anymore because why would you get a newspaper when everything is online? Just that old guy down the street gets a paper, and he probably doesn’t even have a computer is why. He’s mean, anyway, and it’s probably because he doesn’t have a computer. It hasn’t even been one day, and I’m mad about not having a computer.

But the old guy didn’t get his newspaper today. I know because he accused me of taking it just because I was walking down the street. I was walking down the street because Mom yelled at me because I was bugging her about the computer, and Dad yelled at me because there was no newspaper for him to go buy. So my dad was mad because he couldn’t find a newspaper to buy and the old guy was mad because he didn’t get his, so called me names and accused me of stealing it.

Why would I even want some stupid newspaper?

Then the radio said there wasn’t a newspaper for today at all. Because of the internet. Is the newspaper just for people who don’t have computers? If they don’t have the internet, they can’t get news, so why have them if you have a computer?

Mom has been listening to the news on the radio all day, so I can’t even turn on any music. She keeps telling me to read a book or something. Or study. Find a way to occupy myself.

At least she quit telling me to go outside and play. Like I’m a little kid. It’s too cold and wet. And she yelled at me for getting mud all over the floor when I did go out. Because I thought it might be better outside than inside because I was just getting yelled out inside, but then I got yelled at outside, too, by the old guy, and it was raining a little bit, so outside was worse.

There’s no one to talk to on the phone, either, because the phone keeps telling me that all the lines are busy. I suppose that means it’s also working but without working. Like everything else today.

Except the radio. Which Mom won’t let me use.

Today sucks.

I tried to find a book, but I couldn’t find anything I wanted to read. While I was looking, the President was on the radio. Not live or anything, but he recorded a message. He wasn’t live because of there not being any internet. Well, not because of the internet but because of whatever is causing the problem with the internet. He wants it back, too. He’s mad about not having Twitter. He said it’s a disaster.

He's also blaming it on China. Maybe. Mom says he thinks it’s China but there’s no proof. He didn’t say it’s some fat guy in his mother’s basement, though, not this time. He also didn’t say it’s the Russians, but I think he’s scared to say that. He keeps making deals with Russia and they keep changing them. Just like Darth Vader in Empire.

Trump said we’re at war and we’re going to destroy them… just as soon as we figure out who we’re at war with.

I hope it’s just a technical problem, though, like a line being down somewhere. I guess it would have to be a big line. Maybe a satellite crashed. But they’d probably know if that happened.

Now I’m bored AND scared, and I just wish I could go on Facebook or something and see what’s going on with my friends. If I could do that, though, there wouldn’t be a problem, and I wouldn’t be bored or scared.

What if we are at war?

"...one of -those- weekends."

Softball update as we approach the end of the season:
They did lose the game I thought they'd lose (which makes us 9-4, at the moment), but the coach of the other team (the undefeated team, I should add) said we were their toughest competition all season (both times we played them).

And here's a new one I heard at Saturday's game (spoken by the opposing coach to one of his batters as she was getting struck out):
"I can't come and swing it for you."

So, yeah, Saturday started bright and early with a softball game. Prior to the softball game was gassing the car and retrieving coffee. After the softball game was the end-of-season party even though the season isn't quite over yet. Evidently, you can't actually have the end-of-season party after the season ends because no one will show up, because, you know, the season is over. [Let me clarify, this was the end-of-season party for just my daughter's team (yes, there's a reason I'm clarifying).]

Then it was rush home and get the final cleaning in on the house before my daughter's 10th birthday slumber party. [Are you seeing a theme here, yet?] It was a small one this year, because we inadvertently planned the party for the same night as a school fundraiser which involved going to an A's game. [See, not being a baseball fan, I had completely dismissed the fundraiser in my mind so didn't realize we were planning my daughter's party for the same time slot.] She lost several of her friends to the game, so, on the one hand, I felt  bad for my daughter (and for her friends that were upset that they were going to miss the party), but, on the other hand, it was kind of "yeah! we'll only have nine girls!" (instead of 15). Still, nine girls make a lot of noise. [Seriously, the girls never stop talking and I can't hear any one of them over the constant chatter, and there's always at least one of  them trying to talk to me. Parties for my son (the younger one) are never like that.]

And one of them climbed a tree and got "stuck" and, then, went home because I didn't cause a drama over the situation. Basically, I told her she could stay in the tree or I could go get her parents (she actually lives next door, so that was an option (and also why she could just go home)), but she didn't like those options, so she came down (I watched her climb back out of the tree) and, upon arriving back at our house, announced that she had decided she would go home to sleep, which was fine with me. And, while I was dealing with TreeGirl, two of the other girls chased my cat down the street. When I say street, I mean, they chased the cat down the middle of the street to almost a block away. This was after I had told one of the two, specifically, to leave the cat alone, because he wouldn't come to her anyway. And he didn't, so they chased him. Then I had to go fetch him back which was also a bit of a chase, because he was freaked out by all the girls to begin with and, then, by being chased by two of them.

And the night just got better and better as they achieved a kind of synthetic agreement to not sleep. They've never done this before. At previous sleepovers my daughter has had, by the end of the movie, most of them have been asleep. That happens when you start the movie around 10:00 p.m. But not this time. No, at the end of the movie, they were all still awake. So I had to put in another movie. I do plan ahead, though, so I already had one set out. However, I wasn't able to make it through the second movie. The girls had mostly calmed down (after another incident of going off and doing what she was told not to do by the girl that had been told not to go after the cat), and my eyes were melting out of my skull, so I went to bed. I want to say that was around 1:30 a.m., but I'm not really sure.

And I say I went to bed, because I never really went to sleep. There was talking and some amount of moving around and such once I went off to go to bed, which elevated when I heard The Goonies being over. I just waited it out hoping they'd go to sleep, and, eventually, I nodded off sometime after 3:00 a.m., which I know because I got up to go to the bathroom just prior to the nodding and checked the time while I was up. It was short lived. At around 4:00 a.m., I was awakened by one of the girls doing her best Lionel Richie impression, by which I mean that she was dancing on the ceiling. Or something. Maybe galloping through the house on her ghost steed. I'm not sure if she was alone in the cavorting that was going on or if she was the only one brave enough to respond to my shout down the hall that no one was supposed to be up:
"But I'm not sleepy!"
"I don't care. Be in your spot."
"Someone took my spot!"
"I don't care! Find a place to be!"
"But I can't find my blanket!"
"Go to sleep!"
And she did. I know because, 20 minutes later, the cat started scratching on the door that he needed to go out. I've learned that scratching on the door means, "I have to go potty!" Also, he was probably just trying to get away from the girls and only came out at that moment because he figured it was the first time all night that it was safe for him to do so. "Finally! They're all asleep! I can escape!"

But here's the thing with that. The cat has recently switched his eating schedule to eating in the morning before he goes outside from eating in the evening when he comes in. And, normally, I wouldn't let him out so early (so wouldn't be up feeding him so early), but I felt bad for him, because the girls just would not leave him alone when he had been trying to go to sleep after the whole being chased down the block incident. Every time he laid down, someone would put her hands on him, and he'd have to move. It was like a compulsion with them; it didn't matter that I kept saying "leave the cat alone." I mean, he would have been happy to lay down next to one or two of them (which he tried to do) if they would have just quit trying to pet him.

So, anyway, the cat wanted out, and I figured I should feed him, first, so I got up, turned on the lights in the kitchen (basically 10 feet away from where all the girls were sleeping), and banged around to feed the cat. The girls were completely zonked out and didn't stir at all, including the one that had just said to me, "But I'm not sleepy!" After the cat ate, I walked over all of the girls, as did the cat, so that I could let him out. I halfway expected never to see him again. I'm not sure I would have ever come back if I had been the cat. I'd have been all, "Meesa outta here!"

The funny thing with that is that when the girls did get up, about half of them tried to claim that they had never been asleep, including Miss "But I'm Not Sleepy!" One of them tried to claim that she had only been pretending to sleep, but none of them remembered me being in the kitchen or turning on the lights or letting the cat out. heh

I gave up on sleep at that point. Or I tried to. It was only an hour or so before I was supposed to get up and start working on breakfast, and, by the time I was finished with the cat, I was awake. Or so I thought. At any rate, I sat down at my computer to work, but I couldn't focus enough to do that, so I mostly just stared at the screen until I decided I'd go do some more work in the garage because that required standing and some movement. I managed that until sometime after 6, when I thought I'd try to get in a 20 minute nap before the alarm went off at 7, my new time for starting on breakfast since all the girls were still asleep. So I laid back down in bed and had just dozed off... when my daughter's alarm clock went off. 6:30 a.m. I sighed and got back up. [Oh, and there was some stuff with the dog in there after the stuff with the cat, and it was the dog that kept me from going back to sleep after the cat went out (because she had to go see if the cat had left any food, and wouldn't stop bothering me until I took her to see that it was gone).]

Then there was the morning drama, which I won't really go into except to say that it's hard to cook when you have to round up a gaggle of girls and yell at them for the misbehavior. It got the day off to a great start, let me tell you.

Eventually, though, all of the girls did leave, including my daughter, because she had to go to her end-of-season league party. Which, again, had to happen before the season actually ended. The boys had gone off to other places so as not to be home during the sleepover (a wise decision), and they weren't home, yet, so I thought, finally!, I could get some sleep, but that pretty much wasn't to be, because the dog decided to spend the afternoon barking at stuff.

There's more stuff to include, but that stuff will come in other posts, because, really, this one is long enough, and I haven't even gotten to the BIG thing, yet, which is that in between all of this I finished getting all of the last things accomplished for Charter Shorts, Too, and that is now available!

This is the collection of short stories from my creative writing class for this year, and there is some really good stuff in there. Some I was surprised by. There are more students represented this year, since I had some many more, so that's nice. Still, I wish I had more stories from them for it. Maybe, next year, with the changes I'm hoping to get for the program, the book will be longer and won't need anything from me to fill it out. Still, there is only one from me this, year, so that's good. I hope some of you will pick it up and support these kids and the work they're doing.

How To Be... a Juggler

When I was in high school, I decided one morning that I should be able to juggle. It was a spur of the moment kind of thing. It wasn't that I wanted to be able to juggle, just that I thought that I ought to be able to juggle. No, I have no idea why I decided that. At any rate, it was a Saturday morning, and I was at work in the gym at church, but it was a pretty slow day or too early or something, because I only had a couple of kids. They were both just skating, so it didn't leave me with a lot to do other than just be there. Maybe I was just bored, but I don't remember that as having anything to do with my idea of "oughtness" about juggling.

A few tennis balls later, and I was learning to juggle. I worked on it for a few hours until I had it down. Or up. Or around. Or whatever.

Once it was late enough that people my age were crawling out of bed, teenagers began to show up, and I had to actually do some other work; however, my best friend showed up, and I demonstrated my new skill. His response was something like, "That's great, but you're doing it wrong." He took the tennis balls from me and showed me the proper way of doing it, which was not around in a circle like they do it in cartoons. My reaction was something along the lines of, "Well, this is how I'm going to do it," because I wasn't going to go back and try to learn some other way of doing it.

Maybe if I'd had access to Arlee Bird, I would have learned to do it right the first time. What? You didn't know Lee could juggle? Well, now you do. And, due to the miracle of the Internet, something I didn't have back when I was in high school, here he is to tell you how to juggle!

Take it away, Lee! Or something like that...

     It takes a lot of balls to be a juggler.  You've got to learn to throw up and then catch what you've thrown up.  Er, this is not coming out right.   Let's just toss out this opening and let me start again.

     Juggling is an art that incorporates the mental disciplines of math, science, and physics and blends them with the physical disciplines of movement and balance.  Juggling is not difficult if you are willing to focus on what you are doing and then practice.  Once it comes to you it's much like riding a bicycle or something of that nature.

      Want to learn to juggle?   Start by learning the basic three ball cascade pattern.  This is a matter of keeping three objects moving in regular alternating arcs for a sustained period of time.  You must learn to maintain a continued one, two, three waltz rhythm with the three arcs.  A juggling count is very helpful in the beginning.

      The first step is to master one object, preferably a ball or a spherical beanbag, tossed from one hand to the other.   Learn this toss from right to left, then left to right, repeatedly without dropping and keeping the same identical arc each time.  Back and forth, back and forth, until you've perfected the feel of the toss and the catch.

     When the first arc is mastered, then start with a ball in each hand.  Focusing on the arcs, toss the first ball from the right hand.  When that first ball reaches the peak of the arc and begins to descend toss up the ball in the left hand in an equal arc, but not on a collision course with the first.  Repeat over and over until the movement comes naturally.

      As you continue the alternating passing of the two objects between your hands, begin to imagine the third object becoming a part of the pattern.  Now instead of the one-two repetition of throws, think of the one-two-three rhythm with the two objects and one imaginary object.   After the tosses, the hand movements, and the rhythm are ingrained in your mind you can add in the third ball.

      The visualization should have helped, but the actual third object might be intimidating and confusing at first.  The main thing is don't give up and keep that waltz rhythm in your mind.  In the basic juggling pattern your hand and arm movements remain the same and the arcs of the objects should also be repetitive.  Juggling is like music.

      I recommend that you practice over a bed so you don't have to chase balls or bend over too much.  You will be picking up dropped objects a lot at first.  Juggling is good exercise, but in the learning process it might be more exercise than you'd want.  Your focus on the juggling pattern will also be better if you aren't chasing objects all over the room. 

      After you've essentially mastered the basic pattern you will be ready to experiment with more arcs, heights, speeds, and other pattern variations.   And don't forget the essential rule when performing your new skill before an audience:  If  you drop something just keep going and act as though it was meant to be.   Learning the skill of recovery is one of the most essential components in a jugglers bag of tricks.

      Now go learn to juggle!  There are many healthy benefits for mind and body.  You might even be able to pick up a few bucks juggling on the street for tips.

The Serial Experiment

When I was a kid, I had this cousin... no, wait, I still have the cousin, even if I haven't seen him in more than 20 years. Let's try again:

When my cousin was a kid, actually, when he was a baby, his mother (that makes her my aunt) had trouble getting him to eat his baby food. He would do that baby tongue thing and just push it all out of his mouth. It didn't matter what flavor it was, he just wouldn't eat the baby food. Somewhere in trying to get him to eat, they discovered that he liked ketchup, so my aunt took to mixing it in his baby food to get him to eat it. Growing up, my cousin thought ketchup went on everything.

I mean that. When we'd all be down at my grandparents for the holidays, say, Thanksgiving, he'd get his plate of food and pour ketchup over everything on the plate. On the turkey and the ham. On the mashed potatoes and green beans. On the dressing (also known as stuffing for those of you that don't know what dressing is, except they're not really the same thing) and the sweet potatoes. The only thing that didn't get ketchup was the pie. This was just how he ate, and everyone was (mostly) used to it.

Until one Saturday morning when he and I and another of our cousins were down at my great-grandmother's house. One of the few things that didn't get ketchup (other than pie) was cereal. Except, on that particular Saturday morning, he decided he was going to put ketchup on his cereal. Yes, my other cousin and I were entirely grossed out by this idea, and my other cousin tried to pull rank because she was the oldest of us (and could also beat him up at need) and threatened him all the way to Sunday (which was only  the next day, so I guess it wasn't that big a deal) about the ketchup, but he wouldn't be dissuaded.

Finally, the bargain was struck that if he put ketchup on the cereal that he would eat it no matter what, that he would not under any circumstances leave the table until the bowl of cereal was consumed. She was going to sit there and not let him up until he ate every last bite. He had no doubt that he would eat the cereal, so he made the deal readily enough.

I wish I could remember what kind of cereal it was, but I don't, but that's only secondary to what happened next. See, the ketchup went on, and the milk started turning pink. And so did the cereal. In fact, it turned into a bowl of pink mush. My cousin wouldn't eat it. He did manage to try it, but it was as gross as it looked, like a lumpy bowl of Pepto-Bismol.

We sat at that table for a long time. A very long time. It was one of the few times in my life that I remember being bored. But my female cousin wouldn't let my male cousin up from the table. We all just sat there being completely miserable. And, then, we sat some more. My cousin, the ketchup eater, outlasted the enforcer. That was probably somewhat due to me and the fact that I kept saying, "Let's go..." I told you, I was bored. Finally, FINALLY, we, the girl and I, left. We left Mr. Ketchup sitting there with his bowl of... whatever it was with strict instructions that he was not to leave the table until he's eaten every single bit of that cereal.

Yeah, right.

He hid the bowl, joined us just a few minutes later, and convinced my cousin that he'd eaten the cereal. He his the bowl really well, too, because she went back to check; she even looked under the table, and she ended up being convinced. The ironic thing there is that the bowl was under the table, just not on the floor. Later, Ketchup Lad and I sneaked back in and retrieved the bowl of cereal and dumped it for the dogs. These were farm dogs used to eating just about any kind of leftover you can imagine.
They didn't eat that cereal.

Welcome to my first post for Indie Life. Just click the link to find out more.

At this point, you might be wondering what that story has to do with being an "indie" publisher. You wouldn't be wrong to wonder that. It all has to do with experimenting with serials. Actually, it has more to do with the willingness to experiment. My cousin had these two things that he loved: ketchup and cereal, and he decided he needed to try the two together. It didn't work out for him, but he was willing to give it a try. He was willing to give it a try even though he was being told not to do it, that he was crazy, and it was just gross. Okay, so it was gross, but we didn't actually know that until after he tried it. My cousin learned a valuable lesson that day: ketchup doesn't go with everything.

As I was working on my second book, Shadow Spinner, I came across an article that stated  in no uncertain terms that serialized works are dead and that no one should attempt it. I wondered why. Many of our greatest author published many of their greatest works in serial form, and, with our growing fascination with things that are short, serialization seemed to me like it might be something to experiment with. I decided that I would start releasing Shadow Spinner a chapter at a time to see what would happen. The experiment isn't over, yet, but I think it's going well. Actually, I know it is.

And! AND! After I started releasing Spinner serially, Amazon started up its own serial arm of its publishing business. Amazon believes that serializations may be the wave of the future as far as book publishing goes. I was too late to with Spinner to get into that without removing everything I'd already released and starting over, which I didn't want to do, but I do have another idea for a different serial when I finish with this one, and I will try out their serial branch when I get to that one. Only without the ketchup.

The point is... the point is don't be scared to try new things, especially if you're just starting out. Sure, they might not all work, but you'll know what not to do next time, right? And you might just discover the next big thing, like peanut butter and peppermint. Okay, so that's still not big, but my kids swear to me that it's going to be.

The Middleman and the History of Television

Okay, so I'm not really going to give you the history of television. I mean, how boring, right? Actually, I'm not sure if that would be boring or not seeing as how I know absolutely nothing about the history of that most predominant of items in homes. Did you know that on average there are more television sets per household than there are people? How scary is that? And that doesn't include computers which can serve a similar function. It's no wonder, though, that what we watch, how much we watch, has such a huge influence on the way we write. But that's another story.

TV wasn't a huge thing for me when I was kid. Except on Saturday mornings. I wouldn't do anything without my Saturday morning cartoons.The rest of the time, I was more interested in playing. And by playing, I mean playing outside. TV was only for when there was absolutely nothing else to do. The problem was that, as I got older, the times when there was nothing to do became more and more frequent. By the time I was in middle school, I ruled the television set from the time I got home until the news came on at 10. That was my cue to shuffle off to bed and read for a couple or few hours.

All of that changed my freshman year of high school. There's a story that goes with that (I have stories that go with pretty darn near everything), but, near the end of my freshman year, I discovered there was life outside of TV, and I gave it up. Not that I made any kind of declaration, "I'm giving up TV!" or anything like that, but I just lost interest in it, and I've never gone back. Which is not to say that I never watched TV again, but it's never dictated my schedule to me again. There was a period during college when my best friend and I were addicted to Stand Up Stand UP, Whose Line Is It Anyway? and a couple of other shows like that on the newly formed The Comedy Channel (yes, it wasn't Comedy Central, yet, in those days) which was difficult because neither of us had a TV, at the time, so we snatched viewings at my parents' house (a couple of times a week when we were there) or wherever we could.

You have to remember, this was before DVDs and the wide proliferation of TV shows available for purchase. If you wanted to watch something, you pretty much had to be there at the designated time slot on  the designated day. Or, you know, know how to program a VCR for which you had to take advanced courses in college to be able to do. Fortunately, at the time, I invested in those courses. Which are totally useless today. At any rate, it took an extra effort for any show to catch my eye in the first place, and it had to be pretty spectacular for me to bother myself with recording it. Like I said, I no longer bent to the whims of television schedules.

I bet you're wondering what kind of shows I would go out of my way to record, aren't you? I bet you're thinking that if I would go to such lengths as to program the VCR to record them that they must have been pretty spectacular. Are you getting your pad of paper and a pen to make notes about the incredibly sophisticated and deep viewing I'm about to lay out before you? Are you ready for it? The list isn't very long. In fact, there are only three shows that ever demanded such loyalty from me. Are you ready? They're Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (which I misplaced my dedication to after the second season), The Flash, and Animaniacs. Yes, I'm serious. Best cartoon ever. EVER!

The Flash was the first series that I loved that just didn't make it however much it deserved to. But a higher profile show keep using up all its blue screen time and forced delay after delay upon it so that it couldn't maintain its viewers because new episodes came out only about once every three weeks. However, Mark Hamill's two episodes as the Trickster are incredible, and it's unfortunate that the show couldn't sustain an audience.

Eventually, I moved out to CA and got married. At this point, my wife and I actually did make a premeditated decision that we weren't going to have TV in our house. It's one of those things that, if it's available, it's hard to control. It starts with just one show. I had avoided watching TV up to that point by never being home (or shut up in my room painting), but you can't really run a marriage that way, so we chose no TV.

For a long time, that really meant no TV. At all. The television set was, basically, a miniature movie screen in our house, because that's all it was ever used for. Later, there was the DVD player, and, later still, Buffy. And that's how we watch television. We hear that something is really good, so we decide we'll try it out. That's extremely easy to do these days with Netflix

My wife and I don't have enough shows to keep us viewing all year long (or even most of the year long), so, between DVD releases of the shows we follow, we try out new things. One of the disappointing things we've learned is that we tend toward shows that, for whatever reason, didn't make it. Like The Flash. And Deadwood (which may be my wife's favorite show ever). Firefly. The one we just discovered, and we knew it had been cancelled before we watched any of it, is The Middleman.

I don't have a good way of describing The Middleman in any concise sort of way. Yeah, I hear you thinking. Why would I bother with concise? When am I ever concise? Maybe, one of these days, I'll explore the genius of Kevin Smith, and, then, you will understand. Or, probably, not. Yes, I've always been this way.
Anyway...

The Middleman is about this super hero guy called the Middleman and his Middleman in training, who happens to be female. They work for an organization they refer to as O2STK (Organization Too Secret To Know), and that's just the tip of the awesome that is this show. The fact that the villains are continually saying, "My plan is sheer elegance in its simplicity," as they monologue about their convoluted schemes to take over the world (or destroy it) is frosting goodness.

It's a tongue-in-cheek look at pop culture that pokes fun at it while simultaneously celebrating it. The far too few episodes tend to revolve around a specific theme and are full of references to the pop culture landmarks that inspired them. However, don't mistake my praise for the show as being any kind of suggestion that you should rush out and watch it. In all likelihood, you shouldn't. By the second episode, I was fully aware of why Middleman got cancelled.

It's not that it's too intelligent for the average viewer, although it is. Despite it's campy appearance (yes, it does wear camp clothes, dressing itself up to resemble the Batman series of the 60s with such things as the Middlemobile), it is, in many ways, too sophisticated for the average viewer. If you can't catch the subtleties, you'll just think it's silly. To make matters worse, if you're not pretty well grounded in your pop culture lore, the vast majority of the jokes will go right over your head. There's nothing worse than a joke you don't get in a show meant to be funny. And, if it's meant to be funny, and you're only getting every 3rd or 4th joke, you tend to, well, think it's not funny. It's like being the person in the room staring at Monty Python and the Holy Grail with a glazed expression while everyone else laughs uncontrollably.

So... it's not a show I can actually recommend, but I liked it so much, I needed to write about it. The sad part is that it did have some really interesting sub-plots developing, and we'll never know what was to come of them. The only real reason I could suggest watching it is if you really wanted to know how off center I am. Either you'd get the show, and say "oh, wow, this is great," in which case you would be revealed to be off center, too, or you'd make the yuck face and think (or, maybe, even say out loud), "He likes this? What's wrong with him?"

Of course, Middleman did get a fairly good critical reaction. Like Arrested Development. But, when everything comes down to how much money it can generate, the bits on either end of the bell curve (the great and the horrible) become indistinguishable to the profit gurus. Which is just too bad, because everything becomes the same old bland mass market crap. Whit rice, white bread, and white TV. Read anything you want into that statement. I'm sure you won't be wrong.