Rick Hoffman's Blog: Waiting for Takeout

A To-Do List for Shut-Ins: Some Recommendations for COVID-19 Social Distancing

Right about now you’re probably starting to get cabin fever. That is, if it hasn’t hit you full force already. As many of you know, I went through a bit of a tough time with my health two years ago. After the initial crisis, there was a period of recovery, during which I was unable to go to work. Those who have had health issues understand what that’s like. So, when it comes to spending months mostly cooped up in the house, not going to work, not having the feeling of contributing to society, to the culture, to the economy, we know a thing or two. Here are a few things I recommend, and I’ve noticed a lot of people are already doing some of them.

1. Don’t sleep in. I mean, if you don’t have a commute, then you can set the alarm for a bit later, but don’t lie in bed all morning, figuring you can just get your work-from-home stuff done later in the day. It’s important to maintain a routine.
2. Don’t spend the whole day in your robe. It’s part of the routine thing. You need to feel like you’re alive and being active, rather than stagnating in your pajamas all day. Iron your shirt!
3. Have a hobby or a project. It doesn’t even have to be that productive—just something you can do every day that’s for you. I spent much of my time off writing, for instance. Maybe you always wanted to write music, but you never thought you had the time. Well, you do now. And in 2020, it’s easier than ever to make high quality amateur recordings. Heck, your cell phone is more sophisticated than much of the technology that sent people to the moon half a century ago. Maybe start a YouTube channel. I’ll be your first subscriber!
4. Get out of the house, even if it’s only for a short walk. A lot of people recovering from illness, injury, or surgery don’t have the luxury I had to be able to go for a walk around the block. I suppose many people are under shelter-in-place orders right now, and I imagine that means different things for different communities, but whenever you can, try to get yourself out into the sun. Spring starts today, after all.
5. Read more. It’s good for you. It always has been, and it always will be. Maybe tackle that monstrosity you’ve considered a million times in the past but never cracked open. My wife just ordered a copy of Infinite Jest, much to my envy and admiration. What about Moby Dick… Ulysses… War and Peace…?
6. Treasure this time with your family. Many of us are spending more time with our spouses and children than we normally do. Do you have any idea what a gift that is? Don’t squander it. Because as soon as you go back to work, you’re going to miss them. Those of you who live alone, connect with friends and family through Face Time, Skype, and other applications, so you can have that personal human interaction that comes with responding to a smile.

Some of you probably feel overwhelmed with your kids’ schoolwork right now, and you’re thinking, “How in the hell am I ever going to find time for things like reading and hobbies?” My instinct as a teacher is that those schoolwork burdens are going to plateau soon enough, as we teachers get a better grip on this new model of education we’re inventing as we go. There’s a lot of work for now, but it’ll slow down. And I don’t think anyone is ultimately going to suffer much from the loss of class time. Resources are available to you. I know a lot of teachers in different disciplines, many of whom are reading this right now. They’re reaching out to their corners of social media to offer help to parents. This is just going to have to be how we do things right now, so if that takes a period of adjustment, then so be it. And that brings me to the last item on my list:

7. Don’t lose heart, whatever you do. As soon as you start to feel sorry for yourself (and you will), you’re going to become less productive. You’re going to spiral into a mere shade of your potential self. When you start to feel self-pity creep in, you have to stand up and do something different. Turn off the television. Turn off the computer. Shout at the ceiling for thirty seconds, and redirect all that negative energy into something else. Just don’t scare the dog!

We’re all going to get through this time because we have each other. Could you imagine doing this without the internet to keep us all connected? I’m going to close with one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite music icons, Joe Strummer. I think these words are important in times like these.

“And so now I'd like to say - people can change anything they want to. And that means everything in the world. People are running about following their little tracks—I am one of them. But we've all got to stop just following our own little mouse trail. People can do anything—this is something that I'm beginning to learn. People are out there doing bad things to each other. That's because they've been dehumanised. It's time to take the humanity back into the center of the ring and follow that for a time. Greed, it ain't going anywhere. They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square. Without people you're nothing. That's my spiel.”

Thanks for reading.

The Survival of Literature in the 21st Century

I recently read an article titled, "On the Hatred of Literature," by Jon Baskin, that appeared in the digital magazine The Point. The piece runs a little long and focuses too much for my taste on the work of one author in particular, but its opening paragraphs offer unique insight to a problem I've seen amplified over the past decade and a half: our society's fading appreciation for literature. In the article, Baskin gives an anecdotal account of when he witnessed an undergraduate English major accusing her professors of hating literature because they had chosen to read through the lens of New Historicism, rather than for the sake of beauty, which for her was the whole reason she had become an English major. The poor woman was pitied for her naivete, rather than lauded for her wisdom. Baskin goes on:.

"It is no secret that in contemporary America there are many people who hardly read at all, and then another sizable group who, though they keep up with news, sports and the latest fads in self-care or technology, have little interest in serious fiction, poetry or literary commentary." It would be wrong to say such people hate literature, for one has to care about something to truly hate it.

And that's the problem. The scholars, who may or may not have hated literature, at least cared about it, even if they had sucked the life out of it with their criticism. Society at large, for whom literature doesn't typically register as even a blip on the cultural radar, cannot possibly be accused of hating literature. Rather, it has chosen largely to abandon literature for what it values more. As a novelist and an English teacher, this shift away from the written word is intolerable to me.

"But it's a STEM economy!" someone might say in defense of such a shift. "There's no time for literary fiction, and besides, what kind of social capital will it get you when your peers have no appreciation for it either?" .

It's not a bad argument. Why should someone invest the time and intellectual energy needed to stop and read a great book properly when the world outside is moving forward ever faster? I think it's because if we don't take such time, then we risk losing something vital to our psychological security.
Stories are the foundation of the human experience. Every situation is a story. As I type these letters, there's a story playing out--that of the frustrated writer venting the only way he knows how. Should anyone care to read these paragraphs, that too will be a part of the story. Stories are our mechanism for sense making, and we have been telling them for as long as there have been ears to listen. Any story can explore any element of the human experience, just as any machine can be employed to perform a task. Great literature, on the other hand, is the story in the hands of the master craftsman. It is the essential vehicle for the conveyance of those experiences. We abandon it at our peril.

I have this fantasy that one day I will run into one of my former students out in the world. He'll be successful, affluent, and upwardly mobile. We'll spend some time catching up. Then he'll confess he's unfulfilled. After the STEM-related degree and the tech job and the innovation, he'll still feel lacking in some way. "What's the answer?" he'll ask me, and I'll remind him that in his quest to live up to the expectations society put on his generation, he abandoned the humanities and thereby lost his humanity. "Go back," I'll tell him, "and re-read Hamlet. It's all there. I'll remind him of the words of Mr. Keating from Dead Poets Society:

"Medicine, law, business, engineering; these are all noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life." But poetry, beauty, romance, love. . these are what we stay alive for.

Thanks for reading.

The Problem with Extremism

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the drifting I have done in my life away from the two major political parties. I’ve also been thinking about the blame those parties deserve for the rotten state of affairs in our country—in our world. When I was in high school, I was pretty liberal, but something about liberalism didn’t cling for me. It seemed too easy to be a liberal as a youth in the ‘90s. All my literary, musical, and film heroes were liberals. Almost all of my friends were liberals. It just seemed too simple for me to be one too. I became disillusioned with the left. Maybe I should blame the Clintons. Who knew they’d be back in twenty years?

As I got older, I became more conservative and remained that way throughout most of my twenties and accepted the challenge for any debate or political engagement, civil or not. As I moved through my thirties—and I can’t help but think that being a father had something to do with this—I wearied of the fight. I didn’t thrive on conflict anymore. There was no satisfaction in it, mostly because I found myself arguing about people’s core beliefs, and you don’t really change people’s core beliefs. You can upset people, however, when you criticize their core beliefs.

To my shame, I had enjoyed doing that as a young conservative. The juxtaposition of my youth and my politics disarmed people. It gave me an edge, and I was good at it. I might even have made a career of it if I’d started blogging back then. But in my thirties, again something didn’t cling. Maybe I should blame Bush and Cheney. By the time I was in my mid-thirties, those two warmongers were gone, and the Obama administration hadn’t done anything to earn my confidence. The political beliefs I held as most sacred had become less about defending someone’s policies and they were now more focused on liberty.

That’s when I began to gravitate toward libertarianism. What could be more American than a political philosophy that upheld liberty as the highest virtue? If all men are imperfect and all government is manmade, then all government is imperfect and therefore prone to error. Given that deduction, the only reasonable course of action is for man to make sure government will err on the side of liberty. I loved the personal freedom of libertarianism, and as we watched the debt soar to new heights in the Bush years and blast off into the cosmos in the Obama years, I also loved the fiscal responsibility of libertarianism. We had to get the spending under control.

But this is all opinion and not intended to persuade anyone to join the liberty movement. Here’s what’s not opinion:

Having been on both the left and the right, I knew them both well. I knew their strengths and weaknesses. I had taken their strengths with me to the center and left the weaknesses behind. I felt safe in the middle, where I didn’t have to fight anyone anymore because I could always find common ground with both republicans and democrats. Oh, you’re a republican? Screw big government! Am I right? Oh, you’re a democrat? Screw cronyism! Am I right? I had yet to learn that most politicians on the left and the right loved both big government and cronyism. I figured that out along the way too. But one thing I did not count on occurred in my mid-to-late thirties. The political discourse in the country changed. The extremists reared their heads, not wearing white hoods on the right or sporting hammer-and-sickle banners on the left (though there was some of that), but rather their ilk had infiltrated the more moderate realms of the political spectrum and infected those realms with the plague of extremism. This, readers (if you’ve made it this far), is our country’s sickness.

Extremism. That is the word of our undoing. It exists on both the left and the right (and admittedly in the middle too), and even the moderate elements on both sides occasionally embrace it to the point that they become less like opposites and more like each other. Indulge me a moment.

On the left and the right, you have differences and similarities. People focus on the differences because the differences are most obvious, and don’t we all love so much to shout so righteously about them and with such bluster? But it’s the similarities that are the toxins, believe it or not. For the sake of this analysis, I’m going to focus on two traits of the right and two traits of the left, and yes, I’m going to generalize (mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa) because while generalizations do not illustrate the full spectrum of beliefs, they do speak to the core ideas, which are common enough to allow for generalizations in an academic or philosophical context (this one’s philosophical, if you were wondering). That said, I’ll admit some oversimplification in the following paragraphs, but this stuff is pretty complicated anyway and could use some simplifying.

First the right. On the extreme right, you have people who are mostly religious and mostly tribalistic. In the U.S. that religion is generally a form of Christianity, and that tribalism is often considered racist. It is possible to believe one’s tribe should not mix with other tribes while still not harboring any hatred for the other tribes, but let’s face it; it’s still bigotry. Tribalism is a form of collectivism, which subjugates the will of the individual to the collective—the tribe. It relegates the person (the fundamental building block of society) to an inferior position, but it strengthens the tribe and its insular belief system. This gives rise to accusations of homophobia, racism, sexism, etc. Often those allegations are justified.

Now for the left. On the extreme left, you have people who are mostly atheist and mostly concerned with identity politics. That atheism is generally marked by an adherence to science and naturalism, and the identity politics is often considered absurd political correctness. Like tribalism, identity politics is a form of collectivism. It defines people based on the groups to which they belong and draws distinct lines around each group, whether it is based on ethnicity, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or any such category. It presupposes a brand of essentialism, or the idea that every member of a group must necessarily exhibit the same essential properties of the other members of the group. Again, like tribalism, it subjugates the individual to the herd and minimizes the importance of the person. This strengthens the herd, but it gives rise to accusations of socialism, Maoism, Marxism, etc. Often these allegations are justified.

When viewed from these perspectives, the extremists on both sides seem less distant from one another and more like kindred spirits (see “horseshoe theory” for more on this idea). The result of these ideas—indeed the benefit to each extreme element—is almost poetically simple. On the extreme right, tribalism allows members of the tribe to look outside the tribe with contempt. It allows members of the tribe to say, “You’re not one of us. We have no reason to tolerate you, no reason to welcome you, and no reason to believe that your ideas have merit, for you are the other, the enemy.” On the extreme left, identity politics allows people to be categorized and compartmentalized without the added effort of having to pay attention to what they have to say. It permits social justice warriors to shout down and dismiss dissenting opinion without the intellectual effort of logical debate. In the end, both extremes prevent their members from listening to ideas other than their own. They create echo chambers of fundamentalist thought that view the inhabitants of other echo chambers not as human beings but rather as enemies and threats to their way of life.

Ironically, the biggest difference between the extreme elements (religiosity vs. atheism) is a smaller source of conflict than their biggest similarity (collectivism).
The enemy here is not one side or the other. The enemy is obviously collectivism. When you reduce another human being to an impersonal set of ideas—worse still, ideas that conflict with your own—then it’s a small step from there to completely dehumanizing that person. This is where we have gone, and the end result is the biggest threat of all to liberty: authoritarianism. On both the right and the left, you hear “If you don’t like it, then you’re free to leave.” That’s a form of soft authoritarianism. It essentially says, if you don’t think the way we do, then you have no right to try to persuade people to agree with you and instead you should be removed from our society (tribe/group/collective).This is anathema to the free spirit of the individual.

“But most people aren’t extremists,” someone would correctly point out. That’s true. Most people are not. But most people are willing to tolerate many of the ideas that trickle down from the extremes (sometimes in diluted form) as long as they originate from the correct end of the spectrum. I’ve been guilty of it in the past, and my guess is that anyone who examines his conscience with enough honesty would be able at least privately to admit the same.

“So what’s the solution?” another might rightly ask. He might then take a dig at the writer here and say, “Should we all become libertarians?” No, I wouldn’t want that either. The idea of a society in which everyone agrees with each other is kind of creepy to me. I don’t want everyone to agree. I want people to continue to debate. I even want them to continue to fight, fuss, and fume at each other. I just want them to listen as well while they do it.

If anyone chose to read this far, then thank you for playing. I wish I had some lovely parting gifts for you, but I’m afraid I don’t. Feel free to challenge anything I’ve said here. Take me to task. Make me go cut you a switch. Then give me a thrashing. I can take it. I’ve got a thick skin, and I want to hear what you have to say. But keep it civil, or you’ve missed the point entirely.

Thanks for reading.

This is Not a Political Blog

I never wanted this blog to delve into politics, but what has this year been but political? Those who know me know my politics, and they tend to be fiscally responsible and socially accepting. People are imperfect, and they're going to screw up. I'm of the opinion that if you're going to err, you should err on the side of personal freedom.

I have no net cause for celebration or lamentation on the outcome of this election. It is what it is. Many people are happy, and many are equally upset. That's the way of our democracy. Winston Churchill is credited with saying, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." I tend to agree.

To those readers who voted for Donald Trump, the onus is on you to hold him to the standard we should hold our presidents. And if he doesn't live up to them, then please remember that if he should decide to run for reelection.

To those who voted for Hillary Clinton, I can only say that this too shall pass, and I hope people of like minds to yours can keep their voices heard without giving or receiving the vitriol that is characteristic of politics these days.

For those like me who want something for this country that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are offering, we have a hard path ahead. We need to back responsible leaders who reflect our ideals in order to gain enough popular support to stand a chance in future elections. Character and message are everything.

The United States holds the world record for the longest string of uninterrupted peaceful transfers of power in the history of election-based government. We wrote the book on democracy and freedom for the modern age. Literally. It's short and free to read. We call it The Constitution of the United States. Let's live up to that document's legacy. Let's put one foot in front of the other, and let's show the world that we are not as petty as our election process would have people believe.

Thanks for reading.

In Vino Veritas

What can you learn from a grape? Rather a lot, it turns out. Wine is big right now; everybody’s drinking it. Americans are drinking enough of it, in fact, that even casual wine drinkers have cultivated enough knowledge and experience to allow them comment on wine with some measure of authority, and we all have our favorites. While our experiences teach us about these wines and the grapes from which they’re made, I think there’s also the potential for wine to teach us about ourselves.

For years I’ve had a favorite grape. With no disrespect to the noble Cabernet Sauvignon or the bold Merlot, I have to say I have a subtler preference: Grenache. Known for its smoothness, strong berry notes and peppery finish, Grenache is a favorite for blending in Rhône wines like Châteauneuf-du-Pape and its baby brother, Côtes du Rhône, but while this varietal plays well with others, it also shines on its own, particularly in Spain, where they call it Garnacha.

The expertise of winemakers is instrumental to the success of any wine, but one cannot underestimate the importance of the grape itself. Grenache may not be unique, but I think its traits are worth mentioning. First of all, it has a long ripening season, often not being ready for harvest until several weeks after its fellow varietals. This allows the sugars to develop over a longer period, not only concentrating flavor, but also increasing the potential alcohol content of the wine produced. Additionally, Grenache likes hot, dry climates and higher altitudes, which explains its success in Spain. It also has a particularly woody vine, making it difficult to harvest by machine. It needs the subtler hand of a living person to cut the grapes from the vine. I love that.

I see much of myself in Grenache. I’m sort of a late-ripener. I’m also a slow, deliberate writer. Trying to write around the busy schedule of being a dad and a teacher requires discipline and sacrifice. Giving up online gaming to free up writing time was a choice I don’t regret, but I won’t pretend it was easy. I also thrive on human contact. The task of writing is a solitary one, but interactions with people give the writer the juice he needs to produce his next vintage.

Grenache is not for everyone. It doesn’t dominate an entire wall of the local wine shop. It never tops the wine list at your favorite restaurant. If it’s there at all, it’s below the Pinot Noirs and Malbecs, and by that point, most people have stopped reading anyway. Nor is it a particular candidate for aging. Rather, it is to be enjoyed early. But Grenache is perfectly fine with all of that. It knows that it has had to work for everything it has, and wine drinkers who love it know where to find it.

The conditions under which Grenache must thrive belie its achievement. How can it compete, given the success of its market-dominating counterparts? How can a grape ever expect to prosper in improbable, near-drought conditions?

The answer is so simple really: it has strong roots.

Rejection Reflection

Having friends or family members read your work can be rewarding because they always say nice things. Having strangers read it can be terrifying. I've been looking at old rejections lately, trying to glean from their form letter style any details about what the readers thought of my work. This isn't masochism. It's homework. I'm very much interested in becoming a better writer.

Rejections cause some introspective moodiness for me. They don't ruin my day or anything, but they raise a lot of questions. What could I have done better? What did the editor misunderstand? Did she even read it, or did she just skim it because her kids were fighting and the dog had to pee? How can she not see how brilliant I am!!?? ;) It's an exercise in futility to try to divine the answers to these questions, but that doesn't mean they don't occupy my thoughts.

You take the bad with the good. You dust yourself off and write something better. It's not as if you're going to run out of words. I equate it to the athlete who has just lost a game. He doesn't learn anything from the victories. He doesn't even remember them with the same clarity as he remembers the losses. He only remembers being happy at the buzzer.

It's the losses that make you better, precisely because they force you to reflect on the minutiae of the performance to avoid those shortcomings in the future. Sometimes they even make good writing material later.

Questions Upon Questions

This past month has been strange. In early September, I self-published my first novel. I worked on it for two years, researching, writing, revising, editing. I tried for two more years to get an agent to represent it. That didn't work out as I had hoped, but I learned a lot. Specifically, I learned about the publishing industry: that it is fickle; that it is competitive; that it is difficult to enter, even when they like your writing. I learned - as we learn in all things when we pay attention - that I now have more questions than I did when I started. And my answers are all "maybes."

In those four years, I could have gotten another degree. Would an MFA in creative writing have convinced more agents to pay attention to me? Maybe. But then, who would have written The Devils That Haunt You in that time?

Should I have continued to send out queries to agents, hoping for just one response from someone who believed in the project the way I do? Maybe. But then, who would be reading the book right now?

Will self-publishing limit my market to friends and family only? Maybe. But whose opinions do I value more than theirs?

Can I even expect success to be in my future now that I've attached my name to a self-published eBook?
...
Maybe.

Cut, Cut, Cut

Hemingway once accepted the challenge of writing the saddest story ever in only six words. His submission:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

The claim that Hemingway wrote this is apocryphal, but I'm going with it anyway. It doesn't matter what the original source of this six-word tragedy is. What matters is that it trusts the reader to fill in the details. I think the reason we attribute it to Papa is his so-called "Iceberg Theory," which states that most of a story lurks below the surface, and it's up to the reader to infer from the bit that shows above the water what lies beneath. In short, you don't have to tell them everything. They're smart enough to know that if what you tell them is real, raw, and honest enough, then they'll intuitively "know" what it is you do not reveal explicitly.

This comes down to simple economy of language, and that can be difficult. It can be devastating to cut those paragraphs that you just adore, but at some point you have to ask yourself whether they contribute to the narrative or whether you're showing off your chops.

I'm not sure whether I cut enough from THE DEVILS THAT HAUNT YOU. The present-day protagonist/narrator in the novel, Evan, is long-winded. He's an intellectual who lives and dies by his words. As tough as it was for me to cut his words, it was even tougher to get him to shut up and stop making me write them.

The writer is in charge, not the characters. As much as they want to keep talking, you can't let them run the show. Sink them below the iceberg, and if only a single hand flounders above the surface, begging to be pulled to safety, then congratulations; you've found your conflict.

Choices

This morning I taught a lesson on the opening paragraphs of Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. One of the questions I put to the students was about King's choices in his first paragraph. In short, King chooses to address the opponents to his nonviolent demonstration as "My Dear Fellow Clergymen." He goes on to call them men of good will, good intention, all that kind of thing. These are clergymen who did not openly present themselves as being opposed to King's cause, but rather, they questioned his actions, calling them "unwise and untimely." They were his opponents, and he--being a master of rhetoric--addressed them as his fellows. It was a choice.

Every writer makes choices. Every time the hand moves the pen from one word to the next... every time the space bar clicks the blinking cursor forward, a new choice presents itself. Every word is deliberate (Do I call these men my opponents or my fellows?). Choice determines tone. Tone influences the reader.

Did Dr. King believe them to be truly men of good will? Were they really his fellows,or were they his enemies? It doesn't matter. What mattered at the time was that his letter made the statement that his cause was a human cause, not a black vs. white cause.

As John Donne wrote, and as I shamelessly copy and paste:

"No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee."

King knew this, and his choice communicated 200,000 years of human history-- an ongoing struggle for survival--as a common history. For just as any man's death diminishes Donne, so too does any man's incarceration diminish King (and his ostensible "fellows").

But more to the point of writers' choices, controlling the narrative through tone is a manipulation on the part of the writer. It is the magician's misdirection. It's a ploy. We're all guilty of it. Frankly, it's our job.

So, what's the deal with your blog name?

I'm learning a lot now that I'm a newly published writer. This is an industry full of jargon. One of its buzzwords is "platform." A writer needs a platform. That's sort of a way of connecting with readers and/or potential readers. Platforms in the age of social media are easier than ever to build, and, to be honest, I should have been doing this for a long time now. But since I haven't, here's my author blog for the first time.

So, what's with that title, "Waiting for Takeout," that you see attached to the blog?

I do much of my initial writing in Moleskine notebooks. I prefer the ruled, 9x14 cm - 3.5x5.5 in. (hardcover if possible). I use Pilot G2 Mini pens (called the G2 Pixie or G2 XS overseas), preferably with green ink. Writing with a pen, rather than with a keyboard, forces me to make more deliberate choices. Each word is a choice, and each choice is a commitment. Sure, I can always cross something out (I do frequently), but it's far more trouble to do so than it is to merely click backspace. I think more creatively with a pen and more deliberately. I think more methodically at a computer. That's where I do my revising and editing.

OK, there's that. But again, what's the deal with the title?

Here's the inglorious truth. As parents of two active kids, my wife and I often order takeout instead of cooking meals at home. I love to cook, and I do it as often as I can, but this is 2016, and people are busy. Sometimes you need to order takeout. And what is there to do while sitting at a restaurant bar waiting for your wings and fries? You could have a drink. You could also do some writing. I like to do both.

Much of my novel THE DEVILS THAT HAUNT YOU was written with green ink in Moleskine notebooks while sitting at a bar or counter waiting for my food to arrive. And yeah, there was usually an adult beverage in front of me. Much of my second novel is being written the same way, and I'm totally fine with that.

As a result of this habit, I've often said the title of my memoirs would be "Waiting for Takeout." Well, I'm too flipping young for my memoirs and too impatient to let a perfectly good title go to waste.

So here's "Waiting for Takeout." I hope you like it.

Rick