Ordained With An Umbrella Scooter: Short Stories (And A Few Failed Experiments)

The Means and the Ways

****AUTHOR'S NOTE**** This is another story I wrote for a writing class when I was in college.  I'm going to guess it dates back to about 1997 or maybe 1998.  I'm not entirely sure.  Just like The Miracle Men, I thought I had lost every copy of this story, but I discovered in 2021 that I had emailed a copy of it to a friend a long time ago and I was able to recover it.  I hadn't read this one in many years and I didn't remember much about it other than it was easily the most disliked-by-my-classmates story that I wrote in my college writing career.  I think it might be my least favorite also.  Well, I know that's a ringing endorsement to go ahead and read it, but I do think there are a few interesting things here.  

The reason for the hate really comes down to the unlikeable main character.  That was something I actually did on purpose.  I remember conceiving of this story when I was in an extremely grouchy mood while on a long layover in an airport.  Some part of me made note of the fact that major grouchiness is a kind of interesting mindset and I wondered if I could sort of capture that feeling in a character sketch of a curmudgeonly guy.  I also remember being interested in the idea of trying to pull something off that didn't have a traditional plot, per se.

Re-reading this now, I can certainly see why my classmates found him off-putting.  He has some pretty terrible thoughts over the course of this, but to be fair he was supposed to be grouchy and in the midst of an extremely long layover.  I know when I get in the occasional bad mood I think some things that I would be horrified to share in more lucid moments, but that's what I thought made this idea sort of interesting.  Exploring the darker corners of the human psyche is an important aspect of writing I think.  I can also kind of see some precedents here to the character of Fabian who I would write a whole book about many years after this, although I think I pulled it off in a bit more of a fun way in my later effort.  I'd like to think I'm older, wiser, and a better writer now.  I also think maybe it works better to write about unlikeable characters in the third person rather than the first person.  There's a bit more detachment from the narrative standpoint that perhaps makes it a little clearer that I am not sympathetic towards this jerk and am in fact making fun of him.  Although, I will say there do seem to be a few fleeting glimpses of the actual human being beneath the grouch that pop up from time to time in this story.  They may be few and far between, but they're there if you look for them.

The other thing that's glaringly obvious reading this over twenty years after it was written is how much technology has changed since then.  I don't think it would really be possible to get into this particular predicament nowadays.  Not at your home airport at least.  I also make a pointed reference to cell phones, and they were an immensely different beast back in the 90's.  I hardly knew anybody who had one and they were kind of these bulky bricks that were notoriously unreliable and frequently dropped calls.  I thought they were pretty stupid at the time and I held out on getting a cell phone for as long as I possibly could.  Like way past the point that it was kind of ridiculous that I didn't have one.  I still don't totally love them, but they're definitely a necessity of modern life. 

I have no idea why I called this The Means and the Ways.  I had some reason for it, but I've forgotten after all these years.  Maybe you can tell me what it means?  

"That'll be twenty-three dollars and eighty-five cents," the little greasy haired imp behind the cash register said as he looked at me with a malicious sense of glee in his eyes.

"For this?" I asked, looking down at the flattened mess of roadkill that was apparently passing for a hamburger.

"I'm sorry, sir, but I just work here. I don't set the prices." This guy really seemed to be taking far too much enjoyment in his work.