Why I Left

by Kevin Lincoln

Legend has it that William Howard Taft once got stuck in a bathtub. It probably isn’t true, in the way that so many bits of history are just oversold dad jokes. But let’s say, for a second, that it is true. Or better yet: Taft didn’t get stuck. He just decided to stay in the bath.

I thought about William Howard Taft as I soaped myself. I’d left the door to the bathroom open, and I could feel the chill beyond the curtain; I knew what awaited me when I shut off the water and stepped, dripping, from the shower. Even though, when I’d come into the shower three minutes earlier, I’d known that, one day, I’d have to leave it — I’d known that the shower wasn’t, couldn’t, be where I belonged — the thought of Taft’s bulk gave me pause. His considerable girth warmed me. If Taft could stay, maybe I could stay, too. Maybe I could make it in the shower. If I could make it in the shower, I could make it anywhere.

I have a rain shower. It has black and white tiles. When we’d moved in to the apartment three months earlier, I’d thought, “This is a good shower.” Now, I thought again, as though no time had passed, “This is a good shower.”

It’s funny how time passes, even when it feels like it doesn’t. Because it does. The comfort I felt in that shower, warm-ish droplets of water cascading down my head, made me think of time, and how it passes. Hairs from my own body littered the floor of the shower. They weren’t there, once. And that’s when I realized: even if I stayed in the shower, one day I wouldn’t be there. Because, I realized, I have to die. Plus, there’s a drought going on, and I should probably stop using all this water. That’s when I left the shower.

Lunch was at one of those places that puts a bunch of lettuce in a bowl, with other foods. It’s called SLD. You can choose what lettuce you want, of course, although if you don’t choose kale, it’s company policy that the kid making your salad gets to verbally abuse you. I never choose kale. That’s how I was raised.

I was with my co-workers Kelly and Gwyn — it’s pronounced Gwen — and we’d walked 0.3 miles from the office, which involved crossing the road at a notoriously slow light. When you go through that kind of trial to end up somewhere, you don’t necessarily think of leaving, much less leaving before you’d even had time to settle in. The dressing had barely coated my leafy salad leaves when Gwyn said, “Let’s bring these back to the office.”

Gwyn was the one who’d brought us there in the first place. If it weren’t for Gwyn, who I loved passionately, with that sort of sickening ache that only comes from being in love with your married co-worker, I’d never have gone to the salad place. I’d have gotten a wrap, probably. My life would be different. But she didn’t seem to know this, or care. If I wanted to stay in the salad place, that anchor needed to fall from my boat, not hers. She was on her own boat. But Kelly opened the door, Gwyn behind her, extra dressing pouches in her purse, and, content as I was where I was, I knew I had no choice. I left the salad place.

Every office bathroom is more or less the same. It’s one of those pieces of American trivia that binds us, the office class, together. You may lose your job or get a new one, but chances are, you’ll still spend the most private parts of your day in an identical space from the beginning to the end of your working life.

There are the stalls with their vinyl swinging doors, their loose black latches the only thing holding you in obscurity. I stared at my phone. I’d texted Kelly to see if she was going to happy hour. She hadn’t texted back. I looked at the door of the stall. Someone had written there, in scratchy ballpoint pen, “Taking care of business.” A grown man wrote that. Could he have thought it was funny? Was I wrong in thinking it wasn’t funny?

All of a sudden, I felt conscious that the feeling in the stall, the environment that I’d come there for, had passed me by without my even noticing. I was no longer a native, or even welcome. I’m not an old man, but as far as the stall was concerned, and the whole bathroom, I was as old and irrelevant as Mel Gibson, who seems very old, and very irrelevant, these days. If you’re irrelevant, you’re dead, and the culture had moved on. I left the bathroom, after cleaning myself accordingly.

(I did have to go back for my phone, though, which I had left on the toilet-paper dispenser.)

Thursday night is Happy Hour, and the whole floor, usually, goes together to Killarney’s, which is about a half mile away, just slightly farther than SLD. Kelly was there, which took me by surprise. She almost never came to Happy Hour, even though I’d text her every few weeks, just to keep up a presence in her inbox. Don’t want her to have to scroll for it.

Killarney’s has a Bud and Jameson special during Happy Hour, six bucks for the both. It’s what brought us to Killarney’s — all of us. You’d think that out of the whole floor in our office, someone would end up somewhere else, would go somewhere other than Killarney’s, or at least suggest it, but like a flock of seagulls, we’d all ended up there in one group, and we clung to each other like a school of fish, which is ironic, because seagulls eat fish. My head had become an orgy of metaphors. Could we all possibly be suited for Killarney’s? Should we all be there? Weren’t there other places that could take us at that point in our lives, or was it truly the only possibility, like we all felt it was? We could probably drink cheaper elsewhere, to be honest.

I drank three specials. I’d downloaded Uber earlier that day. It was my first concession toward leaving, the first sign that leaving might be on my mind, but at the time, I hadn’t thought anything like that — I’d just thought, hey, this seems prudent. It’s Happy Hour tonight. Might have some Jamesons and Buds.

“Hey man, I heard you downloaded Uber. I love Uber,” Jeff said.

Kelly came over and said, “Hey, you’ve got Uber? Can I look at it?”

Could I have raised a family in that Killarney’s? Could we have had the Happy Hour specials and slept in a corner booth and lived on mozzarella sticks? I don’t want to call that impossible, but all the same, I could never imagine it. Kids weren’t on my mind that night at the Killarney’s, but you can never fully banish it from your thoughts. I knew I wanted kids one day, and that Killarney’s — if I literally never left that Killarney’s, ever again — would’ve been a poor place to raise them. I had a responsibility to my unborn children.

Sometimes you enter a place and think you could stay there. Sometimes you enter a place and can already feel yourself leaving. Sometimes, because you’ve had too many shots of Jameson and too many Bud Heavies, you leave, and you just don’t remember it.

I left Kelly’s as soon as I woke up. I must’ve dozed off. I forgot my boxers.

Kevin Lincoln is a writer living in Los Angeles.

Photo by Linda Tanner

If the supercontinent Pangaea spontaneously reunited, the US would border the Ebola epidemic: http://t.co/0zkMNCgcbH pic.twitter.com/3rzV0kZrpq

— Vox (@voxdotcom) August 5, 2014

Some other interesting conclusions I can draw from this map:

— Indian food in Antarctica
 — Easier to drive places
 — We would need new globes
 — Next weekend I could be like, “hey wanna take the train to the desert” and everyone would be like, “I don’t think the C is running today”
 — There would probably be a news story that says, “If the supercontinent Pangaea spontaneously broke apart, the US would no longer border the Ebola epidemic”

Really makes you think.

A reminder from Google after its automatic scanning of all email moving in and out of Gmail recently identified a man using the service to send pictures of child pornography:

It is important to remember that we only use this technology to identify child sexual abuse imagery, not other email content that could be associated with criminal activity (for example using email to plot a burglary).

Gmail: a secure choice for plotting assassinations and most other crimes since 2004.

The bold actions we are announcing today are significant next steps in our ongoing initiatives to increase shareholder value by building scale, increasing cash flow, sharpening management focus, and strengthening all of our businesses to compete effectively in today’s increasingly digital landscape.

Delivering a quote for a press release, or for a corporate announcement, represents a difficult problem for media executives. Here, Gannett CEO Gracia Martore gives a statement to Gannett’s own USA Today about a plan to split the company into two parts, isolating its broadcasting and digital investments from its not-at-all-doomed newspapers, creating, she says, “two companies that will be among the largest and strongest in their peer groups.” The Gannett journalists among her audience are likely proud of their ability to understand what people really mean when prevented from speaking directly, either by fear or simple pressure. They read the obfuscating phrase “different peer groups” and know they being talked down to; they hear “readership” replaced by that meaningless word, “scale,” and they know that they are increasingly at the mercy of impatient shareholders. Martore knows they know this, and then has to deliver the statement anyway. At least the new newspaper won’t have any debt! Elsewhere in “scale,” the Washington Post just had its best online month ever. [Pic via]

★★★ The cloud light through the trees was deep green, for sleeping in and for sleeping in. A tiger swallowtail flapped and glided back and forth outside the second-floor windows. The goldfinches were the same strong yellow the early fireflies had been the evening before. A female hummingbird sipped at a plastic flower on the feeder, while the male perched on one bare curving stalk amid the swelling wave of trumpet vine. Now and again he flashed the red of his throat. Outdoors was damp, the air full of peeping and piping and trilling. Spiderwebs hung in even the broad gaps between the trees, clinging to the face and neck. The grass had surrendered; the lawn was moss, violets, clovers, plantain. Mock strawberry, mushrooms the color of varnished wood. The low growth trembled with the passing of daddy longlegs. In midafternoon, the sun came out, over the back roads leading around the first of the traffic jams on the interstate. Up out of Maryland the sky was crowded with cumulus, but with gaps of blue finding the car along the way. In Delaware, the heavens and the road were choked off together, dark gray above and hopeless dark red on the traffic-flow map. A sprinkle of rain fell on the unmoving cars. In the distance were torqued and rippling cloud shape. Squeezing finally out into New Jersey brought glimpses of blue again. The two-year-old exclaimed and pointed out the half-moon, high in the daytime. All up the Turnpike, at intervals, came flooding gorgeous light, clear on the trees and the blossoms and the parked waiting excavators. Newark Airport was submerged in an enchanted rosy glow, a fog made of light, the low-flying planes immense but phantasmal. A blue blur over Manhattan matched the pink mists to the west. Then the sun was down, the car on its way back to the parking lot, past cyclists and overspilling restaurant crowds in the lukewarm darkness. Even Times Square, the colored signs of 44th Street scattering on the humid air, looked like a pleasant place to be. The half-moon remained, sharp and white.

The newest project from The Mast Brothers — giant-bearded gingers who arrived on the shores of Williamsburg in exquisitely crafted aprons and denim shirts to make conscientiously sourced and highly articulate hand-crafted bean-to-bar chocolate after leaving behind soulless corporate lives — is called The Chocolate House, and it combines all of that painful earnestness with the trappings of a Fancy Coffee Shop, like cold brew and pourover chocolate. Pay heed, children. This may be one of the signs of The Brooklyn Apocalypse, come to pass. (via Eater)

by Eric Spiegelman

If you want an established screenwriter to hate you, ask them to read your screenplay.

Don’t ever use the words “Lynchian” and “will you read my screenplay” in the same breath.

— Duncan Birmingham (@DuncanBirm) July 31, 2014

I will agree to read your script if you will agree to be lied to by me about what a great job you did in, say, three or four weeks from now.

— Franklin Hardy (@franklinhardy) August 1, 2014

I’ll read your screenplay as soon as I can. Gotta get through this stack of Sinead O’Connor open letters first.

— Todd Barry (@toddbarry) October 3, 2013

I’d rather loan you money than read your screenplay.

— Tess Rafferty (@TessRafferty) July 22, 2012

To the outside world, this may smack of dickishness. The small cabal of writers who’ve made it through the gauntlet and into the promised land of being taken seriously should extend a gracious hand to those starving aspirants still making their way up the mountain, right?

No! Absolutely not.

The reason isn’t that your screenplay probably sucks, or that there’s nothing that an established screenwriter can really do for your career, or that giving notes is something they actually do professionally, for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you’re asking them to give you a free sample of incredibly practiced and refined knowledge, or that reading a screenplay takes a big chunk out of someone’s Saturday. On top of all of this, there’s a valid, legal reason that reading your screenplay is an extremely bad idea. It’s because of George Harrison. The Beatle.

The idea for “My Sweet Lord” came to George Harrison after he got bored at a press conference and slipped away to mess around on his guitar. It was 1969, in Copenhagen, and Harrison was on tour with Billy Preston. He fit the word “Hallelujah” to a basic chord progression, then played the same thing while singing “Hare Krishna,” then he grabbed Preston and the rest of his bandmates and brought them in to riff some more. The result was a number one hit, all around the world. But it was a hit that sounded a lot like this:

Bright Tunes Music Corp., which owned the copyright to “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons, sued George Harrison. Most legal proceedings are dry affairs, and the judge in this case took special delight in writing a decision about a rock star. It’s one of those opinions that’s fun to read out loud in an over-the-top accent. “Seeking the wellsprings of musical composition,” he wrote, “why a composer chooses the succession of notes and the harmonies he does, whether it be George Harrison or Richard Wagner,” he continued, “is a fascinating inquiry.” The judge decided that Harrison, “in seeking musical materials to clothe his thoughts,” had no idea he was plagiarizing The Chiffons.

However, this didn’t matter. Circumstantial evidence can prove someone guilty of copyright infringement if two elements are satisfied.* The first is that the allegedly infringing work has to be “substantially similar” to the original. The second is that the alleged infringer has to have had access to the original. “He’s So Fine” was a popular song in 1963. It was all over the radio that summer. George Harrison admitted that he’d heard it before. He had access. That was enough to make him guilty.

Seeking the wellsprings of screenplay composition is no less fascinating an inquiry. Screenwriters absorb stories and characters wholesale from the world around them. Many take actual, written notes on things that happen nearby. A couple years ago, a writer friend and I witnessed a pair of cigarette-smoking police officers lock their keys in their still-running squad car and try to jimmy it open with a coathanger. She immediately grabbed a notebook and pen from her purse, and said, “I need to not forget this.” Writers are often advised to “write what they know.” To be prolific, they need to know a lot.

Also — and this has happened to everyone — sometimes someone tells you a great story and then you tell it to scores of other people over time, forgetting the source along the way. Great embarrassment follows when you tell the story to the person who originally told it to you, and they’re like, “Ummmmmmm.” A lot of stuff gets mixed together in the cauldron of the mind and one of the first things to boil away is attribution.

So let’s say you ask an established screenwriter to read your screenplay and they do so, because they’re a genuine mensch, but also kind of an idiot. Turns out, there’s one novel plot point in an otherwise forgettable story, and this screenwriter mensch remembers that part and forgets the rest. Four years later, the screenwriter mensch gets inspired by a couple of bumbling cops and writes a movie about it, and innocently incorporates your novel plot point, with no conscious idea where it came from. You can sue him for copyright infringement and you will win.

Or, more accurately, you can sue the big corporate movie studio that sinks fifty million dollars into production of the bumbling cop movie and another hundred and fifty million dollars into marketing it. The studio will look through what they call the movie’s “chain of title” documents and they’ll find the contract where the screenwriter mensch sold the script to the studio and they’ll find the provision where the screenwriter mensch “represents and warrants” that the screenplay “is original with the Writer and not copied, in whole or in part, from any other work” and “does not violate the copyright of any third party.” To put it mildly, this will not endear the screenwriter mensch to the studio. You do not want to be the guy who cost Warner Brothers a hundred million dollars in a lawsuit.

The threat of a copyright infringement claim based on the unintentional plagiarism of an unpublished spec screenplay is so terrifying that many studios and production companies have a blanket policy against the submission of unsolicited screenplays. They do not want their executives to read them. This policy cuts off all claims of the “access” element of a copyright claim. If there’s no access, it’s far less likely that a court will find infringement.*

This is a very smart policy. It’s one that established screenwriters should adopt, preempting you from asking them to read your screenplay. Because when you ask someone to read your screenplay, you’re basically asking them, “Hey, mind if I create the risk that I might destroy your life in a couple of years?”

*However, if the allegedly infringing work is exactly the same as the original, proving access is a bit less important.

Eric Spiegelman is still technically a lawyer.

A month after materializing out of the fog of Tumblr with the surprising and extremely catchy “OctaHate,” Ryn Weaver has posted another song.

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, writer Sara Morrison tells us more about what it’s like to try out for a roller derby team and then have your skate break.

Roller derby tryouts! QUEEN ELIZADEATH II RIDES AGAIN — oh wait my skate just broke. Thanks @iSkateRiedell!

— Sara Morrison (@SaraMorrison) July 19, 2014

Sara! So what happened here?

There was once a time when I lived in Los Angeles and played roller derby for the Los Angeles Derby Dolls and was known as Queen Elizadeath II, and it was good. (Here I am being ejected from my final game because I got too many major penalties, oops!). But then I moved to New York for grad school and stopped playing, and it was bad. I got fat, and I missed the sport. So when I got this new job in Boston, I decided to get back into derby as a way to meet new people (I don’t know very many people here), get back in shape, and play roller derby again, which I love.

You have to try out to get into the Boston Derby Dames. If you’re good enough, you get placed in the more advanced section, which means you’ll be able to be drafted onto a team that much sooner. They don’t hold tryouts too often, so if I didn’t make it in now I’d have to wait several months before I’d have a chance to try out again. So this was important!

I was nervous that I wasn’t in shape enough, and that it had been too long since the last time I played derby, and that I would be terrible and bring shame to my old derby league. Plus, Boston’s league plays a different kind of derby than what I did in LA (it’s played on a flat track instead of a banked track), so I wasn’t sure if there would be things I had never done before or what.

The tryouts are three hours long, and you’re skating the majority of that time. Ideally, you’re skating in a squatting position. It’s meant to exhaust you so they can see how fit you are and if you’re still able to skate safely when you’re about to collapse. So I knew I was in for a haul. But I had my favorite flavor of sports drink (fruit punch and mixed berry. No, not just fruit punch. Fruit punch AND mixed berry. There is a difference) and ate a nice big breakfast (bacon, eggs) so I was as ready as I’d ever be.

There were sixteen girls trying out. I was assigned the number thirteen, which in retrospect should have been a sign that this might not go perfectly for me. Basically they have you do skills you need to master to be able to play the game safely — kinds of stops, jumps, falls, being able to turn around and skate backwards — and test your endurance and skating form. (It’s based on this if you want to know the nitty gritty details.) I got through all that, and I was feeling pretty confident that this was going to go well for me! And it felt really good to skate again and I was looking forward to being a Boston Derby Dame! Then we moved on to contact drills and that’s when my toe stop fell out of my skate.

I thought it was just a matter of screwing it back into the plate (that’s the metal thing that connects the wheels to the skate boot), but it wouldn’t screw back in. It turned out that the threads in the plate were damaged somehow, and no toe stops were getting in there ever again. Which meant that: A) I’d have to replace the plate, which wasn’t exactly cheap at $160 (or get the manufacturer, Riedell, to replace it for free since it’s less than a year old and not supposed to, like, self-destruct in the middle of a skating session), and B) I’d have to skate the rest of tryouts without a toe stop. That’s a bigger problem than you might think — you use toe stops a lot in derby. Not just to stop, but to help you dig into the track, turn around, accelerate (you can “run” on them), stuff like that. In my old league, if you didn’t have toe stops, you weren’t allowed to skate. So when my toe stop came out and wouldn’t go back in, I thought I wouldn’t be able to continue with the tryout and I’d have to wait until December to try again and that sucked.

How did it all shake out? Did the busted skate cost you a spot in the league?

I just sat on the side staring at my broken skate for a while and looking sad when the assessor told me I should just do the rest of the tryout without a toe stop. There were a few times when I leaned forward on a toe stop that wasn’t there, and I didn’t have the agility I would’ve liked, but at least I got through it. I was lucky that we’d already done the toe-stop-necessary drills.

So yes, I made the team! I’m really excited but the first practice is August 2, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to ship my skate back to Riedell, get the plate replaced, and get it shipped back in time. Right now Riedell and I are trying to figure out who will pay to ship the skate from Boston to their factory and back.

Lesson learned (if any)?

I’ve been doing derby for over five years now, and my skate has only broken one other time, when Haught Wheels slammed into me so hard that she actually bent the axel between two of my wheels. You don’t really expect plates to break, and there isn’t much you can do to fix them when they do. It’s actually easier to skate with a broken bone than a broken plate. I know that because I did that once. So I don’t think there is a lesson to be learned here. Unless Riedell doesn’t replace the plate, in which case the lesson will be not to buy anything from Riedell. We’ll see.

So I’ll just leave you with a lesson I learned early on in my derby career: Always wear your mouthguard. At one practice, this girl either forgot or didn’t want to put her mouthguard in, and she made it maybe 20 minutes before she fell on her face. Then we had to waste valuable practice time crawling around on the ground looking for her tooth. Don’t be the girl who holds up practice with her broken tooth pieces. Wear your mouthguard.

Just one more thing.

On the way home from tryouts, at the train station, this girl came up to me and asked if I’d played roller derby in LA. I was wearing my LA Derby Dolls shirt and she recognized the logo. It turned out her cousin was my former teammate.

Matthew J.X. Malady is a writer and editor in New York.

Where is the song of the summer? American music writers have been asking this question every week since summer began, usually with Iggy Azalea playing in the background:

— We Deserve a Better Song of Summer
 — What’s The Song Of The Summer?
 — What’s Our Anthem? Searching For the Song of The Summer of 2014
 — The Summer Without a Song

This transitioned to rationalization:

— Changing habits make it tough to identify top summer songs
 — Can anything truly be called “song of the summer” anymore?

Then grieving:

— Flashback: Seven Memorable Songs of Summers Past

This situation is somewhat grim. “Happy,” which was initially released on the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack album, arrived a little too soon and was instantly torn into a thousand little royalty-licensed pieces. “Rude” is shameful. Nobody wants to let “Fancy” win by default.

Here, then, is a late-stage possibility, a final chance to understand why this is happening. Is it possible that there was no song of the summer this year because there was no summer?

One “polar vortex” after the other, it seems like this summer is really just an extension of spring. The cool temps are causing people who live east of the Rockies to wonder if 2014 will go down as the year without a summer.

It’s easy to agree with this hunch from an East Coast vantage; New York’s summer has so far been strange and uneven, lacking many days where playing a Song of the Summer would even feel appropriate, much less imperative. But just as the data stubbornly contradicts our denial that Iggy Azalea has already won, the data doesn’t neatly confirm the no-summer-no-song hypothesis. The Atlantic summer hasn’t been that cool, the Pacific summer has been fairly hot, and everything in between has been, in aggregate, seasonally appropriate.

At most the data suggests a weirdness or a spikiness, and a slight overall coolness. But maybe the perception of the summer’s weather as either extreme or unseasonable, through countless daily stories about record heat or record cool as well as a general sense of creeping climate apocalypse, is enough to disturb the delicate psychology needed to indulge the concept of a single triumphant seasonal song? Better to look for the Song of the Draught, the Song of the Fire, the Song of the Storm, the many Songs of the End.

Also maybe we don’t actually want a song of the summer. We had one last year, indisputably. It was called “Blurred Lines.”