S.G. Browne

I’m sitting on the balcony of my hotel room on the 20th floor looking south along the beach in Ft. Lauderdale and I hear an alarm going off somewhere on the street below, followed by an authoritative recorded female voice issuing some kind of instructions. The alarm and voice keep repeating, like an outdoor emergency warning system.

Alarm. Instructions. Repeat.

Either it’s a talking car alarm or else there’s a hurricane on the way and we have to evacuate.

This is my first full day in Ft. Lauderdale, having arrived here Sunday afternoon. Over the previous four days I’ve been in Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, Siesta Key, St. Petersburg again, then back to Ft. Lauderdale. Tomorrow I’m heading down to South Beach for a couple of days, then to Islamorada in the Florida Keys.

The alarm is still going off, the woman issuing her warning. The skies look clear to me off the coast and I don’t see crowds of people evacuating on the streets twenty stories below, so I figure I’m okay.

That’s one of the things I noticed driving around Florida for the past few days. There are Evacuation Route signs posted everywhere. I don’t know what the process is like, but at least when they issue a hurricane warning, they have an evacuation plan. In California, we don’t get earthquake warnings, and as far as any kind of evacuation plans, as far as I know, there aren’t any. So we’re pretty much screwed.

The alarm and the warning have finally ended, which means one of the valet attendants at my hotel is probably trying to make sure he knows how to shut off the alarm next time.

As I sit here writing this, the sun moving across the sky from ocean to downtown Ft. Lauderdale, the palm tree-lined beach stretching south almost to the horizon, I’m thinking I could get used to this.

I like Florida. I think I’m going to move here. Maybe to the Keys. I’ve never been to the Keys, but right now, it sounds like a good idea.

There’s lots of water and boats here. Sure, there’s lots of water and boats in San Francisco, too, but it’s not 72 degrees in San Francisco on the first day of March. And the beaches aren’t lined with palm trees. And the water isn’t clear and blue, reflecting the endless sky.

The alarm has started up again. Either the valet needs to work on his learning curve or else I was wrong about having to evacuate.

Okay, I realize it’s been nearly two weeks since my last blog entry, Andy’s comments about breathers notwithstanding. Chalk it up to projects and trip planning and general distraction and attending to some personal matters like flying up to Portland and helping my mom pack and then driving her down to California, which is what I was doing when I was informed that Breathers had made it on to the final ballot for the 2009 Bram Stoker Awards for Achievement in a First Novel.

Woo hoo!

But that’s another blog post. Eventually.

This was going somewhere when I started it. Let me get my map. Hmm, let’s see…ah yes, there we are!

I’m aware that I seldom discuss what I’m working on, or not working on (which is often the case) because I don’t plot and I’m not really sure where it’s going and I’m easily distracted, so I’d have to be vague and stumble through some fragmented explanation that would try to deflect attention from the fact that I had spent the last three days playing spider solitaire and watching the last season of Weeds.

I do, however, sit my ass down in front of my computer at 8:00am every morning (or mostly every morning) and give myself the next 3-4 hours to compose my 1000 words for the day. Sometimes I see other authors posting on Twitter that they’ve finished their 2000 words by noon and will write another 2000 words that night. Or that the average person can write 500 words an hour (which is two, double-spaced pages in 12-point Times New Roman with one-inch margins), and I think, okay you gluttonous bastard, how about giving some of those words to me?

The most words I’ve ever written in one day is 2500, and I powered through 5000 words in two days back in February 2008 just before the Super Bowl when I had a bad cold and was finishing up Fated to give to my writer’s group. I have to say, I think that was probably some of the best writing I’ve done. I don’t think I edited much of that portion of the book. Maybe I should write when I’m sick and under deadline more often.

So that’s why I don’t tend to blog about my writing. But if anyone’s interested enough in knowing more about my process, I’ll be happy to occasionally blog about it. But be warned, there will be a lot of plot holes.

I also notice that some authors are perfectly capable of blogging about personal things that happen throughout the course of their existence – health issues, pets dying, interpersonal relationships. Which always amazes me when men can blog about relationships because we never talk to each other about them in real life. And yes, I firmly believe that the Internet is an alternate reality. Kind of like on LOST. Though I’m not really sure which reality is the real one there. The island now or the airplane landing in LAX three years earlier? Come to think of it, maybe I’m not sure about this reality, either.

Where was I? Ah yes, personal things…

While I’m perfectly happy sharing my love of Ben & Jerry’s and the fact that I have a lingering man crush on Kevin Costner, I’d prefer to leave the more personal details of my life to the tabloids. Who, fortunately, don’t give a damn about me.

So there you have it. A rambling discourse on not much of anything. Thank you for listening. Now, back to spider solitaire.

Sometimes I wish there were Protocol Police, Officers of the Social Graces who would fine people for inappropriate behavior and arrest repeat offenders who would have to serve time at an Etiquette Rehabilitation Center.

People who litter.
People who swear in public.
People who don’t say please and thank you.

Honestly, some of these people need to go back to Mom and Dad for a little refresher course in good manners.

I see it all the time. Men and women and teenagers who seem to have no interest in behaving properly. On any given day, I can walk out my front door and witness multiple acts of behavioral disobedience. Of people who seem to think the rules of common courtesy don’t apply to them.

Bicyclists disobeying traffic laws.
Owners failing to clean up after their dog.
Drivers refusing to merge.

If you ask me, the world would be a better place if everyone understood the concept of merging. And if people would learn to clean up their own messes.

But some of the worst public offenders of social etiquette are people on their cell phones. On their iPhones. On their Blackberries.

Answering their cell phone in a restaurant.
Shouting into their Blackberry on the bus.
Taking out their iPhone during a movie.

Your iPhone’s a flashlight, asshole. A bright, colorful, $300 flashlight.

Turn. It. Off.

The problem is, when using their cell phones, people often don’t bother to pay attention to those who exist around them. To how their actions affect others. To the inappropriateness of their behavior. They exist in a bubble of personal space that excludes anyone else. A cocoon of electronic communication that prevents them from interacting. Plugged into a world of applications and search engines and social networks.

It’s as if by discovering more ways to connect, we’ve lost the ability to interact with the people sitting next to us. It’s as if by improving communication, we’ve lost the ability to relate without the comfort of an electronic leash.

Everyone’s here but not really.
Everyone’s taking up space but someplace else.
Everyone’s connected but disconnected.

While I tend to do most of my shopping at Trader Joe’s, I occasionally go shopping at Safeway, a chain supermarket in California that offers discounts on merchandise to shoppers who are members of their free Safeway Club program. This is one of the main reasons I shop at Safeway. As a member of the Safeway Club program, I can get a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in any flavor for $3.49. At least $1 less than at any other grocery store, including Walgreens. Score!

Not to mention all of the other discounts I can get on such items as Odwalla Superfood, organic butter, Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips (for baking chocolate chip cookies), and Dungeness crab, in season.

But Corona beer is still less expensive at Trader Joe’s.

But back to Safeway.

When it comes my turn at the check-out register, I punch my ten-digit phone number into the point-of-sale terminal and watch as my Safeway Club Card member savings appear on the electronic register readout. Once my sale is complete and I pay for my groceries, the clerk tears off my receipt, glances at it, then hands it to me with a smile and says:

“Thank you, Mr. Cypert.”

Or, to be more precise, Mrs. Cypert. The name on the receipt for the Safeway Club Card program is a woman’s name. I’ve omitted her first name because I didn’t want anyone to go off and Google her.

Anyway, I don’t know who she is, but for the past ten years her name has been attached to my phone number on Safeway’s Club Card system. I don’t know how it’s attached or why, but it’s my phone number and I’m not changing it. And it’s not like I care about the accumulated benefits of the Club Card program. I just want my discounts.

So I say “Thank you,” take my receipt, and go merrily on my way.

This isn’t the first time I’ve willingly accepted the identity of someone else.

Back in college, an acquaintance I met at a party at the end of my junior year kept calling me Steve. Scott. Steve. They share two of the same letters and there’s a vowel in there. Not the same one, but there are only five vowels (and sometimes “y”). Close enough for an end-of-the-year party, especially when you don’t expect to run into the person again, so I didn’t bother to correct him.

Naturally, we ended up in a class together the following fall.

Surprisingly enough, the professor never used any first names and I didn’t know anyone else in the class,so when this misinformed student once again called me Steve, I still didn’t bother to correct him. I don’t know why. I just didn’t. I was 22 and in college. It seemed kind of amusing.

After a while, enough time passed where I couldn’t correct him. It would have been awkward. So I became Steve. It got to the point that if someone called out “Steve!” across the campus, I’d turn and look to see if it was for me.

So I’m okay being Mrs. Cypert, so long as it continues to get me $1 discount on my pints of Ben & Jerry’s.

I’m reading Stephen King’s Just After Sunset, his first collection of short stories since his Everything’s Eventual in 2002.  Maybe it’s just time talking, slowly removing pieces of my memory, or maybe it’s because I didn’t find any of them particularly memorable, but I can’t recall any of the stories from his last collection.  Yet I can still remember “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” and “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,” among others, from Skeleton Crew, so I’m guessing it’s more of the latter.

And as usual, I sit down to write something and end up straying off topic.  How I’ve manged to finish writing several novels, I have no idea.

I just finished reading one of King’s stories in Just After Sunset, this one titled “The Things They Left Behind.”  Like many of the stories I’ve read so far in this collection, it’s layered with a good depth of human emotion that affects you on a personal level rather than on one of fear.  It’s Stephen King at his storytelling best, managing to make you examine your own life and the things that matter.

This particular story deals with a would-have-been victim of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and personal keepsakes of co-workers who weren’t as fortunate that keep showing up in his apartment.  The keepsakes, not the victims.  I won’t go into the details of the story, because they’re not what prompted me to write this.  At least not until the end, when the main character meets the widow of one of his co-workers and she relates the last thing she said to her husband before he went off to work:

“I wish I’d said something better than ‘Bring home a pint of half-and-half.’  But we’d been married a long time and it seemed like business as usual that day, and…we don’t know, do we?”

No, we don’t.  We don’t know what our last words to someone might be.  To a friend.  A parent.  A lover.  We never know what might happen when someone we cares about walks out the door or heads off to work or gets on a plane.

It’s easy to forget this, to get caught up in the comfortable rhythms of life, to expect everything to go as planned, to put your faith in the business as usual. And really, there’s nothing wrong with that.  It’s what allows us to enjoy the present.

But I’d like to think I could make an effort to end the conversations with my friends and loved ones with something personal.  Something that matters.  Something that resonates with the understanding that these connections I have with the people who share my life are precious and I don’t want to take them for granted.

Something other than “Bring home a pint of half-and-half.”

Or, in my case, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

When you’re a writer, you get to go back and edit what you’ve done.  The words your characters have spoken.  The actions they’ve taken. You get the chance to go back and make the words count.

Unless you have a time machine, you don’t get to edit your life.  You’re stuck with your words and your actions.  Sometimes you can atone for them, make things right, but other times, life doesn’t give you that option.

So make the words count.