With respect to Jeff Foxworthy, I’ve put together a short list of people who I feel are good examples of douche bags. Or douchebags. Either way works for me. This list was prompted by my recent early morning bike rides, but I thought I’d expand it to include a few other examples.

-If you’re cycling side by side on the Golden Gate bridge and you don’t drop into single file for an oncoming cyclist, you might be a douche bag.

-If you wear a team racing jersey while cycling and you’re not on a cycling racing team, you might be a douche bag.

-If you’re a cyclist who gets mad at a car that almost hit you when you blew through a four-way stop sign, you might be a douche bag.

-If you’re a smoker who believes the sidewalk and the gutter are official depositories for your cigarette butts, you might be a douche bag.

-If you don’t understand the concept of using the ashtray in your car rather than throwing your cigarette butt out the window, you might be a douche bag.

-If you answer your cell phone in a restaurant while your date sits across from you picking at her dinner, you might be a douche bag.

-If you put your cell phone on vibrate but answer text messages while you’re in a movie theater, you might be a douche bag.

-If you invade a foreign country on the premise that they have weapons of mass destruction and it turns out they don’t, you might be a douche bag.

-If you deny your relationship with a White House intern by debating what the definition of the word “is” is, you might be a douche bag.

-If you’re the CEO of British Petroleum and you’re more upset about the fake Twitter account mocking your company than you are about your historic oil spill, you might be a douche bag.

Slow. Indifferent. Annoying.

Are they conserving their energy for something? Is it a peer display of cool? A nonchalance to give the adult world the finger? The slower you move, the less you care?

All I know is that my light’s going to turn red before they clear the crosswalk.

Lack of courtesy is a major pet peeve for me and it’s something I touch on in the book I’m currently writing. (Not Fated, but Book #3, which I’ve titled Lucky Bastard). My main character is annoyed by a lot of things – cars that take up two parking spaces, neighbors with loud stereos, and cell phone etiquette, among others – so I thought I’d channel him for one of my blog posts.

So besides slow, indifferent teenagers, some of the other things that annoy me:

Street telemarketers.
Bad customer service.
Friends who answer their cell phones in restaurants.

Really, anyone who answers their cell phone in a restaurant. Or while standing in the checkout line at the grocery store. Or in any enclosed, public place. That’s why you have voice mail. You can call them back.

On second thought, maybe it would be more appropriate to think of this as People Who Annoy Me, since most of the things on my list are people.

People who litter.
People who don’t say please or thank you.
People who think movie theaters are interactive experiences.

Almost every time I go to the movies I end up sitting by some man or woman who insists on keeping a running commentary throughout the film. Or who is constantly asking questions. If you don’t understand what’s going on, stop asking your friend or your spouse to explain and figure it out for yourself. Take a class on critical thinking. Improve your ability to problem solve. Read more books instead of watching reality television or playing video games.

Bicyclists who don’t obey traffic laws.
Smokers who think their cigarette butts are biodegradable.
Drivers who don’t understand the concept of merging.

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.

A couple of years back, when I was doing property management for some apartment buildings here in San Francisco, I was performing apartment inspections and discovered that the tenant in one unit, a big, friendly guy in his 50s, had been dead for several days. After walking out of the bedroom and seeking the safety of the kitchen, I called the landlord. Then I called 911. This is pretty much how the conversation went.

“911. What is your emergency?”
“I’d like to report a dead body in my apartment building.”
(I then provide my name and the address.)
“How do you know the body is dead, sir?”
“Well, he’s on his back and he’s not breathing and his eyes are wide open.”
“Are you sure he’s not breathing?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Is the body cold?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t touch him.”
“Can you check to see if the body is cold, sir?”
“You want me to touch him?”
“Yes sir.”
“Do I have to touch him?”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
(After a pause.) “Okay, fine. Hold on a second.”
(I walk back into the bedroom, bend down, then reach out a single index finger and poke him in the shoulder.)
“Yes, he’s cold.”
“Do you have a defibrillator?”
(A defibrillator? No, I don’t have a defibrillator. Who the hell carries around a defibrillator?)
“No. I don’t have a defibrillator. And I don’t know CPR, either, so if you want someone to try to resuscitate him, then I’m not the man for the job.”
“Are you alone, sir?”
“Yes. So if you could you please send someone over here who deals with dead bodies I’d appreciate it, because this isn’t really my forte.”
“We’ll send someone right over.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Red is hot. She’s totally hot.

Dude, she could, like, sit next to me and hang out, maybe go surfing or to the skate park or shopping at the Natural Food store and everyone would look at us and say, “Whoa,” because we would look so awesomely perfect together.

This one time, these dudes were all, like, up in my face, totally resenting the fact that I was a way better surfer than they were. For some reason people seem to get all envious around me. So I was like,”Hey dudes, chill,” because really I’m all about harmony and peace. I’m a big fan of nature, too.

Anyway, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Red watching me. Totally checking me out. I could tell from the way she was blushing that she was totally impressed with my awesome freshness dealing with those dudes. Plus I’m pretty fertile. So when I strolled up to her and said “What’s up?” and she called me a stoner, I was like, that’s so uncool. But then I figured it was just because she was intimidated by my healing powers. And the fact that I’m, like, totally loaded.

She digs me, she just doesn’t know it, yet.

(Sound of bong water gurgling, followed by a long, satisfied exhalation).

Dude, what was I talking about?

My name is Scott and I am a Waterworld fan.

That’s right. Waterworld. One of the most famous box office flops in the history of Hollywood, right up there with Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar, Hudson Hawk, Gigli, Battlefield Earth, Howard the Duck, The Adventures of Pluto Nash, and Leonard Part 6.

It’s my favorite guilty pleasure film of all time. I can watch it over and over, from beginning to end, halfway into the film, two-thirds of the way in, doesn’t matter. I don’t know why I love the film so much. Maybe it’s because of the gills. Or the premise. Maybe it’s because it was such a ridiculous catastrophe. Or that I always get a kick out of Dennis Hopper. Or maybe it’s because I have a man-crush on Kevin Costner.

Okay, that’s admission number two. The Kevin Costner man-crush thing. Maybe it isn’t as deep as it was back in the 1980s when he was starring in films like The Untouchables, Bull Durham, and Field of Dreams, but it’s still there, lying dormant, ready to awaken whenever one of those films comes on TNT or TBS. I mean, come on, how could you not love him as Elliot Ness? What guy didn’t want to be Crash Davis? What guy didn’t cry when he asks his father if he wants to have a game of catch at the end of Field of Dreams? Admit it. Or live in denial. It’s your choice.

I even met him once, back in 1990 when I was working as a driver for a company that did post-production for the Disney Studios, finishing the television spots and theatrical trailers for all of their films. Costner was down the hall in another edit bay doing some work on what would turn out to be Dances With Wolves (which should have acceded it’s Best Picture Oscar to Goodfellas, but that’s another story).

We all knew he was at the editing facility (the Mustang he drove in Bull Durham was in the parking lot with a license plate that said CRASH D), so there was some buzz and I was thinking about what I would say if I had the chance to meet him. We were working on the Dick Tracy campaign (a catastrophe in its own right) and I was sitting on the couch, waiting for someone to tell me to take something somewhere, when a figure appeared in the doorway to my left. Before I glanced up, the figure said: “Is that Dick Tracy you’re working on in there?”

I turned to look and said “Yeah,” all at the same time. When I saw it was Kevin Costner, all of the lines I’d rehearsed had suddenly turned to static and I couldn’t think of anything else to say. So I just stood there and stared at him until he finally turned and walked away.

So that was how I met Kevin Costner. That was what I said. “Yeah.”

One word. Four letters. One syllable.

Now if you’ll excuse me, Waterworld is playing on TNT again.