S.G. Browne

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.

(Previous color entry: And Now A Word From The Color Red)

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?

Okay. Let’s just get this over with right now.

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.