Category Archives: Non-Fiction

“Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act,” Truman Capote.

The Offutt family surviving in self-isolation

Humor, Non-Fiction, Some whimsical stuff, ,
Home. It’s like prison, but with better food and fewer shivs.

I smell bad. When my family, like many around the world, began self-isolating during the spread of the COVID-19 virus, I didn’t consider how it would affect my hygiene.

How naïve.

I haven’t changed out of my pajamas for so long I forgot what color underwear I’m wearing. It’s gotten to the point I’m afraid to check. Socks, too. I’m actively avoiding looking down.

Weeks ago, before the call to hide from reality, my wife decided it would be wise to stock up on food and household items in case we were locked inside our home for an undetermined amount of time. 

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Hmm. Writing that made me realize three things:

  1. She’s smarter than I am.
  2. I shouldn’t have admitted we stocked up. Now I’m worried about people looting our house for paper towels and dental floss. That’s a thing, right?
  3. I must have subconsciously realized I wouldn’t shower during self-isolation because when she asked if anyone needed deodorant I said “no” without checking.

By the way, I’ve mostly stopped using it. Our house smells like a dead cat we’re all too lazy to look for.

In lockdown, this counts as a balanced meal, right?

Lazy is a key word during America’s lockdown. Nothing seems to make an easily bored family lazier than being told we should stay home. It’s given us permission to indulge in some of the Seven Deadly Sins, like Gluttony and Sloth, and maybe even Lust if an unnatural desire for strawberry cheesecake ice cream counts as lust.

All this simply means I’m saddened by the fact that someday I’ll again have to wear pants and go outside.

Human self-isolation is affecting more than just our bathing and clothing habits. Air pollution over major cities across the world has decreased drastically (air pollution in New York City has dropped 50 percent due to COVID-19 precautions). And the once murky waters of the Venice canals are now clear (and strangely devoid of beer cans and rusty shopping carts to show how un-American Italy is).

The plague is also putting French prostitutes out of business, according to the international news agency Agence France-Presse. So, there’s that.

In an effort to prove America’s the best country on Earth, we’ve recently surpassed Italy and China for the most confirmed cases of COVID-19. This is mostly due to the strictly American belief that we can defeat the virus by punching it.

The United States now has a population of 330 million mostly non-showering, non-working citizens, a virus that’s killing us and ruining our economy, and a federal government trying to jumpstart that economy by giving away trillions of dollars it doesn’t have.

Sounds like a party to me.

It’s scary outside. I’m glad we’re trapped inside our home watching Netflix, eating junk food, and stinking up the joint. We’ll come out when all this is over, or we run out of ice cream, or French prostitutes go back to work (a traditional sign of spring), or I need more deodorant.

I was kidding with that last one.

Jason’s upcoming novel, “So You Had to Build a Time Machine,” is available for preorder at jasonoffutt.com.

Writing and parenting; Our own personal hell

Humor, Non-Fiction, Some whimsical stuff, , ,

As writers, we put ourselves under a lot of pressure. Deadlines, arranging words in the right order, showering. It’s all rather stressful.

Throw in children (or out. See Number 6) and no one should wonder why we bleed from our ears. It’s called Writer’s Ear. Or maybe you’ve never experienced Writer’s Ear; it might be just me. I should probably get that checked.

We all became writers for one reason: to get the words out of our head. Being a parent is much the same. If I’m not shouting, “take that out of your mouth,” “I’m not hugging you, I’m picking a kidney,” and “stop that or you’ll go blind,” I’m probably in the wrong house.

According to Data USA (voted the most boring name in data collecting six years running), there are 181,131employed writers in the United States, excluding self-employed/self-published authors, and that person who did 50 Shades of Grey.

Couple that with the fact the U.S. Census Bureau determined 40.66 percent of American households have children, it’s safe to assume at least some of those households contain writers—some of whom apparently weren’t too awkward to have sex with their spouse. Maybe five, or even six of them. I don’t know. Math is hard.

For every lonely alcoholic writer stereotype, sitting at a bar, needing a shave, scratching thoughts on a stained napkin only to go home and throw up something they don’t remember eating, there’s a writer with children.

Children? No, I’m not drunk enough.

And those children make the alcoholic writer stereotype appealing. Sure, these writers may be sloppy drunks, but they at least get to leave the house. Children like something called “attention” that binds writers to their property. We’re prisoners, and our wardens may have trouble hitting the toilet.

Parenting is a demanding job, but so’s writing. How do we do both? It’s easy if you follow Jason Offutt’s Seven-Step Stress-free Method of Writing and Child Rearing:

  1. Hide. Young parents with small children don’t understand the importance of hiding from them. If they can’t find you, they can’t ask questions, such as “Whatcha doin’?” “Can I watch TV?” and “Do you seriously think writing is going to pay for my college education?” To hide effectively, program your children to believe the basement is haunted by Hitler’s ghost. Put a cozy chair and coffee bar down there for maximum comfort.
  2. Ignore your children. The average five-year-old will only shout for a parent 25.6 times before becoming distracted by a squirrel outside their window. This gives the writer-parent precious time to peck two-to-three uninterrupted sentences into a Word document named, “DearGodHelpMe_FirstDraft.”
  3. Tell the child not to do something, then leave the room.
  4. Eat chocolate. You may not realize this but getting into that bag of Twix stashed in the top of the bedroom closet will help your writing career. A 2009 paper in the Journal of Proteome Research showed eating chocolate reduces stress by lowering levels of stress hormones. This also gives you the satisfaction of not sharing treats with the cause of that stress. Little turds.
  5. Turn a radio onto the oldies station and start singing.
  6. Make the children go away. Not in a The Twilight Zone kind of way, more like the irresponsible parenting kind of way; it’s easier. If your kids haven’t returned by the time you’ve finished writing, post their Xbox for sale online. They’ll be home.
  7. Read The Shining for bedtime. Although your children may need therapy later in life, they will NOT get out of bed to ask for anything, giving you plenty of time to finish that parenting book you’ve been working on.

Happy writing.

Pre-order Jason Offutt’s new novel, “So You Had to Build a Time Machine,” at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

So much for best-laid plans

Humor, Non-Fiction, Some whimsical stuff,

My first day of winter break from teaching greeted me with a writer’s dream. An empty house, a fresh layer of undisturbed snow covering the lawn (that I should have mowed before winter) and the smell of coffee.

Where was my family? At their schools, which weren’t on winter break until the next week.

Fellow parents will understand why I danced in the kitchen.

Oh, man, I was going to get so much done. Fix the 13-year-old’s bedroom door so she can’t become a hermit, go to the DMV, call the number on our new health insurance cards to let the automated voice know we received them (an unnecessary exercise of bureaucratic nonsense), deal with the phone company and, oh yeah, work on my next book – just after I check Twitter. It’ll take two seconds, I promise.

Wait. Renewing my license feeds information into a computer database about what I drive. Registering our insurance cards feeds my family’s information into a computer database about our health. Spending an hour on Twitter feeds my social media habits into a database. I feel I’m somehow helping make the takeover by our future robot overlords a bit easier.

Who knew our future robot overlords would be so adorable?

Nevertheless, none of these chores or my justified paranoia were going to stop me from working on my new book. Just let me just check Twitter again. Oooh, a meme.

“Dad,” a small voice said. It sounded close by. Am I starting to hear things?

Oh, and TV. I was going to watch loads of TV I can’t watch while the kids are home. Inappropriate comedies, slasher movies, Bigfoot documentaries –

“Dad,” the voice said again. I turned away from my computer to find our 5-year-old daughter looking at me with big brown eyes behind an explosion of messy hair.

 Oh.

“I’m hungry.” She held up a plastic brachiosaurus. “And my dinosaur is hungry.”

Grrrr. Sorry, that was my stomach.

“Of course it is.” I was still in a bit of shock. I’d forgotten she was on break, too. “A brachiosaurus had to eat an estimated 400 pounds of vegetation every day just to maintain its weight.”

“Well,” she said. “Mine needs toast. With jelly.”

OK. Door repairs on hold. DMV on hold. Helping the robots take over on hold. Registering our health insurance cards, maybe. But, how will I get any writing done? Oh no. How will I check Twitter?

My options were limited. I could only justify letting such a small child with a spongy brain watch “Snow White” so many times. Was three too many? How about four?

I’d planned the next four weeks around my fingers on the keyboard. Now I needed to plan around the planning. I was going to write, right?

 Two hours later.

“Dad,” the Preschooler said. “You took off your tiara again. How are you going to play princesses without a tiara?”

“Princesses poop, you know.”

I didn’t write that day.

She only watched “Snow White” once, but I spent those two hours on Twitter.

Our Children are Aliens; their teachers said so

Horror, Non-Fiction, ,
A, B, C, D, E, F, G,
The Offutt kids are after me.

Parent-teacher conferences are terrifying. Not that I’m worried our children are failing at life. That’s my job. I’m simply concerned one day a teacher will tell us the kids are smarter than me.

What all parents really want is to know more than our children. This is not as awful as everyone I’ve told seems to think. Look, if our kids can survive on their own, they’ll never come home to visit, so I plan on teaching them nothing. If they never learn to drive, they can’t get away. This fits perfectly into my wife’s plan to keep our children in our house until they’re 40, probably in the same room on bunk beds so she can watch them while they sleep.

Not creepy at all. Nope.

However, I probably shouldn’t have told this to our children’s teachers. My wife and I are now banned from all school activities and legally can’t get within 100 feet of our own kids. It makes family vacations a bit awkward.

One of the biggest fears I have at parent-teacher conferences is that the teachers aren’t confused and are actually talking about the pubescent sass machines who live in our house instead of someone else’s kids.

Teacher: “Oh, your child is a blessing to have in class. So thoughtful, so caring and hasn’t set fire to the building once.”

Me: “Really? That doesn’t sound like an Offutt.”

Teacher: “I wish more students were like him.”

My wife: “But he took laxative brownies to the church potluck dinner, tied his grandmother’s shoelaces together and lit fireworks in his sister’s hair.”

 Me: “That’s right. Do you have the county jail on speed-dial, because we do.”

It’s like once our offspring leave the house, they turn into someone else. I’ve seen that movie and it doesn’t end well. People start behaving differently; they’re more polite, happier, punctual. Then the heroes discover too late that sentient alien plants have grown duplicate townspeople in big green pods and taken over the city.

What I want to know is why can’t our real children go to school while the alien pod children stay home and clean their rooms? This would make vacuuming so much easier and I could go to a parent-teacher conference without feeling like one of those TV sit-com dads who’s in no way as smart as his kids.

But it’s not like this. Teachers, administrators, parents of friends, strangers in dark alleys, the FBI special agent who sits outside our house in an unmarked car all think our children are nice and don’t act like the hooligans we know them to be.

Someday I want to hear a teacher tell us once, just once, “Offutt, your kids are out of control. They’re psychotic monsters.”

It would make me feel like we’ve accomplished something as parents – we’ve raised normal kids.

The Offutts have locked us in the dungeon again. Send help.

Chasing American Monsters is here NOW

Non-Fiction
Chasing American Monsters: 251 Creatures, Cryptids, and Hairy Beasts is available now at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.

Jason Offutt’s newest book, “Chasing American Monsters: 251 Creatures, Cryptids, and Hairy Beasts,” is finally out. Featuring legendary, and some little known, monsters from each state, “Chasing American Monsters” is filled with creatures that lurk, slither, run or fly through our nightmares.

Loren Coleman, author of Cryptozoology A to Z and director of the International Cryptozoology Museum, says, “Jason Offutt does a special service to the field of cryptozoology with this new book Chasing American Monsters. By keeping all of us up-to-date and incredibly informed—beyond the scope of lesser guidebooks—we have a better head start on knowing where to look for these cryptids. Highly recommended.”

The book is published by Llewellyn Publications.

Enjoy!

Looks Like Pizza Again

Humor, Non-Fiction, Some whimsical stuff

The recipes seemed simple enough. They should be. Each was posted on a website boasting, “quick, simple meals kids will love.” It’s not like the internet has ever lied to me.

As the cook in our house, I try to come up with a variety of healthy meals that will hopefully teach our children pizza is not the only food in the universe. That’s a hard sell. The busiest days of the year for pizza sales are New Year’s Eve, Super Bowl Sunday and the night before Thanksgiving. If my kids had a say in the matter, “Any Night at the Offutt House” would rank fourth.

One problem with making healthy meals is the people who create these recipes – often on websites called “Healthy Cooking with Kelly” and “Eat Well or I’ll Come to Your House, Asshole” – is the meals don’t reflect the shopping habits of the average American cook.

Flipping through the recipes, I noticed every one contained an ingredient I didn’t have, or, in fact, would ever buy. Like Brewer’s yeast and goat cheese.

That’s where substitutions come in. I could substitute cheddar for goat cheese and chug a beer while cooking. No one will know the difference, right?

Another recipe asked for coconut milk. Stores actually sell that? How, exactly, does a person milk a coconut? Since I’m not Mary Ann from “Gilligan’s Island,” could I use regular milk, or would that get me on the bad side of whatever vegan gods keep track of such things?

And what’s harissa? Isn’t that one of those annoying baby names parents think are clever even though they only changed one letter? “Harissa, stop teasing your brother Konathon.”

No, wait, harissa is a North African hot chili pepper paste. Sorry for calling you out, clever parents.

Broad beans. Hmm. If someone had asked before today, I would have said I’m pretty up on my bean varieties. Soy, lima, green, brown, great northern, cannellini. But broad? Nope. I know nothing about this insensitive variety of bean. Wouldn’t “plus-size beans” or “full-figured beans” be more sensitive terms in this politically correct world?

I soon discovered broad beans are also known as fava beans; the type of beans Hannibal Lecter ate with a census taker’s liver and a nice Chianti in “Silence of the Lambs.” I decided against the beans. To successfully complete this recipe, I’d need a census taker. Besides, my children already terrify me.

Saffron? Off the top of my head, I’d say that’s either a type of material for clothing popular in the 1970s, a Led Zeppelin song, or that one guy in in those “High School Musical” movies. I think his name is Zac. But no, saffron is actually a spice. An expensive spice, which is why I hadn’t heard of it.

The last recipe I came to required pink Himalayan salt, which is 98 percent the same as regular table salt and roughly 98 times more expensive. The only difference between the two is trace amounts of mystery minerals that cause it to be pink.

So, can I use regular salt as a substitute? Vegan hippy who runs the website said no. He also said alpaca farts are the cause of global warming.

That night we had pizza.

Words Mean Things, Damn It. Use Them Right

Non-Fiction, Some whimsical stuff, , , , , , , , , ,

Jason’s head.

My wife thinks I’m stodgy when it comes to words and when it comes to words I find that a compliment. Words mean certain things and when we use them incorrectly the world devolves into anarchy. Right?

Trigger Smith, owner of the New York East Village bar The Continental, took the abuse of the English language seriously in January. He banned customers from using the word “literally” because it is the “most overused, annoying word in the English language and we will not tolerate it,” according to National Public Radio.

I have no problem with literally when it’s used correctly. The problem is, it isn’t.

Figuratively: It sounds like it’s true, but it is not.

Literally: It’s actually true.

Good for you Trigger.

But the work of people like Trigger seems wasted when an organization such as Merriam-Webster comes out and says two words that don’t mean the same thing now do. Apparently, the dictionary folks are OK with “nauseous” and “nauseated” being synonymous. I guess I can’t trust them as far as I can throw their product.

“We must point out that nauseous, like many other words in our language, is remarkable in its elasticity and range of meaning,” Merriam-Webster posted.

Shut up.

Nauseate: Something makes you feel sick.

Nauseous: You actually are sick and probably going to hurl.

They’re not interchangeable and it’s not that hard to keep them straight.

“Language evolves,” my wife said when she got tired of listening to me rant, which is beginning to happen much more often. “Shakespeare made up thousands of words.”

I hate it when she makes sense.

Although she’s right that language evolves, if we don’t stick to the rules we eventually won’t be able to understand what anyone else is saying. It’s bad now. Have you ever tried arguing with a Texan?

Say “plethora,” I dare you.

Let me complain further:

  • I hate the word “plethora.” It is pretentious and wrong. It’s a medical term from the 1540s that means “an excess of blood.” So, go ahead and say you have a “plethora” of drink choices. I’ll assume you’re a vampire and act accordingly.
  • When someone is dragging something, the past tense is “dragged,” not “drug.” A drug is what I need to take to tolerate bad grammar.
  • Don’t use the word “just” unless you’re writing about why The Batman fights crime.
  • The word “really” is a waste of space.
  • Stop using “theory” when you mean “hypothesis.”
  • I dislike the word “lanyard.” It was once a manly sailing term. Now it’s used to describe the cord people use to hang keys, or Comicon badges.
  • Exclamation points are for the signature page in a high school yearbook. Be strong, use a period.
  • “ATM machine”? Do people not know what the M in ATM means? The same goes for PIN number.
  • There’s a difference between “everyday” and “ every day.” Figure it out.

My wife is right, language evolves, but when does that evolution simply become those who know better giving in to those who don’t?

A Word is a Word is a Word, Damn it

Non-Fiction, Some whimsical stuff, ,

Sitting near the back row of pews at church (are protestants even allowed to sit near the front?) the congregation burst into song because the program told us to. Otherwise we just sit there and try not to make eye contact.

The hymn bothered me.

It wasn’t the message, nor the melody. It wasn’t even that the song had too many verses (some hymns can last as long as a sermon). It was because of a simple, easily avoidable grammatical error that made me nearly shout something I usually only shout during football games. I’m told shouting in my denomination is frowned upon because it’s not in the program.

I might be able to handle this misuse of the English language if it was a one-time deal, but it was in the refrain. The refrain.

The composer used “I” when he should have used “me.”

Inexcusable.

My grandmother was an English teacher, so growing up the use of language was something I had to pay more attention to than silly things like math. That kind of attention turned me into someone who’s not very much fun to talk with at parties.

Or at the grocery store.

Standing in a grocery store checkout line one day, perusing magazine headlines like “Kim and Kanye are Space Aliens from the Moons of Jupiter” (which I don’t doubt in the slightest), and “Sandra Bullock Channels Nostradamus; the End is Near,” I noticed a handmade cardboard sign on the credit card reader. It read, “This Machine is Broke.”

Really? Broke?

So, this device that is connected to every bank in the country is somehow out of money? I pulled a red Sharpie from my pants pocket and added an “n.” The man behind me laughed.

I can’t help myself. I’m OCD enough (my favorite rock band is OC/DC) to have been a newspaper editor, which made my head hurt. Here are some of the major offenders:

  • No matter how many times you use it, irregardless is not a word.
  • Pacific is an ocean, it doesn’t mean precise or exact.
  • Doughnuts are made out of dough. Donuts don’t exist.
  • Theatre is a British word meaning theater. Theater is an American word meaning theater. For all you theater types, stop trying to use the British version. That’s a level of pretentiousness that can only be pulled off by hipsters.
  • PIN number is repetitious. What do you think the N means?
  • Free gift is silly. If it’s not free, it’s not a gift, is it?
  • Fantastic doesn’t mean something is amazingly good. It means something is not real. If your dinner is fantastic, you’re going to be hungry later.

I’m serious about grammar. Don’t make me come over there.

But still, about that I/me thing.

“This composer is still alive,” I told my wife as I sat in front of my laptop. You bet I looked him up. “He has contact information on his website. I’m going to write to him and tell him he has a grammatical error in his hymn.”

She put her hand on my wrist. I looked up. She just shook her head.

Damn. What’s the point of being a grammar nerd if I can’t correct everybody?

Hmm, aluminium is a word? Thanks for nothing, Noah Webster

Non-Fiction, Some whimsical stuff, , ,

Back off, this is MY language now.

The British chap* on television said something that struck me as silly. Not the context, the pronunciation.

Given that Americans speak English, and the English speak English (strange but true), language comprehension problems between Americans and the English should not exist.
They, of course, do. There are enough subtle differences between the two versions of the English language to make a conversation between an American and a Brit sound like it’s in Klingon.

The man on television pronounced aluminum “al-U-min-E-um,” which I discovered is correct, although horribly uncomfortable to say. Go ahead; try it.

This particular pronunciation problem came from two sources.

The first being English chemist Sir Humphry Davy who in 1807 discovered a metal in alum and named this new metal alumium. He later changed the name to aluminum because “aluminum” sounded more (whatever word they used for “hip” in 1807). Davy’s colleagues in the chemistry department couldn’t let well enough alone and changed the spelling to aluminium in 1812 because they just couldn’t let Davy have his day in the sun, now, could they.

The second reason is that Noah Webster developed a God complex and completely mucked up American English.

Noah Webster, Jr., was a lexicographer, a pioneer in the field of textbooks, and yes, the dictionary dude. In 1828, he published “An American Dictionary of the English Language.” You see what he did there? It’s the “American Dictionary of the English Language,” meaning it’s not the real English language.

Ever wonder why former British colonies like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and freaking Belize spell color with a “U”? It’s because that’s how it’s spelled. Webster thought English spelling rules were inconsistent, so he tried to standardize them.

He cut out the “U” in words like colour and flavour, changed “ise” to “ize” in words like organise, and realise, turned tonne into ton, grey into gray (although for some reason he left the greyhound dog alone), and aluminium to aluminum even though compared to Sir Humphry Davy, he didn’t know jack squat about chemistry, or apparently spelling.

Damn straight.

It doesn’t stop there. Because of Webster’s tinkering even words spelled the same in both countries are not always pronounced the same.

In England, privacy is PRIV-a-cee, advertisement is Ad-vert-ISS-ment, schedule is SHED-u-al, mobile is mo-BILE, oregano is OR-EH-GON-O and garage is GARE-idge.

As an American, this bothers me. I grew up thinking the British talked funny. Turns out it was us. However, Americans aren’t the only villains here. Time, culture, and geography also play a part. But mostly Webster. Yeah, let’s blame most of this on him.

Aluminium indeed.

 

*You can’t use “chap” unless the voice in your head talks with a British accent. For example, “that German chap with the funny mustache gave us quite a fit during the war.” Or, “that New Guinea tribesman chap with the spear.” Wouldn’t sound right coming out of the mouth of a Texan, would it?

Ernest Hemingway’s Bloody Mary Recipe

Humor, Non-Fiction, Some whimsical stuff,

Ernest Hemingway getting the job done.
Ernest Hemingway writing: Just getting the job done.

Writers drink. Or do drinkers write? Either way we should all turn to the masters to learn our craft. As for writing, Ernest Hemingway said, “Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.” As for what happened next, Papa Hemingway often had a cocktail … or seven. Below is Mr. Hemingway’s recipe for the perfect bloody mary.

Hemingway not writing: Having a few drinks, and taking his son fishing.
Hemingway not writing: Having a few drinks, and taking his son fishing for literary critics.

“To make a pitcher of Bloody Marys (any smaller amount is worthless) take a good sized pitcher and put in it as big a lump of ice as it will hold. (This to prevent too rapid melting and watering of our product.) Mix a pint of good Russian vodka and an equal amount of chilled tomato juice. Add a tablespoon full of Worcestershire sauce. Lea and Perrins is usual but you can use A1 or any good beef-steak sauce. Stirr (with two rs). Then add a jigger of fresh-squeezed lime juice. Stir. Then add small amounts of celery salt, cayenne pepper, black pepper. Keep on stirring and taste to see how it is doing. If you get it too powerful, weaken with more tomato juice. If it lacks authority add more vodka.”