September 2nd, 2010
I look at it this way. If David Sedaris can write an essay on air travel in The New Yorker the comedic moratorium on that topic must be over. I only wish someone had told me sooner; I’ve been holding in a bunch of airline observations with the painful effort of a Big Gulp drinker on diuretics.
Which I am, by the way, so excuse me for a minute.
Okay. So. The last I remember airline jokes were passé. Done to death. In fact, the long-standing parody of a stand-up comedian starts with, “So how about that airplane food?” But if Sedaris can point out various foibles of air flight it must be back in vogue.
Not that I have any jokes, per se. More like observations. Well, basically it boils down to one complaint, which is that you can no longer get a straight answer from an airline employee.
Here’s an example. I recently went back to use an airplane restroom, but when I got there the “fasten seat belt” light went on. The flight attendant pointed this out to me.
“Okay,” I said. “Should I go back to my seat?”
Her face was expressionless. “The pilot has turned on the fasten seat belt sign.”
“So–I should go back to my seat.”
“I can’t tell you that,” she said. “But the pilot has turned on the fasten seat belt light.
By then the seat belt light went off and the rest room was empty, so I went in and did what I always do to break up the monotony of a long flight, which is tidy up the bathroom. I used to simply wash my hands, but you can’t feel clean in such a tiny place until it’s tidied up.
I don’t know what that flight attendant was trying to tell me. Probably she wasn’t trying to tell me anything, merely parroting legal boilerplate. Probably a litigious passenger had sued the airline for not letting them use the restroom while the fasten seat belt sign was on, and then a second passenger sued them letting them use the rest room while the light was on. Probably the legal damages included soiled underwear in the former case and a bump on the forehead in the latter.
And because of that I can’t get a flight attendant to answer a simple question. Perhaps if I had framed it as a hypothetical she would have felt within her legal rights to offer an opinion. “If you were in my position, would you use the rest room or go back to your seat? Also, can you get me another Diet Coke?”
This list of things airline employees are not allowed to say extends to gate attendants. I learned this while waiting for a Southwest flight in Albuquerque. Southwest had just rolled out a new boarding procedure that assigned each passenger a boarding letter: A, B or C. Apparently the old system, which assigned each passenger a boarding number involved too much math for their target customer.
The way the “ABC” system is supposed to work is that you line up under the sign that has your letter (A, B or C). Passengers then board as they lined up, As first, Bs second and, finally, Cs. As an A, I intended to take my place at the end of the A line.
Only there was a problem. A number of passengers, mostly senior citizens, had decided to “sit” in line some distance away rather than stand in line under the “A” sign. I asked the gate attendant where the end of the A line was. Sadly, some unstated rule forbade her telling me.
“Passengers are not allowed to save their place in line,” she said cryptically.
“So, should I line up under the “A” sign or behind all those senior citizens over there?”
“Passengers are not allowed to save their place in line.”
So I walked over the “A” sign–and was almost caned to death.
I went back to the gate attendant. “I just got attacked by a gang of old people,” I said. “Why didn’t you just tell me to line up behind them?” She looked at me as if I were an idiot.
“Passengers are not allowed to save their place in line.”
By the way, it gives me an evil bit of pleasure to report that Southwest passengers don’t have any better a grasp of their ABCs than they do with numbers.
Flight attendants seem to have a whole list of stock phrases. One you never want to hear is, “I’m primarily here for your safety.” An attendant once told me that when I was complaining because they had bumped me out of my assigned seat and wedged me between two people who were even wider than me. She cut me off mid-sentence and said, “I’m primarily here for your safety.”
I stopped right then. It was such a non sequitur I knew something was up. It was not a casual bit of information but a warning, the air travel equivalent of “Stop or I’ll shoot.” I had the strong feeling that if I said one more thing I’d be hog-tied with barf bags.
I sat back, pulled in my elbows and waited patiently for us to get airborne. Then, after the fasten seat belt light had been turned off, I went and tidied up the restroom.
August 18th, 2010
The weekend before last I attended, as people may age often do, a reunion. It was for Night Light, a Christian improv troupe in Chicago. We performed back in the Eighties, mind you, when Evangelicals were looked upon merely as harmless kooks, not dangerous fascists. It was a very talented group. We performed everything from comedy revues to full, improvisationally-developed musicals. We got consistently good reviews from the local papers. We served Ginseng Rush. Really, I don’t think we knew how good we were.
As we sat around trying to remember what show came when and who thought up some funny line or the other (so much for dwelling on the past), someone reminded me of the success I had performing a certain improv game. We called it Story Story; I don’t know what other improv troupes called it. In Story Story the troupe would form a line across the stage, with one person kneeling in front of them to act as the Director. The troupe would proceed to tell a story based on a name and occupation provided by the audience. One person would start the story and continue until the Director cut them off and pointed at another person. That person would then continue the story, and so forth.
The trick was that the other person would have to continue the story wherever the other person stopped, which could be mid-word. And if the second person stuttered or made a mistake or was just generally unpopular the audience was instructed to yell “Die!” At which point the whole troupe would clear the stage and the condemned player would perform a death. Then things would continue, minus that player. The last person left had to provide a moral, and by this time the audience, now into the swing of things, would invariably demand that person die as well.
But what my friend at the reunion remembered was that I didn’t have to die. My moral (and I can’t remember what it was) was so well-received that I received a round of applause instead. As far as any of us knows I was the only person ever to be spared having to die onstage (at least during Story Story; I died many deaths during regular scenes).
But what I didn’t mention to my friend was that I (1) almost always won at Story Story and (2) was spared death two or three times. The reason had little to do with talent and more to do with my competitive nature.
People who know me know I’m generally easy-going, even at sports or games. I like playing, and trying to play well, but it losing generally doesn’t bother me. But there are three odd exceptions. One was intramural broomball. I don’t know why, but I hated to lose at that silly coed sport. I’d actually get angry and yell at the refs, which was something of a turn-off to the girls on the team. Baseball, tennis, football never filled me with the same consuming drive as broomball.
Chess does. Chess is not relaxing to me because I can’t for the life of me play it casually. I should add that I rarely play it and I’m not especialy good at it. Still, if roped into a game I refuse to lose.
Story Story, out of all the improv games we performed at Night Light, was the only one that made me feel the same way. Something in me refused to lose that game. It took me a year before I finally realized that the point of the game, from an entertainment perspective, was to give the audience a reason to yell “Die!” After that I made an effort to try to screw up.
I don’t do Story Story anymore, and my knees are too brittle to go running around on ice whacking a tennis ball with a broom. Chess is easily avoided by suggesting a nice game of Boggle instead. My patron saint, G.K. Chesterton, said that if a thing is worth doing it is worth doing poorly. I get that. A hobby or leisure activity should be something you can enjoy failing at. If not, it’s not leisure–it’s work.
Which brings me to writing fiction. Some people I know love the act of writing fiction. It is for them a wonderful experienc. Relaxing. Refreshing. I am not them. Writing for me is serious business, which is ironic since I write mostly comedic material. In fact, I only enjoy writing good stuff; when I write crap it pisses me off.
So, why do I write? Because I like having written. Written something good. I’m like a gardener friend of mine who revealed to me that he hated gardening but loved roses. I guess that means writing is not arelaxing hobby but a second job. An annoying, low-paying job.
I’m getting stressed just thinking about it. I need to relax. Perhaps with a nice game of, um, checkers.
July 23rd, 2010
I’ve never been on a fancy vacation, never stayed at a villa where servants attend to one’s every whim. Frankly, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude when someone else makes me a sandwich.
I’ve never even stayed at a nice hotel for more than a night—and even that was paid for with frequent flyer miles. I’ve been to a few conferences held on college campuses, but those could hardly be called luxurious. Probably the closest I’ve come to an all-inclusive vacation was a 10-day canoe trip in the Boundary Waters. I mean, the supplier did pack our freeze-dried spaghetti.
All that changed this past week when I got to stay in the hospital for nine days. At first, of course, such an experience can’t be seen as anything but bad. You’re sick, for one thing. And various experts come by to terrorize you with vaguely dismal prognoses, which is nothing compared to the ever-present threat of being punctured with a pointy object. But eventually there comes a time, after the coughing and headaches and mysterious procedures, that you are relatively well. And after all you’ve been through the occasional blood-drawing is no big deal, and being rousted out of a sound sleep at 2 a.m. for a temperature check seems prosaic. And you’ve blasted past your co-insurance and everything from here on in is on the insurer’s dime.
Suddenly you’re not in a hospital—you’re in a luxury hotel. You have a comfortable, fully-adjustable bed, fresh linens, free cable and wifi service and a private bathroom (I should warn potential medical tourists to make sure you have an ailment that warrants a private room—who wants to share a television with a Price Is Right addict?). Best of all, you’ve got servants. I think they’re called nurses. If you want some juice or an extra pillow they go get it for you. All you have to do is push a button. The best thing about nurses is they actually care about you; they’re happy to slip some booties on you when your toes are cold. Heck, they don’t even care if you walk around half-dressed. Try doing that at a Sandals.
And the food! They bring it right to your bed. And it almost doesn’t matter what you order because, chicken, fish or beef, it all tastes the same. Perhaps a gourmand would look down on it, but I happen to think a single slice of white bread served in a sealed square of plastic is tres chic. And if you love oat meal—and who doesn’t?—nobody makes a smoother batch than an institutional food service.
Of course, there are certain drawbacks to a hospital vacation. The activities are in no way comparable to that of, say, a cruise ship. But I find tossing used tissues into a distant trash can to be equally as challenging as shuffle board. There aren’t many places to go either. And to be frank there are way too many sick people wandering around for my taste. But they’re still preferable to all the pasty 300-pound Germans you see pool-side in Acapulco.
I’ve got to go now. Dinner just arrived and it’s pork medallions. Or possibly baked cod. I’ll top off my meal with some green jello (lime, perhaps?) and then it will be time for a romantic stroll around the ward.
Just me and my IV stand.
July 6th, 2010
I was out of town on business last week (I mention this because it happens only once every decade) and my rental car had Sirius radio. After running through the hundred or so stations in less than two hours I developed a new slogan for the service, which they are welcome to use free of charge: “Siriusly, this is it?” The selection was surprisingly sparse, although I did have the option of following the World Cup in several languages, were I at all interested in the World Cup.
One bright spot was the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. The CBC had some very listenable shows. One, called Vinyl Tap, is a theme-oriented songfest hosted by Randy Bachman of The Guess Who and BTO fame. Each song would fit into that show’s theme (the one I heard was “fashion”). Between songs, Bachman would drop in some trivia and even play along on his guitar if the mood struck him. It gave me a good idea of what Brian Wilson would be like today were he not insane.
I forget the name of the other show I liked, but it is a long-running series about religion and spirituality. The guest, Don Lattin, has a new book called The Harvard Psychedelic Club about Timothy Leary and three other key figures who were involved in the famous LSD experiments in the early 1960s. (The other three were Andrew Weil, Huston Smith and Richard Alpert, also known as Baba Ram Dass). It sounds like a fascinating book, and I may pick it up if I can find it used (sorry Lattin, $16.50 is too rich for my blood).
Leary, et al, were trying to determine if psychedelics could induce a religious or transcendent experience. That’s an interesting question, but also an extremely vague one. What, after all, constitutes a genuine religious experience? Or, as the host smartly asked, When is something a religious experience and when is it simply getting high? Lattin, a long-time religion reporter, had an answer. He judges the validity of a religious experience by the fruits of that experience. For instance, if they have a transcendent experience that they are part of everything and that everything is part of God, do they go on afterward to be kinder to others and take better care of the planet? If the subject experiences God, does it move them to value themselves more and make the most of their time on earth? If so, according to Lattin, they had a valid religious experience.
The subtitle of my blog is Notes on Life, Faith and My Stupid Job, yet I have said very little about faith. I think a lot about it, I feel it to be important, yet every time I begin to write about it I stumble. Lattin’s attitude highlights the reason for my reluctance. Because his feeling (I hesitate to call it a thought) about faith is as illogical as it is widely-held, and if I point out the fallacy I do so at the risk of slapping a lot of good people in the face. Nevertheless, here’s my problem with Lattin’s attitude.
A religious experience could be positive, inspiring and beneficial and still not be valid. And by valid I mean true. You could take mushrooms and see “God” or your dead mother or feel one with the Universe–and as a result of that experience start a local food bank. But that doesn’t prove you saw God or your dead mother. Of course, it could be argued that whatever you saw was a manifestation of whatever higher power is out there, but you’re still not proving anything. Because to base the validity of a religious experience on its producing a good result begs the question of where we got the idea of goodness. And to say we get it from God or the universe is completely circular.
I must concede, however, that Lattin’s circular idea has a powerful advantage–it is nice. It’s a go-along-to-get-along sort of sentiment. It doesn’t ruffle any feathers. It’s a way of talking about religion without saying anything about the subject. Which most of the time is the way most of us want our religious discussions.
So that’s why I’ve been reluctant to bring up the subject. I am one of those crazy people who believes what he believes not because it is helpful (although it is) or because many others believe it (they do), but because I believe it to be true.
Maybe next year I’ll say more about that. Until then, I have to find Don Lattin’s book at the library. That Tim Leary was one crazy dude.
June 20th, 2010
I’m currently in Sidney, NE, for interviews. You can probably figure out with what company if you really care. Sidney is on the Nebraska panhandle. No, I didn’t know Nebraska had one either until I got here.
Sidney bears many similarities to my town in Wisconsin. Both have major retailers as their main employers. Both are surrounded by cattle, except here they are more of the beef than dairy variety. But Sidney has some major differences too, and those might be hard for me to deal with if I had to live here. Sidney’s theater as two screens and I’m used to having just one. And instead of a Piggly Wiggly they have a Safeway. That’s just crazy.
Sidney is the home of the the number one tourist destination in Nebraska (the aforementioned company). The world’s longest creek, the Lodgepole, runs through the town, though it’s pretty much a drainage ditch at this stretch. It also has over forty churches. I’m assuming some of them share facilities. I wonder who bunks with the Church of Satan?
Sidney has its own newspaper, the Sun-Telegraph. Today’s edition had a story that will no doubt be picked up by the AP:
SIDNEY – The Cheyenne County fair queen competition scheduled for today has been canceled as a result of an injury to the competition’s lone competitor, officials said.
I drove to Cheyenne, WY, today. It’s about 100 miles directly west of here on I-80. It’s a nice town, but I can’t figure out why they need so many Chinese restaurants. Then again, they say the trouble with Chinese food is you’re hungry again after one block. Between Cheyenne and Sidney is a town called Pine Bluff and, unlike Chicago suburbs with aspirational names (Lake in the Hills has neither a lake nor a hill) there is an impressive ridge topped with conifers. I’ve been told I’m about an hour away from the mountains and 45 minutes from elk herds. And near both the North and South Platte Rivers.
All in all a nice place.
Well, it’s time for me to grab some dinner. Hmm, I wonder if there’s a Chinese restaurant around here?
June 15th, 2010
I am not fishing for compliments or sympathy when I say that I have received the most universally effusive rejections from agents regarding my first two novels (I do my compliment-fishing at Facebook). The praise from big-name literary agents who don’t want to represent me is enough to make an unpublished writer like me blush were my face not already flushed from the disappointment of being unpublished. Phrases like “brilliant, hilarious, talented and inventive” show up so often that I tend to breeze over them to get to the “don’t feel strongly enough about this” part.
Sadly, the reason these agents have rejected my books is as consistent as the praise for them. They all feel that my work lacks “emotional connection” and “human interest.” Both books are apparently funny, inventive, well-written, intelligent and lacking in a protagonist that the reader (or agent) can identify with.
Personal feedback from an agent is a wonderful thing. Agents get a lot of manuscripts in their slush piles and it is to their credit that they give as many of them as much consideration as they do. Any reply a writer gets from an agent, good or bad, is a kindness. And when a writer gets a similar critique from several agents it should be taken seriously.
So, when every agent told me my work lacks heart I took that criticism to, well, heart. Is there, I wondered, something wrong with me? Am I devoid of feeling? Do I have late-onset asperger’s syndrome? There was only one way to find out. I visited the local Hardee’s and knocked a milkshake out the hands of a truck driver. Nope, definitely not asperger’s; I could tell the guy was angry even before he dislocated my jaw.
Confident in my ability to compehend human emotions I sat down to inject some serious pathos into my novels. It’s really not hard to do: just toss in a hot sex scene, some serious navel-gazing and maybe a fatal roto-tiller accident.
But then, thankfully (because I am at my core a lazy cuzz), I decided to leave both novels as they are. The novels, I realized, are not the problem. I’ve just been sending them to the wrong agents.
The agents who are rejecting me, saying nice things to me but rejecting me nevertheless, are literary literary agents. They represent important works of fiction. They like fiction that says right up front, This is a serious work addressing the human condition, a story in which people strive and fail and speak a foreign language. In the business it’s called literary fiction. And up until recently I thought maybe I was writing literary fiction.
But I’m not. And I don’t want to. What I write is popular fiction. At least that’s what I’m shooting for–it’s hard to call an unpublished work popular, but you get the idea.
So I’m moving on to Plan B. I’m going to target agents who handle genre fiction. The advances won’t be as high, nor the awards (if any) as lofty. But at least I’ll be writing what I want to write instead of what I think I should write, and that is not a bad thing. And down the road, who knows, I may try my hand at a more serious work. It shouldn’t be difficult. As a very talented writer friend of mine says, “Drama is just comedy without the jokes.”
June 14th, 2010
Perhaps I am just sensitive. You know, the way Josh Gibson may have been sensitive about the fact that he could never play in the Major Leagues because he was black. Maybe I’m just a complainer. Yes, perhaps when all is said and done I am nothing but an uppity old person who doesn’t know his place.
So when I say that The New Yorker’s recent feature, “20 Under 40: Twenty Young Writers Who Capture the Inventiveness and Vitality of Contemporary American Fiction,” smacks of ageism it could simply be a sign of early-onset dementia. I am, after all, over 40. Who really knows, considering my ancient synapses, if I actually sent the following email to The New Yorker or merely imagined the act, like a dying Charles Foster Kane dreaming of his beloved sled.
20 White Male Ivy League Writers
As long as you’ve chosen to promote ageism when developing features I thought I’d send along an idea that would help your publication branch into the long-neglected areas of racism, sexism and parochialism.
Seriously, in a country with an average life expectancy approaching 80 you would think someone at The New Yorker would realize that even a writer beginning their career after 40–Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, Raymond Chandler and Walker Percy, to name four–could be around for a long time. Or did your editors simply assume that anyone surpassing that milestone is devoid of “inventiveness and vitality”?
Sincerely,
cjb
p.s.: I just noticed 12 of the 20 writers are from the East Coast, so perhaps you have the parochialism thing down already.
Or maybe, just maybe, I’m not being overly sensitive. Ageism seems to be the last acceptable form of unfair discrimination. Don’t believe me? Visit an ad agency, record company or television production company. Earlier this year, over 1000 television writers settled a 70 million dollar age discrimination case against 17 networks and production studios and seven talent agencies. That’s pretty much everybody in Hollywood who wears black.
I used the qualifier “unfair” with discrimination because there are cases when age discrimination is perfectly legitimate. In sports, for instance, there is a ten or twenty year window of opportunity for achievement. In that case it makes sense to write an article about, say, the top 100 high-school basketball prospects, or up-and-coming Triple A phenoms. But as I pointed out in my angry email, there is no such window in writing. Most writers can and do work until they die.
I don’t think The New Yorker editors meant to be ageist; they just were. I don’t believe they meant to marginalize older writers; but they did. And I certainly don’t think they can mitigate the damage by coming out with an issue of 20 Writers Over 60 or some such nonsense. That would be akin to saying “Here are a score of writers who are pretty good despite being so darn old.” They should simply think about what they are doing next time.
Nor do I blame the 20 writers on the list. I’ve read and admire two of them, which is a high percentage considering how limited my reading list is. One lovely bit of irony is that they included a funny and biting story by Gary Shteyngart called Lenny Hearts Eunice in which the protagonist is increasingly shunned by a youth-obsessed society as he approaches the age of–you guessed it–40. It says something unpleasant about the editors who compiled the 20 Under 40 list that they could read and choose Shteyngart’s story without taking one of its main themes to heart.
I have to go now; there are some kids playing on my lawn and I have to confiscate their baseball.
June 1st, 2010
My brother was in the Air Force. He loaded bombs in Thailand at the tail of the the Vietnam War. He spent his spare time drinking and getting into trouble. When he returned, he had a messed up back and substantial hearing loss. He once told me that if he hadn’t returned when he did he probably would have become an alcoholic.
My father served in World War II. His division, the Fifth Armored, fought their way through France, Belgium and Luxembourg and was the first into Germany. He almost died of pneumonia and received a Purple Heart for a shrapnel wound.
Both of them returned alive and fairly intact. Both made sacrifices I’m not sure I could make and am glad I was never forced to consider
We all know, at least intellectually, that war is a horrible thing. I don’t understand where so many ordinary Americans like my father got–and get–the courage to go and be shot at. We all need to remember their bravery and sacrifice. And we need to do what we can to make that sacrifice as rare a thing as possible.
But we should also honor those like my brother who, while not standing in the line of fire, sacrificed–and currently sacrifice–a large chunk of their lives with little to show for it.
Six thousand American soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an additional 40,000 have been injured. I have my own opinions about the wisdom of those conflicts. But I think it’s safe to say we should do much more than we are currently doing to help those who return, as well as the families of those who don’t.
A living wage would be a good start.
May 21st, 2010
I’m pretty pleased with myself. This month a finished a project that had a Feb. 1 deadline. I may be lazy but I never give up. I’ve learned that persistence is a necessary substitute for discipline.
The project was a novel, a ridiculous mystery called Dr. Franks and the Antmen. I have posted bits of it in previous entries, mostly because working on it left me little energy for writing something with a point. I still have little energy so this entry will have no point either.
Writing a novel is hard. It’s a lot of work. And then you have to get an agent. And the agent has to sell the book. And the book has to be bought by someone. And even if you clear all those hurdles, the odds of making a living at it are slim. I realized that a few years ago when I attended a panel discussion of three successful novelists and realized that none of them made their living primarily as writers. One was a radio host, one a writing teacher and the third an advertising copywriter.
The point is that pretty much every day you sit down to write a novel the thought occurs to you that, even if you can manage to finish the thing, it may be a pointless endeavor. Which makes it really tempting to go for a walk or have a second lunch or clean the crumbs out of your keyboard.
Dr. Franks isn’t a serious piece. It is not a story that inspires or “needs to be told.” So why, in the face of the odds, did I finish it?
Because the thing makes me giggle. That’s a rare thing, when my own work makes me giggle. That alone made it worth finishing. Funny is a rare achievement.
One of my pet peeves (and I have about 1700 of them) is when people give humor the short shrift. And a sub-peeve of that peeve is when someone, usually in a book on public speaking, suggests “adding a little humor” to something. As in, “Here’s a tip–start your speech with a little humor.” As if humor were ketchup or some other condiment that anyone can pull out and use. You only have to hear one commencement speaker reciting one tired anecdote from 10,000 Jokes, Toasts & Stories to know that simply isn’t true. There is a universe of difference between telling a joke and being funny.
There’s a crazy idea that humor is not in and of itself an artistic accomplishment. I’m not sure where this idea originated, but it seems to be a recent development in Western civilization. My guess is it was started by people who have no sense of humor. Probably book critics and members of the film academy. U.S. Senators and program directors for National Public Radio. Health food store clerks and everyone at Fox News.
But hopefully not acquisitions editors at major publishing companies. After all, I have a funny book to sell.
April 27th, 2010
I was just avoiding work by watching a video of Lindsey Lohan falling on a cactus–which, even though I live in the Midwest, is my number one fear. It wasn’t much of a cactus, nor much of a fall, so Ms. Lohan is okay. Or as okay as she gets. Basically, she tripped on a curb.
By far the creepiest thing about the video is voice of the guy taking it. Him and his cohorts. The paparazzi. It is obvious from their comments that they look down on Ms. Lohan. Which seems odd for a group whose raison d’etre is to get video of her tripping over plants. I mean, if you think she has no talent what do you make of them?
I think my reaction to these videos is a common one, that is, “Ick!” Paparazzi are, for all their Constitutional rights, icky people. In fact, if it weren’t for people like Lohan these creeps would have to go back to standing in the locations shots of local news reporters, waving and talking on their cell phones.
(Some may wonder how I can complain about paparazzi when I chose to watch this video. It’s a fair question, and the answer is that as a cactiphobe I couldn’t help myself. A phobia is an irrational fear and fascination with something. In my case, that something is cacti. And possibly Lindsey Lohan.)
What I really wanted to say is that I’ve figured out how to make money off the paparazzi. They are pests, but so far no one has figured out how to get rid of them. One can’t punch them, or push them or take their cameras without risking a civil suit. In fact, I think civil suits are how they make most of their money. They have the right to be on public property. Which is the key to making money off of them.
Because I have the right to walk in front of the paparazzi with a large poster board and charge them, say, $100 an hour to take it down. Or charge the celebrity $150 an hour to keep it up.
Sounds ridiculous, I know. But it would be more productive than my last writing job.
