dOC DOT: POST MORTEm

nEW YORK, APRIL 16, 2001 – Tax day: time to reflect and review. According to the personal stock option path I projected a year ago (see “Doc Dot” ScreedMe Feb, 2000) I should have now pushed way past the point where I turned untold and newly found wealth into cocaine, alcohol, depression and determined bi-sexual philandering before withdrawing in self-disgust to eat goat straw, wear burlap, tirelessly invoke Jesus, and finally come to grips with my father’s drinking. The last year didn’t quite unfold that way though. Here’s a summary of the reality that supplanted the promise:

“As the tax man calls, the stock option falls …” Abandoned for decades amid hectoring from politically correct bores bent on “brightening” the bedtime story tradition, this homespun favorite is now back, driven by parents from the lost planet “Dot.”

From the Valley to the Alley, and curling up with many a latte along the way, the line echoes from basements to attics where mommies and daddies go to cry. When its rainy they cry and curse, then accuse each other. According to a local TV story based on wire service versions of a recent tabloid newspaper report, buried deep in one parent’s drawer, hidden beneath imitation Hermes underwear, one child found the new Martha Steward book teaching creative ways to throw breakable things and find random objects of outside blame.

Troubling times often call for traditional remedies and many schools are again teaching kids to spell traditional words like “e-m-b-e-z-z-l-e-m-e-n-t,” to explain how all those trim people with platform shoes and pudding bowl haircuts bought so much candy and so many black clothes.

Older kids eagerly raise their hand, correctly pointing out that last year’s word for embezzlement was “economic bubble.” Those are usually the same kids who demand an “A” for term-paper outlines scribbled on napkins. “That’s how it worked last year,” they huff when directed to complete an actual paper.

The important thing to remember now is what we’re going to tell kids once they grow old enough to ask, … “Daddy, what did you do during the bubble?” Anticipating that day, I am preparing two tales:

A) My Pack of Lies
B) The Sad Truth

A) My Pack of Lies -

“Well son, while most of my generation idled away their hours at requisite office ping-pong tables and shopping for designer glasses, I poured over book titles like “Delay Gratification Until You Break-Down and Cry” and “Glass Shard Breakfast – A Real Man’s Path to Real Success.”

Understanding that fancy ideas are useless without dirty fingers, I applied what I learned, studying business from the bottom up by volunteering for jobs like cleaning ill maintained out-houses and scouring street side garbage bins with my tongue. Each night I’d heat a rusty razor red - “trusty rusty” - then carve my revised earnings goals into sensitive places like the spaces between my toes so I could remember them better in the morning.

Dating? Ha. That was for latte-sippin’ cokeheads. The only date I had during the bubble was a movie with one of those leftover alligators I found living in a NYC sewer section I was cleaning at the time. I was startled at first of course, but she settled me with a wink, helped me collect some long discarded popcorn remnants then convinced me to watch a video docudrama she’d found on John Tecsh, ‘His Music-His Mind.’ Shot totally on DVD in strobe black & white.

It was a quick romance. When her excessive snuggling one morning delayed my arrival at the garbage lickery, I cut her lose telling her to flush herself down the toilet this time, then pulled out “trusty rusty” to calculate my new savings from future unspent movie tickets. Work was work and there was plenty more to do without ‘Gaty’ holding me back.

Living happily on a diet of pumice dust and gutter water, spiced with ketchup leftovers as an occasional treat, I ground away while the permatanned go-out-to-dinner set pointed at me, snickering that ‘pale people who fly commercial are such bores,’ before swigging more Champaign and speeding off in rented limos.

My day eventually arrived years later though when I spied some of those same people-in-black in the unemployment line after the companies they built that built nothing dissolved into something less. They were picking up their bi-monthly checks as I inspected my business enterprise. When a few stopped in at the unemployment office restroom, I proudly pointed out that they were helping enrich me – the ‘Toilet King’.

That’s right, years of labor, sacrifice, and a restraining order preventing Gaty from stalking me at work had made me the undisputed Toilet King of local government facilities. I signed up restroom construction and maintenance contracts from the UI to the DMV in towns from Ashtabula to Cheboygan. I made millions, and never had to stoop to scrap metal sales to do it.

Sitting atop my riches as they sat atop what made me rich, I couldn’t help but chuckle and ask, ‘so who flies commercial now?’”

B) The Sad Truth -

“Despite precautions that included flushing evidence of my sad truth down a public toilet and feeding it to Gaty, anyone discovering the truth will learn that I rushed to planet Dot when it was trendy just as quickly as I fled when it became embarrassing.

Tracing my sad truth further they’ll discover faded pictures of me scurrying from Starbucks gulping Espresso, talking at once on numerous tiny cell phones all wired to my ears (and one inexplicably wired to my nose ring) while also entering frivolous data on my Palm Pilot and checking countless beepers - not for beeps - but for stock quotes of companies that called products, profits, and customers “passé” (pronouncing it “pass”).

And what would they find in my sad truth walk-in closet? My diligently dog-eared copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’ that served as my daily self-help guide, along with my all-black one-piece working-casual ensemble collection; platform shoes attached at the leg the way baby pajama legs attach little feet.

Jammed somewhere behind my enormous dresser still stuffed with monochrome shirt and tie sets for VC and board meetings, they would find a Poloroid photo of me dressed as Elvis, lying moribund next to a public toilet that I might have built in a more realistic life, clutching a one-year subscription to ScreedMe and reams of stock option grants; the more expensive public toilet paper several inches beyond my reach.

The end was clear, the evidence overwhelming. I had met the trendster and he was me. With nary a virtual stethoscope to call my own, the ‘Doc’ was dead.”