Miscounting the Chicken Salad

On my flight to New York I was given the choice of chicken salad or tandoori chicken. I opted for the tandoori. The lady next to me, a rather unpleasant old bird, wanted the chicken salad.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, we're out of the chicken salad. Would you like the tandoori?"

"No. I want the chicken salad."

"I'm sooooo sorry," said the attendant. "We don't have it. They miscounted, and we only had five."

"I don't understand. I'm seated in the second row, how can you have run out?"

"We have an assortment of cheese boxes or snack offerings?"

"I want the chicken salad."

"We just don't have it, ma'am. Would you like anything else?"

"Just fill my bottle with water."

I begin this post with an anecdote to illustrate that cranky old women sure are delightful... I mean, that we don't always get what we want. On those lines, I was going to New York to get published.

"This time I know I'll get famous," I said to the pilot. "And quick."

"Get back in the cabin, sir."

The next morning I took the subway to Union Square and proceeded to get extremely lost. But, knowing myself quite Socratically, I had left with plenty of time beforehand and so arrived at the query letter clinic just as it started. There were about two hundred breathless, wanna-be writers packed into the room, and for the class two beings of pure light (agents) sat to bequeath judgment upon the various query letters that were read aloud. To get your query read you had to raise your hand, wave it, and bellow like an elephant cow. I declined, deeming the whole thing rather unbefitting for someone as unpublished as myself. After an hour of that, I felt very depressed and had a sundae in front of the Judas Priest signed-and-framed napkin at the Times Square Hard Rock Cafe. After using the napkin on my fudge-ringed mouth, I returned to the conference.

At four o'clock was the agent "speed dating." My first date was slated at 4:32. I was to have eight minutes--a bell was cheerily chimed when a minute was left, and then a Zulu death gong was smashed to signal the end of your dreams.

As people sat down in seventeen pairs, the room became thunderously loud. Everyone started braying and yelling and waving their arms. Four sessions, and then it was my turn.

I sat down across from my first agent. She thought my idea, and my existence, was ridiculous. As I sweatily pitched my idea like Willy Loman on Provolone, I felt my face prickle. I was bombing. Ring-a-dingle-ding! Time was almost over.

"Oh! Uh! Um! It's a neat book, a novel for people of all ages," I shouted and gesticulated, "and my mom really liked it--!"

GONG

The horror, the horror.

I was then on the sideline, listening to the old feller in the black beret (pictured far right) tell the sweetie in front of me about his book that concerned a talking pie for some reason. I brooded for an hour, thinking of just leaving as it was all more painful than I had been expecting (which says a lot). But then my turn with the second, and final, agent came. I sat across from a thin, pale woman in her thirties. Her body language said, PLEASE DIE.

"You must be exhausted," I said.

"I'm all right."

"Anyway, my book is about..."

"I'mma stop you there. Let me ask you, if you were in a Barnes & Noble, where would you shelve your book?"

"Well," I said, "I used to work at Barnes & Noble. So... in Fiction and Literature."

This led to a dyspeptic debate about what was "literature." The conclusion: my book was emphatically not.

"Sorry," said Agent Two, "it's just not for me."

"Okay, thanks." I stood up, looked around, tried to see where to thread my way back through the shouting people.

"Oh, Greg?"

"Yes!"

"Please die."

"Right!"

Back in Denver I was singing Wham! in the shower and just as I was finishing I heard some shouts and bestial roars. I turned off the water. The shouts were definitely from inside my apartment. I knew that Xcel Energy was coming that day to force me to be energy efficient (stupid Obama), but I had been hoping they wouldn't come while I was stark naked in the shower. When I came out, I assumed they were downstairs, but.... no. Three dudes were in my bedroom. I held the towel where it needed to be held (over my nips).

"Why aren't you some sexy ladies?" I said.

"Sometimes you get the chicken salad," said the dude dressed in overalls and a greasy beard. "And sometimes the chicken salad gets miscounted."

"Hey, that's really good. Have you thought about attending a writer's conference? Or wearing a black beret....?"