Robert Kroese - The Force Is Middling in This One: And Other Ruminations from the Outskirts of the Empire

This book started with a sea turtle.

More precisely, it started when someone I worked with coaxed me into setting up a MySpace page. For those of you who dont remember, MySpace was what people used for social networking before Facebook gave them another option. MySpace combined all the worst aspects of the Internet into one difficult-to-use and horrifically ugly package. Bad web design; applications that dont work properly; self-absorbed teenagers communicating in a barely coherent mlange of abbreviations, emoticons and pop-culture clichs; an endless barrage of desperate singles ads; sexual predators looking for the aforementioned teenagers: MySpace had it all.

This was in 2006, just after MySpace was bought for 80 gazillion dollars by Rupert Murdoch, who was hoping to make Fox News look respectable by comparison. I had been working as a professional web developer for nearly ten years at that point, so one would assume that I would have possessed the requisite technical background to set up a MySpace account.

One would be wrong.

My first attempts to set up a MySpace failed, presumably because the MySpace robot could sense my lack of familiarity with Christina Aguilera and The Suite Life of Zach and Cody . Its as if the site is designed to be understood only by teenagers (and, of course, 50- year-old men who have a lot of practice thinking like teenagers).

Once I had gotten a 23-year-old coworker to set up my account, I was in business. I set about uploading pictures of myself, listing my favorite movies and TV shows and picking a profile song. and then I remembered I wasnt a 14-year-old girl. Why was I doing this? Who was I trying to impress by listing Def Leppard and Audioslave as two of my favorite bands?

I started over, selecting movies ( Steel Magnolias , Iron Eagle , Mercury Rising ) purely for their metallurgical properties. I listed my interests as moping, procrastinating, and shirking. I cited Batman, Wolverine and Immanuel Kant as my heroes. And then I started to write my first blog post.

In my experience most blogs are made up of stultifyingly dull anecdotes of daily life told as if they were unbelievably exciting. Whoever said Write what you know deserves a fair amount of blame for the eight hundred billion blog posts on the Internet about poopy diapers and newborn kittens. I even coined the term manicdote for stories that have a sense of urgency but otherwise are of absolutely no interest to anyone.

I decided to write the opposite of a manicdote, relating a fantastically bizarre (and entirely made-up) incident in a completely low-key, unemotive manner. I wrote it in about two minutes, without stopping to think what it was about or whether it even made any sense. The result was a short, strange piece of fiction called What I Learned This Morning from a Sea Turtle. I suppose I was unconsciously emulating the inemulatable Douglas Adams. It begins:

I was accosted this morning by a large sea turtle. I had arisen early to steal the neighbors newspaper (I cancelled my subscription when I learned the editor was a freethinker and a bigamist), and just as I stepped outside, I saw it. The turtle must have been a good 5 feet long and 3.5 feet wide (these are shell measurements), and I would estimate that it weighed at least 200 pounds. I certainly couldnt lift him, and Im hella strong. I attribute my exceptional strength to a daily regimen of vitamins and backgammon, although Im also 1/32 Apache Indian, so thats sort of an X-factor.

The story continues in that vein for a few more paragraphs before climaxing in an orgy of incoherence. I had so much fun with it that I went on to write a review of a nonexistent movie. I introduced it thusly:

Ive always wanted to make a movie. Ive also kind of always wanted to be a big-time movie critic. As neither of those dreams is likely to come true, Ive decided to simply write a review of the movie that I would have made if I werent such a loser. Here it is.

And I proceeded to mercilessly pan my own imaginary movie:

The camera work is amateurish, alternating inexplicably between a jittery hand held camera and a slightly less jittery camera attached to a long bamboo pole. The latter third of the film is essentially a PowerPoint Presentation, which drains the climax of much of its dramatic impact.

I emailed the link to my blog to a few friends, who encouraged me to keep writing. Eventually I abandoned MySpace and moved to my own web site, MattressPolice.com. I tried to maintain the level of absurdity I had achieved in my first two posts, but absurdity cant exist in a vacuum; its only absurd against a backdrop of normalcy. So more and more of my real life crept into my blog but always with an edge of the surreal and absurd. Sometimes I wrote about politics, religion or current events, but mostly my posts were transcripts of the random ruminations that occupied my mind while I was driving to work or mowing the lawn or whacking gophers with a shovel. The most random of these thoughts I posted as what I referred to as sock drawer items. This book, by the way, is organized more-or-less thematically, rather than chronologically, so, for example, I may whine about my job in one essay, then whine about being unemployed in the next, and then whine about my job some more in the essay after that. Come to think of it, thats pretty much how things went chronologically too, so never mind.

I wrote under the name Diesel a nickname I had given myself a few months earlier. I have no good explanation for this moniker; I just always thought Diesel was a cool name. (Yes, even before Vin Diesel graced us with his thespian antics and terrific deltoids.) Its just such a blunt, forceful, manly name. So much so, in fact, that nobody ever thought to call me it.

A few years ago I had started working for a company where there was already somebody named Rob. You know how every other kid today is named Dylan, Austin or Tyler? Forty years ago all of those kids would have been named Rob. So Im used to running into Robs, Bobs and Roberts everywhere I go, but this was a special case because it so happened that this other Rob was a world-class wanker.