MemeMachineGo!

Americans need to watch what dialogue they write in the margins of crossword puzzles.

“How are you?” asked the airport security person who popped up beside me on my way to baggage claim.

“Uh, fine — thanks,” I replied, wondering, why are you asking?

As if she’d read my thoughts, she told me there had been complaints about me on the airplane. Then she asked to see the crossword puzzle I’d been working on during the flight. Huh? I thought. Talk about being puzzled! Still, my grin was smug as I handed it over. I’d just completed the Friday New York Times puzzle, for the first time ever.

But the agent ignored the crossword, turning the paper sideways to read a line I’d scribbled in the margin: “I know this is kind of a bomb.”

She pointed to the sentence, her finger resting on the word “bomb.” “What does this mean?” she demanded.

Suddenly a light went on in my head. I remembered the passenger on my left leaning forward in his seat as I scribbled while we waited for takeoff. Seconds later, he’d clambered hastily over me without apology to make his way to the front of the plane. I’d assumed intestinal complications, but now that I thought about it, he hadn’t used the bathroom. He’d spoken briefly with the flight attendants and returned to his seat. As the security woman looked at me, I now realized the passenger had been about as interested in my puzzling prowess as she was.

“I know this is kind of a bomb” is what I imagine Bucky, my main character, would say to Julie, his love interest, in the critical scene of my novel. I explained to the security woman that this is what happens when a 42-year-old man who is to literature what a karaoke singer is to opera tries to put words in the mouth of a fictional 19-year-old.

I opened my laptop and showed her shining example after shining example of similarly awful dialogue. […]

Carted away, the writer is faced with the pitch meeting from hell.

Without further explanation, they took me to the onsite police station, where I waited for an “interview” with the Transportation Security Administration. By then I was being accused of writing “bomb” on a piece of paper and waving it around for people in the back of the plane to see. While two policemen guarded the door, the honcho behind the desk informed me that my choice of dialogue was unfortunate, that life was not a stage play and that the tiniest thing can ignite fear in American travelers these days. He wanted a summary of my novel’s plot to get the context for why I’d written what I had.

I panicked. If five years of working on this narrative couldn’t liberate me from software sales, how was a five-minute pitch going to keep me out of jail?

I think this one is probably even worse that the guy who couldn’t fly because he was reading an Edward Abbey novel.

(Via The 18½ Minute Gap)