Adam Dorsey.com

Tipping for Quality

I wrote this today, but it is fiction, because I had a really good cup of a coffee.

I go to put a dollar in the jar, but then my hand hesitates. I remember that godawful mocha in that Shitbucks on La Cienega. I tipped there. I tipped before tasting, you know, which is the norm, but it’s a stupid norm. I felt so guilty having tipped—I feel so guilty still, today—because maybe my single dollar-bill and loose change encouraged that barista to keep barista-ing. I mean, it tasted like Yoohoo squeezed from Satan’s anus, someone should have been fired over that fucking mocha.

The dollar is already out, though. Do I put in the dollar? What else do I do, I mean, keep it until I taste the coffee? She’s cute. That shouldn’t matter, but it does. So maybe the dollar doesn’t matter. Maybe the coffee doesn’t matter. —No! Eff that, this is L.A., everyone is cute, the hard part is finding a good cup of coffee. I’ve even tipped dudes down here because they make a good cup of coffee, and I mean, that goes against everything I believe in.

Oh god, she thinks I’m stealing this dollar. My hand is literally in the cookie jar. What facial expression do I flash to make her aware that I’m not taking this money, but instead putting it in? Well, not putting it in, but thinking about putting it in—ultimately taking it out, but thinking about putting it in. Oh god, I’m sexualizing this, aren’t I?

I drop the dollar in and smile. She gives me a fake-smile and passes me my mocha. It’s a pretty smile. Maybe I can keep coming back here. Maybe I can ask her out. Did that smile mean something? Maybe it was a fake-smile because her mind was so busy thinking about me putting my tip into her tip jar, then taking my tip out of her tip jar, then putting my tip back in her tip jar, over and over again. Yeah…

I smile at her again. I take a sip. BLSHFSFD! A spit the coffee all over the clean white floor. Why is Satan drinking so much Yoohoo and then selling his concentrated shit to Los Angeles area coffee shops? Fuck this town.

Happy Cat channeling Robert Evans

So, as happens many times in my job and lots of other jobs, things have to be rewritten for one reason or another. For instance, this t-shirt went through several revisions, revisions that changed the audience of people who would enjoy the shirt, and because of that my original writeup had to be scrapped and I did a new one.

This happens a lot and it doesn’t bother me, it’s all part of the process, but today I’d like to share my original write-up. It is written from the perspective of Happy Cat, the first cat on I Can Has Cheezburger (the one who wants the cheeseburger in question). I figured if a cat became a huge star like this cat has, he would probably grow into a Robert Evans-like personality. Inspired, I watched a bunch of The Kid Stays in the Picture (which I always keep near me), and wrote the following piece. Enjoy:

Below, please find an excerpt from the upcoming The Cat Stays in the Lol: The Autobiography of Happy Cat.

There are three sides to every story: Your side, my side, and the misspelled caption on the funny cat picture. People are always asking me how I got into the pictures. I tell them I just wanted a cheezburger. Ha. At the time? I’m thinking to myself, wow, this can’t be happening to me. When it was over, the cameraman pat me on the ears and said, good job kid. Forty-eight hours later, my picture was sitting in every inbox around the world. The subject line? “Lulz.” Ha, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

The fame. The attention. The catnip with Mick Jagger. Was I enjoying it? You bet. Truth be told, I thought it would last forever. Lucky for me, it did. Not that there haven’t been LOLs to come after me, to follow in my paw-steps. Longcat? Lolrus? Monorail cat? They’re all tops in my book. 

Jump to November 14th, 2009 — I’ve just climbed the biggest scratching post of my life, I feel like a kitteh again, like before I was declawed. I’m at the top, the scratching post summit, and I’m enjoying a cheezburger, you know, for old times sake. I sit up there, gazing out over the intertubes. Were they all WINs? Of course not, but FAIL is not in my vocabulary… even if it’s in my bookmarks.

Did I make some people laugh? You know it. Hey, if I got some free cheezburgers out of the deal, so be it, I’m not telling. Haha. What a ride it’s been. Why did I do it? I did it for teh lulz. I did it all for teh lulz, and it was worth every minute. Would I change a thing? Ha, maybe I’d look up the right way to spell cheezburger.

My iPhone 4 Adventure

Yes, that’s me hiding behind Jason Bateman. That photo was taken from TMZ.

First some history
I was an early adopter of the MP3 format. An MP3 player was my high school graduation present. It was awesome. It could hold up to 10 songs. When I realized that that wasn’t enough, I got a sweet MP3 CD Player, which could hold like a hundred songs on a disc, only it had no screen, so it was like a huge iPod shuffle. Then I bought a 2nd gen iPod and never looked back.

When it came to the iPhone, I bought a first-gen 4gb mostly because of peer pressure. Everyone I worked with at the time had one, so I felt like I needed one. The difference was that everyone I worked with had real jobs that paid real money, and I was a low-paid temp. Still, when they stopped making the 4gb (which was almost immediately after launch) and dropped the price by $100 (still making it more expensive than the most expensive iPhone today), I snatched one up and didn’t look back.

The iPhone is the best invention of the last decade. It may be a more important invention than the internet, because it makes the internet useful. In my pocket, I carry around the whole internet, which is really the whole world, at my fingertips all the time. This means that I’m not afraid to do anything, because I always have my iPhone if something goes wrong. It’s the Swiss Army Knife of our generation. There’s no way I could make it in this new, strange Los Angeles without it. I never worry about getting lost, because I’ve always got a map home.

That said, recently my map home had become more and more of a dinosaur. I hadn’t upgraded since that 4gb 1st gen, and I was feeling it. I only kept on the apps I really needed. I only kept a few albums on it. I only kept my most recent podcasts on it. It was lacking all of the new features I so desperately needed. Before the announcement of the iPhone 4, no matter what they announced, I knew I had to get one.

Continue reading…

To Walk and Drive in L.A.

I took this picture one day while walking to the gym.

The people in this town are aggressive drivers. That’s an L.A. stereotype, and it is a stereotype that is based in what I like to call COMPLETE FACT. If you come from a small town where no one runs a yellow light, in L.A. you will quickly be rear-ended for obeying traffic laws. If like me you honed your driving skills in the passive-aggressive Pacific Northwest, where eye contact is avoided at all costs, even when that asshole almost just hit me why isn’t he looking at me he’s just looking straight ahead like I didn’t almost die—the orchestral honking of Los Angeles will hit you hard. The honking is how people communicate down here, not to say that they are without anger, because oh gosh are they angry, but the anger comes in spurts and then is just as quickly gone. How often? I don’t know, how often do you drive through an intersection?

But you can get used to this. You move down here, your aggressive driving skills improve until you’re more aggressive than everyone else, then they level off to fit in with the pack. Worst case scenario, your car gets bumped into every once in a while, you exchange insurance info, and you go about your day. No matter what, you’re protected at all times by a huge chunk of roaring steel, so you’re relatively safe. Plus there’s an anonymity there, like you’re wearing some sort of oversized Detroit Sunglasses. The same can’t be said about traveling on foot.

To these assholes’ credit, the sidewalks are relatively small here. They can also be tightly packed sometimes. BUT JESUS CHRIST PEOPLE, CHOOSE A FUCKING SIDE AND LET’S SINGLE-FILE THIS SHIT. I mean, seriously. If Angelenos are aggressive drivers (and they are), then they’re fucking inconsiderate walkers. No one moves to the edge of the sidewalk to let you by. If a couple is walking side-by-side, they will never separate and let you pass by, so have fun stepping in the dog shit of that little grass island. That is if you’re lucky enough to get a grass island and you don’t have to just step right out into oncoming aggressive traffic. And speaking frankly concerning the shit of dogs: dog owners, please stop turning your leashes into urban trip wires. We’re sort of on the same team here. Sort of.

I mean come on, if there’s a group of pedestrians traveling in a pack, why is it that I’m the one who has to go all sideways to get through? And even then I still have to graze you as I go by? Are you that starved for attention? I’m sorry that your career isn’t going how you thought it would be. I’m sorry that you thought you’d move down here and that you’d be Brad Pitt by now. But look, bro, I’m sure you think you’re as important as the Pittster, but that doesn’t mean you can’t share some sidewalk. I can’t help but think that even Bradlaham Pittlincoln would make a little eye contact with me, choose a side, and we’d both walk by each other without the hassle that you’re causing. And no, I don’t know if Bradlaham Pittlincoln is a Brad Pitt who’s been bitten by a radioactive Abraham Lincoln or if it’s some sort of alternate history celebrity-couple nickname.

Back to the point: Are you really that bitter, people? Is your sense of entitlement really so out of control that we can’t share this asphalt? If we work together, we can make it so that I don’t go batshit crazy and murder you all. Okay? Okay. Bah. And don’t even get me started on L.A. bicyclists.