I suppose I have many faults. Probably a few I can’t name, but ones my family could probably recite in their sleep. I’m often quick to anger, but in my heart of hearts, I’ve gotta believe that lack of patience is my top-of-the-charts, slow burning, double-grinding-stomach-churning crime of gnashin’.

To teach me and my fellow im-patient-aires, God gave man free will to invent shrink wrap on CDs with that white strip on top, the Department of Motor Vehicles, Pancake Pantry lines, and his coup de’ grace, the coup de’ (nash)ville - the 8th Avenue Kroger.

I knew better than to purchase Springsteen concert tickets over there. I knew, I knew, I knew, but it was closer than any TicketMaster outlet I know about, and I was in a hurry to score my fix of ice cream from the Pied Piper, so I went, and I stood and stood and stood. When I finally made it to my turn in the barrel, the two customer service (if you think of customer service roughly the way Jack the Ripper considered women of the night) representatives argued over who was going to have to handle my order. Nobody really likes TicketMaster (I do understand this part).

When the loser of the five minute battle finally sauntered over to the terminal to serve me, I told him I wanted Bruce Springsteen tickets. He said sure, and then proceeded to stare at his terminal for approximately four minutes (I was really hoping that Kroger had sprung for those telepathy ESP-type terminals where the brain waves were actually sending messages to the terminal, but alas, the time spent was attempting to ascertain what exactly a ‘Bruce Springsteen’ concert actually was)…finally, he looked up and asked me if I knew where Springsteen was playing. I told him Sommet and he said ok, and then went back to another period of thought and concentration.

Finally his fingers started on the keyboard and he asked me how much I wanted to spend on tickets. I thought it wise if he told me actually how much the tickets were going for, and we soon agreed that would be all for the best.

‘Ok, we have $29.00 tickets, $65.00 tickets and $97.00 tickets’. I figured the $29.00 tickets were probably on the roof at Rippys or over at Tootsies, so I opted for the $65.00 tickets. He showed me where my seats would be and I said ‘cool’ and after around 73 more key-strokes he smiled and said: ‘That’ll be $235.00′ and I said, ‘No it won’t', and he said, ‘That’s what the computer came up with’ and ‘I said try again’, so he said, ‘For 65 bucks you get behind the stage’ and I sighed, and said ‘Lets go for the $95.00 tickets, where can I sit for that?’, and he showed me the chart and the seats were on the side high enough to see over the crowd and I said ‘fine’ and he said, ‘great’ and then he keyed about 50 more keystrokes and there was this whirring noise and the tickets printed and I paid my money and then I looked at my tickets and they were sure enough, slightly behind the stage on the side, and I said ‘uh, these are not where you said where they were going to be’ and he said ‘that’s what the computer gave you’, and I said ‘what can we do about this?’ and he said ‘I can sell you more tickets but I can’t give you your money back’ and then I realized it was God moving in his super-duper mysterious way teaching me patience and so I merely said ‘this is so sad’ and walked out. I practiced my new-found patience skills by not cursing audibly, and I am going to see The Boss, or, at least the back left quadrant of The Boss.

This patience thing is a real bitch, you know.

Foul play!

I didn’t take my first airplane flight until I was 23 years of age.  It was a time (yeah, it was after spats and in the early years of the push-button phone) when people actually dressed up to fly.  Flying was special, a treat reserved for important-looking-brief-case-carrying-besuited men and rich kids on vacation.  I flew laced, pin-pointed and blazered.  I had no briefcase but I knew Aladdin’s joy.  I was given a meal and as much coke-cola as I wanted.  My bags were checked, my ticket was punched amidst smiles and aisles.

My memory of flying coincides with the closing scenes of ‘Love, Actually’.  Families, lovers, friends hug-a-mug happily embracing.  The entire fam  comes out to meet you at the gate, and if a kid snuck under a rope to see his mom or dad disembark, no one gets shot or detained in a concrete room with a cell phone that can’t penetrate the mass.

I’m not a frequent flyer.  At best, I’m in the air 3 or 4 times a year.  I can’t imagine going through the morass of modern flying more than that.  I pity the foolish scheduled weekly flyers.  They shall see the kingdom of heaven on time, with free drinks.

The process of flying has become loathsome.  It is a process.  We are meat, we are cattle, and we are not golden.  We are extra-charged, bumped, bullied, stripped of clothing, treated like terrorists, delayed and delayed again. Our flights are cancelled, re-gated, de-gated, and de-bated.  The second bag now costs $25.00 to check.  I won’t be surprised if we have to pay for the oxygen mask to appear when the cabin pressure drops as precipitiously as the fun that used to be flying.

On my flight to and from Chicago this weekend, peanuts would have cost me three damn dollars had I asked for them.   The seats, in which I spent 1 and 1/2 hours tarmac-ed,  are made for rear ends the size of mine (I have none).  I pray for a seat-mate that will not be zero to my one, making for a sloppy ten.   I pray that my bags actually appear.  I feel happy when my plane takes off only an hour late.  I’m impressed when the flight isn’t cancelled.

I try to find pants I can wear without a belt when I’m going to fly the once-friendly skies.  My shoes don’t have laces, and when my jeans are more relaxed than I had intended, I stand rapper-like, holding the folds of my jeans, hoping my pants won’t fall as quickly as my pride while being singled out for special wand-ing.  Abracadabra…I hate flying.

I’m not stupid enough to call for one of those boycott days.  People are gonna fly.  Business must be done, but I do wish the next time you think you need to fly someone that you don’t.  You stay close to home.  You write the airlines and tell them why you’re not flying.   Your grounded state may not last forever, or even a year, but for now..you’ve had ENOUGH.

by proclaiming that the best summer song of many seasons is ‘That’s Not my Name’ by the fabulous ‘The Ting Tings‘.  I’m not kidding.  It starts out a little like ‘Hey Mickey’, but it quickly moves into infectious compulsory-dance mode after a minute or two.  The last two minutes of the song just kills me.

You may not have heard it here first, but i just had to say it.  Now..go back to whatever it is you’re doing.

Sigur Ros…mmmmmm

from www.youtube.com posted with vodpod

Meant to be watched, that is…In a bar with the sound down.   An engineer, a high school basketball coach, a Radio Shack manager, a executive car deliver-er, and a state employee walk into a bar, just like they have for the past 25 years.  The bar is Brown’s Diner, and the occasion is annual: The opening of baseball season the way God intended: Baseball in the daytime and in the country of origin*.

Our ritual pre-dates the dawning of the sports bar (at least in Nashville).   We all love the cheeseburgers at Brown’s and they have always had these cheesy 19-inch TV sets mounted on the wall (well, they once had a so-called large screen for a short time, but the thing broke and nobody ever fixed it, and then one day it disappeared and the cheesy 19-inch TV that was there BeFore the large-screen reappeared, and all was right with the world).   Since Terry the bar-tender (and owner) was always a big baseball fan, we knew that the opening day baseball game would be on the tube.

Some years we finagled the afternoon off and nursed Bud from the bottle(s) as long as any game was on.  Some years, like this one, some of us have to hie on back to the workplace.  Every year, the conversation overtakes the game until something dramatic happens.  The Yankees usually appear at some point and the rest of the crew makes fun of me and the pin-strippers.  It’s all as comfortable as a worn-in pair of sweatpants you look forward to putting on when you get home from a rough-ass day at the orifice.

It’s not trendy or remotely the best place to watch a game.  What it is for a few hours is the best place in the universe.  Baseball opening, spring welcomed and friends laughing.   Today was our 25th anniversary.  Not all of us have made it every year, but at least two of us have been there each appointed time (I’ve been there 23 out of 25 years).   We are grayer, paunchier and some of us have lost a step or two, but for those few hours it really doesn’t matter one iota.

*nothing really wrong with Major League baseball played in different countries, but it should be played in the USA for opening day.

Thanks to Jagadiah’s Buffy-a-rama, I felt the need to place Buffy in the pantheon of great TV shows. The best shows, in order:

1. The Wire - HBO’s opus about Baltimore owes as much to Charles Dickens as to the brilliant observations of David Simon and the incredible stable of writers. If Dickens was a 21st century writer living in Baltimore, the Wire is pretty much what he would create. Yeah, it’s an indictment of the war against drugs, public education in the inner cities, bureaucracy in the police force curtailing real po-lice work and political corruption, but wrapped up in the most entertaining and well-designed series in TV history. Hard to get into if you don’t see it from the beginning, it’s a show that demands careful viewing from the beginning.

2. Seinfeld - Literally NOTHING can be said about this show about ‘nothing’ that hasn’t been said before. It’s comedy GOLD and produced more idiomatic phrases to the culture than any show in history: high talker, close talker, low talker, soup nazi, sponge-worthy, anti-dentite, shrinkage..etc. etc. etc. One of the complaints about the show after the first few episodes is that there was no story-line. From that point on, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld managed to cram more story-lines per episode than probably any show in history. Watch the episode about the Kramer’s cigar store ‘indian’/TV guides/Russian cable installers, and a baby shower. Amazing.

3. Homicide: Life on the Street - Baltimore’s dark pre-cursor to ‘The Wire’. Real po-lice work written and driven by people who knew the territory. Made NYPD Blue (another good show) look frothy and light.

4. Sopranos - The first 3 years are just about as good as it gets. The show was never really about the ‘mafia’. Organized crime was the hook to pull you into the cloistered world of the families involved. Relationships between a husband and his wife, the husband and his shrink, and the husband and his ‘lieutenants’ managed to be endlessly fascinating.

5. Buffy, the Vampire Slayer - The thing I like most about this show is that even though the town featured in the show was positioned over the ‘mouth of hell’, the show played it ’straight’, as if the gaping jaws of hades were just another facet of town life, like the square or the main drag. The main cast was pitch-perfect and the ongoing Spike and Buffy romance was the crazy diamond shining on, and on.

You may have other opinions about the best shows ever, but I’m pretty sure I’m right…

Liz Garrigan and the Nashville Scene have decided to tidy up their ‘Pith in the Wind’ blog. The only writers that will regularly appear in PITH will be Garrigan, Bruce Berry, Jeff Woods, and Matt Pulle (big coup to get Pulle back), with occasional posts by ace blogster, Roger Abramson. Quite a nice line-up there.  My only real complaint is that Jim Ridley is not one of the chosen few. Ridley is buttah as far as I’m concerned.

Other than the seasonal lopping of the contributors, the PITH blogroll has been scaled way-way back. Many local blogs including this one have been expelled, cast off into blogging nether-lands. At least they left one comedy blog on da roll. In lamentation of this event (and after reading Aunt B’s much better poetic plea) I have written a bad version of perhaps the worst most famous poem* in all the world.

Tanks for the linkage memories!

*Joyce Kilmer’s Trees …shudder…

I’m no stranger to the colonoscopal experience, given my personal and family history, and I’ve often wondered if there is another way, so to speak, that is more than virtual, but less than what I’ve gone through more times than I’d like to admit. So, when I read about robot colonoscopies, my interest was piqued. But when I read the following…

researchers are developing self-propelling probes that crawl inside the colon and grip its sides with the aid of sticky films.

the old school colonoscopy didn’t seem so horrid. The movie Alien was scary enough with aliens popping OUT..don’t think I want em’ crawling in, thank you very much.

Random numbers? Hardly. These are the latest counts of American dead, American wounded and estimates of the Iraqi casualties of the current war in Iraq.

The hubris wrought by this war goes further than dollars and mountains of debt. It is mocked by the graves, the maimed and the lives that will never be the same.

Now that we’ve been entrenched in this morass for so many years, it will be beyond difficult to get out. This election seems to be hinging on so many issues except this war. Yeah, the issues relate to the war - the debt we suffer because of the war DOES effect the economy, but despite the selling of the surge, we are a long way from home.

Despite how you feel about all this, this war should be a paramount issue in this election. We can’t allow obfuscation. We must insist on the real cost, both economically and in the human psyche.

What will those running for President do to undo the damage in foreign relations and out standing with the rest of the world? I do believe our relations can be salvaged, but I’d like to hear what these folks think they can do.

Mostly, I don’t want us (myself included)  to forget that a lot of people have died and are suffering because of all this.