Innocent Bystander

Of tomato juice and dinner rolls...

I've recently added tomato juice (well V-8) to my daily regimen of food. Okay, that sounds too high-falutin'. Let's just say I've made an effort to drink a glass of it a day because of it's "2 servings of vegetables per 8 oz. glass" claim. This was something I wasn't quite able to do in recent years because of recurring heartburn, but that's a problem I solved with over-the-counter Prilosec™. Seriously, the stuff works...well, it did for me, at least.

But I sometimes think I could subsist on tomato juice and dinner rolls. Family legend has it that I ruined more than one fancy-schmancy dinner by doing so as a kid. I remember one such event, an after-funeral dinner for a distant relative. This occurred when I was 5 or so. The story goes that I downed so many glasses of tomato juice and ate so many buttered dinner rolls that when the actual entrees came I refused to eat anything else, much to the chagrin of my mother. We were at one of my hometown's fanciest eating emporiums, the Beacon Diner, and I'm guessing the funeral spread cost a pretty penny, maybe three bucks a head at the time. All for poor Uncle Carl, whoever the hell he was (jeez...they saved 3 bucks on him alone).

I somehow equate the whole tomato juice/dinner roll scenario more so with Thanksgiving though. We weren't big on appetizers in my house, either when we ate out or at home, so a thin glass of tomato juice before dinner was a rare treat indeed. And the dinner rolls were always on the table at these holiday fetes. To this day I like my Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners to start with a glass of tomato juice. So I guess what I'm saying is that I'd actually be fine with a bread and liquid diet, providing it was dinner rolls and tomato juice.

Which strange combo of food and drink brings back memories for you?

Ennui and me...

Okay...vacation is over, Daylight Savings Time has disappeared from the American landscape, and a heavy weight has descended on your humble blogger. Yes, ennui is me.

The dictionary defines ennui as "a feeling of weariness and dissatisfaction: boredom" and that certainly sums up my feelings in a nutshell. Perhaps it's the instant loss of daylight...it's dark here at like 5:15 it seems...maybe it's the passing of a most-excellent vacation and the feeling of nothing to look forward to, not even--dare I say it--new comic book day on Wednesday. Whatever it is, ennui is nothing new to me. I've wrestled with it all my life. In fact, if I had ever had a son, I probably would have named him just that: Ennui. I would have spelled it Andre, just so he wouldn't have felt bad, but I would have pronounced it Ennui. Poor kid. I imagine with either spelling or pronunciation, he'd be pretty much pummeled every day. On second thought, maybe it's better I didn't have kids.

So bear with me (or bare with me, if you like) through the coming "winter" (this term used loosely in San Diego and surrounding environs) months as we hunker down and hibernate through the dark times. (Hey...why should winter be any different than the other 9 months of summer?) I don't blame you if you decide to bail here...go right ahead. See you in April.

Our Halloween tradition...

Don't worry...I'm as sick of this thing as you are...but, Happy Halloween!

Thank you, Mr. President...

I will, eventually, get around to blogging about my vacation last week and my quest to find fall. Not the act of falling, but the season. You know, cool and windy weather, cloudy skies, yellow, orange, and red leaves and the soft, firm crunch of dead foliage underfoot. Yeah, that fall.

But first, here's something completely different.

As I traveled this country from coast to coast last week, I kept encountering a strange individual. He's a person much admired--and sadly, despised--in this great land of ours. Personally, I like him, but if the truth be told after three almost-close encounters with him in eight days, I am a mite p-o-ed at him right now. Because the long arm of the President of these United States reached into my life and touched me...and not necessarily in a good way.

I'm talkin' about you, Obama. Yes I am.

My personal tale of woe starts on Thursday, Oct. 15th. The first leg of my journey takes me to the beautiful city by the bay, San Francisco, for a work-related weekend. Our flight from San Diego to Oakland was flawless, even landing early. (By contrast, some of my workmates were delayed for hours because they flew on chi-chi Virgin Airlines into San Francisco. Hope the magenta cabin lights and touch-screen teevess were worth the wait.) The three of us hop into a cab and are promptly told getting to our hotel will be difficult because President Obama is in town for a fundraiser (emphasis added) at a hotel one block down the street. He's also staying near Moscone Center, so the streets are closed off.

Okay...no big deal. We make it to our hotel maybe 10-15 minutes late because of that. But that evening, when a group of us try to go to a restaurant we all like next to the fundraiser hotel, we find the entire block cordoned off, all restaurants and shops closed for the evening. This causes some friction amongst our tiny little dinner expedition, but basically no harm, no foul. There are other places to eat in San Francisco.

The rest of my weekend there passes without any further presidential incidents.

On Tuesday, Oct. 20, I arrive in New York City for a short stay. It's a cold, cloudy morning when I land at JFK (hey...he was a president, too, until he was...oops...nevermind), but I find the weather invigorating and rather than crashing after a long red-eye flight from San Francisco, I go out and do my favorite New York pastime: visiting the Strand Bookstore. Late afternoon comes and I take a nap, and head out around 6:00pm for dinner and more bookstores, this time up Broadway, past Columbus Circle.

I get to Columbus Circle and New York's finest are everywhere. Streets are blocked off, crowds are milling. I overhear what's going on: President Obama is in town for a fundraiser. Yes. Again. This time I can still go to where I want to go, though, with some minor walking detours, so again...no harm, no foul.

The rest of the week in New York City is beautiful...great weather, and despite being a bit under the weather myself (sore throat, sniffles, slight fever...probably the 50+ version of Swine Flu), I'm able to do everything I want to do and have a wonderful time. Friday rolls around and I head to the airport for a 6:05pm direct flight home to San Diego. The plane taking us there arrives a little late, but by 6:30 or so we're on the plane and pulling out from the jetway.

And then we stop. And the pilot comes on and says: "Sorry, folks, but we are on an all ground traffic stop at JFK for a VIP plane on the runway. We'll get underway shortly." Someone looks out the window and a murmur goes through the cabin...Air Force One is on the runway. 

President Obama is in town for a fundraiser.

So we sit. And sit. AND SIT. (Well, most of us sit. Despite the pilot's request to remain seated because we could move at any time, pretty much the entire cabin decides now is the time to take a leak. And I'm sitting right by the rear bathrooms. During this parking time on the tarmac, the flight attendants break out water bottles, thus inspiring another bathroom run later in the flight. Obviously, I need to rethink my seating strategy on long, coast-to-coast flights.) Finally we move. The pilot tells us the VIP plane is gone and traffic is starting up again. We move slowly up the line. The pilot gets on again and says "Flight attendants please take your seats for takeoff."

And we stop.

The now sheepish pilot gets back on and says, "Well, folks, I'm sorry but...there are TWO lines of planes and the tower stopped us while they let 15 or so of the planes in the other line go. So it'll be another 20-25 minutes until we take off." And eventually we do, over two and a half hours after our scheduled time of departure. I get into San Diego at a little before 11:00pm, thankfully making up some of the time in the air (we were originally scheduled to arrive at 9:15pm).

So thanks, Mr. President, for all that fundraising. I hope it was successful for you. And as much as I like your politics, if the next presidential election were being held this coming Tuesday my sore butt from sitting on a f*cking plane for 8 hours would try its best to persuade me to vote for the other guy. (Unless of course, the other "guy" was Sarah Palin...then even my ass wouldn't argue with me on that choice. After all, it takes one to know one.)

V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N!

I am gone for the foreseeable future, away on both a work trip and then a bit of R and R. I've left something for you to look at each and every day from now until the time I come back. Meanwhile, I'm going to see me some fall.

Pack it up!

As a work trip and vacation near, I am in the beginning throes of packing, trying to figure out what to wear in two cities with similar--but the possibility for distinctly different--weather. And I have to confess...I'm one of those strange people who love to pack. Unpack...no, but pack, yes.

When I went to London a few years back I did the whole compression bag thing, where you buy these plastic bags, load them up with your clothes and then press the air out of them. It worked like a charm--and as an added bonus, when I returned for a few days' stay in NYC and arrived in a blinding rainstorm and had to walk 8 blocks to my hotel, the bags kept my clothes dry inside my obviously not waterproof suitcase--and it hooked me on the whole organized packing regime. The next year I bought a new Eagle Creek suitcase and all the little packing accoutrements that go with it: the packing cubes, etc.

This kind of packing, which we'll call the "you have a disease, asshole" style of loading up a suitcase, is something I can really get into. Everything in it's place and a place for everything is my motto. There's a cube for socks, one for my underwear, one for my t-shirts. Only my jackets and pants float free. Everything matches and it all stacks neatly in my suitcase, and I'm sure when the TSA personnel open it for inspection, they have some kind of number for me like "we have a 734 here...send help fast!," indicating that my obsessive/compulsive disorder is a federal crime that involves some form of terrorism, or at least an overly-organized transgression involving baggage on an aircraft. 

Anyway, packing is fun for me, but I know I'm in the minority. On the other hand, unpacking it all once I get back...well, that sometimes waits for days and days...

That Letterman thing...

I'm late to comment on the whole David Letterman affairs affair. And I'm not about to judge him or talk about the moral aspect of this whole thing. Everyone feels differently about this type of thing and who am I--or anyone else for that matter--to judge? Especially all those Sarah Palin lovers out there who still want to punish him for making fun of the rogue queen and her family.

No, the one thing that this brought home to me is how human Dave is. Out of all the late night talk show hosts, he's the only one that ever comes across as being a real person, albeit a cranky, cantankerous and flawed one. I'm sure Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Kimmel, Jon Stewart, and Jimmy Fallon are nice people off-camera. But not one of them comes across as anything other than a television personality on-air. Leno is a card-reading automaton who has to rely on that horribly fake audience-greeting thing at the beginning of each show to help him look even remotely human. Conan is a walking, breathing cartoon character come to life. Ferguson is the funniest guy doing this thing on TV right now, but I can't see anyone past the glibness and wit. Kimmel is an overgrown kid. Stewart is smart and funny but I don't get any sense of what he's really like, and Fallon is too busy fawning over everything in his line of sight that I almost expect him to do 3 minutes on how great the microphones are in his studio.

Over the years we've learned how human Letterman is. From his heart surgery to 9-11 to the birth of his son and now through this trial and tribulation, he wears his heart on a sleeve. For a supposedly very private person, Letterman always astounds me as to how he can come through in a moment like this and say something heartfelt and emotional, basically baring his soul. I don't think Dave is long for the TV world anymore and not because of this latest deeply personal incident. I think he'll just hang it up once his current contract is up. 

For anyone who tuned into Monday night's show to hear what Dave was going to say next, they were treated to an amazing show with Steve Martin and surprise guest Martin Short. I was reminded of the classic Johnny Carson show with Dean Martin, Bob Hope, and George Gobel (where Gobel commented something like "Did you ever feel the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?" when he joined the others on stage.) Steve Martin seemed more relaxed and less "on" than I've ever seen him on Letterman (he almost always seemed to have an intricately prepared script every other time), and the crazy walk-on of the delightfully hammy Short was one of those things where I thought for a moment that Glee's Lea Michele would be--in the parlance of the old Tonight Show--"bumped" to another night. The three of them--Letterman, Martin, and Short--were all having so much fun that I thought they'd just keep going. That's what separates Dave from Leno and everyone else: the ability to sit back and let them go. Leno would never--COULD never--do such a thing, he'd try to interject too much of himself into it. Maybe this was a blessed respite for Dave, with his current woes, I don't know, but it was the best talk show I've seen in a long, long time.

The male comfort zone: up close and personal...

I am, most days, the poster child for the male comfort zone. I love my cozy little apartment. To some, it's a tiny pied-a-terre, nestled in the heart of the city. To others, it's a "fuck-pad," a bachelor's dream. A bed, a big screen TV, and a certain amount of seclusion and anonymity.

Let me assure you that neither any French style hanky-panky associated with the pied-a-terre title is happening, nor is there any of the f-word going on, either, except when I stub my toe late at night whilst I make my way to the toilet. What this apartment is to me is quite simple: it's my fortress of solitude, my castle, the chief delineating boundaries of my comfort zone.

The older a male gets, the more defined his comfort zone becomes, and the less likely he is to venture from it. Take me for example (go ahead, take me). There are only a few people who can roust me from my humble abode come the evening hours. I get home from work, the shoes and socks come off, the pants quickly follow, a pair of shorts are donned and I attack my couch with passion. After a short nap, I watch TV, eat dinner, play on the computer, read voraciously, or even--gasp! shudder!--BLOG. The phone seldom rings, and even more seldom is me venturing out to do something. Once that door is locked in late afternoon, I'm in for the duration.

I have a female friend who has recently seen the male comfort zone up close and personal. Her (relatively) new boyfriend doesn't like to sleep anywhere else but his place. One of her closest male friends was unmoved by her major plans for her birthday and declined to attend. The latter person eventually caved, mainly because this woman can be highly persuasive when she chooses to be, but I mean that in the nicest of ways possible, he said, uncomfortably pressing his legs together. And if there's one thing the male comfort zone can't and won't endure, it's an uncomfortable pressing of the legs together.

I remember a time years ago when I had a girlfriend--yes, REALLY--and we battled on a consistent basis on where we were staying. She had a dog and two cats, I had one aged and sickly cat (who required daily insulin injections), and we both used them mercilessly as pawns in our not-so-subtle back and forth dance for dominance. In retrospect, I was getting laid and I liked this woman, too (don't read anything into the ordering of that statement, please), so I should have kept my mouth shut and gave up the ghost and stayed at her place. But the simple fact of the matter is, the older we guys get--especially us SINGLE guys--the harder that transparent shell wrapped around our comfort zone becomes. For me, at this point, it's practically impregnable. Is it any wonder that the ONE thing I've been most enthusiastic about over the past six months or so is having a clean and orderly closet? It's like having a brand-spanking-new addition onto my comfort zone dream house.

My female friend still laments the sleeping arrangements with the boyfriend, even though she won the birthday battle with her other friend (for the record, he's a pussy and he caved). My take on this--for what that's worth--is I have a good twenty years on this guy, and if he won't budge now, he's going to end up a lonely man living in a house stacked floor to ceiling with folded up newspapers, venturing out only to buy Campbell's Chunky Soup in the microwavable containers at Target. Get out of the house, buddy--now!--while you still can, before it's too late. Extend your bedroom comfort zone to include HER bedroom. You'll probably get laid a lot more often, and you'll be happier, too.

Now if you'll excuse me, my microwave just dinged. Soup's on!

Welcome to fall: This, to me, is sheer poetry...

Stop me if you've heard this one before...because I probably wrote it on here.

Each October, my mind wanders to an R. Crumb drawing on the cover of Arcade magazine, a long-ago compendium of underground comix. On it, a beatnik (wow...remember that word?) roams down a street and a solitary brown leaf zips by him as the sun sets, to which he says, "This, to me, is sheer poetry!" (Oh, hell...why am I describing it? This is the age of the Internet. You can find ANYTHING. Here it is, at left.)

I miss the sheer poetry of fall. I live in a place where sunshine and warm temperatures are almost eternal, where a drop of rain is reason to celebrate. I'm sure leaves actually change here in the fall, and float languidly to the ground, but I've never actually seen it happen.

When I lived in Pittsburgh, I lived on this great tree-lined avenue and each year the leaves would fall in buckets. You could walk up or down the street and slog through them, like snow or sand, leaving trails through the piles of them. They crunched underfoot, a loud, snappy, satisfying crunch, not unlike a bowl of cereal. They were orange and red and yellow and bright and the crisp temperatures that accompanied them and quickened their demise made it all seem so perfect. All was right in the world when fall came and the leaves dropped, and then again, when spring came and they came back.

I miss all of that, but because of those memories, October will always be my favorite month. Before the snow came, before the temperatures dropped to below freezing and farther, before we all huddled up inside and only went out when we had to, and before I moved to a place where none of that mattered, October heralded my favorite time of year: Fall. It always will be, regardless of where I live.

This year, I'm going to recapture fall. Stay tuned.

So, I have this mailman...

Let me start this post by stating in all honesty and without any sarcasm usually associated with...well, at least SOME of my missives herein: I firmly believe the United States Postal Service is one of the great things about this country.

Seriously...you can mail a package across the country with Priority Mail in 2-3 days for like $4.00. That's amazing. And I use it all the time, since I do eBay selling all the time. That delivery confirmation thing they do has saved me a number of times from unscrupulous purchasers who email me and write "I never got my package." I whip out that little receipt, type in its number on the USPS website and voila! I can tell the douchebag liar when it was delivered.

So when it comes to sending packages, I have no complaints with the Post Office.

Receiving packages...well, not so much.

I have this mailman. He was the mailman for our building for a long time, and he's a real crotchety bastard, never saying hello when spoken to, always carrying with him a boom box in his letter carrier cart thingie, on which he plays opera. Yes. OPERA. In all caps.

He has a thing about delivering packages to our building. Well, it's not really a thing. He just doesn't do it. When I get a package, as I did Monday and today, he puts a little pink slip into my mailbox, which tells me he tried to deliver it, but gosh, gee, he just couldn't, and it's back at the local Post Office, and I can go pick it up if I want, or he can redeliver it.

But I know he'll never redeliver it, so why bother? Because I've figured out what he does. Using Amazon.com's delivery tracker and geometric logic, I know that my packages NEVER. LEAVE. THE. POST. OFFICE.

Yep. That's his trick. Before he loads up his mail cart and cranks up the opera music, he sits down in the PO and checks all the packages he's SUPPOSED to deliver as part of his JOB, and fills out his little pink slips. Then he brings all the mail he WANTS to carry, and drops off the slips for the packages he DOES NOT WANT to carry. And I know this because I check Amazon, and you can tell when the delivery was "attempted." It's always around 10:30am. And in all the years he's been a mail delivery person here, he never shows up in the building to actually deliver mail until AFTER 2:00pm.

I'm told Opera Mailman is going to retire soon. He was taken off this route for a while--I'm hoping because of complaints--but now he's back on this week. The other mail delivery people actually BRING our packages and drop them off in the downstairs office, which is open weekdays from about 9 to 5, minus lunch breaks. Tomorrow morning I will detour to the downtown Post Office to pick up my package before I go to work. I will feed the meter quarters, since the meters last 12 minutes only per 25 cents, and I will walk into the Post Office that time forgot, where sometimes you can stand for a half-hour waiting to even approach a window and hand over the fabled pink slip.

Last holiday season, I did this trip into Purgatory 11 out of 13 times to pick-up packages. The kicker is these are packages I paid delivery charges on, which to me at least, means they are supposed to come to MY HOME ADDRESS. I am stymied by the whims of a crazy mailman (this is a quote from one of his colleagues, told to a friend of mine in the building, not merely an observation of mine) who refuses to do his job and instead delivers pink slips asking us to do his job for him.

I have a nice pink slip for him. I hope the Post Office does, too.