Musings

Best Buffett in Vegas

· November 19, 2019 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , , , , · No Comments

Just hopped down to Vegas for the weekend to catch a Jimmy Buffett show.

Not sure I’ll do a concert review this year. I’ve only seen two shows , and they’re both bands I’ve seen and written about before.

But we traveled to see both bands, so I guess I can write about the travels and the concert together.

I saw Mumford & Sons in South Carolina in March. Did I forget to write about that? Hmm…

South Carolina was very Caroliney. Lots of barbecue places, although most were mediocre until we found an excellent one in Columbia. Also, Columbia is the home of the University of South Carolina. Home of the Cocks. I guaran-fucking-tee I’ve written about my love of the Cocks before.

Wait a second. That came out wrong.

And the concert was awesome. I think I’ve written about Mumford at least twice before. They are spectacular in concert. In fact, I’m seeing them again in a couple months. This time nearer to my home.

But enough about Mumford and the Carolinas. Let’s talk about Jimmy Buffett in Vegas.

Phil Collins was also in Vegas that night. We thought about trying to fit them both in, but their concerts started within a half-hour of each other. Really, Aging White Dudes? Are you not aware that some of your fans might want to double dip?

Oh well, I can’t tell you anything about Phil Collins. But boy, if you’ve ever wondered if there are any places that might make Buffett fans more Buffett, well, I found it for you.

Parrotheads Descend Upon Sin City.

I’ve been to Jimmy Buffett concerts before. I’ve been to Vegas before. Both are experiences in their own regard. So when I saw that Jimmy would be playing in Vegas, well, I just had to go.

Evidently I wasn’t the only one.

Holy shit!

You wouldn’t think a single fan base could make a dent on the Vegas ambiance. Vegas has a few hundred thousand visitors on a normal weekend, right? Some people are there to see Reba or the Jonas Brothers or Barry Manilow or, occasionally, Phil Collins. Heck, I’m guessing the mummified corpse of Frank Sinatra is performing somewhere. Not to mention the sporting events, be they NBA All-Star Games or Ritualistic Ear-Biting.

In addition there are, allegedly, other recreational activities that might draw people to the middle of a fucking desert.

Normally, any one set of those travelers don’t make much of an impact. The Air Supply fans and the Drake fans each orbit around amongst each other without affecting the overall gravitational pull that is Vegas. I bet when Tupac got shot, he was right next to some drunk frat dude with an ironic trucker hat.

So I didn’t expect to see the neon footprint of Parrotheads wherever I went. In fact, it was so far out of my mind, that when there were four people dressed like pirates when we took the monorail (MONORAIL!) to the Flamingo area for brunch, I didn’t even think they might be there for the concert that was still nine hours away. I just thought, “Huh. Pirates.” It’s Vegas. What’re you gonna do?

But as we took the skybridge from the Monorail (MONORAIL!) station into the Flamingo, we saw a giant banner for a “Son of a Son of a Pool Party,” to be held from 11:00 am to 6:00 pm.

Now, you might think this is just a great cross-promotion. Get all the people that are heading your way for the concert later tonight to show up early, spend some extra money. And, yeah, to a certain extent, that’s what was going on.

Except not entirely. Because the concert was at the MGM Grand, not the Flamingo. Granted, I’m never really sure which casinos are currently affiliated with which other casinos. But when I was in the Flamingo, I could use my Caesar’s loyalty card. Then again, when we told the aggressive timeshare salesguy that we were staying at Hilton, he said, “That’s our competitor. How about I give you a deal to stay here next time?” This despite the fact that it’s always been known as the Flamingo Hilton and there was still a sign at the Uber drop-off that referenced “Flamingo by Hilton.”

Regardless of if it’s a Hilton or a Caesar’s, I don’t think either of those are affiliated with MGM Grand. So while this was an attempt to get the Parrotheads out early to spend some extra cash, it was not an attempt by the property where the concert was actually happening. It’s counter-promotion, like the Puppy Bowl at halftime of the Super Bowl. Except instead of half-time, it’s beforehand. And instead of cute puppies, it’s drunks who should have stopped wearing swimwear like that about thirty years ago. Present company included.

I never found out which pool had a Phil Collins pre-party. It might be tough with all of the bald heads.

Then again, the Flamingo does have the Vegas Margaritaville restaurant. So the symbiosis did make a certain amount of sense. In fact, it’s a bit of brilliance. There’s a reason Jimmy Buffett is one of the most valuable musicians despite never having a number one hit. He knows that his fans are in town, he knows they like to drink, and he knows they tend to run older and higher on the socio-economic scale than the average fan base. And they can’t all fit inside the Margaritaville restaurant. So how about a pool party?

Oh yeah, he also opened a weed dispensary in town with the same name as his band, the Coral Reefers. Its grand opening was the weekend of the concert. Not bad for a dumb redneck from Alabama who just sings stupid party songs.

But the Parrotheads weren’t just at the pool party. We went across the street to Bobby Flay’s restaurant, Mesa, and wouldn’t you know it, Parrotheads everywhere. We went to see Potted Potter, a show at Bally’s, at 2:00 in the afternoon, and there were Hawaiian shirts everywhere. And hey, dude in front of me? Do you mind taking off your foam shark hat so that I can see the Ron Weasley wig?

To be fair, there might’ve been a lot of Phil Collins fans traipsing around the Strip as well. But they’re not as easy to spot.

I actually felt under-dressed. Or maybe I was overdressed, seeing as I had socks. But my major faux-pas was my lack of a Hawaiian.

I packed a Hawaiian, of course. I think of you show up to a Jimmy Buffett show without a Hawaiian shirt, there’s a good chance you’ll end up in Parrotjail.

And heck, half my wardrobe is Hawaiian. The Tommy Bahama outlet store is my own personal, inexpensive Disneyland.

But my Hawaiian (with parrots, natch) was still back in the hotel room. Because the concert was still over nine hours away. And I was going to be eating and drinking in between now and then.

These people… were they going to stay out all day? Were they going to start drinking heavily and still make the concert at 8:00? This is Vegas, can I bet the over/under on how many of them aren’t going to make it to the show? Also, any chance I can figure out what seat the dude with the balloon-flamingo hat and the “pet” foam shark on the pipe cleaner-esque “leash” has? Because I’ve kinda got nosebleed seats and would like to know where there’s likely to be an empty seat tonight.

Did I mention it’s easy to spot the Parrotheads?

But here’s another cool thing about Jimmy Buffett. This wasn’t the last I saw of the pirates from the monorail (MONORAIL! ) or flamingo-balloon-hat lady or Pet Shark Dude. They showed up at the show. Just maybe not in person.

If you’ve never seen a Jimmy Buffett show before, he usually plays in front of a giant HD screen that shows pictures and videos that go with whatever song he’s singing. Lots of tropical beaches, bucolic mountain vistas, and fun-in-the-sunners. “License to Chill” featured a video selfie of Jimmy Buffett kayaking. “He Went to Paris” had shots of the Eiffel Tower.

“It’s Five o’ Clock Somewhere” started with a clock with a whole bunch of fives. Then it showed some boat drinks. Then a pool. The pool totally looked familiar… Holy crap! I know that pirate!

What followed was three minutes of footage from the pool party that day. The pool party at a competitor’s hotel. How cool is that? All you have to do is spend money for his concert and at the pool party put on by his restaurant, and maybe his pot dispensary, and you can see yourself up on stage at a Jimmy Buffett concert. Shit, to do that at a Bruce Springsteen concert, you have to be Courtney Cox.

One more kinda cool thing. There was no opening band. Tickets said 8:00 and by 8:17, Jimmy was out on stage. He’s gotta be considerate of all of the old fogeys he made drink for ten straight hours.

He played for two hours, with only a 6-minute break to go grab a drink or a what have you.

I know the break was about six minutes because he played a video to keep us entertained. The video featured a ukulele player playing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” complete with lyrics so that we could all sing along. And sing along we did. You haven’t heard horror tinged with comedy tinged with “aww, that was sweet” until you’ve heard 20,000 people try to time “Bismillah! No, we will not let you go. (Let him go!) Bismillah! No, we will not let you go.”

Why did Jimmy have this random video of a random ukulele player playing a Queen song? Because the guy had opened for him in Dublin. How cool is that? Buffett liked the guy and liked the performance, so he gave him free exposure to this crowd. And sure, that’s often the point of an opening band, but who the hell pays attention to the opening band? That’s just background music for getting frisked by security, right? And those assholes usually end up playing way too long. Some even get surly that we aren’t there to see them and are only paying marginal attention to get a clue as to how much longer their asses are going to be wasting our earspace.

But this guy, Jake Shimabukuro, is playing right in the middle of the show, when we’re all in our seats. And he’s only playing one song, so we don’t get tired of him. And it’s a song we all know and can sing along to. And even better, he didn’t even have to show up! That’s the fucking trifecta of expanding an audience right there.

If only I could get Jimmy Buffett to promote my blog.

Mid-Eighties Circus. 

We usually stay at the south end of the Strip, but this time we were on the north end. So I was able to check out the Sahara, which has been refurbished since the corpse of Frank Sinatra played there. And Circus Circus, which most assuredly has not.

I’ve been coming to Vegas since the early eighties, when my age was still in single-digits. And we always stopped or stayed at Circus Circus. Back then, my mom could give me $10 in quarters and I’d go full Latchkey for HOURS on the upper floor. Carnival games, arcade, circus acts. What’s not to love? I remember feeling sorry for my poor mom, who had to be downstairs in the boring casino, missing all the fun up there.

Back then, Circus Circus was actually a destination, a worthy anchor of the northern end of the Strip. There were maybe only ten casinos, most of which had been there long enough to have streets named after them. Circus Circus didn’t have its own street, but it was an anchor, nonetheless.

Boy, its hallowed days are gone.

Unfortunately, this affects their business model, as well. Because there wasn’t shit going on on the Saturday morning we went there.

Those who have followed my travels before know we sometimes bring our daughter’s stuffed animal on our trips, so they can “take pictures” and “report back to her.” Except on this short weekend away, where we went straight from work to the airport, oops!, we left Giraffey at home. No problem, we figure, we’re staying by Circus Circus. Let’s go get her a new friend.

Except the upstairs wasn’t open until 10:00 AM.

WHAT? Sure, maybe the circus acts aren’t going to run 24 hours, but the carnival games? And I know they need employees to run those games. But at least the video arcade should be open, right?

Wait, they don’t do video arcades anymore? Is Pac-Man no longer chic? Boy, where have I been? Downstairs in the boring casino, I guess.

Speaking of the casino, we figured maybe we could just gamble for a little bit until the upstairs opens. I just needed to get a rewards card and… never mind. The reward card center doesn’t open until 10:00 AM, either.

So much for being the city that doesn’t sleep. At least one end of the Strip not only sleeps, but sleeps in as well.

I just threw five bucks in a machine while Wife visited the bathroom. Without the benefit of Big Brother tracking me.

When she returned, I had it back up to five bucks. So yay! I broke even. Although if I had been using a rewards card, I would’ve made a point or two. Whatever, I just pushed the button to collect my winnings.

Then something crazy happened. Instead of the familiar dinging sound I’ve come to expect when the ticket prints, there was a strange whirring. Then something shot out the bottom of the slot machine.

Holy Shit! Those are quarters! Coming OUT of a slot machine. It really IS 1986 in here!

When I realized what was happening, the things went through my mind in rapid succession:

1. What the hell is happening? Where is my fucking ticket? Is this thing possessed? It’s, like, spewing out its innards!

2. OMG! Those are quarters. How fucking cool is that? It’s so retro. Like I’m a fresh- faced 21 year old again (at least according to my i.d. at the time). Tonight were going to party like it’s 1999, baby!

3. What the fuck am I supposed to do with 20 quarters? How fucking annoying is that? I hate coins. If I have a dollar bill, it’s worth a dollar to me. If I have 99 cents, I might as well have nothing. In my world, ten dollars in coins is worth less than a single dollar bill. Because the coins in my pocket at the end of the day just go on the nightstand to die. Or they stay in my pockets where the laundry fairy takes them as compensation for cleaning the sacrificial dirty pants I left in her hamper-shaped altar. Back in the old days, when my i.d. said I was 21, I used to hold onto coins until I came to Nevada, but now slots don’t take coins anymore, so the one value coins had is now gone. Wait a second. If these slots pay out quarters, maybe they’ll… Nope. No coin slots. They take in paper money and pay out coins. Even when you win, you lose.

So I grabbed one of those buckets next to the machine. Remember those? Not that I needed it for a whopping twenty coins, but dammit, they done pissed me off with their coin bullshit. They’ll be lucky if they get this bucket back without my DNA in it.

Don’t get me wrong. The idea behind the retro slot machine is a good one. Think of all the all of the old video game consoles on the market these days. But a ticket-or-coin option would’ve been appreciated. Or maybe at least a warning sign.

Unfortunately it still wasn’t 10:00, so after cashing (coining) in my winnings, we headed for the Monorail (MONORAIL!). Still had to get a new stuffed animal. So we high-tailed it to Margaritaville to buy a couple of plush parrots. I’m sure Jimmy Buffett appreciates our business.

Daughter ended up naming the parrots Jimmy and Buffett. She then took them to show-and-tell at school. CPS, I await your call.

People. A couple shorties to finish off. Two people who stuck out. Maybe not for the best of reasons. Unless you are entertained by idiots, in which case, they stood out for the BEST reasons!

First was the guy sitting next to me at Mesa. He had clearly watched a fair amount of Food Network in whatever podunk area of the country he came from. And being at Bobby Flay’s restaurant gave him carte blanche, or rather creme freche, to make random requests out of his ass.

His wife ordered some pink concoction. Maybe it was a Cosmo, but it looked foofier. He tried it to see if he liked it before ordering a drink of his own. Of course, the server had to stand there for the experiment. Diner decided it was a bit too sweet and wondered if there was something a little less sugary.

Boy, that’s a tough one. Are there any drinks less sweet than a Cosmo? Can’t think of a single one. Sorry. We all know that cosmos are the driest drinks around, right? Certainly not Martinis or Old Fashoneds. A straight shot of scotch whiskey might as well be a swizzle stick when compared to the stifling bitterness of the Cosmopolitan. The mummified corpse of Dean Martin drank cosmos all the time.

He then asked if they could take a drink like that and add some bitters. I wanted to jump out of my seat to assist the server’s explanation that bitters aren’t actually bitter. But whatever. Dude probably heard it on a Bobby Flay show once, so who are we to question his culinary knowledge.

I didn’t pay attention long enough to hear what he ordered. The next time he caught my attention was when his burger was delivered. Tight before he asked if they had any “straight mayonnaise.”

Straight mayonnaise? I didn’t even know condiments had sexual proclivities. Sure, mayonnaise might look like semen, but I’m sure these Vegas condiments are only creaming meat, as God intended, and not some other condiment. Then again, I don’t partake in mayonnaise much, so maybe I’m just out of the loop on the Mayonnaise Agenda. Or is it a War on Mayo-mas?

But what do you expect from someone who orders mayonnaise? No mayo deserves to be anywhere near a well-cooked burger, regardless of whose bread it likes to butter.

It turns out, of course, that this guy wanted regular, unadulterated mayonnaise. None of that garlic aioli crap. Unflavored. If he’s going to dip or smother his food in sweet lard, he wants the pure stuff. Black tar heroin.

I only hope he didn’t want the mayo for those fries on his plate. If I end up yacking in my Irish Coffee, I’m adding it to his tab.

But no, the server explains, they don’t have straight mayonnaise. The closest they have is a subtle aioli.

Food connoisseur passed, disappointed.

Umm… not to side with Patron Guy in this endeavor, but if you have garlic aioli, how do you not have mayonnaise? What’s the base of the aioli? I hope Bobby Flay isn’t shipping his dips in from far away.

Go ahead, Server, double-check on that mayonnaise. It might be listed as creme fraiche.

Dude number two came running up to our Uber driver as we were heading to the airport Sunday morning. Where, he wanted to know, might he watch an NFL game.

Uber Driver feigned ignorance. “No hablo ingles.” Pretty convincing, too, as Wife and I were worried we might have trouble communicating with him. Not that you need to communicate with your Uber driver. That’s what Google Maps is for. But still, sometimes it’s more convenient to explain where we’re going.

Turns out he knew enough English to say and hear what he needed to say and hear. And I’m pretty sure he could understand “TV” and “Futbol.” Even if he pointed to where one could watch soccer, he’d be doing Dude a solid.

But that’s not his fucking job. He doesn’t need to tell Dude where to watch an NFL game on a Sunday morning in Las Vegas. Even if the answer is “Literally Anywhere.”

Seriously Dude, you see that high-rise buildings? Or that one? Right, the ones with the neon.  They’re called “Casinos.” And in these “Casinos” are things called “Sports Books.” The “Sports Books” take “Bets” on “Games” and then have giant “TV’s” where you can “Watch.” So if you’re looking for a particular game, pick a direction, any direction, and go into a high rise, any high rise. Then look for the wall with twenty giant screens on it.

They have NFL Sunday Ticket, too, so you can even watch obscure teams like… what’s that? You want to watch the Raiders? You mean the team that’s going to be the Las Vegas Raiders next year?

Yeah, I’m guessing you could watch them on local TV.

Maybe even at Circus Circus.

Everything I Needed to Know (I Learned in the Parking Lot)

· November 5, 2019 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , , , · No Comments

The school I work at has a Fall Break after the first quarter. It’s great. I get a random week off that nobody else  gets off. Including my daughter, who is now in kindergarten.

So this week, I’ve actually still been in the house when she wakes up. I’ve let Wife go into work early since she’s usually on “get the kid ready” duty.

And I’ve now entered the very strange world of “child drop off and pick up” at elementary school.

Seriously people, how the fuck hard can this be?

I had dropped off once before, when I took her first day of kindergarten off work. She’s Late Start, so only half of the kindergartners were showing up at that time, about thirty kids total. The othergrades, as well as the other forty kindergartners, were already inside their respective classrooms, so I didn’t get to see too much of the crazy. My lasting impression was that there was WAY too much athleisure wear amongst the mothers. But whatever, I live in suburbia hell, so it shouldn’t be surprising to see all the stay-at-homers jonesing to get rid of the anchor that’s been weighing down their social lives for the last five years.  Now they can finally get back to the  Pilates that allowed them to entice their hedge-fund husbands in the first place.

Pick up on the first day of school was also a bit subdued, so it wasn’t until this past week that I truly saw the insanity that is drop-off and pick-up at a suburban elementary school.

And really, let me just say before I get too much further, that Late Start Kindergarten is a fucking weird-ass time warp. Three days a week, Daughter starts school at 10:05 am. On Mondays and Fridays, she starts at the regular school time of 8:50 am. What a great introduction to her next thirteen years of institutional indoctrination.

“Hey kids, don’t get too used to any one way of doing things! Routines are for suckers! And, oh hey, did we mention there’s a rally this Friday? What’s that? You’re having a test this Friday. Just put it off till Monday. I’m sure the students will do fine.”

Sorry, that might’ve been a little more teacher bitching than student.

Of course, the early starts don’t show up late twice a week to be equal opportunity annoying. Because early start equals early release, and then they get to have a margarita meeting. Uh huh. I’m sure you’re doing a ton of cooperative planning after school on Friday, kindergarten teacher. Wink, wink.

But that late start, on the days that she has to do it, are fucking brutal. What the heck kind of school starts at 10:05? That’s just early enough to not be able to do something substantive or make plans beforehand. We can’t go to a movie or mini golf. We can’t start an art project or teach the kiddo how to write a blog post.

But it’s late enough where I can’t just let her get ready for school at a leisurely pace. Seriously, I can have the kid ready to go by 8:00. 7:30 if she’s going to daycare in time to ride the bus. But even if I let the kid dawdle and get distracted, even without gentle nudging or voice-of-God “How freaking hard is it for you to brush your freaking teeth?”, she’s still going to be ready to go by 9:00. Then what the fuck am I supposed to do for an hour?

Naturally, I just plop her in front of the TV. What better way to get that brain geared up for a focused day of learning than two episodes of “Vampirina”?

Then it’s into the car for delivery time.

It occurs to me that, when I was Daughter’s age, I walked to school. I lived about as far from my elementary school as we currently live from Daughter’s. Given the rules I grew up under, she’d be a walker. Hell, everybody would be a walker, because elementary schools don’t do buses anymore.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to go all old man on you. No hiking my pants up to my nipples and saying that back in my day we hiked a hundred miles up a mountain just to find some snow to walk through. Uphill in both directions.

Quite the opposite. Like, holy shit, I have a five-year old now. Who in the fuck would think she can be responsible for getting herself to school? She can barely remember to go to the bathroom before heading to her state-mandated, hermetically-sealed, black-box-constructed car seat. Hell, I get worried when she wants to go to the mailbox by herself. What if some Formula 1 driver is driving two hundred miles per hour down the sidewalk of our six-house cul-de-sac? No fucking way I’d let her walk to school unless it was right next door. And even then, I’d put a GPS tracker on her.

Shoot, I wouldn’t even feel safe with her walking to the corner to get on a school bus to take her the rest of the way. Maybe that’s why schools stopped putting fifty kids in a huge death contraption driven by a loadie.

But back in 1979, my mom said, “See ya later,” and I hoofed it five blocks down one hill, then took a left and went up over another hill. Or sometimes I took the short-cut, a trail that went near bee hives and shit. And that was before California changed the birthday cutoff, so I was still four when kindergarten started. I was six months younger than my daughter was on her first day of school. What the fuck were you thinking, Baby Boomers?

Look, I know y’all were (and still are) the Me generation, and my generation became the Latchkey Kids and y’all are the reason we now have strict laws about when and where children must be supervised and that they need to be in a car seat when they get dropped off at high school graduation. I know all your hippie asses just needed to get back to smoking your weed after your five-year sabbatical, but really? You thought a bunch of four-year-olds should be responsible for getting their own asses to school? Put down the bong.

In my own mother’s defense, she said she freaked out and watched me walk to school from the back porch for the majority of my kindergarten year. She knew that I was a little spaz that was prone to simple distraction. One time in preschool, we were walking to the beach and I walked into a parked car. Oops.

Good thing I’m older now and am not likely to distraction and/or tangents, right?

Sorry, what was I writing about?

Oh, right. Student drop-off.

Morning drop-off is pretty simple. Kindergarten parents are supposed to stay with our children outside the gates until the teacher comes to pick them up. The rest of the students can go through the gates to wander around the school. Supervised, of course. What do you think this is, 1979?

So the drop-off line of cars moves pretty quickly. A car (or daycare bus) drives up to the curb, the back door opens, the student unbuckles himself from the seventeen-point harness car seat, and walks toward the school. Then the parent drives off for some Pilates and weed.

And truthfully, I don’t know all the nuances and protocols of the drop-off line since it’s only for non-kindergartners. For now, we have to park a half-block away and stand there with my kid until the teacher deigns to finish her morning constitutional.

Then there’s that really awkward moment after the teacher’s taken our children from us. Do I leave as soon as my child’s made it past the gate? Should I watch her make it all the way into the classroom? What happens when my kid’s first in line but the parent next to me’s kid is last? Do I shout out, “Peace out, motherfucker! You snooze, you lose!” and then run for my car? Technically, he’s handed his kid off, too. Are we both free to leave?

Am I supposed to talk to those other parents? I’ve come to know some of them because our kids have gone to birthday parties together and such. But it’s not like we have much to talk about. Should I ask the athleisure-wear lady where I can get some dank yoga? Or should I inquire if the unemployed father has found a job in the last 24 hours? Or would it be more appropriate to ask him about the best porn sites are these days?

Evidently none of us know how to act. Because we just put hands in pockets and shuffle away, trying not to make eye contact with each other. Like that awkward “both people leaving from the two sides of the glory hole at the same time” moment. Because now we’re just a bunch of grown-ups standing around outside an elementary school. And I didn’t even bring my trenchcoat!

So I just shield my face from prying eyes and high-tail it back to my car, past the long line of cars still dropping their kids off at the curb. Tardy much?

Then comes pick-up time. And this is where I’m fortunate that I have to pick up my kid at the gate. Because that long line of cars is now stretching to infinity. That whole “slow down long enough to kick the kid out” of drop-off is no longer present. Now they have to sit and wait for school to end. And wait. And wait. And wait.

The curb fits maybe ten cars at a time. So the first ten cars to get there can just chill and wait for school to get out. Presumably, they can turn off their car, because I can only assume they got there a half-hour after school started. Maybe they just dropped their kid off and never moved. Squatter’s rights.

Again, I don’t know what the protocol is for the non-kindergartners. I assume the kids get out and have to walk up and down the curb to see if their parent happened to get one of the sweet spots today. And if not, do they just hang out? And I assume that once one car leaves, it is immediately snatched up. Kinda like pick-up at the airport. And we all know how much of a shitshow that is. Now replace all the exhausted travelers with squirrely five- to eleven-year olds and, I’m sure you’ll agree, NOTHING bad could happen.

The rest of the cars are behind those go-getters stretching far into the street in both directions. Fortunately for both the children’s safety and the merging cars, this well-oiled machine is moving along at a glacial rate. And of course, all the cars remain turned on and idling. Huzzah for the environment!

One time at pick-up, I unintentionally tracked it. I pulled up and parked my car on the main street, about fifty yards from the intersection with the chock-full-in-both-directions street that Daughter’s school is on the corner of. As I was getting out of my car, Daughter’s daycare bus rolled up.

Wife and I have been curious about how the bus pickup process worked. So I figured this was a good chance to see how the daycare bus picks up the other kids. How they line up, how they board, what kind of Quaaludes the driver is on to have to sit through this idle hell each day. You know, the stuff that’ll make me feel better on the days I can’t be there.

I crossed the street right behind the bus, which had come to a stop six or seven cars away from the merge. I walked into the school, headed to the kindergarten pick-up space outside the gate, double-checked back on the process of the bus. It hadn’t moved. Of course it hadn’t moved! No students had been released from school yet. None of these cars would be moving for another ten minutes. It’s like the old “Camping out at Ticketmaster” days. .Not sure why all the cars are still running, but whatever. Maybe they are hoping that this is the day all the kids get out early.

The only thing that had changed was the line behind the daycare bus, which now stretched past where my car was parked. Seriously, how long have those first few cars been here?

After checking a few times, I got distracted. I don’t remember why. Maybe I ran into the glory hole parent from earlier. We shuffled our feet and looked at the ground and asked how lunch was and if either of us got anything done after the entire morning was screwed up by a 10:05 drop-off.

Kid was let out. Huzzah!

As I’m walking her away from the school I look at the curb. No sign of the bus yet. Bus is still out in the street. Cool, cool. Maybe I can still see how this whole thing works.

“What are you looking at, Daddy?”

“Oh, I was just curious where you get picked up by they day care bus.”

“Want me to show you?”

Absolutely!

Daughter walks me all the way down to the far end of the curb. There’s a little awning there with some students gathering underneath. Daughter says hi to a couple of kids.

The curb is still filled with idling cars, but not very many children are getting into them. Most of the children are tromping up and down the byway like we are. There seems to be a logjam. The earliest parents seem to be correlated with the latest children. Do go-getters beget lollygaggers?

We head back toward Daughter’s classroom. Still no bus. I can’t really delay her much longer without an explanation, and she’s way too young to comprehend glory holes, so we just head back to my car.

We pass the bus. Daughter waves to the driver. We cross the street just behind the bus. It’s idling, maybe six or seven cars away from the merge point.

Yep, you got it. It hasn’t fucking moved at all. I want to ask Daughter how fucking late the bus usually picks her up. Unfortunately she little concept of time.

But I should be able to extrapolate it or l out on my own. Let’s see, it’s been fifteen minutes and the bus has moved about five feet. By my calculation, they should be picking her up about a half-hour past next June.

But I’ll never know for sure, because after a super illegal u-turn to teach Daughter to respect the power of moving automobiles, I was off like Donkey Kong. At least, to help foster Daughter’s respect for the dangers of driving, I waited until I was at LEAST a quarter of the way through the illegal u-turn amongst children and parents before checking my phone for the latest porn site. Also, I had to wait until I had popped the bus driver’s qualuudes.

In all seriousness, I’m pretty sure I was home before the bus made it to the curb. Which means that all those other cars of all those other parents were still sitting in that line, too.

And the daycare bus has an excuse. It’s their fucking job. What the hell are all of those parents doing? Many of them were there before me, presumably because they don’t want to waste time. Except they don’t really care about the wasted time once they’re there. Or else they’d park and walk their athleisure-wear asses the half-block to and from school. It’s kinda like pilates. Then they’d be home by now, smoking their weed.

Then maybe the daycare bus could pick my kid up before midnight.

New math, indeed.

Tax Error in my Favor

· October 23, 2019 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , · No Comments

About a month ago, something weird showed up in my mailbox.

Money.

Okay, not actual cash money, but a check.

And no, this isn’t a post about this obsolete technology that is a check. I’min my middle ages. Not only do I know what a check is, I remember a time where I had to pay all of my bills by check. Heck, I still write a couple checks a month myself. One to transfer money from my personal account to the joint family account and one for my car payment. Because for some reason, I can never remember my login for the bank that the car loan is through. Plus those checks I had printed up ten years ago gotta be good for something. And maybe if I use enough of them, I’ll be able to order new ones with my actual address on them.

So it wasn’t the fact that I saw an actual check that was surprising. It was that this particular check came from the federal government. Those checks look extra special, don’t they? It’s obvious straight away that this ain’t no jury summons. This ain’t no social security statement that tells me how much money I might be making if I retire, but only if I bring them the heads of twenty-five Baby Boomers who are totally fucking up the accounting model that they made when the life expectancy was 68.

But straight up cash from the government is obvious. They make that tell-tale rainbow color visible through the little window on the envelope, so that, even though you’re only looking at your name and address, you know there is a “Pay to the order of” written just out of view. And sure enough, this turns out to be bona fide money coming the government into my grubby little bank account.

Not sure WHY I’m getting money from the government on a random autumn afternoon, but hey, if you don’t ask questions, nothing bad can happen, right? Clearly El Presidente hasn’t been listening in on my private conversations. Then again, I did criticize California in a blog post once, so I guess that counts for a bonus these days.

This check wasn’t coming from just any old part of the federal government, though. The return address wasn’t for the Department of Homeland Security or the Department of the Interior. Not even the Department of the Treasury.

This one came from the Internal Revenue Service.

Yikes! I didn’t even know they sent checks out. I thought they were a black hole that sucked finances in, never to return. Or to be put to good use. Unless we bring back Space Force.

So we opened the envelope, and there it was. A check for roughly $356. No explanation whatsoever. Just two line items on the check stub: Tax overpayment ($349) and interest ($7).

So Wife and I begin the conversation. When might we have overpaid?

We got dinged for underpaying once. We had dutifully filed our taxes in, I’m going to guess, 2013? And then, nice and timely, we get a notice in something like 2017, saying they didn’t like one of the deductions we had taken. So now, four years later, they ask if we happen to have all the proper documentation for it. It turns out we did, because Wife is way better about holding on to shit than I am. But IRS still didn’t like what we said, so they took a couple dollars off but we still had to pay them a shit-ton of money. Plus interest, because it’s clearly our fault that they waited four years to make up some cockamamie bullshit.

Hey, Space Force ain’t gonna build itself, am I right?

But this time we’re facing the opposite situation. Now they’re saying we overpaid. My first thought was they were belatedly accepting our explanation and returning our penalty. But no, Wife told me the amount we owed the IRS back then was substantially higher than the amount the IRS was now paying us. Shocker, huh?

So we held on to the check. We were too scared to cash it. Maybe if we never cashed it, they couldn’t charge us interest when they realized they had sent it out, right? I mean sure, they’re much more likely to charge us for the interest we could have been earning if we had chosen to cash the check. But still, it might be a felony to cash a check that the government didn’t mean to send us. Maybe if we never cash it, they’ll never know they sent it out.

Or maybe we’ll just be a $350 annoyance that makes it so they can never properly balance their books. Like when Rickey Henderson hung his million-dollar bonus check on the wall instead of cashing it, making the Oakland A’s budget a million dollars off for more than a year.

Except the A’s were trying to balance their budget. I don’t think the government would notice if $350 went missing. Or $350 million, for that matter.

About three weeks later, we got another notice from the IRS.

Ha ha, I knew it. Tear up that check!

Wife and I each received a different notice. Two separate mailings, even though we filed our taxes jointly and there was only one check, sent in one envelope to our house and… come to think of it, we have our refund direct deposited every year. Why the heck are they sending this refund via check? If I return an item I purchased with my debit card at Target, they can just put the money right back in my account. Why can’t the government? I’m pretty sure that, if I owed extra money, they’d just take it out, right?

What’s that? Fourth amendment, you say? Ha ha, that’s a good one. You must not have been following the news for the last… century or so.

But contrary to what I assumed, these letters told us that the refund was legitimate. Woo hoo!

But wait a second. The last four digits of the social security number listed aren’t the last four digits of my social security. I knew it was too good to be true!

Hang on, it turns out that’s Wife’s social security number. I checked to see if they wrote my number on her letter. After she opened it, of course, because we’re not going to tack mail fraud on top of the tax embezzlement charge we’ll be facing when we cash that check. But nope, they wrote her number on top of both letters. She’s the primary wage earner, and since most of our tax laws are based on outdated social mores, the second wage earner doesn’t really count. This again brings up the question of why they sent separate letters, but whatever. What’s an extra 33 cents to the government? Or 35 cents? How the hell much does a stamp cost now? 55 cents? Holy crap! I guess I stopped buying stamps around the same time I stopped writing checks. Who would’ve guessed?

Okay, so if you’ve made it this far, you’re probably wondering why we got this money back from the government.

Unfortunately, I still can’t tell you.

“We apologize for the inconvenience, but we made an error on your 2018 Form 1040. To correct our mistake, we adjusted your Schedule D. As a result, you are due a refund of $349.00.”

About as clear as mud, huh? There was an error on the tax form? Not the W-2, so it’s not my employers fault. But there was an error on the actual 1040. Don’t they proofread that before they send it out to 300 million people?

The letter goes on to say, “”If you don’t agree with the changes, call XXX to review your account with a representative. We’ll assume you agree with the information in this notice if we don’t hear from you.”

Umm, I still don’t exactly know what the “changes” are, only that I get $350. How am I supposed to agree or disagree? Is this like those class-action lawsuits that I can opt out of if I want to go for more money individually? Of course, the problem with those class-action lawsuits is that I don’t remember if I stayed at a Motel 6 between June 33rd and Octember 71st of 1972, so I guess I’ll just take the fifteen cents and be done with it.

And that’s the same problem we have here. But at least it seems to be on the government. If we had erred, I doubt we’d see a penny. Isn’t that why they make super Byzantine tax laws that nobody can understand? Because then if we overpay, we’ll never know. And if we underpay, they’ll call us on it and we’ll have to believe them. I’m guessing the only reason this money is coming my way is because it also affected a senator or some other person who matters. Then they just told the computer to send money back to everyone who had put something on line 135.A.ii.c-2 of the EZ form.

The other proof that this affected someone higher up the food chain than me is how quickly it’s being resolved. This fuck-up was related to our 2018 tax returns. 2018! As in the taxes we filed THIS YEAR. Like SIX MONTHS ago.

Shit, that’s faster than the line at the DMV to get a new REAL ID.

But wait a second. If this is from this year, how the hell was there seven dollars in interest? Let me play with some numbers here. I assume they’re only paying interest on the part we overpaid. So by my calculation, seven dollars is about three percent of that total. The government gets three percent interest?

But wait a second. We filed our taxes in March. So does that seven dollars only represent six months of interest? Is the government getting SIX percent somewhere? Where can I find that amount of return? I’ve got twenty thousand in a savings account and I highly doubt I’ve made seven dollars in interest over the past six years, much less six months. Most months I make about eight cents of interest. Yet somehow the government makes a dollar a month off of $350. Must be nice to know some senators. Have they been short-selling a bunch of stocks right before they announce tariffs?

But I shouldn’t get too excited about that interest rate. The letter tells me that, “Your refund may include interest. Keep in mind that any interest you receive on tax refunds is considered taxable income during the year you receive it.”

Oh joy. What’s the tax rate on seven dollars of income? I’ll just put five hundred aside to be safe.

And then there’s the kicker. The letter says, “If you haven’t received a refund for $349.00, you should receive a refund check within 2-3 weeks as long as you don’t owe other taxes or debts we’re required to collect.”

They don’t even know if and when the check’s coming out!

Had this letter come a day or two before or after the check, it would be one thing. But this thing came a whole fucking month later. Like “Oh hey, yeah, you might be wondering why you got some random money from us. No? You spent it already and forgot about it? Well, here’s a vaguely worded explanation. Or, who knows, maybe it’s coming next year.”

I’m reminded of something Andrew Yang said. Not that I’m a Yang-ophile, but I think if I tag him, I will immediately get a thousand more blog views. So Andrew Yang, Andrew Yang, Andrew Yang.

Anyway, he’s running on a Universal Basic Income. He wants to give everyone $1,000 a month. When explaining it, he talked about all of the random isolated shit that the government had been trying to fix forever. And none of it gets fixed because the government isn’t very good at isolating problems and/or devising solutions. There’s one thing the government is really good at: sending out checks to people.

Yeah, Mr. Yang. Like, four weeks better than explaining why.

And they probably could’ve saved 33-cents by forgoing the explanation. Or 55-cents. Crap. Why can’t I keep that straight?

Oh well.

Andrew Yang.

Andrew Yang.

Andrew Yang.

Going to the Reno of Love

· October 8, 2019 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , , , , · No Comments

I went to Reno a few weeks ago. Nothing much to note. Reno is pretty much always Reno. It ain’t like a box a chocolates. You always know precisely what you’re gonna get.

Although I did find out that you shouldn’t attend a minor league baseball stadium on the final weekend of the season unless you want them to be out of everything. I understand not having all the beers in stock. Don’t want to have half a keg that has to last through to next April. But the mini helmets for the ice cream? Come on, those will be perfectly fine next year.

But I’m not here to talk about minor league baseball or the cockamamie drink-ticket policy that the casinos are starting to implement. Really? You’re going to charge me for a Grey Goose? That’s probably a blog post for another time.

No, for some reason, this trip to Reno reminded me of another trip to Reno many years ago. Before I blogged. Scary to think that time ever happened. I think we used pagers and wore Day-glo parachute pants. And maybe the Challenger ran into the World Trade Center. I’m not sure. The older I get, everything more than a week old just fuses all together into one large morass that is “Youth.”

Although this story involves having a regular bartender, so it was probably after the age of twelve. Let’s hope.

My regular bartender, you see, served happy hour at a bar that had NTN/Buzztime trivia. For those of us who preferred to exercise some brain cells while killing the others. I spent many an afternoon there grading papers, because when a student writes a term paper comparing the military draft to the NFL draft, his teacher just might need a cold one.

The bartender had been in an on-again, off-again relationship with a guy. The relationship tended to be “off” at the times she was pregnant with his child and then “on” when whoever he was banging in his off-time got pregnant. Quality relationship, I assure you.

One time whilst not pregnant, she realized he was a flight risk lifelong catch, and decided that if she liked it, she ought to put a ring on it. Like, right quick! Because no better person to enter into a legally-binding life-partnership with than someone who might or might not be around next week.

She asked some of us regulars what we were doing that Sunday because, if we wanted, we could come to their wedding in Reno. It turns out I wasn’t doing anything. Heck, my bartender wasn’t going to be working, so there was little chance of scoring free drinks in town. Is there anywhere else I might find some free drinks? Reno, you say? Well, that sounds like some synergy right there!

As I said, this was a long time ago, when Nevada casinos offered free drinks. These days, they require $100 worth of bets and a Maruader’s-Map-style oath solemnly swearing that there is more money where that came from as long as they continue to ply me with alcohol. And that I won’t lose that money in any of their competitors’ establishments. And, naturally, that I am up to no good.

When Sunday rolled around, we loaded up in a couple of cars and caravaned to the most romantic place on Earth. Sorry, I meant the most romantic spot in Nevada. Make that northwestern Nevada. Not counting the Tahoe vicinity. Or maybe Burning Man. Or, I don’t know, the Mustang Ranch?

You know what? I’ll just say it. Reno’s a shithole. And thank God for that, because if it were a place people might want to go, I wouldn’t be able to find $5 tables anymore.

We stopped off at Boomtown, the first casino you come to along I-80.

Boomtown’s super classy. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s similar to Primm along I-15, being the stateline between California and Nevada, ie the first place you can gamble en route to your gambling destination. Except that, whereas Primm has three or four casinos, Boomtown only has one. Primm also has roller coasters. And the Bonnie and Clyde death car. And shows. Boomtown has none of those.

Now that I think about it, Boomrown’s nothing like Primm. Primm is still about an hour away from Vegas, so maybe you need to take a leak or you’re not going to make it to The Strip in enough time to bet on the Super Bowl coin flip. But Boomtown’s only about five miles from Reno. There’s no viable reason to stop there on the way into Reno. There’s reason to stop there on the way out, because you can pay Nevada prices for gas instead of California prices for your drive back. But on the way there, it only serves people with poor planning abilities or no impulse control. Kinda like a couple deciding on a whim that they should get married this weekend.

I don’t remember why we stopped. Gas? Smokes? Regardless, they got in a fight about something. Not sure what. Gas? Smokes? Anyway, we all decided to hit the buffet here on the way back to commemorate the occasion, and it was onward to the drive-thru chapel.

Except it wasn’t a drive-thru. That’s the fancy Vegas shit. These Reno rat-bastards made us get out of the car to negotiate the ceremony details! They haggled over prices and pictures and, I don’t know, whether the deluxe marriage package comes with large fries or if they have to be ordered separately. I didn’t inquire about the primae noctis add-on.

Although to be fair, I don’t know all of the privies of the negotiation because I was stuck outside watching the five kids they share via various previous relationships and what George Washington referred to as “foreign entanglements.”

Also, I might’ve been a bit twitchy, because I have a general rule about being outside in Reno. And the general rule is: under no circumstances should one ever be outside in Reno.

If you’ve never been to Reno, I’ll paint you a picture. Pull up a mental picture of Las Vegas. Now take away all the fountains and Sphinxes. And rides and shows. And attractive people. And any building built after 1980. You can keep the weather, though. Oh, and maybe ass a little dilapidated infrastructure and a few homeless people passed out on the sidewalk. Now you’ve got Reno.

Oh wait, did I say the weather is the same as Vegas? I only meant in the summer. The winter weather is way worse in Reno.

But that’s all on the outside. Inside, they have these wonderful, climate-controlled resorts with neon and free alcohol.  There’s a reason three of the Reno casinos decided their best bet was to combine into one three-block long structure so that people can move from one to the other without breathing legitimate air.

But whatever, Bartender, for you I’ll travel all the way to my Mecca, able to see the Great Mosque, my religious fervor gambling addiction quivering in my bones. Ignore the Silver Legacy! I’m here to celebrate a friend’s most blessed day, a day she’s been looking forward to since at least last Thursday. So I’ll suck it up and get ready to throw some rice or confetti or… wait, was somebody supposed to bring the rice?

Although it doesn’t matter, because here come Bride and Groom and, oh no, they don’t look too terribly happy. Did someone forget the Smokes? Gas?

“I fucking told you,” Bride was saying.

Groom was mumbling something or other.

“They won’t marry us unless we get a marriage license.”

Wait, what? This is Nevada, home of the quickie wedding. Don’t they issue the marriage certificate AT the wedding facility? All you should have to do is prove your identity as an adult and sign on the dotted…

Wait, what’s that? Groom didn’t bring his ID? Was that his super secret way of avoiding this date with destiny? If I “accidentally”  leave my driver’s license at home, I’ll escape scot free! 

Except Bride said she told him this would happen. Clearly she knew he didn’t bring proper identification to his own wedding. I would be intrigued if I could get over my sweating scrotum and quivering gambling glands.

Awe, what the hell. Inquiring minds want to know.

Turns out Groom didn’t have his driver’s license with him because he was no longer in possession of said license. It’s a temporary thing. He’s supposed to get it back soon.

Why was Groom temporarily identification-less? Had he perhaps left it at a bar the night before? Maybe it went through the laundry in his gym shorts. Or the cops took it away. Do cops take your ID away? I always assumed that, if the courts suspend your license, you still get the card back. In case you need to get married in Reno or something.

No, it turns out Groom had recently been involved in a car crash. And, as a dutiful driver, he got out of the car and exchanged information with the other driver.

By literally giving his driver’s license to the dude.

I’m going to let that one sink in for a bit. I think I went into a daze when I heard it.

Look, I know I have a tendency to get a little bit snooty in my middle-class upbringing. I understand that other people’s experiences and worldviews can’t always match my own and maybe some people are raised to think that “giving the other driver your information” means something different than I think it does.

Then again, I’ve been in a fair number of accidents in my life, and was capable of jotting down the other driver’s license number and insurance info perfectly fine, even in the times before cell phones could immediately take pictures of that information. And never once have I offered to give away my primary form of identification. Nor have I asked for said in return. Nor has anyone I’ve ever gotten into an accident with offered their identification nor requested possession of my identification, except for the temporary purpose of copying down the information.

Taking the other person’s identification is indicative of human trafficking, not a minor rear-ender.

Who the hell gets in an accident and immediately says, “Hey, here’s my driver’s license. You can send it back to me whenever you’re ready. Want me to buy you a stamp?”

Well, maybe a guy who is trying to avoid hitchin’ his old lady that weekend.

Now you might think that, a time when one of the two signatories to a legal contract isn’t able to prove their identity isn’t the best time to plan a last minute trip to said document signing, but whatever. Who can argue with True Love?

Regardless, I guess this trip to Reno is wasted. Whatever shall we do? And I’m only asking because the glistening dome of the Silver Legacy is just a few blocks away and it may or may not be speaking through my subconscious, begging me to come visit. She’s letting me know in no uncertain terms that she knows I’m in her neighborhood and that I better not be thinking about turning tail and skipping town before giving her a little laugh and a tickle. I’m just sayin’, y’all, ain’t no scorned lover like a scorned lover with more money than the Pope and more secret recording devices than… the Pope. The Silver Legacy knows what I’m doing all day, every day, and most of the time, she approves. But some of the time…

Do we have to caravan back together if they didn’t even tie the knot? I know they were talking about a celebratory buffet at Boomtown, but that’s only if there’s something to celebrate, right? Do we still need to go to the buffet at Boomtown if we’re just calling it lunch?

But wait, Bride has a plan. Of course she has a plan, because she was just telling Groom that she told him this would happen. So she’s prepared. Not prepared enough to, like, pick a different date for the wedding. Or a new fiance. But she’s prepared.

Groom brought other forms of identification. Nothing official, mind you. Not a social security card. Not a military i.d. Groom’s never been in the military, so that would be tough. But I’m guessing he’s been arrested before. Would a mug shot would count as an official government document?

He brought mail from home. Um, okay. I know it’s often used as proof of residency, but that’s not really what they’re going for here. They don’t need to prove that Joe Schmoe lives at 123 Main Street, but rather, WHO IS Joe Schmoe.

He also brought his work i.d. Good news is it has picture of him. Bad news is it’s not terribly official. I mean, the liquor store that you’re rent-a-copping at might be comforted by the fact that ABC Security is capable of color printing a badge, but if you give me a five-minute crash course in Photoshop and point me toward a Kinko’s, I could get a homeless guy standing in for Groom in this ceremony.

So this is why Weddings n’ Chips isn’t willing to marry these two. They have to prove that the state of Nevada will issue them a marriage license. They can go to the Superior Court and see if someone more official than an Elvis impersonator will sign off on the Crayola stick figure that their 4-year old wrote “Daddy” under.

Just kidding. There are no Elvis impersonators in Reno. Way too upbeat. If Reno had any impersonators, it’d probably be Phil Collins. Or Falco.

“I don’t know how the hell we’re supposed to find City Hall,” Bride says.

At this point, one of the guys I drove up with, one of the other lushes who not only has a regular, daytime bartender, but who has a regular, daytime bartender who saw fit to invite him to her drive-thru Falco wedding, looks into the Reno skyline and says, “Um, maybe it’s that square building with the American flag that says ‘RENO’ across the top?”

Well spotted, Dude. So much for lushes not having great observational skills. I might’ve noticed that giant building if it hadn’t been in the vicinity of casinos. His vice is not currently in sight, so maybe it’s easier to focus on minor details like thirty-story square buildings with flags on top. My vice is beckoning me, telling me to ignore those other buildings. Those other buildings are skanks who don’t understand what I really need.

So Bride and Groom are heading to the government building on a Sunday to see if they’ll accept Groom’s t-shirt tag as formal identification. Who knows how long that’s going to take? Whatever shall the rest of us do whilst waiting for a rush judgment from the government?

“Saaaaaaay,” I posit. “Would you mind if we maybe… I don’t know… found some air conditioning and maybe a…”

I can’t finish on account of the shakes and the salivations, but my message is clear enough by the single tear forming in the corner of my eye.

“Yeah, that’s fine,” says Bride, whose focused elsewhere right now. “I’ll text you when we find out and, if we can get married, you can meet us-,”

I didn’t hear the rest of what she said, as I was suddenly moving at the speed of light toward yon distant Heaven. The other lushes came with me. It’s vice o’clock!

I dropped the lushes off at the casino bar, despite the fact that it went against every fiber of my being. Don’t they know they can just walk an extra five feet and camp out at a slot machine and then wait fifteen minutes or so for the septuagenarian cocktail waitress to maneuver her walker over in their direction? And then they can get a well drink! Sure, they might’ve lost $50 by the time she gets back with that free drink, but then they can say they didn’t lose $50, they just purchased a $50 watered-down Jack & Coke.

So I sat down at the slot machine and had just ordered my “free” drink when my phone buzzes. It’s my bartender telling us that they made it to the “justice of the peace” and were granted a “marriage license” and were heading back to the “chapel.” She’ll meet us back there.

Well, shit.

I tell my friends to drink up. Those bastards were already been on their second drink. Not that we’d been there for long, but let’s be honest, we all met in a bar and have a regular bartender who invited us to her wedding, so we can down the drinks pretty quick.

I return to my slot machine to wait for my drink. Time slows as I wait for my cocktail. Or “Cock Drink,” as one of my favorite casino servers of all time once referred to them. I think she was about two hours off the boat from Russia. They don’t hire these women for their conversational abilities. They hire them for their ability to bend time like the Matrix and keep our sorry asses glued to our seats donating more capital into the gaping maws of their reverse-ATMs for as long as possible. They are hired to ensure that people continue flocking to the middle of an unlivable desert to visit wonderful nirvanas of neon.

“Chug, chug, chug!” my friends chanted as we headed back to the car. Not that I needed to chug. It was a long way up to the car on level “Luck You Can Find a Spot at All on a Sunday” of the parking structure. Plus, this is Nevada. We can have booze outdoors. Probably in the back seat of a car. Hell, probably while driving, although please don’t take those last two suppositions as legal advice.

Nonetheless, I chugged all the same and we made it to the car and we drove back to the wedding spot and what did we see when we got there?

Our bartender walking out the front door. With her new Husband. Family members cheering on the steps. Throwing hands in the air with illusionary rice.

That’s right. We missed the wedding. The very reason we had gotten up early and driven to this Hellblight place.

Now, I might’ve exaggerated for storytelling purposes about how long it took me to get my drink. I really don’t think we were in the casino for more than about ten minutes before we got the text. And we busted our ass to the car and were outbound within five minutes of that. And we told her we were on our way.

But here we were, having completely missed the 60-second wedding we were here to watch.

The good news was that Bride wasn’t pissed. Heck, this wedding was happening because Groom was a flight risk, and after coming perilously close to driving all the way to Reno to NOT get married, I’m guessing she wanted to get this shit done. Who knows, maybe the government clerk was about to have a change of heart and call Weddings R Us to tell them to rescind the document. When the armored guard bends down in “Groundhog Day,” you take that fucking money and you walk away. Ain’t no time for equivocation.

(That last analogy was going to be about a prisoner during the Storming of the Bastille, but I thought that might be a bit obtuse for a post with tags about Reno and Quickie Weddings.)

The bad news was that the wedding had happened. Meaning we had to celebrate. So it was back to Boomtown for their majestic $7.99 buffet.

At least Boomtown has a casino. Those hour-old mashed potatoes will hold in the chaffing dish a little bit longer. After the shit-show of this day, I’ve got a hankering to bet it all on double-zero.

Off Target

· September 26, 2019 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , · No Comments

I saw a really weird thing when I went to Target the other day.

A short line.

Ha ha, just kidding.

Of course I’m kidding. Nobody’s ever seen a short line at Target. That would imply a fast Target worker, and the workplace Olympics regularly have Target workers vying for last place against the DMV workers in the 10- item dash.

Not that I blame them. It’s not like working harder and getting this particular batch of customers out the door quicker is going to have any bearing on the next fifty people in line or get them to the end of the day any faster. They don’t get bonuses for checking out more than one customer per interval. That being said, just because they’re paid by the hour doesn’t mean that should be their target transaction time. I mean, the cashier at the grocery store is also paid by the hour, and yet he manages to scan and bag the ice cream before it’s milk.

Instead of being clock-based, the strangity I witnessed at the Target was of the visual nature. A redesign, if you will. And not one of those “reverse the layout of the store” that Target likes to fuck over their regulars with every nine months or so. “Oh, you finally figured out that we put the Brita bottles in the sporting goods section, but their filter replacements in kitchen? Well guess what, now they’re both in office supplier. Let’s see how many products happen to fall into your basket before you find that one specific item you came in for.”

No, I’m pretty used to those types of redesigns, too. They drive Wife crazy because she usually knows which items are on which aisles better than the actual employees. I shop there rarely enough that I assume it’ll be a half-hour of aimless wandering any time I enter.

No, the thing that freaked me out on this Target visit was brown.

I don’t mean I saw something that was brown. Don’t worry, nobody had lain a deuce upon the shoe aisle. There weren’t selling rusted bicycles or crusty toilet-bowl cleaner.

The brown was painted on the walls. And the front of the store. It was all around me. And brown, I shall remind you, is most assuredly NOT red.

That’s right. I saw a color other than red at a Target.

Strange things are afoot at the circle-around-the-dot.

And this wasn’t just a display or at the Starbucks that is now contractually obligated to be inside every Target. Starbucks are now as ubiquitous at Target as syphilis at a hookers’ convention. And probably more expensive.

Wait, hookers have conventions, right? I assume they have breakout sessions on tracking customer orders through the DickYou App and chafing and, naturally,  cosplay.

So yeah, the Target had been repainted brown. Where once (and always) there was the garish, ruby red of fresh blood now stood a deep mahogany of an unhealthy motoroil shit.

Am I the only one who gets motoroil-looking shit? Maybe that’s a post for another time.

Better yet, maybe not.

At first I thought the new paintjob was at the behest of the strip mall that contained it. The one across the street had just redone everything from a tan to a white, so maybe this stripmall was forcing all of its tenants into with a darker shade to follow suit. I know sometimes these are written into the contracts of tenants. They usually only pertain to the various dry cleaners and sandwich shops. The tenants who center the entire shopping center and have universally-acknowledged color schemes usually get a pass. Because who’s ever heard of a brown Target?

But then last weekend we were on the other side of town, visiting non-Target store – you know, the type of store that doesn’t average one location for every 10,000 residents, such that one has to travel more than a half-mile to get to it. Of course, there was a Target next door. With a Starbucks in it. Not to be confused with the Starbucks with the drive-thru in the same parking lot.

And THIS Target was a deep brown, too. What the hell?Isn’t a non-red Target referenced in the Book of Revelations? Did the zombie apocalypse start without me?

Never mind. We all know the zombie apocalypse will start in Wal-Mart. In fact, it might’ve started there years ago, but nobody’s noticed because they resemble everyone else in the Wal-Mart. Plus, Targets are safe from the zombie apocalypse because the cashiers move so slow that the zombies can’t key see them.

When I remarked on a second brown Target in town, Wife mentioned that the one near her work has similarly moved down the color spectrum.

It’s official. Target’s moving from blood to mud.

So come here, Target. I’ve got something to say to you. A little bit closer…. Like we’re pals…. SMACK!

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you?

You’ve spent decades creating a recognizable brand and now you’re shirking it. Did y’all just get bored? Disney ain’t losing the mouse ears anytime soon, even if they’re totally freaking out that “Steamboat Willie” will enter the public domain in another three years. Starbucks actually took the word Starbucks off of their logo, but kept the mermaid. I think my daughter asked about “coffee mermaid” long before she could recognize Mickey. That’s the power of a logo.

And I know what you’re going to say,  Target. That your logo is still intact. Whether red or brown, that single circle surrounding a solid circle is your equivalent of Mickey Mouse. After all, your eternal buddy Starbucks took the word “Starbucks” off of their logo, and are just now using what my daughter was calling the “Coffee mermaid” long before she could enunciate Mickey Mouse. That’s the power of a logo.

Unfortunately, Target, I’m here to tell you that’s bullshit. I’ve known the coffee mermaid. The coffee mermaid was a good friend of mine. And you, dot with a circle around it, are no coffee mermaid. Your “Target” might as will be a curling house. My daughter requests Mickey Mouse pancakes. She’s never asked for a Target pancake. If I made pancakes of a Target logo, her best guess would probably be a Saturn pancake. And she doesn’t even know what Saturn is yet.  She’d probably call it a fucked up pancake. And she DEFINITELY doesn’t know that word yet.

(No, don’t check my Alexa song history and see how many times I’ve listened to “Little Lion Man” with my daughter in the room.)

Target, you more or less owned a color and you don’t want it anymore. One day I wore a red shirt with khaki pants to work. I usually stick with tried and true color combos. Tans go with browns, greys go with blacks. One day, I put on tan pants and, to be daring, I grabbed a red shirt. For some reason, I felt safe with this combo, like I knew it wouldn’t be questioned. A student said I looked like a Target employee, at which point I realized how I knew the combo would work. I’ve seen it a million times.

Then my student wondered, if I looked like a Target employee, why I was moving around the classroom and working.

You know what, Target? I stand corrected. Change all the color schemes you want. You’ll always have a motif that’s all yours.

Brown Target: winner of the Retail Olympics’ Lint Medal. And that ain’t going away with a paint job.

Whiskey Tango Family

· September 6, 2019 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , , , , , · No Comments

I’m pretty fortunate when it comes to my extended family.

Not because they’re particularly helpful. Or empathetic. Or normal.

No, I’m fortunate because they live 400 miles away. Which means they’re close enough to visit for a weekend without wasting a day traveling each direction, but far enough away that I don’t have to see them very often.

I used to visit my family more often. Back then, I was single and in my twenties and my nieces were cute little kids and Southwest ran some really good fares.

Nowadays, I’ve got a five-year old daughter and a lot of shit going on that really makes it a hassle-and-a-half to get on a plane. Oh, and Southwest ain’t as cheap as it once was. Plus those rat bastards charge full-price for said five-year old even though her butt takes up, at a maximum, forty percent of that seat. AND I’ve stopped eating on Southwest since they switched from yummy peanuts to salt-lick pretzels.

And the TSA is a pain in the ass. And driving takes that full day I mentioned. And… umm… the lunar cycle? Help me out here. My mom is asking about next month.

I’ve managed to whittle it down to just two or three visits to the extended family per year. And I’ve started to notice that, with an additional distance between visits, a similar distance has grown between me and my family. Such that, whenever I’m forced to interact, I spend a good portion of my time wondering how the fuck we are related.

Part of it is generational, as the driving forces of my family have always been the baby boomers. So when the cooler is filled with a shit-ton of some tiny-ass water bottles that contain more plastic than water, such that I have to make a genuine decision between hydration and killing the planet, I chalk it up to the baby boomers being hellbent on ensuring that the earth doesn’t survive past their generation.  After all, they’ve been told that the world belonged to them from the moment they were born.

But my generation ain’t lining up to change things, either. I’m the only one who moved away. Everyone else stayed behind. Some of my cousins still live with their parents at 40 years old. The others have ventured a whopping two or three miles away from their childhood bedroom!

One of my cousins has a daughter who is six weeks younger than my daughter. I suggested we hold a joint family party somewhere in between, so that we could separate our requisite “crazy family party” from the “kids’ party.” She wouldn’t hear it! The birthday party has to include both family and friends, and must be as close to the cousin’s actual birthday as possible. The result is a “joint” birthday party that takes place six weeks after my daughter’s birthday, at which her cousin is getting twice as many presents.

And yeah, my daughter got a whole bunch of presents six weeks earlier, but that’s a hard concept to describe to a five-year old. So instead I just tell my daughter that all of those presents are shitty 99-cent store presents (more on that later) that we’re going to throw away as soon as we get home. Okay, I don’t tell her the last part, but I have yet to have her ever ask about any of the shit she’s gotten in the orgiastic bacchanal of two five-year olds simultaneously opening forty presents.

Full disclosure, I used to fucking hate the “family” birthday parties, where the child whose birthday it is ranks about twentieth on the list of reasons for the get-together. Reason number one is always showing off the house/cleaning skills/culinary skills.

One year I went to my room for two hours and nobody noticed. The boomers were all just there to see each other. None of that has changed. At this year’s party, the two birthday girls had to get out of the pool to blow out candles because, dammit, some old farts wanted cake before they left.

But it’s not just about birthday parties. It’s the whole shebang. Why do none of them have interest in anything slightly above banal? I only live 400 miles away. How am I so much less parochial? And, if they raised me, when the hell did they all become so god-damned Whiskey Tango?

To wit:

Beer. Last time I visited my family for a shindig, there were two beer options available: Bud Light and Corona. I tweeted about it, but wasn’t too bothered. The party hosted by boomers, so it was expected. All of their beer tastes were developed in 1960, when all beer came from Milwaukee or St. Louis.  For them, Michelob is a “premium craft.” Heck, I should be impressed they’ve “branched out” to Corona, even if it goes against my core belief that nothing that is supposed to have fruit added should be classified as beer.

Yes, Blue Moon, I’m looking in your direction.

But the child’s birthday party was hosted by Gen Xers, not Boomers. They are world travelers, and I have personally traveled to Australia and Scotland together, and I know she’s aware of craft beers. So I opened the cooler with baited breath. I was greeted with… Coors Light. I moved it out of the way, dug underneath and came up with another Coors Light. I opened the other side of the cooler, looking for the secret compartment with craft bee. Heck, I’d take a Michelob at this point. All I found was another sea of silver.

So I grabbed an iced tea instead. At least it wasn’t sweetened.

Maybe I should have…

BYOB. When we were leaving my mom’s house to go to the party, my mom’s husband asked me to pick out a bottle of wine or two. He said that my cousin never had good wine. I don’t think my mom’s husband’s wine is all that great, either. I live near multiple wine regions. Nothing in Southern California comes close. So if someone who drinks crappy wine says that the wine at this party will be crappy, then I better just plan on drinking beer.

Oops.

So I grabbed a bottle of wine for him. When we got to the party, I felt a little awkward bringing it in. Honestly, who brings their own booze to a non-BYOB party? So fucking tacky. Can I put my car up on blocks in your front yard, too?

Even worse, it was white wine, so it had to go in the host’s refrigerator. Because the cooler’s filled with Coors Light, naturally. Nothing’s so classy as walking in the front door and saying, “Hey, can you move some shit out of your refrigerator so I can put my mediocre wine in there since your wine sucks ass?”

Then again, had I known about the Coors Light situation, I would’ve been sneaking a six-pack in the refrigerator behind the wine.

Is it to late for Amazon drone delivery?

Shopping. At one point, we had to get a couple of things at the grocery store. Mainly, we had to pack the birthday present we brought for the cousin. If we tried to wrap it before we left, the TSA would have undone all our efforts.

My mom also wanted to provide fruit for the party. It’s BYOF, too. So off to the grocery store we went.

My mom didn’t ask what we needed. So when I appeared in the same checkout line as her with a gift bag, a card, and one package of colored tissue paper, she blinked and said, “Oh, I didn’t know that’s what you were getting. We could have gone to the 99-cent store if you wanted.”

Ugh. The 99-fucking-cent store. Both my and my wife’s mothers frequent that place. Neither mother is miserly nor in danger of running out of a pension anytime soon. But goddamn it if that 99-cent crap isn’t going to find a spot on their shelves.

It’s like they took all of those “Thrift” ideals that their Great Depression-era parents taught them, but only understood part of it. Thrift means both not overspending for things you need, but also not buying a bunch of unnecessary crap. But the Baby Boomers want all the crap, they just don’t want to pay for it. This becomes an issue because every time my mom sees my daughter, she’s giving her crap. It’s all ephemeral, not meant to be any more meaningful in the grand context than a passing bowel movement. Of course, each 99-cent piece of crap gets added to all of the other 99-cent pieces of crap and our house is overflowing like a backed-up toilet.

Meanwhile, while my mom’s chastising me for paying full price on a birthday card, she’s purchasing one of those pre-cut, pre-arranged fruit platters. Costs about eight bucks for maybe two bucks worth of fruit. With more plastic than a 3-ounce water bottle.

But just make sure you’re making the most from your “toys made of lead” budget.

Now let’s get out of here and enjoy the Southern California traffic.

Traffic. My mom doesn’t trust traffic apps. How does Google know, she asks, if there’s about to be an accident on a route? Fair enough, although I actually wouldn’t put it past Google to have an algorithm that knows where and when future accidents will occur.

But when she picked us up from the airport at 6:00 and we wanted to make a baseball game by 7:00, I told her in no uncertain terms that we were taking the route Google told us to take.

Of course, Google doesn’t assume you’ll stay in the slow lane for the ENTIRE fucking route. And sure, this is in Southern California. so all of the lanes are slow, but the slow lane is especially slow. Every mile, an onramp deposits ten new cars into the lane, who promptly merge in front of us, then slow down even more in order to pull into the second lane, from whence they speed up by twenty MPH or so. And my mom is pretty much eternally going five MPH, except for the times she’s at a complete stop for all of these mergers.

“And see?” she says when we get to the game twenty minutes later than Google said we would. “Google doesn’t know how to account for this Southern California traffic.”

I wonder what Google would say is the dominant flavor in…

Churros. We met my niece for breakfast at a pretty good establishment in San Diego County called the Breakfast Republic. Solid food. I’ve eaten there a couple of times, but this was the first time I’d eaten at this particular location.

They have lots of scrumptious variations of Eggs Benedict and pancakes. My niece is a vegetarian, so she wasn’t interested in the crab cake bennie I got. She got Churro Pancakes. She gave us each a bite. Pretty yummy. Actual chunks of churro in there, and a dominant flavor of cinnamon.

Which my mom found odd. “Huh,” she says. “I wouldn’t expect that for a churro. Do you taste, I don’t know, kind of… cinnamon in there?”

Um, yeah? What the hell does she think a churro tastes like? What does she think that brown powder that they roll the dough in when it’s done cooking? Cumin?

Oh well, at least she wasn’t offensive or anything…

Pride. After breakfast, my niece was heading off to a Pride parade. She wore a rainbow shirt that said Pride on it. At first, my mom seemed oblivious, but the conversation eventually went there.

She seemed okay at first. Nothing overly offensive. She asked if my niece’s boyfriend was going to go to the parade. My niece said probably not. It’s not that he’s opposed to gay pride, he just doesn’t really want to hang out with a bunch of sweaty dudes with asscheeks hanging out. Totally get that. I’ve never understood how, in order to support LGBTQ rights, you need to oppose basic hygiene. Is there any way I can believe in marriage equality without getting a sunburnt schlong?

That being said, does my niece’s boyfriend realize that it isn’t just dudes letting their asscheeks hang out? Nothing like a gay pride parade to bring out all the heterosexual labias. It’s Mardi Gras, only without the beads and the necessity to fly to New Orleans.

But I digress. The reason I brought this all up was my mom’s response. She agreed with the boyfriend. Sort of. In typical Baby Boomer and/or white trash and/or general out-of-touchness, she started with, I shit you not, “I’m not a homophobe, but…”

Prepare the eyeroll.

“I just don’t want to see it.”

Okay, not quite what niece’s boyfriend was saying.

My mom went on to say there’s a gay couple on a soap opera she watches. She just fast forwards whenever they start kissing. It bothers her.

Um, what exactly does she think the “phob” part of homophobia means. If I say I’m not afraid of snakes, I just don’t want to see one because it makes me uncomfortable, guess what? It means I’m afraid of snakes.

But my mom adds the coup de grace.

“I don’t have any problem with them doing what they do. Just… do it behind closed doors or something.”

Spoken like a true non-homophobe.

Seriously, how did I come from this family?

I don’t know.

Just pass me the Coors Light.

Let’s Talk About Sammiches, Baby

· August 12, 2019 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , · No Comments

I saw an infographic recently and I’m a tad perplexed.

Maybe perplexed isn’t the right word. I feel ashamed of my fellow Americans. Sure, I don’t need infographics to feel disconnected from humanity. All it takes is a short conversation to know that ninety percent of the time, I’m on a little Wombat Island with no hope of getting a proper non-extradition treaty from anyone else nearby.

But I at least figured I wouldn’t be surprised when it came to culinary desires of my fellow Americans. Deep fried, good. Healthy, bad.

So then, why are people listing grilled chicken as their second-favorite sandwich?

Not sure if you saw this, but they polled Americans about their favorite sandwich. Here are the results.

And I’ve got lots of thinkies and feelies on this one.

First of all, if you’re a math genius like myself, you’ll note that these percentages don’t add up to 100%. So it wasn’t a matter of “list your favorite.” It was just a question of if you liked it or not. Which, in some cases makes it worse.

For instance, if you made me list my top two or three sandwiches,  pretty sure peanut butter and jelly wouldn’t be there. But as an overall “Do you like a PB&J?” Hell, yes!

But it only ranked at 66%, meaning one out of every three Americans doesn’t like it. Who the fuck are these Americans? I’d call them dirty commies, but most commies like Jimmy Carter, so they’re probably the peanut-butter eaters. Is it the people who are freaked out about peanut allergies? Maybe they think peanuts are some government conspiracy. So we’ve got communists and anti-vaxxers, but that still only adds up to about ten percent of the population. Who the hell else doesn’t like peanut butter and jelly?

Okay, maybe the great American staple has a few things going against it. It combines two rather distinct flavors, and if you’re not a fan of one or the either, you’re probably hoping to eschew the whole thing. And okay, if I’m honest, jelly’s kinda nasty. You’ve got these globules of sugar trying to mesh with the saltiness of the peanut butter, a dichotomy made even more awkward by all you rat bastards who eat that smooth crap instead of the proper chunky style.

There are plenty of other things that pair better with the peanut butter. I like bacon. Or, if I really want something sweet, honey is a great compliment. But neither of those detract from PB&J being a bona fide sandwich in its own right,  deserving higher than a D grade from the American public.

Maybe some people think PB&J is too childish. But then how do you account for grilled cheese at number one?

Don’t get me wrong. I love me some grilled cheese. It’s melty and gooey and buttery, with just the right amount of crispiness. The only thing it’s missing is meat. Unless you’re throwing some of last night’s leftovers in there, which I totally recommend. Or a nice slice of bacon. Chopped up.

Maybe that missing meat is what puts it over the top. The vegetarian contingent isn’t selecting the next batch of options, but they’ll have the grilled cheese. Vegans won’t go for the cheese, which should give PB&J a slight edge. But I guess that’s why they play the game.

Then again, who are the 23% of Americans that DON’T like grilled cheese?

But let’s get beyond the meatless options and look at the smorgasbord of charcuterie boards. Not too many surprises rounding out the top five. Chicken and turkey in a virtual tie. The deli counter prefers turkey, but restaurants and fast food are more likely to have chicken. I’m curious if the “grilled” chicken means hot only, or all chicken. What about fried chicken? Given the line in front of me at the Chick-fil-a drive thru on a typical non-Sunday, I think most Americans included a spicy chicken & pickle as “grilled chicken” in this context.

Then comes roast beef. Fine. Whatever. We all knew it would best it ham, right?  Nobody likes ham. I mean, sure, sometimes you have a real hankering for a salt lick dropped in a filmy formaldehyde, but nine times out of ten, you’re gonna take the beef or the poultry over the pig. Just not over PB&J, evidently.

Why is ham still an option when they’re are two other wonderful pig options? Astute readers, and decent human beings, will note a common ingredient that I added to improve both the peanut butter and the cheese sandwiches. In fact, if someone wants to make me a grilled peanut butter, bacon, and cheese sandwich right now, I’d probably nominate you for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Bacon makes its dominance known in the bottom half of the top ten. First up is the BLT. Alright, sure. This brings up the age- old question if there’s cheese on a BLT. Some say no. And if that’s a no, then I’m a no for the BLT as the sixth-best sandwich. Full disclosure, I’m not a huge tomato fan. Put avocado on that bad boy and we can have a talk. But nobody wants to have to order a BLAC. At best, you sound like you’re retching. At worst, well…

But what the heck is a bacon sandwich? I’m not saying I’ve never slapped some bacon between two pieces of bread and started munching away. After all, I was an adult bachelor for damn near twenty years. But I’ve never seen a straight bacon sandwich on any menu in any deli or restaurant. Not even fast food does that. I’m pretty sure Jack-in-the-Box has a Bacon Bacon Bacon Burger. But it’s still a burger. Could I order it with no beef? Probably. It’s just never occurred to me. And if a way to consume bacon hasn’t crossed my mind, it’s probably not a legitimate thing.

Then there’s the club. A club sandwich has turkey and bacon, yet it’s ranked below both a turkey sandwich and a BLT. Meaning there are people who said they like a turkey sandwich and they like a bacon sandwich, but they don’t like a turkey and bacon sandwich. Maybe they just don’t like toothpicks. Seriously, Club Sandwich, why do you insist on being chopped in four? Is your “club” underwritten by the toothpick industry?

And then we travel down the list to find the other pork product. Why the hell is pulled pork ranked so low? It’s five spots below ham. Four percent of Americans would rather consume their pork in slimy brick form than in wonderfully shredded strips of nirvana soaking up a tangy barbecue sauce or a spicy mustard sauce or maybe a teriyaki base. Because pulled pork can really be served any old way you want. One of our favorite things to do is let the pork sit in a crock pot all day then take its juices to cook a spicy ramen. Do the 35% of Americans who don’t like pulled pork know that? I don’t think they do, because I’m also aghast whenever I’m at a taco truck and some people order tacos other than carnitas. I assumed that the word scared people away. But maybe it isn’t the foreign word. It’s just the 35% of us who eschew the crispy, slurpy ambrosia.

Sorry, I meant 31%. The four percent who like ham but not pulled pork are a lost cause.

Of course, these rankings are total bullshit because the single best sandwich isn’t even listed. Where the fuck is the cheesesteak? Maybe some people thought it was included in the “roast beef” option, but I doubt it. After all, they differentiate between bacon and BLT, so the implication is that additional ingredients make a different sandwich. Especially if it has its own name. After all, the French Dip is listed as a separate option, so roast beef can’t be a catch-all.

Wait, why is French Dip so low? Y’all know it’s just a roast beef sandwich with a side of juice, right? You don’t HAVE to moisten it if you don’t want to. Does the availability of an option really drive away 25% of the people? If I offer a pickle on the side of your grilled cheese, have I ruined it? Let’s be honest. We all just hate the French Dip because of its name, right?

Which is why you’ll note I called the best sandwich a cheesteak, not a Philly. Because fuck Philadelphia. The sandwich they make isn’t really all that good. Cheez Whiz? Really? When I say cheesesteak, I’m talking about grilled onions and grilled peppers with some provolone cheese. Maybe add some grilled mushrooms if I’m in the mood. Change the provolone to cheddar? Sure. Mozzarella? That can be fun. Hell, I might even allow a side of au jus sauce.

What about American cheese? Watch it, that’s getting close to Philly territory.

As a general rule, if I’m trying a new sandwich place or a new lunch restaurant, I’ll usually order a cheesesteak the first time I’m there. It’s a good barometer of their overall food quality. What kind of bread is it on? What cheese do they use? Do they add one or two ingredients or completely go off the rails?

And I can’t be alone in this regard. There are at least three Cheesesteak restaurants within ten miles of my house. One of them is part of a chain, the others subsist entirely off of variations on one sandwich. And bear in mind I live 3000 miles away from Philadelphia. This ain’t no regional appetite.

So why didn’t it appear on this poll? Hell, you guys asked about BOTH egg salad and tuna fish, and I’m pretty sure those are the same sandwich. It’s called a mayonnaise sandwich. The bacon sandwich shown looks suspiciously close to a mayo sandwich, as well.

And yes, this is only the top 15. Others sandwiches were polled. They had a Muffuletta and a Cuban. Those are more regional than a cheesesteak, although Cubans are definitely starting to leave the southeast. But I’ve never seen a Muffuletta farther than 100 miles from Louisiana.

But I looked at the entire list, and there was no cheesesteak.

Hopefully the missing cheesesteak means we can just throw out the results of the entire survey. The entire premise was flawed from the start. You don’t have to look with suspicion at your fellow Americans, wondering which weirdos rank a Reuben above a pastrami.

And if the results are bogus, you know what that means?

Come here, PB&J. Give us a hug. We were just joking.

Who Knew Bruin Coo

· July 25, 2019 · Blog Entries, Musings · , , , , , , , , · No Comments

The English language is stupid.

I know I’m not the first person to make this groundbreaking observation. Every rule in the English language is broken at least ten times. I before e except after c, or in pretty much every other word where you stop yourself, sure you’re about to spell it wrong, and then you repeat that adage and end up writing, “the horse nieghed.”

We’ve got some words pronounced in a Germanic fashion, others in the Latin manner, and probably some Scandinavian. England’s been invaded so often that they can’t even make their mind up on the correct words for various objects. Theater is a German word, cinema is French, so English uses them interchangeably.

Quick, what’s the difference between purple and violet? Nothing, aside from their language of origin.

And then there are the silent letters. I assume those are coming from French, because those bastards put an eaux at the end of every damn word. And really? Hors d’ouevres? It should be spelled ordurves. But I don’t think there are any gh’s in French, so WTF?

But we all just sit here and accept it all, as silently as half the fucking letters in our language, like victims of Stockholm Syndrome. Come to think of it, the vikings came from Stockholm, and they’re just one group that conquered England and fucked up the way they speak. So much for an island being easy to defend. The Danes were doing island hopping long before Douglas MacArthur made it hip and fashionable.

My current agitation with the only language I can read more than a sentence of is because I’m trying to teach it to my daughter. Not the spoken part. She’s got that part nailed down. Mostly. I mean, she still can’t seem to distinguish between hearing directions and following directions, but I teach high schoolers, and I know that subtle distinction is still a long way coming.

But she’s ready to learn how to read. And we’re ready for her to learn how to read. Because I swear, if I have to read about giving a mouse a fucking muffin one more goddamned time, I’m going to shove that muffin right up his rodent ass.

She’s been doing phonics at daycare for the better part of two years, so she knows all the sounds. She’s been taking swimming lessons for the same amount of time, and her swimming ability is about the same as her reading skills. She knows the motions, but if she were try to put them all together on her own, she’d end up at the bottom of the picture book, struggling to breathe.

So instead of throwing her into the deep end, we’ve been trying to sound things out together. And right off the bat, I’m questioning how much money we’ve wasted on phonics. She’s very lazy at reading beyond the first letter. After two years of “B is for bird,” she now sees box and goes, “buh, buh, big?” I’ll then have her sound it out. And she can do it.

“Buh, ah, ks.”

“Okay, put them all together.”

“Buh, buh, bamboozle.”

Where the fuck did you get boozle out of an x, kid?

But we’re trying, and she’s getting closer when she actually focuses. So we started out with everyone’s first reading adventure: Dr. Seuss. More specifically, “Hop on Pop.”

And it starts out great. Pup. Cup. Pup in Cup. Cup. Pup. Cup on Pup. All words she can sound out. Rhyming words. Once she’s figured out the ending sound, she can substitute the beginning sound, which she’s great at from phonics.

Then it gets a little tougher. Day. Play. We play all day.

At this point, I question whether or not I should explain to her why she’s not pronouncing a “yuh” at the end of play and day. That the vowel following the other vowel turns the former into a long sound, even if Y is a little bitch that can’t decide if it’s a vowel or not. Or do I just tell her that this is one of those cases where A says it’s name and hope she’ll just ignore the extra letter there? And all of a sudden, I’m the phonics teacher telling her the end of the word doesn’t matter and she should just sound out the beginning of the word and then make a wild stab at what form the vowel is taking in this particular word.

Then comes the next page. Night. Fight. We fight all night.

What the fuck? I give up.

First of all, Dr. Seuss, what the hell are silent “gh”es doing on page five of a book that is listed as “Easy reading. For the beginning readers”?

Secondly, what the hell am I supposed to do now? It’s one thing to tell her to ignore the y in day, when the y is silent but is in fact serving a purpose there, and if you were to pronounce “da-yuh,” you wouldn’t be kicked out of polite society. People would probably just think you’re singing a Harry Belafonte song.

But now I’m faced with a silent gh. If you pronounce it “niguhut,” people will have you committed. And now that I look at it in the “liguhut” of day, what the hell are those letters doing there in the first place? Are they acting as vowels to lengthen the i? So now I have to tell my daughter that the vowels are a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y, and sometimes w, and sometimes gh. But the last three sets of “vowels” only act as vowels when they completely give up their will to live, don’t say their name and just sit there, aiding and abetting their “more important” brethren like a goddamned politician’s spouse?
Just sit there and look pretty, dears, and if anyone asks you what you really think about guhu-gate, stay quiet.

So with these words, I didn’t tell Daughter to do anything with the middle portion of the word. I just told her, “That word is night. That word is fight.”

And just like that, I’ve crossed over the great debate line in the world of reading. Because if you’re not on the side of phonics, then you must be with those rat bastards in the whole language camp. Whole languagers say, “Fuck sounding it out. Just memorize what each word is and use context clues.”

And really, isn’t that how we read? Even those of us who read via internal vocalization (and yes, I know that every goddamn speed reading course tells me to knock that shit off and I totally know I don’t need to do it and it’s frustrating as shit that it’s slowing me down, but gaddammit, I just can’t stop), don’t sound out the words. I know what “fucking goddammit” says, so I just say “fucking goddammit,” instead of “fuh, uh, sss, kuh, ih, nuh, guh” in my mind. Whole Language!

Whole Language basically tells us to learn all of the words and voila! you’re reading. Seems rather daunting for a language that has hundreds of thousands of words. But that’s probably also the number of different ways you can pronounce the letter c. So maybe instead of telling her the difference between the sss sound and the ck sound and the ch sound, I can just tell her the cisgendered cock has a chub. By the time I’m done explaining all of the rules of the language, those words will be totally appropriate for her.

And if Whole Language is just memorizing, then my five year-old should be a pro. She can recite the whole goddamned “Hop on Pop” without even looking at the page. Which is annoying when I’m trying to figure out if she’s actually learning how to read.

“Dad had a bad day. What a day dad had.”

“Wow, good job, Love… Wait, why are you staring out the window?”

But if we’re going to go the Whole Language route, then why the fuck have we spent the last two years teaching her the sounds of all the letters? And I don’t just mean that as a parent who has wasted time and money and brain cells listening to “A is for Apple, Apple, Apple” fifteen thousand times.

Why do we spend time telling out kids that e is for elephant when ninety percent of the time you encounter the letter e, it isn’t going to sound like that? We should instead say “e is for evil and elephant, but most of the time it’s silent just to fuck with the other vowel, vowel, vowel.”

And even when all that is done, can anyone, anywhere tell me what the fuck is with the whole silent gh thing?

Editing

· June 28, 2019 · Musings · , , , , · No Comments

I’ve started the editing process.

Wait, editing? Editting? Meh, fuck it. I’ll fix that later.

Right after I finish regrouting the tile. Because that sounds more fun than editing.
Man, I thought it was easy to get distracted away from writing. Then I started editing, and hoo boy. Any chance I can sign up for a root canal surgery or something?

I’ll just blog something instead. Nothing makes writing seem more appealing than editing.

It turns out there’s a lot more “how to’s” about writing than there are about editing. Everything’s all like “Yeah, just keep writing. Get that first draft done. If it sucks, you can fix it in the second draft. You can’t edit a blank page.”

So I finished my first draft. Woo-hoo!

Then they say to let it sit for at least a month, better yet two, so that you can edit it with a fresh set of eyes.

So I waited two months. Even though it took me four years to write in the first place, so Chapter One should have Fresh Eyes, regardless.

Then I waited two more months. And another two. It’s now been close to a year since I finished the book. Five years since I started it.

Because every time I started to think that maybe I should get around to editing, I would realize that it’s 120,000 fucking words. Good God. When I’m looking for a book on Audible, I don’t like them going over twelve hours. This polemic I wrote would be twenty hours. And bear in mind these are 120,000 words of mistakes and typos and characters that drastically changed from the beginning to the end.

Ugh.

But I’m finally doing it. Let me dust off Chapter One, written in November of 2014, and see what I can do.

Back to the writer websites and podcasts:

Write the First Draft. Check.

Let it sit (at least) two months. Check.

Hey, here’s a blog entry about sentence structure.

Because nobody wants to talk about editing.

I did find one podcast, Story Grid, but it’s a really boring podcast. They want me to buy their book, so they never actually say how to make a story grid. It’s just a dude talking about his specific book, and it’s a book that sounds like a boring rip-off of Hunger Games. So I make it about five minutes into each episode before giving up.

Then I edit for five minutes and think that this OTHER episode of the podcast sounds super interesting.

Step number one, according to Story Grid, is to read the entire book while taking notes. Don’t touch a thing. Don’t fix typos. Just read the whole fucking thing.

Hmm…. Let me see if I can find other guides.

Allegedly Lee Child doesn’t edit his books at all. He writes from beginning to end, then gives it to his publisher to fix typos. I guess that’s easier to do when you write pretty much the same story over and over.

I once found a “four color” editing process where you print out a copy of your book and you read through it using four colored pencils to mark four different types of things to fix. It promised that it would become a one pass-through process. Unfortunately, I don’t remember what any of the colors were for. All I can think is, holy shit, there are FOUR things I have to fix on my second draft?

That’s what comes after the first draft, right? The second draft?

Wait, second draft? As in, this manuscript that it took me four years to write, I now have to start over from scratch? Rewrite the whole thing? I want to EDIT, not REWRITE.

In my mind, I really just wanted to go through the book once. Move this thing here, delete that passage there, add a little background to that one scene, change a few “teh”s to “the”s and voila, start the super-fun querying process.

But everything I’m looking at says to go macro first. Read the whole thing, then rewrite it all. Write a second draft, then to start over with the third draft.

Does Stephen King do this? Because it takes me two years to read through one of his books, and he publishes seventy-five per year, give or take. George R.R. Martin says he hasn’t finished writing the next Game of Thrones yet. When he finishes it, is he going to let it sit for a season, then rewrite it twelve times? Good God, he’s never going to finish.

So I decided to say fuck it all, and do things my way. Sure, some of these guys are published. But everybody’s different, right? I’ll just fix it as I go and wrap this shit up in a week.

So I started with Chapter One.

Fixed a couple typos. Cut out some of the excessive internal monologue. And does the reader really need to know the layout of the village the main character lives in? No, maybe not. Clean. Polish. And that’s not a bad first chapter. See? I’ve got this. Bite me, Story Grid podcast.

Why is that foreboding music playing in the background?

On to Chapter Two.

Fix. Clean. Polish. And you know what? Now that I think of it… Do I need Chapter One at all?

A lot of the writing advice I’ve seen says that many books start too early. Chapter One is often groundwork, background information that can easily be sprinkled in later. Some books don’t really get into the plot until you’re 10,000 words in.

I also saw an agent say she couldn’t stand the fact that so many fantasy novels start with the main character harvesting crops. Sure, how else can you make a “Farm Boy Saves the World” story without having him start on a farm. Even if it is a moisture farm on Tatooine.

And here’s where I’m going to do what annoys me about the Story Grid podcast. I’m going to talk about my Work in Progress, which you don’t give a shit about. The difference is I’ll do it for a few paragraphs instead of an hour-long podcast.

First of all, the agent’s comment doesn’t apply to me, because this isn’t a fantasy novel. It’s an alternative history.

But it’s an alternative history such that the Middle Ages never really ended. So it reads like a fantasy. Hmmm…..

And you see, my character isn’t HARVESTING crops in the first scene. He’s PLANTING them. TOTALLY DIFFERENT!!!!

Okay, so is the first chapter really necessary? Ask yourself, the pros say, why does the story start here?

Well, you see, they’re about to leave their manor to travel to a festival many miles away.

So what?

Well, on the way to the festival, they’re going to stop at a tavern and meet the guys that introduce them to the rebellion and whatnot.

So why is he planting shit?

Umm… Because he’s a peasant.

Why doesn’t the book start when he gets to the tavern?

Umm… Did I mention I have a mental map of the village?

…

Okay, so what if I just start it in Chapter Two? And I can move this part about cotton, which will play into the rest of the book, into a conversation with the girl traveling with him. And all of his whining about the state of feudalism? Well, if he’s already thinking all of that stuff, then what’s the point of the guys who bring him into the Rebellion. Okay, I’ll cut that out. And maybe the third important tidbit from Chapter One can be added later when he meets that one other character. I know precisely where it will go.

After all, I just finished poring over Chapter One word by word.

When I was editing it.

Right before deleting it.

Fuck.

Maybe I should’ve, I don’t know, read my whole book first. It would’ve saved me all that time going back over Chapter One. I wonder if that’s why they suggest it?

Okay, so after reading the first 20,000 words or so, the first major arc, I decided that I now knew where the book should start. On the fourth paragraph of Chapter Two. And I’m going to cut and paste some of those parts from the old Chapter One and split the old Chapter Two into two chapters. One approaching the tavern, one in the tavern.

Except I’m not cutting and pasting. Because the wording doesn’t work when he’s standing on a bridge into town instead of planting crops back at home. And while I’m at it, some of his conversations are going to change a little bit. And you know what? That female character needs some agency. Because I know what’s going to happen to her, and it shouldn’t come from out of the blue that she’s got so much inner strength. Plus, if I change her from “The One He’s Always Wanted” to “The Only Girl Around His Age In His Tiny Village,” it’ll make it more pronounced when he meets his True Love later.

So how do I go about keeping most of the words the same, changing a few things subtly, and tweaking a character all at once?

Well, I open two Word Docs. Old one on the right, new one on the left. And then I, you got it…

REWRITE.

THE.

WHOLE.

FUCKING.

THING.

Oh, is this what they call a second draft?

Pre-school Graduation

· June 13, 2019 · Musings · , , , , , · No Comments

My daughter graduated earlier this week.

Okay, maybe graduation isn’t the bet word for it. Promotion? Transition from expensive babysitting to free education?

Tell you what, let’s just call it “Tuesday.”

Because on Wednesday, she went right back to the exact same school, exact same classroom, exact same situation. It seems kind of odd to have a daycare graduation in early June, considering they’re still going to daycare for another two months. First week of August, the week before the local school districts starts, would seem a more logical time to celebrate the kids taking the next big step. But I guess it would be tough to buy graduation cards in August. Shit, it was already difficult to find kid-friendly graduation cards. To say nothing of “Class of 2032.”

But she had a little ceremony, so I guess we’ll call it a graduation. What it really served as was a thank you from the day care to the parents for spending… let’s see, carry the one, and…

Holy shit, have we really spent fifty grand there over the last five years? And all they could muster up for the ceremony was some goddamn Oreos?

But relax. This isn’t a blog whining about giving trophies to every goddamn participant or whatever. I might do that next year when she “graduates” from kindergarten and stays at the same school.

But this one is actually a meaningful transition in her life. Or at least it will be in August. She’ll be leaving behind the daycare that she’s been attending since she was eight weeks old. The next time she leaves a place where they wiped her ass after she shit her pantswill be college.

Seriously though, there were three kids at this ceremony who have been there since her first day there, over four and a half years ago. That’s longer than high school. Sure, she doesn’t remember them being there, but how many high school seniors really remember who sat next to them in ninth grade?

Plus, this might be the last time she’ll be happy to graduate next to the types of friends she has now. By sixth grade, the judgments will be rolling in.

It’s kinda sad. I look at her two best friends now and know, deep down, that they would have nothing to do with each other if they met in third grade instead of near birth.

One of them is on the way to being a total tomboy. She’s either halfway to Birkenstocks or halfway to Doc Martens. She showed up to my daughter’s gymnastics birthday party wearing jean shorts.

I love this kid, though, because she gives absolutely zero fucks. Whereas my daughter is always worried about who is playing with her or who is not responding the way she wants, this girl will do whatever the hell she has the hankering to do at any given point. At the gymnastics party, almost all of the girls clumped together, following each other to whatever ball pit was in vogue for the moment. I think I wrote about a similar chaos theory at her bounce-house birthday party last year.

Tomboy, though, just goes and plays with whatever she wants. So while the line for the slide is seven deep, she’s doing whatever she wants on the trampoline. Then everyone sees she’s having fun, they all head to the trampoline and she’s off to the balance beam. Not saying she’s a trendsetter. She just marches to the beat of her own drum.

Meanwhile, Friend #2 will be a Woo Girl just as soon as it’s appropriate to use that designation. She’s a bit shorter than most of the others. She jumps a lot. It wouldn’t surprise me if she’ll be the kid with the alcohol hookup in eighth grade. She’ll definitely know her way around a kegstand, and have a closet full of straw hats, by junior year.

At the birthday party, Woo Girl showed up in full gymnastics regalia. She usually followed the crowd, but only if the crowd was doing something requiring adrenaline. Swings, slides, trampolines. You wouldn’t find her concentrating the balance beam.

So we’ve got Tomboy and Woo Girl who are absolute besties with my daughter, the prissy teacher’s pet.

I know, I know. Every parent thinks their kid is the well-behaved little angel. And I’ve already posted before that my kid knows a substantial number of Jimmy Buffett songs. She tries to get the Piano Man at her school to play Piano Man, which doesn’t have the most appropriate lyrics for four-year-olds.

But you’ll note I didn’t say she was the good kid. I said she was the prissy teacher’s pet. That moniker comes with substantial baggage. If there’s going to be a kid thrown in the trash can for tattling in fourth grade, it’s probably going to be my daughter. And the ones who will be throwing her in the trashcan are probably Tomboy and Woo Girl, who she can’t get enough of these days.

Okay, you still want proof as to which lane my daughter’s merging on to?

At the “graduation” ceremony, the teachers read out what each child wants to be when he or she grows up. See if you can spot which of the first six students was my daughter based on their responses: 1. Superhero, 2. Veterinarian, 3. Ice Cream Shop Worker, 4. Racecar driver, 5. Mom, 6. Wizard.

No, she’s not the mom. That’s Tomboy, oddly enough. Guessing she’ll change her tune later.

Of course, my daughter was the veterinarian. In her defense, it’s really hard to get into wizarding school these days unless you live under stairs.

There ended up being three other future veterinarians in the crowd and I call bullshit on all three of them. One of them was my daughter’s first friend, who she still thinks of as her bestie despite having very little in common with. Daughter’s exhausted and grumpy on the days she’s played primarily with this girl instead of the newer friends, but it’s hard to explain to her what’s going on.

The first friend became her first friend because she wouldn’t ever talk. Not to the main teacher, not to the secondary teachers, not to the phonics teacher. But she would occasionally talk to my daughter, or at least my daughter would speak for her, so all of the teachers put them together. My daughter got a month of free phonics because they would send her alongside the quiet one to act as whisperer. We asked my daughter if she was actually saying what the girl was saying or if she was just answering the questions on her own. It was usually the latter.

Quiet Girl talks more now. She’s glommed onto the mean girl and is well on her way to being the punk rock girl in middle school. She already looks daggers at people whenever they turn their backs. The only thing she needs to learn is to do that when they’re looking at you, too, and she can wear a Cure T-shirt.

In typical back-of-the-class style, Quiet Girl still doesn’t like answering teachers’ questions. So it’s little shock that she “wants to be a veterinarian.” I don’t know if she actually copied my daughter or if she just remained silent and they asked my daughter what Quiet Girl wanted to be.

The other two “veterinarians” were similarly suspicious. Just copy the answer of the kid that the teachers are always praising the answer of. I can already tell how most of my daughter’s group projects will go for the next thirteen years.

As for the ceremony, it was very cute. The kids sang four songs. They turned “I’m a Little Teapot” into “I’m a Little Graduate.” And the second line of “Zip a Dee Doo Dah” changed “wonderful day” into “graduation day.” They also sang a song called “The World is a Rainbow,” and for the weeks leading up to it, when my daughter was (probably the only one) practicing at home, I kept thinking she was about to sing “The world is a vampire.” Unfortunately, it was some lame 1970s hippie song, not Smashing Pumpkins.

And my favorite song was “This Land is your Land.” If you think about it, it’s not an easy song to teach to a group of people with no concept of geography. Most of the kids could nail the “from California” part, but after that, it got a little dicey.

To the New York Island? Aren’t they a hockey team? The only sport my daughter knows is baseball and she is under explicit instructions that she may not root for any team from New York or Boston. Oh, maybe we’d allow the Mets, because we’re an AL household, so who gives a fuck about the senior circuit.

So instead of New York Island, my daughter started out singing “From California to the Land of China.”

Wow. Those are some lyrics I didn’t know about. Is that what we’re teaching the kids after Trump’s tariffs? That we own China now?

Let’s see, according to Wikipedia, it was written in 1940. So a sizable chunk of China had been conquered by Japan at that point. Maybe Woody Guthrie just figured we’d enter the war and “liberate” China into our possession. We did it with the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, after all.

Hell, we effectively did that in Korea after the war. Damn, that Woody Guthrie was prescient! It’s a good thing our daycare is teaching my daughter the hidden verses.

The next time my daughter practiced the lyrics, she changed them to “From California to the Land of Thailand.”

Wow, holy crap. What kind of imperialist jingoism is this? Last I checked, we never had Thailand. Not in Teddy Roosevelt’s wildest wet dreams. Hell, if you count all the Thai restaurants popping up in California, I think they might own more of our country than we ever owned of theirs.

Seriously, I think Thai restaurants are the new FroYo. Not that I’m complaining, but it makes it really hard to know which Thai place to go to. I can sample each of the FroYo places for $5 a pop. Thai restaurants cost a little more. Unless it’s lunch time.

But alas, my daughter finally figured out that our Land stretches east, not west. From California to the place with the fucking Yankees.

But now, it’s off to Big Kid School.

Only one of the kids from her daycare is going to her elementary school, and he’s one of the boys that she only discusses in passing. Gone will be the Tomboy and the Woo Girl and the Quiet Girl and the Mean Girl.

Maybe that’s a good thing. It gives her a chance at a fresh start. Except I’m going to miss the crazy dynamic from preschool. Who knows how much longer she’ll hang out with vastly different personalities. Another year or two, maybe.

The girl across the street from us is a cheerleader. Not a future cheerleader. A legitimate five-year-old cheerleader. Her mom was a cheerleader in high school. Has the fake tits to prove it. Never made it to college to lead cheers there. And now mom’s got her daughter well down the path to reliving her life. Including a year-round cheer program.

My wife worries about my daughter being in the same kindergarten class with Cheerleader. She thinks my daughter will glom onto another kid she has nothing in common with and it’ll be Quiet Girl all over again. I’m a little less freaked out. I know there’s no future for them. No way in hell are they friends when middle school hits. One of these days, Daughter will start hanging out with friends she actually has things in common with.

Besides, it might not be a bad idea to have someone she knows in the new class. And for the next few years, it’s not bad to have a girl the same age across the street from us. I don’t relish the day when I have to drive her to another neighborhood to play. Or “hang out,” because it won’t be long before “playing” is gauche.

But for now, she’s still in the sweet spot. A sweet spot where the Mean Girl and the Punk Rock Girl and the Spaz and the Cheerleader and the Priss can all get along.

Society will beat that out of them soon enough.

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