Flying, airports, and Roy Halladay's naked body.

I hate flying.  I love airports. Every time I have to go somewhere I both look forward to and dread it.  It’s a strange phenomenon how much I like airports.  I do not like standing in lines and having to take my shoes off.  Ever.  It’s why I strive to be in the VIP line in my flip-flops everywhere I go.  I want in quickly and easily.  If I could afford the airport fast lane, I’d be in it later today.  Also, I tend to wear shoes on airplanes both for their improved versatility and the space-saving effect of packing flip-flops instead of them. 

Once you’re past the security line, it’s another world.  There’s shops and restaurants you’ve never seen; magazines you’ve never read; people that seem to live there.  You cross over, and suddenly you feel like getting a screwdriver.  Fuck it, you’ll just be 40,000 feet in the air.  You might as well be drunk.  What happens in airports stays in airports.  It’s Vegas without the gambling.  (You can imagine how I feel about the Vegas Airport.)  A friend of mine who will remain nameless told me a story of how he met two Russian exchange students while waiting for a flight and an hour later she was giving him the oral pleasure in an airport bathroom stall.  Where else besides Vegas or a seedy nightclub could this possibly happen?  Your chances of running into a fellow traveler again are slim-to-none.  Why not go for broke and give me oral pleasure in a bathroom stall, girls?  That line never works.  Need to meet more Russians, evidently.

I have a nasty habit of buying three to four magazines before my flight.  I always think I’ll read them on the plane but I forget the effect heights have on me.  Maybe it’s the drowning engine noise or the comfortable seats (it’s not the comfortable seats), or my brain’s reaction to the terror that grips my mind at 40,000 feet, but I can’t fall asleep fast enough or sleep long enough.  When I flew to China on a 17-hour flight (I’m guessing but it was long) I slept for 16 hours of it.  The hour I was awake was spent eating, lavatory-ing, and looking at all of the Chinese people on the plane.  By the time we make the landing approach, I wish the flight were an hour longer so I can sleep more.  My brain is an idiot. 

And now, random thoughts about airports.

I think Brookstone should have their stores exclusively in airports.  If I have room in my carry-on, I’m liable to buy just about anything.  And Brookstone sells “just about anything”.  How is this store still in business?  They are the leading purveyors of the world’s most useless useful items.  They should change their name to “The Father’s Day Store.”

Unless you’re in Mexico or Spanish-speaking countries, it should be against the law to sell Mexican food in airports.  Who the hell wants to eat a taco platter before they get on a 3+ hour flight? Of course, the law would not apply to Qdoba, as they make the best burrito money can buy.   No flight is complete without a queso barbacoa burrito.

The chairs in waiting areas should recline.  It’s impossible to take a quality nap in a crudely made bucket seat. 

Do all celebrities fly privately?  I’ve never seen anybody famous waiting at the gate 1.5 hrs before the departure time.  Do they have to time it perfectly to run straight onto the plane?  Wouldn’t that mean they’re always in a rush? 

Actually, last time I flew out of Dallas, I saw Roy Halladay and his family waiting at the gate next to mine.  I wasn’t sure it was him until I studied the pictures I secretly snapped of him in the bathroom. 

In Memoriam. Sort of.

I’ve been thinking about writing In Memoriam blogs about the special people that have been a part of my life.  I’d like to spend a week’s worth of mornings writing about how a particular person was an important influence and whose memory continues to be a source of inspiration in one way or another.  That’s the ideal. 

It’s an ambitious goal and presents a series of special problems. 

I wouldn’t want to leave anybody out.  I’m already consumed with guilt when it comes to the death of pretty much anybody I’ve known - I didn’t cry enough; I couldn’t make it to the funeral; I didn’t treasure the time I had with the person enough, etc. – so I can only imagine how I’d feel if I left out a grandparent or something.  Everybody deserves equal recognition in some way for the impact they’ve had on my life.  But of course, that’s not entirely true - it’s just not possible.

I feel guilty already.

What if I don’t have enough to say about the person and I can only write a short paragraph about them but the next person I dedicate an entire page to?   A real concern. 

Much of the blog would probably consist of stories I remember or that were relayed to me because I was too young.  My Grandmother used to scribble down notes and quotes and short stories as they happened on scraps of paper and kept them in her purse so she wouldn’t forget and could easily recall funny or special moments.  Invariably, I’d try to consolidate my own purse-full of loose-leaf stories here and miss or forget whole fistfuls of memories. 

The benefit of keeping my family’s oral tradition on scraps of paper is that there was never a question of who said what and when. 

Quick story. Since it’s really about me, I don’t feel guilty:

I’m 6 years old.  My family’s housekeeper and my first friend in the world, Paul Trusty, a man with a gut as big as my 6 year-old body and a faded Korean War Sailor Jerry tattoo on his left arm says about his younger boxing days: “When I was a boxer, I used to fly like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”  I respond, “Yeah, but now you eat like a horse and sleep like a bear.” 

As a 6 year old, my status as child genius was cemented immediately. At least as far as my grandmother was concerned.

If anybody knows where my grandmother’s scraps are, they’ll corroborate the story.  Because she wrote it down immediately after it happened.  Also, I think I totally fucked that up.  I sort of think I said something about snoring, not eating.  Or maybe it was a pig, not a horse.  Fuck.  Now I don’t feel guilty.  Just old and disappointed.

It’s an unfortunate truth that it’s not possible to give everyone the time and space they deserve in a blog.  I can barely sit still long enough to get a blog about nothing down.  Anyway, writing is, at best, a shadow.  The writer in me wants to believe that when something is physically on the page it, in some small way, is validated. Is made true or real.  Ultimately, that only rings true for the best novels and novelists.  “The Count of Monte Cristo” is real.  Even fictionally, that shit happened.  Or is happening.   Poor Dantes. (Incidentally, I can’t comprehend how Dumas took a giant dump with “The Three Musketeers” and then just one year later wrote the best revenge story EVER.  I confess, I haven’t read any other of his works.)

Anyway, I could never do justice to a person’s memory well enough that it happens.  Maybe that’s why I don’t enjoy reading non-fiction.  I’ll choose to believe that for the time being, my memories of loved ones can never be equaled by the skill, or lack thereof, of my writing.  It would all end up a feeble attempt to apply a chronology to an inherently timeless, amorphous beast.

A large part of why I enjoy copywriting so much is that I am constantly trying to superimpose words where a feeling exists.   For example, I’m trying to advertise about a scotch being the perfect Father’s Day gift by examining the “unspoken bond that exists between a man and his father.”  That’s hard to write about.  It’s fucking unspoken.  I look at the challenge like a rock or a boulder I need to crack.   I need to do is find a seam, get a little bit of liquid in there, and if the ad works, the reader’s perception freezes it and the rock breaks.  The seam, it turns out, is called “insight.”

The water is a combination of my strategy and words.

Beer "Fest" not "Festival"

In my lifetime, I’ve been to three beer festivals and one wine festival. A year ago, my brother and sister-in-law invited me to an outdoor wine tasting festival in the sweltering heat of Austin.  It was an amazing time.  I don’t remember much of it. 

What I do remember is that my brother bought a couple huge knives from a tent vendors and got a great deal on them.  I also vaguely remember testing out a knife on a celery stalk the vendor had left out for precisely that purpose. Because, you know, letting extraordinarily drunk people chop vegetables with extraordinarily sharp knives makes complete sense. I left a small piece of my thumb with the celery and immediately stopped. Then my brother bought $300 worth of knives.  I could vouch for their sharpness.

It was surprisingly easy to drink wine in the heat, though I think I opted for the white ones.  In my old age I’ve started drinking more white wine.  Generally, it’s harder to be pretentious about lighter colored things. It’s easier to figure out if a white wine is good or bad.  Red wine, on the other hand, is supposed to taste like leather and tobacco.  I don’t have a problem with red wine, I’m just not smart enough to figure it out.  I know that I prefer a chalky dry white, like a Sauv Blanc.  Something you can eat oysters with.  On the other hand, I’ll drink just about any red wine you bring me.

Until my trip up to Los Olivos, CA, better known as Sideways wine country, I preferred reds because I thought they were smarter.  Then I had a late harvest viogner, and was blown away.  Evidently, late harvest denotes that the vintner lets the grapes shrivel on the vine and then harvests them.  The grapes effectively rot on the vine, imparting a peculiar sweetness like an after dinner drink.  If there’s any oenophiles out there that care to correct me, feel free, I could be wrong. Anyway, it was and remains the best wine I’ve ever tasted. 

So I was disappointed when, at the beer festival on Saturday, there was a surprising lack of learning opportunities.  Out of the 10-15 breweries, only two or three of them were new to me.  21^st Amendment is a brewery I don’t know much about but was curious to try, and their two very mini kegs were kicked in the first hour before I found them.  I was happy to find the Terrapin cart, though.  Their Hopsecutioner was the best beer at the festival and one of my favorites.  But I know the IPA well. 

My favorite and most mystifying addition to the beer festival was the Bud Light tent. Their tent took up an entire corner of the venue and at first glance appeared to be a beer garden.  But why would a beer festival need a beer garden?  A closer inspection of the 30 tables and the hundreds of people underneath it revealed the tent was a Beer Pong Emporium.  Evidently, for an additional $15 people could purchase a pitcher and 20 cups from a nearby stand, grab a table, and start playing.  Balls and pitcher refills were provided at no additional charge.  It was equal parts amazing and shameless. The tent flew in the face of everything that beer festivals are about – small breweries offering a limited supply of their fine brew to a discerning crowd.  Nope, not bud light, whose motto is clearly Quantity Not Quality. Maybe Atlanta is just more honest than the other festivals I’ve been to.  Getting shitcanned is an accidental side effect at most festivals.  The Atlanta Beer Fest made it a priority.  Everything tastes better when everything tastes the same.

Regardless of the oddities, I had a terrific time and whoops accidentally got shitcanned. 

Let’s call a spade a spade – at the end of the day, the Atlanta Beer Fest was as much of a “Beer Festival” as a Ke$ha show is a “concert.”  The night concluded with a mediocre band named God Knows What playing to a throng of not-so-accidentally shitcanned locals who could neither hear nor see straight enough to know what they were swaying to.

In other words, to 99 percent of the people there the night was a raging success. 

NBA draft thoughts and such.

I could write about the NBA draft but I don’t know anything about college players except the top five or so them and there are SO many bad NBA teams it’s hard to even name their starters. I tried last night and it didn’t happen for several of them.  Long gone are the days where I can name every starter on every team, and not for lack of me paying attention or caring about basketball.  There’s great parity in football and baseball, to some extent, nowadays.  Basketball has been moving in the opposite direction long before “The Decision” and the “Big Three” in Boston.

Last night, discussing Cleveland’s pre-draft lineup consisted of a lot of guesswork and forgetting of Baron Davis, who is utterly forgettable.  It took me 10 minutes to remember J.J. Hickson’s name.  We are both disappointments.  They started a guy named “Boobie” for god’s sake.  It gets worse.  Try to name the five starters for the Bobcats.  It’s hard.  When they finally drafted Kemba Walker I assumed that they were replacing a veteran (awful) point guard like Brevin Knight.  False.  Instead, I remembered that the pretty decent D.J. Augustin will now have a mate in the backcourt.  Statistically, D.J. was actually good at 14 and 6 with less than 2 TOs a game.  That’s one out of five of the starters.  And it gets more difficult because of the Cap’n Jack trade.  Who in the world is on that team?!  D.J. and Kemba…and wait for it…JOEL PRYZBILLA!  The Vanilla Gorilla!  I completely forgot that he left Portland in the Gerald Wallace trade. Am I alone here?

I admit I don’t follow European basketball.  If you do, you need a hobby. I accidentally read an article about the 7 footer (or nearly – seems like everybody was 6’11”) from Lithuania, Jonas Valalskajslajl or whatever the hell his last name is who was drafted by Toronto.  I like the Raptors.  I like dinosaurs.  So by default, the Raptors are cool.  I also like basketball players that look like dinosaurs but that’s another blog entirely.  Speaking of, I need to update my All-Cute and All-Dino teams, I sense a spot for Kemba. Anyway, I’m actually excited about the Raptors next season. They’re going to be awful, of course, but now they have TWO seven footish foreign guys!  How exciting!  Bargnani is a badass and should have been an all-star last year if not for the last two years.  And they can both hit the three!  The rest of the team is garbage, and next year Jose Calderon may tie Rondo for the highest assist to point ratio in the league.  The difference is, of course, is that Rondo purposely scores 6 pts a game, whereas Calderon can’t score in double digits despite his usual 50%ish from the field. And DeMar DeRozan will continue his role as the most one dimensional player in the league.  How can you NOT be excited by this team?

I can’t wait for a team to field a starting five of all foreign players. That’s all I have to say about that.

What are the odds that Jimmer is better on the Bucks than Michael Redd?  And I mean Broken Michael Redd.  Is he alive?  Where is he?  What hospital is he in? 

I look forward to watching Jimmer play basketball against men twice his size. He’s going to get knocked down. A lot. Though, I said the same thing about crazy Tyler Hansbrough and he turned out to be crazy enough to make a mark.  Jimmer?  Not crazy enough.  Hansbrough is “serial killer” crazy.  Jimmer is “weird Mormon crazy.” I have no idea if he’s Mormon.  His name is Jimmer. No white guy has any business having a name like Jimmer.  “Jimmer” is a name reserved for Mormons, Ron Artest, and perverse sexual positions.  

I remember when J.J. Redick was drafted, I not so silently rooted against him and hoped he would fail in the NBA.  He did.  Until recently when he became a decent, smart role player.  And the damndest thing happened: I started rooted for him.  I foresee the same for Jimmer.  I’ll laugh every time he arrogantly throws up a 30-footer with a hand twice-his-size in his face and then cheer when they go in.  I recommend he write up another Crayola contract promising to “work really hard” and  “be the best NBA player ever.”  If he’s not Mormon, nobody is.

Something about my day of nothing.

Yesterday, I did nothing.    I was so intent on doing nothing that I skipped taking a nap, and instead watched more of the mindless crap I DVRed over the last quarter. I was exhausted from the previous day’s festivities which included but was not limited to: riding inflatable dinosaurs, chugging copious amounts of beer, gorging on mustard slathered bratwursts, and getting hit square in the face by a heavy rubber football.  If not for the red marks on my face and my now ill-fitting sunglasses, I’d forget the football event all together.   Also, I have an enormous blister on the bottom of my big toe that reminds me with every step how truly fucking stupid I can be.

The day of nothing afforded me the opportunity to watch a sickening display of what the ignorant masses watch on the tube all day.  Other than So You Think You Can Dance, which is only watchable because of the astounding likeability and talent of the contestants AND the judges, it was a programming desert. (As a side note if Nigel Lythgoe wants to fix American Idol, he’ll have to sit on the panel himself. Fuck it, I’m part of the ignorant mass.)  I had the unique pleasure of watching The Voice and immediately regretted it.  Mostly it was Carson Daly’s stupid emotionless face/voice/body/personality but Christina Aguilera (who’s strangely overweight) inability to say anything intelligent didn’t help either.  Plus, the scoring system for the show seems entirely arbitrary and the singers are talentless and hard to look at, to be nice.   (What are the odds that BOTH of the women on Aguilera’s team would be BALD?  Seriously?  One in twenty thousand?   A million? What producer let THAT happen?)

I love Gordon Ramsay.  I love his shows.  All 800 of them.  They’re so much fun to watch because they’re produced SO cheaply it’s like watching B-rate television in primetime.  Take “Master Chef,” for instance.  What other show so obviously slaps the American public in the face with the old “you’ll watch anything so long as we add dramatic music, an unnecessarily mean British judge, and crush people’s dreams in an hour long Greek-like hazing ritual.”  Ramsay has the fucking thing down to a science.  The voice-over talent is the same guy he uses for all of his shows; the location for the show is the same as “Hell’s Kitchen”; same forced dramatic commercial breaks right before Ramsay says something unexpected; same hugely underqualified contestants (A show called “Master Chef” that includes a contestant who doesn’t know that carpaccio is not French needs a new name immediately. Incidentally, that contestant is still on the show.)  Comparing Ramsay’s “Hell’s Kitchen” (which supposedly includes highly qualified chefs) to Bravo’s “Top Chef” is like comparing Pal-Mal cigarettes to a Cuban cigar.  Weird comparison maybe, but watching a Ramsay show is at once as satisfying and sickening as chain smoking an entire pack of those Pal-Mals.  And as addictive.  The biggest difference between a Ramsay show and any other competition show is that he doesn’t rely on likeability whatsoever.  Every single person on the show is unlikeable, from the contestants to the judges.  The dancers on SYTYCD are incredibly talented and (some of them) the best in the world at what they do;  Ramsay’s contestants are bumbling, arrogant, antagonizing  novices at best.  The Ramsay show has no heroes.  Which if you think about it, becomes something of a social commentary when we (I) watch his shit so much.  But, I digress.  Me using a Gordon Ramsay show for anything other than my mindless entertainment on a day of nothing would be an even greater travesty than his shows already are.