The Place To Be

Before the door finishes closing behind me, I am immediately overwhelmed by their numbers. Even while moving slowly, and with little deliberation, they seem to somehow swarm throughout the building. Nervousness and claustrophobia set in as they always have, despite my increasing familiarity with the situation. I could turn and leave, probably before anyone notices, but the same thought keeps creeping in, "Just do it, get it over with, like a band aid."

Yet this isn’t like the band aid analogy at all – the process won’t go quickly, and the pain will endure. There’s simply too many of them.

The worst part is the all-too-late realization; the fact that I should know better, and yet somehow find myself in this situation over and over again. I have no one to blame but myself. It’s the same day every week. It’s well advertised. I’ve certainly witnessed it many times before. Yet I never remember what I’m about to walk into until I’m ankle deep in the white-shoes-on-black-socks mess.

I’ve once again found myself in Kroger on Senior Discount Day.

How do I keep doing this? There are six other days of the week in which I could visit the grocery store. Even if I fall into the routine of buying a week’s worth of food, I could go to the store a day ahead of time (Tuesday), or order a pizza and wait one more day (Thursday). The problem is that I don’t always walk in on a Wednesday, which keeps me from remembering that it’s Senior Discount Day on those Wednesdays when I do happen to go to the store. And once there, I’m trapped. The family expects me to return with food.

So I grab a cart and start pushing, mesmerized once again at the popularity of this promotion. Someone working at the deli counter must be calling out bingo numbers.

The trudge through the store, needless to say, is slow. Some aisles contain more people than consumables. Stepping into the fiber aisle is like being on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange if Google suddenly went for 10 cents a share. Cereal will have to wait another day.

Despite only needing items from roughly half the aisles in the store, I always peak down each one as I pass by (habit, I guess). The exception is Wednesdays, when I can’t bring myself to glance in the lane titled "Incontinence."

Upon crossing everything off my list, I head to the front, where the lone retribution for shopping on this day of the week is that, while the checkout lanes are full, the self-checkout stations are empty. Ah, technology - enemy to the elderly. I complete my transaction without delay.

The only obstacle remaining – the parking lot, where interpreting the turn signals is on par with trying to interpret Mandarin Chinese. I somehow make it out unscathed.

So long, seniors.

Until next week…

Sounds About Right

I saw the following headline today, and it certainly boosted my confidence in the American legal system...

Boy band creator sentenced to 25 years in prison

Apparently, from reading the article, his sentence was not handed down as a direct result of creating the boy bands, but the judge certainly must have taken that into consideration.

Show Her You Care

This past Sunday was of course Mother’s Day – a time to celebrate all that our moms do for us. Usually this means showing your mom an appropriate amount of gratitude by making her breakfast or taking her out to lunch, and then expecting her to have dinner ready at the regularly scheduled time.

Sure, on paper this sounds pretty fair. But if you really think about it, moms get the short end of the stick. Aside from only getting one day in their honor, that day (Sunday) happens to be a day that they normally have off from their job anyway, but not a day that they have off from taking care of the demons (I mean kids) that make them moms. And stay-at-home moms never have a day off from taking care of demons (whoops, I mean kids). At the very least, moms should get a day off from work AND from the demons (damnit! I mean kids).

In all seriousness, as someone who has been in a delivery room during the birth of a child, moms should get a week celebrated in their honor just for that. For crying out loud, where I’m from the entire town celebrates for two weeks prior to a bunch of horses running around a track; an event that never lasts more than two minutes. If every two-minute period that my wife spent in labor with our son equaled two weeks of celebrating afterwards, we’d embarrass Lindsay Lohan.

And consider all the other days we celebrate. Despite having no ethnic ties to the holiday, plenty of non-Hispanic people in this country raise a glass on Cinco de Mayo. Same thing with St. Patrick’s Day. And you know who else gets a whole day named after him? A giant rodent that has to be pulled out of the ground by people way overdressed for the occasion simply to ritualistically “predict” six more weeks of winter. Has the damn squirrel ever not predicted six more weeks of winter? Groundhog Day has never given us a reason to celebrate (but in all fairness, it is a great movie).

So I think we can do better. Hopefully you gave your mom the whole day off on Sunday, and if you didn’t, do it this weekend. And next weekend. And maybe a few whole weeks here and there. Devote as much time to showing her your appreciation as she devoted to you.

Then again, if we adequately celebrated our moms, we wouldn’t get anything else done, including preparing our kids to leave home. And according to my mom, that’s when the real celebration begins.

The Never Ending Story

In an effort to continue its award-winning political coverage, this blog is once again bringing you hard-hitting insight into the 2008 presidential campaign. You’re probably saying to yourself, "Campaign? You mean we haven’t elected a new president yet?”

As shocking as it sounds, not only has the election not taken place, it’s still 2.5 years away. Hold on. I’m getting a message from the studio. Sorry, it’s six months away. Still, that’s a long ways off.

When it’s all said and done, the one defining theme of the 2008 campaign will be that, from start to finish, there were at least a dozen defining themes. First it was defined simply by the massive number of people running for president. Then it was the massive number of debates that this massive group held on a weekly basis. Next it was the massive number of times during the massive number of debates that this massive group said the word “change.”

Now the race is being defined by the massive number of primaries that have taken and will continue to take place for years to come. And if that’s not bad enough, this will all occur across the backdrop of a desperately dissipated sports landscape that involves only the professional teams from Boston playing each other in every round of playoffs ever invented to decide who should be declared the most obnoxious and over-exposed team of the 21st century.

At least the field of political contenders has finally whittled down. We now know that the next president will be John McCain, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or some kind of perverse amalgam of both Democratic candidates that sounds like a degenerative eye disease called Barillary Clintama.

That is, if we ever get around to electing one of them. The eventual winner will have spent more time campaigning than actually holding the office. And during all this time, none of them have been able to decide on a vice-presidential nominee? We’re not going to have to hold primaries for that too, are we?

Well, if we do, you can bet that all the really pertinent details can be found right here. Stay tuned.

If you can gut it out that long.

Pull My Finger. Or Just Give Me a Push

I’ve got gas. And thank goodness.

Sometimes it’s inconvenient and mildly embarrassing, but I’ve never been more happy to be full of gas. Well, for my car to be full of gas, I mean.

Just like the rest of the country, Louisville saw record highs in its gas prices this past week, when gas topped out at roughly $12.95 a gallon. With the nearest station holding out for a couple of hours before implementing the increase, cars were recently backed up into the highway waiting to fill up. Thankfully I had just filled up two days earlier. Not that it really matters.

If I have three quarters of a tank on the day of an expected price increase, I always think to myself, “Cool, I should be able to ride this out until it goes down again.” But of course that’s never happened because for at least the past two years, the price of gas has jumped 90 cents every week. So I guess my euphoria over having plenty of gas will soon (pardon the pun) pass.

Despite the fact that the price of everything (minus homes, of course) is on the rise, and always has been, it’s the price of gas that seems to make everyone nostalgic. Just think, 17 year olds everywhere are saying things like, “I can remember when gas never got above $3.15 a gallon.” Yeah, those were the good ol’ days.

But there are ways to deal with the rapid increase. Just the other day I was watching a CNN correspondent go over ways that we can improve our gas mileage to ease our “pain at the pump.” For instance, keeping your tires at their correct air pressure will help increase your mileage by five percent. That’s important because it means instead of having to fill up on a Thursday morning, you won’t have to fill up until Thursday afternoon. Possibly even late afternoon.

It’s painful to think about, but I guess things could get worse. People say all the time that even now we shouldn’t complain because Europeans regularly pay $4 - $5 a gallon for gas. The only problem with that argument is that Europeans are affected very little by the price of gas because they hardly drive. And who can blame them. With the steering wheel located on the right side of their cars, they constantly have to find a friend to ride in the passenger seat so they’ll have someone to work the pedals. Either that or occasionally they’ll use a stick to poke at the pedals from the other side, but that has to be near impossible if they’re driving a manual transmission.

Anyway, the future doesn’t look much brighter. Pretty soon we’ll all be filling up our giant empty tubs of Sam’s Club mayonnaise with gasoline just so we’ll have reserves before the next big hike. We could always walk more or ride bikes or buy smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, but I’m trying to think in a practical manner.

Hands at 10 and 2. Right?

This is a message to the guy driving next to me one day last week who was holding a cup of Starbucks in one hand and his cell phone in the other: Thank you for not killing me or anyone else. At least not during the tenth of a second that I stayed on the road after noticing you. Who knows what happened after I steered into a ditch and hid under my seat until I felt like it was safe to drive again.

Actually, I never really did feel safe again. I contemplated walking the remaining 10 miles to work, lest I get back on the road and discover someone else next to me who might be drinking a cup of coffee, talking on their cell phone and showering. I know this has been asked a thousand times before, but seriously, what happens to us when we drive?

It seems driving has just become so boring that it can no longer hold our attention past the time it takes to back out of the driveway. And talking on a cell phone is now one of the least dangerous things a person can do while driving, thanks to the ability to type on a cell phone. Then again, instead of boredom, maybe the collective IQ of the driving population simply drops a few dozen points each time we put the key in the ignition.

Consider the woman in Oregon, as reported in the Chicago Tribune, who was drunk and then got in the car to drive to ... (can you guess?) ... (I bet you can't) ... the police station. Was it to turn herself in for driving drunk, you ask? Nope. She was driving to the police station to ... (wanna try again?) ... (you'll never get this one) ... that's right, to work. Not only did she get drunk before driving to her job, but she got drunk before driving to her job at a police station.

Then there's the guy in Pennsylvania, also reported in the Chicago Tribune, who thought he'd get a better view by climbing on the roof of his car while it was still proceeding down the highway. If you can't guess what happened next, here's the link. And you shouldn't be driving either.

Maybe the concept of cars and how they work just eludes a lot of people. Take the man in New Zealand who couldn't get his SUV parked just right, and it wound up plowing into a man on his toilet. Then again, you can't really blame the guy for not knowing how to park his car since his country's main mode of transportation is still sheep.

But hey, I realize no one has a perfect driving record. A couple of weeks ago I drove my son to daycare with him sitting on my lap, a la Britney Spears, which my wife was delighted to hear about. I don't make a habit of it. I only do it on those days when I don't put him in his car seat.

Anyway, my point is let's try to be safe out there. Remember to keep your hands on the wheel, the talking to a minimum, and if you must be one with nature, buy a car with a sun roof.

You Take One Down and Pass it Around...

Have you ever been at a party, particularly during college, or some other social gathering, and asked someone, "How's the beer?" only to hear them say, "Tastes like horse piss"?

I don't know about you, but whenever I hear this I immediately assume that means the beer doesn't taste very good. I say "assume" because I don't know for certain what horse piss actually tastes like, having never tried any. That is, until this past weekend.

After trying it, I realize that all those times that I thought people were less than satisfied with the quality of their beverages, it turns out they must have been enjoying them after all. Horse piss is quite good. And to think of all the times I've turned down a drink that tastes as good as horse piss. I guess I should be glad I discovered it when I did.

Horse piss is light, smooth and, surprisingly, doesn't leave an aftertaste (that was my biggest concern when first trying it). I certainly recommend it. Unfortunately horse piss can't be enjoyed from the tap. But you can purchase some in four 12-oz. bottles at many retail locations, or by visiting this website.

As far as micro-brewed beers go (what did you think I meant?), it doesn't have the flavor or richness of a lot of other locally brewed beers, but it compares favorably to a lot of popular domestic brews, such as Bud Light or Miller Lite. So the next time someone tells you that their beer tastes like horse piss, first understand that you're probably cavorting with a member of high society who enjoys the finer things in life. Then crack open a bottle and slurp some down.