California, here I go
Tomorrow morning I’ll get up at 5 AM and start my journey back to Kansas City.
Whoever said “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey” can kiss my ass because I’m guessing Mr. Philosophical never traveled Southwest Airlines and had to do that thing where you line up according to a fairly vague boarding position and then engage in Muay-Thai boxing matches to see who gets an aisle or window seat and who gets stuck sitting in between two people who get recognized by the staff every time they walk into their local Golden Corral buffet.
True story:
For a while I worked in a ski shop as a ski mechanic (the guy who puts the bindings on the skis you bought) and we’d all go to lunch at a nearby Chinese buffet restaurant, ignore the fried rice and anything with vegetables and absolutely crush the spare ribs and one day we pulled up in my buddy’s green, fastback Mustang and the woman who ran the restaurant recognized us and before we could get through the door, she ran over and grabbed the tray of ribs off the buffet and sprinted off like she was running the final leg of a 440 relay and hid the ribs in the kitchen.
That my friends is respect – of a very screwed-up sort, but respect nonetheless.
Anyway…
I love to be places, but hate to get to them, so as far as I’m concerned tomorrow is just a wasted day and I can’t wait for some airline to implement my brilliant idea and start sedating passengers when they come on board and wake them up when they arrive and I’m guessing we’d all pay extra for that. (If you happen to be the President of Southwest Airlines, give me a call and we’ll see what we can work out.)
So right now I’m waiting for my buddy to bring home some takeout food and have my last dinner in California and before I go I thought I’d share a few vacation stories I haven’t written yet.
The son also wises…off
Because of COVID I haven’t seen my son in two years and wanted to make the most of my time with him, so I wrote down a list of things we could do in LA like go to Griffith Park or visit the Hollywood Forever Cemetery or become crack addicts, but after a few days just hanging out, I realized I could throw my list away because it didn’t make any difference where we were or what we were doing because all I really wanted to do was talk to him.
So we watched some mixed martial arts fights (he’s a fan) and he told me all kinds of interesting stuff I would have never noticed on my own, but also said; “Yeah, this clearly ought to be illegal.”
We were watching The Accountant and there’s a scene where Ben Affleck closes a storage unit door from the inside and at that exact split-second my son’s TV picture blew out, but there was still sound so we sat there like two of the Three Stooges thinking the director had made some interesting choices when he decided to do the whole scene in pitch-black darkness. Took us a while to catch on and go get a new TV.
When I suggested we go to a late breakfast the last day I was in LA, he said: “I’m White, but I’m not Brunch White.” (Expect this designation to be on the next census.)
When we’re together we laugh a lot and I miss him more than words can say so I’ll stop writing about this now.
California drivers
Some comedian whose name does not immediately come to mind once said New York and Los Angeles both had bumper-to-bumper traffic, but in LA the bumper-to-bumper traffic was going 80 miles an hour.
This is pretty much true.
There have been times I was breaking the speed limit by double digits and people were still passing me like I was the last place driver in the Indy 500 and just blew a head gasket.
Unless…
The traffic is going approximately no miles an hour which happened occasionally and just outside of Stockton I found myself behind a motorcycle gang which will make you drive even more carefully than a highway patrolman because I’ve never seen a movie where roving gangs of policemen beat innocent strangers unless you count that time Donald Trump wanted to cross the street and hold up a Bible, which I’m about 1,000 percent sure Donald’s never read.
Taking a chance
Chain restaurants appeal to our insecurities because if you go to McDonald’s anywhere in the world you know exactly what you’re going to get and if you go to a restaurant you never heard of you might have a bad meal, but what’s the point of traveling 2,103.9 miles (Kansas City to Sacramento, Sacramento to Los Angeles) to eat a cheeseburger I can get five minutes from my house?
Haysoos Christo, live a little.
We went to a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard and had some of the best tacos I ever had in my life (you’re looking at carnitas, fish and shrimp) and if you went to some expensive restaurant and some guy in a tuxedo served these to you and was kind of snotty about it you’d think it was great dining experience and it really was even though the food was served by a young woman who was extremely nice and when she wasn’t checking her iPhone, kept bringing chips and salsa like she was getting paid a commission on how many chips we ate which turned out to be all of them.
Putting the lid (and my foot) down
As I recently confessed, due to a string of errors I dropped my reading glasses into an open toilet and you’d think I’d learn my lesson and all the women who ever told me to put the toilet lid down are now vindicated, but that assumes I have the capacity to learn and evolve which also proves you don’t know me all that well.
One pair of urine-soaked reading glasses does not a new man make.
Which probably ought to be a slogan for something and I’m not sure what, probably some sort of 12-step program for us Manly Men who refuse to learn from their experiences and think women are attracted to chest-length beards full of that morning’s breakfast.
But let’s go back to that open toilet lid and all the women in the world who want you to close them so they don’t sit down and fall in the toilet, which – if you think about it and I have – means those women are dropping their pantaloons and sitting their naked ass down on objects they haven’t looked at first.
How is that my fault?
Generally speaking that seems like a bad policy and I’m not sure how men got put in charge of making sure their female partners can flounce about, hither and yon, plopping their bare butts on objects they haven’t examined first. (And if you’re a woman, it was nice having you read my stuff right up until I pissed you off with this toilet-lid diatribe.)
Happy Birthday, Mom
So my mom turned 96 and this is the first attempt me and my brother Dan made at taking a group selfie and once we realized we had overestimated my mother’s height we all cracked up and decided to go look for a box for her to stand on.
Bottom line: she’s upright and still making jokes and I’d settle for that if I ever make it to 96.
Time to go
So the food will be here shortly and I gotta go because I have to stay on track so I can get up at the ass-crack of dawn and fly home, which I don’t mind doing.
I just hate having to get there.
P.S. Mom (and everybody else) I’ll be back before you know it.