Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Airport Pickup Policy Statement

When I am picked up from the San Diego airport upon return from a trip to any other time zone, I will be driven directly home without stopping for a restaurant meal with my driver, unless, at my sole discretion, I elect to do so.

I left Detroit the other day on a flight that departed at 6:15 AM. Detroit is in the Eastern time zone. Because the drive to the airport was relatively short, I only had to get up at 4:00 AM local time. I arrived in San Diego and was met by TOG and DYS at the curb at exactly 10:46 local time. That’s 3 hours later than the time I was acclimated to.

DYS has been staying at my house cat-sitting and going through my drawers and had conveniently placed her matching luggage (Wal-mart bags) on the back seat near the curbside door where I had to move them over before I could put my own suitcase in on top and scrunch in.

WISIMH:  You two have the collective intellectual capacity of Albert Einstein. He might have been smart in his day, but he died in 1955. So, zero.

TOG:  Would you be interested in going to Sammy’s for lunch?

Me:  Not particularly, I’ve been up since…

TOG: (Interrupting) We’ve been waiting at Spanish Landing for almost an hour and we’re starved and (he kept talking but I stopped listening).

WISIMH: (Interrupting) because you couldn’t be bothered to get up earlier and stop for breakfast, or bother to do the math and consider I might be a bit tired and cranky?

WISIMH: (Interrupting) And yes, that’s a rhetorical question. You know that because it has the word “consider” in it.

So, DYS drove us to Sammy’s with TOG navigating which meant we headed west to a restaurant that is due east of the airport. On the wrong freeway. And when we got there, we missed the turn I was trying to point out because I was scrunched in the back seat behind TOG who has his seat moved all the way back and who was interrupting me. In all fairness, I was whimpering more than attempting to navigate. I'd lost the will to live.

WISIMH:  Doing the math, I’ve been up since 1:00 AM local time. I spent five of those hours on a cramped plane, in a seat where my overhead light was out and the lady in the window seat pulled down the shades to nap. After our pleasant dining experience, I have to drop you off and then your sister, so it will be at least another hour even if we go directly home.  Why do I bother? I got home at 2:15.

Hence, the new policy. I have yet to write the implementing procedures, which include the option for me to pay $50 for a cab rather than be set up like this again.


Wednesday, October 1, 2014

The Imaginary Race of the Overclocked Mobility Scooters

TOG invited me to join him and DYS at Outback Steakhouse today. The deal was that he’d bring down the HEPA filter and I’d bring the ultrasonic cleaner. Our waitress was nobody’s fool. She suggested that TOG and the husband and wife team in electric wheelchairs at the adjacent table have a race after lunch. Nobody laughed but me, but I was picturing those scenes where teenagers drag race their cars to/off the edge of a cliff.

After a brief discussion of DYS’ latest divorce woes, we drifted on to some issues at the deeper end of the conversational pool:  how Castle WTD (Castle Waiting to Die, aka, La Vida Loco where TOG lives) has three kinds of coffee creamer in those tiny white cups: non-dairy, real half and half that inexplicably doesn’t need to be refrigerated, and we could go on about that practically forever. And then, there’s the vanilla non-dairy, and boy, is that sweet.

WISIMH:  I’ve fallen into a time warp. I feel like we’ve been discussing dairy creamer for several weeks. Or I’ve slipped through a crack in the space-time continuum. I think the song playing over the restaurant muzak channel is “All the Blowing-Themselves-Up Motherfuckers (wlll realize the minute they die that they were suckers)”? Dramatic foreshadowing?

TOG:  I had a cherry tart for dinner last night. Tiny but delicious. It had a little crust, and under that cherries, but what they didn’t talk about was what was under that was this... was … creamy -  but not whipped cream… this…. like custard?

Me:  Yeah, probably.

TOG:  Pink custard. I’d ordered it with a la mode on top (yeah, he said that) but in all the confusion it came without.

Me:  You don’t say? Without ice cream on top, on top?

TOG:  Yeah, no ice cream. And it’s just as well because of the creamy stuff under the crust, then under the cherries. It was like… like…

Me:  Custard?

TOG: Yes!

Waitress:  Would you like more wine?

WISIMH:  I’ll have two Harold Pinter plays and a 3-pack of Slim Jim Smoked Pepperoni sticks, please. To go, please.

TOG:  (Tipping empty glass) Yeah, it all spilled out of this hole in the top of the glass.

Waitress:  Well, that’s taking “dry” wine a little to far.

WISIMH:  And here we thought she hadn’t heard them all. She must fucking love her job.

Waitress: So, have you looked at the menu and decided if you want something sweet?

WISIMH:  Wait. For. It.

TOG:  The menu? Oh, I thought something sweet meant you.

Waitress:  They took me off the desert menu several years ago. Too much fat.

WISMH: I bow down before your genius, little lady. Can we be best friends forever?

So, then we talk some more about dialectical materialism and whether we should climb out of the entrenched narrative and re-think what post-colonial capitalism has done deter germination of the seeds of democracy in Middle-Eastern theocracies based on outdated Books. And then global warming. And then how Michelle Bachman actually said America should be a Christian nation because otherwise it would be a theocracy and that’s bad. It’s like she’s having lunch with us.

Me:  (Regaining consciousness to realize we’ve all stopped talking) So, that Off-Broadway show I went to the other night was dreadful. There were these two male 50-something guys in 30-year old tuxedo jackets singing songs from the 80s while their overdressed wives collected tickets and served diet cola respectively.

TOG:  Funny though. Some wives like to share their husbands’ interests. Like collecting currency.

WISMH: You really just SAID that? Can I just say one thing at the speed of light?

The relentless intensity of your tired humor is lamer than Chester on Gunsmoke after somebody threw him from a moving train, albeit more painful. Your humor is more tired than a convict on a forced labor gang after an 18 hour workday and a long rush hour commute; and more insulting than the Supreme Court is to women in general.

You have been an inspiration to me the way Hobby Lobby has been a champion of women’s reproductive rights. You have been a support to me the way Dick Cheney has been a support to democracy in Iraq. You are as articulate as Bush II, albeit possibly a better painter. Your tireless efforts to help me through the trials and tribulations of daily life have been as effective as the Republican House of Representatives has been in creating jobs.

Your best intentions are as gratifying as a deathbed confession of serial murder who can’t remember where the bodies are buried, albeit, slightly less comforting. The sincerity and incommunicable poignancy of your heartfelt professions of love, and your overdue apologies are more believable than the exuberant passion of hooker on her last weekend shift, albeit resulting in a slightly lower level of customer satisfaction.

Your constant and hilarious constructive criticism of every breath I take has made me a better person in the same sense that sodium chloride has made the Great Salt Lake into the best trout-fishing hole in the world. The degree of respect I have for you would freeze water on Mercury. I love you the way Marie Antoinette loved cake, the way a synonym loves an antonym, the way zombies love brains, the way hair loves wet soap, the way Hamlet loved Ophelia, the way Othello loved Desdemona.

Then my blacked-out vision returned and I found that I could speak again:

Me:  Well, there you go. Couldn’t make it through a one-hour conversation without a passive aggressive wisecrack. Congratulations.

TOG:  So, now, you’re going to tell me how not to be like that any more.

WISIMH:  Evidently, you’re going to not be like that any less.

Me: And we have another home run!

WISIMH: And we all wonder why I’m angry all the time.

Me:  So, finally, I was….

TOG:  This cake is even sweeter than the vanilla non-dairy creamer. Have some more of this cake, you could be a little sweeter.

Me:   Another hit high into the centerfield stands, ladies and gentlemen. We have the passive aggressive hat-trick: three in three minutes. (And no, I did not say that in my head.)


Postscriptum: I brought the ultrasonic cleaner. TOG didn’t bring the HEPA filter. Nobody was surprised.