LONGWALKABOUT

Yes, pizza.  I’ve delivered it, I’ve eaten it, I’ve cooked it in many different forms.  Pizza and I have a long history.

I took a semester of criminal justice courses at a community college in Virginia Beach.  While I was in school, my part-time gig was delivering pizza for a national pizza chain.  Pizza delivery man isn’t a bad job.  The worst thing you have to do is wash dishes or fold pizza boxes in between deliveries.  You meet a lot of different people and hopefully you get a lot of tax free income in the way of tips.  The most interesting day was when I came in for the lunch shift and found out that I missed seeing cops come and haul away one of the local homeless guys for public self-entertainment.  Awkward.  Oh, one quick tip for future drivers.  If you ever feel like you’re going to get robbed at a delivery, put most of your money in your sock before you get out of the car.

The best thing about living in the New York/New Jersey area………   Wait.  Rephrase that.  The only good thing about living in the New York/New Jersey area, is that you are exposed to the best pizza in the United States.  I’ve been a lot of places, and those places have mediocre to bad pizza.  There is something nice about going to the grocery store and passing no fewer than five pizza places on the way there.  Bad pizza places simply don’t survive very long up there.  I remember staying over a friends house on a Saturday night when I was in high school.  Guess what we ate.  No, not Thai food, pay attention.  We had pizza, and we didn’t finish it all.  We were high school guys, so we didn’t put it away either.  In the morning, guess what we were going to have for breakfast.  No, not waffles, seriously, pay attention.  Leftover pizza.  We opened the pizza box and found ants all over the remaining slices.  My buddy threw a piece in the microwave anyway.  He said it was fine.

You can turn anything into pizza.  bread + sauce and cheese = pizza.  Tortillas + sauce and cheese = pizza.  Naan (look it up) + sauce and cheese = pizza.  English muffin + sauce and cheese = pizza.  Etc etc.  It’s versatile.

So, now that you’re sufficiently hungry, Tony Roni’s has a special on Tuesday nights.  A large pie for eight bucks.  See you there.

I took my kids to see Antman this week.  Aside from the two times I had to take my five year old to the bathroom, (the large soda was not a good idea) we had a great time.  It is the first movie in the Antman franchise.   That means it has a training sequence where the hero learns to use his power.  This is always the best part of these films.

No genre of film does the training sequence better than karate movies.  Our hero will usually learn to fight by doing something that has nothing to do with fighting.  Washing a car, painting a fence, baking cookies, churning butter.  Meanwhile, in the background a band that you will never hear from a again, will be playing a song so inspirational, it makes you feel like signing up for the next All Valley Karate Championship.  At the end of the training part of the movie, the karate teacher will invariably explain to his pupil how bathing his girlfriend’s toy poodle made him a better fighter, they will do a training fight, the pupil will be amazed at his own progress, and viola, after three weeks of house chores and some play fighting, he’s got himself a black belt.  I could turn the film off right there.

My wife taught me to appreciate the training sequence.  Growing up, she was exposed to more karate movies than Bruce Lee.  Some kids watch cartoons when they’re growing up, some kids watch sitcoms, and some kids watch the Disney Channel, which is kind of both.  My wife grew up on karate movies and Eddie Murphy standup specials.  That may sound like some kind of sociological experiment, but she turned out okay.  For the most part.  (If you tickle her, she goes straight to the karate.  She will hurt you.)

Now we are handing down our appreciation of the training sequence to our children.  We watch superhero movies and the karate kid movies together.  Then we tell them to go clean their room while we set up a boombox and blast Eye Of The Tiger in the upstairs hallway over and over again until that room is right.

LINKS

• National Geographic video about a tree that grows 40 different kinds of fruit.
• The new James Bond trailer is awesome.  The new Hunger Games trailer is not quite as good, but still cool.
• Today is the 32nd anniversary of George Brett’s pine tar home run.  Here are some interesting facts about that incident.  I still love to watch the video of Brett freaking out.
• Also today, in 1943, the allies commenced Operation Gomorrah.  (The bombing of Hamburg)   Here is an interesting article that includes some photos of the devastation.

Through the last two years of my glorious high school experience, and the first year or so of the sampler platter that was my college experience, I spent the summer working as a landscaper at a retirement community.  Mowing lawns and spreading mulch and trimming hedges in the summer heat is not enjoyable.  It does make cooling down after work enjoyable.  As a friend of mine in the air conditioning trade used to say.  “I do this because it feels so good when I stop.”  To which I would respond.  “I do it for the glory.”

Sometimes after the day was over at the retirement community, me and my buddies would head over to a swimming hole in the local river.  It wasn’t much more than five feet deep, but there was a rope swing and a tree with platforms to jump off at different heights.  We would spend an hour or two flipping off the swing and daring each other to jump from the highest platform.  You really haven’t lived until you have dropped out of a tree twenty five feet above water that is only up to your chin.  You have to land just right, and you still hit the bottom pretty hard.  Sometimes when my back is bothering me, I wonder if that had anything to do with it……..  Nah.

There used to be a road along the river at this spot, but the county had rerouted it and put up highway dividers as a blockade to ensure people could’t drive on that section of the old road bed.  We would pull our cars up close to the dividers to park, and then walk the rest of the way in.  We weren’t the only ones to use the swimming hole.  Other people would show up from time to time.  It wasn’t uncommon to see whole families.  There were no facilities in the area, so if you had to use the restroom, you either found a tree or sat in the water hoping that no one would come near you for a minute.  If they did.  Awkward.  If they realized what you were doing.  Double awkward.  If you had to go number two, you were out of luck.  You had to leave.

One day my buddies and I had cooled off in the river, and we were ready to go home.  We walked back down the abandoned road toward our cars.  When we reached the barrier I put one had on it and hopped over.  I used this method because it was quick,,,, and it looked pretty cool.  I’m gonna do a quick rewind to the part where I said that if you had to go number two while you were at the river, you were out of luck.  Apparently, not everyone thought so.  When I came down on the other side of that barrier, one of my bare feet landed directly on a pile of number two.  It wasn’t deer 2, or rabbit 2, or dog 2.  It was human 2.  I realize that this is an experience that not everyone has had, so I will do my best to let you know how it felt.  EEEEEEEEEWWWWWWW.  That probably didn’t do it justice,,, AAAHHH-EEEEEEWWWWW-$%#@&$!  I spent a half hour grinding my foot into the sand on the bottom of the river, trying to wash, thinking, “I knew I should have thrown the bleach, and the lysol, and the blowtorch in the car this morning.”

There.  Next time you hear someone say, “Look before you leap”, you can giggle and tell them this story.  Then tell them to check out the blog.  Thanks in advance.  And Happy Tuesday.

 

 

• Every feeling that you have seems to have an official “disorder” to go along with it these days.  I remember when Seasonal Affective Disorder was just, “Yay, it’s a sunny day” or “Boo, it’s raining.”  But in the spirit of all things disorder, since vacation, I think I officially have Locational Affective Disorder.
• One of the brake lines in my Jeep blew out this week.  Driving a stick shift home, while using just the emergency brake to stop, involves a lot of pedals and levers.  It makes you feel like one of those one man band guys – should have brought my harmonica.
• I watched Roman Holiday for the first time this week.  Targeting Rome for induction of my next bout of Locational Affective Disorder.  They don’t make em like Audrey Hepburn anymore.
• My prayers go out to all affected by the terrorist shooting in Chattanooga this week.  It is ridiculous to me that those military installations are “gun free zones.”  Isn’t that like your local plumber’s shop being a “pipe free zone”?
• I just listened to an audiobook about a guy who was called in to investigate murders at a company that was using artificial intelligence.  It took them twelve hours of audiobook time to figure out that the computer was to blame.  If they had called me in to help with their investigation, that book would have been ten pages long.  This is how it would have gone when I got to the facility.

Me:  “What is that over there?”

Company guy:  “Oh, that’s our supercomputer.  It actually thinks for itself.”

Me:  (Slaps company guy)  “What is wrong with you people?  Don’t you watch movies?  Burn this place to the ground.”

The End

• I’ve known some interesting people over the course of my life.  Some interesting in a good way, others interesting in a the police might want to swing by their house once in a while kind of way.  You know, give the basement a quick walk through.  Maybe bring a bloudhound or two.  At least my cast of characters is complete.
• I was kind of an Ed Sheeran hater, but Photograph is just a great song.  You finally got me, you crazy ginger.

LINKS

• Interesting interview with the sixteen year old girl who survived a plane crash and 48 hours in the wilderness.
• Proof from two different continents that BMW drivers are the worst.  (Although I’m not fond of the class warfare baiting in the Times article.)
• Someone has suggested that Nessie is just a large catfish.  I have it on good authority from Bigfoot himself that Nessie is quite real.
• On this day in 1918, Bolsheviks killed Czar Nicholas II and his whole family.  Or did they?

I mentioned a while back that I used to be an EMT.  My paid EMT gig was working for an ambulance transport company.  (It is just as thrilling as it sounds.)  My unpaid EMT gig was volunteering for the local rescue squad.  That was much more entertaining.

Weekends were good for ambulance calls.  When the weekend rolls around it seems like everyone is finally ready to unleash all the bad decisions that they were holding off on making during the work week.  A lot of calls come in for drunk people, people fighting, drunk people fighting, and once in a while someone has a non alcohol or substance related emergency.  If I had to rank my favorite ever ambulance calls, the following would be number 1.

It was Saturday night, surprise surprise.  We got called to a local supermarket parking lot with the report of an unresponsive male in a car in the parking lot.  Off we went.  Sirens, lights.  (All actually just as fun as you’d think.)  We found the car with the guy in it.  Just as the report said, he was unresponsive.  He was so unresponsive that the needle was still in his arm, if I remember correctly.  One of my partners grabbed that and bagged it, and we hauled the guy out of the drivers seat and onto our stretcher.  About this time, the paramedics arrived.  Everyone piled into the back of the ambulance, and we started to head for the hospital.

Narcan is a drug that is used to counter the effects of opioids.  I watched the medics administer it, and waited for our man’s overdose to start reversing.  When the guy started to show signs of coming around, a funny thing happened.  Someone grabbed one of the flashlights in the rig, pulled the guy’s eyelids back, shined the light down, and in a very Morgan Freeman like voice said, “THIS IS THE LORD,,,,  MOVE AWAY FROM THE LIGHT.”  One of my friends later told me that because of this particular treatment, there is a former junkie turned street corner preacher in one of the local cities.  Whatever it takes.

On these kinds of ambulance calls, the cops are involved, along with everyone else.  By the time we got to the hospital, the guy was groggy, but responsive.  Our police escort got out of his car, walked up to the stretcher and said, “I know you we went to high school together.  Remember me?  You’re going to jail.”  This guy’s Sunday was now officially ruined, but at least he was going to spend it on the right side of the lawn.

Lesson #1  Herion is bad for you in many ways.

Lesson #2  Near death experiences are not to be trusted.

 

 

• My children don’t seem to properly appreciate vacation. Next summer I’m going to get them jobs.  Maybe that will provide some perspective. They’ll never complain about going to the beach every day again.  One summer, I almost got a job detassling corn. I’m pretty sure it involved me riding a bus to the fields with some borderline criminals. That was the same summer I almost got a job in a glass factory. Perspective achieved.
• Interstate 81 through Virginia was designed to dare you to fall asleep while driving.
• Having a chocolate fondue fountain at any event is a bad idea.  A fairly recent study suggests that almost 50% of people don’t wash their hands after using the restroom.  So, that chocolate fountain is just a bacteria farm waiting to happen.  Consider it a roulette wheel of stomach ailments.
• If I can find something profitable that interests my ten year old as much as Minecraft, he’s gonna be a gazzilionaire. He will talk to me for hours describing the Nether and portals and spawning stuff. When I suggest we talk about something real, he just looks at me with a “but why?” look on his face.
• Recently in West Virginia. Now there’s an intro that could go many ways. Recently in West Virginia, a man was given a citation for keeping two grown deer in his house. They basically accused him of holding the deer hostage. He explained that he had raised them from when they were little fawns. I imagine that conversation something like this.

Officer: “Sir, please let those deer out of the house so everyone can have a fair chance to shoot at them.”

Man: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s nobody here but me, Jerry, and Doug.”

Doug (deer #1): “Jerry, Jerry, JERRY. Do we have any Cheetos left?”

Jerry (deer #2): “They’re right behind the Mountain Dew and Jack Links. Open your eyes, Doug, sheesh. Oh, and bring those Jack Links in here, Ellen is about to come on.  She’s so charming.”

• The Grateful Dead just played their final show. I am grateful.
• I recently came across a list of musical artists who all hated their biggest hit song. Isn’t that kind of like Usain Bolt hating his feet?  To quote David Spade.   “Be quiet and sing the song. Just like it is on the album. No messing around.”

LINKS

• A guy is walking 650 miles to Comicon, wearing full stormtrooper gear.
• It’s Nikola Tesla’s birthday.  Here’s a short bio.
• We officially have three new National Monuments.
• Vacation horror stories from the editors of Frommer’s.

I’m back from vacation.  Contrary to the rumors, I did not join a doomsday cult.  I am in the process of organizing one.  Fake religions can be quite lucrative.

When flying to your vacation destination, nothing is more enjoyable than the airport security line gauntlet.  It used to be that the rules were the same for everyone.  Take the computer out of your bag, take your shoes off, don’t have any keys or coins in your pocket.  Now it’s different everywhere you go.  In fact, it’s different at multiple spots within the same airport.  At one line they’re like, “Hey, what are you doing?  Why are you taking your shoes off?”  At another one it’s, “Put that computer back in the bag, what are you, dumb?”  One line over it’s, “Sir please remove your shirt and shorts.  Then we’re gonna need you to do ten pushups while we frisk you and rearrange the contents of your carry-on.”  None of this actually makes you any safer.  It just frustrates you.

The line for security on the return leg of your trip is invariably worse.  Gone is the excitement and anticipation of getting to your destination.  Nope.  Now you’re just on the way home.  If the vacation was a good one, you’re tired and maybe a little sunburned and you just want to sit down.  Everyone else in line feels the same way.  It’s even worse if you’re in line with an annoying person.

On this last vacation, the annoying guy in line was “frat guy who is too old to still be frat guy.”  There he was in his dress shorts and polo shirt.  He had many little and loud comments that were supposed to be amusing for the whole crowd.  When we were halfway through line, I finally realized who he reminded me of.  Troy, the preppie bad dude from The Goonies.  I started to giggle.  I told my wife.  “Hey look, it’s Troy from The Goonies.  His dad’s gonna tear down the Goon docks and build a country club.  What a jerk.”  She also found this funny.  We spent the rest of our time in line quietly yelling,  “Andy, you goonie!”

There it is.  My suggestion on how to make your security line experience better.  Find someone in line who looks like the villain from a classic 80’s movie and mercilessly make fun of them with quotes from the film.  It works.

I was a painter.  Not a painter who created masterpieces.  A housepainter.  It was one of my college jobs.  The guy I worked for was one of the nicest bosses you could ever have.  My schedule was flexible, and let’s be honest, it’s not terribly hard work.  The worst part is the cleanup.

It was my second year at the school, and since I was on the baseball team, I had gotten to know some of the people in the athletic department.  They had told me that there was a job available in the gymnasium.  To me, this sounded a lot better than painting for another year.  So, I made up my mind to take the gym job.  I just had to tell my boss in the painting department that I was quitting.  Or did I.  I am  non-confrontational to a fault.  If everyone on earth was like me, we would have no world wars.  We would probably all go out of our way to avoid each other.  Also, the only food to exist would be Mexican.  Anyway, I decided to just not put myself on the schedule at the paint department.  In short, I never told anyone I was quitting.

The first week or so at the gym went pretty well.  Then they told me that I was going to be put on a new project.  Painting the racquetball courts.  Great, more painting.  I was sent over to the old racquetball courts, and guess who was there.  Yes, my old boss, who didn’t know that he was my old boss.  He thought that he was my current boss, and that he was there to meet an athletic department employee who he was going to teach to paint.  So ensued one of the more awkward conversations I have ever had.  It involved me explaining that I had more or less quit, and then him telling me what to do at my new job.

I spent a lot of time in those courts, listening to the radio, climbing the scaffolding with a bucket of paint and a roller.  It was probably cosmic justice that I quit a painting job in the worst possible way, only to move on to another painting job.  Me and my old boss ended up being fine.  I was lucky.  Like I said, he was a really good dude.

I am still not sure how this happened.  When my wife and I were in college, we got roped into being counselors for a weekend youth retreat.  It went like this.

Staff:  “Hey, do you guys want to go up to the camp for the weekend?”

Us:  “I don’t know, will there be free food?”  (which is still a main criteria for me)

Staff:  “Yeah, there is a big youth get together.”

Us:  “OK”

Then when we got there.

Staff:  “Oh, by the way, pick one of these cabins full of smelly teenagers.  You’re in charge of them for several days.”

Us:  “Huh???  There had better be free food.”

I was not happy.  The second night that we were there, we went to the cafeteria for dinner, and, if I remember correctly, I was not a pleasure to be around.  I grumbled through the meal and when we were done, I grabbed our trays and tossed the leftovers into the trash.

At this time in her life, my adorable future wife had a retainer.  When she ate, she would take it out and put it in a napkin next to her plate.  Now you may get where this is going.  When I threw out the trash that was on those trays, I also threw out her retainer.  She was already not happy with me for being grumpy.  Now she was really not happy with me.  By the time we realized what had happened, they had already changed the bags in the trash cans and thrown the full bags in a pile with a bunch of other full bags (it was like the opening scenes of Wall-E).  We did the only thing we could do.  We dove into those bags and started sorting.  Dental stuff is expensive.  After about half an hour and several full bags of trash, we still hadn’t found anything.  I was getting desperate, because this was my fault.  We prayed.  Not a normal, “Hey God, it would be nice if you could help us find this thing.”  No, we we said, “God, please help us find this thing within the next ten minutes.”  The very next bag that we looked in, there it was.  We gave it a bleach bath and that thing was good as almost new.

The last night of that youth retreat, it snowed.  There was a big snowball fight in the common area of the camp.  The one thing I remember about that snowball fight was hitting a girl square in the face by accident, and then trying to blend in quickly with everyone else so she wouldn’t figure out who threw it.

The next day we went home.  I never trusted the staff again.

LINKS

• It looks like our friends north of the demilitarized zone have found the cures for MERS, ebola, and AIDS.
• The Travel Channel’s list of the top ten Caribbean beaches.  I’ve only been to two.  Time to get cracking.
• The Simpsons predicted the Cardinals scandal years ago.  Here is the proof.
• We took the kids to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.  (One item off of this summer’s attainable bucket list.)  This was my first time to Ellis Island, and it was cool to stand somewhere that was part of the “largest mass human migration in the history of the world.”

• When someone says something like.  “People are just going to have to accept me for who I am.”  Or.  “I’m just keeping it real.”  What they really mean is.  “I’m going to act exactly how I feel like acting, with no regard for other people.”  Example.  “Those are some ugly shoes.  Just keeping it real.”  No.  You aren’t keeping it real.  You are keeping it adolescent.
• Every day I used to wake up and feel just like Phineas and Ferb.  Yeah, today is going to be a great day.  I’m going to accomplish something awesome.  My kids have finally beaten me down.  Now I wake up and say, “What am I going to do today? I’ll tell you what.  I’m going to take care of breakfast, lunch and dinner.  I’m going to be the referee in at least 12 kid fights.  I’m going to avoid any trips to the emergency room.  I’m going to use an hour of my life making sure the boys clean their room.  I’m going to try to do one thing for myself, and get interrupted about 16 times.  At the end of the day I’m going to sit there and realize that they’re still my favorite people.”
• Mosquitoes are nature’s way of making the outdoors less crowded for me.  Thanks nature.
• Since it’s now cool to identify as whatever you feel like you should be.  I would like to make it known that I identify as a lottery winner.  I’ve always felt like I should be one.  I am a lottery winner born into a middle class body.
• Last night the kids went to bed at a decent time.  The Pirates game was over early.  I thought, “I’m going to bed early tonight.”  And……. then I stayed up till Jimmy Fallon was over.
• I don’t know if any of you have ever seen this meme.  —-   “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.  Except for bears, bears will kill you.”  Think about that for a minute and realize that it makes absolutely no sense.
• I already mentioned Phineas and Ferb in this post, but I just wanted to say how bummed I was that the show came to an end this weekend.  The simple fact that Dora the Explorer is still on, and they aren’t, proves that this is a cruel, cruel world.
• The next time that something gets you down, or you are just frustrated.  Remember that there are seven,,,,,,count them,,,,,,seven Fast and Furious movies.  Life is absurd, and it’s all small stuff.