The road trip (to Detroit, to see Bruce Springsteen with a Bruce-fanatic good old friend [B-FGOF]) started off witnessing, not two miles from home, a car with an Ohio license plate--CA N8VE. Now let alone my disdain for vanity plates (which could fill up a week's worth of regular blogging; though my favorite is still my Classics Ph.D friend's fantasy plate--UBI SUM, which is Latin for "Where Am I?"), what's the point of giving the government extra money to flaunt your California native status in, of all places, Ohio? According to wakipedia, the phrase, "who gives a rat's ass?" was actually coined by a fella from the Collinwood neighborhood of Cleveland when, in a smoky bar back in the 1960s, he heard someone down the bar start some kind of argument with another patron with the introductory clause, "Well, being a native of California, I ... " Know thy place, man. I didn't invade the State Up North (i.e. Michigan) bedecked in BrownsBuckeyeTribe gear, because I respect geography; so don't make left hand turns in front of me without signalling first on my native Cleveland streets when you're allegedly boasting (fail) to me that you're originally from California. If I had better auto insurance, I would have rammed the car.
Used to be road trips called for unwieldy unfold-'em-one-time-and-never-fold-'em-back-properly road maps. Times have changed, I guess. We had barely merged onto our first highway to Detroit when B-FGOF turns to me in all seriousness, as he hands me some gadget that looked like a long-forgotten transistor radio I treasured, and says, "Do you know how to use a SmartPhone?" Good God how times have changed. Wasn't it just yesterday that the macho test of road trip readiness was when the driver handed his passenger a "fuzz buster" and asked him if he knew how to operate it? Do you know how to use a SmartPhone? Like I might be dumber than a phone? Like I'm grandpa who hasn't yet heard of the telegraph? Granted, B-FGOF is younger than I, but only by two years, so this wasn't some kind of inter-generational technology tutorial. It was intra- I tell you, strictly intra-! Suffice it to say that by the time we hit the outskirts of Toledo (a mere 90 minutes) and had to start worrying about merging onto another highway Up North, I had a good grip on the not so SmartPhone and we made it to The Promised Land of Auburn Hills, MI with little difficulty. Up yours, Mr. Steve Jobs, may you rest in peace, and get a decent shave.
Bruce was amazing, despite the six hours out of seven I spent standing in confined spaces. If you've got a little excess of cynicism in your life, pay the money and go see the Boss--he'll flush your system. He might not do it night after night year after year, but I think with James Brown six feet under for a few years now, we can officially crown Bruce the new Hardest Working Man In Show Business. And I must say, I've never been around a more polite crowd of people at a concert than I was at the Bruce show. I know that statement--even the fact that I noticed such a thing--should immediately bar me from attending any more rock concerts in this life, but it's true.
Taxes. I think the reason they make filling out the forms so complicated, convoluted, and confusing, is that by the time you've finally finished them with some modicum of confidence that you did so properly, you're so happy with yourself (show me a SmartPhone that can handle Schedule D, and I'll be duly impressed) that the fact that you owe as much as you do doesn't seem to matter at all. Besides, I like peanut butter.
Work. Some boy around eight years old comes up to me looking for books on hamsters the other day. I take him to the kids' "pets" shelf and start combing through the skinny books, looking for one or two on hamsters. Who knew so many different animals qualify as pets these days? I start naming all the animals that have books about them, sensing that there might be no hamster books here and hoping the kid will forget about those rodents and be instantly excited about iguanas or ferrets. "I don't know," I tell the kid as I near the end of a shelf with no hamster books to be had, "we've got books about every animal on the Ark here except hamsters. They must be hiding from us." The kid, ever hopeful and ever literal as all eight-year-olds are, exclaims, "Trust me! Every time my two hamsters get loose they go right underneath the stove!" Made my day.
Scribbles. Every once in a while I take part in a writing workshop with some homeless men. Yesterday was great. Some of my doodles from the afternoon: "Yes, I said 'no.'" "I know how you is." "Incessantly incestuous." "A musical comedy version of Deliverance." "The part of Cadillac will be played tonight by Datsun."
Fantasy. I watched two old Bogart-Bacall movies this past week, The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. Priceless. Forget the great whistle line--when Bacall shimmied out the bar over to Bogie at the end of Have Not, I almost had to call the ER to have my jaw re-set. Then last night I saw We Need To Talk About Kevin. Wonderful, disturbing movie. But Tilda Swinton. My God, what a masterpiece.
Fantasy baseball. Two weeks into the season, and just this morning I figured out how the points work. Maybe now I'll be able to massage my lineup to move up in the standings from the seventh to tenth place (out of ten teams) ghetto it's been languishing in. Who knew my life would come to obsessing about how someone named Omar Infante does wielding a wooden stick night after night.
Time to cut the lawn and get back to an unblurred life.
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