Days 2 & 3 -- Stick a Fork in Me

Day 2 -- I feel like shit.

Day 3 -- Woke up in lovely Lake City, Florida to misting rain and grey skies. I should have taken heed and gone back to bed. Little did I know how totally one guy could screw up in one day. On my Road Trip in Sept/Oct '07, I lost my car keys in the Mall of America -- and got them back; left 12 DVD's and a library book in a motel in Wisconsin; left my computer power cord in Utah (replacement cost $127); and left my car keys at the golf course in Colorado -- and got them back again. I made fun of myslef in my blog and shrugged it off.

Well, I guess I have moved up to the absent mindedness Hall of Fame. Let me give you the setting in which I am writng this and you'll start to get the picture. I am sitting in my room on the 30th floor of the Westin in Hollywood, Florida and the cruise ship Fascination is making it way to Nassau. What I pulled today certainly qualifies as a cluster fuck.

I had about 375 miles to drive to the Port of Miami. I was driving fast as always, but stopping frequently and in no big hurry. Plenty of time. As I cruise down the Florida Turnpike at 85 watching cars blow by me like I was traveling the speed limit or something, a thought popped into my mind. Did I bring my passort? Is it possible that I have been driving for two and a half days feeling like shit and I don't have my passport with me? Afraid so, dumbass! I FORGOT MY FUCKIN PASSPORT!

I'm feeling nauseous, but then I give my self one of those "you're a corporate lawyer and former executive, you can find a way around this" pep talks. I call the lovely Molly (not her real name) at singlescruise.com and we discuss it -- she thinks I said I'm thirty miles from the docks, not 130 miles, so I've got time. She says go down there and plead your case. OK, might as well. I come up with an idea -- a lame one -- what if my son Rob gets my passport and photocopies it and makes a sworn statement that it's a true copy, blah, blah, blah, and faxes it to Immigration. I call Molly back. I tell her my idea -- she says maybe it will work -- we both know it won't -- and she asks me where I am. 117 miles from the Port. "Jim, you should be there. The ship departs at 4:00!" "No, way. It departs at 6:00!" I WAS TWO HOURS LATE!

There were more phone calls to the Travel Hotline ans so forth but that was it. Three college degrees and I can't remember shit. And the hell of it is, I had a 4:00 departure on my Outlook calendar and I changed it to 6:00!

So here I sit trying to make lemonade out of this. . . Well when I got back last October, I said I would probably go on another road trip in Feb to somewhere warm. I guess I'm doing that.

Unbelievable!

Tommorow I rest and relax and figure out Plan B.

Ann Arbor to Nassau to who knows where.

Monday in southeast Michigan it was about 40 degrees. Last night (Tues) the wind howled and blew and kept me awake until 3:00AM. Three and a half hours later I awoke to a 6 degree temperate and winds. What a perfect day to leave town and head south. So I'm on my way to Miami to hop a cruise ship to Nassau.

I'm in Knoxville -- I'm breaking the drive into three legs -- where it's 39 degrees at 7:30PM. Feels tropical already. Tomorrow I'll stop in Gainesville and then Friday to Miami and aboard ship. So that means today and tomorrow are going to be really boring -- and I'm sick -- and I need to come up with something to write about that's a little entertaining or interesting. I guarantee that there will be plenty of material about my fellow singles and the cruise.

I have six audio books with me and I finshed one today and started a second one. The first is Triptych by Karin Slaughter. It's a murder mystery, of course -- about 98% of what I listen to is. It passed the most important test of an audiobook -- a good reader. I think the guy's name is Michael Caldwell. The hero is a Georgia state cop who is dyslectic and reads at a second grade level and, of course, covers it up. It's entertaining if unspectacular. Being a sucker for romance and believable happy endings, I was pleased that our hero and his life long vice cop lover ended up together. BTW I have no idea what Triptych is.


I started one of Donald E. Westlake's Dortmunder novels that I have listened to before. Don't remember the name. Cooincidentially it's the same reader. It's entertaining and lightweight and the plot is creative. -- If you want to have a book ruined, have Tony Roberts read it. You know, the guy who's in a bunch of Woody Allen movies. He sounds like he's doing a lame assed immitation of James Gagney. I expected him to say "all right, youse guys" at any moment.


Here's three obscure movies that you'll like. German, Spanish and English. The German movie is Vitus. It's the story of a wonderkin at the ages of six and twelve and the way he copes with his genius IQ, his parents and his grandfather. The two child actors who play Vitus (pronounced Vee tus) are charming and believable. If you don't want to just hug the six year old, you are heartless. The Spanish film is Quinceanera -- which is the fifteen birthday celebration for a hyspanic girl. It's written and directed by an American and Englishman who are gay -- "not that's there's anything wrong with that" -- who attended a quinceanera in their neighborhood. The cast is all hyspanic unknowns. I will only say that the plot revolves around a scientifically explainable immaculate conception. Finally there's Interview with Steve Buscemi and Sienna Miller. The dialog is really smart.


My first career (of four) was as a middle school scince teacher -- this was in the early and mid seventies. I loved classroom teaching, I was very well liked and I was good at what I did. But I did some uncoventional things to keep life entertaining - to me at least. The kids may have thought of it as tortue. In 1969 I graduated with a B.S. in zoology and not a clue. I had never taken an education couse but I got a teaching job and a draft deferral. I taught physical science to ninth graders in Xenia, Ohio. My class room was about sixty years old and had no lab tables. To break up the monotiny I'd do shit to entertain the kids. For example, I found an old static electricity generator in the supply room -- you know, it's one of those things that has a belt you crank and it builds up a charge on the gold ball electrodes and makes a big spark when you discharge it. But wait! You can also discharge it by touching the two electrodes in which case it shocks the shit out of you. Or better yet, you can make the whole class join hands and have one kid (or me) grab one electrode and then make a human chain and when the last kid grabs the other electrode -- zap, you get a big assed jolt. So for yuks, I got my first period to do it and it really shocked us enough to make your arm jolt upwards. For second period I refined my act. I had them stand up and I cranked a big assed charge into the machine and told them to hold hands. They knew what was coming and the girls (and guys?) started screaming "No, Mr. B. No". Naturally I said "Shut up and hold hands." The results were even more shocking.


And finally, for now, the other highlight of that year was blowing up the classroom. Again I was putzing through the supply room forsomething to entertain with and I found some solid sodium pellets. They're pretty caustic and if you drop the in water they spin around in a circle and pop. I said to myself, "this should kill about five minutes of lecture time." Again I started with first period and refined my act. Third period comes along and I show them how this stuff works by dropping a few pellets in a big coffee can of water and they go "swirl, swirl, swirl - puff!" The kids decide to goad me on. "More, Mr. B. More." Sure why not. I drop maybe a tablespoon full in the coffe can and it starts to froth and smoke and then . . . BOOM! It fucking explodes! The entire room is full of smoke. The kids are screaming. I'm yelling "Shut up and open the windows." The next day a girl comes to me and says she got some on her hand and it burned a hole through her dress . . . and mom is not happy. Oops.



Please remember I was 22, full of crap and wanted to be popular and entertaining. The end . . . for now.
[I apologize for the misspellings, but the spell checker isn't working.]

February is the meanest month

It's almost February in Michigan which means it's time to get out of town. No airplanes for me anymore, I'm ready to jump in the beemer. By the time I return from this new excursion, I'll have 70,000 miles on it after 27 months. The trade in value will be 12 cents but no matter I'm getting a 535i in June. Manual transmission of course. When I left off in October I had just returned from a three week, 15 state cruise and figured that I would be driving to Arizona in January/February. Then on an impulse I remembered that I had really enjoyed my first cruise (on a ship, of course) and that I might do that instead. So last Friday I called to book it and this Friday I leave from Miami for Nassau. And making a road trip out of it as well. Did I mention is a singles cruise? I don't want to jinx myself but the first one was an over-40 singles cruise and:(1) most of them were way over 40; and (2) there were at least three times as many women as men -- any most of the men weren't Sean Connery lookalikes.

By the way, it's a bit past midnight which is the perfect time to write a blog. (I never could have imagined using the phrase "writing a blog" a year ago. ) Blog is such an unpleasant sounding word. In my mergers and acquisitions days -- you know, before the earring -- I first heard the word accretive. Isn't that ugly and doesn't it sound like it isn't a real word? Actually the spell checker doesn't even recognize it. How about cacophony? You are no doubt asking yourself what about pleasant sounding words. Melody? What do you think?

After thousands of hours of playing super solitaire games on the computer -- spider, forty thieves, blondes and brunettes, curds and whey, etc. -- and spending a grand total of about three minutes surfing, I have discovered the "social utilities" myspace.com and facebook.com, along with the age-appropriate babyboomerspeoplemeet.com. These are so much better than the online dating services -- especially the dreaded and dreadful eharmony. Speaking of which, how the hell to they get away with discriminating based on values and religion. Don't they use federal lines of communication? Would someone please nail their asses? Sorry. . . Myspace.com is the creepiest yet most fascinating place. I have been telling people that there is so much misrepresentation and counter-misrepresentation to combat the deliberate misrepresentation, that it seems like I'm the only dumbshit who actually has a factual profile. Actually that's a complete dramatization as the gecko would say. And of course to me it's only a self serve dating service --I have no idea how to get songs and other stuff. On the other hand, facebook.com is the in service with people who are young enough to be my children (and are) and it's locked down tighter than a drum. So after working with computers every day since 1979 -- no shit -- I have finally become a peruser of the Internet. Finally, may I say that my eighteen year old son hates that I use these services -- he refuses to accept me as a friend on facebook -- and wants me to behave like a normal retired person. Which I assume means buy some white shiny loafers, pull my pants up to my nipples and move to Boca.

I leave Wednesday (Jan. 30) for the south, so I'll be writing each day. I hope it's mildy entertaining. I leave you with the words of Lewis Black: "MTV is to music what KFC is to chicken."

Saturday

Sitting at Panera people watching. My idea of a social life. I used to come here every day (almost) for lunch but how many bowls of chicken soup can one guy eat? So for some reason beyond my comprehension I started going to Alex's Family Restaurant. If you live in metro Detroit you know about all these "koney island" type restaurants which serve Greek salads and gyros and breakfast stuff, etc. They are usually run by immigrants and feature simple food and cheap prices. OK, that's what Alex's is. It took me maybe a nanosecond after entering to be greeted by Jodie with a big smile. It took me about ten more minutes to realize that the food was miserable, but cheap. So in short time I came to know Amber, Lisa, Kisha, Marie, Tabitha (That's right!), Dawn and Amy. For a short while there was some internal back biting because Maria was spending too much time sitting with me and she told me not to talk to other waitresses, etc. Maria is from Bulgaria and I really have this attraction to foreign women. It's not hard to understand why -- intelligent people who have learned English as a second language always have better grammer than most Americans. I relish good grammer. And ESL speakers are anxious to learn and I am happy to help them. It took me about 20 seconds to teach a friend what a double negative was and why it's incorrect. Two thirds of the hillbillies around her couldn't begin to understand the same thing.

So why am I back at Panera? Number One: you can only take so much bad cheap food. Number Two: Everything runs it course (and Maria is married.) And oh yes, reason three: the customers are a different type person than you run into at Alex's. Not better or worse, just different. You know me well enough to know that people watching and checking out the women present are the same thing for me. But, just like at the fitness club, it doesn't mean that I have figured out how you turn a nice smile in your direction into a conversation.

On to other more mysterious topics. What do you make of those comments to my posting about Cancun on12/10/07? The comments are from Anonymous. Little miss anonymous claims to have seen me at the hotel. How the fuck does she (he?) know who I am? Me thinks this is someone who knows me and is fucking with me. This is like myspace.com revisited. There are creeps and scam artists all over that site -- but at least you can browse for interesting people. Interesting could mean bizarre or whatever. My own daughter claims to live New York on myspace and I know many women omit or change information to protect themselves -- a fine idea but it makes it hard to distinguish the real from the scam artists. I've had a dozen or so messages from profile who appear to be young females in provocative poses who want to be "friends".

Remember that there are posers like me and there are FBI -- full blown Italians. Regrettably my mother is not Italian so I can never be a made man. One of life's tragedies.

Let me know what you think about Miss Anonymous. For a laugh, my profile is www.myspace.com/jimbarce.