Driving me mad

While driving to Clearwater, FL from Gainesville, FL on February 27, 2010, I got to thinking about the makeup of the people on the road. I got to thinking, and came up with this list of stereotypical Interstate drivers. I’m sure there are more, and if I think of them in the future, I’ll add them here.

The Scout. If you’re in a hurry, the Scout is of utmost importance. Generally, when people who are comfortable with speeding are on the Interstate, they tend to form “packs” of multiple marauders that rove the asphalt countryside, bypassing weaker commuters and leaving them in a cloud of dust. To do this, each pack tacitly designates a temporary leader to act as a wedge and forge the path between tractor-trailers, wide loads, and senior citizens who are unaware that their Buick can, in fact, hit 70 miles per hour. Of course, with great responsibility comes great risk: it is the Scout’s responsibility not only to clear the way for the pack, but also to keep a keen eye out for the fuzz. Since the Scout is usually the fastest traveler of the bunch, he runs the risk of being cited for his sacrifice. Sometimes, the system isn’t fair. (Note: On long-term voyages, the burden of being a Scout should be shared between pack members. Every 25-35 miles sounds about right.)

The Pace Car. You may be in a rickety old Ford Escort on a two lane turnpike between Uncasville and Norwichtown, but this guy’s in the pace car on the 497^th lap of the Daytona 500. He knows that the second he pulls away from the long line of angry automobiles, the race to a green-white-checkered finish will begin with a roar. Until then, though, you’re stuck behind this guy and the truck he’s trying to pass in the right lane. Unfortunately for all involved, you’ll be waiting a while – both the Pace Car and the truck it’s trying to pass are cruising along at what seems like 12 miles per hour.

The Self Righteous Trucker. Some states have laws that forbid semi trucks from entering the left lane, but these laws assume you’re driving down a highway with more than two lanes. Those unlucky souls who are given the choice between only a pair of lanes, however, are bound to meet the Self Righteous Trucker. To fully understand the Self Righteous Trucker, though, it is important to get inside his head:

“Hm, the truck ahead of me is going approximately .00000000000323 miles per hour slower than I’d like to go.”

The trucker looks to his left and sees nothing. In his rear view mirror, he sees a rapidly approaching car, traveling approximately 35 miles per hour faster than he’d like to go.

“Oh well, I can make it. They’re my roads too, damn it.”

The trucker merges left and takes the span of 4.3 miles to pass his nemesis in the right lane.

The Eagle Eye. Even though the nickname might cause you to respect the Eagle Eye, don’t fall into that trap. As the Eagle Eye drives along, he makes it a point to remain abnormally vigilant for any sign of police presence: “The flashing sign 3 miles ahead in the dead of night? I don’t want him to know I’m going 2 miles per hour over she speed limit – better slam on my brakes!”

The Weaver. In order to qualify as a Weaver, you must fulfill three requirements: (1) you must own a motorcycle; (2) you must be in a traffic jam; and (3) you must be an incredible douchebag. Weaving occurs when these aforementioned douchebags weave between lanes (emergency lane included) of stopped traffic. I understand that splitting lanes is legal in California’s stop-and-go expressway traffic, but the lion’s share of Americans, contrary to popular belief, are from places other than California. So as I, an upstanding and patriotic citizen am inconvenienced to the point that I must listen to yet another installation of NPR News in my motionless automobile, the Weaver is rewarded for his brazen behavior. I guess this falls under the category of life not being fair.

The Police Impersonator. Unlike the Weaver, the Police Impersonator is not characterized as a moron because of a conscious decision to be a moron. The Police Impersonator is a moron because of his uninformed choice of automobile. Rather than choosing a painted, newer model car, the Police Impersonator purchased an old police cruiser at auction. But despite the inexpensive price tag, he’s paying for his decision, all right: now, wherever the Police Impersonator goes, he will invariably be stuck in never ending traffic caused by the inaccurate perception of others on the road that this is a police officer. (Note that the Police Impersonator is a touchy subject – some people are required by law or employment to drive these terrible vehicles. Some folks can’t help it.)

I’m one of these types of drivers. I’ll let you guess which one.

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A relic from the archives

When I was a sophomore in high school, my parents thought it completely acceptable to let me leave the house wearing this:

Taken at the Aftermath Yearbook banquet, circa 2004

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Funeral for a friend

My neighbor, Gary, died a few weeks ago. When last we visited Gary on this fair blog, he was a fifty-something mailman who lived with his mother and rode his Harley for an hour each week. In the time since I penned – with very questionable sentence structure, I might add – my piece, Gary retired, sold his bike, and buried his mother.

Last weekend, we buried him. Figuratively, of course, since he was cremated, but I want to tell the story of his funeral because I’d hate for my lasting memory of his life to be a vague and fading recollection tucked away in the recesses of my mind. So, here it is.

I remember the night Gary died. It was a Saturday in January. He had only been really sick for a week, and I took that at a testament to how he liked to do things: efficiently, without making a big production of things. Only a couple days before, I came home from school in the afternoon to find hundreds, if not a thousand, large black crows flying in the crisp winter air above my block. I don’t think this was necessarily an omen, but later that day the ambulance was called out to his home for what would be the second-to-last time.

It arrived again long after nightfall that Saturday. I, like the nosy neighbor from Bewitched, watched as the anticlimactic drama unfolded. All in all, a small army of emergency response vehicles showed up: an ambulance, two large fire rescue trucks, a fire rescue pickup truck, and three police cruisers that stayed until after I dozed off. After all, I had church in the morning.

The service was on a Saturday a couple of weeks after he died. Given his lifetime of public service and his tendency to be an old school kind of guy, it was held at the local VFW post, only a couple of blocks from where we live.

Now, I had never been in a VFW before this. As a kid, I would always pass by the building and be amazed that a gigantic cannon could sit outside, exposed to the elements, and no one would try to fire it. It was a mythical place: I had no idea what went on inside there, but it must have been important.

The lodge is split into two main rooms: a hall where Lt. Dan can win a four corners payoff on his bingo card, and a canteen where he can invest his hard-earned winnings in the finest American beers. Late in the morning, everyone arrived and was ushered into the canteen, since student speakers of some sort were speaking to representatives from the State Department. I wish I could have listened to what they had to say.

As we stood in the corner of the smoke-filled canteen, I noticed that behind the veil of coziness, the canteen was in many ways a product of the protocol-driven forces that inhabited it. There were no barstools in this place; the bar itself sat no higher than a common desk to accommodate wheelchair-bound veterans. On the walls (and bar, and windows, and hanging from the ceiling) were signs declaring the bartender’s authority: “If the bartender asks you to leave,” one read, “you have five minutes to comply or 30 days to think about it!” Near the entrance of the canteen hung numerous postings of the rules of the house – chief among them the fact that you must be a member to purchase alcohol. The carpet was the industrial, textureless kind that you see in government buildings. The ceiling tiles were stained yellow from decades of smoking. This was the most American place in which I had ever been.

I’m not sure if it was a response to the smoky atmosphere of the canteen, but as we waited for the State Department to clear out from the bingo hall, some people migrated to the parking lot. There, Gary’s coworkers from the post office gathered, many of them wearing their USPS uniforms, as they were merely taking a break from the never ending postal delivery cycle. Gary’s biker buddies also showed en masse (they were the ones who looked like varying degrees of Santa Claus). After nearly an hour, we were corralled into the bingo hall for the service.

Now, the only funerals I had ever been to were in churches. So when I entered the hall, I was expecting to see some makeshift pew system, perhaps composed of a couple hundred chairs in rows. What I encountered was almost the polar opposite: rather than a bunch of chairs assembled facing the front of the room, there was a large, open area in the center of the room, presumably for when the VFW holds its heavily-anticipated singles dances. (I’ve always wanted to see how these events go, but since I’m not a veteran I assume they will remain a great mystery for the rest of my life. A pity.)

Around the periphery of this open space were old wooden tables, each with four plastic chairs. Beyond these tables were long banquet tables arranged against three walls of the room. This was no setup for a funeral, I thought, but who was I to complain? It’s how they did things here, after all.

As the crowd milled about, the service began when the local VFW Chaplain (who, by sheer coincidence, was a family friend) queued up a recording of Taps on the large wooden console at the front of the room. Then, Gary’s brother Steve was asked to say a few words about the man who has always cared for him and his family. There, below the large, unlit bingo board that hung on the wall behind him, Steve broke down.

One letter carrier got up to speak to the room full of grown men drinking bottles of beer and smoking their fifth cigarette. “I sure hope no one is waiting for their mail today,” he said, “because you’ll be waiting for a while. We’re all here.”

While we listened to the service, the color guard shuffled in. A geriatric militia complete with white gloves and black berets, this group of septuagenarians displayed an amazing amount of respect for a ritual they had undoubtedly practiced hundreds of times. We marched back out to the parking lot for the last part of our goodbye to Gary.

One member of the guard, rigid with respect and sincerity, presented a crisply folded American flag to Steve. Another member, after fiddling for a few seconds with a phony bugle that played the same recording of Taps we heard in the bingo hall, stood with the instrument to his lips for a half minute. Three members of the firing squad then shot forth into the suburban sunlight three shells each.

And Gary was gone.

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This post was not written in the form of a question

Tonight, for the second time in as many days, IBM’s Watson will battle the brains of a couple of the best Jeopardy! contestants of all time, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

I’ve been reading about this for months now. For some reason, I subscribed to Forbes in late 2010 and their story about artificial mind power on syndicated television game shows is the only thing from the publication I’ve read to date. Turns out I’m not really a Forbes kind of guy. Surprise, right?

Anyhow, all of this talk of digital daily doubles got me thinking: Who (or what, as it were) should I root for? Humans? Robots? It’s an epic clash of man and machine.

On the one hand, to root against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter would be traitorous to my own kind. On the other, if Watson can eke out a victory against the best of the best, it will prove the technological prowess of our species. But is it acceptable to cheer progress, even if it is at the expense of real men?

After thinking about where my priorities are, however, I came to a conclusion: I can’t stand human Jeopardy! contestants. From their obnoxious little mannerisms to their uninteresting and tedious personal stories after the first commercial break, there are few players I can actually tolerate. And when Ken Jennings was on for 74 days in a row? It was like watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island: you know how it’s going to end, but it’s 7:30, I just ate, and the remote’s all the way over there. A recipe for disaster.

The computer doesn’t have any of those characteristics. No personal quirks, no faux humility, no propensity to be an annoying sack of bones. It’s for this reason – not because of the wonderment of a technological tomorrow – that I hereby endorse Watson in this contest.

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Unlike other prerequisite reading, the bookstores can’t rob you blind on this one

So, having not updated WordPress for fear of mucking up the works behind-the-scenes of this website, the works got mucked supremely this weekend. On Friday, I first noticed the blank page of death. Something must have been wrong with the database.

After a few hours of exporting, importing, and general nerdery, the site is back up and looking better than ever. However, before I could walk away I had to go through and reassign hyperlinks in over seven years of posts. As I was doing this, I realized something.

If you publicly blog over a period of years, you essentially assign homework to any legitimate prospective spouse. I don’t feel I would be completely comfortable spending my life with another person if she hadn’t read my every inconsequential rambling. Long-term blogging acts as full disclosure and a way for others to see how you’ve developed over time, both academically and in terms of the opinions you hold. It’s required reading.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Happy Valentine’s Day, kids.

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As they revolve in the Middle East, I resolve not to feast

I have intentionally neglected to write about this until now, for fear that I would peter out two weeks in and have my words come back to haunt my dreams. Now that a month has passed, however, I reckon it’s time to codify this so I can hold myself accountable going forward.

On December 31, 2010, I was browsing my seven years(!) worth of blog entries. One in particular called out to me. Holy crap, I used to weigh 140 pounds? I was little more than a biological paperweight. A bit too skinny, if you ask me. So, I embarked upon a devil-may-care diet consisting mostly of pure grease and self loathing.

Well, six years and 70(!) pounds later, I began to rethink my decision to kneel at the altar of hedonism. After all, I figured, it probably wasn’t helping my prospects of having full intercourse with a woman in this lifetime. Luckily for me, I came to this revelation during resolution season. In the month since I decided not to fill my arteries with pure mayonnaise and doughnut glaze, I’ve lost 10 pounds (I think – I am too cheap to buy a scale, so I weigh myself weekly at the grocery store). I may have passed back onto the right side of 200, which would be a first since about two years ago.

Not that anyone reads this much anymore (I don’t fault you; I rarely update and when I do, it’s senseless drivel that the Internet would probably do better without), but I just wanted to put this out there. That way, if (when) I revert to my old habits, I can look back to this public admission of intent and perhaps regain some perspective on the whole weight issue.

The bikini calendar photo shoot is next week. Wish me luck.

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