Saturday, March 31, 2007

I received a very welcomed e-mail from a longtime college buddy the other day. He writes often. Most of the time, the to-and-fro are nothing more than e-speak brevity. That's much of what we lob back-and-forth. He's one of two Beatles fanatic friends from Phoenix whom I pointed out earlier that hadn't listened to the "Love" cd when I asked him about it.

Last week he wrote from some pub somewhere in Central Dublin to tell me that he was just sitting there and toasting the good times with some strangers. Wishing that I was there. I briefly wrote back that there is this gadfly barfly in central Dublin named Reggie. I can't remember his last name. He owes me one from when the soccer World Cup was held here in the USA in 1994. TP said he looked high and low, but he couldn't find Reggie, the hooligan with the cleft-palette, from Central Dublin. People knew him, but he couldn't be found while he was there. Too bad.

Anyway, he wrote a couple of days ago and tells me that he's coming to New York on business next week and wants to hang and party on two evenings. I told Wifey about it.

She instinctly said, "I'll get a baby sitter". "Geepers, I didn't think that you'd be interested in making the trip into town for TP", I said. "Sorry, you two aren't hanging around by yourselves.", she added.

I don't kinda' blame her and she would be a welcomed addition, however. If Wifey had friends from college suddenly summon her, and I knew those friends to be like TP, I'd feel a little strange about it.

I truly consider myself very fortunate to have these few long time friendships that I have. Do I have an unhealthy propensity to regress to back to an unattainable point of my life by continuing to nurture friendships forged back in my teen's and twenty's? Would it be considered unhealthy for them to reciprocate?

Off hand, I cannot name a contemporary friend of mine who has college buddies call out of the blue. Wifey has none. We bought the home we have BECAUSE of a college buddy of mine calling me out of the blue after not having heard about him for 11 years. Buying the house was one of the best decisions I've ever made.

I've known TP twenty-seven years. I remember meeting him and his then roommate and high school buddy, JH, back in college. TP's and JH's moms are both British and their moms grew-up a few miles away from each other although they did not know each other back in their motherland. I guess that sharing such a similar background automatically ensures a lifetime friendship, right?

TP, is a little (just a little) like the character that Alec Baldwin played in "She's Having A Baby". Some years after college, Baldwin and his newest bimbo visit Kevin Bacon in the burbs. The situation painted in that living room scene is awkward for Elizabeth McGovern (Bacon's wife) because Baldwin comes across as a pseudo-playboy and womanizer of sorts. During his visit, Baldwin whispers doubt into Bacon's head. She feels threatened with his visit.

TP is not malevolent or a crybaby like the Baldwin character was. TP, however, is the guy that keeps trading up with the girlfriends. After having had a steady relationship with a live-in gal-pal for what seemed like ten years, it's been a carousel of devotees for him. Younger and younger ones. Twenty-something dollies who seem to be attracted to a pleasantly sufficient, gainfully employed, middle-aged guy with a house, an expensive sports car and the no baggage of a previous marriage history.

And there are many. And Wifey knows it. And, Wifey also knows that if I were to be alone with him, it would turn into a safari hunt for him in New York City. A hunt that she doesn't want me near to without she coming along.

Don't misunderstand Wifey, she happens to really like TP because she knows how good of a friend he's been to me. He's also a true gentleman. A long time ago in a different day and in a different time, Wifey, the Rottweiler and I flopped-out at TP's bungalow apartment when he lived in San Diego. How good of a friend was he then? He kept his cat outdoors for the two days we were there! Now, that's a good friend.

I sometimes wonder what it's like to be in TP's shoes these days. He has to be the last friend from my past who has not gone down the aisle once, twice or three times.

My cousin Luis Fernando, has been married four damned times. Offspring from three of those marriages. Poor diet, weight problem, smoker. I would venture to say that Luis is very unhappy. So unhappy, he's Freudianly trying to kill himself.

TP is diametrically the antithesis of my cousin Luis. But, if I were to further analyze TP, it would not surprise me to learn that perhaps he too may be unhappy these days. Even his best buddy JH, who today is off-the-track with a small papoose wonders.

On the occasions that I happen to touch base with JH, he tells me what TP's latest flamea are like. Without the crude boy-talk, in past conversations he's described TP's two-girlfriends-a-year thing as nothing more than fuck-buddies that come and go. He's mentioned that most of these twenty-somethings are so very vacant and barren outside of their measurements. All head-turners, however.

In the grand scheme of things, I'm sure that in today's world you can find many people unhappy with themselves. I have known many. Some of them are dead.

In the industry that I work in, some people tend to get into ruts and their lives spiral out of control. Victims of divorce, alcoholics and drug abusers I have known many.

Recently, a very visible person representing the business that I work for, could not halt his freefall towards self destruction. After he had been allowed many chances to straighten out his life, he chose not to and his boss was forced to let him go.

Two colleagues that I met when I started in this business drank themselves into liver failure. Both began their careers practically at the same time that I did. Both were approximately my age. I would have never thought, that when I first met those two 25 years ago, that there were demons behind those eyes pulling them both down a painful "Leaving Las Vegas" type of death pit.

A few weeks ago, I found out the real reason why someone on the floor that I work on has been in and out of work for the past year. Gone six or more weeks at a clip (leave of absence), two or three times in the last year. I assumed it was attributed to complications from a painful circulatory problem that he suffers in one of his legs. Nope. He's been having to endure the maelstrom of law enforcement after developing a prescription pain-killer drug dependency that led him to forge many phony prescriptions before he was caught. TWICE! Wife and grown kids......way sad.

I'm not even going to touch upon the degenerate gamblers, or the "Jesus Freaks" who exude a cheap, prudish and unconvincing veneer of being well adjusted, or the ghastly dysfunctional adults who have never left the nest and still live with their parents that I know of.

Little in my book is more repugnant and consistent with worthlessness than a thirty-plus adult still dependant on their parents for their sustenance. I have two cousins like that who I have not seen in twenty years.

On two separate occasions in the last two years, I've wanted to visit my aunt and uncle in San Diego who happen to hold these two cousins on their evil nipples. On both occasions, they both found an excuse to bow out of that meeting. Pathetic. Both these cousins are in their 40's now. They both have these menial jobs. But that's it. Wake, work and back home. Repeat.

I have a feeling that someday I may be reading something about them in some Associated Press report.

I seem to see that depression bug everyday. As I live, sometimes I feel that it's getting worse out there for some people. It is a true shame. Society may someday have to honestly consider having anti-depressants in the water systems much like fluoride and chlorine.

If I were to ever begin to exhibit any pathological self-destructive behavior, I hope that I manifest it in a manner along TP's.

That way, I can be unhappy, depressed and angry with a pleased Cheshire like smile across the width of my face until I disappear.

*!*

posted by JerryNJ @ 2:20 AM 0 comments

Friday, March 23, 2007

In the course of doing my everyday routine this morning, it has come to pass that today, Friday March 23rd in the year 2007, at about 9:45 in the morning, marked the day this year of the first tell-tale sighting of green krokus shoots.

I noticed a small cluster of them having risen off the ground on Manhattan's West Side. No flowers yet, just the shoots. The assembly was not drawing any attention.

In fact, I was lucky to have noticed it at all in the middle of a garden traffic divider that separates the north bound from the south bound West Side Highway.

Spring's first sign, however, beckoned. It beckoned to me privately and made me reflect that the grunt and grump old Winter is on decay. The year's next climate cycle was promised this morning by nothing less than Mother Nature's first calling card.

There are a thousand more words to this entry, but I'll just allow you as a reader to contemplate as to what the krokus means to you this year and of what lies ahead.

posted by JerryNJ @ 3:46 PM 0 comments

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Not a week goes bye, not one, where in the course of my driving to and from work, I do not encounter the sight of an automobile accident. It's thirty miles one way and thirty back. Three-hundred per week. Many weeks, three-sixty. I don't care to figure what a year adds up to exactly, but I bet it's more than one-thousand miles. Maybe two-thousand.

All those miles assure me that I will encounter the results of people and their poor driving skills. I see it all the time. Whether the weather is good or bad, sunny or dark at night.....I ride amongst the idiots. Every time I see a crack-up, the first thing that occurs to me is how these liabilities to the insurance companies affect me. I see an accident and I take it personally in the form of a rise in my rates.

Wednesday night was one of those rare occasions that an accident directly affected my commute. It was also one of those rare occasions that I could have been part of the accident itself.

It happened on the Pulaski Skyway. The Pulaski Skyway is deemed one of the most dangerous roads in America. It is a divided, two lane roadway, elevated at some points over 500 feet off the ground, above a highly industrial area of New Jersey. It is about five miles long. It is impossible for law enforcement to physically patrol this road because there is no pull-off lane. The infrastructure of the bridge-like roadway are the edges of the road itself for five miles. There are only a couple of exits along this stretch that exit left and descend down below onto areas with smelters, scrap yards and rail yards. How it is that The Pulaski does not create more NASCAR style pile-ups, I do not know.

I believe that I perhaps missed being involved in a significant accident on The Pulaski just by chance. I hesitated merging onto the roadway by one opportunity. That was all the difference it took to be just six cars removed from the four car mangle that occurred in front of me about two miles down that road after boarding it. There are no other merge opportunities after the one I boarded on.

Approximately six cars went by after I passed up a merge. It involved four. There was the requisite smoke and the sound of metal crunching about one-hundred yards in front of me. Enough to block the unforgiving two lane motorway and create a queue behind me that stretched for miles. My delay and a few thousand others' amounted to an hour and forty-five minutes.

Emergency vehicles are forced to approach the accident going against the direction of the two lanes whenever something like this happens because there is no other access. It was of that kind. Can't go around it. Gotta say, that although two ambulances took away two people, it was only because of injuries suffered to the lower legs. They appeared to be injuries to the ankles. The medics applied braces to those lower extremities. One of the fellows actually got out of the car and hopped over and onto a gurney.

What was the cause? As is the case many times, it was "Driving While Idiot". Car service arrogant SOB believes he is immune to anything and anyone. He may have just walked off the proverbial boat, got the most entry level job available to an immigrant, finally got to see his first Steve McQueen movie and wanted to see if there was a future for him in Hollywood. Why else would he have been weaving in and out of traffic at a high rate of speed, enough to clip a car's front end and sent both of them into the guard rails and two ensuing vehicles onto them?

Ring.....ring.......ring.....Hello, Kearney Police department......I'd like to report an accident by an idiot on the Pulaski.

There are hundreds of thousands of people in the New York area that drive for a living. Many of them are good professionals. A small minority of these drivers are transient in that craft and it is this minority that affect much of the fluidity in traffic. These jobs are held by newly arrived immigrants, and many possess few other skills to forge a better living.

True story. I once got into a New York City taxi after leaving work at 2 a.m. Except for Friday and Saturday nights, 2 a.m. in New York City is pretty much a dormant city. It's fairly easy to navigate around. If you lived in Manhattan and wanted to learn how to drive, learning in the overnight hours is really a good time to do so. It really is.

Guess what? That's what the cabbie who's car I got into was doing!!!

The guy could not have been more than twenty-five years old; had been in New York only two weeks; had just moved from Moscow and was trying to gather enough money to continue on to Norman, Oklahoma to work with a professor at the University of Oklahoma. A professor that had taught him at the University of Moscow. That he was hoping to get there soon.

Yes, I managed to glean all of that up about him in between me saying .....whoa whoa WHOA!.....Slow down!.......Stay in the lane!....You have to work on turning corners!!......I'm not in a rush!!!!.....It's OK. I'm not nervous!!!! No really.

It was almost like a comedy skit now that I look back on it. To his credit, he felt he was invincible, but I was helping him believe that. As he would have said..."It was crazy ride". I hope he made it out to Norman where he is perhaps riding a horse there these days.

Driving is something that I seem to judge about others all the time. I can be a snob about other people's driving skills and habits. I would rather drive myself than be driven. I'm even critical about Wifey's driving. I do not like the way that she participates in traffic and do not like the way that she uses the brake. I am very critical about driving as a skill. Many times I won't utter a word about anyone's driving, I'll just make a branding mental note that such a person is an idiot.

It's like riding a bicycle. You can tell that some people have that panache attributed to experience. Others, are able to ride a bicycle but you can see that they wobble a little and their cycling is very deliberate. Rough, not brisk and not fluid. Many times they are unaware about it.

I find myself making broad conclusions about people's little things. Dumb little things sometimes. Like the way people use a knife and fork. Or the orthodontia on an adult. I notice the way that some people after a drink or two transform. Whether they bite their fingernails. Other little things and that include how one drives a car.

I was forced to do one day of jury duty a couple of weeks back. I was herded into a room with about 120 other people. When the jury coordinator came out to announce the "random" names of who would have to interview for a jury, I was left out of that litter. I was left out with about thirty others. We thirty were all told we could all go home. This "random" choosing did not lump me with the types that included the overly tattooed, soul patch wearing, skin head who sported a shirt that read "Cannibal Holocaust". Morris County needed to assemble a jury of someone's else's peers and I did not fit that mold.

Snob.

Wifey once made the observation that the only time that she ever remembers me not having to drive were on two occasions. The week that we were out on our honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta nineteen years ago. The other, was three years ago when we all went out to Disney World and stayed at The Contemporary where the monorail arrives in the lobby to take you to the park. I did not need a car for both those occasions.

Wifey mentioned, that when I was at both those places, and not driving.....That, I wasn't such an idiot.

*!*

posted by JerryNJ @ 1:45 AM 0 comments