I’d like to write a bunch of funny things for my blog today, but I can’t.  I just can’t even.  Why?  Oh, how about this:

Honestly, I think I’m beginning to understand why the people of the Southwest have little to no sense of humor.  Or, maybe I’m wrong and they do have a sense of humor.

I’d love to write funny things and just enjoy myself a bit, but it’s too hot to even go outside my crap hotel room (the Yelp review for this place is not going to be kind.  Assuming you can Yelp an Air Force Base).  I’d go to the pool, but they have hours similar to the Caddy Day pool hours.

If I can’t be funny, I can at least complain about the negative aspects of traveling.  And, did I mention the heat?

At any rate, I flew American on the way out here.  I won’t bother to get into the details of how airports turn normal people into raging jerks (I’d use much stronger language, but I’m trying to tone it down for this blog).  Like, nobody can remember how Americans line up – we all look like a third world bus station when they start boarding announcements and zone 1 is the only zone that’s been called and I’m in zone 8 and I’m the only one left in the airport before they bother even calling another zone?  Really – the boarding process consisted of Zone 1 (everyone else) and Zone 8 (me)?  Weird plan.  I don’t even understand it – the plane isn’t going anywhere.  Your seat is the same no matter how many old ladies you knock down to jump into Zone 1 from Zone 5.  Apart from being able to board early and stuff your stupid giant wheeled “carry-on” suitcase into the overhead and take up all the room, there is absolutely no advantage to getting on anywhere except last.  You can even make them check your stupid “carry-on” right there at the gate so you don’t have to go to baggage claim at the end of your trip like the rest of us peons.

 

Sorry, I blacked out there for a minute.  Where were we?

 

When we were landing in Dallas – one of the 57 connections I needed to make that day thanks to using the world’s most incompetent travel agent – I had my headphones on and was generally ignoring the events surrounding me.  I fly enough that it doesn’t even register when we’re taking off or landing – I’m usually absorbed in a book or music or a movie, whatever.  Except, this time I was shaken out of my complacency by the plane taking a sharp turn to starboard and then climbing rapidly.  It felt like we were trying to out-maneuver Maverick and Goose while staying above the hard-deck.  It was enough that I took my headphones out and looked around.  A pretty big deal for me.  I assume first time and nervous flyers were crapping their collective pants.

Now, keep in mind that back in DC, where this fiasco of a flight started, we sat at the gate and extra 30 minutes because “Something was wrong with the plane and we thought we were going to switch planes, but we got the problem fixed so now we have to reload all the data back into the plane before we can take off.”  Sure, it’s not, “Gremlins have stolen an entire wing but we’re going to give it a shot anyway,” but it wasn’t a real confidence booster, either.

Back to the aborted landing, the pilot gets on the intercom and says, “We got a little close to another plane, so we’re going to go around and try it again.”  Try it again.  This was clearly not the varsity squad from American.    Then on our second attempt at depositing everyone back on the ground where humans belong, we came in hot – like, I think we’re sideways and that doesn’t seem right hot.

But I’m alive, and I’m ok.  And when I arrived at my hotel, I found an elderly gentleman wandering the hallway with his television remote, begging for help to make the Spanish voices go away on his TV – he claimed they were speaking English one minute, then he accidentally hit something and they were in Spanish.  I helped him locate the SAP button and the look of relief on his face said he wasn’t just concerned with the TV, but that the full scale invasion by Mexicans he’d been hearing so much about on Fox News was not happening, at least not today.

And that’s it.  That’s been my week.  I’d love to get out and see something but I’m afraid of melting for real.  I think that’s a legitimate fear.  People who live here should just abandon the place and start over somewhere else.  Anywhere else.

So, what do Fort Benning, Fort Bragg, Fort Hood, Fort Polk, Fort Lee, Fort Gordon – let’s just save time and say just about every major Army post in America – have in common?  That’s right – they are all named after treasonous traitors who helped make the Civil War possible (with no Soldiers or generals, the civil war doesn’t happen – that’s basic science right there. 101 level stuff).

If people want to keep statues of traitors and not change the names of Army installations named for traitors, I figured I should present a list of other idiotic non-sense we should be working toward. It’s easy – just take two things that have a horrible association and slap them together and everything is good as new. 

The Timothy McVeigh Federal Building with attached Jared Fogel Daycare

The Jeffery Dahmer Culinary Institute and Laotian Refugee Center

Richard Spencer’s Race Relation Hotline 

The Rocky V Tommy Gunn Film Awards for Artistic Achievment in Movies

Bernie Madoff’s Totally Legit Credit Union – member FDIC.  Probably. 

The New Coke Institute of Great Ideas

A statue of Bill Cosby and three frat bros mixing you a drink 
Ok – I think I’ve made my point. I’m sure reasonable people on the internets will now agree and we change the names of all Army bases named for traitors. 

(Fort Sam Houston, interestingly enough, not named for a traitor – he actually refused to join the traitors and so was removed from office and he died before the war ended)

I saw this bumper sticker in the parking lot yesterday while I was Contributing to the downfall of American Unions, i.e., shopping at WalMart. I also hate that I shopped at WalMart, trust me. But it happened. That’s not the point of the story.

For the briefest of moments when I saw that bumper sticker, I thought it read, “Pray for Unicorns.”  Now, I know this bumper sticker addresses and extremely volatile subject in real life, but for a split second it was about Praying For Unicorns.  For a nanosecond, I lived in a world where people were so passionate about unicorns they implored you to pray for them on the bumpers of their Ford Focuses.

Given the choice, that’s the world I would rather live in.

It’s not that I am particularly passionate about unicorns – I mean, I think they probably have some magical powers and I think when you rub them a genie appears and grants you three wishes, so that’s cool.  But I like the idea of living in a whimsical world where unicorns are that important.

Here’s a partial list of other things I wish would make people passionate enough to vandalize their own vehicles with stickers in support:

Pray for a world where guac isn’t extra

Pray for a TV remote that only has three buttons but still somehow does everything you want

Pray for dogs that can understand English perfectly and are more interesting to talk to than humans

Pray for a third season of True Detective and we all pretend the second season wasn’t a thing

Pray for the ability to eat bread without spending the day in the bathroom (you think this is just for me, but there are a lot of people who would be on board with this prayer)

Pray for your wife to remember not to set the cap to a jar on top of the jar without tightening it so the next person that comes by picks it up by the lid and it drops and shatters/spills all over the floor

 

These seem like prayers for a world we can all live in.  Maybe we need to start making it happen.

Last year I bought a boat.  I can’t remember if I talked about it here, but basically I bought a cheap 18 foot bowrider made when I was still in high school.  The theory went, we need to buy a crap boat first because I’m likely to hit a bunch of stuff in the river while I’m remembering what it’s like to be a pirate.  I mean boat owner.

Sounds ridiculous, right?  I mean, I’ve been up and down the Damariscotta River about 1000 times in my life.  There is absolutely no chance I could miss the channel markers and drive right over a sandbar I’ve known about for 30 years and ruin a brand new propeller, right?

I think you see where this is going.

But the Layla Mae is in the shop for the opening of the season, trying to repair, among other things, the fact that water which is supposed to remain outside the boat seems to be making its way inside the boat.  Very odd, indeed.

Obviously I need other toys this year.  So I got some.

Sure, the tractor is fun.  You can dig stuff up, haul stuff around, crush the wheelbarrow with the bucket because honestly you’re never going to use it again, etc.  But it’s not all tractor time around here.  Because I also got this:

That, my friends, is a 1996 E350 van with a V10 and 51,000 miles.  We use it to pick up my father and drive him to various places to eat lobster.  It was made available to us for only the cost of some repairs because a friend of my father and my uncle donated the actual vehicle to us.  All kidding aside, it is an incredible thing that someone did this for us and it’s allowing us to get my father out of the assisted living facility all the time now.  Very special and very happy about that.  Also, it doubles as the most bad ass party bus you’ve ever seen.

The boat will be back soon.  And by soon I mean August or September.  And it’s probably going to cost more in repairs than I paid for the boat.  I’m pretty sure that’s the whole point of boats.