The goal of my blog has always been "a 5 minute break from reality" but sometimes reality smacks you in the face so hard you can't ignore it.
 
My boss & I stood on a corner in Chicago, waiting for the light to change. While waiting to cross, an African-American kid, probably about 12, approached us with an almost full box of peanut M&M's asking us to buy a bag for $1.
 
At the same time, an unmarked police car pulled up to the light. The plain-clothed cop rolled his window down and snatched the entire box out of the kid’s hands and casually tossed the box into the back seat of his cruiser. He said to the kid, "Move on!" The incredulous kid held his hands up like he was confused and the cop repeated, "MOVE ON!!"
 
As the little Candy Man dejectedly shuffled off, the cop & his partner chuckled to themselves.
 
My boss & I just stared at each other as if to say, "Did we just see that for real?"
 
When the light changed, the patrol car and the box of candy sped off and left me with a ton of questions…
 
I am so new to big city life that I wondered just how common something like this occurs. The little Candy Man really didn’t put up much of a fight so maybe it’s something he has been warned about in the past. Or maybe he just knew that this was a confrontation he couldn’t win.

But here is what I really don’t understand. I was just an extra in this scene, not one of the main characters, so why did it leave me with emotions, felt so deeply, that it is still bothering me after four days?

I don’t even know what the laws are about selling candy on the streets. Maybe the cop was justified in every way to confiscate little Candy Man’s box of M&M’s. But the disrespectful way he did it bothers me more than what he did. It seemed to me that he was more concerned with proving that he could take the candy than he was at enforcing the law of the land.

The experiences we have during our formative years are what shape us into the person we ultimately become.  I can’t help but think that this experience will affect little Candy Man in a negative way towards police officers and/or authority figures and possibly even worse. It seems events such as this are what cause the perpetual tension between citizens and law enforcement that is ever-present, especially in big cities.

Who is going to be big enough to stop this? Are the police waiting until they get respect before they give any? Are the citizens willing to show respect if they got some in return? Does that one box of M&M’s represent a major flaw in our society?

Sometimes our days are filled with our own problems and concerns and we don’t ever take the time to think or worry about anyone else. I can’t honestly say that I will buy a bag of M&M’s from every little Candy Man I see from now on. But I can say this: I won’t ignore them like I have in the past. Perhaps a kind word or a positive encounter can cancel out one of the negative events they have had.

I don’t know.
 
Sometimes...  Reality isn't very sweet...

Had my first downtown-grocery-store experience…

While it seems very weird to go into a grocery store that’s in a high-rise instead of the sprawling suburban type stores that I am used to, that’s not what this blog is actually about.

I have to valet park my car here in the building I live in but haven’t even driven it for two weeks since I have found walking to be much easier. So the first thing I do is get the car from valet. They drive it up and all I can think of is that it looks like Pigpens car with a little dust cloud following it since it has sat there for two weeks. I get in and it feels very strange to drive again. (Remember, I was the guy who drove a 1000 miles a week not all that long ago and now it takes me a few minutes to get used to driving again.) I drive to the store and navigate the parking garage.

After parking in the garage I get on the elevator. In walks these two girls. Both are dressed like they are going out “clubbing”. Mind you, this is 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a Sunday, so I have no idea where in the world they may have been going. But if the dresses were a ¼ inch smaller, they could have been arrested in 47 states.

But one of these women had on a dress and nothing underneath. She may as well have been nude because the dress was virtually see-through. Now, most of you think that any red-blooded American Male would have enjoyed the “show” but it was actually a little repulsive and the first thing that came to my mind was, “It’s a little early for you girls to be going to work, isn’t it?” I didn’t say that out loud but, looking back, I wish I would have.

Here’s my question.

Did her friend not see the problem with the way she was dressed and clue her in? to me, letting this girl walk out of her apartment dressed the way she was is tantamount to letting your friend walk around all day with a booger in their mustache.

I just don’t understand…

Of course, now I am watching “America’s Got Talent” and have the same problem. Do these people not have enough friends to explain to them that they probably ought not to go on national TV and sing/dance/(add equally talent necessary task here)?

Is putting yourself on display so important to some people that normal rules of civility do not apply? Do friends not care enough anymore to stop someone from making a fool of themselves?

Or am I just getting old…

What do you call it?

The meal that you eat at night?

There is breakfast… then lunch… then…?

I have always called it supper and, apparently, in the city that makes people laugh at me.

Here they call it Dinner. And I have been told many times that only country folk call it supper. Actually they don’t say country folk they say “southern people”. I try to explain to them that over 90% of the country is south of here so almost everyone is “southern people “  to them but they laugh anyway…

I googled “supper”, then I Wikipedia’ed it and neither really helped. (Spellcheck doesn’t like the verbs I am using. He is telling me they aren’t words. What’s even funnier is Spellcheck is telling me that Spellcheck isn’t even a word and that’s his own name… ha ha ha… God, I hate him…)

My family has always called it supper and we reserve the word Dinner for the special or formal occasions. You know… Christmas Dinner, Easter Dinner, Thanksgiving Dinner… but even then, those meals are usually in the middle of the day not at the end.

It’s the “Old Dog/New Trick” thing but I am trying to remember to say Dinner versus Supper. But since I am used to Dinner being formal it feels weird to say “I had buffalo wings for Dinner last night”.

Eventually I will figure it out. Or, maybe not. If Jesus wasn’t even pretentious enough to call it “The Last Dinner” in the Bible then maybe it’s ok for me to keep calling it supper…

I miss writing…

Or I miss blogging… one or the other… or both…

Not really sure which…

Now I find my head in the clouds… Literally… today I woke up and stepped out on my balcony and I was in a cloud.

You see, just in the last week Zwebbyville has been moved to the Marina Towers in downtown Chicago. You may not know the Marina Towers but once upon a time Steve McQueen drove a car off of one of them into the Chicago River.

Anyway…

It is very strange to find yourself in a cloud in your own home. We have all flown through a cloud in an airliner. (Did I just say “airliner”. I have no idea where that came from. I meant jet or plane but airliner came out… ) But to walk out onto your balcony and to be in the middle of a cloud is very strange indeed.

Just another odd experience for a country boy who has been firmly planted in a big city…

There are a lot of new things happening now that I live right downtown. I am going to try to chronicle them here. Now that I don’t have 3 hours a day of commuting, I should have some time to write.

Zwebbyville has changed a lot!

I’m sitting on the train.

I was unusually efficient today and got out in time to get on the 6:50 Express. (Ok let me decode that for you into what it really means… “Both the owners were out of town instead of at the office so I snuck out earlier than normal so that I could catch the train that has fewer stops and gets me home in 45 minutes instead of an hour.”)

Trains are amazing things…

There is the guy 5 seats up who is arguing with what I assume is his significant other about what’s for dinner… there are numerous book readers, everything from Stephen King to Louis L’amour… The newspapers a big one too, lots of those… then there is the guy eating McDonalds I am sure he picked up just as he got on the train (that’s really bothering me to watch too because I know he probably held onto the railing on the escalator and the handrails getting on the train and now he’s using those same hands to stuff a Big Mac into his mouth! UGH!)

All these people trying to kill 45 minutes of time… It’s  sort of fun to watch but then I realize that MY way of killing time is to watch what everybody else’s way to kill time is…

Not so sure what that says about me… 

Hi Everybody!

Yes, I am still alive.

Hard to believe it’s going on three months since I have posted! Life has been zooming by so fast here in the big city!

I still work for the same type of company as when I was writing daily, it’s just that now I am at the corporate office instead of being out on the road each week. So… I now stay in the Chicago-area the majority of the time. Zwebbyville is still back there in Missouri, I just don’t visit very often and the streets of town have been rather quiet. I get regular updates from Harry and Doc and things are good around town.

The new job is going very well even though the hours are quite long and it has prevented me from spending as much time with the Aldermen. Recently, the Company moved its offices to downtown Chicago which turned me into a daily commuter.

My commuting options are: Take a gamble on traffic and drive the 40 miles to the office. On any given day, barring an accident/construction/filming-of-Batman/etc. the drive can take as little as 45 minutes to as much as 2 hours. OR… take the Metra Train into town then walk about a mile to the office. Usually I take the train, leaving the house at 7:45 and getting to the office just after 9.

So traveling is still a big part of my life, it’s just a little each day to the same place instead of one big drive each week… not sure which way is more fun…

This is one of the main reasons though for my lack of writing. By the time I get home each day if you could x-ray my brain, it would probably resemble a mass of macaroni noodles that was cooked too long or, on some days, one of those bottomless pits you see on the medieval movies like 300 or First Knight…

Speaking of bottomless pits… when did they go out of style? It must have been somewhere between the days of the Knights and the Wild West. You never see them in cowboy movies so they must have stopped making them before that.

And who made them anyway? Was there bottomless pit construction companies? Or maybe just one big company… International Bottomless pit Makers LLC… I can see their tag-line… IBM… we have NO bottom line…

Nowadays they have been relegated to analogies… You know what I mean… When Junior goes down to Bubba’s Blazin’ Wing Emporium for All-You-Can-Eat-Tuesdays, people say his stomach’s like a Bottomless Pit.

Since I don’t want the same thing to happen to Zwebbyville, I am going to try to write more often. Being a country boy in the big city should provide more than enough material…

I gave myself a couple of Fathers Day presents…

The first was a trip to Wrigley Field today where I witnessed my Beloved Cubbies pitch a game where the other team (San Diego Padres) only got two hits… a completely awesome job by the Cubs pitching staff, but, unfortunately, in a way that only a Cubs Fan could ever understand, these guys found a way to lose by a score of 1 – 0… Unbelievable… unless you’re a Cubs fan…

The other thing I gave myself, which may sound strange to some, was… I gave both the Aldermen cell phones…

Some may think it strange that I gave a 14 Year old and an 11 Year old phones but it’s really cool because we have talked more in the last two days since they got them than EVER before…

It never ceases to amaze me how fast these two pick up on how to work new stuff… within two hours of having his new phone, Cman had it figured out better than I know how to use mine! Of course, though, during the game today, he blew my cell phone up with text messages giving me play-by-play to a game that I WAS ACTUALLY AT!! I spent most of my time trying to text him back than watching the game… and I loved every minute of it!!

Then when I got home, I watched a Superman movie…

I have a question…

Just how stupid were the residents of Metropolis to not ever put two and two together to realize that the glasses-wearing cub reporter was the un-spectacled Man-Of-Steel?

THAT WAS HIS ONLY DISGUISE!!!

No fake mustache… no fake hairdo… not even a hat! Just a pair of glasses!

Now… being a glasses wearing guy myself, I understand that glasses can change your looks quite a bit. But, surely, at some point, someone should have realized that if innocent little Clark took off the lenses he was a dead ringer for the Leap-Tall-Buildings-In-A-Single-Bound Dude! I know it was just a Comic Book but I like my comics to have a little reality like Bugs Bunny or Scooby Doo did…

Anyway…

I hope all the Fathers out there have a great day and I also hope they all enjoy being a Father as much as I do!

If only the Cubbies would have won…

I golfed today…

Yesterday was the first time I had golfed in over two years and then I did another 18 holes today. The owners of the company paid for both rounds which made it even more fun.

Unfortunately, I think it’s going to take me all night to type this with the one finger I own that isn’t sore. Recently I have been getting no exercise at all except for pushing the elevator button to get to the floor the office is on (which explains, I guess, why that finger isn’t sore) so I am now walking around in the old-man shuffle and standing up in stages.

This was also the first weekend that I have worn shorts and been out in the sun…

So, now, from where my shorts end and my ankle socks begin, it appears as if I soaked that part of my legs in Cherry Koolaid. Have you ever tried taking a shower without letting the water hit your legs??

As much as I love to golf, I started to wonder as I sat here tonight in complete pain from the soreness and the sunburn… Why in the heck do I love to golf?? 10+ hours of my weekend were spent cussing, swearing, throwing clubs, scraping goose poop off my shoes, searching through weeds and bramble for an expensive little white ball that is the embodiment of frustration to me. I am completely unsure  if I will even be able to get out of bed in the morning. But, yet, as my boss dropped me off I shook his hand and thanked him for such an enjoyable weekend…

Some would say it’s just a Male thing but I saw plenty of Females out there golfing too. Some may say it’s for the exercise but a treadmill is lots less frustrating and tons cheaper. Some would say it’s to enjoy being in the outdoors but goose poop has never been all that enjoyable to me.

The mystery that is golf may never be solved but I will have plenty of time to think about it as I shuffle off to my bedroom…

Wow! It’s been so long! I believe it’s my longest ever without posting…

I wish I could explain why I haven’t posted but I can’t… just life getting in the way of blogging again…

Today was Gman’s 14^th birthday.

I didn’t get to see him due to some screwed up circumstances but I talked to him at length and realized I now have a 14 year old little man on my hands… He’s such a cool customer! He has life all figured out like only a 14 year old can and is completely and utterly fascinated with cars… My kind of dude…

My absence from blogland has been sort of on purpose but more so because life has taken on a certain routine that doesn’t lend itself to my kind of blogging (that means my life has become rather boring)… and I didn’t figure you all would want to hear about the day-to-day grind that has encaptured the last couple months of my life…

The days of exciting adventures where Gilbert and I meet such interesting people as the flocks of south-traveling birds or the interesting people of retail-fast-food fame seem to have come to a halt. Or at least that is my excuse…

I really think that my imagination took a leave of absence and I am finding that putting words on paper is harder for me than it was at one time…

Being funny is important to me…

How’s that for a confession?

I can't tell you exactly why I feel the need to be funny…

Perhaps because I learned in Middle School that being funny was the way to stand out amongst the crowd.

Perhaps because it is more important to me to make you laugh than tell you my innermost secrets.

Perhaps because I want to make your day easier than I know mine will be….

Who knows…

This silly blog has always been a little out-of-the-norm so I guess that it always will be that way…

Know this though…

I miss all of you and want more than anything to stay in touch…

I haven’t given up yet…

I looked him straight in the eye…

It wasn’t a challenge; it was just letting him know I would stand my ground.

He looked back at me with a look that told me this wasn’t going to be easy…

I have to admit being a little confused. This wasn’t normal for him to be here. As much as it almost threw me off my game, I wouldn’t let him win… I wouldn’t back down…

But the sneer on his face told me he felt the same…

One would win… one would lose… I was determined to be the winner. Many times before he had beat me, many times before he had made me feel less than a man…

On occasion, I would come out on top. But the victories were few and far between… My ego doesn’t allow too many losses… can’t take too many defeats… I didn’t want this to be another one…

The second he took off, I floored it!

Time and space seemed to stand still as he tried with all his might to get there before I did. I may have even said a little prayer that I would win…

But, once again, I would fall to the physics of timing, speed and odds…

If he had a middle finger I am sure he would be saluting me with it as I watched him in my rear view mirror, celebrating his victory as I zoomed past…

Once again, I came out on the short end…

Damn armadillos…

216…

Not 217… not 213…

216…

That’s how many noodles are in every regular sized can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup.

I watched “The History of Canned Foods” on the History Channel and learned this little nugget of information. Unfortunately, the way my brain works, this nugget is now forever lodged in a brain cell and I will never forget it…

So now, every time I am feeling a little under the weather, and go to open a can I will think about the meeting where it was decided that 216 was the perfect number…

I can see spreadsheets showing the cost effectiveness of 216 noodles over 225…

I can hear the arguments of taste versus expense…

For some reason, I imagine one executive getting into a heated debate with another one over the time it takes to cut 216 noodles while all the rest of the execs embarrassingly watch until the CEO finally tells the two of them to settle down… In my mind, the two execs never liked each other again after that… Board meetings seemed to always find the two on opposite sides of any issue and Christmas Parties were always very tense…

I also think about the days prior to automation where some poor schmuck had to stand there and count out 216 noodles every time a can of soup went through the line… He probably had a fancy title and all, Noodle Quantity Assurance Inspector or something like that, but at the end of the day he went home knowing that in reality he was just a noodle counter… I bet there were days when he had a fight with his wife at breakfast and got to work with a bad attitude and put very little effort into his noodle math... one can would get 200 noodles and another may have 230… then his supervisor would notice and he’d get written up again for his noodle number apathy…

One of these days I may just open a can and actually count the noodles. I can’t decide which way I would prefer it. More than 216 noodles would sort of make me feel like I pulled a fast one on Campbell’s and could enjoy the noodley goodness even more, but less noodles would mean I would get more soup which is, of course, the whole idea…

Then again, perhaps… just maybe… I am using my noodle too much to think about their noodles…

It’s really difficult to describe my day today!

As I rode in the taxi past the Superdome in New Orleans and the driver explained how he spent eleven days sitting on the roof of his house, I looked around in awe that there is so little evidence of the disaster that occurred here.

But then I started listening closer to the driver, Ismail from Egypt who has lived here 19 years, and realized that the lingering damage of Katrina is on the inside.

These buildings and structures I was looking at with their freshly painted facades and new signage looked better than they probably had in years. But, just like Ismail, there are probably a lot of things on the inside that will keep them from ever being as good as they were. A loss of some sort of structural integrity after being so soundly thrashed by unseen forces that were beyond control.

Ismail described his troubles getting his house fixed. To this day he is still arguing with his insurance company and FEMA over how much damage was actually done to his house.

This same man, who is caught up in a life-affecting struggle with a government entity, went on to describe to me the day that he got his US Citizenship after achieving a perfect score on his test. The pride in his voice caused a lump to form in my throat.

The humor you all are used to in my entries is absent today. I think it’s because, until today, I really had no idea what some of these people down here in the Big Easy went through. After hearing his heart-wrenching story first-hand, it was anything but easy…

I guess it just made me realize that no matter how bad we think things are for us, there are people who would do anything it took to live here in our wonderful country…

Even when our government can be all wet sometimes…

It’s sort of a good thing I’m not in ZwebbyVille right now. That area of the country just got hit with its worst ice storm ever and the power is off with no idea of how long it will be that way.

I spoke to the Aldermen on the phone this morning. They are managing ok but are completely bored out of their skulls since all of their normal time-wasters, i.e. PS2, TV, etc., require electricity. I joked with Gman about how he is getting to experience what it was like to be a kid living in the 1800’s. His response was, “Yeah, well that’s an experience I could have lived without!”

The whole thing has made me think of how dependent we are on modern conveniences. Maybe groups like the Amish aren’t as strange as we sometimes think they are. They are probably sitting back chuckling right now at all of us…

Speaking of the Amish… I don’t understand what made them draw the line where they did. Why is it ok to have a horse and buggy but not ok to put a motor in the buggy? Why is it just fine to use tools but a sin to use a screwdriver that is battery-powered? At what point did they say, “OK! This is enough!” I’m not making fun of them, I’m just confused as to how they decided what was ok and what was not.

Maybe in 20 or 30 years there will be another group of people just like them. They will be the people you hear say things like, “I’m just not a computer person” or “Cell phone? Never use one” or “Blog? Why would you ever want to write a blog?”

My theory is this: Each of us has a Technology Saturation Limit. Our TSL depends on how much technology our brains can absorb. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Why can I build an Excel spreadsheet that will calculate the number of tries it takes to find a needle in a haystack but can’t program my VCR to tape a movie? Why do some people have trouble tying their shoes but can design a submarine that will pick a coin off the deepest part of the ocean floor?

Some Amish dude must have reached his TSL right before electricity became popular and was powerful enough in his community to make sure he didn’t have to ever worry about it by making it a sin to use it.

Of course the only reason we even have electricity is because of how high ole Ben Franklin’s TSL was. I sometimes wonder exactly what the guy was thinking about when he decided to take a kite out in the middle of a lightning storm, attach a key to it and hope that he was lucky enough to get struck by a huge bolt of lightning. I imagine it took quite a few tries to get it just right. I can just see him after an unsuccessful try, dripping wet with his head hanging low trudging back into his house when someone asks him how it went… “It sucked! Lightning was striking all around me and do you think just one bolt… one measly little bolt… hit my kite?? No… nada… zilch…” It seems that having a high TSL might be a dangerous thing…

Somehow though we all manage to find our own TSL comfort level. I wonder just where the Aldermen’s TSL will be when they reach my age…

If, that is, they don’t die from boredom before the power comes back on…

Hard to believe we are 8 days into the New Year and I haven’t posted a blog yet. So much for my “Post more often” resolution…

Part of the problem is that I have yet to step foot into ZwebbyVille this year. I have been traveling, as usual, and hope to get back to Town next week or the week after.

Since it’s a New Year though, I thought I might try my hand at doing some predictions for 2007. Everybody and their brother has made money from odd-ball predictions that may or may not ever come true so I figured I would jump on the bandwagon….

Predictions for 2007:

At some point this year, someone will actually find a bandwagon. They will then jump onto it, becoming the first person to truly ‘jump onto the bandwagon’ in over 100 years…

George Bush will, during a Press Conference, utter the phrase, “You can’t do the Hokey-Pokey and turn yourself around” which will set off a cry among the Republican Elite of making Doing the Hokey Pokey illegal. Ultimately though, the Party will be embarrassed when a famous Republican Senator is found to be a closet Hokey-Pokier and is forced to resign in Hokey Pokey disgrace. GW will then reverse his opinion about the Hokey Pokey…

A Sasquatch or Bigfoot will actually be found. The discovery won’t be as incredible as some may think since the Bigfoot, whose name is Rupert, will be discovered while working the night shift at a convenience store just outside of Billings, MT. He will get his 15 minutes of fame though by being offered a co-starring role next to Sharon Stone in a movie entitled, “Basic Instinct 3” which will later go on to be a cult classic amongst animal lovers…

The biggest scientific accomplishment of the year will happen during the summer when it is proven that Global Warming is actually being caused by the number of Anchor-People that are on all the TV Channels. A scientist will prove his findings late in the year by convincing the Government to put an embargo on TV News for a period of one week in which children end up walking to school uphill in a foot of snow both ways and the Polar Ice Cap stops melting. The unfortunate part of the experiment is that the majority of TV Channels opt to replace the News for that week with Rosanne re-runs which causes the National Average IQ to drop so drastically that people forget what the experiment was for to begin with…

And, last but not least, my most incredible prediction is that the Cubs will win the World Series. Being such a long-time Cubbie fan, you would think I would be excited about this but the fact that they finally win is so overwhelming to the people of Chicago that they forget how to lead normal lives and Chicago is turned into a barren wasteland with people wandering around muttering, “Now what do we wish for next year?”…

Ok… maybe not the best predictions but they probably have almost as much chance of coming true as the professional predictors do and at least you didn’t have to pay $1.99 a minute to hear them…