Weather Girls. I am not gay.

My trip was fantastic, but I was accused of being a homosexual.
When doing anything on or near a large body of water, you want
to keep up with the weather.
The Weather Channel used to give weather reports all through the
day. You could watch for 15 minutes and know what what was up in your
area and those adjacent and maybe some large cities around the world.
But now they have these women who look real good but they talk about
but the forecast.
When I complained at the all you can eat Continental Breakfast, you would think that
I had to spit the cock out of my mouth to speak. "What are you Queer?" came from my twenty something roommate for the trip.
Now this kid had pissed me off from the moment I saw him. He called me 'sir' in a way that you call the 80 year old lost at the airport 'sir'.
So I explained that I love women and women's bodies, but there is no reason for them to wear low cut blouses, tight skirts and not tell me the weather. They could wear camo and tell me the weather and I would be happy. They could disembodied voices and tell me the weather and I would have been happy. I'm about to get on a very small boat and go four or five miles off shore, I want to know what is going to happen.
I assumed that would be the end. But the little snot nosed pin head talked.
After dinner I was talking to a woman in the group and she said "It's so nice to just talk to a man without any pressure"
"Well, I'm a laid back guy, ya know."
"Yeah, but you are gay so I don't have to worry about this going anywhere."
"Wha...?"

The Keys

If life was fair I'd live in the Florida Keys or Cozumel.
As it is, life gives me little installments of Paradise. Every chance I get,
I go to the Keys or Cozumel. Sometimes, like now Mother Nature gets a dig in.
I've been waiting for a month to go on this trip and suddenly Tropical Depression
Erika has popped up.
All season the Hurricanes have formed in the Atlantic and travelled North. Now Erika
goes West, dammit. Oh sure if it forms into a strong hurricane, it will be bad for the
people down there and monetary damage etc.
But I have to Dive in warm clear blue water this weekend. There is no other option.
I have to sit in subtropical sunlight and drink beer and eat conch fritters and fish tacos.
I need this badly. I haven't had a chance to dive since New Years.
To help you understand the anxiety, I'll open a window into my world.
Tuesday 6 am the bubble headed weather girl mentions a tropical depression.
Tuesday 7 am the weather guy on the radio says a tropical storm is developing.
Tuesday 9 am, my Boss says "You see the Hurricane headed for Key Largo?"
Tuesday 9:06 am Weather Bug check #1.
followed by #2-306 by 5pm.
Tuesday 6pm-7pm walk dog around Stone Mountain while fidgeting with broken radio.
Tuesday 7:06 pm check dive shop website. No mention of Tropical Depression.
Wednesday the beast is named and has a track heading for Key Largo or south of Cuba.
This is just the first 24 hours.

What did the Mona Lisa ever do to you?

Why are people attacking the Mona Lisa?
Sure it's in the most disgusting museum in the most disgusting city in the world, but it did not choose it's home.
I hate Paris. The rest of France is wonderful and I would be mind numbingly happy on the Riviera, but Paris is a city of Hate. The closet thing we have in the states would be West Palm Beach, Miami, Naples triangle.
In Paris they hate you for not being Parisian. They stand in their Levi's and berate America and Americans. They will personally insult you for Government actions. I came to the aid of a poor Canadian being attacked for a cheese import tax. In the Louvre I was sent to the restaurant ten times while looking for the rest room. No, don't look at me like that, I knew to ask for the WC. The staff was laughing at me, another Frenchman came to my aid. He took pity on me and explained that they did this to tourist all the time. He was from Normandy and loved the English and Canadians and Americans. I bought him a truly great coffee while my family shopped the insanely overpriced and over large gift shop. He was very happy that we were leaving Paris the next day.
But I digress. The Mona Lisa is very small in real life. It's behind very thick glass, behind a very imposing rope. The Mona Lisa is impressive because of it's age and the little smirk on her face. When you think that 500 years ago a man found a hooker and ground up rocks and sea shells and whatever else was needed to make paint, then sat for hours painting the hooker, and today it's still culturally relevant. Well that's just amazing. But after moving around a few countries and watching the fall of the Catholic Empire, people are now taking flash photos of the Mona Lisa and throwing mugs at it.
The best museum I went into in Europe was in Rome. They had a sorta Renaissance gone wrong room. It was a long, long narrow, high walled wonder room. It was filled, absolutely filled with green Madonna and Child paintings. When they mixed the paint way, way back in day, if you got the wrong egg ratio, after a few decades all the white paint turned green. I was enchanted with that room. Once you realize what happened and could look around the vampire mother of god, there was some amazing art work, that could never be loved, the way the pretty Christ Children would be. A Docent in broken English explained what had happened with the paint. She went on to say that the artist would have never known what had happened with the limited life span of the day.
I like Rome. It's dirty and expensive but the people are happy and proud of their city. Not like the people of Boca Raton.

marriage and idiots

So I've got friends who are married. Some have been married once and stayed that way for years. My Mom and Dad have been married for 46. I have other friends who are on second, third and my Buddy Hopeless is fresh out of five and looking for lucky six. I know a precious few geniuses who never took the plunge.
Me, I got burned bad once and have no need for another try. It's not fun to have a Judge take away your kids, house, car and dog and then leave the debt with you. When I was six I jumped off our back porch onto my tricycle, Cowboy movie style. Only I did not ride off into the sunset, I rode in an ambulance with a broken leg and a future scar on my taint. I never tried to jump on my trike again and see a direct correlation with marriage.
All the people I know who are happily married are happy. In public they are. You can never be sure who is screaming behind closed doors and who is wiping silverware on their ass while the other is out of the room.
But those of us who are single and content are happy all the time. There is nobody to scream at behind closed doors. We can go to places with another person for a dinner or a movie or a drink or dam near anything and then part ways. If we like the other person we can go and do more stuff together and maybe when we spot another person we can do stuff with the new person when the first person isn't around.
It's an amazingly wonderful life.
And that brings me to the idiots. The people who get married and have a couple of kids and then when it spirals out of control they get some other idiot to marry them as soon as the divorce decree is dry.
These are the idiots who aren't happy with themselves. They can't be alone for any length of time. I run across them once in a while and then run away. The Guys always are into something useless. Star Trek, Cars, Sports, something you can spend gobs of money on and still have no direct impact on the outcome. The Women are almost always Mothers, Single Mothers whose kids are their whole life. These people will do anything to be together. It doesn't matter with who.
I've noticed the guys will go for younger chicks with low self esteem. The women will pair up with anyone who shows a little interest, usually with men genetically predisposed to class action lawsuits and second hand trailers.
I love it when two of these idiots find each other. It's best when they are in the other half of duplex or triplex. The arguments always start about money, diapers, school. movie tickets or sports package satellite deals. They move on to unfaithfulness, money, diapers, child abuse, cable sport package deals etc. Then the explosion and the slamming doors the restraint orders and the deputy wasting taxpayer dollars watching him pack up a few Action Figures or signed Caps. And then she starts dating some jerk in a Trans Am with bondo on the quarter panel.
I've sold my share of abandoned cribs and Official Star Trek Doodads taken out of the other side of the duplex after the dust settles. I wore a Devils Hockey jersey for a whole winter before a guy in a bar bought it off my back after explaining what it was.
Marriage truly a gift from the Gods.

Wonderful Vacation Tragedies.

This is going to be convoluted.
About 5 years ago my crazy Father started announcing his death. "I'll be dead in 5 years so you better be nice to me", the rest of us laughed and every one remember that his Father said the same thing for the last 15 years of his life.
This year he announced that this was his last year of life and wanted to go to Daytona and the Dominican Republic one last time. I voted DR because every spring hump back whales gather in the Bay of Semana for calving. Nothing good gathers in Daytona anymore.
Well he decided that he couldn't make the trip to the DR so off we went to Daytona. We made this trip alot during my misspent youth. Usually two or more families crammed into a huge station wagon. (A station wagon was a giant car. It was long and low with a mile long hood and the luckiest kids got to ride in the way back and face backwards. We crammed people in the seats and pile suitcases on top.) The station wagon was the way to travel, for the first 5 or 6 hours. Then the way back AC crapped out and an infant or toddler would start to scream for merciful death. You know the scream that suddenly stops for a few seconds and your ears say ahh, but the monster was just getting a bigger lung full of air.
But eight hours in that station wagon was ok if we were headed to the beach.....Daytona back then was great. We would wade out to the breakers and body surf or bounce over waves and pretend Submarines and Sharks and Dolphins were just over the next wave. Mom and Dad or somebody else half responsible would always be with us and nobody knew what a riptide was. Back then the riptide was the under tow and it was only there very early in the morning.
After burning ourselves lobster red the first day we'd head to the Boardwalk and it never had boards.
But this was the last trip and it was different. We flew. No way backs with no AC, just assholes who refuse to turn off their cell phones.
The Boardwalk was about 2/3 destroyed some time ago and never rebuilt. The super cool video games have been replaced by crap. There are signs about Riptide all over the beach and the best thing in the world is now outlawed. Way back you could drive on the beach. Dad would get the Station Wagon up to 50 on the beach. Now you have to buy a special permit and it's only during special times and places. It's probably much better for the ocean, but.........
On the 4Th my boy and I wandered down to the Pier and watched what Florida calls Independence Day and the rest of us call the re-enactment of the opening of Saving Private Ryan. If you haven't seen it, I can't describe it.
Then we flew home with the assholes who were too important to turn off the cell phones. They refuse to turn off the cell phone even though it could turn our nice little jet fuel laden airplane into a giant flaming tube of death. I hate to fly and have bad thoughts when I do fly. Thoughts about killing everybody else on the plane for one reason or another.
Then we landed and went into the hell known as Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Nothing in the Atlanta Airport works the way it was designed. It's like a bad bootleg copy of a good airport. You know a VHS copy with bad tracking. All the things that make a great airport are there but they kind of drag and the sound isn't quite right. Or think of it as a digital TV signal that almost comes in. So you see a baggage carousel but there are blocks missing out of the corners.
But we survived the airport and the parking that should have cost $90 for the week that charged the credit card $130 without a human in sight.
I was feeling strange so I spent the night with my parents and the boy. At some point I woke up drenched in sweat standing in the kitchen telling some one about 43000 pieces of rebar attached to 23000 cables holding down the sea. Mom found me and put me back in bed with a 105 fever. I explained to her we had to loosen the cables before the next full moon or the whole system would crash. I dare you to match the validity of my hallucinations.
The next day I woke up early and went to work and spent the day sweating and talking to customers who were visiting.
And that afternoon I discovered the tragedy. My garden had been attacked. Something has eaten the leaves off all my tomatoes. They left peppers.
Then the Wonderful thing happened. I was healing myself in the AC with lots of cough syrup and listening to the radio. Iggy Pop was talking to someone and said "blah, blah...Wonderful things happen." About 10 minutes later my 71 year old aunt called and said "Was your vacation wonderful?"

Um, uh, Yes that is...

There is only one thing more boring that sitting in a Lawyers Office being deposed for 8hours. It's sitting at home reviewing the transcript of that deposition.
I never have been a great public speaker. I mumble and stutter, but I never knew how bad until this weekend.
Like all companies that are successful the one I work for is being sued. I've been working for them since 2000 so I get to be on the witness list every time we get sued.
As a named witness you get to do things like depositions. Once you sit for hours in a room with a stranger typing every word you say and another stranger video taping you and two strange lawyers asking you questions. You get a copy to read and correct.
Then you see how bad your language skills have become. I am the Ted Turner of my generation. Ahhh, I think, seem to recall, uh, yeah we did that.

So I've lost about 15 pounds and I feel great. Apparently doing good things for yourself actually is good for you. I shit you not.
I've narrowed it down to eating better, drinking less or all the swimming. I swim every night at a buddies pool.
I really can't tell you how much I love to swim. When I was a kid I would swim in anything. Pool, lake, farm pond. Give me 15 minutes and I was swimming in it. Shortly after college I won $100 American Dollars by swimming across a retention pond behind some apartments a friend lived in. I did not realize it at first but it caught the run off from three big parking lots and funnelled it under ground and away. I knew it wasn't deep and not very wide.
My Girlfriend and his Girlfriend woke up he neighborhood screaming at three in the morning. My buddy was too busy laughing to understand that I was very close to being sucked underground and away. I was swimming for my life dreading that the Police line "Caught between the Scylla and Carib dis" was stuck in my head and would be the last thing I heard. Well I finally got my feet under me and survived.
It took a week to get my money.