3/5ths of a Mile in 25 Minutes

Sitting in my car is a souvenir tollway ticket from the MassPike. I will keep it above the sun visor as a gentle reminder of May 19, 2006, when i left Walnut Hill at 3:10 pm... and arrived home in South Grafton at 8:02 pm. The whole situation can be loosely summed up by "That sucked, a lot." Turns out a tanker capsized on the Pike near Millbury at 8:30 in the morning, shutting down traffic on Route 90 all day and diverting it to Route 9, meaning there was essentially no way to get from anywhere along the central artery of all of Massachusetts. Fun times, fun times, because it wouldn't, it couldn't and it didn't stop. I killed a lot of time on the phone, and I think I listened to the new Flaming Lips album At War With the Mystics approximately 7 times. Good disc, by the way. Anyhoo, good afternoon, and the phone convos gave me some things to write about.

1. Aaron still hasn't read my stories. I find this hilarious. I mean, really. Let's all hold a silent pool on this. One penny a day, winner take all plus 20 bucks I'll throw in. I'm putting $3.65 down on the entire year 2047. I'm obviously kidding, as surely the apocalypse will have occurred by then. The astute reader may point out that it's highly likely that Aaron doing me this favor and the apocalypse may be interdependent events. Oh, well. But anyone who puts any money down on a date in 2006 is just throwing their money away.

2. The San Antonio Spurs, lest anyone forget, have won two championships in the last three years. Bill Simmons, occasional moron that he is (no really, give me more stories from the perspective of brain-dead fans, dude! Ha ha homes, you know I dig the BSG) has a nice little concept called the Five Year Grace Period. As in, you need to stop your whining for five years after your team wins a League Championship. He more or less extends the Grace Period to 10 years if you're team happens to have been previously mired in an 80 year drought. If your team could be loosely translated into Hieroglyphics as something that would be loosely translated back into English as "Small Bears from the North Side of the Windy City," that Grace Period should probably hit the 50 year mark or so. Anyways, by the esteemed logic of the Grace Period, Spurs Fans are double bound (it's like a 5 on 3 Power Play) for two years, and still can't say anything for three more years after that - they are effectively in year 3 of the '03 GP and year 1 of the '05 GP. Oh, and just as a gentle reminder, they were technically still in their '99 GP when they won the '03 Championship. In other words, we should have been spared the moaning voices of small market Spurs fans for the past 7 years!!!

So why, pray tell, do I still hear the paranoia rhetoric of about conspiracy theory refs and how "they just don't look like they have it this year?" Nein! Out of bounds comments! Go watch your championship DVDs or something!!!

Just kidding, Spurs fans. Thankfully, they (the Spurs, not the fans) pulled it out in Dallas last night, forcing a Conference SemiFinals game 7 back in S.A. Nice. So I'm excited for you San Antonio, and I hope the gods will smile upon you and grant you another compounded grace period, the metaphorical equivalent of a 5 on 2 Power Play. You certainly deserve it after all you've been through.

	SA Free Throws	SA Fouls	DAL Free Throws	DAL Fouls
Game 1	30	20	28	24
Game 2	37	26	43	27
Game 3	32	33	50	26
Game 4	32	29	32	26
Game 5	31	19	19	26
Game 6	33	19	20	29
Total	195	146	192	158

Oh, sorry, I take it all back. There's clearly a referee conspiracy.

I mean, damn, don't you hate it when factual information refutes your claims? I guess we don't have to let it bother us. Maybe there's a little George Bush in all of us.

Speaking of - militarized border? I'm the farthest thing from a political science kinda guy, but is he TRYING to construct an Orwellian nightmare? If so, kudos!!!

3. The Polo Conundrum

The only thing I know about polo, other than the shirts, colognes, and general brand-name recognizability, is that you are required to play right-handed, because if people played left-handed there would be a danger of head-on collisions. Beck did not believe me, giving me the stirring feeling of just having yelled "Judas" at a folk singer and/or a very similar sensation to the one that I get on a daily basis in class. I back up my claim with the following hastily crafted photoshop diagram:

I hope this clears everything up.

4. Alright, there were other things that I can't remember. Oh, well. School yesterday was fairly cool - test which people seemed to do okay on, multiple tutoring sessions that went great (one in particular was a students who has been badly struggling with a history paper and in the course of an hour I converted her from hysterics to laughing and smiling about getting the work done. So I may be wasting my life teaching high school*, but at least I'm good at it and every once in a while I make something resembling a positive impact on a young person's life. Of course, it's not about human interactions, it's about degrees, picket fences, nice cars and country club memberships, so I will make my best effort at righting the ship sometime soon.

I also got some great comedy compliments through the course of the day, one being that I should "have my own comedy show like Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert," and I'm pretty sure my colleague actually meant it. Nice! Stephen Hawking! Ha! It's like I'm beating a horse that was recently ridden by a lefty polo player!

What else? Oh yeah, Thursday I hung out after classes with some students and teachers and threw a disc around. I have firmly cemented my rep as an "awesome frisbee player" at Walnut Hill, which means that my throws don't wobble. Self-high-five.

Other news - I've gotten really sick of the sound of my Roland Jazz Chorus 55 amp lately; it's just too shmarmy, too chorus / reverby and just too pretty frilly - I want a much more basic, crystal clean tone, and it just wasn't doing it for me. So I took it in to Daddy's and they offered me $200 for trade in (I think we originally paid between $300 and $350 13 years ago, i was fairly shocked), so I looked around and played with a Peavey Studio Amp that, to my ears, sounds awesome - really clean, pure tones, no frills, with some nasty good lead settings and some nice switch settings between modern amp effects and a pretty solid vintage tube style simulation. So after I got home from the nightmare drive yesterday afternoon, I played for about an hour on it, just to get a feel - and it's just very, very good, combined with a solid DMD makes me feel like a rock star. Oh, and that's Diet Mountain Dew, for the uninitiated.

So yeah, i think I'm finally killing my San Antonio KZEP/KISS metal-glazed roots and trying to get into some cleaner, less chunkified and less goofed with tones. For better or worse, I tried all the amps with a Fender Strat 60th Anniversary edition yesterday - and I may as well have shot heroin. I had the best time playing on the guitar as I have had in quite some time - it just had a great inspiring feel. Not to say my Gibson isn't top line awesome - I came home and rocked the face off the neighborhood in pure bliss last night - but there's just something about the Gibson that works really well for that thick, low-end heavy classic rock, metal, or even the other direction, jazzy and/or "alterny" swelling sounds, but something about the Strat that just locked right into the punk-but-clean vibe I've been digging of late (doesn't hurt that it's the "Dylan goes Electric" sound of choice, either). Plus it had a nice wide neck and wide spaced strings that helped a lot with my somewhat chubby fingers.

Suffice it to say, something may need to be done about this. On the one hand, I hesitate, because I'm hardly in the position to be spending money on food, let alone guitars. But, in my defense, as crappy as I've been allowing myself to feel for an indefinite chunk of the past, I'm inclined to jump on any thing that gives me an inkling of inspiration. I'll be smart and budget oriented about it - no need to get an actual *Fender Strat* - but I think I definitely have to do something about this. I haven't been that excited about doing anything in a long, long time.

"This has been "Power Rationalization and Justification Techniques" with your host, Nyet Jones. Tune in next week, when we sit around with Republicans and laugh at schizophrenic homeless people, shouting all the while, "If you had just worked harder, just developed your Puritan work ethic!!!" Meanwhile, some Democratic passers by will roll by in their new $75,000 "Ford Primes" and throw some change to the streetbound, giving dirty looks at the GOPs and muttering "Tsk, tsk.""

* - Come on, you know you're thinking it.