Mad-Dashing for Bagels

Pinellas County is that thumb that sticks out of Florida’s west coast, without which there would be no Tampa Bay. People live and breed here in mind-fogging profusion, and most of them spend every waking hour – and some non-waking hours – on the road. Vehicular progress of any sort in Pinellas takes place – if at all – on parallel north-south and east-west arteries that crisscross the thumb at two-mile intervals. Between arteries lies a no man’s land of mobile home parks, strip malls and other cul-de-sac-y places that ultimately lead nowhere except to someone else’s mobile home or the local bagel shop. Want to take the back road to get somewhere? Can’t do it. The sole option – so it’s not really an option at all, then, is it? - is to drive from your own cul-de-sac-y maze to an artery, then to another artery – et cetera – then into the cul-de-sac containing your bagel shop. You might think this a simple process, but you would be wrong,

Pinellas’s crisscrossing arteries are, in fact, full-dress highways carrying eternal, torrential traffic. They are cloven by grassy – or what passes here for grassy – medians designed to keep southbound torrents from intersecting randomly with northbound torrents, eastbound from westbound. Our quasi-grassy medians are punctuated at terrifyingly frequent intervals by opportunities, for those willing to risk life and orthopedic integrity, to turn left across the onrushing torrent to get to that cul-de sac-y place that seemed important when they first set out. No traffic lights to help. No guts, no bagel shop.

Median lanes are hair-raisingly short and narrow, and this is where hair-raising turns to tire-screeching lunacy. The traffic torrent in each direction rips along at 55 to 70 miles per hour. That’s 5 to 20 mph above the speed recommended by the Pinellas County Sheriff. To turn left off an artery, the bagel shopper must dismount while moving at ambient speed and stick a landing at zero speed in that tiny chink in the median. This maneuver tests not only brake pads and guts, but coffee-cup holders and seatbelt anchors as well. Did I mention that some Bozo in the oncoming lane always wants to occupy that same little chink of median lane you’re aiming at so he can turn left into HIS favorite bagel shop? Now the available median lane is halved and your initial closing speed with Bozo can be a sphincter-cinching 140 mph. Cream cheese with that bagel, sir?


One more point, then you can get back to your Facebook-ing. The only way to get from the bagel shop back whence you came is to mad-dash your way back to the median chink, this time in perpendicular fashion. If geometry escaped you all those years ago, this means sticking your 17-foot-long Escalade into a 12-foot-wide lane. Chronic under- and overshooters are eventually – and regularly – scooped off the pavement and reassembled at the Global Mortuary (see my diatribe of August 13 if you’re fuzzy on what this means.) However heart-clanging this maneuver may be to the mad-dasher, it is worse for the poor Bozo approaching in the leftbound torrent at his usual 70-mph cruising speed. The highest heart rate ever recorded in Florida belonged to just such a Bozo caught in mid-cellphone conversation just as a mad-dasher began his mad dash.

You gotta love this state.

Newt

Detachment - Florida Style

An essential truth for those of us living in the Sunshine State is that we are called "God's waiting room" for good reason. (Somehow "Sunshine State" seems a bit Charles Addams-ish when you ponder the imminent fate of our most senior residents and those of us who wander into traffic with any regularity.) Anyway, when God calls, many of us respond with such urgency that there is precious little time for carefully selecting a departure terminal. Here is where Global Mortuary steps up to offer the one-stop shopping experience of a lifetime - and beyond. Here in Largo, you can nip into AJ's Sports Bar for a quick pop, check out the grim labor market, get your nails spruced up for the trip, and pick out a nice Glock or S&W next door. As a final convenience, the funeral home/departure lounge is the next door on your left. You don't even need to move your Buick .



Pity, they misspelled "Bizarre." Here's what it looks like from ground zero. AJ's Sports Bar is at the far left.




I couldn't make this stuff up.

Newt

Billboard Rant # 1, part 2

You didn't believe last month's rant about vasectomy billboards, did you? Ha! Both of these signs are still flying a couple of miles apart in Largo. Note the subtle - I can't believe I am using the word "subtle" in this context - anyway, note the subtle changes in text and phone numbers between the new version above and the old version below, obviously designed to appeal to persons of varying tastes and persuasions. The one abiding constant, besides the obvious, is the needle and scalpel thing, and that's OK with me. What I like best is that Dr. Doug did 5,000 more nut jobs - that's 10,000 little tubes, folks - while waiting for the second billboard to go up. So he's cheap, he's fast, he has Elvis's hair (at least during the day), and he doesn't use instruments. Very cool!

See? I was right again.

Newt

Billboard Rant # 2

A clutch of billboards that I suspect you will find nowhere else in this country has has been laid along several Tampa Bay highways. They advocate, of all things, abolishing the traditional separation between church and state, a modern twist on antidisestablishmentarianism, of sorts.

I especially love one version of the billboard that quotes Thomas Jefferson saying that the American form of government owes much to the belief in God. This is hardly a revolutionary thought, either by Jefferson by those who now quote him. But quoting Jefferson in this context is like the Flat-Earth Society quoting Columbus. Good old TJ, or Thom, as he liked to be called, was no antidisestablishmentarian. Here's a quote that better captures Thom's essential belief on the subject:

Question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

Not convinced? Here's another:

The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg . . . . Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.

Of course, Tampa Bay has more churches per mile of road than almost everything except garish strip joints, so one might argue that there is in place already a certain establishmentarianism.

Those of you who suspect I may have posted this rant simply so I could fairly use "antidisestablishmentarianism" in modern discourse may be onto something. You could be wrong, but I don't think so.

Newt

An Army of One

Light-hearted blogging gets harder to do when your number-one son is putting on his fatigues and flying to some God-forsaken desert region, peopled by heathens who think we are heathens and who abjure drinking beer. And that's just Oklahoma, where Erik is going for pre-Kuwait training next Tuesday. The "Army Way" - which routinely calls for training in Alaska prior to desert deployment - is on the fritz again this month. He ships out a couple months later.

While he is in Kuwait, Erik and his helicopter unit are going to - Christ, I hope this isn't classified - they're going to chauffeur important folks from place to place so they can see in the first person what evil is befalling the oppressed people of the region. They also will look to see what's befalling the Iraqis. By this I mean no criticism of the war itself or the Iraqis, although the war is imminently deserving of the criticism it gets from every other blog on the planet, except perhaps Dick Cheney's, and the Iraqis can get under your skin, as well. I do realize that important people need to be chauffeured. I would prefer my son not be doing the chauffeuring.

But that is what Erik does. Well, actually, he makes good helicopters out of bad helicopters so other soldiers can do the hands-on chauffeuring. It's what he signed up to do 16 or so years ago, he's good at it (or so he tells us), and I am intensely proud of him. Of course, I would be just as intensely proud of him if he were home out of harm's way.

Apart from oil - and I'm not getting into that - Kuwait's greatest natural resources are royalty, money, and sand. You could check Wikipedia. Erik is unlikely to run into much royalty, who prefer their own chauffeurs, and God knows sergeants do not see much money (Erik has already earmarked his war-zone pay for the mother of all cars). The soldiers do however get intimate with the sand. Kuwait has too much sand. In fact, in 2008 alone, the Army shipped 6,700 tons of sand from Kuwait to Idaho, which apparently is running low on sand. The good news is that the sand was a gift from Kuwaiti royalty. The bad news - at least for Idahoans - is that the sand is lightly laced with depleted uranium from a prior war. What's left over in Kuwait is exceedingly fine, it contaminates everything it touches, and it touches everything. My grandson Kellan is like that as well. But I am wandering here.

War has been described as endless days of soul-destroying boredom, interspersed with moments of sheer terror. As a parent, I don't care much about the boredom part; it's that other part that makes me breathe erratically. Hopefully, the greatest terror that Erik will see is that which flows from being in a state where beer is so hard to come by. Oklahoma, I mean.

Erik, keep the sand out of your socks, your shorts and your lungs. Do what you need to do and come back safely.

Love,

Dad