the return of the blog (a gargantuan reappearance)

i am sitting on a bus.

it's 5.34 p.m. and every road out of hartford is jammed as the rain clouds teasingly slap the sidewalk. the windows of the bus are so big that if i squint my eyes and concentrate more than i ever have before i think that i can just pick out each falling raindrop before it smacks against the concrete. if i can just get one, out of these thousands, maybe the weather and the roads will give in to me. maybe they hold similar objectives and it is just an incredibly intense race between me and the traffic, me and the raindrops, and also between the rainshower and the traffic: who will catch the others and who will inevitably give up first. we all can’t continue on like this forever...

this is my first bus trip with my laptop. yup, i feel like a million bucks and i bet that everybody else wants to know exactly what's on my screen. the man in front of me has just asked if i would mind if he put his seat back. it’s not my schtick to care what anyone does.

six seconds later: big mistake. his seat reclines so far that he can practically see up my nose and my laptop is unable to open beyond a 90 degree angle. i think that there should be extensive regulations to protect passengers from being violated by the over-recline of other passengers.

my laptop! we were having so much fun together! right now i’m considering switching to paper and pen. i can hear the reggae yelping from the headphones under his big fat dreds. it's times like these that remind me that it should be my schtick to care, so what if i just gingerly pulled one of those dreds out from his space and stuck my gum in it?...no. i'm not riding the middle school bus anymore and the bus driver won't make me sit in the seat directly behind in order to keep an eye on me without disturbing the soft rock wet dream of the big yellow bus cockpit. this is peter pan bus lines, for godsakes!

a best friend of mine helped me to realize one of those rare and insightful pieces of truth that exist within this strange life we all seem to dabble in. he brought to my attention the “everlasting advantages of being a crotchety old person.” an octogenarian perhaps.

for example: when something is stupid, and you are a crotchety old person, everybody will know exactly how stupid you think it is. the other night, on a dinner date with a scorchingly hot babe, i failed this test completely. i was given a butter knife of which i was expected to daintily cut my chicken entree. now, there’s a reason why a knife has been given such a beautifully descriptive name: because butter is really the only thing it will ever cut. this knife is stupid! i said to my studly companion. so tell the waitress he said. i said i will! and after some waiting i held the appropriate knife for the purpose. it was not a complete victory because i failed to inform the waitress, and the other patrons for that matter, just how stupid this butter knife really was. come on. butter wasn’t even on the menu that evening.

this scene took place after a series of ill-fated events that had already occurred in that particular restaurant. i won’t bore you with the entire plot so here’s just one more short-circuit of the evening:

when we had arrived we were told to choose our own table in the dining room. we chose a horizontally circular table placed next to a vertically rectangular wall. inevitably, this would become a problem. after realizing that there has never been a more uncomfortable combination of shapes in the history of furniture, my dashing escort and i found ourselves stuck between a rock and a really stupidly designed eating area. where our elbows wished to be, there was nothing but a dangerous rift between the table and the wall. the space that we did gain (i.e. those four flaps that one would get if one chose to draw a circle and then draw a square within by connecting the four nodal points of the intersection of the two shapes) was actually lost when faced with the horrific vexation of flatware, drinking vessel, and plate arrangement. as already demonstrated, our waitress was two screws short of a toolbox and could not clear our dishes promptly after we had finished with them, forcing the undue paradox upon us of how to accurately arrange our used and not-yet-used (and sometimes to-be-used-throughout-the-meal) dishes, drinking vessels, and flatware in the most space-conserving manner. if i had only realized another caveat of the crotchety old person, "though shalt never feel discomforted," i should have demanded a horizontally rectangular table that was very specfically not pushed up against a vertically circular wall when i had the idea in the first place.

i am still on the bus, you know. the man with the hairy-caterpillar dreds continues to pirate my space and i can’t muster up the inner snarl that one really needs in order to effectively demand anything. the bus ride should be over soon anyhow. and maybe i am sort of small for a good reason.

because i just don’t stand a chance.
atleast until i’m elderly.