INT. Subaru Forester, minutes after Luna picks me up at the airport following a four-day business trip.
Luna: Do we need to stop anywhere or just go home?
Me: I wanted to go by Whole Foods and get some groceries. Fruit and stuff for smoothies.
Luna: (proudly) There are plenty of groceries. I went to the store.
Me: That means there’s Red Bull and yogurt.
Luna: (pause) Those are good groceries.
Okay, hold off on my Storylab story about my Storylab story. Here’s what caught my attention today at Memphis in May:
While I know that MiM is a Major, to borrow the terminology of golf, still, a lot of these people are light-years ahead of Beer & Smoking in Las Vegas. Witness: Remember my flatbed-trailer-lawn-chair-and-Pitmaster setup from Danville? Remember how I envied the RVs and custom box trailers? Yeah?
This is an average booth rig at Memphis in May:
The starting point for this setup? A patch of bare ground with the footprint of a two-car garage.
I have much to learn.
I am proud to announce that tonight at Blues City Cafe I set a new World Record. For those of you looking to get a mention in the big book, the record for “Shortest Interval Between Wondering If I Could Eat Ribs Without Getting Sauce On My Dress Shirt And Establishing That The Answer Was ‘No’” has been set at 11.3 seconds.
Tomorrow: My Storylab story of my Storylab story; then Sunday, my Storylab story.
Crazy busy. Keeping a lot of plates spinning right now. (And doing a damn fine job of it, if I do say so myself.). More to come later. For now, please enjoy this giant photo of Molly giving the Toddler Finger:
Talked to Mom today. I’m out of town for Mother’s Day, about which I feel bad, but she went out with my brother and sister-in-law and their kids.
Me: So where’d you guys go?
Mom: Arlington. It was really nice.
Me: You went to the track?
Mom: Yes. <Grandchild> and I bet on the 7 and the 9 horse in the ninth race. I gave her the money and let her go to the window, but we made a mistake. We…
Me: A mistake you mean besides letting an eight-year-old-girl place the bet at the window?
Mom: No, she was fine. I meant we should have bet the opposite of what we did.
I’m relieved. I’m all for letting kids be the runners on horseracing bets, but you have to check their work. Also, this story reminded me of one of my favorite jokes, which I printed here many years ago but it is time to share again:
A child returns from a day out with her Uncle George. Uncle George is the family ne’er-do-well, so Mommy was a bit nervous about it, but sometimes when you need a babysitter you need a babysitter. “Mommy, Mommy!” the girl cries, “We had a so fun day!”
Mommy says “Really? What did you and Uncle George do?”
“We went to lunch and then we went to the zoo!”
“Really?” Mommy says. “What did you have for lunch?”
The girl says, “Wendy’s! And I had a frosty AND a fries!”
Mommy smiles – she never allows both – and relaxes. Uncle George is a little more tolerant than Mommy, but her concern seems to have been misplaced. Relieved, Mommy says, “How was the zoo?”
“Oh, we had fun! The best time! It was a beautiful day, and there were lots of cute aminals, and – oh! oh! – in the sixth one of the aminals went off at nine to one and paid $42.40 on a five-dollar win ticket!”
I remembered this story while reading Todd Fuhrman’s “Are You A Degenerate?” quiz:
We went to a minor league baseball game as part of a bachelor party maybe ten years ago. Minor league baseball is much less expensive than the major league kind, and so attracts kids and families in great numbers. That many kids means you have to entertain more between half-innings. The Kane County Cougars have the usual assortment of t-shirt slingers and mascot pratfalls and beachballs and YMCA dancers and all the rest. And later on in the game, after a few beers, they have tricycle races. They pulled from the crowd three tots, Annie and Jimmy and David. I would guess all three were four or five years old. They lined them up at first base, and declared the three were going to race from first base to home plate, following the traditional route, on trikes. A race. Well then. I turn to Bob, standing next to me, and say “Five dollars on the girl.”
Bob looks down at the starting gate for a moment and says, “I got David.”
Tom took Jimmy, again for $5. (If we’d had more warning we could have bet exactas.)
The uniformed Cougar waved the checkered flag, and they were off. We were probably pretty loud, cheering for Annie and David and Jimmy, maybe more than the average, but not enough to draw attention. It was enthusiastic and heartfelt, though. There was money riding on those trikes.
In the second turn, two things happened: One was that Annie ran Jimmy off the basepath, and in his efforts to tighten the turn radius while accelerating back to the track he went over the high side and just lay there in the third-base coaches’ box.
The second thing was that in the heat of that moment Tom, who had $5 on Jimmy, kinda forgot where he was for three seconds and shouted “Jimmy, you SUCK!”
Happily, there were about twenty of us there, and no one around us had been looking at the time, so no one could identify the individual.
We drew some long looks, though.
I was sitting in the Catalyst Bar in Vegas in the wee hours of the weekend, and ESPN was running a show on Mike Tyson. Tyson was already the single most fascinating athlete of my lifetime, and at the 1:50 mark of this clip (which is of Tyson’s 10th professional fight) he does something that for no reason I have yet been able to figure out, I found incredibly touching: After knocking out Robert Colay, as the ref is helping Colay up, Tyson pretty clearly asks Colay “You okay?”
I don’t know why I was so moved by this. Maybe it’s that I know what happened over the next twenty-five years, how Tyson was treated like a fighting pit bull or a bear destined for the pit, and that seeing this kid solicitously asking after a guy he just violently put down makes me want to reach through time and screen and warn him about what’s coming.
I am posting this from here:
Which is here:
Or, to be more specific, here:
I am posting it from my iPhone. I also used my iPhone to take all three pictures above, and to look up where we were. Then I wrote this with the intention of posting it to the Internet, so everyone I know could read it while I was still on the air. Then they can text me what they think, or I can be emailed their comments automatically, or they can track me, or they can mail me pictures of themselves holding up signs critical of me. Or they can ignore me.
The future is weird.
I’m starting to wonder if we’ve sucked all the marrow out of Vegas. Don’t get me wrong, I love love love this floating holiday family reunion, and I would never give up the glory that is The First Saturday In May, but we might need new adventures. I don’t want to be the band who spends every year on a Greatest Hits tour. Next year…I’m thinking about Reno. Or Atlantic City. Or El Paso. Might be time to find new lands to conquer. (No children.). Thoughts?
Missed a lot of you people today. See you next time, whenever that may be….
