2010: The Year We Break Contact

Where the hell was Roy Scheider when we really needed him?

In the movie 2010, we were told "something wonderful" would occur which, at the end of the film, turned out to be another sun. But that's Hollywood. What did WE get in the real world? Snooki. That's not a sun. That's more of a moon.

This year started out with such promise, but we all know that's just the self-delusion of time. The calendar changes and that's supposed to change everything for the good? What a bunch of gullible schmucks. Another decade in the still new millennium? It's gotta be good!

There were high notes to be sure that were hit right at the git-go, again perpetuating the myth of optimism in an increasingly cynical age. It holds about as much water as a cheese grater, a point proven when the tide turned in the wink of an eye. Oil spills, missing children, terrorist plots in our own backyard, political discourse leading up to a potential revival of the Civil War, 21st Century style combined with some personal kicks in the groin that aren't as easy to recover from as the year passed. It all became off-kilter, much like that hotel corridor sequence in INCEPTION.

But far be it for me to end this year on a down note. To tell you the absolute truth, I'm actually feeling a wee bit upbeat. It hasn't always been so over the last 36o-odd days, that's for sure, but as I've told my friends recently, life has a way balancing out. As I say, the yin, the yang and the whole damn thang. Perhaps it's all a balancing act after all. And sometimes, there's actually a net when you least expect one.

It's also me trying to be reflective and wax poetic at the end of the year, just like every other nimrod with a laptop and a blog to call his own. What have I learned in the year Twenty Ten? well, for one thing, the year isn't over for me until my birthday which falls at the end of January. I'm not done yet. I have a few deadlines to meet by January 29 and maybe we should talk then.

I also send you folks out there in the blogosphere the great wish of finding some balance in this cockeyed world o' ours. It's tough. You fall over a few times and most certainly will get knocked down too. There's no reason you can't get right back again, even if it is slowly. Let's just say you're an easier target on the ground and, if you're standing on your own two feet, you can push back. Balance, baby, balance.

Next up: The Best of 2010, just like every other nimrod with a laptop and a blog. (New Year's Resolution #1: Stop being redundant.)

Happy New Year, ye lads and lassies.

Merry Christmas, You Ol' Internet!

Instead of a snarky diatribe about the commercialization of Christmas or a whiny dissertation 'bout why I ain't got no spirit this year, I decided to relate to you a little tale that may or may not be related to the holiday season. However, it occurred at this time of year and therefore, it's relevant...sort of...

Driving home the other night from the northeast side of Portland to my home out in the 'burbs (a cruel act of fate from which I may never recover), I had my radio tuned to KNRK, what passes for an "alternative rock" station in this day and age. Listening to this keeps me young, yo...and in denial. Anyhoo, the volume was cranked as I was singing along with my man Cee-Lo Green's sweet tune "Fuck You"(censored to simply "F You" for बे or "Forget You" everywhere else or "Fudge You" if you're Ralphie from A CHRISTMAS STORY). Naturally, I had been emphasizing the chorus at the top of my lungs to blow off some necessary steam after the stress-o-rama known as the workaday world. Once the song ended, I heard something not quite right on the right of my car, sudden vibration with a noticeable deceleration of power.

"Hmmm...what could THAT be?"

Several possibilities ran through my head, the stupidest being:

"I'm only ten miles from my house। I can probably make it ।"

It should be noted that I was dropped on my head when I was a baby। How many times, I'm not sure। Must have been daily.

My car decided for me as something began to seriously start rapping up the right side o' my front end. Okay, could very well be a flat. Great! Thanks for playing, dumbass! I had already made my way over to the far right lane ever so carefully with the next exit just a few hundred feet ahead. I made it, turned and parked. My tire had shredded like so much black licorice right down to the rim. I swear on a stack of pancakes that it didn't feel like a flat tire at all. It didn't veer to the right at all and it just felt like a vibrator having a seizure. I thought it might be the tranny or a loose belt of some kind, maybe Grandma got run over by Honda Civic but not a flat friggin' tire.

The question was: What to do NOW?

Sigh. Well, I'm in a well-lit area. Gotta change the tire, but first, call the wife. Phone. Where would a pay phone be? No, I don't carry a cell...DON'T YELL AT ME! I HAVE MY REASONS! NO, THEY'RE NOT BASED ON PRACTICALITY!...there's got to be a pay phone somewhere, right? I wandered the neighborhood, a series of strip malls. Hmm, the rain stopped. it's almost warm outside. Where in the hell is there a goddamn pay phone in 2010? Not at Home depot. Not at Taco Bell. Plaid Pantry (an Oregonian convenience store)? No pay phone, says the clerk. Could I use their phone? I could? Really? SA-WEET.

"Hi, honey. I'm going to be a little late. I got a flat tire."

"Oh, that's too bad. What are you buying at the Plaid Pantry?"

"Gotta go!"

As I head back to the car, a Washington County Sheriff's car pulled up right behind my car, lights a blazin'. Friendly chap. Shone his flashlight as I started to dig out the donut sized spare, the first time it's been removed since I first bought the car back at Stockton Honda in 1997. I had a bit of difficulty with the jack when the officer suggested we use his. Okay by me. Before I knew it, here was Officer Friendly changing my tire for me and I was holding the flashlight for him.

Say what?

When he finished, the officer noticed there wasn't much air in the spare, so he offered to follow me to the Chevron station around the block. Upon arrival, he asked if I had any change for the air since, in this day and age, you have to pay for air. I'll be damned if the air wasn't free.

I asked my new best friend his name and he told me he was Officer Morris. I shook his hand, thank him again and again, then wished him a Merry Christmas.

So let's review:

I got a flat and drove on it for at least two miles, working it right down to the bone. It had stopped raining. I was able to use a phone at a convenience store. Officer Morris of the Washington County Sheriff Department changed my tire for me. My brake line was undamaged . I didn't have to buy a whole new wheel, just a replacement tire.

Come on, people! If this was not a Christmas miracle, then I don't know what is. It works in my book. More likely, it's the best thing of all, an act of human kindness that restores more than just a little hope in my heart that somehow balances out the rest of the michegoss from the rest of the year. Let's not forget a big dose of faith too. Aren't those two main ingredients of the season- hope and faith? Just to complete the trilogy, don't forget their lil' sister charity either, me hardies.

As for the other bullets I dodged-the weather, the lack of damage, the free air?

I'm not above believing in a little holiday magic.

So there you have it. If you don't think this is much of a heartwarming tale, then try to imagine it in Claymation with songs by Perry Como, Toby Keith, and Ke$ha.

Or would like to hear Cee-Lo Green again?

You bet I would!

Merry Christmas, y'all to y'all, a g'nite!

Red Asphalt 2: Chains of Fury

An Xmas treat...or just another rerun?

A little of both, children. It's a reposting from a now extinct separate blog. If you haven't seen it before, it's new to you. Hey, at least it's appropriate for the season.

From the Great Artic Blast of 2008, please enjoy this new holiday classic that I call:

RED ASPHALT 2: CHAINS OF FURY

To get the dirty truth out of the way first, I have to confess that I am still indeed a medical courier.

Hey, I gotta eat, y’know. These RED ASPHALT royalty checks ain’t exactly payin’ the rent. When I wrote this book, I really thought my driving days were just disappearing images in the rear-view mirror. I stopped working for Smith-Kline Beecham Clinical Laboratories in January of 1999 and couldn’t find a comparable job when I moved up here to Oregon. Therefore, RED ASPHALT served to be an exorcism of the speed demons I acquired in California and, employment-wise, I moved on. But fate kicked me in the balls and sent me back to square one back in 2003, returning me to the highways and byways of Oregon as an A-Number One Courier. Lucky, lucky me.

This brings us up to the present. The Pacific Northwest has been hit with the worst winter storm in almost forty years, making driving more fun than a swimming pool full of razor wire. All this snow, ice and freezing rain,

terrifyingly called THE ARTIC BLAST by the local media, made this the most traditional Christmas season ever and a pain in the ass of the highest order. To add a cherry to this mountain of frosty delight, it made for the absolute worst time I ever spent on the road as a courier.

Since I begin my route from Northeast Portland, I have to drive twenty miles from where I live in order to just get started. I begged off going into work a couple of times, the first being Monday the 22nd, the day after the big freeze. But Tuesday, after spending two hours digging my wife’s VW out and driving her to work, I headed out to my own job.

Conditions being what they were, the powers that be decided to not sacrifice any of their own couriers (including yours truly) and outsource the more difficult area pick-ups to other services. That was a break for me since my run covers more miles than any driver in the vicinity. I still had to get on the road and make a few local visits. The van I was assigned had been chained up on the front wheels, but as soon as I got it on the road, the right side loosened causing me to pull off immediately in an attempt to fix it. This first loop turned into a two hours job, giving me the heebie-jeebies for anything that might come later. The chain still didn’t feel or sound right to me.

My shift ended later than most couriers, so I became the designated pick-up artist for the remainder of the evening. Around 5 PM, I had been sent out to unfamiliar territory, that being the town of Gresham, famed in song and story…no, that’s a lie. Nobody cares about Gresham. Not even the people who live there. I required directions, so what dispatch relayed to me turned out to be the beginning of the end for your humble narrator.


In order to get to Gresham, I headed out on the freeway to what was to be the 257th Street exit. The on-ramp I chose had been blocked by a disabled truck , a sure sign this was going to be a suckfest in the making. The only thing I could do was maintain forward motion, cutting through some well traveled city streets that hadn’t been too treacherous, but to find another way onto I-84 was another matter. It took the better part of a half-hour just to accomplish this feat.

When I finally hit the freeway, I noticed immediately that there had been more asphalt than anything else and that this had started to play havoc with the chains, even though I had been driving at a sluggish pace. The right side began to undo to the point I needed to pull over and tighten them again. It didn’t help. I was out of the van more than I was inside. Out of town finally, I was headed right toward the Columbia Gorge, the source of all problems for the whole area. The Arctic blast, as the news services are so fond of reporting and repeating incessantly, had been carried through the Gorge with constant winds up to 100 MPH. Even though the snow had abated and the roads finally cleared, it was still a motherfucker out there, blowing more flurries back and forth than Tony Montana in SCARFACE. I approached the exit for 235th Street, knowing the next just had to 257th, right? That’s when the right chain undid completely and violently whipped up the side of the wheel well. At this point, there was no way I could pull off. Snow drifts sat on each side of the freeway and I just pressed on.

“Not much further…” I told myself, optimistically.

The next exit sign read: Troutdale.

Whuh?

Where the hell is 257th? It’s got to be the next one, right? Right? Anyone?

I passed the Troutdale exit, which had a line of semis jutting out almost all the way back to Portland itself. I assumed I would have been sitting there with nowhere to go for the rest of the night. It never occurred to me I could have turned left off the exit and maybe turned around, but I didn’t anyway because IT WASN’T 257TH!

As I chugged on by, the left chain started to go. Now I had two chains slipping off, smacking up the insides of the front end and the noise became immediately deafening.I felt like I would lose my fucking mind, but what kept me going was the fact that 257th was just a few feet away…

...but it wasn’t. Nothing lay ahead. I was headed toward Hood River with no exit in sight. Fifteen minutes of non-stop banging and rattling in decibels that would make the Dalai Lama got bugfuck, I saw a sign that said: Corbett-Next Exit. There was no 257th Street exit. By now, I had been in the 500s at the very least. I had to turn around and it was there that I did. But first, I had to check the chains. I opened the door, which fly back and smashed right in the mush.

“Oh yeah. I’m in the fucking Gorge, aren’t I?”

I had to go back to Troutdale. I looked up to read: Portland-20 miles.

Oh mama, I thought. I get to relive the nightmare, now in reverse.

In Troutdale, I attempted to do something, anything with the chains, but no avail. I ventured forth, clanging and banging my way to 235th and crossed into Gresham, almost two hours after I initially left the hospital. This ice and snow muffled the racket, but only slightly. With each block I drove, I lost another chunk of my sanity.

At my first stop, I surveyed the damage in a sheltered spot. In the light, I saw that I had lost the right chain altogether. The wheel well was completely torn out. What was left of the left chain, I disconnected. It fell behind the wheel, still attached. The well on this side had been ripped to pieces. Every time I turned the wheel after that, it fluttered like a kid’s bicycle with playing cards in the spokes. The fenders on both sides were now silvery chrome, the paint stripped off and covered with the pock marks of a savage beating, the kind the Hell’s Angels used to lay down with their own chains. Slowly but oh so very surely, I found my way out of Gresham, worrying that the remaining chain would wrap around the front axle.

My final stop had been an elder care facility that informed dispatch a urine specimen would be sitting outside their door in a manila envelope. As I pulled into the parking lot, my path was blocked by a maniac in a small tractor clearing out the snow at a dangerous rapid pace, as if he had been fueled up on a six-pack of Red Bull and two dozen hits of crank. When he almost smashed into the front of the van, I honked my horn as a warning. He just stopped short, turned around and snarled like a rabid wolverine. Then, he sped off again to continue his crazed mission. I just left the van where it was in the driveway and went off to grab the manila envelope left at the front entrance.

I retreated to the hospital a defeated man. I couldn’t park the van in the courier lot because all the empty spaces were filled with piled snow. Maybe Charlie Manson had been by there earlier with his tractor. Weary, I left the van in an empty handicapped spot, which were all empty, and lumbered inside to drop off my specimens. Along with the blood and everything I picked up on that run, I left the unopened envelope in the drop-off area in the lab. As it turned out, nobody in the lab bothered to open the envelope. Instead, it was placed in the interdepartmental mail and had been delivered to the office addressed on the front. Whoever opened up their mail the next morning got a very special Christmas bonus.

As for me, I finished up for the evening and relayed my tale of woe to the remaining dispatcher on duty. As for the whereabouts of the non-existent 257th Street freeway exit? That would have been the Troutdale exit.

In the words of Captain Binghamton from MCHALE'S NAVY, I could just scream.

Instead, I took the next day off.

Oh, and Bing Crosby can kiss my frozen White Christmasy ass.