9/11 Memories

I will always associate 9/11 with Gallagher.

When I was a kid, I was a big fan of the comedian Gallagher.  I loved prop comedy, so his Sledge-O-Matic routine was especially hilarious to me.  I also loved how he made fun of words and pronunciations.  Some of his content wasn’t really appropriate for children, but my parents were cool with it.  We didn’t have cable growing up, but we had several of his specials someone had taped off of Showtime for us.   Some of his jokes were mildly racist, but I didn’t get the impression he was racist himself, so much as he just saw the humor in everything and loved having fun with stereotypes.  Which was typical for comedians, really, both then and now.

In August of 2001, I found out he would performing in downtown Nashville the following month.  It was the same arena where I used to attend wrestling matches as a teenager.  My wife had never seen his routine, so I hoped she was in for a treat.  We also brought one of my high school friends.  I wondered if Gallagher was still as funny as he used to be.  His signature act was so full of energy, I wondered if he’d slowed down as he got older.  Plus I was older and wondered if my tastes had changed.  But good or bad, the three of us looked forward to a night out.

So… between the time we bought the tickets and the night of the concert, 9/11 happened.  I was on my way to work when I heard about it on the radio.  They said an airplane had hit the World Trade Center.  I didn’t realize it was a passenger plane yet; in my mind I was picturing a private, one-person plane, maybe an amateur pilot who got off course.  When I got to work I immediately turned on the radio, and soon heard about the second plane hitting.  Now we knew it wasn’t an accident.

It was hard waiting to get off work that night.  I wanted to get home so I could e-mail a friend who lives in New York, and make sure he was all right.  He was fine.  He’d made a lot of posts about it on a message board I frequented at the time.  I found out that somebody had already posted a T-shirt in an online store that said, “I flew into the World Trade Center, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”  The seller’s location was NYC, and (supposedly) the shirt had already been posted before the second plane hit.  People on the message board were furious, but my New Yorker friend advised them to let that one go.  “This is how New Yorkers grieve,” he said.  “We make jokes.”  I guess I’m not cut out for NYC.

It was a while before anybody was in the mood to laugh again.  A lot of sitcoms didn’t air that week.  When time for the Gallagher concert came around later that month, I almost wanted to give away the tickets.  In retrospect I wish I had.  But just enough time had passed that I was ready to see if I could laugh again.  I should have realized that 9/11 affected comedians too.

Gallagher was not funny that night.  He was angry.  He told a few jokes, but he spent the majority of the time making racist rants about people from the Middle East.  He must have been funny to someone, because he did get some laughs.  There was an extremely drunk woman behind me who spent the concert laughing so loud we could barely hear Gallagher.  But I don’t remember any actual jokes.  Several times he mentioned wanting to bomb the Arabs back to the stone age.  By this time, the world knew that the attack was the result of terrorists, rather than a government, but he was still happy to imagine an entire country being bombed to rubble.  He didn’t even do the Sledge-O-Matic bit.  He got the hammer out, and then let audience members line up and smash things.

I don’t blame him for being angry; we all were.  I’m not even sure I blame him for the racist bits – everyone was hurting at the time, and wanting to retaliate against someone, anyone within reach.  I’ve seen the same misaimed anger on crime shows.  The family of the victim often wants to convict the first guy the police catch, even when it becomes obvious they’re innocent.  Because it’s easier to punish the target in front of you, than to come to terms with the killer still being on the loose.  And it’s easier to say “Let’s blow up the continent these bad guys might be on” than to accept that it might take years to find the terrorists.  People think they want justice, when they really just want closure.

So I don’t blame Gallagher for feeling the same.  But I do blame him for not simply cancelling the concert.  He had to know he wouldn’t be funny, he had to know he wasn’t in the mood for comedy.  Maybe it was therapeutic for him, getting to air his grievances in front of an audience.  But it’s not our job to pay for his therapy.  I’m not mad – How can I be mad about a stupid concert when so many lives were lost earlier that month?  I’m hardly the first person to have to sit through a disappointing concert.  I was lucky to be alive and attending bad concerts; too many people weren’t.

But for me, Gallagher and 9/11 have a permanent connection in my head, and I can no longer look at him without thinking about the tragic event.  Maybe he doesn’t deserve it, but he will never be funny to me again.

Pour Painting

My wife has started making "pour paintings".  These are beautiful works of abstract art, made by pouring layers of paint onto a canvas.  You can see some of her work here:

https://www.deviantart.com/thecraftykj

And as long as you're looking at DeviantArt pages, I've got one of my own as well.  Mine's mostly cat pictures, but I've also uploaded a few of my bad drawings.  Here's the link:

https://www.deviantart.com/xinefury

Video Game Dream

Last night I dreamed I was playing a video game.  The graphics reminded me of “No More Heroes”, and the gameplay consisted of a variety of mini-games with different controls and rules.  The overall theme was very Japanese, the kind of game that rarely gets exported to the states.  I don’t remember the title.

At the beginning of the game, your best friend is murdered by the CEO of a major corporation.  The opening has your character visiting your friend’s grave, then performing some sort of mystic ritual to guarantee the friend gets his revenge.  Then, believing yourself to be the instrument of your friend’s revenge, you enter the CEO’s downtown skyscraper and try to make your way to the top.  Your intention is to confront the CEO and challenge him to a duel.

Your character is tall and thin, wears a business suit, and carries a sword.  However, you never use the sword until the very end of the game.  The building has 100 floors.  You have to complete one encounter on each floor.  After each encounter, your character runs up a flight of stairs to the next floor.  Apparently there are no elevators, or maybe they require keycards. 

Your character doesn’t want to hurt anyone but the CEO, so the encounters don’t involve combat.  Instead, each floor is its own minigame, with a bizarre and eclectic mix of puzzles and stealth.  On one level, you might avoid employees by hiding behind potted plants and support columns.  On another, you might have to talk your way past a security guard by picking the right dialogue choices, or by doing a short fetch quest for them.  Some of the levels were really bizarre, like having you compete in a Parappa-style rap battle with a security guard. 

It was one of those games where weird things happen for weird reasons, like “Feel the Magic: XX/XY” or “Incredible Crisis”.  Some of the mini-games would repeat themselves, with harder versions occurring at higher floors.  You never had to go back down a floor; everything you need to complete a floor was found on the floor itself.

When you finally reach level 100, the CEO accepts your challenge and you fight.  It doesn’t control like a fighting game, instead being more of a drawn out quicktime event.  However, it is impossible to win regardless of how well you perform.  If you do poorly, he kills you.  If you gain the advantage, he cheats by having a henchman grab you, and then he kills you.

You are buried next to your best friend.  The ending shows the CEO standing over your grave, making a villain speech about how he always wins.  Then, thanks to the ritual you performed at the beginning of the game, your friend’s animated corpse bursts out of his grave and drags the CEO underground.  So you were the instrument of revenge after all – your death was the only reason the CEO ended up standing so close to your friend’s grave.

Dinner With Dorks

My wife has started a YouTube series called "Dinner with Dorks".  In each episode, she and I make dinner, play a video game, and watch a movie, usually sticking to a specific theme.

You can find the playlist here.

I Just Got It!

From "Star Trek Generations":

Data: (laughing) I get it! I get it! When you said "The clown can stay, but the Ferengi in the gorilla suit has to go!"
Geordi: Data, what are you talking about?
Data: During the Farpoint mission; we were on the bridge, you told a joke, that was the punchline!
Geordi: The Farpoint mission? Data, that was seven years ago.
Data: I know! I just got it! Very funny!

Anyway, I just got a joke a friend made 27 years ago.  I drew a lot of sci-fi comic books in high school.  In one issue, several of the characters go to an intergalactic carnival.  One of the rides was called "Bump -N- Hover".  When my friend Bryan got to that page, he started singing "Bump... and Hover" over and over in a sing-song voice.  Honestly I just thought he was making up a tune as he went along, and I laughed.

Today I was browsing YouTube and came across an old "Duck and Cover" PSA.  I immediately recognized the tune as the one Bryan had been singing.

The whole thing reminds me of an old comedian who compared his jokes to grenades.  You pull the pin, toss it to your audience, and wait for them to get it.  Sometimes they take longer to detonate.  In this case, decades.

This Didn’t Happen Either

One time, back in the 80s, a friend and I decided to go to a costume party.  We agreed not to tell each other what costumes we were going to wear, so it would be a surprise when we met there.  We arrived separately, and I looked around until I finally spotted my friend.  Imagine our delight when we discovered that we’d both worn the same costume: a California Raisin.

I guess grape mimes think alike.

Fast Food Woes

I never wanted to be one of those “kids these days” old fogies.  You know, the ones who fail to realize that it’s not the kids who have changed, but our perception of them as we reach certain ages.  But here we are.

I have always stood up for fast food workers.  The world is full of people who’ve worked nothing but cushy office jobs, who often look down on fast food workers as if it’s the easiest job in the universe.  But let me tell you, there are a lot of dangerous or back breaking jobs I would take before I went into fast food again.  Fast food work is tiring, sweaty, and thankless.  Honestly I would rather work my current job at fast food pay, than work in fast food again at my current pay rate.

That said, what is going on with service lately?  It’s probably just coincidence, but this has just been a very bad week for me, service-wise.

On Tuesday, I picked up Taco Bell after work, and found that the lobby was closed.  No biggie, except that it was the second time this month that the lobby has closed early.  The first time, one of the employees told me it was because they were understaffed.  If that location keeps having staffing issues, that’s probably a management problem.  I’ll admit that when I worked fast food, I occasionally closed early.  But I’m talking five or ten minutes early, and only if it looked like the world was dead outside.  The owner even encouraged it.  But lately I’ve been encountering more and more restaurants that close the lobby hours earlier than their posted hours, only taking drive-thru orders.

On Wednesday, we ordered DoorDash.  The first order never arrived.  We saw a car start to pull up to our house, then drove off.  A few minutes later we saw what we think was the same car off in the distance, stopping at a different house.  This is when the driver marked it “delivered”.  We believe they gave the food to the wrong house, and whoever lives there just took it without saying anything.  We contacted DoorDash, who refunded our money right away, plus $10.  We immediately used the money to order from somewhere else.  This time the driver did fine, but whoever made my wife’s calzone misread “green olives” as “green peppers”, rendering it inedible to her.  She just couldn’t catch a break on dinner that night.  We’ve been using DoorDash, UberEats, and GrubHub for about six months now, and I have to tell you, something goes wrong at least 50% of the time.

On Thursday, I picked up Burger King on the way home.  The lobby was closed, much earlier than the posted hours.  So I went through the drive-thru.  The employees weren’t exactly rude, but they were very stoic.  No smile, no “thank you” or “have a nice evening”, they just used the minimum words required to get the order taken care of.  I saw they had at least five employees working, so I’m surprised they felt they had to close the lobby.  Maybe some fast food restaurants are starting to do that so they don’t get robbed.  If so, they need to update their signs.  Anyway, they also got our order wrong, by putting onions on my poor wife’s burger.  I know they heard me because the receipt had it listed correctly.  It’s enough to make me go on a Joe Pesci-style rant.

I filled out the surveys for both Taco Bell and Burger King.  If the managers don’t know their employees are closing the lobby early, they need to be told.  As much as I want to side with the employees, that’s a serious thing.  If you’re turning customers away, that’s not much different than stealing from the company.

As a customer, I avoid doing things that bugged me when I was an employee.  I never go into a fast food restaurant that closes in less than ten minutes.  It’s not about what time you walk through the door, it’s about what time you leave.  If you know it usually takes five minutes for them to make your order, and you walk in four minutes before they close, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s premeditated trespassing.  You know your actions are going to keep you in there after their posted closing hours, and that makes you a criminal in my eyes.  When I was working at a Subway that stayed open until midnight, I once had a guy walk in at 11:59 and say, “Whew, just made it.”  No, no you didn’t.  “Just made it” would be coming in at a time that had you walking back out the door at 11:59.  You, sir, are a dirty, low-life reprobate.  Of course, I didn't actually say that.

I know from experience that managers have unrealistic expectations on how long it takes to close a restaurant.  They’ll give you a list of closing duties that have to be done before you leave, a list that honestly should take about an hour, but they’ll tell you to be out of there fifteen minutes after closing.  The only way to keep your job is to start some of these duties in the last hour before closing.  A last-minute customer’s order may only take five minutes, but they can cause you to stay an extra twenty minutes.  Because now you have to re-mop the places they walked, you have to re-clean the drink machine they messily used, and redo all kinds of other little things that wouldn’t occur to people who’ve never worked in fast food.  The managers don’t care that the final customer brought in more money than the extra twenty minutes they now have to pay you.  They never make that kind of connection.  If you weren’t out in fifteen minutes, it must be because you’re lazy.

But that’s just one example of how I try to be understanding to fast food workers.  My point is, the employees I’ve encountered lately aren’t like I was.  Yes I was lazy, and apathetic, and I took shortcuts wherever I could.  But my customers never would have known.  I did everything with a smile, a please, and a thank you.  I had many a customer piss me off, but I doubt any of them ever knew it.  To their faces, I went the extra mile.  Behind their backs, I cursed them to fates worse than the lowest levels of Hell.  But the point is, I made sure they got the same fast food experience that I would want to receive myself.

And that’s all I’m asking.  If they want to make fun of me after I leave, that’s fine.  If they want to gripe about that customer who had the audacity to order a burger without onions, I have no problem being the bad guy.  But at least keep your lobby open the posted hours.  And keep the onions off my wife’s burger.  With all the food allergies people have these days, an extra ingredient is practically attempted murder.

I’m not asking fast food workers to be perfect.  All I’m asking is that they work at least as hard as I did back when I was a lousy employee.  That can’t be so hard, can it?