Grizzled Road-Warrior Story

The next two entries will be in reverse chronological order. Ideally, this would be my Christmas entry, in which I share choice mundane details from the holiday weekend, spent at my parents’ house outside Philadelphia. Instead, it will tell of events that transpired Wednesday night on my trip back to Buffalo, and the next entry will be my Christmas entry. The reason for this is that my trip-back story is much less pleasant, and I’d like to get it out of the way.

I had doubts as to whether I should blog this at all, as the events were, in a word, disturbing. Do I really want to think about it again? Should anyone else have to? The answer to both questions is no. But then again, I took my car to the carwash yesterday at lunch (for reasons that will soon become clear), and as the soap washed down over the windshield, I considered the cleansing effect a good detailed telling of this story might have for me. And, since it’s my blog, and I have rather gruesome images permanently seared into my head anyway, I might as well go ahead with it and see if this process is at all cathartic.

If you don’t want to read gross things, proceed no further. Be ye warned.

Aside from the small city of Binghamton, Southern central New York is pretty rural, and Interstate 81 in this area is not unlike the rest of the route I drive from Buffalo to Philadelphia and back again a couple times a year: an equal sampling of field and forest, set atop rolling hills, with the occasional cluster of unnaturally-tall fast-food restaurant signs and digital billboards alternating between the price of diesel fuel and that of a T-bone steak dinner. The roads, too, are easy enough; two lanes and two full shoulders in each direction, separated by a gently inward-sloping grassy median and guardrails where the falloff is steeper.

I found myself passing through around 6:00pm. Traffic was light to moderate, and it was dark, which tends to be a favorable condition for highway driving in my opinion. I was making good time, listening to William Shatner’s album “Has Been,” and seriously considering a stop for dinner.

I was on a very low-grade downhill stretch, the kind that one wouldn’t really notice as being any more angled than any other part of the road, except that it provided an improved line-of-sight in which I could see a police car pulled over to the right shoulder off in the distance. Traffic slowed accordingly, and bunched up a bit in the process; I found myself in the left lane behind a silver VW Jetta traveling almost exactly 65 miles per hour, with a tractor-trailer that I had passed earlier right behind me.

Quickly, the Jetta jerked left to the shoulder, and my eyes fell on the legs – and then body – of a horse. In my rolodex of permanently-stored mental images of the event, this is the first. I don’t know much about horses, but if I had to guess, I would say that this was a good one. It had an irregular pattern of brown and white splotches on its body, brown legs, and longer white hair just above its hooves, like built-in socks. It looked sickly, though, when illuminated by my headlamps; the whites of its coat washed-out, and its eyes reflecting back the light that blinded it as it ran down the middle of the passing lane into traffic. I don’t remember the specifics of my reaction (instinct, thankfully, took over), but I can recall, with startling realism, the sound of its hooves at it galloped past on the right, missing contact with my speeding car by no more than two inches.

Permanently-stored mental image number two captures several simultaneous physical events: the continued stopping of my car, now fully on the shoulder, the scraping of my left front fender against guardrail, and a sense of almost total paralysis – like when you’re at the top of the roller coaster, about to plunge – as I looked in the rearview mirror, knowing that that tractor trailer was right behind me, realizing that I’m nearly stopped, and seeing its headlights grow brighter. This moment lasted forever.

Then, in rapid succession: a crunch, a splatter, and a prolonged period of gentle taps on the roof of my car. The horse virtually exploded upon impact with the tractor-trailer, and my car was immediately struck, then showered, with quarter-sized pieces of its remains.

In permanently-stored mental image number three, I sit in the car, most of which is now covered in blood, pieces of skin with brown fur still attached, and other parts not so easily identifiable, trying to process what just happened. The VW is in front of me, stopped on the shoulder. There’s a guy crossing the street to talk to the VW driver. More traffic is approaching, and not slowing down very much, and there is a sickening smear of blood across the road in front of the Volkswagen, ending in a small pile of brown and red just off the shoulder in the median. I turned on my four-way flashers and sat for a moment, but my continued fear of being rear-ended by approaching traffic incited in me enough panic to decide that the best course of action was to escape as quickly as possible. The tires made a squishing sound as I pulled back out in the road, and through my blood-streaked windshield I saw the tractor-trailer (FedEx Ground), steam rising through fissures in its fiberglass hood, pulled in neatly behind the police car, its driver outside inspecting the damage.

Assuming the horse had to go one way or the other, the most favorable sequence of events possible was what actually transpired. The only vehicle that, in my estimation, could strike a horse without significant risk of injury to the driver would be a conventional tractor-trailer. A car would only have knocked the animal’s legs out from under it, leaving the body to come crashing down, most likely on the windshield or roof nearest the driver’s head. Equally dangerous would have been the truck driver acting upon his instinct to avoid striking the animal, as this surely would have meant a swerve to the shoulder and an impact with the vehicles nearly stopped there, namely my Subaru and the VW. This, too, could have had a catastrophic outcome, as even allowing for a second of braking and subtracting the speed of my car’s forward movement from the total impact speed, I estimate a collision force of, say, 50 mph.

I pulled off the highway in Binghamton to inspect the damage, and parked under a billboard for Off Track Betting that said “May the Horse Be With You.” (I take this as evidence that, if there is a God, he's kind of a dick.) The damage, aside from the obvious gore, was minimal. I’ll need to take it to a body shop to have the fender stripped down and re-painted, which will be inconvenient and potentially expensive, but all in all, things could have been much worse. On the other hand, they also could have been much better, specifically by not happening at all.

Obies, Grad School Stuff, Heat

First, this, from Michelle Malkin’s blog. Who is Michelle Malkin? Conservative columnist, blogger, and author of such books as “Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild,” and “In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror.” I came across her blog off another blog, which, in turn, was linked from the main page of nytimes.com this past Thursday or Friday. From what I can tell, she likes to make fun of John Kerry and rail against the “MSM.” Inherent hypocrisies aside, check out her bio:

I began my career in newspaper journalism more than a decade ago as an editorial writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News (1992-94). Covered school board meetings and pole sign ordinances. Exposed Rep. Maxine Waters' gang-infested job-training center boondoggle. Received a death threat from the Mexican mafia. Moved to the Pacific Northwest and worked at the Seattle Times from 1996 to 1999. Wrote editorials supporting a repeal of the death tax. Opposed editorial board on everything else. Exposed Gov. Gary Locke's Buddhist temple cash connections. Opposed publisher and supported successful campaign to abolish race-based affirmative action in government hiring, contracting, and college admissions. Quit job and moved to Washington, D.C.

My column, now syndicated by Creators Syndicate, appears in nearly 200 papers nationwide. My first book, Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores (Regnery 2002), was a New York Times bestseller.

Other: Fox News Channel contributor. Oberlin College grad. Philadelphia-born. South Jersey-raised. I live with my husband and two children in Maryland.

Yup, let’s get that one more time.

Fox News Channel contributor. Oberlin College grad.

How often can one use those descriptions when talking about the same person? It should be noted, by the way, that on her blog, the text links to Fox News, but not to Oberlin College.

I’m a little irked by two grad schools to which I have applied, both of whom have sent me postcards to inform me that they’re missing some application materials. This, to put it politely, is bullshit. I mean, I appreciate the helpful reminders and all, but I was downright compulsive about my adherence to each school’s instructions in application preparation. I spent a LOT of time, energy, and money to put together my applications. I checked and re-checked the contents of each envelope. Everything that needed to go out went out, in one big envelope for each school. Not even to mention the (exceptionally high!) application fees, which, I reckon, ought to entitle me to the courtesy of not having my transcripts or recommendations “misplaced.”

I was in this irritable mindset when I received an envelope from NYU on Saturday. Inside was an acceptance letter.

??!?!?!?!!!?!?!?!?!

!!

Yesp! Indeed, an acceptance letter, roughly 2-3 months earlier than I had expected to hear anything. I had a meeting with the chair of the Composition Department in October, but it wasn’t like an Interview interview, and was certainly not an audition, which at NYU requires that certain pieces be performed on the piano (yikes!). It was more of a “is NYU a place I want to go?” question-and-answer session. And as I recall, I was asking the questions. But whatever. It’s a tremendous relief to have been accepted to a program I would like to attend, though there’s still much unresolved in the great grad school saga, including auditions at other schools and that whole notion of “tuition.”

Oh, and, in the “dang!” department, the cost of heating my apartment this past month came to $395, with the thermostat set at 62 degrees Fahrenheit. I will not have to pay all of this myself, or even half of it, for at 654 we employ complex internal cost-distribution formulas taking into account the physical properties of warm air, but still, daaaaaaaang. The chief physical property exhibited by heat in my apartment, by the way, is “escape.” Thus I am in the (time-consuming) process of covering each window with 2 mil plastic sheeting and several yards of duct tape. This, I hope, will bring my heating bills back down into the “ouch” region, rather than the “boing” region so adequately represented by the one currently sitting, unpaid, on my piano.

Busy week: rehearsal tomorrow, winter concert at my old high school Wednesday, Rock Extravaganza with Dan an Ang (pronounced “Anj”) on Thursday (coinciding with reunion of high school folks back in town for the holidays), and then home for Christmas on Friday. This month has gone very quickly.

Oh, one more thing: mint Oreos and Silk Nog (with a dash of nutmeg) are a holiday combination not to be outdone. I wholly recommend them.

Over and out.

My Grammatic(al) Crisis

The other day, a newspaper quoted a Brigham-Young professor as saying “all of a sudden, I...” Though I’ve heard this before, it still looked and sounded strange to me, as I’ve always said “all of the sudden,” but, curious as to the origins of this alternate, and, I assumed, slang pronunciation, I googled both.

The google statistics do not reflect positively on my grammatic instincts: 7,810,000 entries for “all of a sudden,” and only 671,000 for “all of the sudden.” Further, there are bunches of “grammar” websites that take up the issue. I hate these people, by the way... I mean, I get annoyed when people use, commas and apostrophe’s wrong, but not to the extent that I’d, you know, start a website to complain about it. But these dudes are adamant:

“...the proper phrasing remains "all of a sudden," and those who use "all of the sudden" will be marking themselves as imperfectly educated, or at the very least as careless in their use of language. “

Yikes.

And, perhaps more alarmingly, dictionary.com has an entry for “all of a sudden,” but none for a “the” variant.

I’ve been saying this as long as I can remember. There’s no way to tell when I first adopted the idiom, but I’d say that, at a ripe old age of 24, I could easily be sitting on two decades of occasionally sounding stupid. So why hasn’t anyone ever corrected me? And where did I learn this? How do YOU all say it?

In other news, I had that gig last week, which turned out pretty good. My playing was mediocre at best, but as I re-orient myself to the style, I imagine it will improve somewhat. Another gig next week at a party and some talk of regular or semi-regular restaurant engagements, either at the same place or an Italian bistro down the street. Good deal.

Also, for those in Buffalo, I think I’m playing a show with Dan (et al.) on the 22nd, under his name, at the Mohawk. Interestingly, we have not yet rehearsed.

Finally, my house is exceptionally cold, all the time. I wear many layers.

That is all. Over and out.

'Tis a Loooooooooong Entry, fa-la-la-la-laa...

The season of socially acceptable cheesy music is upon us. I am referring not, of course, to World Aids Day (today!), which in name alone reveals its startling potential to inspire multi-platinum artists to collaborate to raise “awareness.“ Picture the bizarreness of “We Are the World,” only aimed at AIDS instead of starvation. And without Ray Charles and Michael Jackson, because the former is dead and artists will want to distance themselves from the latter. Unless, of course, there’s a way to overdub Ray Charles using pre-recorded material. Then he would definitely be in. Add, oh, I don’t know... Sting, and probably Elton John. Stevie Wonder’s always in for a good cause. Then you’d need about 10-12 B-listers, including at least two American Idol rejects. Bring in the American ‘tween [I hate the word “’tween” more than I hate the word blog, I think] crowd with someone like Jessica Simpson, the country vote with Shania or Kenny Chesney, and add a dash of a ‘70s or ‘80s band for good measure. I’d say the BeeGee’s, but the one dude died. Umm, oh! Toto. They’re random enough. AND HEY! The song could be “Africa,” with altered words: “We’ll stop the AIIIDS down in Aaaafricaaaa.” Perfect. So in conclusion, we have Sting, Elton, Stevie, Jessica, Shania/Kenny, Toto, a from-the-grave Ray Charles using clips of previously recorded music, and an epic cast of two-hit-wonders and Idol rejects. Book the studio, baby, we’ve got a hit.

But I’m NOT talking about World Aids Day. In fact, I am talking about the run-up to Christmas. Disney World’s Christmas-factor was not nearly as high as I’d hoped. There were a few unnaturally tall and perfect (fake) trees spread throughout the various parks, and some wreaths and pine rope hung here and there. The music was Christmasy, but not the traditional brass-quintet and orchestra stuff I would have expected. At times, it verged startlingly close to Kenny G (more on him later). The Backlot at MGM was highly decorated, and featured fake snow. This, I will admit, exceeded my expectations somewhat. But no carolers on Main Street. No giant Santa hat atop a castle spire. Missed opportunities, Walt, missed opportunities.

The vacation, by the way, was good. The weather was warm, but not hot. I’ve reached the conclusion that one never really gets too old to enjoy Disney World per se, but one does get too old to tolerate the crowds. I was, at various point, struck in the ankles by every wheeled vehicle permitted in the park (except the Segways the security folks ride): wheelchairs, strollers, personal-mobility-enhancing-scooters, you name it. Seriously, there were too many of them. Strollers EVERYWHERE. Traffic ground to a halt at times for all the strollers parked outside rides. And at one overwhelmingly crowded point on our first day, my mother was completely knocked down by a fat woman on a personal-mobility-enhancing-scooter in “The Land” at Epcot Center, who, I might add, sped up before plowing into her. Literally adding insult to injury, her two equally obese companions then scolded my mother for not moving out of the scooter’s way (which, might I add, was impossible) more promptly. I’m putting that too politely, actually. Basically they bitched my mom out. “SHE SAID EXCUSE ME, YOU KNOW!”, one fat woman said in reference to her scooter-bound, fat-ass chum. The other fully-mobile fat woman said something too, but I don’t remember what. Suffice to say it was equally venomous in substance and tone. This shook mom up quite a bit. We were pretty uneasy about crowds from then on.

But again, I’m talking about Christmas. Jeez, people, stay on topic. There are three giant (real!) Christmas trees in the lobby of the building where I work, surrounding the newly-restored 1920’s-era Art Deco clock from Buffalo’s Central Terminal, an enormous architecturally impressive train station unused and un-maintained since the early 1970’s. These (the trees) make the atrium smell like pine, which is great. My office neighbor has switched from CDs of Rod Stewart singing the classic American songbook to various Christmas albums, which, especially now that it is December, is fine by me. At least I think so... I’m a little concerned that I will peak too early. See, you want the zenith of your Christmas spirit to occur on or around the 24th of December, so that by the time New Year’s rolls around and soft-rock radio stations switch back to their non-seasonal format, you’re ready for the change, having lived the Christmas season to its fullest potential. Peak too late and Christmas will fly by before you can really enjoy it. Peak too soon and you risk approaching Earth from too shallow an angle, causing you to bounce off the atmosphere and shoot back into space. And without enough fuel for a second attempt, you’d be in a pretty pickle there, friend, let me tell you! Indeed, overexposure to Christmas songs early in the month could lead to a hazardous situation, but for now it’s okay. I’ll keep you posted on any future problems related to the level of my Christmas spirit if they arise.