Pardon me while I rant

As I grow older, I find that my feeble mind (my second choice for a blog title) gets fixated on one thing at the exclusion of all others. In this case, it's my rather hectic schedule over the next week or so.

My new bike should be together and road-worthy by Friday or Saturday. In addition to paying for it (ugggghh) I need to find time to get there and pick it up. I'll be off on Friday, so I hope it is ready then. Why am I taking Friday off? Glad you asked. Friday night, Umphrey's McGee is playing at The Electric Factory. The show starts at 8:30 (with Tea Leaf Green), and they probably won't go on until around 10 - and play for 3 hours or so - so I'm sleeping in a bit so I won't fall asleep on the Hi-Speed line and miss my stop, as I have done in the past.

That's a particularly odd experience. I take the train from the Woodcrest station, and coming home I have to be fairly alert to be sure I don't miss my stop. Once, I got off a stop too soon and once I slept through it altogether. Either is bad, since the trains run every 40 minutes at those single-digit hours, so it takes a while to bring another one around to pick my drunk ass up. Hopefully, a few extra hours of Friday morning sleep will be just the thing to keep me coherent until the end of the evening/morning.

The following week is the LPGA McDonald's Championship in Havre de Grace, Maryland. I'm still undecided as to whether I will spend Wednesday night there or drive the hour-plus back and forth. I want to go for the practice round on Wednesday and the first round on Thursday, skip Friday and go back Saturday and probably Sunday. There is a nearby Motel 6 that will cost $80, so the money is a factor. The extra rest and lower stress might be worth it, though. Compound that with the inevitable shore traffic and it might be a bargain.

In the middle of all this (or maybe because of it) my television is starting to act strangely. The screen goes black at random moments. Turning it off and back on brings the picture back, but I'm worried because these things almost always get worse, and never better. I'm not up for TV shopping right now.

Maybe Lindsey Lohan has it right? Do some funky shit and throw yourself into rehab. I'm sure she has personal assistants to do her laundry and TV shopping. Forget about work. What is it exactly that she does, anyway? As near as I can tell, it's a bunch of crappy movies and equally crappy records. On the IMDB, the list of her as "self" is ten times as long as the list of her as "actress" - what's that tell you?

How did I get started on this?

And now, this one says "I've hit rock bottom." Get a grip, Britney. You are so far from rock bottom that you can't even see it from where you are. Take a walk along Broad Street and check on a guy curled up in a cardboard box with more teeth than cents and let me know where your rock hits bottom.

These people kill me. Over the weekend, I stumbled upon The Simple Life, with those two simpletons, Paris Hilton and whatshername - seemingly making a joke out of life's occupations. I don't know if we are supposed to think these two jackasses are hot, stupid or funny. I don't think they are any of those things, and I found the show to be insulting to people who live in the real world and have to make decisions about things with the knowledge that their decisions might end up with them in a cardboard box on Broad Street.

At one point in the show, they were "working" in a fast-food joint. Their supervisor gave them their paychecks - $56 each. One of them asked, "What are we supposed to do with this?" The supervisor told them, "You cash it."

"Where?", they asked. I immediately knew that they had never seen a check or had to actually sign one and take it to the bank, because when the answer "The bank" came, the look on their faces spoke volumes.

So, here we are in our world of made-up celebrities who seem to believe that their made-up world is shattered every time one of them crashes a Mercedes or gets so drunk that they would forget their train station - if they needed a train. Meanwhile, the rest of us would love to have a Mercedes to crash and a TV show to exploit people who made them what they are, just so we could feel what rock bottom is really like.

I gotta go pee.