Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Loud Alarms, Waiting Rooms and New Music
Thursday
May 30, 2002
If there had to be a day where I was up past my usual bedtime, today would be that day. As I type this, an unbearable, ear-piercing, excruciatingly loud beep is blaring through my fire alarm. They're "testing the system" this morning, so the woman at the door told me. She told me they were "almost finished". We'll see. Shena in the Camden Ybor front desk told me they mentioned it in a flier on Friday. Funny, I don't recall receiving it. Maybe I overlooked it, though. Camden is usually on top of things..... goddamn, there it is again. This is getting old fast. I am most irritated. Imagine if they pulled this shit at 11:14 PM at night instead of 11:14 AM?!? But there are sacrifices that go with the shift I work.
At the massage therapist this morning, I had to wait 40 minutes because they accidentally double-booked. But in hindsight maybe that was a good thing. I got to read the May 2002 Esquire magazine in peace. No head-splittingly loud alarms going off every two minutes.
I mentioned Esquire earlier this month, and I have to say that it is actually a pretty interesting magazine. Much better than, say, Popular Science (another magazine rack option at the massage therapist office). Esquire has a few too many pictures of dudes in there for my liking (what's up with the pictorial about Route 66 in the May 2002 issue?!? I was expecting inspiring photos of landscapes from rarely seen settings, not random guys leaning against non-discript buildings and the like...) But, Esquire does do a good job with their interviews. The Tom Cruise piece was well-researched, if nothing else (making the best of guarded quotes), and the Suge Knight piece was downright fascinating. I feel Knight was dead-on about what should've happened with Tim McVeigh.
Well, Bobby Bills will get his wish. Avalanche/Red Wings: Game 7. Friday night. Should be intense. I plan on cracking open a couple of cold ones and watching what should be an intense hockey game. You might remember one of the all-time classic hockey games of the 1990's was a Game 7 involving the Red Wings -- versus St. Louis in the 1996 Western Conference Semifinals. The year Wayne Gretzky played for the Blues. Detroit won in double OT in a game for the ages. It would be fitting if the Avs and the Wings put on a similar showdown on the ice in Hockeytown tomorrow night.
We're going to hit a challenging few weeks at work. May sweeps pretty much prohibits people from being off (the quarterly ratings period), so time off aplenty starts rolling in about now. And with things being what they are at WTSP, that means everyone will be stretched to cover as much as possible. So it goes. Monday in particular will be brutal. Won't get into the specifics on here, because this is not a forum for me to defame or belittle or overtly criticize, but rest assured it will be a CHALLENGE. Believe me, I plan on being in very early on Sunday night. There will be much work to be done by very few. Enough said.
My payoff comes one week from tomorrow, when I leave for California. I'm so ready for a vacation. It'll be quite nice. I'm thinking I either need to buy a digital camera, or a scanner when I get back, so I can put some of the pics on here. My pictures section is woefully inadequate on here as of this writing (and I have plenty of available space on my account)... but perhaps that can change.
My quarterly "Irish Ayes" Father Ryan High School alumni newsletter arrived today. It's always interesting to read through there and see the latest from old classmates. Even from people I haven't seen in more than seven years. Names from the past, people getting married or graduating or moving to new jobs or whatever else motivates them to write. I let them know when I moved to Huntington, and again when I moved to Tampa. Some names pop up and you think: wow I haven't thought about them in a long time. Things like that make you realize how quick time passes.
Back to the massage therapy... Actually this is Pulp Fiction talk -- if you don't care about it, skip to the next paragraph. I came to the conclusion in talking with Ray (my massage therapist) this morning that Vincent in fact died on Day Two of the film. See, Day One was the morning of the early morning meeting with Marcellus' business partners, and the Bonnie Incident, and then that night was the boxing match. The next day, while going to retrieve his watch, Butch encountered and killed Vincent. So there wasn't more to it -- sometimes it is possible to overanalyze. Though with Terrentino, you never know...
New Orleans in early August is looking more and more like a firm go... Waiting to hear if I can land Friday 8/2 off from work; if so I'll fly down Thursday, otherwise Friday. Southwest Airlines has ridiculously low rates from Tampa-New Orleans (we're talking in the $80 range round trip), but that could change. So I hope to hear yay or nay by tomorrow about the day off so I can book it. Turns out the Phi Tau national convention will be there, and a bunch of old fraternity brothers will be down there for it. And you know I'm not one to miss out on a party in New Orleans.
I leave you with some hip-hop songs I strongly recommend (if you're into that kind of music):
Rayvon "My Bad"
Ying Yang Twins "Say I Yi Yi"
Wyclef Jean "One Last Chance"
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