BlitzBlog

My blinker was on so I turned. Admittedly, I cut the corner a bit
short, but I had been sitting on the opposite shoulder, where I had
pulled over to speak on the cell phone. I was in Kate's car, so I
didn't have my earpiece, so being The Good Citizen, I stopped for a 15
second conversation. Once I was done, I checked my mirrors, pulled onto
the road and made the left. Unfortunately, a local police officer was
coming the other way, just pulling up to the stop sign. Since I'd cut
the corner a bit short, I had to make a mid-turn adjustment and correct
into my own lane a bit quicker than I'd anticipated. It wasn't a
dangerous or aggressive move, just a minor correction that anyone could
have made.

I looked in my rear view mirror and saw the police
car make a U-turn and start to follow me. I chilled it slow at the
35MPH speed limit for about half a mile. I made another left (carefully
this time) and about 200 yards later the cop flashed his lights on.

Now this was a deserted country road through rolling farmland, so we're not talking major traffic here.

It
was about 95 degrees out on this Memorial Day Monday. I was on my way
to our friends' house where I was meeting the rest of my family, who
were in the process of bicycling over.

So Officer Davis
approaches the sparkling dark blue Audi wagon, replete with empty kayak
rack on the roof and empty bike rack on the tailgate. Not your usual
“profiled” vehicle. Just another suburban parent-mobile.

Now
normally (I say normally as if I'm pulled over regularly, but I'd
estimate in reality it's been 5 years since last time) I have about 15
PBA cards in my wallet, and I usually make sure to flash them as I
“search” for my license tucked behind them all. However, on this warm
day, I'd forgotten my wallet with my copy of the A6's registration and
the PBA cards. I had only my money clip with my license and a few
credit cards and some cash.

So as Officer Davis approaches,
I've already got my window down and hand him my license and the
insurance card. “Cutting it a bit close back there.” he says. I tell
him that I'd just pulled across the road “because I was trying to obey
the law about hand-free devices, and, this is my wife's car and it's
very different and much bigger than my own car, so yes I suppose I did,
but I can offer no explanation or excuses.”

Officer Davis asks
to see the registration, which I know I don't have, but I make an
attempt to look for it in the glove compartment, all the while
explaining this is my wife's car and that I don't drive it much and if
there wasn't such a mess in the glovebox I'm sure I could find the
registration for him right away. I even flash the box of emergency
tampons Kate keeps when I reiterate it's my wife's car (we both
smiled). I feign exasperation and tell him I cannot find the
registration, that I'm sorry, and that I'll have to have a talk with my
wife about it when I see her.

He mentions that my windows are
tinted pretty dark. I tell him that I bought the car this way from the
dealer, but I know it was originally a Florida car, so I guess it's
possible that the tinting might be darker than a New York vehicle. I
say “Sure works good on a hot day like today,” and smile. He say's he
bets that it does, then puts a light meter over the edge of the window
and tells me it's about 30% too dark. He then tells me to wait, and
saunters back to his patrol car.

What seems like 10 minutes go
by. I'm sitting there in the car, calculating the infractions; Careless
driving- 2 points and $150. Driving without registration- $100. Driving
with an obstructed rear license plate,- $75. Tinted windows- $75. all
told, a $400 pop and 2points which will add $200 to my insurance for
the each of the next 3 years. Grand total: $1000 for a turn cut 6 feet
short on an almost empty country road.

Sounds fair, yes?

No.
Not even close. In reality, it's outrageous and serves only one
purpose. To enhance the coffers of the local township and the insurance
companies. It's not about the Law or even Public Safety. It's only
about one thing, and that is M-O-N-E-Y.

So Officer Davis
finally gets back out his patrol rig. He strolls to the side of my car
and hands me back my license and insurance card. He then hands me a
summons for the tinted windows, and…

…that's it.

The
ticket doesn't say the fine, but I know it's not a moving violation, so
I'm guessing a guilty plea on the back, mailed in might set me back
$75-100.

Shamefully, I thank officer Davis for “showing
courtesy” (cop-speak for letting someone off with less than the
maximum) and slowly drive off.

While I am relieved at not having
come to fruition what I thought might be the worst case scenario, I am
still just aggravated at the futility of railing against a system that
is so entrenched that we just accept our fate. Make a minor (and not
even illegal) mistake, pay a minor price. I guess I can just chalk it
up to “being at the wrong place… etc” but still it just infuriates me
that this is The Game.

While I play The Game as well as
anyone, I still hate playing it. I speed habitually on the highway, but
not aggressively, nor do I weave in and out of traffic. I have the best
radar detector made and use it religiously. I carry as many PBA cards
as I can get my hands on, and when I've been ticketed in the past, I go
to court to see if I can talk the Officer or the District Attorney into
a lesser charge with no points on my license. While this usually works,
it costs time and money and serves no purpose other than to enrich the
aforementioned parties.

I've beaten a ticket once, even after
the testifying police officer blatantly lied on the witness stand.
Luckily , the judge actually believed me and dismissed the case (after
I'd asked the officer if he remembers writing the ticket that night.
When he replied that he did, I asked the judge to look at the time
written on the ticket- 9:30 in the morning. Case Dismissed).
Afterwards, in the hall, the cop came up to me and asked me “No hard
feelings.” I exploded at him with an F-Bomb and the use of the words
“dirty crooked lying pig” teling him that the reason people hate cops
is becasue of “dickwads like him who would get on a witness stand and
lie for a freaking traffic ticket,”
all the while my Dad was pulling me out of the Courthouse hallway while
the cops spat back that “I better not get stopped by him anytime soon.”
All of which I'm sure made me a very careful driver whenever I passed
through Bogota, New Jersey for a number of years following.

Anyway…..

I'll post the info about the tinted windows and rant on the inequities of that sometime soon I suppose.

“Excellent! There’s seats open in the front row!”

We weaved our way through the maze of seats in the tiny club, and there, right at the corner of the stage, were a couple of empty wooden chairs. They were in the side section, looking directly at the 3-foot-wide aisle between the main front row seats and the tiny proscenium stage. “These’ll be great!” I said to Milo. Milo looked at me a bit trepidatiously, but then sat down anyway. Lon and Marc, on the other hand, grabbed two open seats directly behind ours.

“Where’re you sitting?” I asked. “Why are you sitting back there?”

Lon replied, “‘Cause who the hell knows what’ll get spurted on us?!”

Added Marc, “Fuck you if you think I’m sitting in front.”

At this point I guess I should tell you that we were four very stoned 22-year-old kids in the midst of a grand backpacking adventure through Europe.

And tonight, we were in Amsterdam. A sex club in Amsterdam, to be exact.

Oh my.

So apparently the evening’s show was to begin with a standard strip tease dancer. An attractive young lady sauntered out to some music and began her stripping and gyrating. Once naked, however, she began to acquire various oblong objects with which to, um, enhance her act.

Now, even at the tender age of 22, I was pretty well versed in the female form and many of the wonderful things it can do. But, this woman, this extremely talented woman, who undoubtedly had rehearsed and perfected her gift, was showing me things that, well, at the time I found more fascinating than stimulating. I mean, the ability to “inhale” or “exhale” a Coke bottle (and I’m not talking about breathing here) without the use of hands, and the control needed to be able to allow the bottle to peek out just so - well, I was truly impressed to say the least. Then to add to such a wondrous ability, that of shooting ping pong balls clear to the bar at the back of the room (I hope nothing landed in somebody’s drink), well, I gotta say, I learned a thing or two that night.

So Dinah The Vagina finishes her act, and the lights go dark.

Then more music begins playing. But not your typical dance/stripper music. No, this, oddly enough, is the music from the Muppet Show. At the moment one’s confusion at the incongruity of the music and the venue become realized, a spotlight hits the next dancer on the stage.

Stunned, we are, as we behold this woman. Stunned, for before us stands a woman in nothing but a gold lamé string bikini and a Miss Piggy mask.

A three hundred and fifty pound woman in a gold lamé string bikini and a Miss Piggy mask.

Oh my.

So Miss Piggy begins gyrating around like that old Chris Farley Chippendales skit. She’s dancing and skipping and jiggling (reeeeeally jiggling) all over (and I mean ALL over) and the place is going nuts. Once I get over the shock, I start enjoying the joyous burlesque of it all, like some great Cabaret acid trip. So Miss Piggy gets all naked and then heads out into the audience. She’s mauling guys, pushing bald guys’ head into her gigantic cleavage, dropping her gynourmous boobs on guys’ heads, sitting on guys’ laps, just having a grand old time. She’s on the opposite side of the stage from us, doing the funky chicken with some guy on the other end of the aisle from me.

We’re dying laughing when all of a sudden the music stops, the drummer hits a rim shot, and Miss Piggy jumps and turns full about. She looks across the aisle, directly at me. The drummer begins a drum roll, Miss Piggy starts skuffing her feet like a bull about to charge. I hear the musicians laughing (never a good sign) and then I hear one of those wooden train whistles as Miss Piggy starts heading towards me like Mary Lou Retton about to hit the vaulting horse.

Before I can move, before I can scream, or cringe, or even take a breath, Miss Piggy takes a full-boat belly-flop flying leap right at my own schnozzola.

I am enveloped into this woman.

I am sucked into total sensory blackout. There is no light. No air. No sound that I can hear.

I can only feel 350 pounds of boob and belly and …. yeeeesh!

My chair is thrown backwards as my feet head up in the air. I can feel the chair land on Lon’s lap, who I can only guess, is almost as stunned as I am (but at least he can breathe). What seems like minutes go by, and Miss Piggy finally frees me from her Prison of Unending Flesh.

My glasses are bent, I’m not sure if my ribs are intact, but I know my heart is working because I can feel it pounding against my flattened spine as I gasp for air.

Miss Piggy, helps me up, gives me a hug and a sweet peck on the cheek, and heads off stage. Apparently I was the finale.

The rest of the show was an assortment of couples, trios, and larger groups performing all sorts of interpretive dance while being conjoined at the genitalia. It was entertaining, but after my eclipse with Miss Piggy, I guess I was enduring some post-traumatic stress disorientation, so it was all just a blur to me.

The palace I live in with a wife, 2
kids, and 2 dogs, tends, as you might expect, to get a bit messy. I'd
say that the place generally looks like what I imagine Times Square
does at about 2am on New Years Eve after most everyone's gone home.
Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, but I'd estimate that at any given
time I can dig up at least 9 stray socks from the corners of rooms
where socks have no business being.

Our basement is the
repository of anything anyone puts down when they enter the house (we
usually come in through the walk-in basement door from our garage.)
While I guess this arrangement isn't really that bad, as if we entered
the house through the front door, the mess existing in the basement
would just exist in our main entry hall.

My
son believes that if his hamper isn't full to the ceiling, or that he
isn't completely out of underwear, then there's really no need to bring
his laundry to laundry room.

My daughter, who has never met a
pair of sock she couldn't split, owns enough large stuffed animals to
ensure that her bedroom floor and bed are 90% covered 90% of the time.
Lord only knows what's under those furry bags of dust mites.

The
saving grace in all this is that we have cleaning lady who comes to our
house twice a month. The good thing about having her come to our house
twice a month, is that on the night before she comes to clean our
house, we clean our house.

Yes, we clean for the cleaning lady.

My
wife's logic for this is that she'd rather pay the cleaning lady for
vacuuming and mopping and dusting, rather than straightening and
picking
everyone's sundry crap off the floor. Makes sense to me, but still, I
have become ambivalent to those twice-monthly visits. On the one hand,
when I come home from work after Karen has visited us, the house is all
sparkly and clean. On the other, my wife usually waits to announce (to
remind us) that “Karen is coming tomorrow” until 9pm on the night
before, and this sends everyone in the house into a cleaning bitch
tizzy. By 9pm on Tuesday night, I am ready to unwind and lay down on
the couch and catch some TV. My kids are usually heading for bed or
bath, and now we three are expected to hop-to and start picking up all
the detritus that we've allowed to collect over the last two weeks.

Now
for my own detritus, it is usually a quick 5-10 minute shoveling and
I'm done. But for the short humans that I spawned, 2 weeks is enough
time to accumulate an Everest of laundry, even when spread across the
entire bedroom floor, and enough ripped, crumpled papers of homework
and passed noted and cute little drawings of cars and horseys to choke
a shredder.

My son is loathe to throw anything away without
examining it's deeper meanings (known only to him) so every tiny scrap
must be screened for its value as a golden heirloom or a piece of
snot-speckled tissue that he might deign to part with.

My
daughter's idea of straightening up her room is to use a push broom (or
to fashion one of ropes, sticks and dolls) and bulldoze everything
under her bed or into her closet, until it is ready to burst like
Professor Whoopie's on the old Tennessee Tuxedo show. This leads to the
inevitable surprise at finding long-lost trinkets on those twice-yearly
forays that include cleaning under the bed, or safaris into the nether
reaches of her closet.

I suppose that living with 3 other
primates in an enclosed space will always be cause for home hygene
compromise. Kate has always maintained that I'm “the neat one” and
she's “the clean one.” This is, for the most part true, as when I lived
in my own apartment, it was, upon initial viewing, immaculate.
Everything was always in its place and the was virtually no clutter.
That is until one looked closer to find the dust rings around
knick-knacks that hadn't be moved in 3-4 months. Kate did take heart in
that at least my manly toilet didn't look an earth-toned Jackson
Pollack painting. It might even be one of the reasons she eventually
moved in, knowing that all the place needed was a quick vacuum and
dusting. I, on the other hand, probably need more work, which of
course, is a subject for another column.