Thoughts of a Common Man

I pulled up at the gas pump at a rest area between Rochester and Syracuse. I was pumping my gas when a man pulled up at the pump across the way. I'm not sure why, but I pegged him at about ten years older than me. He was nearly bald and what wasn't missing was grey. He had a bit of a paunch too, and he looked road-weary. His wife exited the passenger side of the car and offered to wash the windows while he pumped the gas. I knew it was his wife because they were speaking of their three boys and how they wished they lived a little closer. "What're you bitching about?" he asked. "I've driven every mile." "Cause you think I drive too slow," she said. I sort of chuckled because I definitely have had the same conversation with my wife. She dunked the squeegee in the water and leaned across the hood of the car to clean the windshield. The man whistled at her and said, "I have a good view from here." His eyes were trained on her backside...

All right. I will be the spokesman for the City of Buffalo. I appointed myself to the task and then seconded the nomination. We want LeBron to stay the hell out of here! We don't want him taking up our valuable billboard space because we need to advertise for our lawyers and we need to save space for the moments when we ask Ralph Wilson to fire the entire Buffalo Bills team. We don't have enough money for LeBron anyway. Word on the street is that he wants to be a billionaire. If we pooled all of our money we probably couldn't come up with a billion. We can't pay you. We don't have a basketball team. We used to, and they were good, but they skipped town for some reason. Probably to save us from having to pay the King the ransom. Our night life won't be classy enough for LeBron. Unless he likes to go bowling and drink shots in between rolls, there isn't a helluva' lot for us to do. He could go down to Chippewa and run down bar patrons with Marshawn, I supp...

I swear to God sometimes I read things on the 'Net that simply blow my mind. Like today, for instance. I just completed reading a story about a contested will. Seems a man about my age, Bret Carr, is contesting the will his mother left behind to distribute a pretty size able amount of cash. Bret was all set to cash in when his mother left, but he found out that there had been some changes made. As an only child, there wasn't a lot of competition for the nest egg, but he lost anyway. Seems his Mom left a bit of the cash to others. Namely her three dogs. Three million bucks, actually. One mil for each Chihuahua, so that they can live as they are accustomed. They also get the run of the mansion until their deaths. Bret got kibbles 'n bits in comparison. Can you imagine? Your mother cuts you out of the will so that she can provide for the dogs when she's gone? And these dogs had a grand time of it while mommy was still kicking too. Conchita had a $15,000 necklace that she r...

The 4th of July weekend is mere days aways and we are struggling with the idea of what to do. The boys want to head to New York City for the weekend with the promise of possibly meeting up with friends and a Yankee game hanging in the balance. I'm sort of in for that, but I drive a lot during the week. Do we need to sit in the car for that long? Really? I'm thinking a water park somewhere, with food cooked on a grill, a few beers with friends, and chasing the kids around. We used to go to a Six Flags Park each year for the 4th, but we stopped when the whole trip became too exhausting, but I'd be up for that sort of fun again. Fun. In the words of Chevy Chase, "We're going to have so much %&*king fun we're going to be singing zippity-doo-da out of our ass---es." No matter what happens there has to be some sort of fun had, right? Think of the 4th of July celebrations of your youth, for instance. In the town where I grew up there used to be a festival of ...

...life turns grey...like the skin on a dying man. And night after night, we pretend its all right. But you have grown older....life has grown colder... And it is so easy to get down about things... and so hard to keep treading high above the rising tide. As a growing man I loved Pink Floyd and their music, but wondered about how down the writer was...I studied Roger Waters through the years and gained a lot of respect...but... I spent the evening with Sam and his constant giggle. The Yanks were getting spanked but we raised an app on the droid and answered questions about music. And Sam was giggling because I knew the answer on every single John Denver song. "Who's John Denver?" He asked. "Was he like the Rolling Stones?" "Not exactly," I said, but there was so much good music back then. So many different ways to hear the songs. "And you had one radio that got three channels?" "That was it." And it has to be like the stone ages to...

Saw the Adam Sandler movie Grown-Ups last night for Sam's birthday, and it was a lot of fun. Smiled a lot of the time, particularly when remembering doing some of the goofy, innocent things as a child. We most certainly swung on a grapevine in the back woods, clearing the dry creek and landing on the other side. I recall being afraid to make the swing, but doing it so I wouldn't be targeted as a wimp...or more of a wimp. I also thought about all of the big games we played as kids, little league, backyard baseball, and on and on. I couldn't help but consider those friends from long ago, and I could also sympathize with Sandler's character who is almost begging his kids to go outside and play instead of playing video games. And most of all, I couldn't help but think about how fast it all goes. Sam turned 10 yesterday. I clearly recall laying in my bed on my tenth birthday, in disbelief that I had already been around for a decade! I kept saying the word. Decade. Decade...

Watched a truly disturbing report last night about the women who are chasing that VanDerSloot Monster around. It seems that since he's been arrested for the murder of that girl in Peru, he's been receiving 50 letters a day ranging from women who want to get to know him better, to women who are proposing marriage. Now to hear me tell it, I was always something of a ladies man myself. I often tell Kathy and the boys that: Chicks dig me because I very rarely wear underwear and when I do it is something usually erotic. Of course I stole the line from a college roommate who remembered it from the movie Stripes , but I use it to make a point that I was a well-sought after man. Of course, it's a lie. I made the whole thing up. I was a very pathetic dater who was not so vigourously pursued by anyone. If Kathy hadn't of seen something very few others did, I'd be the Nicholson character from As Good As It Gets about now. But I fail to understand the women mailing their underw...