I am Just a Hot Mess

After last week’s softball game, and the July 4th kickball game, I was ridiculously sore. Because I am old.

At today’s game, I realized that my lack of arm strength from last week has somehow turned into me wondering where my right rotator cuff has gone. Basically, I have no arm left. I’m like Chet “Rocket” Stedman at the end of Rookie of the Year.

It left me wondering if I had injured it the last time I played softball (in Dayton in 2006) and just didn’t remember it (we tended to drink heavily after games. And non-gamedays). Or if it was something else (hockey-related perhaps?) or maybe stems from my previous back problem from last winter.

Needless to say, I can barely lift my right arm.

After a post-game shower, which included cleaning off the rug burn on my right leg from sliding on astroturf, I noticed I have cuts on three fingers on my right hand. Neither of which was all that painful, so I assumed my arm/shoulder and general stiffness was all the injury I had on the day.

Then I made dinner (bacon, egg, cheese on an everything bagel with tobasco). I pulled our grease cup from the freezer and set it in the sink.

I forgot that bacon grease is like five times hotter than grease from browning ground beef. The grease hit the frozen beef grease, crackled and hissed. I picked up the cup to put it back in the freezer…

… and the hot grease melted the side of the plastic cup, poured out the side down the fingers of my left hand. So now all my finger tips are scalded.

How could bacon do this to me? It knows how much I love it!

All the veggies from my freezer are now ruined, as I thawed all of them on my throbbing hot fingers.

But I’m a hockey player. So I manned up, and pecked away at this update fot you, my faithful readers. On the plus side, I don’t feel any of the normal leg stiffness from softball. At least til I try and get out of bed tomorrow.

You Are Now Free To Hang Yourself in an Airplane Bathroom

DALLAS, Texas – Amid a large post-Mardi Gras throng of travelers fleeing the Crescent City, I found myself late for my flight and used that as an excuse to not submit my Southwest frequent flyer number.

I say excuse because if you earn a free flight on Southwest, is that supposed to be some kind of reward?

For example, let’s say I redeemed my credits for a free flight to Dallas to watch my favorite women’s basetball team. It doesn’t matter if I’m in Group A, B or C, because no matter where I sit, some rotund freak is going to come along and place himself right next to me in the middle seat.

There I am, got my aisle seat all picked out. I’m leaning towards the middle, and my right arm sticking out on the aisle, so it looks like two people are there, in an effort to protect a buffer seat between me and some seemingly normal random dude.

And the last guy on the plane is some hulking mass of humanity, who’s kinda sweaty, an majorly bulbous. And he sits down right in that empty seat.

My new stinky pal has his love-garage doors invading my personal space to the point where I have to lean over to not drown in his meaty flank. To his credit, he was gentlemanly enough to hold onto his shoulders so the full range of his girth did not suffocate me.

My back couldn’t even find the middle of the seat, it was on the edge of the seat, which is angled inward. The next 90 minutes turned the muscles in my back into a twisting coil akin to a can of worms of spasms I’ll be feeling tomorrow.

Satan runs this airline

I lean forward, fire up the laptop and try to work. No room. I can’t type, I can’t move the cursor. I can’t comfortably sit. I hang over the armrest and spill out into the aisle and get hammered by a drink cart and sympathetic but powerless stewardess. I can’t lean my seat back — did I mention I’m in the very last row? And there’s a line forming for the bathroom, so I can’t even escape.

Finally, I realize I can lift my armrest using MacGyver-like tactics on its hinge, only to be told we’re beginning descent and I have to put the armrest down.

A free flight on Southwest (No, I didn’t redeem points for this) is no reward. It’s no-class ticket to hell. Sure, I’m getting somewhere for free, but sitting next to a rotund stranger who could suffocate me makes me think I’m better off hitchhiking if I need to go somewhere cheaply. (Sure, I might get raped or killed, but hey, at least there’s a sense of adventure!).

I do feel violated, though! This communist airline, where no person’s seat priority is beneficial, ensures the discomfort of all passengers, demeans us with a cattle-call lineup to board, and demoralizes us to flashbacks of the fifth-grade bus (assuming everyone in your fifth grade class were strangers with hyper-active pituitary glands). And that’s all before take off.

The experience reminds me of how I hate romantic comedies, where the cute quirky chick meets Jerry McGuire on a plane, or Tom Cruise sits next to Meg Ryan. Do I have a hot female stranger plop down next to me? No, I’ve had one flight ever sitting next to an attractive girl who I didn’t know before getting on the plane (she was happily married to the guy sitting on the other side of her).

The next time I fly Southwest, I better have a hot, thin, 25-29 year old, single redhead who’s attracted to witty, immature goofy-looking men, sit down next to me and say “Do you mind if I sit here?” while carrying a brown paper bag full of deli-meats and french bread. “Sorry if I take up room with all my stuff here, but I’m making sandwiches. Would you like one?” Is that too much to ask?

Probably. But after all the emotional and physical torture Southwest has inflicted upon me, they owe me an introduction to Miss Awesome and the future Mrs. Kev-Fu.

(Intro) Creed Dot Gov

Colleen, who is the primary writer for the widely popular blog which shares her name and recent addition to my office, had just heard one of my highly entertaining stories, and said “this is why you need to have a blog.”

What I think Colleen fails to realize is that, because she has known me for a mere three weeks, there is a limit to my entertainment value. She’s hearing all these stories, all of them entertaining, for the first time. Quite soon, she’ll have heard all the good ones and within three months will be pleading for me to stop talking.

So to humor her, we’re starting this. It’s not a blog. It’s a word document on my desktop. Just like Creed in The Office, only he thinks it’s really a blog on the internet. And he’s slightly more fictional than I am. He also has a team of writers working for him. Then again, I have Richie Weaver to provide material, and no FCC rules.

I’m tempted to just put up a massive list of all the great anecdotes I’ve accumulated – hell, I even have those mostly written – but I am saving those for a book, so that I can get rich.

Also, I’m quite certain Colleen has more of a fan base than I do. My friends wouldn’t check a blog I write. Most of them know if anything truly good happens in my life, they’ll get a drunk text message at like 2 a.m. (one of alcohol’s effects on me is the rapid erosion of my concept of time zones).

My blog would soon become quite boring. With nothing going on in my life except work, it would quickly deteriorate into my complaining about the bullpen usage of the Mets and how bad the Islanders are.

Plus, all hypotheses on my lack of charisma and lack of popularity would now be quantifiable in the form of a hit counter.

And of course, I’m just too cheap to pay for website hosting and too lazy to research the right content management system.

So for now, I’m writing for an audience of one: Colleen. After a week, if she can still stand reading, maybe we’ll add more.

EDIT – I may post this online sooner than expected because of how much I hate Microsoft Word. Freaking auto bullets.