Hey there and welcome to another issue of Moronitude!
I want to start off by getting on my knees and begging forgiveness from all of you wonderful human beings who have subscribed to this lovely newsletter. I haven’t updated the way I should. Life, uh, got in the way, as Jeff Goldblum told us in Jurassic Park. I’m going to make sure to be more diligent in the future.
As a bit of housekeeping, as the world opens up and the weather gets warmer, I don’t think I’m going to be sending the newsletter out on Sunday evenings moving forward. For a while, all the weekend really was for me was 48 hours of waiting to go back to work. So I gladly spent time working on this silly endeavor. Now that I can venture out into society and do things like sit at an airport bar in St. Louis and pound out the newsletter, all while chomping on toasted ravioli, drinking a tall Goose Island IPA and cursing Southwest for thinking this godforsaken city is “on the way” between Jacksonville and NYC, I’m thinking that writing this thing on the weekend isn’t the greatest idea. There are adventures to be had! So, even though this bad boi shall be showing up in your inbox on Wednesday, I proclaim Tuesday evenings as the new home of Moronitude! Huzzah!
This week we’re also going to be doing something a little different. We’re ditching the format of the newsletter to do a bunch of quick hits. The last couple of weeks I’ve had a real bad case of the “goldfish brain.” This means that I have roughly 40,000 ideas running in my head at all times, but I can only focus on each one for about the length of a song by The Locust. So we’re going to go through all my rants/thoughts in rapid fire fashion. Put 3,000 words on the clock… and… GO!
Where’s the damn lettuce?!
I’ve been doing my best to eat a little healthier these days, lest I end up needing a crane to remove my corpse from my apartment. Thus, I’ve been eating a lot of “entree salads.” If I just go plain old lettuce I’m going to be running to 7-11 for a bag of Extra Toasty Cheez-Its around 3:30, so I need a little more than just a plain old salad. Sometimes I get a chicken caesar. Sometimes I get a falafel salad. Sometimes I feel extra adventurous and get this nice feta salad from the place down the street with chopped chicken. It’s delightful. But do you know what the problem is with all of these salads? There’s barely any lettuce.
Lettuce is the whole point of a salad. You chow down on a bunch of refreshing greens that not only fill you up, but they expedite the digestion process, which is nice. When I order a salad, I expect there to be, oh, I don’t know, a 60-40 % ratio of lettuce to accoutrement. Maybe I’m a weirdo, maybe people are just ordering salads to eat all the better tasting stuff, but every time I get a salad the ration is something like 25% lettuce and the rest is all the bells and whistles. This infuriates me. If I wanted half a damn chicken I would have just ordered chicken, not a salad. When I say “salad” what I mean is, “Give me a copious amount of lettuce with a couple of other ingredients thrown in for extra flavor, but please, and I can’t stress this enough, give me a buttload of lettuce.”
Even when I try to be healthy I get jammed up.
Killing time in St. Louis.
I went to go visit my dad and his lady friend down in Jacksonville this week. I had a pretty wonderful time while I was there. We walked along the beach, had an amazing meal at one of my all-time favorite restaurants, saw a hawk carrying an entire sandwich as it flew overhead and went to a brewery and had some very nice beers. Plus I got the chance to visit a cousin of mine and I had some absolutely killer homemade biscuits and gravy right before going to the airport. BnG that we chased with a dram of Jonnie Walker Blue (we had failed to have any the night before, a Connell tradition, so we powered through and had breakfast scotch because traditions are important!) But because I am who I am, there has to be something negative about the trip for me to focus on. And in this case it is the route I had to take to get both to Jacksonville and to return.
For reasons that are known only to the all-powerful Gods of Southwest Airlines, I have had a layover in St. Louis on both legs of this trip. If you want to make me spend an hour or two in the undisputed worst city in the Midwest on one leg of the trip, fine. But I had to stop in the Lou on both flights. And as I type this missive at a Budweiser/St. Louis Blues themed bar, I am smack dab in the middle of a four hour layover in one of my least places on Earth. As a friend of mine told me when I informed him I was here on my way to Jacksonville, my journey is not unlike Dante descending through the levels of hell. The only problem with the analogy is that St. Louis is far worse than even Jacksonville.
While this city is home to one of my three favorite bands [MU 330], it is also home to my second least favorite hockey team and my second least favorite baseball team. It is the so-called “best fans in baseball” that gave birth to the bulk of my hatred of the town, way back when I lived a stone’s throw from Wrigley Field. Every weekend the Cardinals came to town was a shitshow, filled with yokels making the big journey north to root on their redbirds clad in tight rolled jorts and Cardinals shirtseys depicting their favorite white players. You’d think there would be a ton of Ozzie Smith throwbacks or Pujols jerseys, but no, it was always McGwire (who I love but I’m making a point here), David Eckstein (so scrappy!) or Chris Carpenter. They’d wander around the neighborhood, openly talking about what a cesspool the city was. Every time I’d engage one of them in conversation they would inevitably blurt out something along the lines of, “how do you live in a war zone like Chicago?”
As a lover of the city I lived in, this pissed me off. And it led me to take action. Not drastic action, mind you, but I created a code that allowed me to show my displeasure with folks from the Lou in a subtle, yet effective, manner. Every single time somebody in a Cardinals hat asked me for directions I would send them the opposite way. They need to go east? I send them west. They ask me which train goes downtown at Addison? I tell them to head to Howard… despite being able to see the Hancock building from the platform.
I fully recognize that rivalries between cities are stupid. For example, I think both New York and Chicago (both deep dish and tavern style, the real Chicago pie) pizza kick ass. [Before anyone asks, St. Louis pizza is a complete abomination to the word “pizza,” and should not be considered. But I have toasted ravioli in my belly as we speak and it is fantastic] But the bulk of my interactions of people from St. Louis while in Chicago consisted of them shitting on the city of Chicago, even when they were doing it in an “aw shucks” kind of way. So I hate St. Louis more than any other city in this fair nation.
Karma is probably what led to me being forced to spend two afternoons here, I recognize that. And while their beer isn’t very good, even when they’re serving me Chicago beer that their corporate overlords usurped from us, it is cold. And that’s all I really need while waiting for my flight.
Dreams Are Evil
Now that I’ve prefaced my hatred of St. Louis, the following story will make more sense.
I can say this without exaggeration or hyperbole—I am in the 99th percentile of airplane sleepers. More often than not, I’m cashed out before the wheels leave the ground. I’m not sure why I have this ability—maybe it is my mutant power—but I have never met another human who can will themselves to sleep on an airplane the way I can. As a sometimes insomniac while planted on Earth, I’m a grateful narcoleptic in the air.
Shortly after taking to the sky from Jacksonville I drifted into dreamland. I had a very vivid dream. I was on an airplane, not unlike the one I was actually on. We were traveling to St. Louis, just like I actually was. But there was a tornado. And the tornado laid waste to Lambert Airfield. There was nothing left. There was no possible way that we would be able to land and I sure as hell wasn’t going to make my connection to LaGuardia. My flight was diverted to Chicago. I ended up meeting up with friends, having some beers at the L&L before heading to the Fireside Bowl to watch Deals Gone Bad and the Slackers. It was amazing. I had such a nice time. Then I woke up to the pilot announcing that we were on our final approach on the way to St. Louis.
I’d rather never dream than to have the rug pulled out from under me like that.
The Pandemic Is Over… in Florida
In the weeks leading up to my trip to Florida I was joking about how happy I was to be going to a place where the pandemic was no longer a thing. The hiccup is that I thought I was making a joke… it turns out that when you’re in the land of DeSantis, it’s a reality
For the entirety of the last year I’ve been saying that we should “trust the science.” In other words, if we should be keeping our distance and wearing a mask, that’s what I was doing. If I was told to get a vaccination to nip this sucker in the bud, that’s what I did. Now that we’ve reached the point where those of us who have been vaccinated can shed their masks in public, well, that’s what I’m going to be doing. I just never expected it to be this uncomfortable.
I know that I’m vaccinated and I’m safe. That’s not the issue. The issue is that I’m so used to wearing my mask when indoors, even after being vaccinated. I’m so used to wearing a mask to protect those around me in case they haven’t been vaxxed. So, giving up the mask isn’t easy for me.
I guess I was expecting to be able to dip my toe into the pool a little bit, check out the temperature first. As I have been by going maskless outside when nobody is around me. But when I got to Florida, well, Charlie got thrown off the high dive, my friends.
Everywhere we went, people were maskless. And when we were outdoors at a car show, the concept of social distancing was completely thrown out the window. It’s not that I was worried about my health in this situation—Pfizer’s got me covered on that front—but I just wasn’t ready to go back to randos running into me as I was trying to take in a tiny Jetsons-esque automobile.
It’s so strange how my brain has rewired itself over the past year, but I don’t think it’s all for the negative. I really don’t want to ever stand within six feet of a stranger. I’ve never wanted to. So I’m not ready to go back to standing shoulder-to-shoulder with people. Personal space rules, as you can see from this documentary footage.
It took some time to get used to masking, it’ll take some time for me to get used to not wearing one. That’s it. I’m sure by the end of the summer I’ll be pushing through people to get onto a crowded subway car like it’s second nature. But not right now.
Why do rich people drink horrible beer?
As I mentioned above, on Saturday I went to a very fancy car show called the Concours D’Elegance. Immediately upon arriving there were three things that led me to understand just how classy this event was. 1. The word “elegance” is in the very name of the event. 2. It was taking place at a Ritz-Carlton. 3. The first tent when you walk in was for NetJets, the World’s Leading Private Jet Rental Service. I’m used to attending events like Warped Tour where the fanciest vendor was a trailer giving away free YooHoo.
So when I was starting to get parched by the hot Floridian sun, I wandered on over to the beer tent to pick up a frosty brew. I was stupefied by the menu. Every beer on it SUCKED. Miller Lite. Bud Lite. Corona. Yuengling (which I enjoy, but it’s certainly not a top tier brew). And for the effete crowd, Stella Artois.
I could go on my usual rant about how Stella is the most overrated swill ever served in a bar, but anybody who knows me has heard this at least 100 times by now. What really struck me was that we were at an event catering to the classy, why in the world weren’t there high quality beers available? They had multiple different tiers of hard alcohol available, but not a single craft beer or even a macro with a more challenging flavor profile like Sam Adams or Sierra Nevada. Just the same stuff I would pound while playing softball and Belgian pisswater. If this was a situation where there was a sponsor involved I would understand, but they were serving both Bud and Miller, so you can throw out that excuse.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been to a highbrow event that couldn’t be bothered to provide beer that actually has a little flavor to it. Maybe it is a subtle way of prodding people to pay for $14 cocktails. Or it could be that beer is an afterthought since it’s for the plebes in the first place, who cares what they end up drinking?
If I ever have another chance to infiltrate the gatherings of the upper crust, I’ll make it my mission to get to the bottom of this.
This car would have won Best in Show if it were at the Concours D’Awesome
I saw this right outside the airport, minutes after I landed. This car is somehow significantly better than the film was. And do you know who was behind the wheel? It is Vigo.
That’s it! We’ll be back on Tuesday. New Bat Time, Same Bat Newsletter! As always, thanks for reading. Don’t forget to tell your friends to subscribe… even if they are Cardinals fans.