(in bad comedian voccé…imagining me in a sportcoat and T-shirt will further sell it) :

“You ever notice the line that YOU choose to stand in at the bank is always the LONGEST wait, no matter how much shorter it is than the others? What’s up with that? And don’t get me started on hospital food…”

(now imagine yourselves hauling back and throwing empty beer bottles at me. It will cleanse your souls.)

As lame as that cliché may be, why is it SO TRUE???? Although, if you’re still standing in lines at the bank, you may want to email me and ask about this brand new concept called the “ATM”. It will blow your mind. I also will be shocked that you managed to set up an email account to contact me in the first place.
Whether you’re in line at the supermarket, the movie theater, or the urinals at the ballpark, the “other guy” seems to always shuffle up more expediently to the cashier, ticket seller, or ice-filled pisser, doesn’t he? And it goes without saying that he’s pulling this off on purpose and silently snickering at your pathetic, hangdog expression while wheeling away his cart or zipping his fly. But HOW?
Allow me to take you back about 7 steps:
On Friday, I’d had my fill at my place of employ. I’d been laid off and asked back in a 24 hour frame of time, had numerous construction workers stand on my desk while shooting nails into 2 x 4s as they built an enclosed office beside me (that had yet to be completed in 3 months time), and I had been pulled aside by the “head of business affairs” to stop snapping the photographs I’d been taking, documenting the odd goings-on during the construction of said office. The number of script rewrites that I and the other writers had been put through kept us so busy that our shows – which we’d begun working on at the beginning of November – were still unfinished at the end of January. The company owner constantly marched about the offices, his thundering, booming voice demanding attention and gut-laughs from his employees, which were immediately surrendered as though he possessed the power to wish everyone into a cornfield like Billy Mummy’s character in the classic Twilight Zone episode.
Which I don’t doubt he is able to do.
I’d had my fill and, for the first time in a decade-long career in television, I gave ye olde “sayonara”, laying out a week’s notice, only to be told a day later that I was only needed only on Monday and thereafter let go.
So why wouldn’t I find this morning that my tire was flat? And that my AAA was no longer active, that I’d be paying $120 for a tow? And that not only is my single tire flat, but another is cracking so badly that the service man insists I get it replaced now, instead of in a month. And that the coffee shop across the street from the tire shop only has DECAF?
Now that I’ve caught you up, as I sit in the lobby of a tire shop in Glendale, I ask again:
HOW CAN MURPHY’S LAW BE SO GODDAMNED SPOT-ON???
I have been thinking on this, lo these last (checks watch) 45 minutes (kidding, I don’t wear a watch, but “checks cellphone clock” is such a mouthful), and have come to the conclusion that we, as humans, are blessed and cursed with the ability to forecast a future. No other animal, as far as we know, has the capability to “guess” what the next second, hour, day, or year may bring. This is why dogs’ New Years Resolutions involve sniffing as much butt as possible and pissing on as many shrubs as he/she can get their urine on.
So, when the delicate balance of, “I’m going to get in my car and drive to work” is upset, we’re thrown. HOW CAN THIS BE THAT I HAVE A FLAT TIRE/BUSTED RADIATOR/GENITAL WARTS? Simply put: Because it you DO. You guessed that you wouldn’t spend the afternoon at the free clinic and believed you were most definitely headed out to the local pub to pick up another skanky gal/guy and have unprotected sex with them. But there you sit, warts and all, in your paper gown and a doctor’s gloved finger in your tush.
I have managed to keep my frustration levels low by integrating reality into my life. I’m not Buddha by any means, unless Buddha was known to exclaim, “MU-ther-FUCK-er!” when he realized he was out of beer just as he settled in to watch a Dick Van Dyke Show rerun.
Plans are fantastic. Plans are necessary, and we’re lucky as hell to be able to dream them. Control is a fickle mistress, though: The minute she starts fucking around on us behind our backs with Mr. Reality, we lose our shit. My advice: Let her go, man. She’s not worth it. Her sister, Flexibility, is way hotter and, well, flexible, if ya know whadda mean.
All of this being said…WHEN THE FUCK ARE MY TIRES GOING TO BE READY????