Why.

Flight.

31 people were killed and over 100 people were injured in an explosion at the busiest of Moscow’s airports today. Russian officials are calling it a terrorist attack.

Sigh. This really bothers me for a couple of reasons: I have family members that have flown through that airport on numerous occasions and people I love work for the airline industry. I am so tired of this perverted obsession with airplanes and airports. Like everyone else, I wish the terrorists would just stop it. My heart sinks whenever I hear of this sort of thing. I really think the human race has somehow shifted into reverse on the evolutionary PRNDL selection of gears.

I used to love to fly. There a few things more thrilling to me than getting into a two or four seat plane and soaring high above the earth. I used to find flying on a commercial flight to simply be a watered down experience of that thrill but now it’s become such a pain in the ass to fly that I have decided that I will drive to wherever I want to go unless there’s an ocean or something in the way. To me that’s very sad, but it’s reality. I hate the idiocy that has permeated the airline industry.

One of Alec Baldwin’s blog entries recently mentioned his thoughts on the airline industry and I found it to be most accurate. Referring to the airline industry after 9/11, Mr. Baldwin said this:

“The airlines were quick to take advantage of the new climate of security at the expense of all else. Whatever shreds of elegance were left in the US airline industry (most of it gone after the death of Pan Am) were yanked out and replaced with the public school bus system we fly on now.”

That really describes what flying is like now. Passengers are herded like cattle into a ridiculously minimal amount of space carrying obscene amounts of luggage, food and snacks to avoid any extra fees, with the hope that they won’t be left out on a Tarmac for five or more hours while the TSA tries to figure out the best way to blast passengers with an unhealthy amount of radiation for “security measures”. It’s a small wonder that more flight attendants aren’t popping open a beer and sliding down the emergency slide. The combination of security concerns, the declining sense of personal responsibility (especially with the passengers) and the lack of any sort of class with what was once a fairly classy venture has made the thought of getting onto an aircraft somewhat intolerable.

Now, I bitch about the state of the American airline industry because I don’t buy into the security theatre nor the corporate cutbacks of the airlines. No backscatter X-ray machine would have prevented the Moscow attack today.

This is sad, because as I said before, I like to soar. I wish others shared that feeling with me.

I grieve for those affected by the Moscow airport attack today. I hope I love long enough to see this kind of thing come to an end.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

24 January 2011 by J.P. Why. 2

Spray.

Dear Dunkin’ Donuts,

It appears that it is time for our monthly chat. I regularly order a large, unsweetened iced tea from your fine establishment. It is store #331323. The receipt you gave me says that you gave me an unsweetened iced tea. It looks like an unsweetened iced tea, but when the young lady was assembling my drink, I saw her take the cup and spray something into it. It looked like it could be an artificial sweetener. Perhaps it was antifreeze. Possibly high fructose corn syrup. I was hoping it was just a little extra water.

After tasting this drink, I can not figure out what you put in my cup and quite frankly I am mostly frightened by this. I say ‘mostly frightened’ because I am confident that whatever was sprayed in my cup was not a body fluid, so there is a small amount of relief.

We both you know you can do better.

Fondly,

11 January 2011 by J.P. Why. 4

Wow.

Many thoughts and prayers for everyone affected by the tragedy in Tucson today.

8 January 2011 by J.P. Why. 0

Hysterics.

It was shaping up to be a pretty normal morning. It was time to head out on my hour-long commute. The sky was just starting to shy away from being pitch-black. Sunrise was still 30-45 minutes away, but that’s what happens at this time of year. I actually like driving in the dark. The “zen experience” I feel when driving is enhanced by motoring at night.

I hit the Thruway a few minutes earlier than I usually do. I was going to be able to relax and not worry about making it to work on time. The roads were clear, but the impending dawn revealed ominous clouds dead ahead.

Just as I was making my way over Shumaker Mountain I started hearing that familiar noise often heard this time of year: the pelting of ice and snow on the windshield. I fired up the wipers on their most infrequent setting. I slowed down a bit and made sure I had two hands on the wheel.

The ice continued and mingled with snow. The blackness of the blacktop was disappearing into a covering of white and the trees showed the wind that was picking up. I slowed down some more.

The sign led the way to my exit and as I urged the wipers to go a little faster, I noticed that my windshield had completely iced over. The car made that “we’re going through slush” noise and then the wind started blowing some snow around.

Now, if I was your average American in this day and age, I would immediately pull the car over to the side of the road, threaten to sue the National Weather Service for not warning me about this calamity, sue the Thruway Authority for allowing the blacktop to go away and then promptly starting screaming uncontrollably and then cry into my gloves, because it’s obvious that the foot or so of snow being blown around was the beginning of The Great Blizzard of 2010 (the third one!) and I was going to die right then and there.

But you see, I’m not an average American. Aside from that whole gay thing, I realize that we live just south of the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole and that means that when our part of the world is at it’s furthest point away from the Sun, otherwise known as “winter”, there’s a really good chance that I’m going to have to deal with inclement weather here in the Northeast.

I pride myself on the fact that my parents raised their only boy out of some pretty hearty stock and I’ll be damned if I’m going to get whipped up about a few flakes of snow and a few patches of ice.

Now I know that the folks down in the other part of the Empire State don’t get to experience blizzard-like conditions on a regular basis like we do up here in the part “that resembles a snowy Alabama” (to quote a blogger from the other part of the state), but nevertheless, life does go on, despite all the desperate attempts of the media to scare the beejeezus out of you.

I listened to a woman talk about how she just HAD to fly from Hartford, Conn. to Houston today and to accomplish this she was going to rent a car, make her way down to Raleigh-Durham, catch a flight to Chicago and then hopefully make it to Houston. I wanted to throttle her right through the radio. Just balls it up and drive to Houston. It’s practically going to take the same amount of time and you might see something between here and there. You might actually see that the world doesn’t revolve around the megametropolis of the East Coast.

Now, I might sound a little cranky in this blog entry and quite frankly I’m not. I have plenty of friends and family members that live along the East Coast and I love them.

Especially when they don’t buy into the hysterics.

28 December 2010 by J.P. Why. 2

Waiting.

Dear Dunkin Donuts in the J-town,

Since March of this year you have been a part of my daily routine. In the early days of this J-town experience I would go to the World’s Best Subway(TM) for a predictable meal but that grew somewhat expensive so I decided to start packing a lunch for the days I worked in your fair city. I decided to visit your establishment on a daily basis to pick up a large unsweetened iced tea with lemon. On days when I was in a particularly madcap mood, I would also order a chocolate chip cookie. A few weeks ago there was a misstep that shook me to my very core, as you gave me a toasted bagel with some offensive pink goo instead of my madcap chocolate cookie, but aside from one nasty run in with some sweetened coffee concoction, you have been right there for me with my large, unsweetened iced tea with lemon.

Yesterday, in celebration of the unseasonably warm temperatures, I decided to park the car and walk inside your establishment to purchase my iced tea. The plan to walk would be the extent of my frivolity, but I was planning to tell you to keep the change as I completed my purchase. This would have been a 10% tip for you.

I waited at your counter, lamented to my next madcap mood when I gazed over the chocolate chip cookies and then discovered there was one important element missing from the service with a smile.

It was the person that was suppose to wait on me at the counter.

Now there were four suspects milling about the food preparation area. One was yelling into her headset. Presumably she was speaking to someone that couldn’t comprehend that you do not sell Whoppers at Dunkin’ Donuts because she kept yelling “That’s at BURGER KING!!!”. One was shuffling muffins around but two young ladies were chatting and texting, even though they were wearing their uniforms.

I waited for four minutes.

As the clock, which looks quite industrial and is made by the Chaney Instruments company, by the way, clicked to the fourth minute, I made an abrupt 180-degree turn and left your establishment. I made my way across the road to the Rock ‘n Roll themed McDonalds where apparently all the men are required to wear Elvis sideburns and ordered a large iced tea from there, which saved me $1.00 and was served to me faster than you can say “two all beef patties special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun”. There was smiling, there were sideburns and there were no cell phones. Customer nirvana.

I decided to give you one more chance today and feeling particularly adventurous, I was going to go for the gusto and order a brownie with the daily iced tea.

Again, disinterest of the customer that was standing at the counter waiting was a recurring theme. I waited five minutes, per the Chaney Instruments clock you have, and again, I made a 180-degree turn and left and went to the McDonalds, where today’s theme was apparently ZZ Top beards and indulged in my adventurous mood by adding a plain hamburger to my order of a large, unsweetened iced tea with lemon.

There were plenty of smiles, a hearty thank you and I deposited my change in the Ronald McDonald Home fund.

I am sorry, dear Dunkin Donuts of the J-town, but I am breaking up with you. Your disinterest reminds me of the feelings I had for my girlfriend in the latter half of my senior year of high school and quite frankly, I know that means no one is going to get any.

Fondly,
ME

10 November 2010 by J.P. Let's All Rant. Why. 0

Voting.

So yesterday was Election Day in the United States and like the good American that I am, I did my patriotic duty and joined Earl as we headed to the town hall to cast our votes. Last year our town hall was the beta tester for the new electronic voting machines that made their official debut last night and I have to say that I am still very, very uncomfortable with these new machines. I was very vocal to everyone that would listen about how I felt about the machines and many of the Important Voting People agreed with me.

Here are my issues with the new electronic voting machines:

1. They are suppose to be more accessible for those that had a hard time pulling the lever next to the name of the person they wanted to vote for. To remedy this situation, the new system involves taking a magic marker and colouring inside a little dot next to the name of the person that you’re voting for. If a voter does not have the dexterity to grab onto a lever and pull it down, I doubt they’re going to be able to wrap their fingers around a pen and colour neatly within the dot.

2. Any shrouds of privacy have been removed. In the old days, you went into this booth like device where a big, red handle awaited. The voter then swung the handle to the right, and hopefully it would close the curtain behind you, turn on the light so you could see what you were doing and reset the machine to ‘zero’, all with the swing of that red handle. Now you are given a scorecard with the aforementioned magic marker and herded over to a cubicle with flappy sides which is in very close proximity to other voters. There’s no privacy. Anyone can look over your shoulder. I saw that the person standing to my right was a staunch Republican because he had coloured in the Republican dot on his row. He had even marked one dot per column, where in some cases there were two columns requiring only one vote between them. So not only did I know his vote, I knew he was doing his vote wrong¹;. By the way, the mechanical machines would not have allowed him to pull too many levers down.

3. This is one is the biggest concern for me: these electronic voting machines are electronic, do not print out a receipt and have been programmed by human beings using a closed source program. I firmly believe that any programming code (otherwise called source code) used on a publicly owned computing device for the purpose of voting in our elected officials should be programmed with open source code where anyone could see what makes the machine tick. I don’t trust our government so I’m sure as heck not going to trust a company working for the government using trade secrets. The fact that there is not that much stink made about this sort of thing makes me angry in unmeasurable ways, however, I’m not surprised because the majority of the population is too lazy to think and would rather be spoon fed their media and thought processes.

Prior to the introduction of these electronic voting machines I felt a sense of honour and duty whenever I cast my vote. I was making a difference and old people using older, proven technologies were making sure that my vote counted. When I walk away from casting my ballot now, not only do I feel dirty from having to basically choose from the lesser of two evils, I feel cheated as an American because I have no idea where my vote went and if whoever wrote the program in the first place approved my vote based on their parameters.

Like electronic toilets and sinks² in public wash rooms, we have taken a step backwards in one of the most important elements of our country.

¹ I watched this man feed his scorecard into the machine, and it did not complain about the errors of his vote. The mechanical machine would have never let that happen in the first place. One is left to wonder, did his entire ballot get nullified or just that vote?

² In the past three months, I have seen at least six boys or men become dumbfounded because the manual sink wouldn’t turn on when they thrust their hands under the spigot. I had to turn the sink on for one young lad who was old enough to grow peach fuzz because he kept going from sink to sink and said they were all broken.

3 November 2010 by J.P. Why. 1

Learning.

So I just passed through the local Dunkin Donuts drive through as part of my daily lunch routine. I normally order a large, unsweetened iced tea with lemon and enjoy that throughout the afternoon, but today I decided to get a little crazy and order a chocolate chip cookie to go along with the iced tea. I have a meeting scheduled to start at 1500 and go until 1600 tomorrow, so I figured I would need the extra sugar. On the other hand, adding the cookie breaks my record of consistency with the ordering process. I strive to achieve what my mother did back in the day, she could call the local pizza place, just say “It’s Sandi” and hang up the phone and 30 minutes later a pizza cooked to perfection would arrive at the door. No directions, no topping notices, no haggling over the tip. Consistency got the pizza joint trained like so many cocker spaniels and it was good. I was hoping to achieve the same with Dunkin Donuts with the intent of them recognising the hum of the Acura but now it’s all crazy because of that chocolate chip cookie.

But I digress.

And I didn’t get the chocolate chip cookie.

Instead, I got the aforementioned iced tea with a toasted bagel smothered in pink goo. The goo was acting like a glue and holding the two halves of the bagel together. I figured one was suppose to eat it like a sandwich.

First of all, pink food of any nature just makes me nervous unless it’s a jam and then it should be much more red than pink. This pink was almost neon pink, kind of like something you would find on Cyndi Lauper’s hair back when she was telling us that She Bopped. Pink is not a natural food color. However, I was feeling adventurous and thought I was give this errant bagel a try, since it was toasted and all.

I’d rather eat shaving cream.

Wow, that pink goo had the strongest, foulest taste of strawberry substitution I had ever had in my life and that includes any attempts at downing a glass of Strawberry Quik. It was just plain awful. I chucked the bagel with goo into the bag and hastily grabbed the lemon out of my iced tea glass and licked the lemon, hoping to get the goo taste out of my mouth.

This got me to thinking, this chemically induced taste ‘sensation’ can not be good for us. If one peruses the interwebs in the right places you’ll find Public Service Ads for various things back in the day, and by that I mean back in the early 1950s. You know how many of us cringe now when we see Lucy and Ricky and Fred and Ethel smoking up a storm on every episode of “I Love Lucy” or when the Flintstones were smoking in their cave and the like? I’m sure more than one person has muttered to themselves, “What in the world were they thinking back then?” It’s like when we dumped chemicals into the river and killed Onondaga Lake or, and this one really gets me, when we covered models’ faces with radioactive dirt from Yucca Flats so a cleansing cream company could demonstrate how well it really worked. (They never show the part where their faces melt). Again, reading those sentences may make you think,”What were they thinking?”

Do you think in 20 or so years that we’ll be saying “What were we thinking?” when we think back to the all the artificial flavors and fake sweeteners and genetically modified food that we are eating today? I have told the story of when Frito Lay was doing a trial of their “Olean” product here in Upstate New York back in the mid 1990s. The stuff erupted my stomach in a way that hasn’t happened again and quite frankly to this day I still can not look at that tree just off Thruway Exit 24 without remembering how much I desperately needed toilet paper after a few munches of some sour cream and onion chips with that crap in it. Explosive bowels, my ass (no pun intended). Hiroshima had it good. Now do we run (no pun intended) around screaming that we want Olean (aka Olestra) in our food? Not so much. We know better.

One can’t escape High Fructose Corn Syrup these days unless you just make something yourself and now that it’s getting a bad rap they want it renamed to “corn sugar”. Why is it getting a bad rap? Because it’s probably bad for you and renaming HFCS as “corn sugar” is the same as renaming cancer sticks as “Kool”.

The bagel with the pink goo is now in a trash bucket where I have no doubt that it will survive 2012 and beyond. It’s much like that Happy Meal everyone has been chatting about this week, the one that was left in the garage for six months and it didn’t decompose, it looks the same as it did the day it was made. That’s freakin’ scary to me.

I think I’ll just start making an extra thermos of tea so that I don’t have another pink goo catastrophe.

14 October 2010 by J.P. Ponderings and Musings Why. 2

Late.

I have mentioned from time to time that I am not a morning person. I try really hard to be a morning person but try as I might, my body is just not wired to be the early bird. I have no desire to catch a worm. So having to be at work at 0800, with a solid hour of commuting time built in the gaiety, is a bit of a struggle for me. Don’t tell my boss but I’m not really awake until noon. They think I’m kidding when come back from lunch and say “good morning”, but in reality I just woke up.

My alarm is set for 0530. Usually.

This morning I was having a lovely dream about “The Love Boat” (I have no idea why that was the theme) when I awoke at what I figured was 0400 or so. I scolded myself for waking up early again and quite upset with the fact that I wouldn’t be able to resume my conversation with Julie McCoy when I went back to sleep. I rolled over to look at the alarm and discovered it wasn’t 0400 after all.

It was 0632.

I normally leave for work at 0635.

Hmmm.

Now one would think that this paragraph would contain descriptive, colorful words about e hysteria, panic and subsequent dread that set in as the covers flew off and the cat went flying, but no, I just muttered “Holy shit” and quickly followed it up with “I can do this.”

I flew through the shower in three minutes, cleaning only the important parts and opting not to make my head shine. I brushed my teeth whilst putting only underwear and i skipped the closet ritual of waiting for something to move me and went with just putting on the first clothes that looked reasonably unrumpled to me.

I flew down the stairs, fed the cat, grabbed some blueberries from the fridge, made a sandwich, patted the cat on the head, made sure I had enough coin to buy the orange juice at work and hit the road.

I was on the road by 0647 feeling remarkably calm and well rested.

I was in my cubicle by 0752, a few minutes later than usual but in plenty of time to grab the aforementioned OJ and then get on with my day in the usual fashion.

I’m quite proud of the fact that I accomplished that this morning without the usual hysterics. But as I type this at 1238, I am happy to wish you a good morning.

It’s going to be a lovely day.

12 October 2010 by J.P. Why. 3

Coming Out.

Today is National Coming Out day. For this occasion, I include two things. The first is a video I made recently for the “It Gets Better” project on YouTube. This has already been shared on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, but I thought today was the appropriate day to share it here.

The second is a repost of a blog entry from October 2004, when I first wrote “my story”.

Not only is today Columbus Day, (is it the real Columbus Day or is it just “observed”?), but it’s also another holiday of sorts – it’s National Coming Out Day. It’s on this day that gay men and women, regardless of age, strive to come out of the closet and announce to someone, be it the world, their family or even themselves, that they are gay. National Coming Out Day was designed as sort of a support mechanism, to let people know that they are not alone.

I don’t think National Coming Out Day was around when I “came out”. Well, I actually didn’t really come out, for the most part I didn’t really feel the need to. I guess people just assumed. After all, in high school, I ended the morning announcements with phrases like “Have a Wonderful Wednesday” or “Have a Fabulous Friday”. I mean, come on, all that was missing was the flashing pink neon light. When I lived in Massachusetts, my dear friend Donna told me that coming out was only a big deal because gay men and women made such a big deal about coming out. If it’s not a big deal to you, then it’s not a big deal to anyone else. I can sort of see the logic in that and it’s a theory that I subscribe to, though I don’t think it fits in every scenario. For example, I don’t think that a teenage boy living in the middle of the Bible belt is going to be able to drop a “That was a wonderful six hour sermon today. I really liked Maude’s punch at the church social afterwards. By the way, I’ve been sleeping with the farm hand, we both like boys, but it’s really no big deal” and not have the family get their panties in a knot. It would be wonderful is the Mother and Father then embraced the boy and welcomed the farm hand into the family, and the positive energy in me tells me that this has happened at least once in a great while, but I fear that there’s not enough of that type of support in the world.

So here it is, National Coming Out day, so I’m going to share my story. I knew my sexual orientation in my early teens. Actually, now that I think about it, I knew I liked other boys when I was in elementary school. Second grade to be exact. I always opted to be on the girls’ team when we played “shove the kids on the ground” on the playground because after all, the girls needed help (wink wink). I actually wanted to be pushed around by the boys and I wanted to wrestle them to the ground. But it wasn’t until my early teens that I knew what all this meant. I figured it was just something that all guys went through. God Bless my mother and father, they never talked to me about how these things worked so I had to figure it out myself. It wasn’t until my later teens that I figured that whatever “this” was was here to stay and I might as well just live with it. Even though I had a girlfriend at the time. Luckily, my girlfriend dumped me (guess I didn’t put out for the prom or something) and I was free to pursue my true feelings. I had a crush on a classmate named Dave, but he ended up going out with my sister. She always got the cute ones back then. Towards the end of high school I accepted the fact that I found some of my male schoolmates attractive, though I didn’t really do anything about it. When my parents dropped me off at college, I made a vow to myself. I was never going to hide who I was again and I would always allow my inner feelings to be. And boy, was I “out” in college. It’s all I ever talked about! Small wonder I failed out of school, I was too busy trying to be gay (even though I didn’t go on ANY dates!). Someone should have dumped a bucket of water on me because my pilot light was flarin’ WAY too high. So much for preconceived notions on how gay men should act. Luckily I was at a music school or else I would have been beat up a lot.

I didn’t really talk about my homosexuality with my family until Earl came along, save for my mother, my sister and my cousin Stephanie. I told my mother my first break home from college, with the usual dramatic flair, but she told me she knew all along and that she still loved me very much. I can still picture sitting in my parents’ living room having that discussion with my Mom back in 1986. My sister just knew. Perhaps it was the discussions years earlier about how cute Rick Springfield, Jack Wagner and the guys in Duran Duran were. And my cousin and I were very close and she always teased me about being gay so I finally just confirmed it. I finally calmed down a bit and ended up having one boyfriend in the year or two after college that I brought around once or twice, then a half hearted attempt at a relationship after that, but until my commitment ceremony with Earl it was just an unspoken assumption, I suppose. I just went out and did my thing and everyone worried about me. I think everyone breathed a sigh of relief when Earl and I began wearing our wedding bands after our commitment ceremony. Then it was like the closet doors just blew off their hinges, even though no words were spoken. I was in love and I was happy. And am even more so to this day.

I wish everyone had an easy path with their homosexuality, coming out and acceptance. I cringe when people say that being gay is a choice. It’s not. It’s part of who I am. Without the “gay”, I would not be the man I am today. It is just as inherent to us as eye color or left- or right-handedness.

So on this National Coming Out Day, whether you’re contemplating, talking or listening, know that there are others in similar situations. You are not alone.

11 October 2010 by J.P. Gayish. Why. 2

Gleek?

As a card carrying homosexual, it is my community duty to watch the hysteria of a show known as “Glee”. Not only does sitting down to watch this show afford me a nice chunk of “family time” on a Tuesday night, but it also gives me the opportunity to know what everyone else is hyperventilating about around the water cooler when I go into the office/mall/market/penitentiary the next day.

We are now beyond the second episode of the second season and I have to say without a trace of humor in my voice, “I just don’t get it.”

If one tries to use Twitter or the like to stimulate their brain cells whilst watching one of these episodes in real time, they will find that the tubes are clogged with random squeals, a plethora of exclamation points and randomly barked out song lyrics. I hate to admit it but I think that my lack of enthusiasm for the show is making my gay card degrade from pink to putrid.

Here’s my take on the show:

1. The blonde Brittney chick is a hoot and I enjoy everything that comes out of her mouth. Her random take on life is worthy of her notoriety, however, when her quotes are posted on Twitter, completely out of context, they kind of read weird.

2. No one can sing without autotune these days. Apparently we have all gone tone deaf. This is one of the few occasions where I feel the need to shoot the closest piece of technology with a .22.

3. I was sort of warming up to the show this season until they dragged out that stupid, idiotic, mundane story line about Will’s ex-wife and the wallflower. I despise the actress that plays the ex-wife and I secretly hoped her powers on “Heroes” would have gone haywire and she would have blown herself up (with an agonizing scream, of course). Horrible actress, horrible role, horrible storyline, be-doop be-doop be-doop through the TiVO and we are looking for evidence of the her presence being over.

4. When did Rachel become such an unlikable bitch?

5. Sue Sylvester is approaching Urkel land with her presence. I’m now preferring Coach Biest. She may be a dumb hick but at least she’s a little more real feeling. (And I can’t believe I said that either when one considers the context of the entire show).

I’m sorry. I should be ecstatic about “Glee”. There’s music, dancing and high school drama. But I’m not. The only good thing the show brings to my life is the opportunity to sit down and spend time with my family.

Perhaps that in itself is enough. But god that show is awful.

29 September 2010 by J.P. Geek Why. 3

Why.

Flight.

Spray.

Wow.

Hysterics.

Waiting.

Voting.

Learning.

Late.

Coming Out.

Gleek?

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