There comes a time in every man’s life when he looks across the crowd at a packed casino bar with a shitty cover band playing “I will survive” and sees John Adams wearing a neck brace, sitting on a stool in the corner of the room, gazing menacingly around the room.
At that moment, I knew I had to post on this sweet blog. It was a watershed moment, a seminal moment, a moment when I realized “shit, if John Adams lived in the 21st century and for some reason wore a neck brace, he’d look like an angry assassin who had just sprained his neck while being foiled in his latest attempt at sniping whomever John Cusack was supposed to kill in Grosse Pointe Blank.”
Anyways, for some reason it inspired me to post this little snippet that I’ve been sitting on for a while…
I stopped at the Sheetz gas station on my way home from work this evening for the bare essentials (the simple bear necessities) — fierce grape gatorade, orange-strawberry gatorade, trashbags, windshield wiper fluid.
The purchases were unrelated, mostly.
I was standing in line, trying to act very cool and casual while listening to my ipod. (You may be thinking, hey, here’s the tenuous music connection. Wrong, sucker. It was a Bloomberg economics podcast I downloaded that morning. Who’s the nerd now?)
I was understandably exhausted after avoiding work for most of the time I spent at the office on Monday, and certainly all of the time I spent at various coffee shops outside of it. I spaced out, waiting for the cashier to handle this woman’s purchase of a $198 money order, paid in cash; ice cream for her kids, paid with a credit card; and $5 in gas, paid for with a different credit card.
It was then I saw a hooded figure in the doorway. Black hood, black mask. I tensed. Stephen Roach chairman and acting chief executive of Morgan Stanely, Asia, was talking about the the bailout plan on the podcast.
I dropped my fierce grape gatorade. The cap broke. It spilled. Tragedy. But, I was more worried about what my sleep-deprived mind thought was a ninja about to bust through to door. In one of those split-second slivers of time where your mind can make dozens of illogical leaps from synapse to synapse, I thought “which would better deflect a throwing star, wiper fluid or gatorade AM? The wiper fluid bottle is bigger, and the gatorade would probably make a better return volley than a shield, I figured.
I shifted my feet - left foot forward, right back slightly, putting myself in position to throw the gatorade, if the need should arise, or box with my dominant hand in the preferable cross position.
In walked the Muslim woman, wearing her black robe, hood and veil, and three little kids. No throwing stars, no gatorades in return. But it took me a moment to wipe the idioticly tense look from my face, and I got a disgusted look from the woman in return. It was all in the eyes.
So that’s the story about how I got fierce grape gatorade all over Sheetz. Also, I don’t mean to diminish the amount of bigotry and insensitivity in this country. But, couldn’t some of it be chalked up to misunderstandings like this one?
PS - I was just making up annoying tags for this article and, through the auto complete feature, realized I had already used the “gatorade” and “lots of gatorade” tags. Sad, sad business.
PPS - How sweet is that “Gloria” song by Patti Smith? G-L-O-R-I-A. Woooo.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Tags: Gatorade, Lots of Gatorade, ninjas