On the Road to San Antonio

The Captain was recently abducted by aliens and taken for a ride in a spaceship. OK. I exaggerate. The truth is I went on a business trip to Texas and drove with a colleague in a space blue Lincoln Town Car from Houston, where NASA HQ is located, to San Antonio, where there are droves of aliens of the illegal variety. The trip was indeed a long strange trip and one worthy of The Captain’s blog. What follows is a running account of my perceived reality, no doubt hijacked by my extraterrestrial imagination.

5 PM Wednesday. Blasting off with a coworker from Houston in the Lincoln via the mega beltway on our way to San Antonio, a city everyone in Houston promotes as being nicer than Houston, which is kinda like saying a Mule is better than an Ass because it was bred with a Pony. Hoping to catch a glimpse of an Armadillo, a creature that looks like it would be perfectly comfortable foraging for glow worms on Mars. The hotel gift shop was selling Armadillo Beanie Babies, so my hopes were high. 6 PM. Still leaving Houston, I think. Hard to tell, though. It all looks the same – oversized industrial buildings rubbing elbows with “used” tire shops, strip clubs, and the odd attractive brick house with bars on the doors and windows. Houston is now behind us as we venture through fields of scrub trees and cows. We are determined to find an out of the way place to stop for some authentic Texas ribs. Huge billboards everywhere. There’s one for a place called Buc’ees, which boasts it possesses the taste of Texas – 100 miles away. Must be good. More cows. No freakin’ Armadillos. Big billboard for something called Schlitterbahn. My coworker and I theorize that this is some cheap Czech or German beer. There seem to be a lot of billboards with Czech or German sounding names, like Czhilispiel. How did so many Czechs end up in south Texas? Must have gotten schlitfaced drunk in Minnesota and took a wrong turn and realized – holy shit, it’s warm down here, let’s settle! More Buc’ee the Beaver signs. Can’t tell if they sell food or indulgences, or both. Wait! I think the worst seller of indulgences was a Czech. 7 PM. Large building looming ahead on the left. A meat packing plant! That’s not normally exciting, unless your heading down a long, straight highway that cuts through a cow field. Across the way there’s an exotic animal farm. Curious. Wonder what kind of meat they’re packing across the street?? Wonder what Giraffe tastes like? Finally some road kill. Looks like a partial torso of an enornmous rabbit. Must be a Hare. Where are the f*&kin’ Armadillos??! Blah, blah, cows, grass, blah, blah, blah. 7PM. Sign for Mike Mikeska’s BBQ!! This could be worth checking out! Fifty miles and 4 more Buc’ee signs later, we spy Mikeska’s and decide to go in and have a look; it appears authentic (grimy with every square inch of wall covered with a stuffed animal head). They were…cough, choke…out of ribs!! I suppose that’s what you get for trying to procure BBQ ribs from a Czech…We decide to climb back in the spaceship and continue west toward Buc’ees. Which makes me wonder…it’s dry here, no water for beavers. Why a beaver for a mascot? I have my theories, which are naughty and will remain unstated. Hold on…approaching another BBQ joint, this time with an American sounding name. My coworker and I debate the prudence of stopping again and before we notice, we miss the exit and are now downwind of the rib joint, tortured by the heavenly wafting of hickory scent for several miles as we curse our indecision. We have now been conditioned to look for Buc’ees signs…red flags waving in my mind – could this be an alien plot? Is Buc’ees a front for a real alien abduction center? Seems to explain Texas…Must…push…away…thoughts. There. Much better. 8 PM. WHERE ARE THE F*&KIN’ ARMADILLOS???! My coworker and I are getting impatient and hungry. Thank god for the Lincoln and its heat massaging seats. OMG. There it is! The exit for Buc’ees!! As the sky is now darkening, we can see the neon for miles as we approach. What we found was shocking: Absolute proof that life forms from another planet have indeed landed on earth and built a secret headquarters – a giant Rest Stop with a “convenience” store that sells 67 varieties of beef jerky, along with Ciabatta Ham sandwiches. Apparently not sure what to sell to humans to lure them into their lair, the aliens must have broken into a TV satellite signal and started watching commercials, using this stolen (a federal offense, mind you) info to build giant human traps. And what was the final piece of evidence that confirmed that our theory was correct? Enormous, well-lit, CLEAN rest rooms!!!! For decades, the brightest human minds at NASA have tried to build one of these without success. It has to be Aliens!! After peeing, we fled. And satisfied our hunger at the next exit with some very affordable Chilis dinner specials and our fear with likewise affordable Margaritas. 10 PM. Sated, we drove the last 15 miles to San Antonio. Upon entering the San Antonio Loop, we soon learned the grim truth. Buc’ees was just a scouting outpost. The actual alien HQ was in San Antonio and the brand spanking new highway loop complex a veritable Hotel California Expressway– you enter and drive endless loops (we did for at least an hour) and but you can never get off. I kid you not – there were numerous exits that did nothing more than take you off one loop and put you on another. We must have driven past our hotel a dozen times before we managed to escape! Midnight. We got to our hotel, a structure with a lush green open air courtyard fenced in on all four sides. We looked up into the dark Texas sky, ready to exhale and congratulate ourselves on having eluded the aliens, only to notice a faux sky overhead. ..those alien bastards had us after all.

Believe The Captain when he says: you haven’t lived until you’ve peed in an alien restroom.

Yours from the brig of a Flying Saucer,

The Captain

Ps: Czhilispiel is Czech for Chili fest. And the Schlitterbahn is not, as we guessed, a type of beer or a highway for drunk drivers, but a world class waterpark. I bet Buc’ee lives there!

Why Is It?

The Captain has an idea for a semi-regular feature that accomplishes two important objectives:

1. Empties the intellectual compost from my brain before the fumes expand and my brain explodes;
2. Saves me the time and trouble of thinking of a topic or theme to butcher.

So here comes the experiment, a brain dump Captain style I call “Why is it?” which allows me to patch together the divers and disparate hobgoblins of my mind, known most commonly as “random thoughts.” I think it would be fun if any of you, my readers, shared your “Why is it?” thoughts to be published as part of this series. I know many of you to be clever and funny and I encourage you to share. Just email your random thought to thefloorcaptain@gmail.com.
Why is it…

· That 9 times out of 10, the person who yells “Don’t say hello” at you from the other side of crowded room while you cover your face with your hood (or newspaper, or whopper, or decorative Chinese hand fan) is the one person you don’t want to say hello to?
· That Women can’t read my mind?
· That Women don’t even bother listening when I take time out of my busy day to verbalize the thoughts in my mind they fail to read in the first place??
· That the only time I can read a woman’s mind is when she’s thinking about a time I screwed up?
· That Ostriches can’t fly? This shouldn’t bother me but it does. Large wrecking ball body, long, oversized neck and legs, dinky little wings like you get from one of those pre-packaged Halloween fairy costumes for little girls, big goofy grin and vacant expression closely resembling the one I see in the looking glass every morning– talk about an argument against Intelligent Design!
· That fish are considered dumb while humans who hunt fish by impaling an earthworm on the end of a half inch hook and casting it randomly into hundreds of thousands of gallons of water in search of (if we’re “lucky”) 12” to 24” prey are considered intelligent? (There is a simple answer, which applies to many a human endeavor: alcohol!)
· That Old Spice aftershave didn’t die out with my father’s generation?

Why????!!!

Believe The Captain when he says: women know!

Yours practicing Occlumency,

The Captain

Why do women always know???

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

My friends from the proverbial slow pitch beer league lobbed me another fat softball for my literary field of daydreams. It was a link to a website that sells, among other things, fake insurance cards. Though extremely tempting, I must decline to go down that path. Creating false legal documents is fun I agree, but as I learned in Junior High, they are actually illegal documents, or so says my PO. Note to aspiring criminals: never try to pass mimeographed counterfeit bills to the cafeteria cashier, especially in $1,000 denominations. Also, do not underestimate the risk of stealing a license from your buddy’s older sibling – the one with the facial hair - to purchase alcohol at a neighborhood package store, especially if that sibling works there behind the counter. “Can I see some ID please? What’s this? You little punk!!” Boy was she pissed. But I digress.

One teeny little lapse in judgment and no one ever believes you again! This haunted me through my 6 and ¾ years of High School. Any note from Mom, any plea for an extension for a term paper, even a love poem written in the throes of despair and drunkenness – all viewed as forgeries by significant players in my childhood. No matter how authentic the document, no one ever believed this beleaguered author. Allow me to illustrate.

· Missed a week of school tending to my dear, ill mother. The devil’s fire whiskey once again ravaged the home of The Captain. On Monday afternoon, Mom started to write a letter excusing her cherub from school – with lipstick on a napkin, only to trip and fall over the invisible rabbit that haunted her days. When she came to on Wednesday, she resumed writing, but the red letters were now indecipherable, lost in the crimson of the bloodstained napkin. By the time I managed to get her into her Depends, it was Thursday, and someone missed me enough at school to call and inquire about my whereabouts. It was the cafeteria cashier – I still owed money. When I finally got my chance to speak to the Principal (on hold for over an hour), I told him I had a note for him, but he just told me where I could stick the note and informed me that my presence was not required anyway.

· Then there was that poem I wrote to my first love, that new girl from California who once sat next to me on the bus before she knew she shouldn’t do such a thing – an entire 28 seconds elapsed, maybe even 29 - before someone noticed and whispered something into her ear, causing her to wretch and jump off the seat and hit her head on the ceiling. I was in love! And I immediately produced some very moving iambic pentameter and slipped it into her cubby at school when no one was looking. At the end of the day I saw the note back in my cubby with a handwritten reply. My heart skipped a beat! It read: “Don’t ever talk to me. I can’t believe you did that with a gerbil!”

· And perhaps the worst experience. When I produced a signed note from my caseworker explaining my tardiness due to him transporting me to visit my mother in rehab, the Principal threw the note back in my face and laughed, “Tell that lying bitch of a mother of yours that she needs to do a better job forging notes. This one’s almost as bad as the one on the bloody napkin!”

Believe The Captain when he says: don’t bother smashing that empty vodka bottle on your temple and let the wound bleed into an inkwell and use it to scrawl “Dog ate my homework” on eggshell white linen stationary – it’s a waste of time and money.

Yours writing to Mom,

The Captain

What Kind of Animal Are You?

Were you ever mandated to attend one of those hokey HR interventions just because you offended a few hypersensitive coworkers? Invariably, whether the topic is wild monkey sex or sensitivity, the instructor leads with one of those lame ice breaking activities they recycled from some paramilitary Bible camp they attended as a kid. (Non sequitur – it has been suggested that The Captain is obsessed with monkeys; I suppose that all depends on what your definition of “obsessed” is. Lest any reader take this in the wrong direction, as I KNOW some will, I want to set the record straight. To echo the public declaration of a famous politician: “I did not have sexual relations with that primate!!”) My favorite is always the one where you secretly write down personal qualities and pick an animal that best represents those qualities. It’s my favorite because, in the hands of a true imaginative (for you grammar know-it-alls who are snickering right about now, I know that “imaginative” is an adjective and not a noun. It’s called poetic license. Get over your anal self already!) as yours truly, this exercise can be good, dirty fun!

Let’s play. OK. I’m the one writing this, so you really can’t play along, so I’ll play with myself. This last sentence is an example of how words can unintentionally offend the thin-skinned. I love language!!!!!

There are no rules. I function better that way. I will pick as many animals as I like until I can’t think of anymore or get bored. So here we go. If The Captain was an animal, he’d be…

Otter: Spends the day playing around in the water, stopping only to eat and perform necessary and pleasurable bodily functions. Loves to taunt other animals for no apparent reason. Sound like anyone you know?

Pig: Is reportedly intelligent but you can’t tell by looking at it, especially when it is rolling around in the muck and eating slop at the same time. How many animals do you know who use “muck” and “slop” metaphorically in the same sentence??

Capuchin Monkey: The Captain has referred to this monkey as “God-like” – that is, if you are able to suspend belief and consider a hyperactive creature who makes agitated noises to be divine. Please forgive…………the PUN!

Badger: Fiercely independent, with razor sharp wit, er, I mean teeth, foul breath and a cool racing stripe down the middle of its hairy back. Or maybe just what the bullies in high school called me because they couldn’t pronounce my last name but yet somehow managed to shave a racing stripe right down the middle of my hairy back after I passed out after an afternoon of drinking a case of Kronenbourg beer with my geek friends playing Dagorhir while pretending to be Vikings. Remember Kronenbourg beer? Not me.

Ass: No explanation necessary!!

Believe The Captain when he says: Bray, Bray, Bray!

Yours performing a bodily function (take your best guess),

The Captain

Sharing My Succeses

The frustrated writers at the impersonal behemoth for-profit corporation where I work publish propaganda pieces called “Sharing Our Successes.” I have found that the arrogance of the individuals running the corporation blinds them to the basic selfishness of human nature at which they excel, evidenced by their misguided belief that their low level employees are actually willing to accept gilded compliments as a legitimate substitute for cold hard cash. We want ours, too; the only difference is that we just aren’t willing to screw others to get it.

Furthermore, which here means I don’t care if you are interested in my thoughts, I am most definitely interested in my own thoughts and, in fact, much prefer them to the thoughts of others, so it follows that what I really want to share with the world are my successes.

So here they are, a lifetime of The Captain’s milestones!

· Before I could speak, I was writing little love notes to Mother of The Captain. Notes like: “What in the name of Gerber was that? Oatmeal or Sawdust? Take this back to the chef!” Or “I’ve got an aromatic package for you in my diaper. That’s what you get for feeding me lumberyard waste!” And “Please take me to visit the Nursery school teacher with the large chest and low cut blouse; being bottle fed, I yearn to snuggle up with the real thing.” And on many an occasion with puppy dog eyes: “Mummy Dearest, a Bowie knife is not on the American Academy of Pediatrics approved toy list, so why is that the only toy you ever leave in my crib? And why is that razor wire still woven around the top of the railing?”
· Kindergarten. Brought home my first report card to my reclining mother (or was she supine?) – straight Cs! I was so excited - I knew these must be outstanding grades because my smiling teacher sent me home with the words, “I can’t wait ‘til you show your mother that!” Unfortunately, mommy was feeling under the weather again and taking her medicine, which was amber colored and came in 2 liter bottles and dispensed PRN (as needed), and she just mumbled something about Captain Morgan, which I took to mean that “C” stood for Captain, a tender, touching and prophetic analogy for my academic rank.
· Lost my first tooth on my sixth birthday opening Dad’s beer bottle – no twist offs for this little guy!
· I learned to ride a bike on the very same day I was potty trained. Year seven was an eventful one for The Captain!
· Age thirteen, a lucky number for yours truly as I reportedly lost my virginity during my first blackout!
· Age 14 – 29, the “lost” years, defined by vague recollections of significant achievements, like graduating college, where I learned to drink beer upside down or through an IV, or upside down through an IV, or using an IV to expedite some substance or other into my bloodstream.
· Age thirty – sex while conscious…wooohoo!!!
· Age forty – conscious…wooohooo!!!
· Age 41 – I discover Gin – it’s all downhill from there!

Believe The Captain when he asks: “Dear Mom, who was it? The milkman, the Maytag man, the plumber, the Old Spice traveling saleman??!!”

Yours measuring success in liters,

The Captain