Lane Shift

My first intimation that not everything ahead will be smooth sailing is the sign that glowers at me. The moment I see it, my hands tighten involuntarily on the steering wheel.

Lane shift

2,000 feet

Can I handle this? I’m not sure. I’ve already driven through three states. I’ve faced perilously narrow construction cattle chutes, gaper delays of accidents that were probably caused by gaping drivers, driving rain and trucks that refused to stay in the right lane. I took it in stride.

But can I handle the lane shifting on me? I am not sure my decades of driving experience in all conditions and on all types of highways have trained me for this reality. Yet I have precious little time to prepare myself. The signs, in an alarming shade of orange, remind me the moment of truth approaches without remorse or relent.

Lane shift

1,000 feet

Just look at that sign: So serious, so commanding. Aside from the written words, there have been signs with the universal symbols of lanes that drift. I’ve already seen more signs warning of a lane shift that I’ve seen signs warning about a mysteriously closed exit. This must be a big deal. They wouldn’t have so many signs if this were something routine, something any driver can handle, right?

Lane shift

500 feet

That’s one-tenth of a mile. That’s six seconds at the speed I’m going. That’s nothing. That’s everything. That’s enough time for so many thoughts to flash through my brain.

Lane shift ahead

Here we go. No time to look back. Ahead I can see the curve where the lanes shift gently like a wave a child draws in art class. I can see the fresh coat of white dotted lines and how the blacktop stays straight while the lanes move.

Can I handle this? My knuckles whiten as I face my defining moment.

I can't stand the Kardashians

I can no longer keep silent: I can’t stand the Kardashians. I have been living with this feeling for too long and it has metastasized inside me. And so I must come clean. For many people, the statement “I can’t stand the Kardashians” is blindingly obvious. Nobody can stand these people. But I had seen one too many tabloid covers in the supermarket with Kim Kardashian bemoaning her pregnancy weight gain or whether or not Kanye West is gay and I decided that this family is a drain on our resources and they cannot suffer too much spirited invective. “But why do you hate these people, Brian?” you might ask. “What did they ever do to you?” Nothing direct, to be sure. But the metaphysical bandwidth that these people suck up with their insipid exploits offends me. These people take up too much space in our collective brain and that is space better served by remembering things that might actually have some scintilla of value in our lives. The Kardashians are worthless. They produce nothing of any value. They exist only to endorse other people’s products. They are so talent-free that they make Zsa Zsa Gabor look like Leonardo Da Vinci. Their only discernible talent seems to be the ability to maintain a heartbeat while the cameras are rolling and it is truly a pathetic commentary about all of us that doing something as effort-free as that could be considered a talent, let alone a cause for celebrity. I do not care about the exploits of any member of this family. I do not care if Kim Kardashian marries someone else. I do not care about the terms of her divorce from the basketball player. I do not care about her baby except in the abstract sense that one might care about a child’s welfare. I do not care if she gains 20 or 200 pounds during her pregnancy. I do not care what she looks like in her maternity clothes. I do not care about any of the commentary on what she looks like in her maternity clothes. I do not care about any of the analysis of the commentary on what she looks like in her maternity clothes. I do not care about Kim Kardashian’s ass. I resent the fact that I know any of these details about this woman’s life, as I stumble over them by the simple virtue of being socially engaged and maybe wanting gossip about a celebrity who actually has something more substantive on her resume than the pathetic declaration of “I am a brand.” She and her family might be a brand but they are a hollow brand that stands for nothing. Brands are made by people or companies that actually create things. At least from a brand like, say, Mercedes, you could divine something of substance about the quality of the car or the socioeconomic status of the people who buy it. You know what I think of when I think of the Kardashian brand? I think of people who will endorse anything their agents put in front of them and then they call that a talent. I think of people who endorsed debit cards for kids that had usury levels of fees tacked onto them. I think of people who achieved fame via the most bottom-feeding method possible: Reality TV. It wasn’t even good reality TV, like American Idol or Dancing With the Stars, where at least people need to do something or have some ability to get on. No, the Kardashians achieved fame by the worst kind of reality TV: being rich people who got even richer by being filmed doing nothing more challenging than being sentient life forms and displaying a lack of ability of anything other than making money through some perversion of a perpetual motion machine. Consider: Kim Kardashian’s first notoriety came as a friend of Paris Hilton. If people rightfully declared that Paris Hilton contributed nothing of value, how much less value would her sidekick have? Kim attained fame by being a footnote to a footnote. Yet through some infernal social alchemy, these people live on in the public eye, rather than fading like any obedient mayfly should. The Kardashians are bottomless, eternal, soul-shredding vapidity in the shape of Botoxed, over-tanned humans. They represent all that is godawful and contemptible in American celebrity culture.

Quitting Time

When Michael Scott returned to the Office series finale to deliver a perfectly timed “That’s what she said,” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I ended up doing a little bit of both. It was an absolutely perfect moment that not only hit the bulls-eye but split down the middle the arrow that was already stuck in the bulls-eye.

I thought the series finale was sublime. The series had been drifting for some time and had a horrific season after Michael left and there was a parade of celebrity guests vying for the manager position of Dunder Mifflin. But I did see an uptick in season 9 of The Office (it helped that Andy was at sea for months because I hated him). I liked the higher stakes drama of Jim and Pam’s marriage and the sweet callback to the note he didn’t give her in the blue teapot. It was hilarious when Dwight proposed to Angela by pulling over her car and yelling at her through a megaphone. I loved when the group gathered to watch the documentary and the camera panned over all their faces.

This was one of the better series finales I’ve ever seen. It was funny and cringeworthy and poignant all at once. It resolved the stories of some characters, showed that some would never change and set others in new directions.

There were so many character resolutions that moved me. I teared up when Erin met her birth parents. It was a perfectly done scene, with her mother telegraphing just enough so I knew what was happening right away but it took a moment for it to sink in with Erin. It was really sweet when Phyllis choked up that Stanley carved a wooden bird that looked just like her and that she missed him so much Phyllis started to fatten up his replacement so he’d look more like Stanley. Michael’s appearance was just enough not to overshadow the present cast. After he got his own perfect farewell episode, this was just a nice coda, finding out that he is happy with his kids and in a Michael Scott way, he bought two smart phones to hold all his kids’ pictures.

It wasn’t all tears, of course. I thought Meredith cheering on her stripper son was a riot, especially since it’s the same actor who played her kid, much younger, years ago. Kelly and Ryan running away together was just stupid funny, showing just how myopic these characters will always be. Creed’s story could not have ended any other way than with an arrest. 

The real stunner, which summed up the arc of her character, was Pam’s talking head at the very end: 

It took me so long to do so many important things. It's just hard to accept that I spent so many years being less happy than I could have been. Jim was five feet from my desk and it took me four years to get to him. It would be great if people saw this documentary and learned from my mistakes. Not that I'm a tragic person, I'm really happy now, but it would just make my heart soar if someone out there saw this and she said to herself 'Be strong, trust yourself, love yourself, conquer your fears, just go after what you want and act fast because life just isn't that long … There's a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn't that kind of the point?

Now that The Office characters have turned out the lights for the last time, it makes me even sadder and angrier to see the pathetic shadow that NBC has become, particularly on Thursday nights. That used to be the crown jewel of the network, the home of shows like Cheers, Friends, Seinfeld, The Cosby Show … it goes on and on. Sure, we have my beloved Parks and Recreation and the diminished Community but NBC used to have a full menu of delicacies on Thursdays and now there’s one hour of comedy and that’s all. They have really destroyed their own network. After 30 years, the almighty Thursday night comedies have just about wheezed and staggered to an end.

Let them eat their own discrete piece of cake

I recently married another dude so by most measures, I’m pretty gay. But there is one gay metric that I do not at all follow.

I do not share dessert.

I was watching David Sedaris on The Daily Show and he said you could tell the difference between gay men and straight men because the gays will share a piece of cake. If you ever see Steve and me in a restaurant, you would assume we are straight cousins. This is because we each require our own piece of cake.

Tell you what: You order your own piece of cake and I’ll order my own piece. Oh, you say you can’t finish yours? Not my problem, honey. Why should I eat less than I want just because you can’t finish a little piece of cake? Eat it, don’t eat it, get a doggie bag. I don’t care. Just let me eat my cake. I will finish my dessert. I very rarely need a doggie bag. What can I say? I’m a big boy.

I do not at all believe in that nonsense romantic notion that couples should share food. First, it’s difficult with us because if Steve playfully stole a bite of my steak, he’d be in for a very unpleasant evening. You can have a bite of something if you ask but you’re sure as hell not getting half.

That’s the key: If you ask. Don’t ever think it’s cute to playfully take something off my plate without asking. You’ll end up in the emergency room getting treated for the puncture marks on the back of your hand from my fork.

I’m not kidding.

This is why I don’t like family style restaurants. I am so picky about food that I will invariably get screwed in a situation where someone says “Let’s order a bunch of appetizers and split them.” Half that food will be food I can’t stand and I’ll end up unsatisfied when I could have just ordered my own food and enjoyed it.

I’m like an animal: Don’t mess with me while I’m eating.

Apropos of Nothing

Ordering ice cream in a cone seems like a waste of time because it’s just going to drip all over everything. Then it gets all over people’s hands and they squeal in horror. Well, what did you think would happen? I just order ice cream in a cup because when I want to inhale some ice cream, I’m all business and don’t have time for the nonsense of dripping.

I think if I ever watched one of the trashier reality TV shows, like the Real Housewives series, I would be able to hear my life force leaking out of me like a deflating air mattress and the sound it would make would be “Briiiian … you’re wasting your liiiiiife …”

That Doritos commercial, where the boy kisses the girl and says, “she tasted like Doritos,” is repugnant. I can’t imagine a less flattering sentence in the English language. It doesn’t help that I can’t stand Doritos.

Continuing a time-honored tradition, roadwork is starting again on Route 52 in Centerville. This has happened annually for the last four or five years. I have no idea what else they could do with this road. It’s just a two-lane highway; how much more work could it possibly still need? It kills me when there’s extensive construction and you can’t tell what they did on the road.

I don’t understand how 3-D printing works. You can print a gun now? What about the bullets?

Who the hell is Rebel Wilson? Do I need to know who this person is? She was in some kind of movie (was it a movie?) called Pitch Perfect and she hosted the MTV Movie Awards. Is the fact that I don’t know who she is attributed more to my ignorance of recent pop culture or just that we now deify even D-list celebrities?

I feel almost bad for not really caring about or following whatever happened in Cleveland. Some kind of sex slave thing? This is terrible but if some scandal happens during my vacation, like this crime during our honeymoon, I just don’t pay much attention to it. Benghazi happened when we were in Seatowne and I just couldn’t care less about that one, either.

Aftermath and Afterglow

Our wedding was the best day of my life. I am still a little overwhelmed by the experience, by all the love we felt from our family and friends and by everyone’s generosity.

I had meant to write more about the planning process as it was happening but my mind was so fragmented by everything we had to do that I couldn’t concentrate enough to write anything coherent. A year and a half after I proposed to Steve on a roller coaster overlooking Lake Erie, I finally have some time to reflect on all of it.

Our entire wedding day was perfect. After all my habitual worrying, it all went off without a hitch. When we started planning, I had braced myself for the reality that not everything would be perfect. Of course, the wedding would always be perfect no matter what because Steve became my husband but I didn’t go into planning obsessed with the idea that every detail had to be my way or the highway. Something small would inevitably go wrong, like the table linens would be a slightly off color and I didn’t want to let it bother me.

No need. It was all perfect. The ceremony was poetic and meaningful to us. We couldn’t have asked for more beautiful weather. Salero and its 270-degree ocean view were stunning. I loved the food and the cake was out of this world. People danced all night. Neither of us fell during our first dance. The toasts made me cry, which does not happen easily. I hope we showed everyone a good time.

Planning was fun but stressful for awhile. Going in, I hadn’t appreciated the sheer scope of stuffing 100 envelopes with invitations, return cards and those little pieces of tissue paper, then stamping and putting address labels and return address labels on everything. I hadn’t realized what a project it would be to make all that sea glass candy and put it in 125 bags. I didn’t know how much ink we’d use printing those 7-inch record table markers and the programs. It was hard work but fun being creative. With some help, we got it done and it was beyond worthwhile.

Then we got to sit by the pool for a few days in Florida and not have to worry about anything. Right after we came home from the honeymoon, we found out that we would soon be literally married as Delaware had approved same sex marriage.

I am so very grateful Steve and I got to tie the knot surrounded by all the loved ones we could cram into that beautiful place, in an area that holds so many memories for us.

Now in the aftermath, I get to soak up the afterglow and relax a little, enjoying my time with my new husband.