Frenchy's Rant

“Please take out all liquids, gels, aerosols and pastes, place them in a Ziploc bag, and put them in the bin separately,” the automated TSA robot droned at us early morning travelers. 4:45 AM is without a doubt my favorite time of day to fill my Stupid Quota, and the TSA never lets me down.

The rookie traveler in front of me asks, “Toothpaste OK?”

“No, toothpaste is part of this.” Without even looking up, the TSA drone mindlessly continues, “Put all liquids, gels, aerosols and pastes in a Ziploc bag, and place them in a bin.”

From someplace at the back of the line a gruff voice asks, “Wha’ ’bout whiskey? Is whiskey OK?” I turn around and realize the guy, completely dressed in white except for his sunglasses, is actually serious.

“No. Whiskey is a liquid. You can’t take more than three ounces of liquid on board.”

I think to myself, is this a rule change? I didn’t realize we could bring our own liquor with us, provided it was in a Ziploc bag. I need to stock up on Ziplocs!

Waving his brand new, unopened bottle of cheap whiskey at the agent, The Snowman demands, “Well, what I’m gonna do wit dis den?”

With a shrug, the agent says, “You can’t take it with you sir.” Thinking she’s finished with this exchange, her popular refrain continues, “All liquids, gels, aerosols and pastes must go in a Ziploc bag, then place the bag in the bin.”

But the guy wasn’t done.

“Yo! You tellin’ I really can’t bring dis wit me? OK. Das fine.” He then proceeds to open the brand new bottle of whiskey, takes a long, deep chug from the bottle, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, screws the cap back on and hands the bottle to the now flustered agent, saying, “Dere you go. Make yo day betta wit dis, honey!”

My Stupid Quota has been filled for the week, and it’s only Monday!

Now that September has officially arrived, it’s that time of year once again – time for me to try and lose some of my accumulated winter weight. In other words, it’s back to that evil three letter word place, the dreaded g-y-m. I have a love-hate relationship with the gym, I love to come up with excuses not to go, and hate it when the excuses run out, and I end up back on the treadmill like a rat in a deranged experiment.

There are two reasons for my unceremonious return to exercising:

One – In a moment of sober yet extremely irrational exuberance, I declared the other day that I’d hike up Mt. Washington in New Hampshire on my fortieth birthday. Thankfully, that birthday is at least fifteen years away, so there’s still time to get in shape for it. There is also time for Mt. Washington to collapse the same way the ‘Old Man Of the Mountain’ did a few years ago.

Two – The WWE crew is in the middle four month long contest to see who can lose the most weight. Only at the halfway point and the roundest members of the crew are already starting to look svelte. Though I am not in the contest, I don’t want to be the odd man out, or the round man around for that matter.

Through years of intense training my body has become a super-tuned fat storage machine. I’m not sure exactly the reason, but lately I’ve been suspecting my fantastic cheeseburger and Guinness diet may have something to do with it. Even though a cheeseburger platter contains nutrition from all four food groups – Swiss cheese for the dairy group, Two All-Beef patties for the meat group, French fries and ketchup for a double helping of the vegetation group, and… what the hell is the fourth food group? Oh yeah! The most important group of all – beer! I always try and have a triple helping of Guinness to satisfy the daily recommended dose of that most important group. Maybe my diet is partly to blame for the thickening layer of insulation covering my abs. In any case, it’s time to try and zap a few of those – shall we say unnecessarily additional accumulated calories.

When I was younger, all I had to do is think about it really hard, and pounds would melt away. But as my metabolism has slowly let me down, my girth has quickly increased. So, it’s time to dust off the ol‘ shorts, deodorize the ol‘ sneakers and… well… throw out the ol‘ gym socks and get some new ones. It’s finally time to go back to the torture rack better known as:

The Gym… gym… gym… gym… gym…

What a silly word. It should be called something more appropriate, like the Blood and Guts room.

I dragged myself away from dreams of two Jessicas kissing this morning to begin the grueling regimen to undo years and years of fun and good times. The hotel fitness center featured the latest in high tech treadmills, the HeartThrasher 9000. Not only do these fancy contraptions measure heart rate and calories burned in real time, they also have built in TVs! What a great way to waste time while wasting time going nowhere!

Thanks to this high tech gadgetry, I found out it takes a half hour of high-speed running in place to burn off the amount of calories contained in two pints of Guinness and five peanuts. The obvious easy route would be to stop drinking Guinness, but I’ve never been one for taking the easy route. I’ll probably cut down on the peanuts though.

I watched as my heart rate climbed alarmingly during this calorie-burning fest. 210 beats per minute is 3.5 beats per second! I felt that was an unreasonable amount of work to ask of a heart, especially one that is happy to crank out about one beat a second or so. My body readily agreed. A copper taste filled my mouth as a tingling, electric sensation shot down my arms. My legs felt as if someone had poured cement into them, and it was beginning to harden. My lungs wheezed pathetically as they cried for more air. As the clock slowly ticked off the minutes, my vision narrowed to the tantalizingly out-of-reach defibrillator on the wall. Boy this was some fun!

Four hours later, I’d completed my half hour on the Death-o-Matic Treadmill of Doom. I climbed off… well climbed isn’t really the word, I think it’s more like… fell – yeah that’s it – I fell off the still-moving belt while desperately trying to suck up all the remaining oxygen in the room.

People gave me a wide berth as I staggered wildly back to my hotel room. My field of view kept narrowing until it felt like I was walking though the world’s longest toilet paper roll. Everything, including my eyelashes was sore and hurting. It was all I could do to pour myself on the bed and watch as pretty pinpricks of light danced across the ceiling. Who needs drugs when working out has pretty much the same effect? Maybe this is the reason people go so nutty for the gym.

After half an hour of this self-induced light show, I recovered enough basic motor function to drag myself hand over hand to the shower and wash off all the blood.

Though it doesn’t seem like it, I’d have to say that all things considered, Day One of ‘Working Out’ went pretty well. By pretty well I mean I didn’t die. Now if I can only think up an excuse not to go back tomorrow.

A few years ago, I coined the term ‘Dr. Peppered‘ for when something I fully anticipated to happen had an unexpected, almost random result. For example, if I order a chicken burrito and get a fish taco instead, I’ve been Dr. Peppered. The term came about when I tried to buy water from a vending machine, and out came… a Dr. Pepper. Inattentive waiters, airlines, and motorcycle shops have all taken their turn Dr. Peppering me.

Until yesterday, I had never been Dr. Peppered by an elevator.

I checked into the Cincinnati Hyatt as usual, received my key card entitling me to one night’s sleep in a heavenly bed on the nineteenth floor, pressed the ‘Up’ button and waited for a car to deliver me to my palatial suite. The elevator soon ‘Bonged‘, doors opened, and I got in.

I pressed the button labeled 19 and away we went. This Hyatt was super fancy, their elevators talked! For some reason, my elevator stopped on the fifth floor, the elevator seductively purring, “Fifth floor. Going… Uuuuup.” Nobody was on the fifth floor waiting to go Uuuup, so after a few seconds, the doors closed and we ascended some more, the red floor numbers ticking up, up, up, until we arrived at the nineteenth floor.

“Hey Frenchy, this is the nineteenth floor, and may I add you’re looking miiiiighty handsome today!” Though it probably should have, the elevator did not actually say this – but that’s not how I got Dr. Peppered. When I stepped out, I was on the twenty-first floor! The elevator had gotten lost!

I pressed the down button, and that same possessed elevator returned, as if waiting to torture me some more. I’m pretty sure I heard the sexy voiced elevator lady laughing as I got in. Unsure where we’d end up this time, I pressed nineteen again. “Nineteenth floor. Going… Down.” Well, I suppose seventeen is technically close to nineteen, but close only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades, not elevatoring with a huge suitcase. I took a different elevator from seventeen, and amazingly enough, on the first try I arrived at the correct floor.

My friend Abi and I met later for dinner and drinks. After a meal and many, many frothy pints of Guinness, we called it a night. Waiting in the Hyatt lobby for the elevators, I explained to Abi how I’d been Dr. Peppered earlier by the mischievous elevator. While I was telling him the story, the very same Twilight Zone elevator door opened with a ‘Bong.’

The elevator cackled, “You again, Frenchy? Some people never learn. Ah ha ha ha!”

I hit 19 again, and Abi pressed 22.

“Nineteenth floor. Going… Uuuuup!” The door opened to reveal –surprise– the twentieth floor! I’d had enough Dr. Peppering for one day, and, defeated, I took the stairs.

I wrote this the day before the WWE tour bus accident, so this post wasn’t really inspired by that incident, it’s just an eerie coincidence. This story took place earlier this summer. I guess I didn’t write about it at the time because I wanted to forget about it, ignore the fact that it happened, the fact that it COULD happen to me, and the fact that it happened so quickly.

Thus far I haven’t been able to.

For the past twenty years or so I have been completely addicted to motorcycles. I got my first bike, a ten year old Kawasaki KZ400 as soon as I turned eighteen, much to my parent’s dismay. I also wrecked my first motorcycle when I was eighteen, thanks to a lovely old woman deciding to turn left in front of me. I was OK, though I took a break from riding for a few years. However, once bitten by the riding bug, it stays in your blood for life. Since that time, I’ve owned a Honda Shadow, two Suzukis, a Harley Davidson, a BMW and most recently a Yamaha FJR 1300.

I’ve logged well over 40,000 miles on these machines, mostly trouble free. The problem with trouble free riding is it tends to make riders complacent about the ever present dangers of motorcycle riding. Sometimes a little wake up call is necessary.

One fine summer weekend with nothing much to do, Fiona and I decided we’d take a little ride on the Yamaha up to Santa Barbara, about a hundred and twenty miles away. With the standard perfect California weather, the ride was exceptional. We stopped at Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area Headquarters for a National Passport Park Stamp.

Traffic, for a change was actually not that bad, even on the normally clogged 101. We made it to Santa Barbara in good time, had a nice meal, a few refreshing adult beverages, then called it a night, finding accommodations in one of the lower priced motels in the area.

The next morning we got up nice and late, and started heading for home. Once again, the traffic was miraculously light, flowing along at 75 MPH. I was in the left lane just enjoying the day when suddenly, brake lights exploded in front of me like an angry rash. I saw smoke from a pickup truck’s tires, then the truck slammed into the car in front of him.

It’s amazing how much time seems to slow down when something really bad is happening or about to happen. Here I am doing 70, going along with traffic, when 300 feet in front of me most of the traffic has suddenly just… stopped, and the rest are stopping when they lock their tires or crash into the car in front of them. For this very reason I always try to leave a gap between me and the vehicle in front of me, and now would be the time to find out if my ‘leave a gap’ theory worked.

Life proceeded in slow motion for what felt like the next ten minutes, when in reality it was probably closer to ten seconds.

I grab a handful of the front brake, and squeeze harder than ever. I feel the ABS brake system pumping and rocking and doing it’s job, keeping the front tire from locking up. Thankfully I’d tested the ABS in a parking lot when I first got the bike, to know what it would feel like – it would have been pretty scary otherwise. Not that it wasn’t scary enough as it was. Fiona managed to brace herself on the tank, which kept a lot of her weight from sliding forward into me, making it easier for me to control the bike.

While all this was happening, I remember thinking at first, “Oh fuck! Here comes my wreck!” then “This is gonna hurt. I hope we live through it.” That was about all I had time to think about, the rest of my time was spent trying to avoid crashing.

The car directly in front of me came to a dead stop, it’s evil brake lights glowing right in my face, and I was still doing about thirty miles an hour. The gap was rapidly closing. Quickly checking my mirror, I saw a little room between cars in the next lane, and squirted into it. As I passed the stopped lane of traffic on my left, I saw the pickup truck had rear ended an Audi pretty hard; steam and liquid was pouring out from under his crumpled hood. Cars were stopped in front of the wreck as well, so this accident wasn’t the reason for the abrupt deceleration.

I giddily pumped my fist in the air, elated that we’d missed becoming part of the chain reaction. Then the realization of exactly how lucky we’d just been and the jolt of adrenaline hit me full force at the same time, and I shook uncontrollably for about ten minutes. It was only much later that the true acceptance of how seriously bad things could have turned out hit me. And that hit hard.

As is so often the case in California traffic, the reason for the stop was never discovered.

Though that little incident was a good wake up call about the dangers of my chosen method of transportation, it wasn’t enough to make me want to hang up my riding gear and call it a day. I still think about it quite a lot though, and it did change the way I ride and will ride from now on.

In what is seeming to become an annual tradition, another cross country ride is in the works for early October.

Some addictions just aren’t worth curing.