Eliot Ness Was Not "Untouchable" to the TSA

Sunday before last I learned a lesson: I looked so good I was dangerous.

So I’m standing at the small local airport, head and shoulders visible above the curtains of a “privacy” booth, a TSA agent doing his damnedest to not let my shorts fall off as he’s running his fingers inside my waist band. The two dozen people going through security all saw the tall guy with the bright yellow polo holding his arms out to the side, getting some hands-on action courtesy of the US government.

My belongings, the few that I was carrying, went through the x-ray machine with no issue, and I had walked through the metal detector without error… at first. But instead of the usual alarm that triggers, in moments I had received a less urgent tone from the machine. I was the lucky winner of a random selection for additional screening! Yay! Eliot Ness, come on down! You’re the next contestant! But I wasn’t guaranteed a good junk groping just yet; first I had to win the lightning round: an agent was already snapping on blue latex gloves and had me hold my hands out, palms up, while she swabbed them with some paper discs and sent them through the analysis machine. When the sniffer dinged twice with a bold red screen: “Explosives detected”, they turned to the bin of my belongings. I laughed; surely the sandals I wore that day had soaked up some spilled gasoline the last time I mowed my lawn, and that was what triggerd the - nope, all clean.

After I received my complimentary pat-down, I asked the agent why my hands triggered the detector, if my clothes and belongings checked clean. He identified that I had pomade in my hair (check), was wearing cologne (check), and asked if I used some sort of lotion that day (just shaved my neck, after-shave moisturizer, check). Apparently, any one of those could contain nitro-glycerides which stayed on my skin. A good hand washing or rubbing alcohol would take care of them next time.

Rewind 15 minutes earlier: security doors open up and I decide to piss one more time before going through. Afterwards, I scoped myself out in the mirror, then realized I didn’t piss all over my fingers and I didn’t want my paperback book to get wet, so I’m not washing my hands.

***

After collecting my luggage at Lambert Airport in St. Louis, MO, my first task was to get my rental car. The company set me up with an “intermediate” sized car, after I specifically requested something to fit my 6’4”, 305 pound frame. “We’ve got you in this Mazda 3” the guy said.

If my life were a sitcom, this is where the laugh track would go.

Five minutes later I’m comfortable in a new Ford Escape at the additional expense of $4/day. I synced my phone to the onboard computer and it bumped some Prof from my phone automatically whenever I started the car, giving MO a little taste of MN underground hip-hop.

***

Everyone in our Missouri branch office is super friendly. The drawl was apparent in their voices, and the funny looks I’d get as soon as I spoke proved that my almost-Canadian accent was giving them enjoyment in return. A group of 9 joined me for lunch that Monday, and of course I wanted to get a good taste of some real BBQ. I was the first to speak up to our waitress for my drink order, and since I’m not drinking pop soda anymore, I was proud to get water.

Everyone else: “Sweet tea.” “Unsweetened tea.” “Raspberry sweet tea.”

I very quickly changed my order. When in Rome…

***

Every bar and restaurant with patio seating had giant metal fans running full-blast to provide a breeze. One particular bar’s fan was blowing the savory smell of the burger grill right at me. I laughed that by the end of the night, I’d smell so good I’d need a cattle prod to keep hungry people away from me.

The smell certainly didn’t make the wait for my Yogi Burger any shorter. I was told by our waitress (who almost looks like Sweet Dee from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) that the burger was huge, I’d not need fries. After five minutes of assault with kitchen smoke, I started regretting at least not getting the jalapeno poppers as an appetizer.

The burgers eventually did come out, though, and mine was a sight. Sitting solitary in the basket, the burger was not diminished by the absence of sides; it stood tall and wide like a monument. Onions drooped lazily over the edges of the beer-battered, deep-fried patty. Thousand Island dressing oozed out of both the top and bottom buns as I crunched through the burger with my first bite. Imagine the largest onion ring in your life, but instead of the sometimes-unwanted slimy bit of onion, it’s high-quality beef to be found inside. It was a damn good burger.

***

A delayed flight from St. Louis to Minneapolis meant I wasn’t making my connection home, so instead I took a 2 hour layover to get on a flight to Duluth. It was during those two hours that the 60-mph-wind, rain, and hail hit. I was already having a hard time finding a ride home from Duluth, but as the flight status kept creeping further and further into the future, my prospects got worse and worse.

The wind and rain was an awesome sight through the airport observation deck windows, but the repeated severe weather alerts on the P.A. system only got more and more on my nerves. Text messages started coming through to my phone from work: our headquarters office was without power and it might not be on again until Sunday or Monday. Who can go in? Who can check these servers? Can we redirect the website to an external host so we can communicate with our employees? I sat nursing a $7 tap beer watching these come in, begging people for a ride home or a place to stay. Then the most stressful event of the night occurred:

With my flight delayed til 11:40, two and half hours out yet, the bartender said “I have to close soon. Last call.”

Preposterous Portions of Pancakes

Not long ago, mammoth blood was found preserved in a frozen carcass. This gets exciting, as visions of cloning these long-extinct beings prances through every John Hammond-wannabe's head. But if we could clone and grow our own woolly mammoth, what would you feed it?

You feed it the pancake feast at RJ Riches, that's what.

My loyal readers have seen my accounts of Ducky's housewarming party, and hopefully they will also have had a chance to visit Frank at Kinked Slinky to read his take on Saturday night. We both promised our joint telling of breakfast the next day. So be sure to read his post today after reading mine, because we're both two grown men of our word, and it takes two to tackle just writing about the pancakes we got. Hell, it would prove to take two just to eat one of them...

For two people who can no longer sleep in past 7:00 AM, even on the weekends, the morning after a party is fraught with tip-toes and hushed voices. Someone was asleep in every room, shoes piled haphazardly around the doors and patio. It didn't take too long for Frank and I to decide that if we kept waiting for Ducky to get up, our growling stomachs would wake everyone else up and hasten the households' oncoming hangovers.

Frank and I cleaned up the yard a bit, collected our belongings, and soon I was following him from Roseville to Riches. Frank was confident that we take Highway 10. Naturally he took County Road 10 instead, and we had to double-back through church traffic before we found the end of our pancake pilgrimage.

Frank: Walk into RJ Riches and you feel minutely as if you’re in the opening scene of “Reservoir Dogs.” Surrounded by scenery as dirty as the men involved, Eliot and I started our recovery from a … shall we say, inelegant night of partying (at least on my part) at this veteran New Brighton diner. The gem was the taste of breakfast, and two large men got killed by a gigantic pancake.

The family-owned restaurant was 1970's answer to the 1950's all-stainless steel breakfast diners like Denny's. Wood-grain laminate accents and decades-old glass lamp covers - none of which matching in color with the others - met us. The people working there could all have been family indeed, from the hot 20-something chick working the register; our hostess, the lone blonde, who might have been the adopted cousin; and the perpetually grumpy (but hospitable enough) portly aunt who served us. In the kitchen, visible through an old-fashioned brick pass-through, the type found in a pizza place, the father and the uncle of this family worked the grills.

Frank had foretold epic prophecy about RJ Riches' pancakes. “The size of your plate” he said, and a glance at the table next to us confirmed. The menus might as well have been 3 blank pages and a section titled “Pancakes”. The only option we had to consider was if we wanted the Pancake Feast, a cake, choice of meat, and eggs; or Rich's Challenge, which is all the above and a healthy serving of your choice in potatoes. I figured that I didn't need any extraneous carbs getting in the way of my cake, so I ordered the blueberry pancake, bacon (what else?!) and eggs, over-easy, which of course were destined to break yolk into my pancake.

Frank: For the first time in my life, I sucked down a whole pot of coffee. It tasted like the contents of a rain gutter, but you don’t aim for a Wolfgang Puck face at a family restaurant. I pooh-poohed the bacon for a slice of ham. The "premium" pancake blends cost a little over a buck extra, but if you've ever seen me pass up a chocolate-chip pancake ... you haven't, because it's never happened. I would have paid the tip of my pinky for chocolate chips on my pancake.

Somewhere between my third and fourth cup of coffee, the plates arrived. The ham and eggs looked like everyone else’s ham and eggs, but the pancakes … well, look at them.

It didn't take long for our food to arrive, and though I had already spied our neighbor's pancake, nothing had prepared me for the one destined for my mouth. The breakfast was served on two plates: a smaller plate for the meat and eggs, and a large dinner plate dwarfed beneath this huge pancake. If Bob - “His name is Robert Paulson” - had taken his shirt off for Fight Club, I could imagine seeing two of these pancakes as nipples on his bitch tits, “the way you think of God's as big.” The edges of the pancake nearly drooped over the edge of the plate to touch the table top. The crust was an even golden brown, and the cake was thick yet fluffy. When I make pancakes, I'm lucky if one out of 3 of them turn out as well, and mine are hardly poured larger than a DVD. This behemoth before me was perfection.

Before we dug in, we made good on our pre-breakfast deal of flavor-swapping. I took my butter knife and tried to assess the best way to attack this task. Carving out a chunk to share was like trying to dissect a blue whale with an X-acto knife. If we had a real estate agent present when we swapped the large tracts of our pancake territories, we surely would have needed to pay closing costs.

The first bite I took was of the chocolate chip, sans syrup. And let me tell you, it couldn't have tasted any better if served to me in a picnic on the fields of Elysium. I made short work of the chocolate chip, and finally turned to a piece of bacon. Yes, the cake was so good that I gave it priority over bacon.

At this point, both Frank and I were able to start forming words again, and we started discussing the ideas you'll find in these words here. It was interesting to hear that while I was chewing in reverent silence, brainstorming just the words I'd say about these enormous cakes, Frank admitted he did the same thing. In fact, he said it was nice to not have to worry about keeping up conversation.

Now, to my blueberry. I carefully cradled the two over-easy eggs and placed them on the two-thirds left of my cake. They looked comically inadequate, and once broken, the yolk barely lubricated the fluffy cake. I supplemented it with some maple syrup and started in: the blueberries were warm, unbroken, and juicy, meaning the cake had been stirred with care. A few bites of egg-soaked cake, the rest of the bacon, and I chased it all with the remainder of my orange juice (with sufficient pulp to prove that it was either home-squeezed.. or at least it was the expensive store-bought kind that mimics home-squeezed). My hunger was satiated, tummy straining at its limits, and as I sat back in the booth and relaxed, I realized that a full half of my monster cake remained.

I looked up at Frank, who hadn't made it even as far as I. “The wife will appreciate this, at least” he stated as we asked for our to-go boxes.

Frank: Yeah, I had eaten a pathetic portion of my pancake. The balance was cut into sections, like a damn dinner table, and stacked on top of each other in a styrofoam container. It took my until Wednesday to finish it. Just know that entire pizzas came and went at our house during this pancake's lifetime. This pancake lasted longer than Petoria ... I think.

With each of our bills under $15, both Frank and I came to the conclusion that RJ Riches was a step above your commercial “family-styled” restaurants. Whether all the employees there were truly related or not, I never got to ask. It matters little, though, with pancakes that weighed more than the wood-carved box Grandma kept the recipes in, a Thanksgiving dinner atmosphere, and reasonable prices, RJ Riches earned our future return.

Keeping the Peace, and Keeping to Myself

I’m the third “Jason” – and the fourth “Jay” – at this party. Since it’s not really kosher to arbitrarily assign nicknames like “Ranger” (since he’s the only other Jason here from Da Range) or Fingertoes (since that Jason is inexplicably wearing Vibrams instead of sneakers), I decided I’m going to from here on out introduce myself solely as “Ness”.

Ness found himself at a housewarming party in Roseville. “Ducky”, to affectionately loan a nickname from Kinked Slinky, and his what-she-lacks-in-height-she-makes-up-for-in-beauty girlfriend, let’s call her, um… “Shorty”, have extended this 200+ mile invitation my way to help them celebrate being property owners, so I made sure to grab my ball cap and packed an overnight bag. I prepped my truck with a fresh oil change the night before, and loaded a tent and sleeping pad in the back, just in case we avoided any thunder and the night proved decent enough to sleep outside. I was happy to help deliver Marine Vargas (sorry, never did quite learn your proper rank) to the airport for her return flight to California the same morning, then I found the street I was directed to, but did not see the promised balloons-tied-to-mailboxes that universally indicated “PARTY OVER HERE!!!” (is that a Family Guy joke? I feel like it was…). Before I can call our hosts liars, though, I see a car pull over to park on the side of the street, and out pops Shorty herself, pulling the strings of three helium balloons.

Guess who ended up tying them to the mailboxes. It was one of my few contributions to this party.

Let’s fast forward through setting up the volleyball net, hiding from slight rain showers, the arrival and introduction of further guests, the tapping of the keg, and the eventual arrival of Frank and his tailgate- (and junkyard-) ready PT Cruiser. Alright, so the only other person I can expect to know is here, it’s time for Ness to get super smashed with some bros, right?! “PK DRINK!”

While my intentions might have been as high as Pokémon-shaped parade balloons, my spirits were a little more bounded to Earth. I just don’t know what it is. I feel like I owe Frank not one but two weekends of jovial camaraderie now: both recent times I've visited I've felt like my damage meter was at 210% and a slight poke would knock me away. (If you haven’t picked up on the video game references yet, than that last one was like a home-run bat to the head. Ok, ok, I’ll stop now… and start with other nerdy pop-culture references!)

I had stayed in and got some decent sleep the previous two nights, yet I still felt thin, like too little butter scraped over too much bread (thanks, Bilbo). I sat in my Big Boy camp chair (over-sized and reinforced to support my fat ass) and drank keg beer. I paid attention to the lavish praise Frank received on his weight loss efforts while glancing down with loathing and despair at the manboobs still hiding within my green Harley t-shirt. Here I am, prime opportunity to meet many new people – women – but years of lethargy is taunting me from the past. I realized that my fake-it-til-you-make-it has run out, and I make some lame excuse to myself to allow Frank to baste in his due glory, promising myself that my time will come when skinny-Frank is old and busted, and skinny-Ness will be all the rage.

So I sat in my silence, making cursory conversation only when addressed by someone who feigned interest out of pity, it seemed. Nobody really cares what I do for a living. A brief spark of personality leaks through when I get to talk about my dog, but nobody wants to suffer a pet-lover's monologue that extends into bat-shit crazy territories. And in return to anyone suffering through my rantings and ravings about my sweet Juno, I won’t give a shit about your Maltese.

I listened in on conversations, soaking in snippets from one acquaintance to another, trying to make sense of these strange windows into strangers’ lives, trying to drown out the rising depression snaking its way up my spine. I just don’t get it. Am I just that tired, though I've done nothing but drive a few hundred miles and walk for 30 minutes in the Mall of America? Is it the dreary cloudy weather and clingy damp cold that screams more of April than June? I've successfully navigated the societal landmine field of rooms full of strangers before, and managed to even provide some life to a party or two. I have no shortage of things to talk about, but today I was more an anti-social Butters than I was a floating social butterfly, and it sure stung like a bee. Maybe if I imbibed drinks as mixed as my metaphors instead of beer, I would have loosened up a bit more. But as it was, I had stood there struggling to initiate conversation with a woman I would never ever see again in my life.

As the sun set and I took an inordinate amount of trips down the long driveway to my truck to change into progressively warmer clothes – first from shorts to jeans, then from Chuck Taylors to boots, finally to grab a hat and jacket – the party reached a crescendo and everyone adopted the roles they would carry for the rest of the night. Two of those particular roles were Super-Frank, the BAC-fueled hero that Gotham needs but nobody asked for right now, and Disciplinary Officer Ness, whose sole task it became to make sure Super-Frank didn't hurt anybody or himself in his antics. Read Frank’s accounts over at Kinked Slinky to get a good feel of how the evening went. Unnoted, however, was how I was forced to get uncharacteristically aggressive with some Mr. Smartass Commentary, who did not find Super-Frank in any way agreeable. There are few times I leverage my size and weight advantage over someone, and this jerk cowed pretty easily. To be fair, I did ensure Super-Frank hung up the cape and settled down for the night, and fisticuffs were averted.

Almost as if it burned the last of the fumes in my gas tank, this keeping of the peace was soon followed by a sojourn to the bathroom that became a turn-in instead. It was very easy to get comfortable in front of the TV, which was playing Men in Black. The big guy who was somber, brooding, and seldom of words, the guy who probably outwardly seemed like some aloof asshole but inwardly struggled with demons of inadequacy and loneliness all night, the sleeping bear that roused only when necessary to protect him and his own, soon fell asleep on the couch.

I can't imagine what conversation went on about me out around the bonfire, or if my absence was even noticed. Every party has to have that guy and I feel like I was definitely one of them. People probably dared sidelong glances at me and formed their opinions about me, wondering why, if I couldn't have any fun, did I even stick around the party. 

I know that reality is probably more sonderous than that. Nobody gave two shits about me, everybody had their own internal struggles at the party, whether it was over the game of bags they were playing, whether they should get up and grab another beer, or if they should stay by the warm fire and just be done for the night. I know I wasn't anything more than a background character to everyone else's story that night. It's still hard to find solace in that sonder, though. I still have the harshest critic nagging me from within, my own R Lee Ermey screaming obscenities at me, and unlike Gomer Pyle, I'm stuck enduring it without an easy way out.

I woke up shortly an hour or two later when Shorty, a woman of three-quarters my height and much less than half my weight, tucked me in like I imagine she’s done with her own son, giving me a blanket and pillow and even taking off my eyeglasses. I chuckled at the absurdity of it all as she did the same for Frank on the love seat opposite me, and I quickly found the sanctuary of sleep again.

Next week you’ll find the first of our (hopefully many!) double-team restaurant reviews, where we exhaust the English language, and maybe some Spanish, French, and Klingon, of ways to describe the largest pancakes we've ever attempted. I promise it won't be as morose as this entry! Scope it out Monday!

Triboelectric Filanges

I've just had the strangest reaction to the most mundane daily event today. This past weekend, I sliced my fingertip open – the index finger on my right hand. In absence of super glue, and the presence of a lawn party, typing work on a computer, and a night of volleyball, ensures that this split skin isn't going to heal very quickly. It’s a small gash, but it’s open nonetheless. It is into this open skin that a static shock charge leaped from the handle of the bathroom at work.

Now, who enjoys receiving static shocks? With the arrival of June, one would think we've survived the dry, electrical winter and should enjoy a nice reprieve from unexpected jolts, no? Apparently my office is dry enough to facilitate a buildup charge, and that homing bolt found exposed subdermal.

And it HURT.

Usually one’s reaction is to jerk their hand away, maybe gasp in sudden surprise. I actually exclaimed out loud a bellowed “OW!” and shook my offended hand violently. My finger throbbed, even long after the electrons dispersed throughout my body. Soon this pulsing pain was accompanied paradoxically with a numbing tingle falling over my fingertip. From first knuckle to the end of my nail, my finger fell completely numb.

“I might have just caused permanent nerve damage…” I pondered as I stood at the urinal (nature was calling and static shock in a surprisingly vulnerable spot or not, she wasn't going to wait for me much longer). Even now, a half hour beyond the critical event, my finger tingles.

I wonder if I could somehow take advantage of this rift in my skin. Maybe if I stick my finger into some radioactive ooze or gamma rays, I can make it glow like E.T. and heal things by booping them with my fingertip. But then I might as well just jump right in full-body and become a super hero like... Starving for Blog Content Man.

Fun fact to finish off this short little entry: did you know that the ooze that created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the same radioactive ooze that blinded Daredevil?!

Stay tuned for an epic joint effort double-team blog entry where Frank of Kinked Slinky and I tackle the largest pancake we've ever eaten.