Been reading a little about all the shenanigans involving the football game on Monday night. Having worked two night games last year on the Bills staff, it was decidely nicer to spend this game on my couch, warm and with the cold beer already paid for and no line for my reasonably clean bathroom. A few years ago, for a work function, I got to sit the M&T Club. That is one of the big monstrosities at the end of the stadium. 200 people private service, closed windows. It was like being a Roman watching the christians escape the Lions. But the past two seasons found me decked out in this splendor:



That was from the hockey game, but that was also my post for football days and nights. To the left were season ticket holders and pretty consistent in their attendence. To the right was a few season ticket types, walk ups, opposing fan types. Since it was the end zone, they were the last seats sold. Never a dull moment. When ESPN came to town last year, it was for a game with the Cowboys, which brought out the inner asshole in some Bills fans. The fights were clear cut. It's the near fights that put people on edge. The bulk of the stadium is fine, but something about the end zones and near end zones that. Something about somebody wearing the wrong team colors turns the joint into Lord of the Flies.

Game still sucked, but seeing the suckitude from the comforts of home is preferred.

Part of my job is taking meetings, even when there really isn't much point. You know, the dreaded networking meeting to scope out potential business partners and sponsors. The conversation is usually dripping in false sincerity and takes me back to the disingenuousness of my my dinners at Adelphia. I'm getting to be pretty decent at getting through them. (e:uncutsanflush) and (e:leetee) caught me showing off Zoo property to a potential partner last week (he later parted with $5,000) (See, told you I was good).

Well, on thursday night, I was dispatched to an affair run by the Buffalo Partnership. Various companies were exhibiting services and the partnership invited companies involved with the partnership and ones they like. So, I got to take my life in my hands and take the 190 after dark to the Grand Island Bridge (not an easy fit) and meander back twenty years down Whitehaven road to the Holiday Inn resort & Hotel that is on the river. It wasn't promising. After you cross the main boulevard on the island, it is full of nothing, light, structures, which was made all the more eerie by the damp evening. I half expected a fog horn in the distance. You're driving and you get to the point where you are sure you took a wrong turn, only off in the distance is the strangely comforting holiday inn neon green light.

I park and schlep my to the conference room where this little party is encounced. After necogiating my way past the check in nazis (who rightly noted that I wasn't Dr. Donna, nothing slips past the partnership crew), I got a drink and set about meandering. The food looked like what if White Castle served beef on weck. Not a wonderful concept, but keeping myself on a coca cola diet seemed the prudent coarse. I saw a couple former colleagues from my Adelphia. One noted that I looked a little thinner. Stories I could have told. The other was a little too amped up about selling tires.

After chatting a little with one of the folks from a magazine I buy advertising in, I was pounced on by a printing salesman. The guy looked like somebody called central casting and said "give us the greasiest, most uncouth, poorly suited, hygenically impaired stereotype and we'll let him talk to the public." Now, in my work, I have perfected the insincere, I really am listening, smile. It looks like I'm there for you, but in reality, I'm mentally out back having a drink.
I had to call upon those skills while this putz complained about how his newspapers publish the zoo press releases, but we don't send him any printing business. While he's making this complaint, I'm mentally noting that I'm not sure if that was a moustache he's sporting or if the nose hair is running amuck, because you can't tell where one stops and the other begins.

I pretend to rifle through my swag bag looking for a card or something and blessedly an announcement breaks up his ethical complaint for me to slip to the bar. A conversation gets started up by a woman from the presenting organization who knows a little too much about my family. Turns out she is a Clarence resident who knows my folks. Turns out she also played a role in my Mom getting squeezed out of the town planning board. Turns out if she was on fire, my mom might write a note to the fire department about coming to put that out....when they had a minute. And so it goes...

By this point, I've filled two hours and done the deed. I even got a potential sponsor for something at the Zoo. The whole exercise makes me feel like I need a shower. I get to my car and place a call for good food from Mr. Pizza who fucks up the order but even with delay, my takeout and I are home for 30 Rock, along with a new collection of pens, flashlights, candies, folders and whatnot.

Had to laugh, because there was a company there who did nothing but sell promo crap that the other 19 booths were foisting on people.

First believable word I heard all night was from the Mr. Pizza guy who offered a pop for the messed up order.

Sometimes you just have those days...

Not good, not bad, just ripe for a scene in a workplace sitcom.

A man and a woman started to have sex in the middle of a dark forest.

After about 15 minutes of it, the man finally gets up and says, "Damn,
I wish I had a flashlight!". The woman says, "Me too, you've been
eating grass for the past ten minutes!"

Perhaps out of spite since I still have my hair, my Dad sends the occasional photograph to keep me on my toes. The one that arrived in today's email wasn't so bad. I worked for St. Bonaventure Unversity Radio Station when I was in school in the Mezozoic era (the mid 80's). We were almost a big deal, had many leatherbound books on shelves of rich mahogany....mostly because the four commercial stations down there at the time played either country or "music of your life." The attached is a picture from a remote broadcast from the Olean Center Mall, so long ago that my hair was a uniform color of brown and the picture was only in black and white. Enjoy.



Another questionable fashion choice. 1984 was a kidney stone for such things.

Oh yeah, My eldest needed a baby pic for her senior page in the City Honors yearbook, so this is what is going in, apparently. Brace yourselves for a window into my decay.



She's the clean shaven one....

I guess at my core, I'm a bit of a romantic. The great book (and okay movie) Fever Pitch had a line about how immersing yourself in something bigger than you is good for the soul. That's not an exact quote but you get the idea. Essentially, it's healthy to forget all the intellectual bullshit that can bog down our days and let yourself ride a wave. Bear with me, dear reader. This thought reoccured to me on Tuesday night after being strung out from a long work day, a tough exercise session, watching a little of the returns, I finally dropped my exhausted self on to my bed a little after midnight.

Phone rang. It was an uncle from my ex's side of the family, euphoric with the election. He's a good guy and has waited nearly 70 years for a moment like Tuesday night, so I was happy to listen to the party for a couple of moments before he moved onto his next celebratory phone call. I hit the pillow and a few minutes later, off in the distance, I could hear some chemically serene young democrats whooping it up, packing as many syllables as is possible into chanting the new president-elect's surname. Part of me wanted them to hush up, part of me wanted to join in.

I think that is what drives people. It's what motivates people to sprint across Grant Park to get a space for everything. Not only do you want to be there for the speech itself, but the experience of being in the park, being part of shared moment is almost as important as the words coming from the podium.

We have family in DC and my ex hatched a plan to take our three troublemakers down in January to witness the big moment. I felt like the Grinch when his heart grew three times when my eldest asked her Mom "Can Dad come with us?" Seriously, moi? I must be doing something right. That too will be one of those transcendental moments.

I was thinking when I was working the Bills games that there was no fun in rousting drunks (which apparently I was pretty good at) or settling seat disputes. The fun came in the silly high fives from goofy strangers, the fist bumps from players' moms, the food offers from tailgators after the games. There are, of course, copious amounts of assholes and knuckleheads in those lots, but there are folk too who are just savoring the moment, losing themselves somewhat in that moment. That's finding unabashed joy on a very minor scale in comparison, but I could see people seeing the forest for the trees on Tuesday Night.

It was a grand unshackling, made all the better by the sense of community in a place where 40 years earlier the same location was such a scene for conflict. It's only a first step, to be sure, but the footprint runs deep.