If you don't, I have some bad news for you. Or maybe I don't. I'm told dumb people lead way happier lives, and feel more fulfilled and keep reading this here if you really want to feel better about the idea that you might be an idiot and there's some sort of silver lining. Because, fuck it. Dumb people deserve good news too, right? You're not really still reading this paragraph, are you? I’m not calling you dumb. But I also cannot confirm that you aren’t dumb, as I have no idea beforehand who is going to read these entries. You’re probably not dumb, but you also might be. You really could just skip to the next paragraph and not worry so much about whether or not I’m going to try to qualify your level of intellect. This is going to keep going on for two more sentences. You really shouldn't feel obligated to ready every word of this unless... well, you could also be obsessive-compulsive as well. Regardless, let's move on.
And look, it’s not like smart people can’t be dumb at things too, or say dumb things that they later have to live down, or just momentary lapses. At times, there are signs that something near you is about to be a huge waste of time, resources, manpower, money, effort, opportunity, hell, signs that it's just going to be a waste. Perhaps it's what's going on, and you've taken part before and you know that nothing significant will get accomplished, like a procrastinator's convention, or a session of Congress in the U.S. House of Representatives. Maybe you know things will be pointless because of who is involved, people that have wasted your time before. Maybe you’ll be in a worthless and time consuming place, like the DMV. Or Toledo. I don't know. But after your time on this earth is severely waster a few times, you may start to look for signposts that something utterly fruitless is going to occur soon.
There's one phrase that many have identified as a direct correlation with a thought that will probably underwhelm everyone that hear it. And I'll share it with you, so that you know for sure the next time you hear someone actually use it, or use it to refer to something nearby that failed this test of using what was probably basic logic. The phrase is, quite simply,
"See, what had happened was..."
Listen for that exact setup to any discussion, and my guess is you are not going to find a well-planned sequence of events that were set in motion. The phrase, as far as I can tell, was first introduced officially in an episode of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but there's absolutely no way that it hadn't ever been uttered before that moment. Something about this phrase is timeless, almost as timeless as people trying to explain things that are without explanation.
I should know. I was in a situation without explanation once. At least not a good one.
Well, see, that's not true. Technically, every situation has an explanation. It may not be something anyone wants to hear, and it may just prompt more questions to be asked, but there is always an explanation for how we got to where we are.
For example...
A few weeks ago, I left work later than I should have and got stuck in a flood situation about 5 miles from my house.
You see, what had happened was about a week prior, I got a flat tire coming home from the gym. It was in the morning, I had forgotten something at home and drove most of the way back to our apartment when I started hearing and feeling the car struggle to make turns or maintain a straight line. And I turned the radio down and, yep, tire's flat. So I get home, and we got the spare tire on the car that can't go faster than 58 miles per hour. So I can drive the car but very gradually and can't get it replaced until the following weekend.
Well, it would turn out that between the flat tire and the next weekend, our part of town would receive about 13-16 inches of rain within a 6 hour period, and would present a real problem. And it’s not like it’s never flooded here in Madison before, but granted I had never been directly involved in it and , frankly, I thought other people were just full of shit. I thought a foot or a foot and a half of rain would not be that big of a deal. So despite being warned by my lovely wife, Tara, who is always right about this kind of thing, I didn’t try to leave work as soon as possible at 5:00 on the evening that this rain started coming down. Now, in my defense, the rain had been coming down for a while prior to this time, so the events that I’m about to describe to you may have occurred the exact same. Not sure. All I know is that trying to finish some work and leaving around 6:15 did me absolutely no favors.
I hop in my low sitting Sedan on 3.5 wheels and note, quite calmly, that there is quite a lot of water around. Falling from the sky, in the parking lot that I am about to leave, pretty much everywhere. But there’s not a reason to panic. The car starts, more or less with the same normal rate of difficulty, and I start on the back road journey that I normally do. And again, there’s a noticeable increase of water from what I normally see on rainy days, but I’m chugging along, through what appears to be a constant quarter mile of a puddle. And there’s not a whole lot of other cars on the road, so it isn’t a big deal that I can’t actually see where the lanes begin and end, and the street lights don’t really seem to be working anywhere over in this area as I’m driving through, but hey, again, nothing to worry about.
Now, I get to Greenway Station, a shopping center area on my way home with a few restaurants, some bars, a bunch of shopping outlets, and a few hotels. I will swing back to why this is important in just a second. I try to continue through the back roads on my way home, as my wife suggested. And it was the roads right after Greenway Station that I began to have problems. As in, there were no roads to make it through to continue my journey. The first way I went had a Jeep parked in the middle of the road. And by parked, I mean, the hazard lights were on, the drivers side doors and passenger doors were open, and the road underneath was not visible because of the apparent river that formed there. So yeah, that wasn't going to work.
I hen turned around and tried to get back to the highway to get around that area, and found this also was not much of an option, because other cars were turning around that, again, had way better chances of getting through the water than I ever would. So I turned back from turning around and tried to get through another way, and this is the photo I took of the most feasible way to get across the area I was now trapped in:
To be fair, I have this photo because I actually stopped and watched an SUV make it through this. I decided to watch in case they began to be swept away by the current, not that I was going to know exactly what to do, but I felt better about it when I saw them pull out on the far shore. So with that, I turn around and head back to Greenway Station, and sit down at the bar area to attempt to wait out the storm for a bit. An hour or two pass, and the forecast reveal that there is not real end in sight to the rainfall that evening, it was not going to quit until at least the following morning. So I try one more time to get out, by backtracking to the way that I came in the first time to this shopping area, and that is more flooded than anything else I've seen.
It began to sink in that I may be trapped here, actually trapped away from home for an undetermined amount of time. I called Tara again to explain the current status of the situation, and she said she would reach out to one of the hotels and try to get me a room, since I would need somewhere to go as a fail safe. I reluctantly agreed, although very annoyed that under normal weather circumstances, I could walk home from here if I really needed to. I'm not naive enough to think that walking through a downpour and flooding currents would tilt the odds in my favor, though, and so I agreed to have dinner at the bar and chill out rather than try to venture out again. At this point, the cable service in the bar keeps going out, so there's nothing to watch on TV. The internet is spotty so completing my homework assignment out of boredom is also off the table.
About an hour later, Tara confirmed that the hotel had a room for me. I decided to close my tab and head over there so that I could at least try to relax for the next few hours, get a good nights sleep, and then see if I can confirm what's going on at work the next day. And I get to the car and realize that is has not stopped raining since I had last left the car. This is important because now the very parking lot that I am sitting in is no longer a given for me to leave, since I am so low to the ground in this death trap on 3+ wheels. The puddles turned into a mass lake in the parking spaces outside of Home Goods and Guitar Center, so I had to navigate my way around to get to the parts of the lot that my car would not need to float through. I circle around the next bank of shops and come to an apartment complex up on this little hill, the only area around that I am sure won’t be under water in the next hour, and I park in an open space for the night.
Only because I’m pretty sure how to get to the hotel from my current location, I grab my computer bag and start hustling through the rain to get to the hotel from my current spot. It’s no more than a quarter mile, right around the corner from where I am. But as i start running down a slight grassy hill, the power goes out. Like, every-fucking-where around me. Street lights, neon signs from the nearby stores, everything. Goes black at the same time. And I’m jogging when this happens so naturally, I trip and fall down this hill as I’m running, so I slide all over in the damp grass and mud, that’s cool, definitely needed that. When I get back to my feet, I’m fairly sure I know which direction I was running before, but there’s a bit of doubt, honestly. I get back to the sidewalk, and make my way around the same corner I was going towards, and I can see that the sidewalk ends and I will need to walk the last few hundred yards to the hotel (the right one, at least) in fairly high water. Which, at this point, is a small price to pay. Hurrying through the water, I make it to the front of the hotel through the mini-moat that has formed, and I’m a bit surprised to find several people out sin front of the hotel, smoking and shooting the shit with each other. Then I remember that the power is out, and the flood lights in front of the hotel are almost certainly emergency lights, so this is one of few places that have light at the moment. Moving inside, I come to a short line at the front desk. Who doesn’t have power. So how the hell do they know if they have reservations or not? I’m concerned that I wont have a room after all and will have to go back to my car. And believe it or not, I’m not in a great mood at this point of the evening, and that would not be welcome news.
Well, good news is that they had printed out the reservations about an hour prior, so they had my name on the list. Sadly, the guy in front of me did not call ahead. So he did not have a room set up, and it took way too long to get that part sorted out. Because he was so sure that the power was going to come back on while he was sitting at the counter. And it didn’t. So he gave up his credit card number and took two full bottles of wine from the bar area. So the lady at the counter was happy to see my name and give me a keycard for the room I had reserved.
You might be thinking, it’s an electronic card, how does the door work? I asked as much, and the front desk lady confirmed that the rooms all had battery operated readers. So I was fine there. But couldn’t see shit in the room when I first got in. But i was drenched, so I basically just stepped down and used the towels to dry back up. No TV, no internet, my phone is on 11%, can’t charge anything, so I just laid in bed, at what was around 1 AM. To make matters more annoying, the windows didn’t have any of the thicker sheets that blocked out light from the outside. Or it did, and I couldn’t find it there in the bedroom with me. Whichever you want to believe actually took place. But the parking lot across the way just happened to have someone sitting in a truck with their high beams on. Pointed right at my god damn window. After all of this, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but try to go to sleep, and someone’s high beams are pointed in my dam window. As you can imagine, I just buried my head in my pillows, curled up, and stuck it out for the next three hours until the power came back on.
See, I’m lying. About 20 minutes into it, I jumped out of bed and started trying to flag this dude down to turn off his bright ass lights. And I still had my clothes damp in the closet trying to dry them, so I am completely naked, using a hotel blanket to try to cover myself as I still try to get attention but not too much attention so I can tell, through interpretive dance, that I no longer want the spotlight pointed at my window. It was one of the few times in my life that I wished that myself and a large percentage of the population knew sign language. But even then, they would need binoculars to see my signs correctly, so honestly, it would not have mattered. Long story short, it ended, the power came back on at about 4 and the dude with the high beams left. I got a good 3 hours nights worth of sleep and came downstairs for the obligatory continental breakfast. Drove home in still a shitload of traffic, had to find a place to get gas on the way. Found several spots where cars had been abandoned but the after had subsided, so it just looked like a third world country. Yeah, it was that kind of morning. And then work was closed for all of that next day and most of the following morning. Fun times.
So yeah, that’s my story there, which doesn’t have a particularly great progression, but has the point that I already made. Dudes, just listen to your wife. For better or for worse. Just do what she says, or be prepared for the substantial consequences you’ll face. And then have to listen to how you should have just listened. That’s almost as annoying the story itself, is having to tell it back and knowing how dumb it sounds to tell any story that starts the with, “See, what had happened was...”
