Monday

Monday was the one day we woke up early. We got up at 8, because we had a 2+ hour drive ahead of us to Vero Beach, where we were planning on seeing the Red Sox-Dodgers spring training game in Dodgertown. Now, getting to Vero Beach involves driving on a small-ish state highway for 2 hours, and side roads for another 30+ minutes. It’s not the best drive, since it isn’t on a major interstate or anything. Anyways, the drive was pretty uneventful, but we realized that we needed to remedy our music situation. On Sunday, during our Target trip, we picked up some small Sony speakers, just so that we could listen to the mp3 player in the car. This was cheaper than getting the tape adapter, but it turned out to be the wrong move. The speakers were absolutely terrible. This made the drive slightly less fun, since music was non-existent.

Two and a half hours later, we arrived to Dodgertown. It was around 11 by the time we got there, maybe a little later, but surprisingly, the parking seemed relatively full and there were already a ton of people at the park. We got to the box office to find that the game was standing room only. This was surprising, but not upsetting. Tickets were just $8, and we immediately went into the stadium. Around this time, I called Asian just to let him know about the crazy sold-out game. He told me he was driving to Los Angeles. Given that it was 8am there, I think I was ahead.

The game was definitely sold out due to the very large number of Red Sox fans. There were probably more Sox fans than Dodgers fans. It was just kind of annoying, because I get enough of those fuckers up here during the season. But I digress.

We watched Red Sox batting practice for an hour and a half, and waited for the first pitch. We walked around the concourse, had a Dodger Dog (they are quite good), and just soaked in Dodgertown. It really was baseball heaven; it was such a happy place. The lineup whiteboard at the front of the stadium had Odalis Perez and the mostly opening day Dodger lineup going up against Schilling and none of the great Red Sox (Manny, Nomar), but all the rest of the useful Red Sox (Mueller, Millar, Varitek, Damon). From the first pitch, the game was a lot of fun. We witnessed an excellent performance by both pitchers, and we got to see Gagne after Odalis got pulled. Schilling pitched into the 6th or 7th, and when he exited to a standing ovation, we did too, since we were pretty exhausted. You have to remember, we were out in 80-degree heat and direct sunlight for 4 hours at this point. We were done.

Before we leave Dodgertown, let me tell you about two of the crazy characters we were around when we were there. First was Nazi Guy. Nazi Guy was distinguishable by his huge beard, his shortness, his gigantic beer belly, (his ass crack too) and his swastika tattoo. He inspired fear in everyone when he was nearby, but soon he moved towards his seats, leaving the concourse in peace. He was definitely scary, though.

The second character was Gun Guy. He was made unique by his cell phone conversations with Senators (he kept addressing the guy he was talking to as ‘Senator’, and he was talking about Kerry and gun control in Massachusetts). He also had this memorable line: “I don’t care if a guy killed someone 20 years ago, let’s get him a gun.” People really like their guns.

So let’s leave Dodgertown. Geoff and I were pretty pissed about the speakers and we were also pretty tired and dehydrated and hungry, so we decided to use all this to defend our lack of judgment and go ahead and buy a tape adapter for my mp3 player. There was a bit of an adventure opening it. Geoff was in charge of this, and he claimed that the packaging was made out of “fucking space-age plastic” (which it probably was), and for the life of him he could not open it. After about 15 minutes of tugging, pulling, shaking, and generally destroying the packaging, it finally broke enough for him to get the adapter out. He yelled “bitch” louder than anyone has ever yelled anything, I swear. It was fucking terrifying, and between being scared and laughing afterwards, I almost drove off the road. Almost!

The tape adapter worked very well, and we quickly dismissed the speakers as a lost cause. If you want a couple of speakers, I think Geoff still has them. With the tape adapter giving us much needed tunes, and a stop off at the gas station giving us much needed huge bottles of water, we set out to cross mind-numbingly boring central Florida. I complained often of hunger on this return trip, but my whining was drowned out by Led Zeppelin and the like, so I don’t know how much Geoff was actually bothered. He was also definitely getting hungry, and I began to notice this, and started goading him about getting Taco Bell. The reasoning behind not getting Taco Bell was that since it was open very late near us, we should save it for a night that we were up real late and real hungry. This made sense, but at the same time I was starving and I wanted Taco Bell. I started challenging Geoff’s ability to eat Taco Bell, which is kind of like Gary Coleman telling Godzilla he isn’t that big. It got pretty ridiculous, but I got Geoff to get his 5 beef chalupas, which he consumed pretty rapidly. I got a couple of burritos, so I was satisfied too.

Of course this ruined our timing for dinner. But who cares? We were on break!

We used this logic a lot. For example, we got home and we decided to watch WWE RAW. Why? Because on Sunday we saw an ad for RAW and it seemed that they were doing something interesting (they were not). Also, we were on break, so who gave a shit what we did. It’s not like anyone else was there and would know what was going on. Anyways, to get in the mood, we played some Playstation. Geoff and I have a history with Smackdown, possibly the best wrestling video game ever. We’ve played it since I got it back in the summer after freshman year. We created ridiculous characters, we created ridiculous situations – it is very, very fun. When we turned it on this time, we decided to have a tag-time bout between my character, N-Dog and Geoff’s character, Niv Shah on one side, and two characters modeled after certain friends of ours from home, Ramm-Kamm and Porquito, on the other side. However, we forgot what Ramm-Kamm looked like. We had an idea, but we forgot some late changes we made, such as gigantic hands and green skin. When our match finally loaded up and started, we saw this and I just died. I was laughing so hard, I had to walk around the room for about 10 minutes, and then turn off the Playstation so I didn’t have to look at Ramm-Kamm anymore. Geoff was dying too, but he really died after he made fun of me, and I told him, laughing, that this is why we slept in separate beds (if you don’t get it, look at the pictures of our motel room). Basically, we laughed really, really hard until RAW came on. Once RAW came on, there was much less laughing. There was one interesting discovery, however.

Geoff and I don’t watch wrestling a lot. In fact, we almost never watch wrestling. The few times we do, we catch up on the plots, and then we realize that since the last time we saw wrestling, EVERYTHING has changed in completely illogical ways, and no one in the audience ever seems to mind. Thus, we called wrestling soap operas, but for guys. This was our stance for a long time. Now, we watched RAW, and we had a very similar experience, noticing that none of the characters were at all like they were back when Smackdown came out for Playstation, and the audience of course did not care at all. This is when I realized that this followed a pattern of another television show: The O.C. I told Geoff that I thought the O.C. was wrestling for girls. This pretty much took us straight through the end of the show, which was entertaining enough, but not that good. Anyways, O.C. == Wrestling. However, this was not the only amazing comparison we came up with that night.

Tom Hanks was on Conan this evening, and we of course watched. Within 2 minutes of seeing Tom Hanks run around and make awkward moments and just beat the hell out of jokes, I made another startling revelation. Just call it the “night of the Niv”. I realized that Tom Hanks reminded me of someone I knew – Scott Gordon. Right now, everyone who went to high school with me is laughing, and everyone else is confused. Trust us, Scotty Gordon is a character. The thing that was insane was that neither of us had any idea that Tom Hanks was this wacky. We didn’t expect any insanity from the interview at all, and we got incredible, incomprehensible insanity. As Geoff pointed out retrospectively, we should have seen it coming, because Tom Hanks did start out on the sitcom “Bosom Buddies”, and, as Geoff said repeatedly, Hanks winning Best Actor Oscars would be comparable to Jim Breuer winning one in 15 years. Still, Tom Hanks totally flattened us.

So that was Monday. It went on a little longer than expected, but the next few days are pretty short, in comparison. That doesn’t make them any less interesting though! God this is dragging out more than I expected. I’ll combine the next few, so make sure to tune in for the next uber-installment!