Well, I thought I was all cool, posting my re-evaluation of this site last Saturday night, and a few hours later, Saddam was captured and the whole thing seemed a touch irrelevant. I could have course mustered up some type of entry to provide lucid commentary on the shocking events, but then I remembered that I don’t know very much about politics. So that stopped that plan cold.
I mean, there I was, all groggy-eyed Sunday morning. The Olson Twins were hogging the sheets, as per usual, and so I got up out of bed to make some coffee. And lo, my roommate was also up, telling me the news. So I flipped on the TV, and the first thing I see are images of the cubby hole Hussein had been preparing for “Iraqi Cribs”, so near as I could tell. Then I thought…wow, all this time they’ve been searching for him in Iraq, and they appear to have found him in a 1-room studio apartment over in Roxbury. Who knew?
But then Mary Kate and Ashley woke up and, as per usual, wanted mimosas. So the whole political spectrum got washed away in champagne and Sunday afternoon football and MORE FREAKIN’ SNOW. Ok, yes, I’m New England born and bred, but this is ridonkulous. I felt like Sam and Frodo wading through the Dead Marshes on the way to work today, and you’re damn right I already have tickets to a showing of “Return of the King” this Wednesday.
So it’s now 7:15 am this morning, I’m at work, I’m barefoot, we’ve got the boss’ boss due in from NYC in an hour, and I have 5 hours to ensure 500 pages of materials make it out the door before we’re due to leave for our office party. Cue the theme music from “Gladiator”, because 1) anything is instantly cooler when done to the triumphant main theme of “Gladiator”, and 2) because the song actually factored into my night.
Luckily, I had a backup pair of shoes at work---my old cross-trainers, which compared to my running shoes feel nothing so much as two blocks of cement on my feet, comparatively speaking. No wonder I couldn’t run in these things…it was like strapping a baby to each foot. (Which, while fun, won’t help you improve your mile splits.) So I’m rockin’ the shoes and no socks, working away, trying to get my work done and hoping Mr. NYC doesn’t get a glimpse of my hairy ankles sticking out below my jeans.
You might wonder why I was not in my Sunday best, and that’s because our office party was at Red Bones in Davis Square, a Southern style restaurant. Ribs, ribs, and more ribs. We were encouraged to dress to the occasion. Dirty rice and mac and cheese won out over impressing the brass. Plus, I can always count on the quality of my work alone to get me ahead in this world, right? Right? Beuller?
So, 500 pages of deliverables later, we head out to the restaurant. Once again, my life encounters those two epic words: “Open Tab”. Ooooh. My nipples could cut glass right now. 20 beers on tap, and I order…Amstel Light. Look, I got nervous and choked. Sorry. Made it up in later rounds though with some fairly obscure Oktobefest beers. After one hour, one of our medical writers asked me what beer I was on. “Um…I think this is four,” I semi-slurred.
He looks at another writer. “Well, looks like it’s a race for second place for the rest of us…” Second-best line of the day.
See, most people are afraid to get drunk at office parties. They fear that might say or do something stupid in front of their boss. See, I do and say stupid stuff all the time in the office while sober, so I didn’t have a terribly high-risk situation at hand. I’ve got it down pat with my immediate supervisor: I walk by her office, and stop. Look at her. She looks at me. We nod, she stands up, and we break out into the “Elaine Dance” from “Seinfeld”. I’m in the freakin’ hallway doing that weird thumb-based performance art movement on a daily basis. A few beers aren’t going to damage my rep any.
So we get the grub: collard greens and macaroni and cheese and garlic mashed potatoes and four kinds of ribs and chicken and dirty rice and fresh rolls and they spoon it all onto your place and instigate a chemical reaction where the food coalesce and becomes one big plateful of YUM. Until you realize you’ve had five pints, 2 plates of YUM, and it’s only 4:15 in the afternoon. Then it’s a world of UM. And ERK. And, “Please let me intestines stay in place.”
All good on that front, luckily. Four of us employ snow dogs to sled us to safety back to the train. During said ride, my supervisor said one of the truer statements of all time: “Farting is like saying ‘I love you’…you never want to be the first in a relationship to do it.” Wise words, people. Take note.
I dig my supervisor for many reasons. One of which is statements like this. Another is our tendency towards spontaneous bouts of “Dance Dance Revolution” in the offices. And yet another is her propensity to lay free tickets on us to various sporting events. She gets them through vendors, and passes the savings onto us, her peons. Tonite, I went to see the Boston Celtics take on the Minnesota Timberwolves, thanks to her giving me her fourth ticket. So I scurry home, with literally two pans of leftovers from Red Bones, and vow to hurry up, change, and leave, and…and…wait a sec…what the…
IS THAT MICHELLE BRANCH ON THE COVER OF MY MAXIM LOOKING JUST SMOKIN' HOT?
Man, I really have to re-evaluate that song she did with Santana now. OK, no I don’t, I can just drool for a while, making me almost late to the game. Which I did go to, because the face value for the tickets were really high. We’re talking, “I’d only pay this much to have been a gaffer on the Michelle Branch Maxim photo shoot, and I know I’m gonna get in trouble for the continual harping on this, but man, she can be ‘Everywhere’ to me, on specifically, on me, and yup, that comment seals it, moving on” type of money.
So we’re at the Celtics game, which by and by is pretty terrible. It’s a blowout, but not even in a “the other team is completely schooling your team in a way that you can secretly ooh and ahh at the great plays” sort of way. To make things even weirder, the Celtics tonite retired Cedric Maxwell’s number. Now, I don’t know Cedric. He might be a perfectly nice guy. Enough people showed up to honor him from past Celtic teams to validate the respect that the organization has for him. That all being said, they retired Maxwell’s number?
It’s not quite as weird as say finding out A Flock of Seagulls have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but it’s still a bit of a head scratcher. Not as confusing as say finding out Jackie Collins has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but it’s enough to give one pause. He’s basically one of those “he’s much better than his stats” guys. That person who on paper looks decent, but no one you’d spend time telling your grandkids about. And it’s all well and good to honor the more unsung heroes in any field, be they sport, in the community, in your family.
That all being said, they retired Maxwell’s number?
Most of the comedic value for me derived from being a long-time Bostonian and Boston sports fan. Hardly a fanatic, but I was dropping some Greg Kite jokes like John Kerry drops f bombs these days. Just little things, like the emcee, Tommy Heinsohn , clearly and unashamedly reading a script for the event, and reading it badly. Things like people clearly having that, “Oh crap, what’s ML Carr doing here? He’s gonna do something stupid!” look on their faces. Things like having Cedric on the Jumbotron next to Red Auerbach, who God bless him looked like all he wanted at that moment was a little nap. And, in the climatic moment, watchin Cedric and Red hoist the numbered banner…to the battle theme from “Gladiator”. I didn’t know if I wanted to full court press or attack Germania. It was all terribly confusing. (I guess "raising your retired number to the rafters" is the exception to prove the "anything's cooler when doing it to this motif" rule.)
Above all, though, there was genuine warmth and affections towards Maxwell, even from those like myself who are a bit suspicious at having his number next to those of Parish, McHale, Lewis, and Radja. (I realize only two of you may have gotten that joke, but man, I’m freakin’ SLAYIN’ myself over here.) I think the affection derived from a sense of acute and painful nostalgia. Seeing those on the court, sensing the greatness…given the demographic in the audience, mostly as old and older than myself, there was enough institutional memory therein to pay homage to what had come before, which stood in stark contrast to the angst over the current state of the team.
See, the Sox fans and Patriots have seen either the top of the mountain or a really high cliff nearby lately. Celtics fans, though…well, they are still waiting for the true rebirth of the franchise that died along with Reggie Lewis in the mid-90’s. Maxwell made the odd statement at one point that (I’ll paraphrase here), “No offense to Springfield, but this…this right here is the true Hall of Fame.” For a moment, I think fashioned himself as standing center court in the old Boston Garden. That’s a Hall of Fame. The Fleet Center is Corporate Nation. A marker for the new breed of arena. It’s sleek, modern, actually allows me legroom, and is as devoid of personality as anybody on “24”.
Bostonians are peculiar in their nostalgia, I find. I think it’s why we resist change so much. Why most incoming college students find the area so unfriendly. Why it takes an extra decade to build a freakin’ tunnel. Why we don’t like Eurotrash. (Ok, there are a lot of reasons to hate Eurotrash.) But there’s a keen sense that the ways things are now is not the best way it could be. There’s both pride in the fact that the old ways are the best ways, and frustration that we can’t get back there. We’re fiercely provincial. We treat local politics as the live-and-die, blood-and-guts way that all cities and towns once did. We take enormous pride in our teams when they win, and feel acute pain when they lose. We are not only of the area, we are of the earth of this area.
So the game returns in the 3rd quarter, and the Celtics fall behind by something like 150 points by the time I leave. People are cursing up a storm, hanging their head in frustration, feeling it all far too much. Back to the stereotypically negative Boston sports fan. I wish that people could see the way they were during halftime, though. I think they’d get a different picture. They’d see a fan-base (and by extension, a people) frustrated, but who want to make it better because they know in their hearts that it once was much better. They saw the way the basketball would float between players during the video retrospective, the grace of it all, the literal poetry in motion.
They don’t want to settle for the prose of today. Not on the court, not outside the court. We’re sometimes awfully coarse in that search for poetry, but I’d like to think that’s what we’re doing here, on a daily basis. Some of us, at least.
And the rest of you…learn to drive already. It’s not THAT hard.
Postscript: I looked up Saddam's place on Craiglist's Tikrit page, and it's apparently still available.
Posted by Ryan McGee at December 15, 2003 11:55 PM