The Sin Of Pride

 

There was some discussion recently about the time I threw Sugar’s sandwich out of our hotel room in the Greater Cincinnati area onto the roof of the ground floor car park.  On the surface, this sounds like a heartless and cold act, taking away a small simple joy for no reason except cruelty.  However, there is a track record for this action.  I didn’t necessarily want to toss that tuna sandwich off the balcony, but I feel as if I would have failed Sugar if I had not done it.  I was not acting as some sort of rogue agent.  I was put in this position of having to heave that sandwich off that balcony.  If I didn’t act, I would have failed to live up to my responsibility.  I owed it to her.  You see, there is a rule in the van about “The Sin of Pride”. 

 

“The Sin of Pride” began in the mid 1990s.  Bobby Latina was a smoker at that point.  I’m not sure why he started smoking, but I think it had something to do with the fact that he was 19 years old surrounded by older degenerates like Leo that all smoked.  If we had been a prog rock band, he probably would have been reading “Dune” instead of sharing a pack of Marlboros with Leo.  Frankly, if we had been a prog rock band, that just would have created longer load-ins at clubs with Leo needing a 17 piece kit, and he’s got enough challenges keeping his 4 piece kit in working order.  Also, I don’t think any of us wanted to drive around listening to Robert Fripp cassettes, so it’s probably for the best that we played the kind of music we did/do.

 

So, what happened was that Bobby had purchased a pack of cigarettes at a gas station.  This in itself was a rarity as he mostly bummed smokes off Leo, or sometimes they would pool their money to share a pack.  There were a lot of secret little pacts between those guys back then, teamwork focused on the common goals of cigarettes, weed, and frivolity.  They had a pretty good thing going.  However, this was a bit of a break in the normal alliance.  Bob had secured cigarettes and was lording the cigarettes over Leo, drunk with the power.  “Look at this Leo.  You see this?  These are MY CIGARETTES!”  Bobby held the box between his hand, held aloft for emphasis.  “Take a long look…. These are ALL MINE.  MY CIGARETTES!”  He was inflated by his good fortune over his lowly friend sprawled on the van’s bench seat.

 

We were in Virginia in the middle of nowhere.  The summer was warm and the windows were down.  It was that time of year when the air smells sweet.  I was driving, Bob sitting shotgun.  I asked Bob if I could see the pack of cigarettes.  Bob handed them to me, and I nonchalantly tossed them out the window without a word.  They were gone.  There was a brief pause.  I didn’t say a thing.  The Chief burst open with laughter.  “OMG!  He threw them out the window.  HAHAHAHAHA!”  Bobby was stunned.  He couldn’t believe it had happened.  It was all gone.  His power.  His leverage.  His cigarettes.

 

I don’t want to downplay how pissed Bob was.  This was $5 I just tossed out the window, and he was a cheap little fucker back then.  I explained to him that I would replace the cigarettes later, but he had gone too far.  He had been consumed by “The Sin of Pride”.  After a discussion in the van, it was agreed that “The Sin of Pride” was a punishable offense.  Bob had been consumed by the object and had used it to elevate himself above the others.  Like a Biblical Thunderbolt, justice had been served.  If you ask Bobby about it today, he will readily admit he deserved what had happened.

 

It is not lost on me that I made myself Judge, Jury, and Executioner in these scenarios.  Have I become corrupted by my own power?  Yes.  Yet, I believe that this nuclear threat of complete devastation has helped maintain a sense of civility over the years.  Have there been other incidents in the past?  Regrettably, yes.  The Easter Basket tossed from the van on I-90 east of Toledo comes to mind.  Again, I did not want to do it, but I owed it to Leo.  The cartwheeling basket exploding candy, plastic straw and small cottonball bunny decorations flying across the highway was terribly sad to see, but Leo admitted that the punishment was just.  That Easter Basket was more than a collection of candy.  It had become a weapon used to become a False God within the confines of the van.

 

If you will note in the photo of Sugar at the top of this post, there is a mixture of sadness, bitterness and and regret on Sugar’s face.  She is struggling to come to grips with the sudden turn of events.  There is not an overflowing anger at the tuna sandwich being on the roof below.  Does she have negative feelings about the action I have taken?  Of course.  That is evident in the eyes and the downturned brow.  She had spent the previous evening proclaiming about how only SHE had a snack for tomorrow, and NONE of us had the good fortune of being in possession of such splendor.  Oh, how she waxed on in the van ride over to the hotel…. She had a sandwich while the rest of us had NOTHING!  This sandwich had corrupted her.  Now, look more closely at the photo.  You can see in Sugar’s expression the fact that she had, without question, indulged herself in “The Sin of Pride”.  She had earned this swift justice, and there was no point in arguing the issue.  The only one to blame was herself.  She knows this.  You can see this realization in her expression.  This photo, taken at the exact moment she recognized it was her beloved sandwich perched on the roof, captures the horrible toll of “The Sin of Pride”.  After this purge, this cleansing, she could now begin anew. 

 

This moral inflexibility is part of the reason why we maintain our position as one of America’s favorite entertainers.  There was also a functional rationale lest you think Dear Reader that we are heartless beasts.  It should be noted we didn’t have a refrigerator in the hotel room.  This was also an act of mercy.  Sugar, left to her own devices, would have gotten sick like an animal if allowed to eat that spoiled tunafish.  We also should have stopped her when she bought a 50% off gas station cottage cheese in Indiana years earlier, but that’s another hard earned lesson best told another day.  Regardless, by adhering to this strict moral code, we are able to keep ourselves on the rails.  It should also be noted that if we cross paths and you are going on about some small creature comfort, and you are noting how it is ALL YOURS and NO ONE else can have it, there is also a decent chance I might ask “Can I see that?”.  There is also a pretty good chance I am about to throw that item out the window.  It’s not something I will relish.  It’s that I owe it to you.   We must all be vigilant in our quest to stamp out "The Sin of Pride".

Nurse the Hate: MW Final Push

 

I am heading out to Napa to “course days”, which consists of taking a mock tasting exam first thing in the morning, and then running through the answers in the afternoon discussing your various missteps in a group setting.  It is an odd way to spend a morning, trying to figure out in two minutes if a glass of sweet wine in front of you is an Australian muscat which has been fortified and aged in a solera in some tin roof shed in the middle of nowhere or maybe some weird ass Italian unfortified wine made from dried grapes that were placed on straw mats and later bottled to presumably sell to tourists passing through in buses with their fanny packs and New Balance leisure shoes.  In either case, these are wines nobody really drinks and you are as likely to encounter as a honey badger popping out of your luggage.  I once correctly identified one of these sweet wines that I had never even seen before (much less tasted) just because I remembered reading about it.  As far as I know, the sample I had been poured represented the only known bottle of the stuff.  These are the wines that these wide education programs love because they are obscure and are process heavy.  There is the same joy in lording your knowledge of these wines over others that I believe car aficionados have in belittling fellow car buffs with arcane trivia about a limited run of 1962 Corvettes with wankel rotary engines.  It’s all sort of pointless information used to weed out The True Crusaders from The Unworthy. 

The gate at the airport has the usual suspects.  There are pockets of Latino young women dressed “comfortably”, which means they are wearing pink and pastel sweatpant pajama onesy outfits with slides like overgrown first graders.  This is offset by the fact they are also wearing three inch fake eyelashes and full makeup with carefully sculpted hair.  It must be a “leisure glamor” look I’m not aware of that exists on cable networks I don’t turn on.  There’s a couple of families with teenagers, kids that have their own Jeep Wranglers and don’t know how to start lawnmowers.  They all have perpetual looks of disgust on their faces as they gloomily scroll their phones.  Pairs of seniors crowd into the preboarding lines, aggressive energy focused on boarding the plane and claiming their territory.  I could be anywhere.  The corporate blandness of the airport is the new global shopping mall.  

I am heading into the home stretch of the MW year one exam.  In a few weeks I will sit for an exam that has three potential outcomes.  The first outcome is that I pass the exam which means I will progress to “Stage 2”.  This means I passed the entrance exam to get into the program which allows me to take this exam, which if I pass allows me to take “The Big Exam”.  The second outcome is that I almost pass, but don’t quite make it.  If that happens, I will be placed back at the starting line of Stage 1 and be given another chance to pass the exam I am about to take next year.  Then there is the third outcome, which is failure and being banished from the program in shame.  In this result you are told to go away, and you can reapply to enter the program in two years.  Something like 13% of people pass this thing to give you context on the level of challenge.  

It should be noted that there is roughly an equal possibility of any of these three outcomes for me.  It all depends on what questions I am asked and how I am tasting that day.  For example, if the two essay questions I am presented with includes topics related to marketing, business, and certain viticultural/winemaking topics, I can reasonably answer these questions.  If I am asked questions about specific process oriented topics like pre-bottling procedures, SO2 regimens, or vine disease intricacies, I could very well be “fucking fucked”.  It’s important to note that almost every single person that will be taking this test spends all day working at a job focused on the production of wine as opposed to me who spent yesterday creating a marketing plan for a Digestive Disease Center focused on senior citizens with colon issues.  I have what could be called “a competitive disadvantage”.  When I get snarky feedback on some of the assignments I submit, my immediate thought is to reply, “OK smart guy, so you know how to properly crush diseased grapes for a bulk wine, but can you tell me the best ways to do a geofence mobile display and OTT digital video campaign for a multi-state personal injury law firm?”.  Then I realize I would be like Fredo in Godfather II saying “I’m smaht!  Mikey!  I’m smaht!” and I quietly take my written berating.  

For the last 18 months or so my brain is all wine, all the time.  When I sleep, I often dream of making tasting notes or falling behind in studies.  I have a constant level of stress that is a hum that courses through my body like a current.  I haven’t had a rock solid night of sleep in two years.  If I stop reading or doing essay plans, I feel guilty because I should be working.  Remember, if you’re not reading in the shower, you’re falling behind.  In the last month though a certain malaise is beginning to seep in.  I think it’s exhaustion.  I’m hitting a point where I am ready to let the cards fall where they may.  I am going to summon up as much energy as I can for a final push, walk into that room, and see what the hell happens.  If I’m tasting well that day, and get reasonably lucky on the questions, I’ll pass.  If I don’t, I won’t.  Let’s do this thing.  

A quick note on baseball gambling.  My guys in the Desert and I have taken a “position” on the Oakland A’s winning over 58 games this season.  I went into the season with a conceptual idea of how bad the A’s were going to be.  I did not, however, prepare myself for the reality of watching this team on a daily basis.  Holy shit, are they bad.  The A’s are owned by a guy that has decided that he has no interest in spending the money necessary to compete to win, but instead fields the cheapest team possible and pockets all the revenue sharing money from the league.  The team is being run like a discount store, not a major sports franchise.  As a result, there are a stunning amount of players in the starting lineup of the A’s that are either minor league players, castoffs, or low cost gambles.  

There are two players I would like to bring your attention to, Ken Waldichuk and Shintaro Fujinami.  Waldichuk is a starting pitcher that we have deemed “What’s His Fuck”.  He clearly has no business playing professional baseball at this level.  He has been hit hard and hit often.  He has two choices when facing major league hitters.  He can either a) throw an off speed pitch that goes out of the strike zone or b) throw an ineffective fastball over the plate that gets hammered.  He is the Oakland A’s #2 starter.  Meanwhile Fujinami is the Oakland A’s #3 starter.  This is his first year in MLB, having just come from the Japanese pro league.  I can’t figure out why he came from Japan as he was ineffective in Japan last year and was sent down to the Japanese minor leagues.  Why the Oakland A’s thought they found a good MLB starter is a mystery.  He must have been cheap.  At any given moment Shintaro’s control can completely abandon him and he’s left with no choice but to offer up juicy 92 mph pitches over the plate after walking the bases full.  As you can imagine, this has created issues for the team’s success.  The best part?  In Japan starting pitchers don’t pitch as frequently, so Shintaro Fujinami only goes every seven days.  The A’s are “trying to transition Shintaro to become an every 5 day pitcher”.  Question...  Why would you want him out there more often?  As a result, I am recommending betting against the A’s for the brief period while these two continue to start in any way possible.  Full game, first five innings, first three innings… your choice.  There will be some new stiffs coming from AAA soon enough, but these guys are the ones to watch for now as they are walking ATM machines.  You’re welcome.