rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

Tom DeLay is going to be on ‘Dancing with the Stars’. and if that’s not a fitting end to the political career of one of the dirtiest sons of bitches to ever befoul the halls of Congress, then I don’t know what is.

so I spelled my name wrong on a job application I just sent out. McMulllan. I noticed it about a second after I hit ’send’.
god damn it, is that shit irritating. it was a job for a transcriptionist. my cover letter was playing up my eye for detail.

I had a good time up in NYC for a few days, but relaxing it was not. family vacations, in my family – and this became a family vacation, long after it was planned to be a guys-night-out-get-drunk-and-reminsce-vacation – are never relaxing. some families, they go to the beach and lounge around for a week. decompress. my brother, his family, my sister, and dad and stepmother, they’re all doing that right now.
fuck them. I say that with unabashed jealousy. I recognize that I’m not the only motherfucker who could use a South Carolina beach vacation, but right now I could stand to sit and watch the ocean for about a year. somehow, my ass is left holding the fucking bag when everyone high-tails it to the beach.
and I’m back at the goddamned newspaper. tunafish sandwich on an onion bagel for lunch, please.

but it wasn’t all bad, man. it wasn’t all bad! mom and grandma stayed in a Best Western about a block from Times Square that was undergoing heavy renovations. me and mom and grandma toured Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. we ate the hell out of some dinner in Chinatown. took in the view from the top of the Rockafeller Center. Aarti met my mom. I met Aarti’s cousin. Phil met Aarti. Phil and I walked Phil’s dog.
and mom and grandma and I, we bitched and complained and argued the entire time. grandma, for instance, thought the whole trip was stupid. that’s it, that’s grandma’s quote of the week: ‘this is stupid.’ her feelings on just about everything we did, every tourist trap we walked into. well put, grandma.
mom, though, she motored through it all, itinerary in hand. here’s an anecdote, that many of you have already heard firsthand:
mom, grandma and I are waiting for the ferry, the ferry to take us from Ellis Island to Liberty Island in New York harbor. from one national treasure to another. we had missed the last ferry. the gift shop has grown boring. and we, have decided to wait outside by the dock, on the water, so that we don’t miss the next one. it’s best to be close, because we don’t move quickly as a group. grandma is closing in on 90, and has lost some of the spring in her step over the years.
but we have walked for miles, and struggled with directions and hordes of other tourists and confusing, self-guided audio tours, and we are weary. and we are wearing thin, and grandma is broke-ass tired. I don’t blame her. we all are. and it’s raining. so we park her on a bench and cover her head to keep away the cold, and we wait.

here they are.

standing next to me in the rain, looking into the choppy harbor under gray skies, lower Manhattan to our left and the Statue of Liberty to our right, mom, well aware of the track record of vicious dogfights that are our annual family excursions, she says, “I think this one’s going to go down in the anals of history.”
I think that one over for a few seconds and say, “don’t you mean annals? annals of history?”
the ball has passed back to mom. she studies it for a few seconds longer, and she says, ‘no. anals.” and we both started laughing, one of those long, exhausted laughs.