As I write this, I am sitting at gate 1 of New York’s JFK International Airport. The honeymoon is over (see pictures here). Our flight has now apparently been delayed for two hours due to bad weather in Minneapolis.

What the hell? This slightly inconveniences me!

I’ll have to remember to look up the Wright brothers in hell and thank them both for nothing.

With full certainty, I can assure all of you that the Park Central Hotel (870 7th Ave in Manhattan) sucks eagerly at the teats of New York’s cat-sized subway rats.

I will now regale you with a timeline of the events of last night, the first night of our honeymoon. No exaggeration is needed whatsoever to make this horrific and funny.

8:10pm - Bridgette and I arrive from the hotel from the airport, hungry and eager to check in and eat.

8:30 - After waiting in line, we are called up to the counter and are told that our reservations are not in the computer, regardless of the fact that we have already paid nearly a thousand dollars for them. The man helping us is Mike, a mustachioed with a friendly, sarcastic attitude and a Jersey accent. He is clearly aware that he is about to have the worst night of his life, as he tells us that the Park Central hotel is overbooked by 20 rooms tonight, and that number only gets bigger until Friday, when they are overbooked 90 rooms. He details for us his drinking exploits that will most certainly follow his shift as he tries to help us.

8:55 - Mike finally finds us a room, but tells us that isn’t ready for us yet. We’re told we can store our luggage at the hotel for free while we go out to eat.

9:15 - We stop at a nearby resturaunt (a block away from the Ed Sullivan Theater, where David Letterman does his show) and eat an unsatisfying, overpriced meal. Bridgette is particularly unimpressed by her veggie burrito.

10:00 - We arrive back at the hotel, where we must wait in line again behind a group of weary travellers being told that there basically no rooms left at the hotel.

10:15 - Mike greets us again and gives us our room key. Prophetically, he tells us that the room may not actually be ready yet, but asks us to go upstairs and check it out.

10:20 - Room 1931 is still messy and unkempt, as Mike feared, so we head back downstairs. Our bright, happy attitudes are now just beginning to dim.

10:25 - When I tell Mike that the room isn’t ready yet, he telephones up to a gentleman named Joshua who tells him that it will be cleaned in 5 minutes. There is a nice Indian business traveller and his wife at the counter with us who have just experienced the exact same thing.

10:35 - Bridgette and I have a seat on a lobby couch. We notice a young couple in their early 20’s, a tired European-looking family, and a few other groups with their luggage in the lobby who must be in similar situations.

10:50 - I go upstairs to check on the room, and nothing has changed - housekeeping is nowhere to be found.

11:05 - Ditto.

11:15 - People in the lobby are starting to get pissed. One woman is really arguing with management, demanding that her reservation be cancelled since she went ahead and booked a room at another hotel. Bafflingly, the manager refuses - it seems like he’d be happy to get another person wanting a room out of there. In addition, this is a good time to mention the manger - George. He was ineffectual and unhelping, possessing the demeanor of a man in his first day on the job.

11:20 - The lobby is filling with people looking for rooms and complaining. Bridgette and I have been here longer than most of them, but it isn’t in me to complain vociferously enough to get attention from the staff. Bridgette and I just assume that our room is just about ready.

11:25 - Bridgette goes upstairs to check on the room, and it still hasn’t been touched.

11:30 - A beleagured employee announces to everybody in the lobby to form a line if they want to talk to the manager. I hop up, and am 3rd in line (about 10 deep).

11:45 - The manager is expressionless as I explain that the first day of our honeymoon has gone down the tubes, and we just want to go to sleep but our room hasn’t been cleaned. He passively stares and asks me to sit down again in the lobby and it will get worked on.

12:00 midnight - Mike - on his way out the door to go drink - sees us and can’t believe that we’re still waiting for the room to be cleaned. He brings us up to the counter and tries to find another clean room for us but is unable to. He is also unable to contact Joshua, the housecleaning coordinator. He brings us over to the new manager, who has just started his shift. Mike explains the situation to him, and I talk to him now, explaining forcefully that Bridgette and have been waiting for 4 hours, and we need to go to sleep. He tells us that it will be handled right away.

12:15am - The lobby is slowly emptying out. The young couple are still waiting, and the children in the European family are sleeping on the couches. I approach their father to chit-chat, and he tells me in broken English that they are from Barcelona, it is 6am their time, and that he can’t believe his daughters are forced to sleep on lobby couches when he had a reservation for a suite. All around, the issue seems to be that rooms haven’t been cleaned, and now there are only 2 housekeeping staff for the 3rd shift.

12:25 - The manager approaches me and tells me that somebody has just begun to clean our room. This is the best I’ve felt all night.

12:35 - Bridgette and I go upstairs to see if the room is ready. We figure we’ll be happier waiting in the hall outside the room than in the lobby.

12:40 - The door to the room is open, and it is partially clean, but nobody is there. The bed seems to have been made, but the pillowcases are dirty. The bathroom doesn’t seem to have been cleaned yet. There is litter and shopping bags on the floor. Exhausted, and assuming that the lady has gone to grab supplies, we sit down in the hallway and wait.

12:55 - Nobody has come back yet, so I head back downstairs to try to find the manager. I am now delusionally tired and cranky. I am told by staff that the manager has gone upstairs, but they take down my complaint. The young couple is still waiting in the hallway - they apparently are here for a short stay (her boyfriend suprised her with a trip to NY that has now gotten crapped on). I am happy to see that the family from Barcelona seem to have gotten a room. There is a line about 7 or 8 deep of people trying in vain to check in.

1:00am - On my way back to the elevator, I run into the manager, and with near-tears in my eyes, I tell him that our room still isn’t cleaned (5 hours after we got to the hotel). This hits him like just another bit of bad news, but he immediately gets on his walkie-talkie to deal with it.

1:15 - Bridgette and I are lying on the hallway floor outside our room. Somebody arrives from the laundry room with supplies of clean bedding. Bridgette and I stop him and get some clean pillowcases. We enter the room, throw the towels and litter out into the hallway, and begin getting ready to sleep in dirty bed in our dirty room, and bring a crappy end to the first night of our honeymoon.

1:20 - A lady from housekeeping knocks in the door, and asks what has been going on. We explain the situation to her, and she nicely enters and cleans the bathroom.

1:40 - Bridgette and I finally lay down to go to sleep. We are cranky, exhausted, and ready to cry.

Again I say to all of you, the Park Central Hotel in New York sucks the collective asses of all the unbathed peoples of the Third World. Avoid it at all costs. My only solace has been in the fact that we brought our computer, and I can now warn all of you away from it this morning.

2005 was a year that saw me purchasing a bit less music than I have in years past, but there were still plenty of amazing albums that passed through my world, including two from 60-something artists that managed to land in my top 5 for the year.

eels: Blinking Lights and Other Revelations - a haunting, beautiful and moving double album from the recovering kings of melancholy. Ostensibly this is an album of songs about recovering from deaths (plural) in his family and learning to be okay again, but this is an epic album for anybody who is aquainted with heartache.

Neil Diamond: 12 Songs - This was perhaps the most anticipated album of the year for me. My all-time guilty pleasure matched up with Rick Rubin, probably the finest rock producer working today to create an album of weighty acoustic gems that rumble and sparkle. While this collection drops a dud or two, it remains a truly remarkable, outstanding album from a unique talent. If you at all liked the sound of Johnny Cash’s last few albums, you need to think about picking this one up.

Coldplay: X&Y - Sure it wasn’t as good as their last one, but it was close, and that means that it’s still a damn fine album full of heartfelt songs and solid craftsmanship.

Paul McCartney: Chaos and Creation in the Backyard - A surprisingly darkly-toned album filled with left turns from the master of pop craft and melody. Producer Nigel Godrich wisely commanded McCartney to handle nearly every instrument heard on the album, since there are so few musicians in the world who could match him in both ability and importance. The songs here are fully-baked beauties - it’s fun to hear a former Beatle so invigorated by the muse again.

Elizabethtown Soundtrack: While I enjoyed the movie (for the most part), the soundtrack might have ultimately been more fulfilling. Littered with bluegrass-tinged acoustic nuggets from Tom Petty and Patty Griffin, the music evokes the sadness and nostalgia that so much of my favorite music done. In addition, there’s some fine stuff from small space-rock outfits like Helen Stellar as well as underappreciated later works by Lindsay Buckingham and the Hollies.

Honorable mentions:
Bruce Springsteen: Devils and Dust
Ben Folds: Saving Silverman
Halloween, Alaska: s/t
ODYC: Black Sun Rising

Suggested songs to download (in order of preference)
eels - Things the Grandchildren Should Know
Neil Diamond - Hell Yeah
ODYC - Goldmine
Paul McCartney - Friends to Go
Derek Webb - I Want a Broken Heart
Coldplay - Swallowed in the Sea
Helen Stellar - io (This Time Around)

Bridgette and I are leaving for our honeymoon in New York on Monday.

Hopefully that crappy illegal transit strike has been crushed by then, or we’re pretty much screwed.

I’ve got to get something off my chest. Something that’s really stuck in my craw, like a beef jerkey fragment wedged between my bicuspids.

What’s the point of becoming a teacher if nobody is ever going to call me Teach?

I literally spent thousands of dollars on grad school for my M.A., hundreds of hours in class or mired in homework all while working full time for the years 2002-2004, and now I’m stuck looking like an idiot because nobody calls me Teach. What gives?

Maybe it could be something simple:
“Yo Teach, what’s up?”
“What’s happening, Teach!”

Or something derisive*:
“Hey Teach, go home!”
“Shut up, Teach!”
(*automatic detention)

Or maybe something altogether different:
“More applesauce, Teach?”
“Yo Teach, you’re bleeding.”
“Hey Teach, my dog got run over.”

*sigh*

I guess I just can’t catch a break. I suppose I’ll just go put the BB gun in my mouth again.

As Bridgette and I drove down the loveliness that is St. Paul’s Robert Street yesterday, we observed a horrible, nay a Satanic development - Fazoli’s had closed.

How could this have happened? Did the citizens of St. Paul reject Fazoli’s affordable Italian cuisine? Do they have no time for their fast-food pasta stylings? Could it be the breadsticks? I’m serious, if it’s the breadsticks, then I’ll give real thought to personally taking a brick to the skull of neighborhood St. Paulites. For those of you who don’t know, Fazoli’s offers free garlic breadsticks to all patrons, going so far as to send around an employee with a basketful of them to load up all interested tables. The breadsticks are savory and tender. They make Olive Garden’s bread taste like they were dipped in a Chinese sewer.

Talk of this succulent bread love brings to mind a story from my adolescence.

I was 18. Having just graduated from high school, I was working three jobs in my final summer before college began. Arguably the finest of these jobs was being a food preparer at the brand new Fazoli’s that had just opened in Rochester. One hot July day we were particularly short-staffed. I remember making pizzas and penne noodles like a fiend while anger seethed deep in my loins for the bastard who failed to show up that particular afternoon. At that moment, my frazzled manager popped his head in the back room where I was and asked me to grab a basket and distribute breadsticks to the patrons, a job normally reserved for our developmentally disabled employees.

While normally quite willing to enjoin activities more appropriate for the mentally handicapped, I was not so willing this day. I remember thinking to myself, “This is ridiculous. I am a high school graduate. I don’t deserve to be humiliated like this, and treated like some disabled - albeit lovable - kid!” Thus, in my unquestionable wisdom, I made a fateful decision.

When finished half-heartedly offering breadsticks to the slovenly customers, I quickly darted into the bathroom, still clutching the basket loaded down with sumptuous garlic breadsticks. Closing myself into the largest stall I sat down on the toilet and began eating the breadsticks as quickly as I could. Fueled by my frustration, resentment and teen angst I pounded one breadstick after another, frantic in my pursuit of garlic-flavored satisfaction and undertanding. Moments later, my breadstick binge was over as quickly as it had begun. I quickly returned to the dining area, empty basket in hand, and my stomach filled with the goodness that only comes when an 18 year old makes a selfish, spiteful decision.

Years later, as I look back on that day, I see in my actions the determination and intelligence that have made me the man I am today, and the virile manhood that Bridgette fell in love with were clearly on display when I hastily consumed 15 breadsticks that fateful afternoon.

Long story short, I am awesome.