I forgot to mention y’day we drove over that new eco-friendly causeway they are building across the Everglades to replace Tamiami Trail. This is the roadway that allows the water to flow along the same patterns as centuries past. It sure is nice. And very expensive. We saw no alligators. But we did hit the hundred year storm, which blasted the windshield wipers off the truck. We had to stop and buy new ones. Later, I mean new one. He only bought one wiper.I sampled the health food only as JZ insists oysters are healthy. I dunno, aren’t they called the garbage can of the oceans? Or is that clams. Either way, no raw seafood for me unless it is caught miles and miles offshore. But oysters, they grow near effluent pipes, see. JZ, that’s effluent, not affluent, quit mixing those up. The restaurants here have a sauce made from peppers in oil. So my buddy digs one out of the jar and bites it in half. I have never seen that grown man cry before.
Should I mention my buddy today downed 12 raw oysters, 24 clams, and 12 chicken wings, plus trimmings? (Later we went for burgers. Other than a light breakfast, that burger was my entire daily intake.) If you add it up and think, hey, that guy just ate 6,000 calories, you would be right. Five times my total. And this is not all that unusual. He likes his food.
Now with all this fun and adventure, it is easy to forget that JZ and I remain quite different people. It some ways this works, for example he likes fat girls and I don’t. In other ways it is astonishing we can get along, for example his take-it-or-leave-it attitude about adventure. To me life is nothing without the most adventure one can afford. Or just look at the high premium I place on natural curiosity where he could care less. By way of commonality, our greatest similarity would be our resistance to learning anything new that contradicts our current thinking, but that explains nothing much because the same is true of most people.
Is this important? Well, yes, in that I missed out on the one single event that was central to our trip out here—Karaoke. I’m a veteran of over 200 shows and know the formula. That includes arriving early enough to quickly get that first song in while any babe that sees it knows you got there after she did. Then a maximum forty minute wait for your second turn. That, Karaoke pick-up artists, is my window of opportunity. Karaoke works best once at each new location, if you don’t score in the first 90 minutes of your first show, don’t bother ever going back. You’ve become the next wannabe.
How, I hear you ask, did I miss a show that was three months in the planning? How did I spend three hundred dollars to drive to the other end of the state and not accomplish my plan. Well, you see, it turns out JZ thought Karaoke was just lip-sync. What? That is correct. What’s the big deal over something that even kids could do? Never mind that it took me years of struggle to accomplish.
Why, those years are explainable by the fact I am so dull-witted that I learn slow. That is an easy assumption to make about others. My buddy took so much time to get underway that I finally left him behind and raced over myself to the place I’d chosen (the Lighthouse Pier). I arrived two and a quarter hours late. The nearest chairs were sixty feet from the stage and the wait was 21 singers ahead of me. It would have been midnight before I sang. So I left and went back to the hotel to read. Here is a picture of the Lani Kai. Now you don’t need to laugh so hard. Learning to sing was a life-altering struggle for me. But not for my buddy, to whom at best it is a passing incident, so you sing, no big deal. Yes, we did have roughly eight discussions in advance that the whole idea of this trip was to meet great women in a new town. It didn’t click for him that Karaoke was pivotal to that plan. Like most men, his concept of picking up women involves an awful, awful lot of wasted talking where my style is much more, “Watch this.”
So, it was no Karaoke for me. JZ draws no distinction between being the star and sitting in the back row watching the show. Upon later talking about why I didn’t want to “sit around to see what happens”, it turns out he honestly believed Karaoke was just make-pretend singing. Funny how there is actually a certain logic to that thinking. In fourteen years, JP has never seen me sing, call bingo, or play in public, and therefore does not “believe it makes any difference”. It follows how things made no sense to him why I was in a hurry and making such a big fuss to get there on time. I see now that to him, showing up like the next guy or the next guy was all the same thing.
Chalk it up to an expensive missed opportunity. We got lots of other things done, I visited a bookstore, he swam the marathon. We walked through the downtown to notice it was mostly new after being flattened by hurricanes. We looked at real estate prices, it has gone crazy as people move north from frighteningly expensive locations like Marco Island. The life here is more wholesome than what Miami has become. No, it is not the tropical paradise portrayed in the movies. Immigration has turned it [Miami] into a festering rat-hole except for the gated communities with armed guards. For the record, while I refer to the area often, I actually only drive through that town a few times per year.
