JayarJackson

1.                  Don’t try to always call a good friend for entertainment value to pass otherwise boring time, they’ll eventually catch on, and might get offended.

As everyone in the country knows, LA traffic sucks.  “What the hell is that old lady thinking?”  “When are you gonna GO??”  “Damn, there’s an entire car length between that guy and the car in front of him, the gas pedal is on the right, fool!”  In order to avoid these uncontrollable outbursts of anger, I’ve discovered that many disgruntled LA drivers that are sick of listening to the same 5 songs on the radio have chosen to call and talk randomly with friends in order to pass the 2 hours it takes them to travel the 25 miles home in rush hour.  There is a reason that LA passed the law that restricts us from yapping on the phone without a hands free earpiece. 

Sure, we may come off as if we’re so important and handling so much business that we have to constantly talk while driving, but in reality, 9 times out of 10, that important looking person sitting on Interstate 405 in his Mercedes is talking to his best friend about the last episode of “24” or how much he hates his idiot bosses at work.  If you’re this “important person” that gets the bright idea to use your friend as absorption for your babble, make sure you try to mask it or else your calls will begin to get ignored. 

I soon found out that I was the court jester that kept a few friends entertained at one point in my life.  If they’d only attempted to hide their intentions a little better, I might have not started giving them the silent treatment. 

If the same person calls you every weekday at the same time of 5:15pm, and every conversation begins with the sound of a car’s seatbelt alarm beeping, you may want to reanalyze their affection.  When the conversation seems increasingly pointless and belabored, with uncalled for interruptions from your friend inexplicably yelling “get off my ass!” when they’re not talking to you, then they’re probably venting at the Range Rover driver that thinks tailgating will move traffic.  Once 2 hours has passed and their interest in your day immediately turns to “Ok, I’ll talk to you later,” you should understand that they’re happily home and the reason your ear is hot from a cell phone being smashed against it is that you’ve just been played.  Put on your clown hat and prepare new material for tomorrow’s drive home. 

 

2.                  The worst thing you can say about another person’s car is that “it gets you from point A to point B.” 

It seems that everyone wants to drive an impressive looking car, especially us men.  We know that it can draw attention and make us look better.  Maybe we can rev the engine, blast the stereo, and speed around a few turns just to get women to look.  Every time reliability enters the conversation, the seemingly complimentary gesture sounds more like an insult telling us how ugly it is. 

Ladies, if a guy is telling you all about his car and how it has multiple features, and has power-controlled this and that, don’t try to add to the attempted bragfest with the overused, “Well, as long at it gets you from Point A to Point B, that’s great!” 

Telling an overly car-conscious guy that his new ride simply gets him from point A to point B is like telling a woman that as long as her new dress covers her butt and her chest, it doesn’t really matter that that hotter girl with the better body is wearing the same one.


--JJJ

1.                  People waiting for the bus ALWAYS stand in the street!

  As all of you know, I live in LA, the city overflowing with people, especially on the streets.  The freeways, streets, and even residential areas are loaded with cars, so our environmentally conscious residents take the bus.  OK, these are the people without cars or else they’d contribute to the congestion the way I do.  Since most buses sit in the same traffic that all the cars do, people waiting for them get impatient and decide to lean into, step onto, and simply STAND in the street to see if their #20 bus is coming.  When several bus riders are there, it creates a competition to see who can balance on the edge of the curb the longest to check for the bus.  Since I am one of the “economical” drivers on the road that takes full advantage of the far right lane that many neglect, they run the risk of catching a chest full of my compact Ford. 

The last time I checked, buses are the biggest vehicles on the road.  Many of them are orange, red, or bright blue!  They are also the slowest moving vehicles on the road.  If these bus riders are abandoning the security of the bus stop canopy to lean back and forth in the street so that they won’t miss their bus coming, they don’t have to worry.  I don’t think anyone has ever said, “Damn, if I only stood in the street instead of at the huge bus stop, I would have seen that big, red, extra long bus with the accordion in the middle, before it passed me by at 15 mph.”

 

2.                  Those “Erasable” Pens NEVER worked!

  I remember back in 5th or 6th grade when right after the school banned slap bracelets from all us annoying kids that wouldn’t stop snapping them in class, we had to come up with a new gimmick that distracted us from math lessons.  Our answer came in the form of a pen that erased just like a pencil!!  All the rules from Mr. Moran about mathematicians writing in pencil only so that they can correct their mistakes went right out the window with those slap bracelets.  We were so clever, as soon as he caught the smart asses using a pen in MATH class, they’d simply show him the eraser, and rub those mistakes away!!  Once this phenomenon took hold, I noticed that my eraser didn’t seem to “erase” my mistakes.  In fact, it made my mistake a lighter colored one with a blue cloud surrounding it.  Since I was a neat freak when it came to my school work, I immediately threw that useless garbage erasable pen out and went back to my trusty mechanical pencil. 

To my surprise, seemingly everyone else continued to use those stupid pens!  I developed a complex and assumed I must be seeing something different than everyone else, so I kept my reality from everyone else with papers full of blue haze. 

Was I all alone in my observations?  When I returned my kick ball pitch asking for it to be “slow and smooth” was it already so?  Was the pizza the cafeteria served on Fridays actually nasty?  I got over it and eventually realized that deep down inside, you, me, and everyone else always knew that not only did those ink erasers not work, but the pens wrote spotty and lumpy.  Paper Mate got over on us!

 

--JJJ

1.                  Pointless car horns are the biggest catalysts for an instant bad mood.

I was in a pretty good mood yesterday. I was driving down Olympic Blvd heading toward work, it was 80 degrees outside, my windows were down, and one of my favorite songs was on the radio.  As many know, the far right lane in LA doubles as the parking meter lane.  During certain rare times of the day, that lane has no cars parked in it and everyone is afraid to enter it since it’s not the norm.  That’s where you’ll see my ass passing all traffic and actually making the often proposed time of “it takes 20 minutes to get anywhere in LA.” 

So as I neared my final turn, a big old half van, half Winnebago quickly seized one of the meters in my lane that I enjoy taking advantage of everyone in.  This was completely legal and within his right to do, so I snuck back into the lane next to me that had a full car’s length of space between the two vehicles.  Since we were all stopped at the red light, this maneuver was all done at 2 mph and since my right turn was only 10 feet ahead, this maneuver also only hindered my fellow driver from getting to the red light sooner.  He didn’t even have to look at my “USC Alumni” rear license plate frame for any longer than 10 seconds as I was dipping right back out to make my turn.  (Los Angeles is littered with cars representing USC with license plate frames…we’re kind of upfront and sometimes obnoxious about it.)

So you can imagine my surprise when he blasts his loud horn directly into my open window where my head was contently boppin’ to my jam!  In this instant, this mild mannered young Black man forgot that Pharrell was entering the bridge and went into a hand flinging, “shut the hell up” tirade wishing he’d blow that horn again.  Smiles turned to frowns, what would have been polite head nods from driver to driver turned to mean mugs and I dare yous, and the sunlight didn’t seem to shine so brightly anymore. 

Still, 10 seconds after his horn was needlessly utilized and I was immediately back on my route, the radio magically came back on in my ears, that fool was a lost memory, and the sub-zero temperature in the look I gave him warmed back up to 80.  It’s a beautiful day in LA!!

 

2.                  Why do baseball managers wear baseball uniforms during games?

My Dodgers are in the NLCS after sweeping the cursed Chicago Cubs with a serious goat impediment.  Anyway, I’ve been getting into watching baseball more closely for the past 3-4 years and I finally noticed the odd practice of the managers of the teams, also known as coaches in other sports, wear a full baseball uniform, complete with baseball pants and a jersey donning their name and number on the back.  I can’t tell so far if they wear cleats or not. 

What the hell do they need all that on for?  They look absolutely silly.  Most of these guys are pretty damn old and decrepit looking.  Sure, they used to play the game back in the day, but time has since tap danced all over their athletic builds, leaving the body of a dude that definitely eats large portions.  Players have their numbers and sometimes names on their uniforms for identification purposes.  When a foul or penalty is called on a player in basketball or football, the referees assess the foul to the number.  Why is Joe Torre wearing #6?? 

Can you imagine if rickety old Phil Jackson coached the Lakers in some basketball shorts and tank top jersey?  What if Charlie Weis coached Notre Dame from the sidelines with tight ass gold Capri-like pants, shoulder pads covered by a jersey, and a helmet? 

This doesn’t make any sense.  Tell these baseball guys to put on some khakis and a polo with team logos…please.  Leave the past in the past. 

---JJJ