With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
I enjoy paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
2003-01-06 - 2:01 a.m.
I better update now, I haven’t in two days.
Yesterday afternoon I went to visit Marc in Allentown. I haven’t been to his house since he moved back east from Albuquerque. The plan was for us and his wife and two sons to see DVN Saturday night in nearby Sellersville. Things weren’t simple. First he said they could make it, then he said they couldn’t. Then once again they could make it. Then on Thursday his older son Paolo got appendicitis, he was operated on Friday morning. There was also a threat of a major snow storm on Saturday. We decided to play it by ear. Come Saturday Paolo was due back from the hospital and the snow was not a major threat so I went out there. I made it in great time and actually got to his house a bit before he got home from the hospital. His wife, Becca was there with his younger son Gianni. By the way before you ask, no neither Marc nor Becca are Italian, they just like the names.
Marc, Gianni, and myself went to the concert while Becca stayed home with Paolo. It took us a bit longer than we thought to get there, largely because of silly mapquest directions and silly road signs. I really think that exits from highways really should tell you what road you are exiting onto.
We had about a half hour to spare before the show started so we picked up the tickets and went to get a quick bite of pizza. We had planned on checking out The Washington House which is right next to the theater. I told them that if we had gotten there earlier I’d have introduced them to the guys in DVN before the show but now they’d have to wait till afterwards. Just after I said that Gregory, Kenny, and Bernardo Jose walked out of the Washington Inn. I said hi and introduced Marc and Gianni. Skippy had gone on ahead to set things up.
When we got to the Roc and Ray’s Pizza, which was right around the corner we found that it wasn’t set up for much of an eat in business and that they had no slices ready. Luckily someone had ordered a large pie and hadn’t picked it up so we were able to get that. The timing worked out perfectly. If we had to wait for the pie we probably would have been late. The pizza was very good and Roc or Ray, whichever was working there was very accommodating and pleasant. A nice relief from the many food servers I’ve had problems with.
The Sellersville Theater 1894 is a beautiful old theater dating back to (OK now you can guess the year before I say it) 1894. It has just recently been restored. It holds about 250 people in a beautiful and quaint setting. The acoustics were excellent. The only problem was it was a bit tight getting into and out of the lobby.
Once we were inside I found John and Joolee and said hi to them. John just got his tickets that day and ended up sitting way in front of us, someone must have cancelled or there just happened to be a single left up front.
During request-o-rama they called on Joolee and John, the only other Früheads in the room. The blacklist only applies to people sitting with Carey, Lawrence, or myself I guess J
It was a fairly typical two set show for non hardcore fans. In the first set people really didn’t get the idea of request-o-rama. Two of the requests were for DVN songs and a third for Freebird. Julie was the only one who really understood, she asked for the Folgers coffee jingle by Rockapella. They didn’t do it, they did their own coffee jingle they did for some local chain in central New Jersey.
During the intermission Marc bought Mike Fanning and I bought yet another copy of Brontosaurus for a friend. I tried waving it around during the second request-o-rama and Bernie almost called on me, unfortunately it was Gregory’s turn to pick. John requested Coney Island Baby so I was subjected to some barbershop. They did do Metal Shop later so at least everyone was made aware of the danger of barbershop music.
After the show we got our CDs autographed and went home. Gianni went straight to bed, Paolo and Becca had already hit the hay. Marc and I sat up and talked for a couple of hours. That was really nice. We even put some meat on a discussion I had had with Lawrence the other day on life expectancy. Marc is an actuary and is preparing for the third actuarial exam. We had originally met when I helped him prepare for the first exam. He showed me a book he was studying from and it had a mortality table for people of all ages according to a 1981 study. I found that I was wrong that though the average expected age at death goes up by about a month for every year you already live that the mortality rate doesn’t increase slowly year by year in adulthood. It actually increases by about 10% every year.
OK sorry for that excursion into math. I hope I didn’t lose all you English majors. I have to remember that you are the cute ones. The real point is that though the conversation sounds dry to you it was the kind of thing Marc and I can bond over. We also discussed things like our both losing our fathers recently and our future plans for our lives.
This morning Marc gave me a tour of the area including a stop at the supermarket. It does put any supermarket near me to shame. By the time we got back we didn’t have too much time before I had to leave. We ate brunch and had a quick game of chess. I haven’t played chess in years, not since Ira moved away in the early 90s. I used to play all the time and was pretty good. As usual for me I’m strong in strategy and weak in tactics. I’ll never have the powers of concentration to be first rate. Marc is out of chess shape too so the game wasn’t a good one. It was a lot of fun though. I’m going to make sure we play again next time I visit. Lawrence do you play chess?
It started snowing so I want to leave lots of time to get back to New York for the Knick game. The snow never really accumulated so I had no trouble. I also found parking in about 2 minutes. It often takes a half an hour or even more. That gave me time to eat a relaxing diner at Popeye’s and get coffee before the game. The Knicks lost again and more importantly I lost to Alan.
I got home from the game, called Carey and came online. I better stop before I start saying, I then started typing “I better update now, I haven’t in two days…”
The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy - October 07, 2008
On the Road to Westchester County - October 06, 2008
Inside the Madison Square Studio - October 05, 2008
I'm a Bosniac and I'm debating like I've never debated before - October 03, 2008
Islands in the Stream of Consciousness - October 02, 2008
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile 2003-01-06
