Go post to my birthday thread, then come back and read this.
August 26th, 2002 | by Scott Jennings |If you need evidence of my raging hypocrisy in order to make you feel better about dismissing everything I say out of hand, here you go:
I spoke with my archnemesis the other night. Yes, that’s right, I placed a phone call to one Mr. Kevin Hodge, the overnight DJ on New York’s home for the best classic rock, Q 104.3. I’ve written at some length about how much I dislike Mr. Hodge and his specific propensity for talking far out of proportion for his job as a person who makes classic rock come out of my radio at night. So when he declared that the next segment would be dedicated to him talking to the idiots who were motivated to dial the 800 number at 3am, I nearly turned the damn thing off and rolled over to fail to fall asleep.
But before I could hit the volume knob, I heard Kevin Hodge tell me about a declaration made by the governors of New York and New Jersey asking the Port Authority to change the name of Newark International Airport to Liberty International Airport, in honor of the tragic events of last September. And that was enough to really piss me off.
This has got to be the stupidest thing I’ve heard all month. (And yes, that includes this baseball strike business.) You can go ahead and set aside the notion of whether or not we’ve had enough honoring the victims of 9/11, because I don’t really care about that as far as this is concerned. This is completely stupid and deliciously ironic all on its own.
All right, so you get into a taxicab and tell the driver, “take me to Liberty.” You arrive, you get out of the cab, but the minute you set foot in the airport, you’re instantly subjected to questioning, prodding, searching, X-raying, and a general loss of any privacy you could have hoped for. You best be careful what you say, because if you mention something on the list of bad things to talk about, you’ll be hauled off for more questioning. You best not appear at all out of the ordinary either, because if you frighten Aunt Hilda from Omaha and she points the finger at you, you’ll immediately be presumed guilty and hauled off again. All of this is just the prelude to being herded onto a tiny plane to be wedged into a tiny seat where you better damn well behave yourself for the duration of the flight. Now, we don’t even need to touch the idea of whether or not this is a good thing or a bad thing; it’s just the way it is. But it sure as hell isn’t liberty.
So I spent the next hour dialing and redialing and trying to get through to participate in one of these segments I purport to abhor. I was about to give up, since I was getting really sick of hearing the phone ring off the hook and I was feeling progressively sillier for working so hard to call into a radio show. I decided to try one last time, and whoa-ho! Success!
It was Kevin Hodge himself on the other end, and I was on the air. For some reason, I failed to mention to him that I consider him my archnemesis, and launched straight into how stupid the whole name change idea was. He listened, let me work through my idea, and at the end, declared that I was absolutely right, and I had changed his mind. I managed to make this the occasion of my very first radio request, and I chose the Traffic classic “The Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys,” which is an excellent song which is played on the radio far too infrequently. I stayed up until about 5am or so to hear my requested song and reward for correct thought make it to the air, and ended up sleeping longer than I had intended.
So there you go. I’m a hypocrite. And I seem to be somewhat proud of it.
Billy Merritt was talking to Joe about an upcoming Piledriver match, and asked if he’d be willing to kiss me on the mouth as a part of the bit. Joe said maybe, that he guessed so, that it would depend. But here’s what I want to know: why did he assume I’d be all right with this?
The twenty-third annual Scott Jennings Day, generally observed on August 26th, has been cancelled for this year. I do not want to do anything for my birthday.
The cable is off, my dial-up Internet account is gone (we’re “borrowing” Joe’s grandfather’s AOL account), my cell phone is off, and I have seven dollars in my wallet. Let’s not think about rent right now. Jethro Tull played Jones Beach on Saturday, and it was the first year since 1995 that I missed their concert. SummerSlam, the WWF’s annual birthday present to me, was in the Nassau Coliseum tonight, and I stayed at home clicking the website for results. And that’s just the superficial crap.
It does not appear that I’ll be joining the good folks down at ZoharCo. Naturally, this is a rather stinging rejection, and one that doesn’t really make much sense to me, but that’s life, and I’ll have to dust myself off and find the horse and see about getting back on it.
I’ve seen a lot of rejection in my life, as have we all, but this one ranks up there with my blackballing from Delta Upsilon or the time Mindy Fountain sent the URL of the website I had designed to declare my love for her to a full 15% of the Internet. Am I to understand that Zohar is good enough for this job and I am not? So it would seem.
However, you should feel free to observe Scott Jennings Day as your family’s tradition would dictate.
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