Wonder twin powers, activate...

Dropping bombs...

Location: Hattiesburg, Mississippi
Pictures: Here

So yeah, I'm sitting in the bathroom at the Marriot in Hattiesburg, Mississipi. I've been saying I ess ess I ess ess I pee pee I, all day long. And I spend a lot of times in bathrooms in hotels because for one, I take great pleasure in having a poop, and two, I smoke and write in them because it is the only place that you can smoke in a hotel room these days.

Pensacola beach.

Sometimes I sit in the tub, depends on the quality of the crapper.


And how did I end up in Hattiesburg? I really don’t know, but I know that I've been to Biloxi before, and I've been to New Orleans, and Hattiesburg is a somewhere I have not been before. That was the decision matrix.

I came up with this idea at the Barnes and Noble outside of Mobile, Alabama. Nice little place if you get the chance, but like most places you're not going to get a feel for anything if you're on the main streets and just driving through, so I will keep my yap shut on this particular town.

USS Alambama. Roll Tide. 

But right before you get to Mobile, there is the USS Alabama, which is a destroyer I think, that was used in WWII and beyond. Look, I don’t know the whole history of it, you can do that on your own, but what I can remember is that it did shoot down 22 enemy planes in WWII and had around 2500 troops on it and I think weighed 90 Million tons when fully loaded with crew and ammunition.

Also there are oldish and newish planes, some tanks, and a submarine. Worth the visit. Never been on one. Even when I lived in NYC, never went to the USS Enterprise. I jogged by it a bunch of times, never stopped.

not as clean as I found it...

And if you get in the flight simulator, like I did, and you haven't eaten much, make sure you know where the interior kill switch is before it starts. Enough said.

As I may have just said a few pages ago, something about walking through places like that where important shit happened before I was born is humbling. I  feel the guys around me, hear their voices, I can see them in their beds and at the helm of the 40MM guns and I think about how people died here and probably some of the ones who didn’t are the ones we shake our fists at on the freeways.

seadogs scuttlebutting..

And that reminds me that everyone has a rich history, well maybe you might just call it a history, some people endeavour to make it rich, but everyone has a story.

And that gets me to thinking about empathy in general, and how few people have it.

As in last night when I am at "Jacksons Steak House" in Pensacola and there is this blond lady, maybe 55 or so, maybe greater, obviously wealthy, with her husband and a younger dude and the younger dudes girlfriend or wife, I didn’t check with them.

But she is blond and she is dressed well and she has fake love mounds and she sees someone come in that she knows and I already know this woman is just struggling to make her way through the world organically, because I can hear the conversation she is having at dinner and it's “the asparagus is JUST wonderful isn’t it?” and “I adore this place, my husband and I come here at least once a week” and bullshit like that. As in, not a real conversation, but filler small talk.

And so this other woman who she knows walks in and she shrieks and gets up and gives her a hug and then, this is the part that I meant to get to, they stand dye-rectly in between the table and the bar, so not a single waiter/ess can get by, which about 5 of them need to. And despite every waiter/ess standing there and having to interrupt them to get by, they neglect, for about five minutes, they neglect to get out of the fucking way of the people trying to do their jobs.

And I can see the waiters/esses rolling their eyes and I can feel their tension and I can hearing them muttering under their breath, and I tell one of the girls who I hear muttering “standing right in the middle of everything and they wont move” that I guarantee neither of those ladies has ever worked in a restaurant.

And man that is a big pet peeve of mine. Don’t like it. Don’t understand it. Don’t comprehend it. How does one not have the peripheral acuity to understand that there are other people in the world besides themselves?

Maybe they don’t care, hey this is how things work, people go around me, I don’t get out of the way. Maybe its an ego thing, an image thing, doesn’t matter to me what it is, it’s a crime against humanity to walk around without at least an average amount of concern and awareness for the other human beings around you.

Hmm, that felt good but that also felt a little angry. And I do struggle with that as well. Sometimes I do get angry and call people names and shake my head at the ugliness of it all. The general ugliness of people and how they treat one another will ultimately run you down. And it's an effort to stay above it, a real effort.

And I've done my share of trying to lead people into a new mentality.  I've tried to make them understand the honey mentality, but I think maybe it only works for a little while, and I can't change the world alone.

But maybe if we all put our heads together and make an effort on a daily basis to lead by example, well, maybe in a hundred years or so everyone will be perfectly polite to each other all the time.

Help me out here.