It's up to you...

I am so very, very tired. I returned from my recent trip to NY city just this past Wednesday night. Three days later, I still haven't recovered. Five days with only five hours of sleep each night really takes its toll. I plan to tell more details of this amazing trip in the days to come. For right now, I wanted to share this photo that my friend Buddy took. It's supposed to emulate a famous photo of John Lennon. I have to confess, I can't recall the particular photo, but it made for a neat image in any case. When I go through the bullet list of memories from this trip, it sounds like a fever dream: full of non-sequiter faces, oddly disconnected events and synchronicity of unparalelled proportions...and yet it happened. Stay tuned...

"We're going to the zoo today, and then...

"We're going to the zoo today, and then were going to the baseball game and after that were going to Japan..."

I can't help but think of Bill Cosby's jealously in his routine about the kids from special class from his 'WONDERFULNESS' album anytime a get near a zoo. Today was no exception.

The goal was to escape the madness that is Superbowl Sunday and to this end we headed out to the Fort Worth Zoo. It's a really nice zoo and in some ways better than its Atlanta counterpart, yet there's always something sad about seeing these animals restrained from doing what comes naturally, i.e. rending the flesh from my bones. One particular mountain lion was pacing and growling at the onlookers in front of his habitat. Had he the chance, I knew he would have had at me. In some odd way, it seemed wrong that I was able to lear at him from 6 feet away in his 'natural setting' and he could do nothing about it. Without the structure of 'zoo', it would be quite beyond my means to impose on this impressive animal in such away. It seemed like I was taking advantage of his situation through no effort on my part. It's not really an animal rights thing to me. It just felt... awkward.

As far as escaping the Super Bowl, the large crowd we found at the zoo was not what we expected at all. We thought it would be a ghost town! I guess 70 degree plus temperatures in February will draw people to such venues despite the big game. I also noticed a large number of the zoo patrons were Latino and wondered if the general disinterest in American football to those with a Soccer-savy background was a factor.

We avoided the Super Bowl until we stopped by Sam's Club shopping for printer ink.
There IT was! The Game! Blaring from several large screen TVs! We then headed over to Fuddrucker's for dinner and saw most patrons had positioned themselves in order to get a good view at numerous television sets which were all showing the Super Bowl.

None of this is a shock to us, knowing that in Texas there are two denominations:
Baptist and Football. So, I, being a Baptist, find the blurring of the two faiths somewhat of a mystery, but they seems to go hand in hand here, in ways I had never quite experienced prior to moving.

Texans really like football. I mean, they REALLY like football. So it seems you can run from the Super Bowl here, but you cannot hide.

Hey Bill! When's that trip to Japan coming up?

Is this a reach?

Flipping across the dial tonight (what's a dial?) the wife and I ended up watching "Casablanca" on Turner Classic Movies. It's seems SO cliche to say what a GREAT movie this is, but it really IS a great movie! Watching a film where you see people in conflict actually beginning to steer their lives in a better direction and choose good over evil, as Victor Laslo tells Rick, is simply amazing. Just wonderful.

It reminded me of another Bogart movie I haven't seen in years: "Key Largo". I may be going out on a limb here and tieing the ridiculous and the sublime to the same hitching post, but did you ever notice the common theme this movie shares with the Steven Segal movie "Under Seige"?

The bad guys come in and take over a hotel/ship little knowing they have a trained killer in their midst. In the end, both heroes (Bogie and Segal) take out the bad guys who are not a match for the hero's military training. Coincidence or something more?