I had just dropped off the 6 year old at school, and I hadn’t had any breakfast yet. So, instead of going directly back home, I turned the van toward Biscuitville. The 3 year old was full of questions.
“Where are we going now?”
“Where is mom?”
“Why are we going this way?”
“What is the name of this road?”
“What is the name of this store?”
On and on and on and on. . . .

On the way, I called my wife to ask if she wanted anything from the restaurant. We went through the drive-through, where I ordered an egg biscuit for me, a bowl of grits and a medium Mountain Dew for my wife. The 3 year old didn’t want anything—I asked him if he was sure, twice.

When I got my order, the guy at the window handed me a bucket of MD. Good lord, I thought, this cup is big enough for movie theater popcorn. It’s been happening for years, this increase in drink sizes, but it still catches me by surprise. A medium today is the size of what would have been considered extra large 20 years ago. And to add a little bit of sad irony to the trend, when I order a water at a fast food restaurant, I inevitably get a little child-sized cup mostly full of ice. It’s like they’re trying to make sure you get more than plenty of caffeinated sugar-drink, but they want to keep you thirsty for good, healthy water.

Anyway, I set the barrel of MD in the cup holder between the front seats. The cup is smaller at the bottom so it can fit in car cup holders. This makes it very top heavy—something that didn’t really seem important at that moment.

When I pulled out of the parking lot, turning left onto the highway, the cup jumped out of the holder and into the passenger seat. I quickly reached over to catch the cup, and managed to just barely get my fingers on it. When I looked back up, out the windshield, I saw I was about to hit the right-side curb. I had to jerk the steering wheel with my left hand, and this renewed momentum to the extra-large “medium-sized” cup of Mountain Dew, and it flew out from under my fingers and into the passenger-side door. It wedged between the seat and the door, but the plastic top popped off, and 50 gallons of ice and green liquid all poured out into the floor.

As soon as I could, I pulled off into a parking lot. I got out of the van and walked around to the passenger side. When I opened the door, MD and ice fell out like sports gear in an over-stuffed closet. Nice. Just great. Sigh, double sigh, and cuss (under my breath because the 3 year old was watching).

“What happened daddy?”
“Where are we?”
“Why did you get out of the van?”
“What are you doing?”
“I want a biscuit.”

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I’ve come across three damaged DVDs from our nearest Blockbuster store in two weeks. We rented Toy Story two weeks ago to show our boys, but when I put it in the player, the feature movie wouldn’t play. We could watch all the previews, but not the movie we actually wanted to see. When I returned the DVD to the store and told them the problem, the clerk credited my account for the rental. We got something else several days later.

A couple of days ago, I rented another movie, for myself to watch, and it froze up at the last 10 minutes. I took the movie back and told them the problem. Again the clerk credited my account, but this time I got another movie right away. I watched the new movie that night, but again, it flaked out half way through and skipped a chapter. I could watch the rest of the movie, fine, but just couldn’t see that one chapter.

I had tried all three movies in our main DVD player and in my computer DVD player to make sure the problem wasn’t our player. I got the same error in both machines.

When I returned the second movie, I asked the clerk if they test the DVDs when someone tells them there’s a problem. The clerk told me that they did not test them, and that they just throw the disc out and get a replacement.

When I returned the third movie, I told the clerk that this was the second movie in a row I had rented that had an error (the first movie from two weeks ago slipped my mind at that moment). I asked if they could test the disc just to make sure the situation was actually the disc and not my electronics. He said they don’t have a DVD player in the store, other than the one that plays the preview videos on all the monitors hanging around in the store.

That’s odd. I remember back before DVDs, when Blockbuster rented VHS cassettes, they had players in the store. I remember returning one or two tapes with errors, and they checked them as I stood there telling them where the error occurred.

Now I’m going to have to play one of my personally owned DVD movies just to check that my players are working properly and hasn’t been causing the problems I’ve experienced with rented discs. I can’t imagine that my players would mess up in the same place on three perfectly good discs, but I wouldn’t have imagined getting three broken discs from Blockbuster within a two week period, either.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

My 6 year old had a writing assignment for first grade homework. He had to write “3-5 sentences about our trip to see Junie B. Jones.” His class had gone on a field trip to see the play earlier in the week.

He sat at the kitchen table, fiddling with his pencil and paper. After a couple of minutes, he got up and was fiddling around with everything around the table. I asked him why he wasn’t writing, and he said, “I can’t think of anything to write about.”

Writer’s block. The bane of anyone who works with words. Some days I can’t think of anything to write about, and then some days I have so much I want to write about that I can’t figure out where to start.

I asked my son what they did at the play. (We had already discussed it the afternoon after the trip, but asking again would get him thinking about something to write.)

“How did you get to the play?”
“Where did you sit in the theater?”
“Who did you sit beside?”
“What was something funny in the play?”
“What was something weird in the play?”

He answered the questions, and I directed him to write the answers down. Unfortunately, his writer’s block had already killed his initial enthusiasm for the assignment, so I had to really keep on him to make sure he started writing and finished writing. Eventually he wrote three sentences, and I let him call it finished.

A few hours later, I sat down to write this blog post. I couldn’t think of anything to write about for several minutes, and then I came up with this idea to write about writer’s block.

Writing about writer’s block when having writer’s block is sort of like looking into a mirror that shows a mirror behind you. It’s a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, and on and on. It’s silly, but at least I wrote something.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I had to run out to the grocery store last night, in the cold for the first time in six months. I was going to be there for only a few minutes, so I just had on jeans and a coat over a t-shirt. I wasn’t very uncomfortable, but the cold combined with my hurry led me to notice something about the layout of the parking lot.

The shopping center has seven stores, one of which is the grocery store. In front of the stores are seven double-rows of parking spaces, and each of the seven has four handicapped parking spaces — the first two of every row. That’s 24 handicapped spaces.

I’ve never seen more than one or two cars parked in the handicapped spaces, and easily half the time I see someone getting in or out of their car in those spots, they have no wheelchair, walker, cane, or even a limp. What’s wrong? Do I just not shop at the times that handicapped people do, or are the parking lot designers really over estimating the number of disabled in our town?

I see far more moms and dads with small children in need of close parking than I ever see truly handicapped people. They should take away at least three of those seven groups of handicap parking and make them spots for shoppers with small children. Or, hell, just make the spots open for anyone. That would at least let everyone park two spaces closer. I have no problem with some young guy parking in the first space to run in for two minutes to buy a loaf of bread. It’s a stupid waste to take up two dozen parking spots for what probably isn’t necessary for more than two people at a time.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com