So we closed up South Pacific this weekend, and I’d like to report that it was FREAKIN’ HOT. I don’t mean hot in the sense that the show itself was spectacular, though this was so, but in the sense that it was something like 85 degrees and 70% humidity every bloody night.

My costume for the first act consisted of blue jeans (hot), a white tshirt, and a blue chambray shirt. Thursday and Friday it was so hot that I ditched the chammy shirt and did my dancin’ in just the white tshirt and jeans (and too-small Sailor hat, which sat on my head like a very comical yarmulke; pictures shall be forthcoming). I still had rivers of sweat running down the crack of my ass into The Sweetness (aka My Taint). Luckily the amount of time I had to spend onstage this year was somewhat limited, so I could sprint for the safety of the air-condition’d dressing rooms.

Despite the heat, the shows went off with nary a hitch, and now we can relax in the evenings and look forward to the after-party on Saturday evening, at which certain folks intend to drink heavily, but not me, of course, as I am a teetotaller. Yeah. That’s the ticket. Right.

Meanwhile, Sarah and I are in the market for a new automobile, as her Protege is starting to make disturbing noises, and it’s almost 8 years old. We figured we’d go out on Sunday afternoon and look at a few automobiles, so we headed over to the Nissan dealer on route 13 and admired the Altimas. Then, to our great consternation, we realized that the dealership was closed. This surprised the hell out of me; I had assumed that the only thing stopping a car dealer from being open 24 hours a day was federal regulations or something.

Still, it was probably for the best. We were able to look at the cars without having some assmaster salesman breathing down our necks, and got a good feel for MSRP and options. I was frustrated to discover that the Toyota dealership nearest us doesn’t seem to carry any V6 Camry models, or at least, we couldn’t find one. There’s always other dealerships.

BTW: Now that the show is done, I’m going to endeavour to return to a more normal schedule. That is because I am rad.

I’m feeling a little guilty for going silent for the better part of a week and then giving you a weird one-man-show transcript and a link to some monkey videos. Somehow it just didn’t feel right, even as I hit the publish button and walked away whistling the tune to “Loser” by Beck. So I thought it would be best if I spent a little time today letting you know about the amusing things that have occurred in my life.

South Pacific is coming along nicely. We had our preview on Tuesday, and of course I flubbed one of my lines a little bit, but it came off okay anyway. Jared and Nora and Brian and Art came to laugh at us, and apparently nearly peed themselves when I did a little leap during “Nothin’ Like A Dame.” I cain’t hardly blame ’em; it is great hilarity to see someone of my size leap into the air like Nureyev, but more gracefully.

Sarah’s having a great time with the show as well. Last year she didn’t have to do much but wear an ugly dress apparently made from 14th century German tapestries and carry a yarn tree around, which is about as much fun as health class. This year she’s a nurse, which means she gets to dance around in tight clothing, and even has a line in the first act that never fails to produce applause. She’s like Baryshnikov with hooters.

We open tonight, and I fully expect to be phenomenal. I’ll fill you in on any interesting details later.

One annoying side effect of the show is that I’m usually not home in the evenings, so I don’t get an opportunity to exercise except for the occasional late afternoon, when it’s roughly 104 degrees in the shade. There’s no way I’m running or riding in that. It was about a month before I could bring myself to mow the lawn, and even then I only did the front so the neighbors would stop leaving me threatening voicemails.

Anyway, I think I’ve gained roughly 18 pounds in the last two weeks. I’m definitely back to my fat man pants, and I’ve had to loosen up my belt a few notches. This displeases me greatly. Hopefully after the show is done, things will cool off a bit (literally) and I can get my road bike back together and take up lengthy rides all over New Castle County. That would be freakin’ sweet. When we drive up to Longwood Gardens for rehearsals and shows, I see a lot of guys on road bikes on 52. It looks like a fun ride, and the shoulders on that road are like 15 feet wide. I may have to start hauling the two-wheeler up there for some exercise.

Hopefully I won’t have a heart attack or get taken out by a Jaguar XKE.

Anyway, I may have more tomorrow, or not, depending on how late we’re up for opening night tonight. STAY LOOSE, you crazy kids.

Fun links day! WOOOOOOO!

• Political Correctness continues its inexorable march towards the complete destruction of humanity.
• I really hope this is true and verifiable. Not that I’m particularly eager for people to die, but it seems like that’s the only way to demonstrate to people that their ideas suck. They certainly don’t listen to reason. (Of course, they don’t necessarily listen to dead bodies, either, which is sad and not terribly surprising. See also: Washington, D.C. and Gun Control.)
• I like the sound of this . Anything to force me to pay credit cards off faster is a good thing, since I don’t have the discipline to just do it.
• Uh . . . what?
• Sigh:
  

  “Ebonics is a different language, it’s not slang as many believe,” Texeira said. “For many of these students Ebonics is their language, and it should be considered a foreign language.”

Since I’m sure so many of you spent Sunday morning at your respective places of worship, fervently praying that I would get through my mountain bike race without injury, I thought I would do you a solid and give you the rundown of the pain that I went through this weekend, in the form of a short (as if!) diary:

Saturday, 10pm – Other Matt arrived at our crib so’s he could sleep over and we could just get up and head straight to the race on Sunday morning. Well, not STRAIGHT to the race; we’d have to stop off at his apartment and pick up his bike, because it was raining when he came over, and his bike doesn’t entirely fit into his car, and he didn’t want it getting all wet.

11pm – We go to spleep.

Sunday, 6am – I awake and set to inhaling as many carbohydrates as I can, in the form of Corn Pops. (I also had taken in a lot of carbs the previous evening in the form of beer.)

6:30am – I wake up Matt and start loading my bicycle into the truck, along with the water-carrying backpacks that Sarah bought us, plus helmets and gloves.

7:10am – Matt and I leave for his apartment to pick up his bike. I realize, about halfway there, that I forgot both my camera and the ratchet tool I need to keep my left bike pedal from falling off. (Due to banging the hell out of it on a large log last week, the pedal tends to loosen up a lot during rides.) No big deal; I leave a message on Brian‘s phone to get him to bring his camera (he was planning to come and watch me injure myself in the hopes that he could laugh until he cried), and I figured there would be tools and things at the race facility so someone could tighten the pedal up for me if it loosened.

7:25 – Matt and I arrive at his apartment, and he realizes that he left the keys in his car, which is back at Casa De Hearn. We head back home.

7:40 – We arrive back at the house, so I take the opportunity to grab my ratchet wrench and look for my camera, which I could not find. Matt retrieves his housekeys.

7:55 – We get back to Matt’s place, he throws the bike in the bed of the truck and we drive rapidly to the Fair Hill Natural Resource Area.

8:00 – We unpack the bikes and get ourselves registered for the race, and head over to the starting location. Here was where several mistakes, due to getting unpacked in such a wild hurry, were made:

1. We decided to leave our water-backpacks in the truck. We’d never ridden with them before and were worried that they would annoy us, and we figured hell, there’s probably a water stop every mile or so. We’ll be able to drink our fill and be just fine. For the same reason, I didn’t bother filling my bike-mounted water bottle at the registration area, because I was frantically trying to get to the start location so we didn’t miss the racer’s meeting. As it turned out, there were water stops at 2 locations: mile 5, and mile 9. (The race was 15 miles.) Things were not shaping up well for Team Matt.
2. Since I wasn’t going to carry my backpack, I had no place to store my ratchet tool (it was too long for my under-the-seat bag), and my pedal didn’t feel loose, so I left it in the truck.

8:15 – We arrive at the starting location, where a man with a megaphone gets us lined up by age and skill, and explains where the various water stops and hazards are. Matt and I are going off with the first group, which is, except for Team Matt, filled with people who share the following characteristics:

• They are all in astoundingly good shape, with thin legs and waists and chests that seem to be entirely made of lung. Matt and I are, of course, wider in the middle than anywhere else.
• They are all extremely well equipped; everybody has “camelback” water backpacks (the extremely expensive version of the cheapo $10 things that Sarah bought for us that we stupidly left in the truck), expensive padded biking shorts and thin biking shirts, not to mention bikes that cost anywhere from $800 to $3000. (As you may remember, I got my bike at Walmart for $135.)

We were clearly in over our heads.

8:25 – Our group lines up at the start line in one long row, which somehow they expect to condense into a straight line of riders by the time we enter the “single track” about 200 yards away. This does not bode well. Also, Brian shows up, with his son Zachary, to laugh at us.

8:30 – We’re off! I accelerate hard off the line, which later struck me as the stupidest possible thing I could have done, since by the time we reached the single-track I was ahead of half the field, who then had to pass me on a race course barely four feet wide. Matt won the award for “first off the bike” when he took the first turn at a high rate of speed and realized too late that it was entirely mud. He slid off into a bush, which made me giggle greatly.

8:40 – Mile 1 – Hm. My pedal feels like it’s getting wobbly. This isn’t very good. Meanwhile, the better racers are flying by me like I’m standing still (which I was, some of the time; I’m averse to getting in the way of other people that know what they’re doing, so a few times I just got off my bike and stood out of the way to let the speedier racers go by).

8:50 – Mile 2 – Matt falls off his bike yet again. In a creek, this time. My pedal is getting worse and worse, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to die of exhaustion. The groups that went off 5-10 minutes after us are flying by me, particularly uphill, where I end up having to get off and walk the bike because I can’t pedal properly.

9:00 – Mile 3 – I get off and tighten the bolt a bit with my finger, cursing my decision to leave my ratchet tool back in the truck. By this time I’m walking the bike any time I’m going uphill, and only getting back on for the downhill portions.

9:10 – Mile 4 – We come across some kind of weird Army reservist picnic and ask a Sergeant if they have any tools. They do not.

9:20 – Mile 5 – Finally, the pedal falls off while I’m trying to meander through a field. I go back to retrieve it and the bolt that holds it on, and notice that most of the threads are stripped and the whole apparatus is coated in small metal shavings. At this point I realize I’ve done enough damage to the bike that I’d be hard pressed to ever get it fixed, let alone get it back together enough to finish the race. I come across two gentleman taking pictures of the riders as they go by; they furnish a pair of pliers and help me put the pedal back on enough so that I can get back to the parking lot. Matt rides on ahead and says he’ll meet me at the water station, but the photographers tell me the best way back to my truck is a different route; I ride off in that direction instead.

9:30 – I’m still half riding, half walking my bike on asphalt roads, following the directions given to me by the helpful photographers. Apparently, also at this time, Matt comes back looking for me and rides a mile or two after me before giving up and reentering the race. This waste of about 3-4 miles of energy and hydration becomes very pertinent later on.

10am – I make it back to the truck, load my bike in, and drink an entire 20-25 oz. backpack of water. I then drink some of the other bag as well, and also eat two powerbars, and I go to find Brian and Zachary and see if I can figure out what happened to Matt. Some of the faster riders are already crossing the line at this point. Very impressed am I.

11am – Zachary’s getting tired and hot and hungry, so he and Brian skedaddle. I wander down towards where the riders come flying out of the woods for the last couple hundred yards of climb to the finish line. I notice a young man of about 12 that clearly is in far better shape than I will ever be, pedalling up the hill without any apparent exhaustion. I hate him.

11:30 – Matt calls me on his cellphone, having had to bail out of the race not long after the 2nd water station. He got about 11 miles or so, which is annoying since he was 3-4 miles short, just about the same distance he wasted looking for my dumb ass. I feel guilty. He doesn’t care. We gather our stuff up and get out of there.

noon – We begin eating Boston Market.

So I have to say, it was a somewhat fun, very educational experience. Things I have learned:

1. Get plenty of sleep the night before. 7 hours isn’t really enough. Go for like 10.
2. If you have the means to carry water, carry it. Buttloads of it. Don’t worry about the weight. At least two full water bottles or a backpack full of H2O is minimum, and that’s assuming you can refill everything at water stops every 5 miles.
3. Don’t cheap out on equipment. Bikes purchased at Walmart for $135 are not going to stand up to real mountain biking very long. I’m not sure what I’m going to do now; I can probably bolt the pedal back on with a hellacious amount of superglue and see if that holds it a bit better, but it’s probably still going to have an ugly wobble. I really need to get my road bike back together and do more of that, since I’m planning on Bike to the Bay in October. Anyway, before I do another mountain bike race, I plan to get a decent mountain bike costing at least $400. Which means it’ll be a while before I get another mountain bike.
4. Intake as much crystal meth before you start as you can.

Tomorrow: I take the advice of some friends again, and watch “Team America.” Great disappointment ensues.

Two things you should see:

My 2 minutes of fame this week.

Milo‘s latest creation.

That is all.