Culture Wars

I spent the Memorial Day weekend in America's finest city, San Diego. It was glorious, mostly. We took the grandson to Sea World on Sunday. For my money Sea World is the crappiest theme park in the U.S. The ingress/egress is a nightmare and the ticketing procedure is Soviet-era bad. We were waiting in line to buy tickets when I noticed an older guy sidiling up to the line just ahead of me. I thought to my self, "That guy is going to bust the line." Sure enough he slides in and is quickly joined by two younger guys. You have to understand that this line had at least two hundred people in it and we had been in line for about 45 minutes at that point. My wife, God bless her, says, "Hey what is going on here?" One of the younger guys turns to her and says, "this is the line for tickets." They turn out to be middle eastern fellows. She says, "I know I've been in it for 45 minutes and you weren't in front of me." One guy puts up his hands in the sign of surrender. This causes a bunch of people to turn around and these guys scram fast. You are probably asking yourself why I bring up their ethnicity. Well not because old Merle is an ethnocentric racist, as Kinky Friedman might say, but rather because this illustrates a problem at places where people mingle who have differing understandings of the concept of lines. Which brings me to incident number 2, the parking lot showdown. Clearly, not my finest moment as a person. As I mentioned, egress from Sea World is a nightmare. They funnel dozens of lanes of traffic into a few lines and ultimately those few into one at the traffic light at Sea World Drive. Imagine the feeder network for the Mississippi River and you get the picture. Anyway, we are stuck in a line and a car comes up from a driveway that is perpendicular to us. The guy signals for me to let him into the ine so I do. He is driving a late model Infinity and has advertising for a car stereo store on it. I assume he has some ownership interest in the store. As traffic slowly proceeds we reach a point where several streams of cars are merging into a single line of traffic. The guy I let in is ahead of me but I can't get into the line because the car behind me had crowded me out. I am forced to drive on the shoulder next to Mr. Stereo Store. As we slow, the space in fromt of his car widens to about five car lengths. He is distracted or something. Seeing my chance I speed up to get in. At that moment he floors it and cuts me off. I put down my window and say, "Hey pal I just let you in what are you doing?" He responds that I was trying to cut him off and that he isn't letting me in. For a moment I can't see because of the blood rushing to my eyeballs. "I look at him and say, "I let you in." He respond, "Too bad." I retort, " Bite my ass you jerk." He responds, "Too bad for you." His trashy girlfriend/wife/hooker says, "Hey, you bite your own ass." Clearly she is syntax challenged. I realize that I am dealing with another jerk who doesn't understand the concept of the line. I am not saying he too was middle eastern, but he did own a car stereo joint. After an hour we get onto Sea World Drive, which is two lanes toward I-5. I notice a car ahead with its turn signal on trying to get into my lane. I also see it is my guy. I speed up next to him so that he can't get over, put down my window and scream, "bite my ass you jerk, you're not changing lanes." There is alot of shouting and bird-flipping back and forth but he isn't going anywhere. Slowly he drops back still stuck with his flasher going and his girlfriend/wife shouts, "You tired-ass bitch!" I take the next right and disappear into the night. As I said, not my finest moment. Tag: Rants