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A comedy of errors

I was quite perturbed. I made a stop in North Hollywood to get some money out of the Bank of America ATM on the way to my Basketball Game. Absentmindedly, i made a safe illegal U-turn from the curb and was subsequently pulled over by a couple of young bald cops. If you have ever been in my car around town, you would know that i am one of the most traffic law abiding citizens out there. Because tickets are stupid and not to mention a pain in the you know what. Once getting pulled over, i knew there was no talking myself out of it. There is no point to it anyway, right? I hadn't planned on admitting guilt though. Besides, the process of "getting a ticket" is merely an indictment of sorts. You may plead your case in court and the cop may not even care. What i did was completely illegal, so i figured i'd just shut my mouth and eat the ticket, pay the fine and effectively remove the pending point from my driving record by attending traffic school. Not a fun concept but necessary, nonetheless.

"Do you know why i pulled you over?" inquired the young cop. "I do" i replied, sounding completely resigned and hopeless. It was no time for debate (and i was in no position to). I just wanted to get it over with. But for some reason, even though i had said yes, the cop felt compelled to explain my error. Technically and eloquently at that like a professor. It actually sounded like he was reading from a manual or something. I remained silent even at his strange enthusiasm, hoping to get out of there as soon as possible (I did not wanna be late for my basketball game). I was actually pretty surprised those guys did not draw their guns. You see in my haste, i had grabbed the registration and proof of insurance from the glove box rather abruptly after being asked for it (Almost like reaching for a weapon, you know what i mean?). Of course i didn't realize i was doing so, until, well, until i was doing so...

I swear it was an interminable wait for that ticket. And when i finally signed it, the cop bid me a "nice rest of the weekend". What?! What a thing to say, i thought. I felt it was somewhat improper ya know? Must he say something at all? I obviously was not in the mood to be social nor did i feel i should have been. But what could i say? I was in a hurry. So as perturbed as i was, i just had to let it go...

I made it just in time for my ball game thankfully, despite the unexpected stop (I like to arrive early and warm up). I was still feeling a little heated though, so i thought the game was a great opportunity to channel my frustrations in a positive way. But unfortunately, my frustrations would continue to pile up. We began the game down 10 points (10-0) and scored a measly 14 points total in the first half. Down by 16 points (That's 20 minutes of basketball). My day was not going great...

I told the guys we had a lot of work to do in the second half. Were gonna try our best! And it was a good opportunity for a great comeback. I mean what better way to appease my dismal day than a win. Right? With 4 minutes remaining in the second half, though in a slow and somewhat methodical way, we cut the lead by half. Then two minutes later we took over the lead by 5 points and in penalty (free throws), much to their dismay and surprise. Especially because they began to blow their own trumpets very early on. But this blog is entitled "A comedy of errors" so you must know we would wind up blowing the game, even with two critical mistakes in the last minute by our opponents. They hit a three pointer to cut our lead by two but then made their first critical error by fouling off the in-bounce, sending us to the line. And then they did it again on the ensuing possession. A total brain fart. All of this would have worked to our advantage, except, we missed all our free throws and they made back to back baskets to take the lead by 1, leaving us with 3.1 seconds to try to win the game. Needless to say we botched the drawn-up play by Phil Jackson.

I didn't even bother with Poker that evening...

On Monday i had decided to work from home in the morning with the intention of taking the rest of the day off to take care of a personal matter. My boss (nice guy that he is...) suggested to take the whole day off instead. This allowed me to take care of my matters before 1 pm and was able to sneak in plans for a matinée show at 2:15. To give you a bit of a history about my movie futility as of late; i had not seen a movie since the Summer of 2007-- it was Transformers (Incidentally, that was the last time i got a traffic ticket). So you can imagine my excitement over this one!

Of course this blog is entitled "A comedy of errors" so you must know i would wind up missing the movie somehow. Though this one was no fault of mine. The real problem was that my friend could not go to a later showing, it had to be some time around 2 pm or nothing. That's the thing about going to the movies. Since i go so infrequently i tend to treat it like a Dentist appointment. You know, arrive extra extra early, to allow some room for error if you will... Not this time though. When we arrived at the movie theater, the very first thing i noticed was four employees having a smoke break right outside the ticket booth. That didn't seem like a normal scene at a movie theater to me. So, right away, i thought something was amiss. As it turns out, the movie theater was closed because of a Power outage. I guess it wasn't mean to be...

Posted by: Marc Gabay
Monday, January 21, 2008