" /> BRAINPAN LEAKAGE » concrete
  • Goodbye Cruel World…

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    170signThere is a stretch of highway in Saint Louis county known as I-170. Sometimes it is called the “Innerbelt”, although these days that term is not as prevalent as it was once upon a time. A time, incidentally, that I am actually old enough to remember.

    You see, way back when, in the days of dinosaurs and mammoths, I-170 was designated as 725. These days I-170 stretches from the Highway 40 interchange in the southern portion of the county, up to the I-270 interchange in the north. But, back when it was called 725 – or, as we teens at the time called it, Seven And A Quarter – the Innerbelt ran from Eager Road in the south and unceremoniously ended with a barricade and a single must take exit at Page Avenue, smack in the middle of Northwest County. Back then it was the quickest way – and ostensibly, still is – to get to Clayton. You may have heard of Clayton – and no, I’m not talking about Clayton Moore aka The Lone Ranger. Clayton, Missouri is where you find the county courthouse.

    But, as usual, I’m not actually writing this blog to talk about Clayton. I’m writing it to talk about construction.

    Road construction to be precise.

    Many years ago, as the dinosaurs were dying out and mammals were becoming the dominant species (i.e. my early, early 20’s) our short little stretch of tarmac, so lovingly known as Seven And A Quarter became I-170 and was expanded, lengthened, what have you. Well, as urban sprawl continues to… well… sprawl, traffic changes and what seemed like a good idea at the time no longer meets the needs of the unforeseen future. So, things get torn up, rebuilt, expanded, stretched, widened, and otherwise completely re-invented.

    Such was the case with I-170. At some point during my late, late 30’s the powers that be realized that the person who had originally designed the interchange at I-170 and I-270 had probably been smoking crack while drawing up the plans. It was probably one of the wort, most congested, and literally dangerous interchanges known to man. So, in a bid to correct the mistake, they redesigned it, tore it all up, and made a bigger and better interchange between the thoroughfares.

    Then, traffic increased on I-170 because the I-270 terminus was no longer a clusterf*ck. What did that mean? Well, simple. It made the rest of I-170 a cluster. What was once a lonely stretch of road connecting two parts of the county was becoming a parking lot every morning and evening throughout the week. So, what did the powers that be do? Well, the only thing they could. They found someone else who wasn’t on crack, redesigned the Innerbelt, tore it up, and made it better than it was.

    Better, stronger, faster…

    Let me tell you, it cost more than 6 million bucks too. It even cost more than 7 million (the pricetag on the Bionic Woman… ya’know, inflation and all…)

    But, in the end, congestion was alleviated and I-170, while not returned to its original quietude as 725, became much easier and faster to travel. In many ways this is good. In others, maybe not so much. You see, living where we do, I-170 is pretty much a main thoroughfare for us. It is  close by, easily accessible, and an artery that will take us most anywhere we need or want to go – even if it is simply getting us to a different highway in order to reach our final destination. Therefore, E K and I travel it often.

    Such was the case just the other day.

    As we cruised along in the northbound lanes, wind whistling past the Evil-Mobile, (at the time the cloaking device was on and switched to Soccer Mom Van mode), and traveling somewhere near 987 miles per hour, (E K may be a petite bundle of mean, but her foot weighs 12 metric tonnes whenever it comes into contact with a gas pedal), we were watching the landscape flashing in the windows. Bare patches of flattened land were evident where grassy berms and stands of trees once lined the thoroughfare. Nearing our exit I happened to glance to the left and noticed the carcass of a rather large groundhog, sprawled lifeless in the center emergency lane against the better than 3 foot high concrete dividers.

    I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the creature, and vocalized my theory about its demise.

    “Poor bastard was probably just trying to cross the road and got stuck there because of the dividers and traffic,” I lamented.

    groundhogEK  clucked her tongue and said, “Maybe it ran into traffic on purpose.”

    I furrowed my brow and grunted, “Whaddaya mean?”

    “I mean maybe it finally had enough of us tearing up its home and it just ran into traffic to commit suicide.”

    You know, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if E K was right about that. And, what’s worse – If I were a groundhog trying to escape the utter insanity of human urban sprawl, I might just do the same…

    More to come…

    Murv

  • I Wanna Be On TV…

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    Well, actually, I have been, but that’s a different story.

    So, why do I want to be on TV? For the fame? The glory? The hot chicks?

    To be honest, none of the above.

    Let’s step back for a minute. Not to TV land, but to early last week in Murvland. For reasons that don’t bear exploring at this juncture I had to make a mad dash to the hardware store during a downpour. For yet still other reasons that don’t bear exploring, while in the parking lot of said store I fell. I fell hard. I fell hard three times. Onto concrete. Wet concrete. Hard, wet, concrete.

    Okay, you get the idea.

    Anyhow, I was bruised. I have a purple hip and a purple stomach where I fell on top of the item I was carrying, (yeah, for a dyed in the wool Browncoat to have a “purple belly” it really sucks). I also have shattered cartilage in one knee, and a lot of achey muscles. I’m not as bad off as I was last week, but I’m still a bit sore here and there.

    Now, this incident didn’t stop me from going on with my life. I didn’t end up in the hospital or anything that drastic. However, at 46 and some change one does not just get up, brush off, and go on as if nothing happened. No, that is reserved for the 20 year olds… So, while I was still moving about, it was slow going, with a lot of pain. Yes, I groaned, moaned, and even whined a bit.

    What in the name of Pete does this have to do with being on TV, you ask…

    No, there weren’t any cameras in the parking lot filming me… Well, actually I don’t know if there were or not. Maybe there were and I just haven’t seen the Youtube video just yet. But, that’s neither here nor there… I fell, I hurt, I moved slow…

    Now, on TV it is a different story. I watched the season finales of Bones and House the other night and discovered that the world inside the tube is radically different. People almost completely heal within hours or even minutes. For the truly horrid injuries it might take a couple of days, but that’s just for the REALLY life threatening stuff.

    For instance – On Bones one of the main characters took a penetrating round from a revolver. I didn’t get a good enough look at it to say what caliber, but it was at a minimum a .38. Moreover, the wound was in his right chest. He wasn’t wearing body armor or a bullet proof vest either. He bled a lot. He passed out. We didn’t know whether or not he would survive. Something on the order of one week later (maybe even less) he was not only up moving around, but tackling bad guys and waving his arms about. The only evidence of the wound was that he was wearing a bandaid. Other than that, he was just fine and dandy. Now, I won’t even go into the rest of the stupidity that tried to pass for a storyline in that episode, but suffice it to say, unless Patrick Duffy shows up in a shower at the beginning of the first episode next season, they’ve lost me as a viewer.

    On House we had yet another semi-miracle. Of course, Hugh and the crew perform those weekly, but this one was really cool (in some ways, literally). A patient who had been severely injured in a bus crash, then purposely put into hypothermia, including filling her lungs with slurry, is warmed up and re-awakened (basically so they can tell her she is dead as soon as they turn off the bypass machine or in a few hours, whichever comes first). She lays on the bed and carries on a clear and coherent conversation with her boyfriend so they can say goodbye. The fun part about this (besides the enormous technical inaccuracies that a layman could spot) was the fact that this two part episode only spanned something like 24 hours in TV time. What I found really amazing about this is how clear, coherent, and without pain she was. You see, when my appendix burst several years ago I spent a week in the hospital. I won’t go into the gory details, but I wasn’t clear and coherent for at least 3 days. I wasn’t without pain for better than a week. After what she endured, and with the limited time frame, I’m thinking maybe a handful of “ouches” and an “I forgot what I was saying, sorry about that,” or two would have been in order.

    So, you see… That’s why I want to be on TV. It obviously doesn’t hurt as much when you get injured, and apparently it doesn’t hurt anywhere near as long. I could definitely do with the not hurting.

    But, even if I don’t get to be on TV, I suppose I will never write for it either. Why? Because, in my mind if I write something it has to make sense. Sure, even I have elements to my stories that require suspension of disbelief, but you are only allowed just so much of that before suspension turns into “you’ve gotta be effing kidding me…”

    You see, suspending it is one thing. Shooting it in the head, burying it in the back yard, and forgetting you ever saw it is completely different. It’s also not very nice.

    More to come…

    Murv