All Tough, All The Time

I Don't Wanna Get Off On A Rant Here, But...

[warning: not-so-clean language is contained herein]

For a moment, I’d like to discuss the marvel that is Guam traffic engineering. I’m really not sure who is responsible for the design and construction of roads here, but my guess would be good ol’ “Gov Guam” as it’s known. Gov Guam, the sorry excuse for a local government, is not known for being very reliable or thorough in basically anything they do. The governor is no exception to this rule. I don’t know much about the current governor, but the previous governor is currently up to his neck in shit for stealing tax money to fund the building of his estate. Nice job, gov. Then there was another governor, or maybe it was the same guy, who closed down one of the local schools in order to make it the Governor’s Complex. Why in the world would he do that? Well, the school was in a beautiful location right on the ocean and it looked more like the summer getaway of a Colombian drug lord than an establishment for education. That’s not to say it was a sketchy place- it looks like it was a great place for a school. In a nutshell, the governor said fuck the kids, booted them out, and made it his office space. Oh, and he put a nice big statue of himself out front. How noble…you self-aggrandizing, narcissistic piece of crap.

Anyway, we’re not here to lambaste (too much) the governor or his shoddy organization. No, we’re here to laugh at the roads. Now, I’m no traffic engineer, but I do have some semblance of common sense and a little insight from my Dad, who is, in part, a civil engineer. I’ve learned from him that there are certain important things needed on major roadways like, say, drainage. If the roads are filling up with water, it’s not exactly conducive to driving. Apparently they don’t get that concept here on Guam, despite the fact that it rains here, often heavily, every day during this time of year.

The primary road, Marine Corp Drive, which runs right outside my door, is in the busiest area of the island. It’s a 6-lane divided road that, in this area of Tumon, is along the side of a steep hill. The topography would promote perfectly decent draining of the roadways when torrents of water come rushing down during a storm. However, culverts are few and far between, placed in stupid spots (i.e., in some places higher ground than the surrounding spots), or clogged. Water flows down the streets so abundantly during large storms that often some of the lanes are full of water. But maybe there’s just nothing they can do about it. I mean, there’s a lot of rain, right?

Then there’s the omnipresent construction going on. Either they’re perfectionists and never satisfied with how the roads turn out or, more likely, they’re screwing up and have to keep going back to redo their work. A classic example of this is how they will frequently pave a road and then, sometimes days, sometimes weeks later, go back and rip up a chunk of the road to repair something. Now, often this may be because they have to repair a water main or sewage line (which conveniently run side-by-side here), which has nothing to do with the road. But other times they just tear up pavement, without further digging, and leave it that way for weeks.

Here’s one of my favorites. Just a couple years ago, there were no contiguous sidewalks along Marine Corp Drive. Gov Guam decided that, perhaps, they should allow some other option besides driving or certain death. So, they built sidewalks running for several miles. They’re a little lumpy, they’re poorly maintained, and there are huge, concrete power poles that in some places take up half the sidewalk, but they do have them. I appreciate that. What I don’t appreciate is when, for no particular reason, they rip up a huge chunk of the sidewalk, don’t flag it in any way, and I crash into it on my bike at 25mph.

So, I’m biking along and everything is wonderful. The sun is shining, a light breeze in my hair, the birds are sing… oh, wait, there aren’t birds here. Anyway, I’m just tooting along, minding my own, and I decide to ride on a section of sidewalk I don’t normally traverse. Well, at first the sidewalk is fine (most of it is new in this area) and I’m swerving around power poles per the usual. Unexpectedly, there’s this gap in the sidewalk about two feet wide and 10’’ deep, stretching across the entire thing. It’s narrow enough that I don’t see it until the last second, but too wide (and deep) to successfully cross without screwing up my bike. On one side is a drop off with loose gravel and the other death-by-speeding, exhaust-spewing automobile. Thinking quickly (as I always do not do), I jump over the gap with my front tire, but lacking the skill or clipless pedals to bunny hop the entire thing, I slam my rear tire directly into the crevasse.

Amazingly, my tire didn’t explode and I didn’t fall off my bike, but my rim was effectively destroyed. It had a major dent from the impact and I broke two spokes in the process. When you break even one spoke, it temporarily warps the rim. Having a bent rim and two broken spokes makes for one silly-looking wheel. Being too far to head back home, I decided to ride another 5 miles or so to Potts, from where I could get a ride from someone.

I’m impressed with my bike that it made it to Potts. Now my wheel is fixed, but it set me back about $80 for a rim, new spoke set, and labor. My frustration came primarily from the fact that I had just been into the bike shop twice in the past two weeks to repair broken spokes on my rear tire. For some reason, they were breaking while doing things that normally don’t break spokes, such as riding down a flat stretch of asphalt. Maybe this close encounter with the fault line was to prevent me from having to walk a broken bike in the adventure race next week. Then again, maybe it’s just karma having a laugh. Either way, Hornets sporting goods made off like bandits.

Ironically, the hellhole is now marked off with cones. My guess is that someone remembered, after a couple months, that, “Oh, yeah. We forgot to mark that huge, gaping hole in the sidewalk, didn’t we?” However, it’s also likely that someone else had a similar incident and, rather than bitching about it on their web journal, actually called up Gov Guam and chastised them for being the morons they are.

Another engineering marvel is the road design at the airport. Take the average electrical cord sitting in a box in the back of your closet for 15 years and you’ve got a pretty good schematic of the road layout there. The traffic is horrible, no one knows where to go, and by all accounts there should be a lot more accidents then there are. However, no one can go very fast since they’re all crammed bumper-to-bumper in failed attempts to move anywhere.

All right, I think that’s enough of deriding for the time being. I’d like to continue by discussing the abnormal amount of rain we’ve been getting over the past week. Today was the first day in over a week that I was able to ride my bike to work without the imminent threat of being killed by a car sliding on the coral-based roadways. Old coral, being in abundance here, was once used to pave the roads (it may still be mixed with the asphalt even now). The only major problem is that the coral easily grows thin layers of algae when it’s wet, creating a very slick surface on which to make poor attempts at safely driving. So, if it’s pouring rain in the morning, I don’t ride my bike. I would be pretty upset (I think my family wouldn’t be too pleased, either), if I met my demise on the grill of an out of control car, especially in Guam.

Every day the same basic series of events has panned out. It will be pouring in the morning, the rain will let up in the afternoon, it will rain again in the evening, stop at night, and start back up all over again the next morning. Today the rain held off until just after I got home. Now it’s dumping down with full force. It’s not exactly a monsoon, but it’s about as close as Guam gets to one without the presence of a typhoon. The heaviest rain we’ve had so far was conveniently when Chris and I were checking traps out at closed pop. on Sunday.

It began lightly raining right as we started, which happens frequently. As we continued along our way, the rain picked up and became pretty steady. By the time we were finished the trap lines inside the fence, we were both completely soaked. However, the storm was just getting started. My first outside line was fine, but the very dark, very ominous clouds rolling in our direction didn’t bode well for what remained. As I began the next line, the shit hit the fan. The temperature felt like it dropped about 10 degrees and I nearly expected to see some hail. The rain picked up to such an extent that it was coming in sideways and I could barely keep my eyes open. It was actually a hell of a lot of fun. That is, until the lightening struck Chris. No, no, I’m kidding. Lightening was striking nearby, but not quite close enough to be any real imminent danger. Well, unless you’re picking up the large aluminum ladder we use to get in and out of the fence. As Chris was taking it down, I yelled to him, “Hey, why don’t you hold that up a little higher?” It’s bad enough that we’re some of the tallest things out there since the vegetation is stunted. The last thing you need is a large metal object in your hands. I nearly expected a reenactment of the storm scene from Caddyshack.

While I’m on the subject of movies, I was luckily able to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It came out about 2 months ago at this point, but it never showed up in theaters here, much to the disappointment of both Brent and I. However, Karen called me up on Friday to let me know it was playing at the $2 theater down the street. Excellent! I had to work that night, so she saw it, but Matt, Chris, and I went to check it out Sunday night. We were soon accompanied (although we didn’t see them until leaving) by Ginger and her boyfriend Justin who just moved out here. We were also greeted by Claudine and her boyfriend Mark, who is in town for a couple weeks. Apparently the 5:30 showing of Eternal Sunshine was the place to be. It was really a fantastic film and probably one of my favorites in a while. Just in terms of creativity, Eternal Sunshine and Big Fish are right up there. For those of you who haven’t seen it, I recommend checking it out.

After such an acclaimed film packed with substance, we decided to dumb it down a bit and go see Dodgeball. After some dinner and pool at the Mariana Trench, we went over to the Guam Premier Outlets (oh, yeah, baby) and saw one of the stupider, but really funny, movies I’ve seen in a while. Ben Stiller's character is classic, accentuated by his incredibly fake handlebar mustache (a la his character in Happy Gilmore). This is at least the third time he has played an arrogant imbecile and the character is nearly identical to the one he played in Fat Camp. However, it’s still funny and he’s good at it, so that’s really all that matters for this movie. There was even a random Guam reference at the end. It was definitely entertaining, albeit ridiculous. Of course, I really liked Tommy Boy, Ace Ventura, and Jackass: The Movie, so that let’s you know where I stand.

All right, just one more thing to bitch about, this time it involves our local, not-so-friendly postal workers. A couple of the people at the post office appear to be very much the classic disgruntled postal workers. There’s one guy in particular that just rubs me the wrong way. He appears to be in his early 50’s, he wears thick glasses, sports a thin mustache, and he always looks like he holds contempt for all his customers. He also takes his sweet time in every task there. It’s not as though I want the guy to run around like an idiot in an attempt to get the line moving as fast as possible, but his frequent trips into the void that is the back room are really annoying. He’ll often wait on a couple customers and then stroll out back under the guise of doing something important, not returning for several minutes. None of his coworkers do this. This probably isn’t much to be perturbed with, but there’s just something about the guy I don’t like. It could be the large “I loath Isaac Chellman” tattoo on his forehead, but I may be reading into it.

No, I don’t think I necessarily am and here’s why. I biked down to the post office today to send off some things. I brought my bike inside, setting it way in the back, in an area never used by anyone in all the times I’ve been there. A couple of the employees saw me come in and said nothing. So, I prepared my package and got in line. After about five minutes, I was staring off into space when I caught eye contact with my buddy from above. Immediately afterward he broke eye contact with me and said, “Who’s bike is that?” Now, keep in mind there are about a dozen people in line. Me being the exception, everyone is at least older or not dressed at all for biking (unless you’re into biking in heels and a dress). I’m in shorts, my t-shirt is soaked with sweat, I’m wearing a backpack, and I have bike gloves on. Gee, sir, who could POSSIBLY have brought that bike in here several minutes ago while your head was in your ass?

Attempting to keep some composure, I say, “It’s mine.” “Please put your bike outside.” “Do you mean outside the room or outside of the building?” “Outside of the building.” Suppressing the strong desire to throw my helmet at his fat head, I turn around to get my bike. The guy behind me, an older man proudly displaying his Veteran hat, said to me, “Do you have a lock? Someone will take it out there.” I nodded, went outside, and locked up my bike on a tree. When I came back in, the Veteran gentleman kindly let me back in my spot and said, “Your bike wasn’t bothering anyone.” I responded, purposely speaking in a normal volume in my postal friend’s direction, “Yeah, I know it wasn’t. Apparently it’s a breach of security to have your bike inside the room.” The jerk didn’t look up, of course, but he did leave after finishing with his customer to get a fan (apparently to cool off his desire to vaporize me with an AK-47).

By a stroke of luck, he was the one who waited on me. I was polite, as was he, although I did have to suppress the urge to strangle him with my bare hands. Maybe I need a punching bag to let out some of this aggression? I think it’s exacerbated by the story my brother recently discussed on his live journal of people being stupid on a train ride he and Lisa took to a concert this weekend. It’s annoying enough when people are jerks to you, but it’s much worse for me when I hear of it happening to my brother.

In happier news, I updated my Friendster account this weekend and added a few friends to my list who I haven’t talked with in a long time. They’re all folks I met at Kingswood and with whom I have some fond memories: Evan Coffey, Ashley Allen, and, to my shock, Ryan Crossan. As I told Ryan, I made several half-assed attempts to contact him over the past several years with no success. I’m not positive, but I believe the last time I saw him was my sophomore year at UVM. The two of us were close friends my senior year of high school, but things kind of fizzled out when I went off to college. It’s great to be back in contact with him and hopefully we’ll be able to e-mail regularly. Evan was another guy I knew later on in high school. He was in the same crew as Ryan and I, a bunch of obnoxious comedians in the drama club. Evan is a hilarious kid and fantastic at improv. I really think he could go far as an actor if he set his mind on it. The same goes for Ryan.

I believe the first time I met Ashley was in my sophomore biology class. She was a year younger than me, but in many classes above freshman-level. Ashley is exceptionally bright and has always done well in school. She excelled at Kingswood and often got a lot of crap from people because of it. Some people thought she was an intellectual snob, which was not the case. It was a classic case of those people who felt inferior deciding to harass the person smarter than them. Fortunately, it seemed like she had to deal with that less as she got older. The first time we spent any amount of time together was in our AP biology class taught by the devilish(ly handsome) E. Kevin Thorsell, whale-watcher extraordinaire and captain of the Cetus. Ashley, Allison, and I had a great time on a whale watch the summer after my freshman year of college, a day-long excursion that left me the color of a seared steak.

The last bit of news that’s fit to print is that my good friend Priya, who I worked with at Patuxent, is now engaged. She recently took a trip to Italy with her then boyfriend, now fiancé, Shannon and he proposed to her in Tuscany. Apparently it was very unexpected for her, in a very good way, and she sounds ecstatic. Now if only I can make it back for THAT wedding and not have a repeat like missing Brian’s wedding! I suppose that will be up to me, now won’t it?

Posted by Isaac at June 21, 2004 11:31 PM