OW! My Rhomboids!
A list of current woes that I thought we could go over.
My rhomboids are inflamed! May this never happen to you.
The rhomboid muscles connect your shoulder blade to your spine. Or so I think. I’ve tried reading a few articles about this, but who can concentrate when your back feels like it is on fire? All I know is that I did something to screw up my rhomboids, probably from too much swimming. I was doing a lot of swimming in an effort to lose weight so I wouldn’t end up with back pain. The lesson clearly is to never exercise.
About 10 days ago or so I began to notice it hurt when I was sitting at my desk. I adjusted my chair and it didn’t help. Then it began to hurt when I stood too long. Now? Now it pretty much hurts from the minute I wake up until I eventually fall asleep. Trouble! Trouble right here in River City!
What’s worse is that I am packing on the pounds because I can’t stop eating shit. Do you realize how close I live to a Taco Bell? Do you know that Taco Bell makes something called a “Grilled Cheese Burrito”? What even is that? I have no idea, because I inhaled mine last night shrouded in darkness and shame in my automobile approximately 11 seconds after a teenager handed it to me through the drive-in window. From what I can tell the Grilled Cheese Burrito is a sodium slurry wrapped in a sleeve of dough. It’s miraculous.
Worse news: the Reggie! bar is back. Have you ever had a Reggie! bar? It isn’t really a bar, it’s more of a patty. It’s like if an elephant stepped on a Baby Ruth. This is not a negative. When they were created the food artisans said “this is so delicious we don’t have time to make it into any shape. We want to get this to you NOW.” And they were right to do so.
The Reggie! was only around from 1978 to 1981. They briefly came back in the 1990s, but now they are here to stay.
I absolutely one during that initial run, though. I distinctly remember chomping into a Reggie! at the Krauszer’s Deli next to DuSal’s Pizzeria in Freehold. And it was with that first Reggie! bar when I learned who Reggie Jackson was. (He was a baseball player, later seen in the movie The Naked Gun.) We had a family friend named Reggie, short for Regina, so I did not know Reggies could be men, too.
While eating (and loving) the mound of caramel, chocolate, and peanuts as a young lad I naturally assumed that Reggie was the most common name in the world. Then I didn’t meet another Reggie until 2004, when I became a New York City tour guide and began yanking dough out of Gray Line’s pockets on the “Night Loop.” (I wrote about that scheme here, but changed the driver’s name to Andre.)
That same Krauszer’s still trucks in olde tyme candy. I bought a strawberry Charleston Chew just a few days ago before going to see Shin Godzilla — a strange formalist exercise masquerading as a monster movie. (As such, it frequently is more “interesting” than “good” — but when it cooks, it really cooks.)
I picked up a Reggie! bar a few days later at a car wash in Toms River, shortly before visiting the Robert J. Novins Planetarium at Ocean County College — a campus with an agreeable EPCOT Center aesthetic.
The Novins still does a few old school “expert with a pointer” shows where the topic is “what’s in the night sky tonight?” The lecturer (← I suspect there is a cooler name for what the guy at the Planetarium is called, but let’s stick with lecturer for now) is a fella named Phil Zollner, and if you search under his name you’ll see he’s something of an important guy in this field. He’s been at this post for 47 years.
Of note: in a few months, the orbits of Earth and Saturn will align in such a way that the great gas giant’s rings will be “edgewise” from our planet’s perspective. This means that the ring will be at such an angle that it will appear so thin we won’t even see it at all. A Saturn with no ring, can you dig that? This happens once every 13 years or so. Weirder is that, due to orbital fluctuations, it won’t be like a moon waxing then waning and that’s it; the angles will align, then drop out of alignment, then there will be a return, and this cycle will repeat a few more times — almost as if someone is trying to get these two things to sync up, but wobbling around a little bit before finally getting it to snap into place. I like the idea of a clockwork universe that factors in momentary whoopsies like that.
Anyway, after the hourlong look at the cosmos, the real fun began: LASER QUEEN.
Oh yeah we’re going to the Laser Show!
They still make laser shows. I know, I can barely believe it myself.
The Laser Show, if you are on the younger side, is a cultural artifact from a pre-YouTube, hell, pre-MTV era, when access to musical output wasn’t that easy to come by. Basically you lean back, look at the dome of a planetarium, listen to classic rock, and watch colors zoom around.
I have not been to a laser show in 30 years. I distinctly remember the last one I went to, at the old Hayden Planetarium. It was a mix of tunes, not dedicated to a specific artist, an I remember thinking “what the hell am I doing with my life?” as I listened to “Toys in the Attic” by Aerosmith as the word TOYS exploded above me then disintegrated into little red twinkles. I attended with a girl whose name I can not remember, but, um, I remember other things about her. (That’s enough about that, my wife sometimes reads this blog.)
Today’s laser shows are of considerably better quality than the ones from my youth, but a Def Leppard can’t really change its spots. You are still sitting there listening to a tape while goofy squirts around on the ceiling.
For the Queen set, there was room for a little humor. The place turned into a velodrome during “Bicycle Race” and when Freddie Mercury shouted “Galileo!!” during “Bohemian Rhapsody” we saw images of the real Galileo. I was delighted.
During “Another One Bites the Dust,” though, they went the pure synesthesia route. I can’t explain it, but the images they constructed for the scratchy funk guitar during the “How do you think I'm gonna get along” bit was exactly right.
I kinda expected a bunch of stoned teenagers at the Laser Show. Alas, this wasn’t the case. In fact, the place was mostly empty. (On the positive side, it is increasingly rare that I go somewhere and end up being the youngest person in attendance!) I’m told that the Laser Taylor Swift events sell clean through to a different clientele. I’ll definitely be going back.