Eric Hates You

Thursday evenings used to be one of my favorite times during the week.  Not anymore.  Now I have to turn the volume on my television way up to drown out the sound of badly played Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bon Jovi.  To the cover band that plays at the bar behind my house on Thursdays nights, you are awful.  I hate you.  I don’t even know the name of your band but I’m sure it’s something like, “Full Throttle” or “Maximum Overdrive” or “Under The Gun”.  I haven’t seen what you look like but I’m going to guess that the singer is bald, has a nicely trimmed goatee and wears a black t-shirt that is way too tight for him.  Your drummer wears a flannel with the sleeves cut off, weight lifting gloves, and cutoff jean shorts with a hole in the left thigh.  The bassist has long curly red hair, weighs 99 lbs and sweats more than I do when I hit the sauna.  The guitarist is wearing a faded Jimi Hendrix t-shirt that he was wearing when he met his wife in 1988 and is wearing matching faded black jeans with the same work boots in which he spent the earlier portion of his day.

Now I understand that your band is an escape from your 9-5 job, nagging wife and your rebellious kids who don’t respect their father because he spent their college fund on a Fender but I want you to realize the reality of this situation.  You play at a bar on Thursday nights.  A bar that doesn’t even have live music on the weekends.  They would rather play a jukebox than have your band play live for their weekend customers.  I would hope that the people heading out to the bar on a Thursday night are going there to get drunk out of their skulls because any sober person will despise your band for ruining “War Pigs”, “Livin’ On A Prayer”, and “Old Time Rock and Roll” forever.  On top of that, ending every Thursday night suck fest with your cover of “Drift Away” makes me want to move away and out of my apartment.  Some day I will make my way down to that bar on a Thursday night, earplugs in ear, so I can see if my suspicions are true.  Maybe I’ll even get my picture taken with you so I can post it here, or even better, maybe your band will have a Myspace page.

I went to fill up my full size, late 90’s sedan today and the person next to me had the gall to strike up a conversation about how high gas prices were reaching. Instead of punching this man in the throat to teach him a lesson about having conversations with strangers, I decided to let him continue. He went on to say that at this rate, we’d be paying $6 for a gallon of gas by the end of the year. Apparently this man has never taken a high school math course. Just for kicks, I told him that I lived in Denmark for a year and gas prices were already $6 a gallon and that I was happy gas was so cheap here in America. Like most people who rub me the wrong way, he gave me a dirty look, got back into his SUV, and went along his merry way.

Are you really going to gripe about a 5 cent increase in the price of gas? By the time you are done reading this article, you could have made enough money working to cover that 5 cent increase for a full tank of gas. Unless you are filling up a motorhome, you are complaining about an increase of between 60 cents and a dollar per fill up. I’m pretty sure I’d swallowed that much change by the time I turned 10 years old. I’ll also ignore the fact that if you are filling up a motorhome, a 5 cent increase in gas prices should be fairly low on your budgetary concerns. America is finally catching up to what the rest of the world has been paying for years and you are going to complain about it? You better hope that the next time you decide to talk to a stranger about high gas prices you don’t get a punch in your throat because it might just be me.