Welcome to Miami...

So we moved to Miami…long strange trip…crammed into a very short period of time. Here's a little context. In 9 weeks...

I moved down here to start a new job.
Renee packed up the entire house in NJ
Renee came down and interviewed, she got a new job.
Got Ava registered into a new school
Bought a new house
Sold the old house
Moved in.

It was 20 gallons of fun in a 10 gallon bucket.

So what have I learned so far in my short time here? Hold on to your panties...

Driving:

Ok I had heard tons of stories about driving down here back when I lived in NJ. I laughed out loud while I read the accounts that Dave Barry put to paper in his humor columns after he moved to Miami…but it turns out a lot of what he wrote isn't humor.

So its pretty simple. Down here traffic moves at 2 speeds, One is just under 8 miles an hour, the other is at a speed sufficient to outrun a full-bore tsunami.

The traffic rules seem pretty flexible depending on time of day, ambient temperature, day of week, random holiday etc. and of course the elderly (who all seem to be driving tremendous cadillacs imported from 1982) don't have to follow any of the rules… 

...ever.

They pretty much do whatever they want and you would not be surprised to see a, Powder Blue El Dorado making its way thru the lobby of the Fountaineblue Hotel on a typical Tuesday afternoon.

Also here it doesn't seem to be a crime to change lanes without looking, the rule seems to be if you really need to get out of the way…then you will.

I may be wrong but the other morning I was headed down 37th Avenue (more on that Rubiks Cube in a second) and it appeared that everyone on both sides of the road, in all lanes were all going south at the same time.

Now logically that can't be right, I mean unless Godzilla is making his way to downtown Miami, I can't image the flow of traffic would just be reversed, even if only to accommodate his rampage.

Generally the rule seems to be to go as fast as possible at all times.

Traffic Signs and Lights.

Haven't been able to make sense of this either, I drive around a fair amount now and from what I can tell, I think there is a group of people employed by the city who run around every night and change the signs randomly, so one day you might not be able to make a right turn without checking for pedestrians and the next day, Bam!... it's OK to mow down a half dozen nuns cause they're walking too slow.

The Grid (Ha!)

They say there is a grid down here, it's separated into NW, SW, Sideways and Left. I may be making that up, not sure. Anyway, the system is such that you can follow a series of streets that go SW23rd Street then SW23rd Terrace then SW23rd Court etc so that whereas in a place like NY you know for certain that there are 20 blocks between 12th and 32nd Street, down here it could be 353 blocks between SW 23rd Street and SW 28th Street only probably more.

Also in an attempt to make sure no one ever takes the same route twice, there are multiple names for all the streets. So Miracle Mile is also Coral Way and on the same sign it tells you what corner you are at... Ponce De Leon and there also appears to be a random number like 190 on there too.

Then on many corners there are no street signs, instead you have concrete markers about 12 inches high that sit on the grass. Now since most people here drive over 138 miles an hour, they can't read them. By the time the light hits your cornea with the image, you're already 6 blocks away.

So what have I learned from all this, is that everyone (other than Gonzalo, the VP of my firm who has some innate sense of this so-called-grid), no one in Miami tells anyone, at anytime how to get anywhere by telling them street names. It always sounds like this:

So, you know the Burger King near the Crook n' Crook, you take a left there, go thru the roundabout and make another left at the Dairy Queen, go a bunch of streets until you see the BBQ place with the fat pig on top of the roof, pull into their parking lot, there's a hole in the fence behind it, mind the bum who sleeps near the trashcans and then take a right when you see the stone wall with graffiti that says "Raoul has Tasty Nuts". That's where the laundromat is.

Public Affection and Downright Nakedosity.

So its no secrets that Miami is the Latin Capital of the US *. And with that comes a level of affection I have not seen outside of the film Caligula. Everyone is always hugging and kissing down here. Business associates who only parted long enough to have lunch at separate restaurants hug and kiss when reunited an hour later.

I imagine if you were out for a day to get your car registration renewed, you would have to jump into the utility closet with your boss and engage in wanton carnality just to make up for the lost day.

* International Turnip Farmer, October 2011

Music

Music is always played at a level loud enough to be heard in another solar system. The bass must be played in such a way that when you drive within 100 yards of it, the tires of your vehicle must detonate like a child's balloon under a hippo's ass. 

The volume level must be so high that it renders birds flying overhead sterile.

And no matter what you are doing, when said music starts, you must jump out the front door and start dancing in the street with the nearest stranger regardless of race, creed, color or gender, no matter what you were doing beforehand even if that something was giving an infant a bath or disarming a bomb or talking a jumper off of a roof.

A personal example, the neighbors to one side of my home have a family/friends get together on some Saturdays. The music is very loud until around 11pm. I think at that point, the booze has run out and generally everyone is tired from smoking and dancing at a pace that makes a hummingbirds wings beating look like a tortoise with a bad leg crossing the highway.

Anyway I was in the bathroom, (taking a whizz if you must know) and the music came on with such intensity and volume that I, startled, peed all over the wall before I regained control of the situation (if you catch my drift).

So I don't use the bathroom anymore on Saturday night before 11pm.

Weather

The weather is great down here except during: 1. Summer when the heat is so intense that the simple act of inhaling causes you to sweat and froth like a thoroughbred after The Kentucky Derby.

And during 2. Hurricane season when everyone tries not to think about the fact that The Monster Death Wind could come thru anytime and render everything you own into a pile so small, you could fit it into a coffee cup…

…and still have room for coffee.

DressCode and "Enhancements"

You may have heard or seen on TV that in Miami there are women everywhere just walking the streets in bikinis..that simply isn't true..some of them are riding bikes.

Some women here wear very tiny clothes even though they have breasts that defy every law of physics I understand. There is a strange dichotomy here in which you have women who are very comfortable with their bodies…some so much that when they lean in to kiss your cheek, you find yourself getting vertigo from glancing down their cleavage...

…and then you have women who as they have gotten older have felt the misguided need to make changes to their appearance using medical means, by that I mean someone who has had their lips injected with dangerous chemicals so that when you talk to them, you feel like you're speaking into the clown's mouth at a fast food drive thru.

Like this…only somehow even bigger.

Men wear sandals entirely too often unless they are attending a funeral or wedding in which case they wear white tube socks with the sandals.

Men also wear large metal religious necklaces on the idea that if you hauled around a hunk of jewelry in the shape of Jesus for that long, they are obligated to let you into heaven.

Food

Hell yes, there is great stuff down here. lots of new stuff to try. For instance I'm pretty sure that when I die, I will be face down in a plate of Vacca Fritta from Havana Harry's.

Ropa Vieja, Pastellitos, Churrasco, Tostones and oh sweet jesus the coffee.
Cortadito or even a Colada once a day is a great way to make sure you are getting the Nutrition Councils annual amount of sugar in a single serving.

Conclusion:

Anyhoo, thats the preliminary impression of my new home here in a city that is bound on one side by alligators, on the other side by people who have paddled all the way from Cuba on top of a claw-foot bathtub and on another side by 92 year old men driving automobiles so large that they are often on both sides of an intersection at the same time.

Stay tuned for more entirely accurate strange adventures as they happen.

The Crow Flies Only at Midnight...

Saturday, at breakfast
We are discussing an upcoming art project Ava has due on Monday…

Ava suddenly says: "Do you Recognize the Path of the Lion"?

Renee and I look at each other.

Renee: "Where did you hear that"?

Me: I believe that's the code phrase they use to activate the Child Assassins so they can come for us while we sleep.

Renee: "Great... now I'm totally freaked out".

Ava: under her breath…"Im an assassin".

I get up.

Renee: "Where are you going"?

Me: Upstairs to make sure the lock on my door works.

What about the Fantastic Four?

Wait... shouldn't there be three figures on the bottle?

Consensus...

Sometimes, it's really easy for everyone to agree on something and I think we all know what that is…

It's that in the history of music starting with the first person who clonked two rocks together, the absolute worst song ever made is:

One (Blake's Got a New Face), by Vampire Weekend.

It is without a doubt, without any exaggeration, the most irritating thing ever.

Part of me doesn't believe its a real song, it's almost as if a group of guys got together and said, lets just screw around with the public and see who is actually demented enough to buy this single.

The song does have its uses though…

If your child hates math, play it for them once and then threaten to make it their ringtone... by the end of the next week, that child will be able to teach advanced Calculus at MIT.

If your spouse won't touchup the garage door where the paint is chipping off, have him listen to this musical gem and by the time the weekend is over, he will have painted not only the garage door but the next 52 garage doors in your neighborhood.

I think if you ever want to mobilize an army all you have to do is play the song once, afterwards tell the soldiers if they won't fight, they have to listen to the song once a day for the next year and you will have on your hands, the most savage, blood-thirsty, angry hardcore, death dealers to ever storm a castle.

Anyway, that's what I think.

Have you seen the paper?

One thing that hasn't changed by moving to Miami is my constant struggle for delivery of the New York Times paper. I'm not asking for a lot, I just want the Sunday paper, just once a week so I can sit down and attempt to get a heads up on the next fiasco.

Anyway, every Sunday I get up and go to the driveway and I keep my fingers crossed that it's there.

This morning, laying in bed, I thought it was a lot like the thought experiment known as Schrödinger's Cat.

So... in simple terms:  A cat, a flask of poison, and a  radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.

Anyway…

So I'm laying in bed and Im thinking that right now, right here as I lay in bed, the newspaper is definitely there laying on the ground waiting for me to scoop it up, get a comfy spot on the couch and read it…

…except the moment I actually get out there, I will collapse the superposition (the possibility that it is both there and not there) into the reality of it not being there.

And that means I won't get my paper again…and that makes me cry.

But it probably also makes Erwin Schrödinger smile.

Cartoon is the sole property of the very funny Mike Jacobsen of SeeMikeDraw.com

I feel so cheap...

After Dinner

Ava has received a Halloween Card from her grandmother.
She opens it and reads the cute saying on the inside.

Ten bucks falls out. 

Ava: "Yeah, man..ten bucks"!

Me: "That was nice of your grandma, wasn't it"?

Ava: "Yep…here go buy yourself something pretty".

Me: "Ummm"?

He has a ball…I have balls...

I've emailed a friend about my moving to Miami. She writes me:

Rachel: "Do you and LeBron James have some sort of secret deal where he leaves Miami and you head to Miami? Are you secretly LeBron James?? I mean, I have never seen you in the same room at the same time so…"

Me: Well isn’t it obvious…I mean look at the facts, woman!

Lebron is 6 foot 8, I am 6 foot 1.

Lebron is 250 lbs with a lot of muscle, I am 250 lbs with a lot of belly.

Lebron is Black, I am Black.

Lebron has 6 women hanging on him all the time, I have a 6-year old hanging on me all the time.

Lebron has mad skills on the court, I get mad if have to go to court.

It’s all right there, just read between the lines.

D.

Bruised Fruit...

Sunday night…Im not sure why these weird things always seem to happen on Sunday nights but here we go…

Scene One:

Fade In: The Living Room...Ava is clearly bored.

She is tying a long shoelace to my little toe.
Renee is watching intently to see where this goes.

Me: Ava, what are you doing"?

Ava: 'Working".

Me: "Listen, I know what happens next, you tie the knot too tight, my toe turns purple and I start to scream. Your mom says something clever, like "don't be so dramatic, you have 9 more". Then we end up at the emergency room."

I look up because Renee is laughing so hard that she is coughing but its not at what I said. She has been looking at the other end of the same shoelace and it's tied to Ava's little toe.

Still don't know what her plan was.

No Backsies!

She is such the delicate flower…

Sunday night. I am reading on the couch.
Ava runs over, turns her butt to me and farts.

Me: "Hey"!

Ava: "Once you get it…you can't un-get it".

Me: "That's sort of how I feel about you sometimes".

That's what who said?

Me: "It’s like 10 feet long"!
Anisah: "That’s what she said".


Me: "Just fit it all into a small box"!
Anisah: "That’s what she said".

Anisah: "Don’t mind me, im just gonna watch".
Me: "That’s what she said".

Ayten: "Oh! Its so big"!
Ayten: "That's what she said".

What! Five bucks a glass?

We have been unpacking for 2 weeks now…could be a month, sort of lost track. 

Lots of boxes, lots of crumpled paper, lots of stuff we didn't need to pack, like an entire box full of assorted teas… I tried to tell Renee that there was tea in Miami but she doesn't really trust me...

...been married too long for trust.

Anyway, I also found this note that Ava wrote when she was 3 or 4…

How you make Lemonade

First you start with lemons.

Then you put in water 

and then you (it is a secret) put in...

...9 SCOOPS OF SUGAR!