Phthursday Musings: From Cruising Altitude To You

This week’s installment is primarily written on my phone, on board a 50 passenger jet en route from Burlington, Vermont to Chicago. The jet is little - for a jet - and so too are the pretzels:

Yes, that is a Dubble Bubble wrapper you see. I got a bag of Dubble Bubble for Christmas. And then I was reminded about the existence of said bag before departing. It was a remarkably thoughtful, on point gift, which nevertheless stems from an incident 16 years ago I can’t live down (even though I did nothing wrong, I merely bought a pack of gum), and also from an older familial tradition of gum-in-stocking that my mom came up with, though that sometimes wound up involving weird, weird gum, like toothpaste tubes that said Bazooka. Anyway.

While at the airport waiting to board the news came down of a tentative agreement between MLB and MLBPA and the attendant word that the regular season is expected to start April 7. My baseball rant will take a different form. It will still arrive. Fear ye not.

This past weekend, as part of a group of families from school, we went to our first hockey game. The first one, at least, for me and my boy. My wife, you see, used to frequent Peoria Rivermen games. Something about some cute man with a stick.

When I say “first” I mean that as expansively as you can imagine. I am 45, and I had never been to so much as a youth hockey game.

The game was much faster than I realized. Just a very different kind of live experience from other sports. Most of you no doubt know this but it was still a relevation. It’s easy to understand the nature of the appeal.

The last time I had ice skates on, I think, was during Reagan’s first term. I think it was a school field trip to the Riverview Ice House and I think it was second grade. It was awful. All of the other kids had done it before, or at least that’s how I remember it. It was so bad I still haven’t put ice skates on since. I can at least handle a little roller skating now, but in general, I am super opposed to wearing anything on my foot intended for any kind of locomotion besides the standard.

The hockey game was interesting in a few respects. The Wolves are an AHL team which is the hockey equivalent of baseball AAA. So the guys are very good, and yet the game is still minor league, and therefore a lot of extra stuff has to go on to attract and hold fan interest, including an excessive amount of pre game fireworks.

After the game, as one might expect, we found ourselves at the Franklin Park White Castle, in search of Impossible sliders. While at the counter I noted this:

I’m hard pressed to explain White Castle to the unfamiliar. It’s a burger chain but not one where any ostensible effort is made to entice anyone to show up. No attempt whatsoever to market to children is visible. The indoor color scheme serves only the purpose of making it clear that the place is not filthy. It is, ultimately, the hamburger equivalent of Taco Bell, minus any marketing short of putting inserts into newspapers, as though trying to attach a crowd of people from 1984. And yet this is the chain which first offered Impossible burgers, and they are cheap and small and even though it is all fast food it is not really especially bad for you overall and it’s really kind of nice to just sit in the car with a tiny burger, and if I were going to do their marketing I would just show a family like ours sitting in a car with tiny burgers, and a caption of White Castle: Sit in a Car with Tiny Burgers, and it would probably work just fine.

… Somehow though I don’t think Birthday Cake On-A-Stick is going to attract a tremendous amount of new patrons.

It is funny to think how infrequently my growing child has consumed fast food compared to me at his age. Happy Meals were incredibly ubiquitous then. Now? Last week he literally explained to us that the reason people get Happy Meals is because they come with toys, something he found remarkable… because we have never actually taken him for one!

And that’s it. This week is short. I will make it up with baseball talk this weekend, or soon thereafter. Welcome back, baseball. The owners still blow. And, as you will learn, Rob Manfred hates baseball.