Look, Miami/Dade government, this isn’t rocket fucking science. It isn’t like the MetroMover has never failed before and you have’t had to put buses on the street to take riders along the routes. And it is hurricane season, which increases the possibility that this service failure might actually take place. And you (and the high cost of gasoline) have done a great job of increasing ridership. So.

So why the ever loving fuck are you incapable of updating the public (hey! I have a radical idea! Use your freaking website!) on where the shuttle stations are and which routes they are servicing. I’m sorry. Is that so much to ask of my local government? Yeah, stupid question for a body that just voted to raise my property taxes by twelve fucking percent next year so that they can mow the street medians less often, repair the streets less often and cut hours of park and library services.

Yesterday, as readers of my Twitter feed are well aware, it took me forty minutes to go six blocks across town, because there was only one bus and it was servicing the Omni route. This meant I was treated to a tour of various halfway houses and homeless shelters (and in intimate proximity to their residents who were on the same bus, and frequently leaning into the same seat) during my 20 block detour north and then back south.

This morning, despite promises by the Miami Herald and the update on the MiamiDade.gov website, the MetroMover was NOT back in service, and there was just the one Omni bus again. Since we were going in the opposite direction, it only took me 15 minutes to get cross town. Tonight, as I left work, the government website informed me that the MetroMover will be out of service until further notice and to allow for longer travel times. Fair enough.

I crossed the street and took my place under the “emergency bus service for when the MetroMover is out of service” sign. And waited. And waited. I got on the first Omni loop bus, resigned to the ride from Hell, but was told, rudely I may add, that there were now two buses and that this wasn’t the one I wanted if I wanted to get to Government Center. I got off and waited some more. Another Omni bus. Two Aventura Mall buses.

Finally a random Transit Authority Person pulled up in a car. Huh, am I getting private car service, I wondered? No, he’s just there to tell me that I was standing in the wrong place for the Inner Loop bus. That bus stops on the other side of the street. In front of my office. Where there is neither a regular bus stop nor any indication that it is an emergency stop.

I am sweaty, pissed off and now at the end of my travel, waiting for the RLA to pick me up for a hot date with the Urgent Care Center to get my stitches out.

The RLA and I celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary on Wednesday. Yes, we wed on Bastille Day, but that’s another story for another day. The RLA gave me a wicked cool hand-made bamboo case for the iPad, a set of professional class ear buds and strict instructions to load some music on this thing. So I did.

Oh, gentle readers, I am forced to confess that for the inveterate music junkie that I am, I have never used anything more than cheap, but cool-looking ear buds on any of my music-playing I-devices. Holy shit! These things are awesome! I had some nitwit sitting next to me on the train yesterday, yapping away on her phone about random, and inane shit and once I popped these bad boys into my head, I couldn’t hear a fucking word!! Sweet!!!

Today, same thing. I can’t hear any of my fellow passengers, and I have pure, sweet, crystal clear rock and roll pouring in my head.

The only downside I can see is that the music is so loud, and so pure, that I feel like I’m all alone and tend to start singing (or at least humming and finger snapping) along. And that has to be as annoying to my fellow train riders as their mere existence is to me.

Miz Shoes ankle receives a two-inch gash. Damn, she thinks, this isn’t good. Perhaps she should take a quick drive over to the Urgent Care Center. But first, a little reality check. Honey? Do you think this will require stitches?

The RLA threw me in the car and asked if I had any preferences as to which UCC we visited. No, not particularly. Less than an hour later, I was laying on my side, having a pleasant conversation with the PA who was practicing her needlework on my ankle. She loved that it wasn’t a straight line and she got to do something or other fancy involving the triangular rip in the middle. She had a light touch with the Novocain or whatever it is that is used on body parts other than one’s mouth. So light, in fact, that by the time we got to the last stitch that what had been a slight prick and tug was a distinct piercing and pulling, prompting the following exchange.

“Motherfucker”, I said, in a totally conversation tone of voice, lacking all affect, “That hurts. I do believe the Novocaine has completely worn off.” Apparently, that was an unexpected remark, at least in that tone of voice, because both the PA and her aide laughed. They did apologize, but your narrator didn’t mind if they found humor in her suffering. After all, I said, you’ve given me enough content for a week of blog entries. 

Or, you know, my bandwidth. The RLA and I have been having excruciatingly slow download times at the Casita de Zapatos, and when researched, turns out to be poachers on our unlocked wi-fi network. This blows for me, because I hate passwords that are impossible to remember. But there it is. Intruders in the virtual house.

I spent a part of last night with the Number Three Surrogate Daughter. She turned 21 last week. She is emancipated and finally able to control her own choices. She is finishing her undergrad and wanting to get her Master’s? Her Doctorate? In psych. By joining the Navy as an officer/doctor. The Military will pay for the degree in exchange for six years of her life.

I love her dearly and want to be proud that she is capable of considering this choice. But I am afraid that I have become an old woman, set in her ways, and those ways were forged in the 60s. I was too young to have participated in the televised youth movement; I watched it on tv from my living room in a tiny, coastal sub-tropical town, so far removed and yet so far ahead of that movement that I can never vote Republican, nor embrace the concept of the military. I knew the last draftees and the first young men to die (in droves) of AIDS.

I know that this is my problem, and I have no right to try and pass them on to her. She’ll just be one of that tiny minority of good people who enlist for the more noble reasons. And I can be proud of that.

Part the first: this is an experiment to see how the iPad works as a mobile blogging device. If it works well then the chance exists that I’ll be able to do better with poor old Girlyshoes than once a month.

Part the second is a meditation on rock and roll. I had a conversation with someone from work the other day and she commented on my relationship with music, or at least with rock lyrics. She said that I quote them and read them like poetry, while admitting that they are poetry. I went home and thought about it for a while. Not poetry, scripture.

I often see people on the train reading dog-eared bibles, sprinkled through with underlines, highlighted passages and post-it notes. While this does not reflect well on me, I find myself mystified by this behavior. Having read the old testament, there is very little I would read over and over. And once you’ve grasped the concept of do unto others, or thou shall not, really, how many more times does one need to read it? But then I had an epiphany: scripture is scripture and it is a comfort and an affirmation. Those folks I see are doing no more than I am when I listen to “Badlands” for the hundredth or more time. For them, the words are, you know, something about the meek or whatever. For me, and other disciples of the Church of Rock and Roll, it’s the more immediate satisfaction of “I want to spit in the face of these badlands, let the broken hearts stand as the price you gotta pay.”

So last weekend, I spent a few hours at the laptop and created a short form proselytization for my co-worker. I had to include some variations, sort of like multiple translations of King James… Because there is the studio version of “Rosalita”, and then there are many, many, many versions of it live. She needs to hear the words, hence studio, but she also needed to feel the energy of the live version. With the intro of the band, during the heyday of the song, when it was the centerpiece of a concert? (Which is, by the way, what was playing when I saw the lights swinging from the rafters at Madison Square Garden, from the rhythmic stamping of feet of a full house.) Or without the intro, but with the happy shrieks of the crowd when they recognize the opening riff and it’s a rare treat during the encores?

Then there is the flip side of affirmation, those songs I go back to when I am so depressed that even killing myself would require more effort than I can manage. Those are the Leonard Cohen dirges, and Dylan’s “Desolation Row”. For the record, when I was a senior in college, “Desolation Row” was in constant rotation on my turntable. My shades were kept closed and the AC down low. My house plants never grew better.