Grandaddy Of The Suck, Part 5
Part 5: Wrapping Up The Suck
Worst trip ever?
Well, that’s really a matter of perspective. After the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the United States government more or less death marched tens of thousands of Native Americans from their homelands in the Deep South to what is now Oklahoma, an exodus that would come to be known as the Trail of Tears. That trip was probably worse than the Rose Bowl, as most trips to Oklahoma are. Rampant death due to starvation, dehydration, and heat exhaustion was probably also a factor.
Worst trip of my life?
Well, the camping trip to Eastern Oregon over the summer was pretty bad, although that was more due to rapidly deteriorating conditions between The Ex Girlfriend and myself than any negative aspects of the atmosphere, our chosen activities, or the fine, proud people of Boardman, Oregon. All excuses aside, in Pasadena there were no shrewish jabs at my failures as a boyfriend and a lot more hygienic places to poop.
Worst bowl trip ever?
Yeah.
Longtime readers (Hi Mom! Hi Dad!) will remember the many months I spent ranting about the band’s 2007 trip to El Paso two years ago. Our voyage to Texas was similar to the trip to Pasadena in many ways – we stayed in a hotel that was in the middle of nowhere, entertainment opportunities were lacking, and nobody was happy. At the outset, it would appear that Pasadena this year had quite a lot going for it compared to El Paso.
However, that’s just it – we went to El Paso knowing that we were going to El Paso. It’s tough to get your hopes up when your destination’s claim to fame is that it’s the front line of an increasingly bloody drug war. We expected a bad trip, we got a bad trip, won a football game, and came home.
We had nothing but the highest hopes for Pasadena. I mean, they call this game The Grandaddy of Them All. It gets higher ratings than the BCS Championship. Plus, they’d already done it 95 other times. With that much repetition, we figured they’d had the time to figure out how to make it fun for everybody – team, cheerleaders, marching band, and whatever poor souls come lower in the Oregon athletic pecking order than the marching band.
So maybe it was really just a mediocre bowl trip, but our hopes had further to fall because we’d expected the very best. I will say this – in El Paso, when we’d travel by bus from one gig to the next, we would look out the windows and think, “Good lord, I’m glad we’re not stopping here.” In Pasadena, we drove by an endless parade of awesome places where we wanted to stop and have fun, but couldn’t, because the trip dictated that we had to spend an hour sitting on the bus before going to do something not fun.
I wouldn’t even go so far as to say that this was anybody’s fault – everybody in the band’s staff did the best they could to make this a good time for us, but it sucked anyway. The matter was beyond their control. Sometimes a thing just sucks, and the Rose Bowl was one of those things.
Were there good things? Of course – there were three of them. And in one way or another, these things made the trip bearable. Not great, but bearable. Observe:
Booze
They sell hard alcohol in supermarkets in California. I don’t think I should really have to say anything else – you can walk into a Safeway in El Segundo and just grab a bottle of Smirnoff from their impressive selection of fine spirits. And, due to the absence of a liquor tax, it’s a damnsight cheaper than it is here, too.
Oregon is the greatest place in the universe (and believe me, I’d know), but they’re really dropping the ball on this one. Oregon is supposed to be the land of hedonism, where people can pick up a bag of medicinal marijuana from a 12 year old prostitute, all while on their way to get an assisted suicide from a doctor who just happens to be totally gay! And yet the Oregon Liquor Control Commission seems to think it’s in the state’s best interests to tell people they can’t buy a fifth of Everclear from the same place they get their frozen waffle fries.
In-N-Out
Yeah, I don’t get it either – they print Bible verses on the shake cups, but the restaurant is named after sex. I guess it’s some sort of weird California thing.
The fact is, I got free In-N-Out twice on this trip, and while that doesn’t even begin to make up for a lot of the suck, I got the best damn fast food burger and fries money can buy, but I didn’t have to buy it with my money. After the parade, there was a whole box filled with extra In-N-Out burgers. I wanted to steal it and take it home with me and stick it in the freezer, rationing the burgers to myself one by one whenever I’d had a bad day.
Man, it doesn’t matter what you’re talking about – if you want to steal it and keep it in your fridge, it always sounds creepy.
The Rose Parade
I know, right? Why would walking six miles be one of the high points of Truman’s trip? Doesn’t he, like, hate all physical activity? I hear he sleeps in a vat filled with bacon grease.
Marching band is a pretty stupid hobby when you get right down to it – you invest crazy amounts of time in the cold and rain learning and rehearsing a performance which is often ignored by your audience and openly mocked by opposing fans. You receive little credit for your work, save for the occasional offhand mention at an alumni event or a quick human interest story in the local paper. And at the end of the day, no matter how much of yourself you put into this activity, people tell you that what you do is easy and then make a joke about American Pie.
During the Rose Parade, the sidewalks were jam-packed with legions of people who were screaming and cheering for us, dancing along to the music we played, and generally singing our praises – some of them were even wearing Ohio State colors. For as long as we were in front of the people watching us, we were center stage – the main event. Marching bands are part of the reason people go to the Rose Parade, and we were what they wanted to see.
And that’s why I love marching band. That’s what the people who aren’t in it – the people who call it a faggy activity for overweight nerds – will never understand. It’s about performing. That’s why I keep coming back, even after rehearsals in the rain and Midwestern slander and trips to Pullman and El Paso and Pasadena.
So yes, the Rose Bowl sucked. It was the Star Wars Episode 1 of bowl trips. But it was not without its minor perks.
Truman Capps fulfilled his sentimentality quota for 2010 way too early.
Blarg.
Worst trip ever?
Well, that’s really a matter of perspective. After the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the United States government more or less death marched tens of thousands of Native Americans from their homelands in the Deep South to what is now Oklahoma, an exodus that would come to be known as the Trail of Tears. That trip was probably worse than the Rose Bowl, as most trips to Oklahoma are. Rampant death due to starvation, dehydration, and heat exhaustion was probably also a factor.
Worst trip of my life?
Well, the camping trip to Eastern Oregon over the summer was pretty bad, although that was more due to rapidly deteriorating conditions between The Ex Girlfriend and myself than any negative aspects of the atmosphere, our chosen activities, or the fine, proud people of Boardman, Oregon. All excuses aside, in Pasadena there were no shrewish jabs at my failures as a boyfriend and a lot more hygienic places to poop.
Worst bowl trip ever?
Yeah.
Longtime readers (Hi Mom! Hi Dad!) will remember the many months I spent ranting about the band’s 2007 trip to El Paso two years ago. Our voyage to Texas was similar to the trip to Pasadena in many ways – we stayed in a hotel that was in the middle of nowhere, entertainment opportunities were lacking, and nobody was happy. At the outset, it would appear that Pasadena this year had quite a lot going for it compared to El Paso.
Keep in mind, this is what our uniforms USED to look like.
However, that’s just it – we went to El Paso knowing that we were going to El Paso. It’s tough to get your hopes up when your destination’s claim to fame is that it’s the front line of an increasingly bloody drug war. We expected a bad trip, we got a bad trip, won a football game, and came home.
We had nothing but the highest hopes for Pasadena. I mean, they call this game The Grandaddy of Them All. It gets higher ratings than the BCS Championship. Plus, they’d already done it 95 other times. With that much repetition, we figured they’d had the time to figure out how to make it fun for everybody – team, cheerleaders, marching band, and whatever poor souls come lower in the Oregon athletic pecking order than the marching band.
So maybe it was really just a mediocre bowl trip, but our hopes had further to fall because we’d expected the very best. I will say this – in El Paso, when we’d travel by bus from one gig to the next, we would look out the windows and think, “Good lord, I’m glad we’re not stopping here.” In Pasadena, we drove by an endless parade of awesome places where we wanted to stop and have fun, but couldn’t, because the trip dictated that we had to spend an hour sitting on the bus before going to do something not fun.
I wouldn’t even go so far as to say that this was anybody’s fault – everybody in the band’s staff did the best they could to make this a good time for us, but it sucked anyway. The matter was beyond their control. Sometimes a thing just sucks, and the Rose Bowl was one of those things.
Above: Another one of those things.
Were there good things? Of course – there were three of them. And in one way or another, these things made the trip bearable. Not great, but bearable. Observe:
Booze
They sell hard alcohol in supermarkets in California. I don’t think I should really have to say anything else – you can walk into a Safeway in El Segundo and just grab a bottle of Smirnoff from their impressive selection of fine spirits. And, due to the absence of a liquor tax, it’s a damnsight cheaper than it is here, too.
Oregon is the greatest place in the universe (and believe me, I’d know), but they’re really dropping the ball on this one. Oregon is supposed to be the land of hedonism, where people can pick up a bag of medicinal marijuana from a 12 year old prostitute, all while on their way to get an assisted suicide from a doctor who just happens to be totally gay! And yet the Oregon Liquor Control Commission seems to think it’s in the state’s best interests to tell people they can’t buy a fifth of Everclear from the same place they get their frozen waffle fries.
In-N-Out
Yeah, I don’t get it either – they print Bible verses on the shake cups, but the restaurant is named after sex. I guess it’s some sort of weird California thing.
The fact is, I got free In-N-Out twice on this trip, and while that doesn’t even begin to make up for a lot of the suck, I got the best damn fast food burger and fries money can buy, but I didn’t have to buy it with my money. After the parade, there was a whole box filled with extra In-N-Out burgers. I wanted to steal it and take it home with me and stick it in the freezer, rationing the burgers to myself one by one whenever I’d had a bad day.
Man, it doesn’t matter what you’re talking about – if you want to steal it and keep it in your fridge, it always sounds creepy.
The Rose Parade
I know, right? Why would walking six miles be one of the high points of Truman’s trip? Doesn’t he, like, hate all physical activity? I hear he sleeps in a vat filled with bacon grease.
Marching band is a pretty stupid hobby when you get right down to it – you invest crazy amounts of time in the cold and rain learning and rehearsing a performance which is often ignored by your audience and openly mocked by opposing fans. You receive little credit for your work, save for the occasional offhand mention at an alumni event or a quick human interest story in the local paper. And at the end of the day, no matter how much of yourself you put into this activity, people tell you that what you do is easy and then make a joke about American Pie.
During the Rose Parade, the sidewalks were jam-packed with legions of people who were screaming and cheering for us, dancing along to the music we played, and generally singing our praises – some of them were even wearing Ohio State colors. For as long as we were in front of the people watching us, we were center stage – the main event. Marching bands are part of the reason people go to the Rose Parade, and we were what they wanted to see.
And that’s why I love marching band. That’s what the people who aren’t in it – the people who call it a faggy activity for overweight nerds – will never understand. It’s about performing. That’s why I keep coming back, even after rehearsals in the rain and Midwestern slander and trips to Pullman and El Paso and Pasadena.
So yes, the Rose Bowl sucked. It was the Star Wars Episode 1 of bowl trips. But it was not without its minor perks.
Truman Capps fulfilled his sentimentality quota for 2010 way too early.