Grandaddy Of The Suck, Part One — Thinking Comes Later

I'm going to be doing something a little different this time. There's an awful lot of stuff that needs to be said about the past week of my life, so in an unprecedented Hair Guy event, I'll be updating this multiple part series daily until I'm good and done with it. Watch this space, and please enjoy...

GRANDADDY OF THE SUCK:

Or,

How the Oregon Marching Band Learned that a Higher Ranked Bowl Game Does Not Necessarily Equate to More Fun

Ever since I was a little kid, I always remember seeing commercials for the McRib sandwich at McDonald’s. It was always mysterious and fascinating to me – how, for example, could somebody eat a rack of ribs on a sandwich? What was that sauce it was dipped in? Were the bones edible? However, what elevated the McRib to mythic proportions in my mind was its rarity – it was only around for a few months out of the year, and whenever it was, McDonald’s hyped it up big time with an ad campaign showing mobs of people all but killing one another to get a McRib.

My family did not eat a lot of fast food during my childhood, so I never got a chance to try one of these mysterious sandwiches, and as I got older I avoided McDonald’s entirely. About a year ago, though, I happened to be at McDonald’s with friends when I saw that the McRib was available. I eagerly ordered one, took it home, and unwrapped it, excited to see what all the fuss was about.

In the end, it was a pretty mediocre sandwich that failed to live up to any of my expectations, and it also gave me some of the worst gas of my life.

The Rose Bowl was exactly like that.

Part One: Getting There Is Half The Suck

We were sent an itinerary a week or so before the trip which informed us that the buses would leave Autzen Stadium for Portland International Airport at 4:00 AM. Accordingly, the entire marching band was there at 3:00 AM, allowing us plenty of time to load all of our stuff, get onto the buses, and hit the road.

So, once everything was loaded, we all sat there, buses running, for about half an hour. There was no clear reason for it – it was just kind of something we were doing. Maybe the bus drivers were pulling a prank on us and waiting to see how long they could sit in the dark with the engines running before somebody told them to move. If this was the case, the bus drivers had clearly underestimated the ability of the Oregon Marching Band to sit around with our thumbs up our collective butts and waste away our precious youth, because eventually they gave up and the buses lurched forward and we were on the way.

And then, after ten feet, the buses stopped again for another 15 minutes or so as kind of a parting “fuck you” to our schedule.

Entertainment.

We were just on the outskirts of the airport when the buses pulled over and we were informed that our plane had been delayed by a few hours, and that if we wanted breakfast we should utilize a nearby Sharis. We did, and two hours later we left for the airport once again.

Along the way, somebody on my bus went into the bathroom and violently puked up the fine Sharis cuisine he’d just ingested. This did not do much for the smell of the bus. However, I took solace in the fact that we had reached the airport, and as we rolled onto the tarmac I, in my childish naïveté, assumed that we would be boarding a non-vomity plane shortly.

So we sat on the tarmac, in the buses, for a couple more hours until Delta brought in a plane from Detroit that we could use. Later, I learned that our original plane had been having “technical difficulties” the night before that Delta had been unable to repair in time – all of this makes sense, I guess, save for why they didn’t send for a replacement fucking airplane 12 hours before 250 people on a tight schedule showed up.

What was worst about it was that they made us wait in the buses on the tarmac, so we could watch all the other planes taking off and contemplate how we weren’t on them. No, we couldn’t have gone into the terminal or something, where there was more space and perhaps no stench of half-digested Sharis eggs benedict – we just sat there on the tarmac, watching other planes take off, contemplating the fact that most of us had got up at around 2:30 AM and we probably weren’t going to leave Portland until noon.

When the plane finally did arrive, it pulled up near us on the tarmac and the flight crew began to prep it by loading it with airline food and wheeling a big staircase up next to the door. This, naturally, took about an hour, during which time we sat there and watched it all happen.

Finally, the buses pulled around to the plane one by one, where we unloaded and stood in line to be screened by a team of TSA agents with metal detector wands and short tempers. The temperature on the tarmac at this point was about 20 degrees, but with wind chill it was absolute zero. Naturally, this line moved as slowly as possible.

Once we made it up to the security agents, each member of the band was forced to remove his or her jacket and shoes and stand there in their flimsy Oregon Marching Band polo shirt and black slacks, arms out, in front of everyone else while they were wanded. I get the idea that this procedure was less to facilitate security and more to judge which members of the OMB nipped out the most prolifically. Incidentally, congratulations to Jerome.

Then we got on the plane, where the flight attendants forced us to strip naked and made us run down the aisles to our seats while they whipped our asses with bamboo canes and stubbed out cigarettes on our genitalia. We had the choice between two in flight movies – one was a slow motion highlight reel of each person’s own most embarrassing moments with an accompanying laugh track and commentary by Lee Corso, and the other was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

But then, once the plane got off the ground, our luck changed for the better. Part of the meal service was this absolutely delicious sausage cheese and biscuit sandwich – it may sound gross, and it honestly even looked gross, but basically the entire band agreed that that sandwich picked up our spirits and signaled a bold change in our fortunes. Life was good again.

Until we got to Los Angeles, at which point it immediately turned to shit.

Tune in tomorrow for Part 2!