I'm not much of a football fan but I'm borderline obsessed with Sports Illustrated's longtime football columnist Peter King. I've watched about three total quarters of the NFL this season yet I find myself checking his column immediately upon entering work -- even before work e-mails and the like This is almost solely because of the last page of his column, where he puts in "interesting" factoids about his life.
He has a segment called "Coffeenerdness" which is a sentence or two about coffee. The thing that's so odd about it is that 85% of the time, it's about Starbucks. I enjoy coffee quite a bit. I'm not a nerd (I have no idea what single drip means) but I'm 100% certain that Starbucks coffee completely sucks. To wit, today's coffeenerd line:
"Seattle, you should know that the baristas at the 51st and Madison Starbucks are superb, particularly the store-openers at 5:30 on Sunday and Monday mornings."
Another 10% of his coffeenerd is about other national chain coffee experiences -- Seattle's Best, in particular. And, I'm pretty sure their coffee is terrible as well.
The remaining 5% is dedicated to talking about how terrible the coffee on Amtrak is.
I believe there has been only one time he ever wrote about coffee at a non-chain coffee joint.
However, his all-time most fascinating tidbit was not about his love of sub-par coffee. Instead, it was about his colonoscopy in 2006.
I was scheduled for a colonoscopy on Thursday in West Paterson, N.J. If you've had one, or if you've had any intestinal procedure, you know that the day before such an internal snaking you've got to be, well, cleaned out. One problem for me: On Wednesday, I was covering the Vince Young workout in Austin. My cleanout was due to begin at 1 p.m. My flight was due to leave Austin three hours later, and I was scheduled to get home by 8. In other words, I was not going to have the home-bathroom advantage for a good portion of the internal preparation.
Pretty tricky. I've had two prior colonoscopies -- you should have these things fairly regularly after turning 40, and I'm 48 -- and know that once you begin your prep work, it's about a six-hour process. So I figure, OK, I'll start on the plane home, then finish at home. When I advised a friend, Rich Fitter, of my plan, he shook his head and invoked an old Cosmo Kramer line. "Wet ... and wild,'' he said.
I took the first of the preparatory medication (and believe me, that's putting it very nicely) just before the three-plus-hour flight took off from Austin. I was in fine shape until maybe 40 minutes from landing when the captain came over the intercom and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, we've been told by the tower in Newark that we're going to have to slow things up a bit because of traffic into the New York area. They're putting us into a holding pattern, and we're going to head over to Pennsylvania to circle ...''
I heard nothing else. All I could think was: My worst nightmare is coming true. It would get worse 10 minutes later, as we were banking bumpily somewhere over southeastern Pennsylvania. The flight attendant came on and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, because of the bumpy ride, we're going to be turning on the fasten-seatbelt sign for the remainder of the flight...'' AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!
Take deep breaths. Long, deep breaths. Bumping around for 45 minutes. An eternity. Hold on. Just hold on. You raised two kids not to be ax murderers, you can survive this. I'm going to have to get up and brawl with this flight attendant in a minute because of the seat-belt sign...
Out of the holding pattern. And seven or eight minutes later, like the God of Aviation knew what was happening inside me at that moment, the captain came on and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, we're on our final approach into the Newark area.''
Day of my wedding. Births of my children. Red Sox win the World Series. Landing in Newark.
Once off the plane, I was as dignified as was humanly possible. I brisk-walked to the men's room, and the rest is history.
One benign-polyp postscript: The anesthesiologist and the internist were both big Sopranos guys. And my last memory before drifting off into never-neverland was those two guys talking about how unrealistic some of the medical scenes in the second episode were. Seems the family would never be allowed to witness the gruesome sight of dressing a gunshot wound, and there was insufficient attention paid to cleanliness in what should have been a perfectly antiseptic room. And my doctor, John Farkas, pointed out that the size of Tony's wound was consistent with an exit wound, not an entry wound. "He got shot in the front, right?'' Farkas said (I think). "Unless the bullet somehow hit something and came back out where it came in, that wound was far, far too big.'' See what you learn reading this column?
