Meet Sparrow, an average man passing an average life…
Wednesday, August 28
Good gravy, today’s training was tedious at times.
First off, the government being the government, everything that can possibly be reduced to letters and acronyms: NOD, DRO, PCP, C-BOTS (I think), RO, CV, DTC, FBI, ABBA, RTD, aichiwawa, WTF, I didn’t know a lot of them and yours truly still doesn’t because while in submarines you’re taught the only dumb question is the one you don’t ask, you can’t really bring everything to all-stop every two minutes so you can be brought up to speed…I was expected to know these.
There were small American flag pins on the table this morning…Pat put one on and encouraged me to wear one, but I declined…Regular readers of this crap may – or they may not – recall I tend not to wear things like this because I’ve long felt Old Glory is entitled to more respect than to be an ornament on my shirt…I took the pin from Pat, set it down and ignored it and nobody mentioned it again, sparing them ol Sparrow’s boring thoughts on the matter, which generally aren’t all that popular with veterans…This is especially true for sports officials uniforms, where you sweat…The flag is entitled not to be sweated on.
Early on this guy came up to talk about the new appeals process and boy, he was so tedious to listen to I got up and left for a while…He had a soft, high voice which made him sound ineffectual, even with a microphone…He talked with his throat and not his diaphragm and was one hell of a cure for insomnia…We weren’t in class two hours and I was ready for Nap Time.
Appeals are confusing anyway…One state VSO asked a question that in itself had me scratching my head and the answer didn’t clarify anything whatsoever and, not for the first time since I’ve had this job, I found myself wondering how our government managed to send people to the moon without rerouting them to Saturn…The government would tend to, as we used to say in the Navy, muck up a wet dream…Or it was as mucked up as soup sandwich tho, as I recall, this tended to be reserved for individuals rather than the whole of the naval department.
And ol’ Sparrow was out at the stadium again!!!…I am not making that up.
I went down for breakfast and Renee, a state VSO I got to know in April when I went out for initial training, had five tickets someone else in the state office who couldn’t use them had bought…One was for her, of course and the three others she gave to three other women – I turned out to be the youngest of the bunch – and to some dolt named Mike, who ended up canceling.
These were primo seats, club level, right behind first base…Plot Tuesday’s seats and these on a graph and you have a perpendicular line…There was no comparison…I looked at the ticket and the box office price was $110 tho, of course, it was issued at no charge to ol’ Sparrow.
The home team lost again and, again, we left early…Recall Tuesday our VSO group left early because the visitors were naming the score but tonight the game was relatively close but we left after three hours – more than enuff baseball – and there were still two innings remaining.
I ate like an oink-oink…Club seats have a private entrance here so the mouth breathers in general admission are kept out…This meant lines were short and didn’t resemble food lines at refugee camps like they did Tuesday in the bleachers…To compensate for Tuesday’s failures – I didn’t eat anything – I had two foot-long bratwursts and an ice cream cone that was so huge climbers could have summited it…Good gravy it was big and, thanks to the falsies, difficult to eat, too…The bratwursts were not Brats of the Year but they were twelve inches long which is good for morale and makes up for minor taste deficiencies.
Nothing historic happened in either game…That’s one of the reasons I went both nites…Especially nowadays with more home runs being hit than ever before and especially here, where you’re a mile up, balls fly out left and right and I was hoping someone would hit five home runs, which has never been done in a game before, but no…One guy hit two, and there were others, but the record book stayed shut both nights.
The home team has another game tonight – the football team is playing an exhibition game, too – and I’m going to keep on the earie for a comp to either game – but I’m not going to listen too hard…We’ll see.
Sparrow’s Sleep Log: 2330 Tuesday until 0500 Wednesday…5.5 hours and I have completely lost track of the weekly today…Apologies are issued.
The Diary of a Nobody is a novel. All elements are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Anything else is a coincidence.
It was inspired by the 19th century British novel of the same name.
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