Nothing Compares to Safety

Posted by John:

And we’re back. It was a glorious month-long World Cup hiatus and it really couldn’t have been better. Actually it could have been better if England and the US hadn’t shit the bed in the Round of 16 but I’m not upset that Spain won and I’m not upset that I watched 50 or so of the 64 matches. It was wonderful. Now I feel like a convict that has been paroled after 30 years behind bars - I’m not quite sure how to reintegrate myself into society. The other night I came home from work and instead of watching three soccer matches in a row I had to actually find something else to do. I briefly thought about having a conversation with the wife but then I thought I would just read instead. After several seconds spent trying to focus on the words on the page I gave up and opted  instead to just stare at the wall and remember all the fantastic moments from the World Cup. 

One of my big concerns prior to the World Cup was work travel interfering with my match watching agenda. In fact, I had several trips planned during some very crucial stages of the tournament that would have prevented me from actually seeing many of the games. That is, right up until I lied to my superiors to get out of the travel. At first I felt this little pang of guilt for my deception but that quickly turned to anger for living in a part of the world where it is not socially acceptable to skip work for soccer let alone watch it at all. I actually had one redneck tell me that he tried to watch 5 minutes of a match before he got too bored and changed the channel. “They’d just kick ‘er down to one end then kick ‘er back to the other end then kick ‘er back to the first end and I was like, ‘I’ve already done seen this before!’ So I switched ‘er over to the NASCAR race instead.” The NASCAR race??? Are you fucking kidding me! You opted for NASCAR because soccer was too boring!?! I can’t even look at you right now! Anyway, after I lied the first time to get out of work travel it actually got increasingly easier to lie each successive time. In the end I was able to watch every single match that I wanted.

The benefit to living in the South during something like the World Cup is that I could easily record the games during the day on DVR and not have to worry about anyone ruining the results for me before I could get home to watch them. In fact, only one of the results was ruined for me when my buddy sent me a text message before I had a chance to see the game. Shame on me for checking my text messages on the day of a game but the reality is that I blame him exclusively for ruining it for me. In fact, not only did I not respond to his text but I haven’t talked to him since then. Maybe in 30 years he’ll realize his mistake and apologize at which point I’ll consider reconciling with him, but until then he’s as good as dead. Seriously.

I actually did have one business trip during the Cup that I had to take. In the end it worked out fine because it was just a 2-hour drive down to Alabama for some safety training and I was able to get back home in plenty of time to watch the games that night. In fact, the only place better than Tennessee for avoiding the results of a soccer game is Alabama. If you’re in Alabama and you ask someone if they know the score of the soccer game you’re just as likely to get a comprehensive dissertation on the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement on Central American agricultural labor as you are the actual score of said soccer game. So I didn’t hesitate to take my ass deeper into the south on that occasion.

Actually that’s not true; I did hesitate only because the purpose of the trip was to sit through 5 hours of safety training which I had already completed just barely a year prior. If you recall, I wrote about it here. Back then there was only one other person in the safety training - a Good Ol’ Southern Boy that I affectionately nicknamed Bubba. The safety training class I took a few weeks ago was actually full of about 20 Good Ol’ Southern Boys that I affectionately nicknamed all sorts of names from Cletus to Hal to Forrest to Jeb to Roscoe to Cooter to Robert E to… I could go on. But let me digress for a moment and bring up something that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately – when did the phrase “Good Ol’ Southern Boy” became a a term of endearment synonymous with “racist and homophobic”? Why do we need to sugar coat that shit and pretend like hating minorities and homosexuals makes you a good ol’ anything? You don’t see anyone going around and being like, “Oh, you know Abdullah, right? He’s just a good ol’ jihadist…” When did we allow it to become acceptable to take something that’s clearly morally and ethically reprehensible and make it whimsically endearing? “Roger is a great friend of mine. He’s just a good ol’ cannibal. What are you gonna do? He just loves that human flesh…”

At any rate, it was evident from the get-go that all the other participants in the class were contractors or laborers including the instructor who was a retired laborer. I pretty much knew going into it that not only would I be the only non-blue collar worker in the training, I was going to be the only engineer. Which, if you recall from any of my previous posts, the only thing worse than being an engineer in a room full of Good Ol’ Southern Contractors is being a black homosexual engineer. If for some reason I had forgotten about that for any reason I was given a reminded as soon as I sat down in the class. Immediately after the instructor introduced himself he asked if there were any engineers in the room. Now, I’m no idiot and despite the fact that I was the only one not wearing a shirt with a grease stain on it, you better believe I did not raise my hand to identify myself. Granted, the instructor’s purpose for asking the question was just to make a joke about engineers as an ice breaker, but it was really no different than telling a good ol’ joke about an African American, Latino and Muslim in a bar – even if it’s the funniest joke in the world the fact that it’s funny doesn’t excuse you or hide the fact that you’re an ignorant racist; or that you hate engineers, as the case were. Part of surviving is knowing your surroundings and in that case I knew if I wanted to survive in that surrounding I was not going to raise my hand as the only engineer. In fact, there were a number of similar questions the instructor could have asked that I would not raise my hand to answer under any circumstance in a room full of Good Ol’ Southern Boys:

“Did anyone here catch the episode of Project Runway last night?”

“Who knows how to get to the nearest Whole Foods?”

“Did anyone vote for Obama?”

“Anyone know the score of the Germany v Ghana match today?”

“Who can spell the word ‘Pelosi’?”

So I kept my mouth shut and sat through 5-hours of safety training intermixed with horrible first-person stories about accidents that people had either witnessed or been through personally. The thing was though, for all my self-awareness and self-preservation during the training it was almost all for not because of a stupid lapse of judgment on my part earlier in the day.  

I had to be on the road at 5:30 that morning for the two-hour drive to Alabama. At that hour I have one priority – staying awake at the wheel. Luckily I have several playlists on my iPod with just such a purpose in mind. One such playlist is titled “Badass Music”, which is a compilation of songs taken largely from my childhood in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Think lots of GNR intermixed with Poison next to some Nirvana along with some Rage Against the Machine. The utility of the playlist is pretty obvious – the nostalgia of the songs from my youth will keep me pumped up and rocking the whole way down the road. Now admittedly not every song from my childhood was a badass, face-melting, ear-drum splitting example of alt-rock/grunge/metal. Admittedly some tracks are a bit on the softer side but that doesn’t mean they’re not still great nostalgic songs from when I was a kid.

It’s under that pretense now that I admit my single biggest faux-pas of the day was pulling into the parking lot of the training center amid more than a dozen big ass pick up trucks, the redneck owners of which were all filing into the building, with my windows down completely ignorant to the fact that I was blasting Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares to You” for all the world to hear.

Now let me digress for a moment and say this – I don’t care what you think, “Nothing Compares to You” is a seriously badass fucking song. Period. I mean, you can’t submit any evidence to the contrary. We’re talking about 5-minutes of the most gut-wrenching, tear-jerking audio bliss ever produced for human ears.

It’s been so lonely without you here,

Like a bird without a song.

Nothing can stop these lonely tears from falling.

Tell me baby, where did I go wrong?

Oh my god, I just want to rip my heart right out of my chest, it hurts so bad.

I can assure you I’m not making this up – my love for the song nor the fact that I was playing it as I pulled into the parking lot. Rolling up to a safety training session with a bunch of Good Ol’ Southern Racists and Homophobes blasting Sinead O’Connor out the windows of your Mini Cooper is like a death wish. I might as well have been carrying a giant banner that said, “Osama Bin Laden 4 President!” or “Healthcare Reform is for Winners!” or “Crimson Tide? More like Crimson Gay Pride!!!”

Needless to say, I killed the radio as soon as I realized what was happening and thanked my lucky stars I didn’t end up in a bloody pulp. After that I didn’t say a single word the entire rest of the day – especially about engineering, politics, social injustices, Sinead O’Connor or anything else.

I’ve listened to that song several dozen times since then, as I do every week, but now I’m careful to do so within the privacy of my own headphones, just for safety’s sake.

I went to the doctor and guess what he told me, guess what he told me?

He said, “Girl you better try to have some fun no matter what you do,”

But he’s a fool.

Because nothing compares, nothing compares to you…

Ah, my soul is sobbing like a goddamn baby right now.