Out of place

One thing I don’t like much about my job is occasionally I have to go to meetings, where I am definitely a square peg in a room full of round holes.

I had to drive up to Athens this week to sit in a room with a bunch of politicians and business leaders and chamber of commerce people. I wore a suit and tie, just like every other guy there, but I suspect that’s about all I had in common with them.

I just really don’t know what to talk about to these people. They will usually come up and introduce themselves to me, and after reading my nametag, they realize they don’t know who I am. So then they ask me what I do, on the off-chance that I might be somebody important enough for them to be nice to. Inevitably they are disappointed by my answer, and soon find a way to excuse themselves.

I was listening to a “classic rock” radio station on the drive up to Athens, so as a result, I had a lot of things on my mind when I walked into lunch. For one, I’ve always wondered how, as a teen-aged boy, I didn’t seem to notice that Freddie Mercury was gay. You have to understand that, for a boy of that age growing up in the South in the ’70s, the idea of a man being gay was not something we could really grasp, let alone accept. Yet I’d see pictures of Freddie prancing around in tight pants with his porno moustache, and all I thought was, “These guys rock!”

Also, I heard a song by the band Boston, and that reminded me of my theory that Boston was not actually a group of musicians, but rather some sort of computer program created by Tom Scholtz, founder of the “band” and holder of a Master’s degree from MIT. Really, does their stuff sound human? Go listen to Long Time and tell me you can find one ounce of human emotion in there. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

I wondered some other things, too. Like, in AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night Long, Brian Johnson sings in the verses of a certain “she” – “she” was a fast machine, “she” kept her motor clean, etc., etc. But in the chorus, he’s singing to someone directly – “you” shook me all night long. So, was it two different women? And would he be telling the woman who shook him all night long about this other woman, who knocked him out with her American thighs? I don’t think that would be very smart.

Anyway, these are the things I wanted to talk about to my lunch companions, but I never really found a way to work it into the conversation. The woman sitting to my right is the director of some hospital and she was wearing an outfit the same color as an orange Creamsickle. I made a couple of attempts to talk to her, but we weren’t clicking. She struck me as more of a Celine Dion fan than a classic rock fan, so I didn’t bring up my theories.

Part of the buffet was some fruit salad, and I had some on my plate, but I was having trouble eating the grapes with a utensil. Grapes are really not suited for a fork, because it’s hard to stab them, or a spoon, because they tend to roll out. I couldn’t eat them with my hands, because I was in such high-tone surroundings.

So I looked over at Creamsicle woman and said, “You know, you would have thought we would have invented some new utensils by now. How long have we been using the fork and spoon? Hundreds of years? Why did we decide to just stop utensil development there? And please don’t bring up the ‘spork,’ because it’s not good for anything.”

She just sat there quietly, looked again at my nametag, and found a reason to excuse herself.

Eventually the lunch meeting ended, and I slipped out a side door, climbed into my car, put in a Louvin Brothers CD and took the long way home because I like riding through the country. At least the day wasn’t a total waste.