PATRICK MCVAY

When I retire, shortly after my kids’ college degrees have been secured via subterfuge and related shenanigans, I’m going to start a new business in which I give the current time to visitors of the American southwest.

You’d think from listening to our esteemed commander in chief that the biggest problem facing the US is Mexicans crossing the border to take good jobs in our Mexican restaurants, but that’s because he doesn’t ever book tours in northern Arizona, where the current time is anyone’s guess. Arizona has a deep disdain for the rigging of clocks and has adopted Mountain Standard Time as its year-round time zone, because to hell with saving daylight! Just because the liberal north has a daylight deficit doesn’t mean Arizona does. So when the rest of the mountain time zone is two hours earlier than eastern daylight time (no matter if its daylight savings or not), grumpy Arizona is an extra hour earlier.

Meanwhile, the Navajo Nation, which is almost wholly inside the boundaries of the state of Arizona, has adopted daylight savings time because they know how much it pisses off the rest of Arizona. This means that Page, AZ, just outside Navajo Nation, is on Mountain Standard Time, while the rest of the region -- predominantly Navajo -- is using Mountain Daylight Time.

This makes for complications when you book a tour of the Upper Antelope Canyon, inside Navajo Nation, and need to be onsite 45 minutes before the tour starts. Is that 45 minutes before Page, AZ time, or 45 minutes before Navajo time? Says the outfitters website: “We operate on Mountain Standard Time,” while their website displays Mountain Daylight Time.

Planning to make zillions getting people to their slot canyon tours on time.

Everyone has his or her own opinion about what’s in the Mueller Report, but no one seems to think that it will be a mostly funny and wryly-observed discourse on American social behavior, with virtually no mention of the whole Russian Interference in US Elections matter.

Except me.

Having gotten to know “Bob” (as he lets me call him in postcards I send him, which he never responds to) over the past 24 months, I’ve come to expect funny and wryly-observed discourses from him, intended to distract attention away from the subject at hand and make you basically forget about it. The idea being that no one really cared that our elections were influenced by a foreign adversary in the first place, so why not go for the funny bone instead? It’s not like Attorney General William Barr doesn’t have a sense of humor. In a recent poll, huge portions of the population listed “didn’t know there was an election” as the reason they didn’t vote, which I’m told the attorney general thought was hugely funny.

Anyway, you go with your opinion – a report mildly suggesting that the president was egging on the Russians to help the election in his direction; and I’ll go with mine – where Mueller is cracking one-liners and making risqué jokes and saying, “Bah! I’m sick of talking about this collusion witch hunt!”

We’ll find out this weekend!

I’ve received word from my publicist that you’re wondering what my rock and roll experience was like way back in the 1990s. I’d rather not talk about it. 

OK, but just this once. The decade was progressing more or less like most decades, in fits and starts without a strong sense of how to distinguish itself from other decades in the history books, when my acerbic high school principal friend Bob reemerged into the US from Colombia, where he’d been teaching. Bedraggled and looking for work, he nevertheless came armed with word of the band Soul Coughing. I was made to pay heed – probably via a cd he had illegally smuggled through customs undeclared, that sneaky bastard! Which he then ripped so we could listen to it endlessly on our smartphones (which we had purchased on Amazon).

Anyway, I listened to the first album, Ruby Vroom, on my smartphone on and on and on in the early-mid 1990s, while driving and texting, and right around when the second album was coming out, the band played a fundraiser gig at the Middle East Club in Cambridge (that be in MA). The lineup, by order of appearance, was Dan Zanes (of Del Fuegos), the incredible Groovasaurus, now lost to history (but with videos on youtube!), Morphine Jr. (Morphine sans their injured drummer, whom the show was benefitting, but with the legendary Mark Sandman at the helm), and headlined by Soul Coughing, doing a short and spot-on set (with Doughty getting pissed at one or two choice mosh-pit bullies).

I saw Soul Coughing probably 4 or 5 times after that first show, and then they too were gone forever, living on only as a band-that-was, as front man Mike Doughty wanted nothing to do with the music or the bandmates.

Until this winter, when Doughty launched a tour in which he reprised Ruby Vroom, playing it beginning to end with the band Wheatus backing him up. To my great pleasure, he played the music with faithfulness to the original hip groove, even if his band (with little pepper on the drums!) didn’t quite manage to recreate the energy of those early years.

But don’t take my word for it. Check it, from some early iteration of the band, doing Moon Sammy. (As always, I don’t own these videos and can’t count on them sticking around forever, so watch them now).

When I use my status as an influencer to get my kids into a slot at a prestigious institute of higher education, I’m going to make sure they are treated just like everyone else in their class. I don’t want to find out that my kids are getting Eggs Benedict for breakfast before Math 1A while the rest of the students are getting Rice Krispies. My kids shouldn’t get special treatment just because I’m a famous blogger. I want everyone to get Eggs Benedict. And to achieve this I plan to make special donations to my kids’ colleges to establish “Eggs Benedict for Everyone.”

Of course, I know how colleges love to peel off large chunks of philanthropic gifts for “administrative costs” and will be very specific about the terms of my donations. Only Bays Original English Muffins may be served, not Thomas’. And certainly no bagels. If I find out that traditional bacon is used instead of Canadian Bacon, well, I’m going to demand that my donation be returned.

You must be wondering whether I’m going to donate a draw-down gift that will be gone by the time my kids graduate, or instead endow The Patrick McVay Fund for Eggs Benedict, thereby enabling Eggs Benedict to be served in perpetuity. I must admit I’m leaning toward the latter, so that long after I’m dead and gone my name would still be synonymous with the cholesterol-infused sandwich. Students the world over would wonder why they have to pay so much for room and board and yet can’t have Eggs Benedict like they do at my kids’ high-end universities, and the administration at these second-rate institutions would be forced to admit that they have no fund for Eggs Benedict.

Of course, if there comes a time when it is impractical to continue to serve eggs benedict because Canadians are no longer making their famous bacon, the terms of my endowment will allow the University President to use the funds to serve an egg dish that is in keeping with the spirit of my donation.

Need to start getting ads on this site so I can generate income for my donation.