A Fool’s Journey By now,

A Fool’s Journey

As usual, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” are not particularly interested in lending another voice to the post-Katrina, post-Rita juggernaut. Regular readers of this humble “weblog” undoubtedly recognize that we have a habit of bucking trends and focusing on less notable issues. How else would we have managed to leave our unpopularity so unsullied?

It is with a collective heavy heart, then, that we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” devote another humble “post”—today’s “post”—to the hurricane blitzkrieg. In our defense, we must say that we received such an interesting e-mail from a reader that we simply had to share her story with you.

A devoted fan from Galveston (TX)—who preferred to remain nameless although possessing a perfectly fine name—recently sent us a very entertaining e-epistle. It is lengthy, however, and thus we have decided to offer our paraphrase of her tale.

This woman was one of the sundry unfortunate characters to be stuck on the highway in her automobile in the ridiculous pre-hurricane traffic. To make matters worse, fearing the possibility of running out of gasoline, she was compelled to cut off her air conditioner—an unpleasant thing to do in the God-forsaken heat that is southern Texas.

Whilst stuck in countless hours of traffic, this lady tuned in to the radio, in order to determine whether the gridlock would ever subside. Most of the stations on the FM dial had converted to news-only formats, in order to offer help to the community. Apparently, only impending natural disasters are sufficient to ward away impending natural disasters such as Elton John and Peter Cetera. Can’t say Mother Nature has never helped us.

Anyway, the announcers on one particular radio station informed their listening audience that the mayor of Houston had just informed the public that he was worried that the traffic would be so bad as to turn the highways into a “death trap.” As you might well imagine, our female traveler was greatly distressed by this thought. Things were looking very grim indeed.

Soon afterward, the announcers took a call from an unidentified male. His question? Something to the effect of: “Hey, I know there’s a hurricane and all, but is the Journey concert scheduled for Friday cancelled?”

That’s right, dear reader, a category five hurricane was traipsing into town, and this chucklehead was chiefly concerned about missing out on the histrionic pseudo-hard rock of Steve Perry and his cronies. Naturally, he was deeply distressed to find out that, yes, indeed the concert was cancelled. “That sucks,” he said. When the DJs informed him that missing a Journey concert was not the biggest problem in the world under the circumstances, he only begrudgingly agreed. “Yeah, I guess so,” he muttered. “But it still sucks.”

As far as we’re concerned, only a natural disaster would compel us to attend a Journey concert. And, if Rick Astley or Hall & Oates were opening up, we still wouldn’t go.