TaB-ulation

This past Sunday I went out to Long Island City to watch some of the ING New York City Marathon (you can't forget the ING ... or else!) with some friends. Our particular viewing location in L.I.C. was somewhere between mile 13 and 14 of the race and was not very crowded, but for some reason I had people unnecessarily close to me. One particular moment I thought I had entered the Twilight Zone.

On my left was an older woman who had her sheltie with her. She was holding the dog in her arms and talking to it like it was a small child. "Do you see all the runners?" Ooh, look at that guy's sneakers." "Did you see how skinny that woman was?" "Do you like the marathon?" I didn't hear the dog respond to any of this.

To avoid Ms. Crazy and her dog, I slid over to my right a bit. Over there was no better. A posse of parents with their little kids running around all over the place was inhabiting that space. For the most part they were OK, but this one woman from the group was on the roadway side of the NYPD barricades keeping an eye out for some friends that were running. God knows you can't see anything from the spectator side of the barricade. I found her pretty annoying to begin with due to the fact that she felt obligated to be on the wrong side of the barricade, her unnecessarily loud voice and the fact that she kept inching further out onto the road causing some runners to slightly adjust course. Who the fuck wants to avoid some idiot spectator after they have already run 13+ miles? The thing that bumped her from annoying to alarming was the fact that she was drinking TaB soda. Fucking TaB! I felt like I was in a 1977 time warp.

Anyway, I eventually got away from the freakshows around me and all was well once again ...

Now if you will excuse me I am going to go enjoy an frosty TaB and play some Space Invaders on my Atari 2600 with my dog.