You Know Who You Are

I cannot claim credit for finding this. I can't even claim credit for blogging about this first. This comes courtesy of my college roommate and another former housemate of ours from the days when we lived on Duke Street in Nueva Brunswick, which is in Nueva Jersey. If you didn't ever stay up late enough to see NJN sign off at like 2:30 in the morning, chances are you haven't seen this. But for those other owls who were sitting awake on their living room couches, contemplating actually doing homework for once or just masturbating and then heading to bed, all while going into their fourth straight hour of channel-flipping, you know what I'm bloggin' about...

I'm blogging about this "movie."

On this subject, I can't write anything more sublime than this, which was written by our good friend Squawking VFR. Mr. VFR and I were roommates for more than four years. And rather than try to tack my thoughts onto his gorgeous testimonial to Garden State pride, allow me instead to present for you a fun fact about Mr. VFR.

Mr. VFR's favorite movie is (or at least was) none other than the 1987 box office juggernaut, Planes, Trains & Automobiles. (Directed by John Hughes, starring John Candy and Steve Martin, runtime: 93 minutes.) Who wouldn't love it, right? But VFR was a quirky dude, and his relevant quirk was that he would only watch this movie on Thanksgiving.

Understandable. It's a holiday thing, a tradtion thing, whatever. Except that we never celebrated holidays together, and we certainly never celebrated them at our college places of residence. (To some extent you could argue that at college, every Friday and Saturday night is a holiday, but again, whatever.) So why the hell did he bring the tape to school with him?

I think I know why. It was to tempt me into the embarrassing predicament, late in our sophomore year, of having to explain to a room full of my friends why my roommate had just interrupted us, 45 minutes into Plains, Trains & Automobiles, and angrily demanded that we eject the tape from the VCR immediately. And in so doing, Mr. VFR had generously also given me this very story that you're reading. And stories are the rarest gift of all, kids.

I have no shadowy psychological idiosyncrasies to share about the other housemate involved in the finding of this fine piece of Jerseyana. But if he's out there reading this, I hope he knows that he has my sincere gratitude for its discovery. Good job, man.