The Cutting Room Floor

I suppose honesty often goes hand in hand with social ineptness. Maybe it’s the child like quality in us all that often makes us blurt things out that better judgment wouldn’t allow us to utter had we given a topic reasonable forethought.

I knew that traffic would be bad, and I promised someone a week before that I would meet them for coffee in town. It was a beautiful day so I rode my bicycle six or so miles into town knowing full well that traffic and parking would be nearly impossible.

The event was the Mighty Mo. The USS Missouri was visiting our fair city and it brought droves of people over the roads and bridges to Astoria. A bicycle was the only reasonable form of transportation if you needed to be anywhere on that day.

I was early, so I cycled around Smith point and I was easily able to get down to the port, where lines of people stood waiting to walk upon the teak decks of history. As I stood watching an historical event of all these people coming to Astoria, I found myself being scanned by a television news camera. A TV news reporter stepped beside me and asked one of those lame news questions like,” What do you think of the crowds coming to Astoria?”

I didn’t hesitate when I blurted out the answer. “It’s funny if you think of it, but every one of the people here will probably flush a toilet at least once during their stay. I’d hate to be at the sewer lagoon today.”

Needless to say, they had no follow-up questions for me after that. I watched the news that night and saw that I had ended up on the cutting room floor.