[Wow!  Ted Byrne is the Managing Editor/Economist for the Business 2 Business Magazine whose website is here: http://www.b2bezine.biz/about_us.htm .  Ted was nominated for an Emmy.  I am contrite and impressed.  But Ted, you have too much talent to write about business and parking garages.  You should be writing about life and love and gardens and playgrounds and such things.  Come write for me, Ted.

    Yesterday, I posted the picture and what is below it on the “old site.”   Ted’s response is this (if anyone knows what an illio is, please contact me).]

“Saw the illio on your site…

But… but… I don’t have that much hair!  And it is churlish to muss it up like that.  Although the picture does capture the comedy of chronically being late for my own life.  But you did catch my, um, sensual fire in that shot.  Well, I respect your mission here.  But, tragically, I am a one trick pony.

And what a tiring trick.  Here I am in mid-summer with reams of parking lot reading – and parking lot reading is every voter’s favorite thing NOT to do!  How cool is this?

However this garage thing is resolved I shall go, like the genie whose job is done…. ‘PFFFT!’  back to that place where all the other unicorns, basilisks and manticores spend their quiet hours… And you won’t have Ted Byrne to kick around anymore : - )

It is always hard to do public lifting.  It is harder than hard in an election year.  The odds are overwhelmingly against our project.  Did you know in Scientific American’s Discovery Archaeology for Jan/Feb 2000 evidence was presented from 8,500 years ago of a cult in Cyprus that wanted to turn back the clock.  Romantic primitivism is part of our nature.

Change is torturous to us.  So we investigate it closely.  And here the LPA is, pulling 19 million bucks worth of change, full-tilt boogie, seemingly from a magician’s hat!  In a freakin’ election year!  That’s a hell of a lot to lift… my muscles are trembling.  So yes, I wear that expression you caught so well in the photo with the mussed hair… the look of a man whose brain spontaneously undergoes the human equivalent of rebooting.

Ted”

An artist’s rendering of Ted Byrne, the Parking Guy

[Editor’s note – Ted Byrnes don’t happen to everyone.  If you’re lucky enough to get one in a lifetime, you run with it.  When life hands you a lemon, you make lemonade.  Mad Magazine has waited 20 years for a Ted Byrne.  National Lampoon has waited 25 years.  The Onion calls me everyday for his number.  No, Ted is mine.  Together, we will soar to the seventh story of a parking garage and from there, the sky is the limit!  You will come to know more about that cutesy scoundrel Byrne than his mother, God bless her soul.  I have been honored.  I am blessed.  Thank you to the journalism gods.  I will treat him with the humor, charm and disrespect that he deserves.  It doesn’t get any better than this.  Life is good.]

A CRYSTAL GLASS GARAGE

[These are the inspirational and spiritual words posted by Ted Byrne, the Parking Guy, on Talkback.  The insight, the wisdom and the beauty of his writing brought me to tears.  But last night, Ted, well into his second book, turned mean.  Gasp!  It’s true.  Check back later for full details.]

    “In life, much as I try, I cannot get it all.  It perturbs and frustrates me.  Frustration is a pesky thing, it comes out in so many ways.  In fact, it is why I get crankier as I build the stuff up with age.  I guess it’s the cost of change.  I’m reminded of the wedding couple, she hoping he will change, he hoping she will never – change.  Life holds surprises for them and us.  Good points though.  I wish we could afford a crystal glass garage…that, at least would let the sun shine directly in.”