-- I told you not to turn right but no, why listen to me, you know best, you're the best. Good job getting us stuck in the middle of nowhere, Howard.
-- Be quiet, Darla, I'm trying to think.
-- Oh, NOW you want to think! What a reversal!
-- You're not helping.
-- Oh Darla, you said, a Hummer will go anywhere, you said. We'll never get stuck ever ever anywhere ever, you said.
-- I didn't say that.
-- Liar! What are we gonna do now, Howard?
-- I guess we'll just have to wait for the Spring thaw.
-- Oh, is that your idea of a joke?! Well here's a joke for you - how about I divorce your stupid ass? Isn't that a funny joke, Howard?
-- If we had a winch, we could pull ourselves out.
-- If the damn thing had wings we could fly! You're making me nauseous, Howard. Call a freakin' tow truck and get us out of here.
-- I don't have a phone.
-- You don't have your cell phone?
-- No.
-- Well I don't either! How are we going to get help, Howard?!
-- Calm down, Darla. One of us will have to walk to that farmhouse we passed.
-- That was like 8 miles back!
-- As you know, Darla, I recently twisted my ankle-
-- AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
May 2, 2015
Drove past a downtown bench where a man with a 4 pack of Red Bull sat. I completed some errands and about 20 minutes later, found myself again passing the guy on the bench. At his feet were two empty cans of Red Bull and he was guzzling from the third. Yeesh. An hour later I came around for the last time and saw four empty Red Bull cans on the ground. It gives you wings they say. Great, but need he have littered before he flew away?
May 4, 2015
Drat, caught the flu yesterday. Feel like crap. Later.
May 5, 2015
A friend of mine decided that he wanted to be on a TV game show "for all the free prizes". He flew to LA and made the rounds of several open calls but didn't get selected for any of the programs. When he returned home I asked him if it had been worth it (he spent over $2,000 including air fare, hotel, car rental and food). He said it had definitely not been worth it, he wished he'd never gone, it was a fool's errand, he must have been out of his mind, what was he thinking, he was an idiot to have tried, game shows were for suckers and he regretted the whole blasted affair. Later, his condemnations made more sense when I found out he got herpes from a fellow wannabe contestant, his only free prize.
May 6, 2015
Sitting in front of the post office was a woman with a cardboard sign that read, 'I'm lost, from Uruguay. Do you speak Portuguese?' Everyone that walked by shook their head no. I walked up to her and said in Spanish, "Pensé que el idioma nacional de Uruguay era Español?" ("I thought the national language of Uruguay was Spanish?"). And she said to me in English, "It is." I said, "Are you really lost?", and she said, "No." Okaaaaay. I went into the post office, got my mail and left her there doing whatever it was she was doing.
-- Everyone says we look alike, but I just don't see it.
-- Maybe because we have the same sunglasses.
-- Yeah, that's probably it.
-- And the same walking cane.
-- Sure, I can see that.
-- The same style of clothes.
-- I do love your shirt.
-- Yours is pretty cool too.
-- Someone asked me if we were brothers.
-- What did you tell them?
-- I couldn't believe they were serious. Take away the sunglasses, cane and clothes and we're as different as night and day.
-- Word.
May 8, 2015
Had an 8:30AM meeting with a producer who shook my hand and offered me a drink. Really? At 8:30 in the morning? I declined but he poured himself a glass of scotch and sipped from it during our entire meeting. You know how there are flaws in some people you can overlook because their flaws are idiosyncratic or personal and they don't affect you? Well this wasn't one of them.
May 10, 2015
I'm on the phone with an editor who says to me that if a meteor were going to crash into the Earth and obliterate everything and this was the last day before the world vanished, she would take the handgun that has been in her bedside night table for ten years without ever being fired once and she would go outside and randomly shoot strangers just to see what it felt like. Then, she said, I would find some heroin and get high as hell, again, just to see what it felt like. What would you do? she asked me. Uh, spend time with my wife and our animals? I replied meekly. Not me, she said cheerily, not me. Huh, and you think you know somebody...
May 11, 2015
I had a dream that an old camera carrying case held some treasure inside and in the dream I spent a great deal of time looking for it. When I got into my office this morning I saw my old camera carrying case sitting right where it has for years, so out of curiosity, I opened it. Inside was my 9V Bosch hammer drill. Well I'll be. Now if my dream would have told me why I stashed a cordless drill in my camera case...
May 12, 2015
You create your own life with the thoughts you have about it. If you think you're unworthy or lame or useless, you are. If you think you have unlimited potential and vast inner beauty, you do. Get me?
Doris had had enough. There was too much going on and at some point she just checked out. Later, when she tuned back in, everything seemed better, or more tolerable, at least liveable. But for now, Doris had had enough.
May 14, 2015
You hear a loud bang, go to investigate, and find nothing. You hear footsteps when there is nobody there. A book falls off a shelve all by itself. There's a knock on the door but no one is there. You're sure you hear voices whispering in the same room in which you are alone. What do you believe is actually going on? Does it dawn on you that there might well be other dimensions of reality? Do you start to think that perhaps not everything can be accounted for with just the five senses? You should.
May 15, 2015
I was someplace I shouldn't be and saw someone else's To Do list. Hmm.
Coils of wire
rubber gloves
dog treats
ginger ale
climbing rope
bread
hammer
chainsaw
taser
May 16, 2015
Overheard a man and woman on the street.
-- Have you ever been handcuffed?
-- No.
-- Would you let me?
-- What?
-- You know, I could handcuff you to the headboard. Maybe tie you up. We could pretend I broke into your home.
-- You mean as a sexual fantasy?
-- Yeah.
-- You have a bondage fetish?
-- Kinda.
-- You're not going to do anything weird, are you?
-- Besides breaking into your house, tying you up and having my way with you? No.
-- Sure, might be fun.
-- Leave the backdoor unlocked tonight. I'll do the rest.
-- This is kind of exciting.
-- I know.
May 17, 2015
Just before I threw up in my mouth, I surfed into a program featuring some dumpy little rich guy showing off his ridiculous living room in which he had parked a garish custom chopper that only a dork would ride and a tasteless fool would display. When asked why he had 17 TVs in the room, he had no clue. He had animal skulls all over the walls. The room felt like a little guy trying to show how big he isn't. The camera follows him to his bedroom where the greasy 5'6", 200 pound, little icky rich guy strokes his chin beard leeringly and licks his pork chop thick lips at the three beautiful young girls prostrated across his bed. That was when I threw up in my mouth.
May 18, 2015
Look, you can do anything you want. So there is little point in blaming others for your missteps, foibles and gaffs. You did what you did, so take responsibility for that and you might be amazed at what comes of it. Or continue playing the victim and wonder why life is piling on. As always, the choice is yours.
As far as Lydia Meyerhoff was concerned, the Austrian moustache craze of 1831 had gone too far. "I can't serve soup to anyone!" she denounced. "And trying to get little Karl to trim that Fu has been next to impossible!"
May 21, 2015
I'm pumping gas when next to me a very old Winnebago wheezes up to the island. Out get two men who are arguing about something. One starts to pump gas while the other is cleaning the windows, but they are yelling at one another the whole time they're doing it. Gas pumped and windows washed, they stroll inside the convenience store, arguing the whole way. A couple of minutes later they come out of the store, stone faced, each with a dazed look, and no more arguing. I go into the store to pay and the cashier is totally excited. She says, "Did you see those 2 guys! They just won the lottery!" Easily, the best way to stop an argument that I've ever seen.
May 22, 2015
A family with carpentry skills took a good piece of property with a scenic view and over the three years they lived there, didn't stop improving the acreage. They built a beautiful barn, attractive outbuildings, white picket fence pastures, a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a complete redo of the main house. The entire family considered this to be their only jobs. None of them worked outside the home. Their plan was simple: allow themselves three years of prepaid living expenses, salaries and building materials, live and work full time on the property, create useful, desired spaces, and in general, greatly improve every aspect of it through their own skill and labor. Then sell it for a large profit, buy a new good piece of land and do it all again. While successful (this was their fourth flip), there is both good and bad news with such an arrangement. The good news is you're working and living with your family, the bad news is you're working and living with your family.
May 23, 2015
Overheard at a cafe.
-- I think my husband is losing his mind.
-- How's that?
-- You know we have the three cats, Horace, Miguel and Zeke. Well it's Lenny's job to clean out the litter box, but lately he's been spending like a half an hour doing it! At first I thought he was maybe doing something gross with the cat poop-
-- Lenny has a fetish?!
-- But it wasn't that at all. He was drawing Zen patterns in the litter.
-- Wha'?
-- You know how the Japanese draw Zen patterns in the sand as a meditation.
-- I did not know that.
-- Well Lenny's doing it in the cat box!
-- What? Eating poop?!
-- Ew, no. Jesus Janet. He's cleaning the box and then he draws some slo-mo Zen patterns with a chopstick - that's why we have only one and half sets now because I refuse to use a chopstick that Lenny drug around in the cat box and put it into my mouth no matter how many times it's been washed.
-- Yeah, I can't think the last time we had Chinese food.
-- That's why.
-- Wow.
-- So every day Lenny's drawing in the cat litter and the cats are getting pissed 'cause he hogs the box for like a half hour at a time and they gotta go.
-- Wait, that means he spends all that time drawing elaborate designs and the first cat that goes in there messes Lenny's Zen up. All that work and then...nothing. Why even do it?
Well, I jumped up, turned around, spit in the air, fell on the ground and asked him which was the way back home.
He said, "Take a right at the light, keep goin' straight until night, and then, boy, you're on your own."
Bruce Springsteen
Now that you find yourself here, you wonder,
sage advice or just bad directions?
May 26, 2015
My Dad at 89 had a desktop computer, an iPad tablet and a smartphone. Kids as young as one are being introduced to computer games. Well that's pretty much the gamut. So at this point in time, do we thank Bill Gates or curse him?
May 27, 2015
I surfed into some ridiculous TV preacher with spittle and foam at the corners of his mouth wearing a dumbass fur hat with a purple and green floor length robe adorned with all kinds of frou frou and piping and velvet fop all over it, yelling and screaming his religious brand at the little people in their seats who are, to a person, mesmerized by the spectacle before them, and I thought to myself, Can't you see he knows nothing more than you? Can't you recognize a sideshow when you see one? But the audience was rapt, the ridiculous TV preacher had won. Click.
May 28, 2015
Susan was cooking something at 450 sizzling degrees and when she opened the oven door to check on it, the door fell off. Literally. Searing heat blasted straight into the kitchen. We both realized how ridiculously big the oven opening is without the door on it. Ok, it's not much of a story, but it was the talk of yesterday.
May 29, 2015
Ran into a kid that was stoked about everything he did. He was just as happy to do the dishes as score a goal for his hockey team. A bug on a tree was as awesome to watch as the Super Bowl. He was enthusiastic about everything equally. You can't teach that kind of vim. It was sweet to encounter someone who sees the world as a wide open place full of marvels and treasures.
May 30, 2015
With the big stuff - houses, cars - you never really own something in perpetuity, do you. Your car and house may be paid off and you own the title to both free and clear, but every year you will have to pay property tax, license fees and insurances and if you don't, what you own free and clear may not be yours for much longer. And because this will happen every year, forever - you owing more money for something you have already paid for - at some point it will dawn on you that you never really own something in perpetuity. Right, for me, that moment just came.
