Until the Road Ends
If you’re interested, I had a short piece accepted at Six Sentences: http://sixsentences.blogspot.com/2010/09/until-road-ends.html
Going Postal
Watching my daughter walk out to the mailbox this weekend, I asked myself: why? Ben Franklin started the United States Postal Service over two-hundred years ago. Today it has an operating budget of $79 billion, and is the second largest employer in the US. And according to Wiki, they have somewhere in the neighborhood of 260,000 vehicles and consume over 800 million gallons of gasoline per year. But is all this still necessary? You have to ask: how much of that mail is really needed? It’s mostly bills and …Read the Rest
Where Arnold Lives
California. Home to the Brady Bunch, Disneyland, and Charles Manson. I like it there. East of San Diego, just outside of El Cajon, there’s a fifty-foot tall inflatable Ronald McDonald, and even though clowns are creepy, still he’s quite impressive and I’m sure he can eat more hamburgers and terrify more children than I can ever hope to do. There are great big power-generating windmills out near the Indian reservation past Alpine. They even work, most of the time. I …Read the Rest
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When it comes to communication, kids today have it made. They have smart phones, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, IM, Yahoo, and MySpace. What’s more, they have a secret and cryptic language which uses acronyms, emoticons, and shorthand in place of normal human speech. The only secret language we had as kids was Pig-Latin, and fooled ourselves into thinking that our parents weren’t smart enough to understand our talk of ex-say, rugs-day, and ock and oll-ray. In contrast to my then future-wife’s and my love letters and hours-long telephone calls, I …Read the Rest
Remembering
It’s been four months since we lost Kaden. On most days, that night seems like such a long time ago, but once in a while the pain reaches out and grabs you, making you feel like it was yesterday. In the end, each of us must learn to deal with it in his own way. This morning I loaded a new page on his site – you should take a look: http://ourlittlefighter.com/?page_id=502
Still on the Line
Driving to San Diego today, we enjoyed some excellent Country Western music by the legendary Glen Campbell. As a kid, I remember watching his TV show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, and even though it couldn’t compete with the incomparable Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, still he hosted such greats as The Beatles, Three Dog Night, Don Ho, Johnny Cash, and even Rock Hudson (long before he admitted to being queer). I grew up listening to The Wichita Lineman, Southern Nights, and especially …Read the Rest
Revenue Enhancement
What the hell are you supposed to do? You’re sitting at the intersection, second in line for a left-turn signal and the arrow turns green. But the idiot in front of you is too busy texting his girlfriend to notice that he’s supposed to be operating a motor vehicle and doesn’t move until the light turns yellow. Now you’re in the middle of the street, drivers on either side revving up their engines as they eagerly prepare to t-bone you, and FLASH, some fucking machine takes your picture for running the …Read the Rest
Attaboy
Except for the occasional dirty limerick, and maybe the poem Jabberwocky, I never gave much thought to poetry. To be honest, I still don’t, but I’m going to brag now and tell all four of you that I was published at http://www.everydaypoets.com/making-parts-by-kip/ I even got paid three bucks for it, but the Nordic Warrior Queen claimed half because she washes my shorts. P.S. Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky can be found here: http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/jabber/jabberwocky.html. It’s a great poem, you should read it. I once had the whole thing memorized, …Read the Rest
Finally, It All Makes Sense
Read the instructions. After all this time, I finally understand that it’s not the beer, it’s not low fiber or poor diet. As it turns out, I have two rectums, and I’ve only been treating one of them. I’m glad we have doctors and pharmacists to point these things out. Now the only problem I have is finding the other hole. Maybe a mirror would help?
Finding Just the Right One
We went grocery shopping tonight, the Nordic Warrior Queen and I (it turns out she hates it when I call her that). Shopping is always an adventure, especially after a couple of beers at Chili’s as a pre-Basha’s lubricant. The Nordic Warrior Queen insists on going down every…fucking…aisle, just so we don’t miss anything. I try to be a gentleman and push the cart for her, but I admit that I sometimes get distracted by the condiments, imported cheeses, or pickled vegetables and leave …Read the Rest