Hey, it’s Dan Umbach and myself at the rifle range. That’s me in the background. Dan, see him hunched over with bad posture and leaning into the sights? Well, he was the best shot of all of us, had a real talent. We used to go through a few dozen boxes of .22 caliber on the odd weekend when the gun club was closed. My talent is firing twenty shots and hitting twenty times, although rarely a bulls-eye. Ask Julie K.
The club was free if you went there when no paying customers were using the targets. I was probably around 23 years old in this picture. One time Dan and I picked up these two gals at a lounge and went back to their apartment. When we got their clothes off, one of them had stolen a complete set of silverware and ashtrays from the lounge.We may have gotten rid of Iona. When I began to cross examine her, she insulted me 57 times in twenty minutes. Disabled, my eye. Mostly saying I didn’t know what I was talking about, or that she’d never heard of what I’d said before, meant as an insult. Reminded me a lot of dating Sharon, except Sharon would have also said counting was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard of, making it 58. Iona has some unspecified disability and is convinced the world is responsible, and the people in it aren’t paying enough attention to her. She stated I was not concerned enough about her disability on a daily basis!
[Author’s note: I do not consider being stupid to be a disability, only a disadvantage Anyone, properly motivated, can learn almost anything. Not finding it easy is not an excuse to stop trying. I told Iona to state everything she had to say about the topic now and get it over with. She wanted to keep interjecting it into the chat lines over time.]
I got her on generalizations. She kept saying any point I made was a generalization. Until I suggested her saying such a thing was itself a generalization. And, that it seemed as if some authority figure told her back in grade school that generalizing was wrong, and she had not ever re-examined that situation as an adult. She blew up, and was out right there, she just didn’t know it. I went further to say she had blindly accepting her stance, which made her a hypocrite, because she should not be criticizing others who recognized that generalizations are a necessary part of life. That since you had to generalize, your duty was to get good at it, or at least better. I told her that unless she could prove at her own expense that somebody’s “generalization” was wrong more than half the time, she had no business running off at the mouth. She entered “Feck you”, and the bot booted her out of the room, we never invited her back.
Quiet Saturdays are becoming a custom. I have spent more time at home on Saturday the last month than ever in the last twenty or thirty years. It’s a side effect of my prescriptions, true, but one of the more pleasant ones because of other spin-offs. It was a 70s thing, the reward for a week of hard work was going out Saturday night on a skrunt hunt, and the evening was a loss unless you scored. I figure I spent a small fortune carousing through the next twenty-five plus prime years.
Now I’m home watching Survivor or Stranded, where this actor is stranded on the only desert island in the world with no birds or insects to bother him, just a soccer ball called Wilson. I can’t help pondering that this nothing evening is what is happening to other men all over America, but for the opposite reasons, ha! Which is not to say I might not have wound up like this myself, but there the comparison stops.
Mind, the trade off is my toothpick business. It’s at a standstill until I get my second wind. This was never part of the plan. With toothpicks, I meet fifty women a day, without them I don’t meet that many a year. The bright point is that the investment account is building by around $50 per week, there is over a thousand in there now. Slow, but it is one of the sacrifices I had to make during 2003 to keep moving ahead and learn the trade, and the year flashed past faster than I can imagine and it’s tricky to even remember it except for California and my heart attack. Almost time now for another big push. You know, I heard that tale again that one should have six months cash in the bank for an emergency. That has got to be the biggest lie, I don’t know anybody that does. I have 8 months, true, but I’d have to cash in my future to get my hands on it.
I finished the book on Johnny Carson. For a lark, I stayed up late for the first time in my life, just to watch television, the Tonight Show. I don’t know if I got the right one, because I don’t have cable, and this fat lizard-looking short man came on. Named Jay Leno, he was dressed in this 1930s style Italian zoot suit or something, to cover his lousy physique. And that Kramer haircut! He told two stupid jokes, which drove the trained audience wild, before I shut the thing off. It was disgusting in its bad taste. I’m sure I must have been watching the wrong show, it was so bad, so tacky. I was embarrassed for him.
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