Over to JZ’s, waking him up at ten, sluggish and as usual, over-concerned about getting to a family function. By that I mean it is no big deal if he missed ten or twenty a year, but he never misses even one. That is a lot of family. I installed Opera on his computer only to discover that it can’t keep up no matter what – he needs that unit sitting in the corner of his dad’s garage. Sigh, JZ may have already fallen too far behind to catch up.
We had to get a few things so it was over to the only place open in the area, the Winn/Dixie on S. Federal. I love that place, there are always babes in there. It is an expensive upscale area I cannot afford. In fact, JP and I had a quick squawk about his statement that he survived on his own. Not true, JP, he has always had a free place to live thanks to his family, and in fact he was quite surprised when I informed him that over half the money I’ve spent in my life was for accommodations.
Walking out of CVS, I could not help snapping this photo of a garbage can with an Out of Order sign. Right – how can a can be out of order? Dead batteries? Out of gravity? Was this a joke or another of those Miami things? A couple of pedestrians nearby and us went over and found the trouble. A metal bracket on the inside bottom that holds the trash off the ground had rusted through. We ate rice and shelled peanuts all through some millionaires playing football. I swear every game looks exactly alike to me where he even knows some of their names. Yes, I understand they are rich and get lots of women, but that does not excite me nor do I wish I was them. JZ cannot get this picture.
He left at 4:30 for Tanya (his other sister who sometimes invites her single lady acquaintances over to meet JZ (and of course does not want me around when this happens)). She knows that JP and I frequent clubs with women half our age. He’s told me the low quality of her taste in women for him is legendary. Just knowing her casually makes this perfect sense to me. She’s the one who thinks her sixteen year old daughter and all her girlfriends are all virgins.
On the way back, Alain called. She’s invited me for dinner tomorrow, along with JZ and the mysterious girlfriend she has in Boca Raton [not Ft. Lauderdale as earlier reported in error]. This tips me off that the girlfriend must be ugly enough to gnaw off an arm. With the exception of Marion, no woman has ever introduced me or any man I know to another woman who represents competition.
Pulling up back home, some guy was sitting near my parking spot. I knew better than to get involved and that is one reason I chose a place with a back door. Sure enough, five minutes later the Rescue and Police show up. Here’s my beef – they did not tend to the drunk and leave. They proceeded to haul all the nearby neighbors out and collect their identification and paperwork and issued one of them a “warning for possession of an expired Florida ID”. Such police are not to be trusted for the paper had expired but not the man. That white line on the pavement in the left corner is where my bumper normally sits. The less you have to do with such a system, the better off you will live.I’m running some outdated documentation through the [Brother] scanner. It has some very annoying problems but I got three huge scribblers through in two hours. Dated 1999, some were my accounting homework before I realized that Florida did not know what a CMA was. I glanced over my work and know I could relearn it all in a month if I had to. I even found a transcript of a very difficult interview.
This was the famous Robert Half interview where they tried to channelize everything I said to fill a position I did not want. They were miffed when this tactic did not work on me, it was my first experience with the Florida “politeness” tactic, where the only way you can be polite in their eyes is to do what they want. For example, my answer to where I would like to be in one year was that I would like to be earning what a person with one year experience would be making. They had noticed I had programming experience and wanted to steer me away from accounting. A tough interview.
I found the original song list, twenty songs I learned with the G back in 2000. Interesting because on a side note, I listed around ten other tunes some of which became our standards. This is odd because the G is nearly totally resistant to new ideas or music and it surprised me to see the list. Written on Xmas Day 2000 is a note that I had met his stepmother and his sister “Helen” had taken a shine to me. There are also hundreds of handwritten drafts of letters for then, as now, I know that laptops are still not as convenient as a booklet and pen. For those in danger of making assumptions, I point out that I have owned a laptop since the mid-1980s and still do not like them much because they are impractical.
Just for the record, I would like to point out the volume of material here. We are not talking a few notes here and there, but thousands of pages of handwritten material in addition to what I keyboard. Entire two hundred page scribblers of my notes on a pretty fantastic array of subjects. Lists of foods that I thought would make hurricane supplies, hand-drawn maps of eastern Venezuela, a recipe for bannock and even a thirty page manual of how income tax people cheat you. People who say there is nothing stopping you from getting ahead in life do not understand tax law. If you obey this law, you will never get ahead. This is referred to as the Horatio Alger curve.
If it were not so much work, I’d montage together several hundred pages to display here, if only to give the disbelievers a concept of the scale. I can’t give full examples simply because I distrust the analytical abilities of people to reach the correct conclusions. Stupid people tend to consider this journal a diary of admissible evidence. There is a note, for example, that my net worth on 12/31/99 was $112,266.62. This was not true, it was an accounting exercise.
Last, I was watching “Ace of Aces” in the background, it is generally too slow to keep me riveted. It is astonishingly clear for a 1933 movie and contains what were then top notch action scenes. The biplanes used seem far more powerful than the sluggish machines actually in the war. I commend the accuracy of many technical parts of the movie, especially the close inter-dependency of the pilot to his ground crew. This is too often ignored. There are also some excellent shots of the machine guns.
One gruesome part is the battle scenes which are highly stylized. Honor may have had a role in the first combats but make no mistake about it. When trying to shoot down a string-bag from your own moving platform you can forget about tracing out the enemy roundel. The best tactic is to aim for the cockpit and try to nail the bastard in the head. I’ve read these things flew at under 120 mph so the last thing you want is to let some guy crash-land and come back tomorrow mad as hell and recognizing you.
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