We broke even for the day, which is positive in this era. I was in the shop all day plugging ads into the Internet. It is mindless work that has to be kept in the correct order. There were a few interesting customers. That Elly lady was in, the single mother who did time in jail for assault and can’t figure out why I’m not after her. She is studying “law”, in quotes because I don’t know what manner of it you can study through NOVA on-line. Yep, people with no computer knowledge can study law over the Internet, these are amazing times indeed.
Somebody donated a Mah Jongg – maybe that is the wrong name but all Chinese games look alike to me. Boringly complex. This had real bakelite playing tiles and four trays for players. The trays have little spring-loaded clips for holding what look like small poker chips. They are for keeping some kind of score. Unlike the computer game, these tiles are placed by the players in rounds (I think).
I stopped for a morning bagel even though I had first stopped for coffee at Panera. It took so long to get service, around 22 minutes, that I took my coffee over to Federal Highway for the snack. Legs was there, one day I’ll get you some good close-ups of those famous gams It took all day to place around 16 ads onto the Internet. I was only interrupted by customers for a few minutes at a time. That means I basically have to charge $10 per ad even if they supply the pictures.
It was another perfect weather Florida day, the only thing that this place ever gets right, if only once in a while. Great time for photos. Remember, I am still taking photos of the greatest moments in city planning, and today I go one of a sidewalk that literally goes through a power pole, leaving not enough room to go around the pole in either direction. Seriously, if you have time and it doesn’t hurt too much, stop as I did and try to imagine the mentality of the people who managed to do this thing.
You see, this brand of stupidity cannot exist in isolation. It requires massive droves of entrenched inter-generational stupidity of the grossest magnitude to both do something like this, and get away with it. There is an enormous unspoken agreement between multiple layers of bureaucrats to look the other way before this kind of ignorance becomes an accepted everyday event in any part of the land. There you see it, right smack in the middle of the path. Not one inch out of the way. I’ll bet you ten bucks the sidewalk pavers did not even notice the pole until they bumped into it, and by then it was too late. To do anything about it might mean they’d miss lunch and have to fill out paperwork, and we all know how overworked they already are.
I stayed open an hour later, to 5:00, and put in ads for a game table, a piano stool, a captain’s wheel, a secretary desk, a boom box, a picnic set and a porcelain lamp. I hope I mentioned at least a few things I did not before. There is always something new and interesting at the thrift. A couple of good-looking women were in, but not alone. Dickens disconnected the printer. The picnic set is interesting, made in Sheffield in England of “nickel silver stainless steel”. The only place I ever heard of this great industrial complex, other than that it was bombed a few times, was in the movie “The Full Monty”.
Well, I now have proof that England’s mightiest metal factories were actually able to produce a basic picnic setting for six. The dishes were a strange material called Balasta(?) and they had these neat sandwich boxes with spring-clamps on the lid. So even if those who worked in post-industrial revolution England could not afford to go on picnics or find a soot-free area to do so, they exported this set to Ambercrombie & Fitch in New York. I wonder if there are any places in Florida to have a picnic. Maybe in the Everglades, beside the alligators? Count the silverware before you leave, and while you’re at it, the family members.
Say, would you like a newspaper? Here is a pretty sight on the main road through town, the same town that won’t let people put up six foot privacy fences because they don’t look nice. What’s the odds that the person who doesn’t want to allow privacy fences had a neighbor who put one up shortly after they moved in next door to him. Very shortly. The hedge is okay, probably because it is easier to peek through a hedge and it affords some camouflage for the peeker. For sure, the same town council allows these vending boxes to proliferate.
Hmmm, I just got a call from one of the customers that was in today, a preacher’s wife from upstate. She bought a Bavarian tea set, but she left the creamer behind somewhere. Both of us remember that she did not bring it up to the counter, where I carefully wrapped everything in newspaper. I did not know there was a creamer, so Dickens will have to look for it. How did she get my number? The number in the phone book and on the store window is the house phone and she could not have called Dickens. Maybe I gave her a business card.
Okay, I’m going to break down and buy new glasses. For twenty-one years I’ve been planning on laser eye surgery and never got around to it yet, meaning my glasses are very old. I’ve also knuckled down and began a systematic study of CSS box structure. The wording on the advanced techniques was too complicated without going back and studying the special word contexts used. I dislike such computer languages, the concepts are easy, but the way they contort things is shameless. For example, “background-color” is identical to “padding”, but guess which one you have to type and of course, you have to memorize both terms. Not to be confused with “bg-color” which is the same thing but changes depending on where you type it.
In all, I did not go out this evening. I biked twelve miles and decided not to go over to the Barn. There is a lot of study material here I have to cover. I baked bread, meaning I thawed and heated up a frozen loaf. It tastes no better but sure makes the place smell great. Cooking reminds me of Elly, the gal who was in earlier. She thinks I am really handsome ever since I grew the goatee, and actually was coming on to me in the shop. Sorry, not my type, so there is nothing to report. She called me sexy a few times and was probing for a reaction. What a strange bird, when we first met she was totally standoffish, but now that I look a bit like an aging biker, she is all over me. I must laugh a little at this sad display of feminine pride. She cannot, no matter what, simply ask me to go out with her. Can the dignity lecture, I don’t want to hear it. Many women have very tactfully asked me to go to bed with them. So many, in fact, that I don’t buy into it that women can’t do it at all without seeming desperate. That is not the case.
My all time favorite was a blonde, blue-eyed hairdresser I met from the South West end in 1976. Her name was Kim Berlin, and she, upon being asked what she would like to do on her 19th birthday, replied “I’d like to take you, and a bottle of Black Tower, over to my place and not quit until you are both finished.” That, ladies, is an approach that works well with me, and to this day I fondly remember Kim. Yet this Elly, an ex-con with no education, no job, no future and an indeterminate number of illegitimate offspring is worried what the next man will think of her? Give me a break.
The true problem, if you ask me, is the upbringing of these type of women. They are raised to believe that the right kind of teasing can get them anything they want. Of course, there are always huge numbers of desperate men around to promote that fiction. By the time they are 21, worked over, and dumped a few times, it is too late. Very few of them can change their modus operandi. Instead, they resort to more elaborate and futile methods of keeping a man – getting shacked up, getting pregnant, you know the drill. Sure enough, sooner or later they are back on the market, minus any natural charms and knowing only that one single strategy that works best for the young and pretty. Have I analyzed this to death?
