One year ago today: May 1, 2020, “a clear distinction”.
Five years ago today: May 1, 2016, be warned, banks suck.
Nine years ago today: May 1, 2012, hippopotomonstrosequipediophobia.
Random years ago today: May 1, 2006, at the shop.
MORNING
This morning is a first-world problem for me. I want that new Fishman PA, but it is in West Palm, out on the Okeechobee. That’s 60 miles from here. The dilemma is do I take the batbike out there today? Or ride the Tri-Rail to West Palm and have the guy meet me? Or wait until tomorrow when I am in Boca anyway? Not sure what a first-world problem is? That’s where people who live in wealthy industrialized nations make up shit to be upset about. See panel.
√ Diamond earrings keep scratching iPhone.
√ My house is so new I can’t find it on GPS
√ My ocean view is blocked by my yacht.
√ Eating while driving and it’s all green lights.
Stonehenge and chemtrails.
NOON
This photo is just for balance. This is the new “laser-leveled” track along Dixie as it looks now, several months after it has settled a little. You can see it is no longer perfectly aligned. The astute view will notice this new railroad track is considerably lower than the older roadbed to the left. I can’t figure that out, but yes, the rails rise up to the grade level at every crossing and then back down on the other side. That will be fun to ride on.
[Author's note 2021: the next paragraphs are misleading in that this incident happened 25 years ago. Today they only got my phone and bank account, which were restored within a few hours. Below I am describing an old audit, and to this day, I don't keep a phone in my own name. And I always have service.
Also, today's problem was not an audit, but the fact I had refused to get a chip card. This is also the time I became aware that on-line banking was tied to your telephone. Now, I never give banks my phone number--and they refuse me on-line banking.]
They could not find him, he was working on the North Sea oil rigs. So they attacked me. My phone went dead, my bank account was seized, my paycheck garnisheed, my Cadillac was towed, and there was a plug inset in the lock of my apartment deadbolt. But it taught me all I need to know about government policy and I vowed never to be that vulnerable again. In the end, it turned out my partner did not have receipts for claiming the deduction of paying his 8 year old step-brother for mowing our apartment lawn one summer.
Anyway, this time I shrugged off the problem until later. This time I have other vehicles, other money, other phones, other ways of doing things. But I can see how devastating that would be to the unprepared sheeple. The phone was pure coincidence, I ran over my minutes, which has happened a few times since I began looking for real estate. I usually have enough of a balance in that account to pay for any overage, this time there was not. So that’s taken care of.
But the bank, not so easy. Back a few months I declined their offer to “upgrade” to the new chip card. The card is not safer or more secure, the algorithm is identical to the old magnetic stripe. The cover story that it is for your benefit is pure bunk. There are thousands of lines of other code that is unexplained, so I declined the card. Well, it turns out so many people were doing the same that the bank decided to force them into compliance. Notice how they do it on a Sunday morning so they can put you on hold for twenty minutes?
Still, refusing the card was no reason to freeze my account. It was an interesting conversation because it shows me that they have fallen for all of my alternative “information”. I have a prepared list of near-mistakes and they have every one of them on file. To access my account, I must use the chip card. Do you understand what I’m saying? I cannot even close the account or get my own money from the teller in person until I activate the chip. That, folks, is why I have this one segregated account that I use for nothing but depositing my pension check, nothing else.
And don’t think the bank isn’t aware of that $400 emergency study. For most people, getting locked out of your account is the emergency and don’t think the bank doesn’t know that.
I was also treated to an uninvited lecture from a retarded bank supervisor who advised me he was running a “protection” operation on my account whether I wanted such a thing or not. He insinuated I was not qualified enough to monitor my own account, and that the bank was the judge if any of my transactions were “suspicious”. This, folks, is why I never take anything out of my account but small multiples of twenty and never use the debit function. (I’ve never owned a credit card.) I’m curious what the band would consider “suspicious” activity on my account. Buying houses in cash, maybe? Ordering robot parts or maybe purchasing military motorcycle parts from the Ukraine?
AFTERNOON
A glorious day for a motorcycle trip up to West Palm to pick up the PA. I couldn’t wait. And Pat-B is playing at the Rhum Shak, so I combined the two objectives and stopped in to see his show. He offered me $650 for the PA, no way. It’s mine. He’s also beginning to conclude playing the same old crap isn’t getting him anywhere. But he still has not foreseen that playing anywhere else in this land is not going to work out any better.
I picked up he PA and the guy threw in a brand new bass case for free. He saw my old one was beyond repair. He was just an older jazz musician who decided to get out of the business. I can see it, he was handsomely set up in a retirement community near West Palm. I stopped in to see Pat-B at the Rhum Shak, a watering hole in Lake Worth.
There was an incident. The crowd including myself was watching the band at the Rhum Shak when the entire place paused for just a split moment. But I recognized that stunned silence for what it was. I slowly turned around to find myself looking at the spitting image of my wife—when she was that age. Tall, slim, blonde, perfectly proportioned. When I say perfect, I speak with authority. And like my wife, she was unphased, smiling back at everybody. You just don’t see something like that every day, and certainly not in Lake Worth, Florida. Alas, she was a third of my age.
One again, the only reason I regret growing old is how badly you miss young women. Last morning, this cowpie sat next to me at the Senor, hefty and flabby-armed, trying to engage me in a convo that her mother also does the crosswords. Like, at her age, she’s still that attached to her mother? That sounds like a sure-fire fun winner. I did not stick around Lake Worth, it is around forty miles on the freeway and I was driving the batbike into the approaching sunset.
Ah, but the batbike turns every trip into an adventure.
NIGHT
The new equipment is here, just not unpacked and set up yet. I checked it out completely, included the full bass setting and can’t find anything wrong. It’s a milestone, the 28 pound PA system, though I was quick to note that does not include the cables or stands. This is sometimes called the “Behringer weight”, where all the adaptors and cables needed to make their equipment work weighs more than the equipment. It is closer to 40 pounds wet up, which includes the aluminum stand.
Here’s one for you. I stopped at the club on the way home and got into a word game. My turn, I chose the word “zyzygy”, which I happen to have looked up plenty of times because it was the last word in the dictionary. Alas, that was a dictionary written by people who had any brains. The Millennial spelling is “syzygy”, so I lost. As I’ve said, Millennials have a different test of fact. In a world full of common core idiots, fifty million terrible spellers can’t be wrong.
ADDENDUM
Trivia. May 1, was the first journal entry ever of my life, back when I was a teen. Writing was frowned upon unless you were writing a letter to your aunt or uncle, most of whom we never met. And, as it turned out, had nothing in common with. When people in my family got the hell out, they stayed out. Any other writing was a waste of time and a quick way to get your ears boxed.
A lady teacher at the school had given me some light green writing paper. It was super thin and could be hidden easily. Sadly, those early writings are long gone for the simplest of reasons. Poor people have to move so often you eventually lose things like that. And I was the poorest of poor until I got out of university and fifteen years afterward.
You know, that same teacher took pity on me. I was that smart kid trapped in a dumb family. I never really knew the lady since she never taught any of my classes. But that’s the same lady who was the only person to send me money while I was in college. Every other month, she would send me a letter with a five dollar bill. When I was 17, that wasn’t very much money, but it was often all I had at a period I was supposed to be having the time of my life before settling down.
Let me check with the rulebook to see if I can write her name. Yes. Her name was Rosie Kent-Barber. I heard she eventually died in way up in the Canadian North West Territories, so sad. She sent me more money, around $60, than my entire family combined. That was my only “dating money” in my teens. Yes, I did write back, but what can a farm kid write? “Hi, it was twenty below again last week and I walked to school because I am the only student on this gigantic campus who has no car.”
Last Laugh
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