One year ago today: September 11, 2015, an already forgotten place.
Five years ago today: September 11, 2011, on food stamps.
Nine years ago today: September 11, 2007, I write 1 to 100.
Random years ago today: September 11, 2012, Denver in the distance.
MORNING
It should not have required four hours for me to zip down to the south end today. Even if I did stop at Denny’s for the new 50% fluffier pancakes. I was the only vehicle on the road until around 10:00AM. Here’s the local train station with the flag at half mast. There are a lot of mixed feelings about this whole 9/11 affair now that it is generally recognized as a somewhat less than a surprise attack. Want to hear the cruel joke making the rounds? Okay.
A: You can’t milk a cow for 15 years.
Hey, I told you it was cruel. I’m not taking sides on that one, but that is also an admission there are two sides to that story. Simply too many people at the top knew about the incident in advance. And too many Liberals are at work tearing the heart out of America. Listen to their “logic” of allowing so many terrorists into the country that they’ll stop attacks for fear of hitting each other. That certainly hasn’t stopped them in the Middle East.
Let’s call this morning relaxing rather than quiet. I like relaxing. So let’s go back to last evening, where I finally went out kind of late and stayed out until nearly midnight. I went to a club on Main, bit of an upscale place with only a juke box. As usual, this blog will talk about women. But sex, not so much. Compared to Broward-Dade, the place had an eye-popping eleven well-dressed under 30-ish women present. All blondes or brunettes. How I love being back in civilization.
There was one who was a cut above the rest. She knew it. Now you may well suspect that I often read when I’m alone in a saloon just to be different. I’ll have you know that is only marginally the case. The fact is, I will often read anywhere that is not full of young, available women, simply because the rest of it bores me. I’ve scored countless times reading, it is second only to music. Yet reading is only incidental to me for a basic reason and you already know that reason: it is rarely the type of women that I want that approach me while I’m reading.
Such was the case last evening. She saw me, she watched me, she knew I was intellectually a cut above the pack, if only because I own a pencil and paper. She saw I didn’t give a damn what other men did. Alas, she did not so much as smile. She could have walked over and told me what I was doing for the next twenty years. Sporting “tight-fitting” jeans, several times she worked into my ogle zone. Unfortunately, that was it.
Sorry madam, I’m way past the slight brush-past and hair-twirling stage. But that one I will remember. She’s the type that “recognizes” you later when she sees you behind a microphone, not knowing that by then, it is too late in my world. While I’ll certainly partake of the offerings, I know from way back that the only relationships that work for me are the result of instant attraction, not from “getting to know you better”. Hesitation is extinction, ladies. When you meet a guy like me, it is not the time to get coy.
And when 30 looks young, buddy, you are old.
Dormant volcano.
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NOON
Here is a picture of the swan at the Lakeland Public Library. One really should drive through this area to get an appreciation of how bid a 4,500 square foot house really is. Most of these homes were built in obviously wealthier times. Acre after acre of mansions. Get your atlas and look at the southeast area of Lakeland.
I think I can now answer that. The best analogy is your computer. It is turning bits off and on constantly, but the “off” state does not mean there is no power. In fact, if you turn the power off, you totally lose your bits, whether they are on or off. They are gone. There is your answer. A gate requires power to maintain itself in an “off” condition. The difficulty is most people compare it to a light switch, where the light is off whether you hit the switch or turn off the electricity. The answer is, they are not quite the same thing.
We learned in 2012 that these integrated circuits, or “chips” require power to operate. Because they are just groups of gates in a single housing. They behave like tiny [solenoid] relays, which require power to function. If the power fails, all the relays return to a rest position and your circuit has no more smarts. You have to “reboot” the thing to make it work again. Upon learning that, I quickly moved to combinations of NAND gates and got only as far as groups of two before I got lost.
I can explain that, as well. These gates are switches with one (and only one) output. But they have more than one input. (Most have two inputs, but there is no limit.) NAND gates have two, and to turn a NAND gate off, you need to supply power to both inputs. So far, that’s easy. But you’ll find very often to give the circuit a “memory”, the single output is tapped to feed power back to one of those inputs. Duh, I had to stare to see. Yet, if you really apply some brain thrust, it sort of melts after a half hour. It’s foggy, but getting there.
And you see what that skinny blonde lady was up against. Millions of years of evolution. She may have been compressed into her daughter’s denims, but she isn’t her daughter. I would have been all over her daughter like a herd of turtles in my day. But now? Without the confidence to walk over and say hello to me, she was up against the intensity of a learning experience, something she could not supply to a gnat. I could overhear parts of her convo, and about all she was capable of was pretty talk.
Give me a good book.
AFTERNOON
I drove past what I had thought was a pub last time, but it turns out to be a “trading post”, with junk for sale. Here is a planter made out of an old pump organ. It’s a nice place to tour, I’ll get more photos of what is unique over there. Once again, the place is full of “antiques” that closely resemble the junk we used to throw away on the old farmstead. Rusty washbuckets, old pitchforks, broken toys. Nothing I haven’t used in my own lifetime.
Another lady tells me of narrowly missing being scammed by a real estate agent who was adamant about the timing over viewing the property. Turns out it was a school zone where the SUVs stacked up twice a day so badly nobody could use their driveways. Mr. Trump, make it easier for consumers to get back at misleading advertising and shady sales techniques, particularly the Internet epidemic of bait and switch scams, sometimes called click-bait.
Next stop was the Goodwill, but I have to quit using that place for reading material. It is the same donated material as anywhere else. Cookbooks, Harlequin romances, escape literature, but Goodwill prices are now triple. And I still don’t know where anywhere else is around here. Goodwill charges $3.66 for any hardcover book. I bought one on new archeological techniques as now being applied to older digs, and how this often brings up artifacts that got missed.
This is the first time I’ve wheeled the red scooter around town just to see what’s there. Give me a month anyway to know all the main roads and I’ll see what there is to see. I also scribbled out my 24 songs, the music that finally tips the scales in my favor. They are the songs I can do by myself if anything goes wrong with the guitarist. Until now, except for exhibition slots, I was always to some degree reliant on the guitar player acting in good faith. One of the worst scenarios is the guitarist who performs well enough at rehearsal, but as the gig approaches, starts to get ever more antsy and demanding.
In one case, I had yahoo I had rehearsed with for six weeks absolutely refuse to play the new material we had learned. It was stage fright, but he would only play the ten songs he knew from birth. Ruined the entire gig. There is one condition I know that spells doom for a band, and that is to let the guitar player think he is calling the shots with the song list, either on stage or off. I’ve learned, do that even once, and you are asking for major conflict. When a guitarist wants to do a song these days, I never agree. I merely say I’ll think about it.
However iffy this kind of horse trading sounds to anyone out there, remember that at least it stands a chance as opposed to the certainty of failure over letting and ego become dictator. I’m too old to keep starting over. I purposely did not answer the inquiry from the Nashville guitarist same day. I’ll wait until tomorrow and see if he’s still on board. The biggest selling point remains not the music, but the fact that solo performing is a dry, one-dimensional existence. We’ve all seen the spiritless guitar player plodding through his last set because he needs the money.
NIGHT
I went through every available size envelope in normal inventory, and you know, I must conclude that there is a deliberate agreement not to manufacture an envelope that will contain a regular number 10 business size stamped business envelope. You know that situation, where you want to send somebody a SASE, a stamped self-addressed envelope. Fine, as long as you are putting a personal size inside a business size.
When it comes to the business size, there is absolutely nothing available that does not involve folding the envelope, paying postage for a full size document envelope which gets expensive in materials and postage, or in some way making it obvious there is something unusual inside. I see there is a specialty stationary store in Winter Haven, so I’ll maybe check that during the week. What’s suspicious is not just the lack of a standard envelope expressly for that purpose, but the fact that there is nothing even close that could be adapted. Things like that don’t happen by themselves.
Last Laugh
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