One year ago today: September 30, 2015, early Trump plagiarism?
Five years ago today: September 30, 2011, they’re 306 years off.
Nine years ago today: September 30, 2007, body part art, Oregon.
Random years ago today: September 30, 2004, Tacoma, Washington
MORNING
Chasing around for nothing, because I got the batbike up to Kissimmee to meet up with my old school chum and didn’t arrive until 2:15PM. Florida had chosen this week to rip up all the roads and make detours through each small town along that route. Way to go Florida, over three hours to go 46 miles by highway. But as you see, we made it. Here is the Mitch the Great, finally making it to, well, Haines City, Florida. Yes, the same Haines City that was supposed to be the metropolis of the state.
I hauled the guy out of the tourist traps of Orlando and environs, but not before we stopped at the Calypso Tiki for a Budweiser and to admire the finer points of the server, Melissa. From New York. But soon enough (after an hour getting out of the rat’s nest of Kissimmee, which otherwise is a nicer town than Orlando), we headed south down good old Highway 17. Who remembers the time I got lost in Davenport? It’s a town along that road. Otherwise, I’ve never been in that area.
Of course, I know the drill. At regular intervals, you have to get out and stretch, so here is the LiquorUp, a rather aptly named pitstop in Haines City. I tried to find a road sign for a classic photo of us arriving in Haines City, but none exist. Maybe like Luckenbach, Texas, they finally quit putting them up due to souvenir hunters. But Haines City is not exactly immortalized in song.
His trip was to visit, celebrate his retirement, and his birthday. So, he got to see Winter Haven, Auburndale when I missed a turn, and Bartow as well, since I took the scenic route to avoid the tolls. Of course, I want him to know I retired in style, so I drove through the swank areas of town. With houses built before the war.
Wyoming.
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NOON
Naturally, the talk was about the years in between. His career was successful as a mainframe programmer. Like myself, he got into the field kind of backwards, by consulting for a different project. I have permission to tell you, the project was a government study of the land to the northeast of a city I won’t specify. The city wanted to expand, but the government had certain “utility” interests in the area. The premise was the acceptable number of civilian casualties should one of the utilities decide to explode. Yet some people still want to vote for the establishment.
Like myself and most, he is not prepared for retirement. I’ve got 11 years experience, so I could answer a lot of his questions, but I’ll tell you why I could assure him he’s ahead of the pack. Like myself, he owns his own house. That remains the single most stabilizing factor of life in North America. We have the old British system of land ownership here, but only that ownership can guarantee you will never starve. No matter what challenges he could foresee, I assured him time and again that owning that house was almost assured salvation should all but the worst happen.
NIGHT
After our tour of the property, we braved the last of the afternoon rains to head over to the fancy club in the SW end. Can’t go to just an ordinary spot with my pal, so we rolled the sidecar into town and stopped to listen to the music. And chat and ogle the pretty gals. There was enough of that going on and by now I even ran into a few that I recognize.
Aha, Mitch wasn’t expecting I’d be a good cook. These are not my old boy scout meals, I explained that I’d learned to cook full meals by, in my day, dating only pretty women. What I’m saying is if any cooking got done around the gals I usually date, it is done by me. Of course, we talked about the interval, it’s been more than half a lifetime. As can be expected, our lives, careers, and take on things have all diverged in that time.
I can almost hear the readers who’ve been following along asking, what things changed the most? That’s easy, personality. Mitch is now a much more passive personality than I remember, as long as you keep in mind were just high school kids and there was a lot of turmoil in the world back then. Most everybody was aggressive, but by comparison, he is now a more easy-going and reticent personality. And I suppose he found me as assertive and gregarious as ever.
That would be a good example of what I mean. I chat up every woman I find attractive which was four or five by day’s end. Mitch, would at most say hello, like I said he’s more passive than I remember. Return tomorrow for pictures of his house. He informs me he’s got a second house now. Neat, because when he showed me the picture, nearly a thousand miles from his first house, I recognized the place. It was a hippy house in 1971. I may have crashed there. It's downtown, west of the main road, south of a school.
Last Laugh
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