One year ago today: September 2, 2016, I intend to make mistakes.
Five years ago today: September 2, 2012, my biggest expense.
Nine years ago today: September 2, 2008, airports: money laundering 501.
Random years ago today: Setember 2, xxxx, WIP
Be somewhat afraid? Here’s something fairly new, at least to me. I wouldn’t know if it was featured on TV last week or last month. This is a tee-shirt making robot. The maker says it puts 17 people out of work, or as the 1% like to put it, encourages those workers to find a better match for their job skills. It does not specify if it replaces just production people, or the output overall equates to fewer humans. Or maybe it is 17 times faster? I’ve not witnessed it in action but for the dropouts of this generation, the writing is on the wall, why, you can even see it there yourself. If you were born before 1991, you can probably see it and read it, too. The sad part for Miami fashionistas is that each shirt is perfect, so there are no seconds for the bargain bins.
I devoted the whole day to logistics, the factor that keeps this ship of state afloat. The pieces don’t all nicely fall into place by themselves. At one point I even got creative. You know those little stringy things you use to hand your glasses around the neck. One of those things you never much think about, but ah, that’s why you let the robot club do that for you. There are two basic types. The ones that attach to the ear part and the ones that attach to the front, up where the ear arm (does it have a name?) meets the lens. This latter model is the one you want if you need to slip the glasses on while wearing a motorcycle helmet.
Problem. These are the cheapest type made and they don’t last long. Thusforth, I took and made one out of an old purse chain. Snappy looking, and it holds. It’s temporarily fastened with little blue clips of antenna wire, hey, these things have to be field tested. If it works, I’ll stop at Wal*mart, pausing to put on a thrift store t-shirt so as to look the part, and replace the wire with some of those fancy tiny jewelry clamps, or maybe those pierced earring stubs. No more chasing around for my glasses. I had a metal chain model before, from Colorado. When it broke, well, have you ever tried to find replacements for such things? Without giving your life history to Google or Amazon, I mean.
Does that seem callous? Too bad, I’m just rating by the type of gal that I’m used to dating. Let’s face it, there has to be some attraction, right? And I know what I find attractive. But in the sense of the delicious, super-sexy types I was used to in my younger days, nothing around here comes close, even to look at. Now when I say women, I’m talking the 24 – 48 age group. Nothing doing around here, but at least there’s a chance. In south Florida, there is no hope in hell. Anything remotely attractive is long gone by age 18. Long gone.
As for it being a man’s world, once you are over 30, unless you are movie-star good looking or rich, you pretty much go unnoticed. Unless you play in a band. Then at least you meet women, but rarely the ones you want. I haven’t forgotten that my last few girlfriends turned out to be friends of the one I met at the gig. Let me think, no, in my adult life, I have never directly dated a gal I met strictly from being on stage. It has always been somebody they were with or, like, a younger sister or cousin.
Wait, wait, there was one. The lady from the Unitarian Church Halloween party in 2000 or 2001. Sadly, there was a blog doldrum at that time, but I remember it now. That’s the one I should have walked past for the well-dressed Jewish lady. The nurse, that’s the one who, while on a date with me, put her cell phone on the table in case one of her sons “called for bail money”. When I dumped her she sent me e-mails saying she’d pray for me because I couldn’t “deal with the complexities” of her life. She heavily confused “couldn’t” with “can’t be bothered”. Read on and I’ll tell you about the gal tonight.
World’s smallest country.
(For sale, about $900,000,000.)
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Now, I begin revamping my music act. According to the problems encountered y’day, I have a lot of ground to cover, but it is ground that just needs going over once. Ah, it’s out of sequence but I’ll tell you about the gal just mentioned right away. I had a bunch of plumbing diagrams to draw, so what better place than Saturday night pub in central Florida? It’s not like the place is going to be fully of dazzling women to distract you. I parked my azz at the far end of the counter, furthest from the Karaoke and foot traffic. There I am working away, when this short one, not fat, but puffy, sits next to me and she starts in.
The boob brush, the hair flick, the lingering glance, the Axe body spray. Over the next 90 minutes she did about everything except what might have worked. The massive bend over to pick up the dropped dollar and the accidental stumble to land flat in my lap. She did that stunt twice. Ah but you want to know what she failed to do. Well, she could have explained that the 6-foot-3 tub of 320 pound lard she walked in with was her brother or neighbor or something. That he was just another goof with his ball cap and his brain cells on backward. I would have gone for it since she was maybe 28, but not if I have to risk cracked ribs or missing teeth to get there. She wasn’t that pretty.
It’s sad in a way because these women don’t realize it is not about tonight. It is about forever and I have a rule about asking out a gal who failed to connect first off. I know myself and you get one chance. I’ve tried other ways, the worst of which is “getting to know” someone better because that never works out for me. W women without the hard bark to make the first move when the situation calls for it would never last in my world. Now back to my music.
I have 26 songs I can work up to snuff. Down from 32, but some of the pub songs just had to be shelved. It’s not quite enough tunes to do a full gig but I would not be the first one around here to dig into repeats by the last set. That 12-song limit of most talentless guitar players is very evident in the local acts. You know it when you can’t tell what song they are playing until the singing starts. That’s talentless guitar playing, or if you would, comping.
“What good is the Moon if you can’t
buy it or sell it?”
~ Ivan Boesky, convict.
And the Watchdog show had an interesting commentary on a position I’ve held for decades. Government bailouts. They should be abolished. House prices do not collapse on their own, rather they seek their intrinsic value. If people want to mortgage houses built on a Texas floodplain, gamblers should take their own losses. Same with the fracture zone people. The taxpayer should not be bailing them out. Who remembers the bank term “underwater” for owning more on the house than it is worth? Prophetic, or what? The morons at DC are talking about writing checks for billions to “homeowners” who in most cases, didn’t own a damn thing.
The same situation was present in Louisiana in the 70s, where developers kept getting government grants to build subdivisions below sea level and the banks got government grants to mortgage those houses. The population was repeatedly warned that disaster was looming, but they insisted on staying. I heard some of them defend that decision. They were so inbred everything they said came out like, “Lawd go’ sheppin’ wif de bane pone un rangdee farlem onsum latmun sookles”. Where’s Dave Barry to translate that?
The Watchdog had my attention because in one show, he used two tiny phrases that instantly had me glued to the radio. It is not the subject that triggers my suspicions of plagiarism of this blog, but the order and phrasing. Darn rights I would notice if you repeat what I say back to me in the same order, with the same emphasis and in the same amount of time. But it was only two and I need three to get really uppity over it. Chris, if you are lifting anything from this blog, at least give me the credit. You can keep the cash. For now.
He was on about the contrived inflation figures, which could be anybody. It was when he mentioned you should be basing inflation on what you have to buy yourself, and gave some figures and examples that were a little too coincidental for me. But he was pursuing a different avenue, so it was nothing. He was telling about this government idiot who says times are good. This so-called “gubmint man” proves his point by saying times are so good that people are withdrawing record amounts of money from their IRAs. Yep, it takes a freeloading civil servant to come up with shit like that.
I hope I live long enough to see the government do an Enron with the civil servants pension plan. Yes, I would see those people suffer, and if they complain, we could tell them we are “just doing our job”. The sad part is that day will never come. Instead, the government will turn on the printing presses to pay them, passing the cost on to the rest of us through the resulting hyperinflation. The Watchdog says the true rate of inflation is 9% or so. I say it is closer to 15% over what really counts. Food. Rent. Motorcycle parts.
Since we’re talking money, let me peek at how this year’s budget is coming along. Hmmm, I’m only $744.34 over. That’s a far cry from the trailer court where it was regularly more than that per month. Anything interesting or revealing here? I’ve spent $203.92 in coffee shops, not counting coffee with any meals at a café, usually when I’m on the road. I’ve spent only $1,057 on groceries since January 1. My entire household expenses, which would include everything from laundry to bug spray has been $325.37. That would change if I ever got married. At the thrift, including DVD movies, I’ve spent $329.69. The only category where I am drastically under budget is books. All year I’ve spent only $92.51, mainly because I now use the library more.
This makes sense because magazines that I used to buy, such as Popular Science, have gone downhill while their prices have doubled and tripled. We’ve covered how the Internet changed magazines from printing what the customers want to what the advertisers want. PopSci was really walloped in this area. An appropriate name change might be Popular Pseudo-Science, or how about Popular New Age Science-like Stuff. Their illustrations have become cartoon-like and their articles cheapened down to millennial levels. I’m not paying $13 a copy for that.
And the library still has not figured out that I’m scooping the crossword puzzles out of the newspapers over two days old. Tactics of this nature put me nearly a hundred dollars under budget for my “books” category every month. For the environment, I’ve spent only $444.09 on gasoline this year. That is, less than $56 per month, down from $66 at the trailer court. For any sharp-eyed readers who spot slight discrepancies in my statistics here and there, ignore them. Nothing material is out of whack. But I do regularly update old files and change categories to what works best for me. For instance, books used to be under entertainment.
Going over the book and thrift budgets always gives me a chuckle. It’s from the days I used to chum around with the Hippie. When we’d hit a Thrift store, I head straight for the used book section and he’d head for the used shirts. Myself, I buy mainly my work clothes at the second-hand, though a few have turned out nice enough for stage work and general wear. But I have something against buying used dress clothes. Mind you, I will buy cowboy boots second hand. Because I only wear them on stage. Five bucks tops, for an excellent pair, easy to find as my size is 8-1/2. The most popular size, but you have to get there early.
ADDENDUM
I forget the name of this star, but it is something like “Ralph”. Shown here are pictures taken around three years apart. I’m pointing at the movement. The other stars in the photo show no movement, but Ralph here shows itself tracking along way out there in the cosmos. I used to spend hours out in the prairie nights looking at the stars with my binoculars. I even froze part of my nose bridge by touching it to the cold eyepiece. I saw a moon of Jupiter once. But for the rest of my life up until a year ago, I lived in the city where only the brightest stars are visible. Sigh.
Last Laugh
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