The Point of the Story

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Author: BJ (Page 16 of 34)

A Little Advice For Making Jail House Friends For Life

3 October 2021 / / 0 Comments
6 Min Read

“You boys have been found guilty of being incredibly frickin’ stupid.”

“I hereby sentence you little dumbasses to be friends for life…”

“I don’t want to go to prison!” *Sob* *SOB* *S.O.B.* “My daddy always said I had a butt that would make a black woman jealous…”

Our partner in crime was mostly assuredly dead, and my father’s racist and sexist commentary on my body image was only serving to egg on my worst-case-scenario imagination…

Oh, hello! I didn’t see you there! You maybe wondering what I’m going on about, and in that case you definitely need to take moment to check my previous musings, Introducing: Pony Boy and the Treehouse of Prison Time (as always, I’ll wait).

…

Ok, so now it makes sense right? My bro, 1SJ, my cuz, Pony Boy, and the new kid in town, NKOTB, had just been abandoned by my classmate and fellow posse member, Etu Brute, who wanted no part in our scheme to break into an unoccupied house in hopes of stealing any random items we might find inside. And thanks for reminding us all that the average of our Ring of Thieves was right around 11 years old–a key point of context, indeed.

So last I left you, us older idiots had sent NKOTB to break in through a window on the second floor of this house–which he had done successfully–and we had been waiting waaaaaaay too long for him to come downstairs and let us, his accomplices, in through the back door.

Fearing that gangly little ----- had managed to kill himself in the process, I was internally melting down at the prospect of, at only the ripe age of 9, being charged with murder, seeing as how it would be a death that occurred during the commission of a crime.

Oooooh…you can just taste the tension in the air…

“Um, guys, I kinda got lost trying to find the back door. I mean, I made it downstairs, at least…”

At the 6-minute mark, he popped his scraggly-toothed head out the same window he had entered through, and left us dumbfounded with the news of his failure.

It can’t help bring to mind the “You had one job” genre of memes, such as this one taken from the credits of Jurassic Park:

Jurassic World: Dinosaur supervisor demoted after letting everyone die in Jurassic Park Phil Tippett | Metro News
Figure 1: Where the hell were you the entire ----- movie, Phil!?!

…

There was a moment of dead silence before we all busted out laughing. We simply couldn’t resist the temptation to drag his ass for another good five minutes over the fact…um, the fact that…well, just how exactly does one get lost in a 2-story, 3 bedroom house?!? It wasn’t exactly a labyrinthine chateau that he was working with here, amiright? Who let this dumbass into our group anyways?

“Okay, you just stay there,” Pony Boy called up. “We’ll come to you.”

Unfortunately, the back door was locked.

Even more unfortunate was that the front door was not locked, and therefore when we went around front and tried the knob, we were able to waltz right in…

“Man, there ain’t jack-sh*t in here!” You could definitely hear the disgust mixed with disappointment in Pony Boy’s voice.

I guess he was really looking forward to his acts of petty thievery–hopes which were quickly dashed when-surprise, surprise-the house was empty as vacant houses are wont to be.

The rest of us weren’t quite as vested in the whole endeavor, and quickly shrugged it off, taking the opportunity to explore the house like a bunch of curious kittens instead.

It was much to our chagrin, then, when we came back down the stairs, only to be greeted by the lone cop in Rolla. At his side was Sorg, the busy-bodied troll-looking middle-aged man who lived next door, and apparently had been watching us from his porch as we broke into the house.

“Oh, sh*t.” We collectively gasped, acknowledging that we were collectively screwed…

From that point, things were kind of a blur. What I remember so vividly was the all-encompassing sinking feeling of regret that leaves one questioning their life choices.

I also remember waiting outside with the Po-po for our parents and guardians to come, and guess who comes pedaling up on his bike to see what all the hub-bub was about? That’s right, the one person in our group with an ounce of sense in his brain, Etu Brute.

“Haha, you dummies! I told you it was a bad idea!” And then off he pedaled, enjoying the feeling of freedom breeze through his little 90’s bowl-cut, while we were left to sit and ruminate upon the ass-whoopings we were indubitably about to receive.

The real highlight though, was when NKOTB‘s mom showed up–and she was soooooo pissed…

…at the cop.

But not because he had arrested her poor baby. Nope. She was absolutely livid that NKOTB appeared to still be able to enjoy the liberties of a non-criminal.

“What the hell are you doing? Put his ass in handcuffs! Teach that little shit a valuable life lesson…”

“Ma’am, your son is only 8. I don’t think that is either appropriate or necessary. We just–“

“I don’t care what you think! You need to scare his little thuggy ass straight! CUFFS. NOW.”

Sadly for her, she never got her wish. Instead of getting thrown in jail for the high crime of walking through an unlocked door to an empty house, we all just had to go down to the laughably-named “police station”–the back room of the lone hardware store in town–to be interrogated the next day.

Believe you me, that was the longest night of 1SJ’s and my little lives. Sure, Dad was pretty pissed in his own right–I mean, he cancelled all of our “Town Days” for the remaining few weeks of summer, and yes it sure sucked cornballs to have to go labor in the fields for the rest of our vacation.

But, still, knowing that you’re going to have to face the long tall shadow of the law when you wake up the next morning? Nothing like wondering if you’re going to be spending the rest of your life trying not to drop the soap in the shower to keep you up all night with ulcers, amiright?

Looking back, our “interrogations” kinda make me chuckle, but in the moment it was pretty traumatizing. I mean, the copper went through the trouble of separating us, and then–and I don’t why this is what really struck fear in my heart–he recorded the whole interview on tape.

He hit us with hard-ball questions like “Do you know who even owns that house?” and…and…and, um, that’s actually the only question I specifically remember (oh, what I would give to get my hands on those tapes now!).

In the end he was just like “Go, and sin no more.”

Well, he didn’t say that literally. It was more like, “All right you little sh*ts, don’t be going uninvited into other peoples’ house, you hear? It’s a waste of my time, and besides, I don’t really care to be publicly berated for not using handcuffs on minors…”

The point of the story is, first and foremost, even if you’re a kid, there’s no excuse for surrounding yourself by–and taking advice fro–shady characters with names like Pony Boy. Dammit, L’il Mee-Jay,1So that’s the tentative nickname for myself, whenever all my youthful escapades eventually get turned to an animated series: “The Many Shenanigans of L’il Mee-Jay”…has a nice ring to it, no? that nickname should have been your first clue that he was nothing but trouble…

But second and aft-most, if you want to forge a lasting friendship or two, all you need to do is engage in some mild larceny or other milquetoast act of criminal disobedience with some loose acquaintances.

You see, years later when I returned to Rolla to go to high school, that scraggle-tooted mother ----- we call NKOTB, with the little help of braces, blossomed into my high school bestie…also known as none other than the one, the only, Phillip K. Ballz, ladies and gentlemen!

And Etu Brute? You may know him from recent stories surrounding the events of The Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99–that’s right, ’tis The Bard!

Fuzzy feel-good life-lessons aside, in the end though, I can’t get help but always be reminded of this “headline” from the parody news website, The Onion, which pretty much sums it all up:

Content created on: 25 /26 September & 1 October 2021 (Sat/Sun/Fri)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Introducing: Pony Boy And The Tree House Of Prison Time

26 September 2021 / / 0 Comments
4 Min Read

Oh man, Pony Boy just rolled into town.

You best believe that some horse sh*t is about to go down…

“Aw, crap! Now I’ll never get to be president with this on my record…”

In one fell swoop, I had just ruined my very nascent-yet-very-promising political career. And it was all because of that stupid ----- tree house.

Ok, I admit I’m being a little over dramatic here–calling it a “tree house” is stretching the truth a bit, seeing as how in SW Kansas trees aren’t exactly in ample supply.

It was more of a stilt-house, if you will. You see, someone had put 4 very tall poles in their backyard and built a sweet little clubhouse about 15 feet off the ground on top of them. And then, as luck would have it, whoever this mysterious someone was had decided to abandon their house (and our sleepy little hamlet of Rolla altogether), leaving it all vacant.

And that’s where a bunch of rowdy young vagrants came into the picture…

‘Twas the summer between 3rd & 4th grade, back in the day when my bro, 1 Skinny Jay (aka 1SJ), and I were living in Missouri with our mom during the school year. Which meant that we got to spend our summers back in our hometown of Rolla, KS with our dad.

We had come to an agreement with Dad that every other day we would go out to the fields and farm with him. And in then during the alternating days in between, we would get to live the city-slicker life and spend the day in town at our grandma’s and do fun kid stuff like going to the pool, hanging out at the Corner Stop,1The one and only convenience store in town. and engaging in general youthful chicanery.

Now, we were more than capable than entertaining ourselves on our own, but sometimes we liked to roll more than 2-deep, and on occasion we would form our own little posse to help keep us preoccupied.

During that fateful period back in the Summer of ’90,2Not to be confused with the Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99. we were trolling the mean streets of Rolla with an old classmate of mine–who we’ll just call Etu Brute for now–and a snaggle-toothed kid a year younger than me who had just moved to town–we’ll call him NKOTB (and yes, that is an unabashed reference to those early 90’s pop-culture icons).

Now, I don’t properly recall who discovered the empty “tree house,” but whoever it was was celebrated as a ----- genius amongst us. I mean, it was pretty dang sweet having a hangout spot that not only had a view, but where also we wouldn’t live in fear of being harassed for “trespassing” or whatever the term Old Man Degarmo used when he found out that we had been using the loft of his barn to stash our cache of trashy mags (but that’s a whole ‘nother story).

Yes, technically we were squatting, but we weren’t hurting anybody, and no one seemed to really care. So for a few blessed weeks, we were drinking up the high life, which was flowing like an avalanche coming down the mountain.

Or as the kids would say these days, we had a good thing going…

“Pony Boy? What kind of nickname is that??”

Yes, it was none other than our slightly older cousin, a teenager with such impeccable judgment that he somehow had ended up with the moniker Pony Boy–but for all the wrong reasons, though. Rumor had it that it had something to do with a very stupid dare made in the barns of the Stevens County Fair…and I’ll just leave it at that.

Anyways, thanks to his notorious judgment (or lack thereof, *ahem*), there was never a dull moment when Pony Boy was around, so we didn’t mind when he started hanging out with us.

In retrospect, that was probably our first mistake.

Our second mistake was when we listened to him when he got bored just kicking it in the treehouse and suggested we up the ante and explore the main house on the property.

And by “explore” he meant…how did he put it? Oh yeah, and I quote: “Yeah, let’s break in and see if there’s any stuff like stereos and other sh*t that we can steal!”

Yes, yes, a man above all reproach, indeed.

And since at that point he was the de facto leader of our gang, we were all like “Sure. It sounds like fun…I guess.”

Well, all of us except for that party-pooper Etu Brute, who was like, “You guys are pretty stupid, and I ain’t havin’ no part of your dumbassery–I’m out!”

That left the 4 of us to figure out how we were going to go about breaking and entering at 3…p.m. Yup, we were going to do this in broad daylight. The incredibly brilliant ideas were just flowing like wine that day, no?

Pony Boy, our resident criminal mastermind, eventually decided that NKOTB, being the new kid, should climb up the T.V. antenna and onto the roof of the back porch. From there, he was to shimmy through one of the upstairs bedroom windows, then come downstairs and let the rest of us in through the back door.

A solid, solid plan. What could possibly go wrong?

So up and off he went, surprisingly making it into the house with no issue. Once we saw him disappear through the window, we started eagerly waiting for him to swing the back door wide open for our greedy little asses.

But after 5 minutes or so…still no NKOTB. What the heck was going on? Did he trip over a can of paint in there and break his neck?

Well, sh*t. That would be no good, now wouldn’t it? For serious, here–isn’t it that if somebody dies during the commission of a crime, then all of the accomplices are guilty of murder in the eyes of the law?

Oh, Pony Boy, what have you gotten us into this time?

“Wait!” you say!

“So what happened to NKOTB?!?”

“Will the Hardly-Any-Common-Sense Boys be sent to federal ‘#-me-in-the-a$$’ prison for the rest of their lives???”

“Will we ever uncover the true origin story behind the name ‘Pony Boy’? Like, surely a real pony wasn’t involved…right???”

“And most importantly, does NKOTB–poor guy, Rest in Power–die and have to persist for eternity in heaven as an awkward snaggle-toothed 8-year-old??”

“INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW!!!”

Ok, I get it. You’ve still got questions.

Well, in that case, you’ll just have to tune in next week for the stunning[ly stupid] conclusion…

Content created on: 25/26 September 2021 (Sat/Sun)

Footnotes & References:[+]

I’ll Shut Up About Better Beach Rentals When Hell Freezes Over

19 September 2021 / / 0 Comments
8 Min Read

Hyperbolically speaking, my ranting and raving about Eden Cove 9 will never end.

Or will it…?

Friends…Romans…Countrypeoples…at long last we have arrived at the final leg of our journey that should in theory land us in the Guiness Book of World Records under “World’s Longest Vacation Rental Review.” Indeed, it is my hope that this is the very last time I have to remind you that I thought it was a good idea to air all the grievances I managed to collect during the 5 weeks my fam and I took refuge at the beach house known as Eden Cove 9 (aka EC9) while our home was being repaired and renovated.

If you need to catch up, you can do so here, but in case your in the mood for some brevity, all you really need to know is that this place had to have been designed with the goal of passively-aggressively slowly driving guests mad.

It’s as if every little detail was crafted to mess with your head in small and asinine ways–nothing exciting or obvious–just a thousand little pains in your ass, each one so small that no one would believe your complaint to be an overt act of aggression–ergo, why I’ve been using terms like “purgatory” and “almost hell” instead of outright likening it to Hades.

But when you stand back and survey it all, you see very clearly that this place was…odd. Everything seemed just a little bit off…

I’ve waited a long time to reveal to you my own pet theory, and finally here it is: It felt like being in a sci-fi/horror/psychological thriller where there is some malevolent force–say, aliens–that is trying to hold you captive without you knowing it. And to do so, they try to trick you into thinking that everything is normal by creating a fake version of reality and plop you into it.

Why would they do this? Maybe we’re part of one of their scientific experimentations? Or perhaps we’re their favorite food supply, but can only be truly enjoyed when eaten fresh? I don’t know…that’s not really the point.

Anyways, these beings manage to do a pretty good job of mimicking the reality you expect–say, they nail it with 97% accuracy. But, not being humans, they totally overlook details such as providing an elevator shaft but no elevator, or make the toilets easy for their alien hands to flush, not human hands.

…and just like in The Truman Show, you slowly realize that your entire world is a facade.

…

That’s what it was like to live in EC9 for 5 weeks, my friends. Thirty-five days of constantly questioning your own sanity. Fun times, indeed.

Welp, enough of my digressions. I best get to my last few items and then we can all be done with this fiasco once and for all…

Level 7: Purgatory Freezes Over

“You want some clean, cold water? Hah! Good luck with that!”

For the first 2 weeks or so, we had to constantly keep our bottled water supply fully stocked. Unlike at home, EC9’s fridge didn’t have the indispensable1Pun alert, mother ----- ! amenities of a built-in ice or water dispenser.

…or so we thought. I eventually made this discovery:

Gifure 1: A Most Inconvenient Truth: Getting Filtered Water From The Fridge Is A Right Pain In The Ass

So…good news/bad news: the good news was that we did have access to cold filtered water. The bad news is, O-M-F-G, how insanely inconvenient can you make it?!? As you can see from my mini-movie, it fully required 2-3 hands–like “oh, you want some refreshing water? Well it’s going to cost you! You better think long and hard about whether it’s really worth the effort!”

I also couldn’t help be reminded of this classic Far Side:

Pin on Hahahahahahahaaaaa........
Figure 2: This sh*t makes me chuckle every time…

Jeez, this is so on-brand for EC9, it’s not even funny…

“We’re all freezing down here!”

Boy was I tired of hearing Mother Dearest exaggerate about how cold they were at night on the first level, while we folks on the third level were getting the night sweats every stinking evening. (Though, in her defense, I simply couldn’t use any of the showers down there because it would be rather frigid when naked, even in the middle of the day…)

“Well, you have your own dang thermostat–just turn it up!”

With a thermostat on each of EC9‘s 3 levels, I could not understand how this was a problem. Why couldn’t we all be comfortable? Yet somehow, nobody was comfortable.

After only 4-5 days into our stay, and after 4-5 nights of nobody really getting any good sleep, I finally tried to investigate further into what the hey-ho was going on with the A/C.

Being ever the astute scientist, I decided it was best to proceed by changing one variable (i.e. thermostat) at a time, and then observe what effects that change induced (i.e. if the vents on a given level on were blowing air, and if so, was it hot or cold air?).

It sounded simple enough in theory, but quickly devolved into sheer madness. For example, I would set the thermostat on the third level so it should be blowing hot air up there. The result? The second floor air would turn off, and the first floor would still be blasting cold air. There should have been zero correlation there!

Later on, when I tried setting the second floor thermostat to cool, the third floor air shut off, and the first floor started blowing hot air. The holy ----- is going on here?!?

After about 3 rounds of complete and utter insanity of this variety I broke down and had one of these moments:

Will Ferrell Crazy Pills GIF
Gifure 3: Fun fact: I once looked almost exactly him, and loved quoting this much to the delight of those around me.

After that, I broke down and called those jackasses that call themselves the Better Beach Rentals maintenance team. Fortunately, the A/C pro the sent over came pretty quickly, because by then the whole place was being blasted with hot air and even turning the entire system off–get this–did not stop the heat from coming out of the ----- vents.

But oh man, I had no idea what I was in for when the grizzled ol’ A/C guy rolled up. He insisted on walking me through every single step of his trouble shooting process as if I was his protege-in-training, including having me feel the various copper tubes hooked up to the A/C-slash-furnace system.

“You feel that?”

He would gaze into my eyes looking for a response…which was incredibly awkward, to say the least.

“Uh, that’s…warm?”

“And…”

“And…it shouldn’t be that warm?”

“Bingo! Now let me explain to you what these red and yellow wires are connected to, Young Grasshopper…”

I’m not exaggerating. Except for him calling me “Young Grasshopper.” I embellished that part a wee bit.

And so it went…he would explain something to me in waaaaay too much detail, and then peer into the windows of my soul to see if I was appreciating his wisdom and knowledge on a deeper level. It was exhausting.

Oh, speaking of ‘levels,’ he dragged me and his ladder up to the third level balcony, where he proceeded to have me assist him in climbing onto the roof to get to the actual cooling unit. Because, of course, that’s where they had put the freakin’ thing. The whole time he was up there, I was just sure that he was going to slip and fall 4 stories to his death before my very eyes. Luckily, he made it back down safely.

After that, we somehow got off on a tangent taking a grand tour of Every. Single. Vent. In the. Whole. House. I guess, he vaguely remembered servicing that very unit several years previous, which had the comedic result of him closing his eyes and turning every which way, and then almost shouting as he pointed “Over there! Over there! There’s one hidden under the entertainment system!” …as if he was divining for water or something.

He even made me help him move the huge-ass entertainment center, just so he could have the satisfaction of proving how good his memory was. He was right, by the way–that dude had thermodynamic memory, if you will.

Eventually we made our way back down the first level where the main unit was, and we repeated the whole “Feel this copper tube, my friend” business, with him naturally being pleased as a pickle that he was able to get it back to cooling. If you’re wondering, the system had somehow got stuck in emergency heating mode, and since–fun fact–that either the whole system is either blowing hot air or blowing cold air in any given moment, EC9 had been literally turning into the hell that we were already suspecting it to be.

Anyways, the old dude, quite pleased with his days’ work, eventually left after about another hour of completely unrelated regaling…

“Why is still so ----- cold in here?!?”

I could only imagine that Mom was dropping the f-bomb in her head when, 1 or 2 days later, we discovered that we could simply not keep the cold air from blasting the first level any time we were trying to cool the much toastier upper levels.

“Dangit, I guess I’ll call the maintenance guy again…”

Old Man A.C. had made it sound like I could personally give him a ring should anything go awry again, but unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) he failed to give me his direct number. So I ended up having to deal with the BBR maintenance chain of command again, and eventually they sent out some young buck from the same A/C company.

After some troubleshooting that was much less involved for me (thanks be to the gods!), he determined that the flap that controls the air flow into the first level was busted. But the way they work, they are open by default, and so it was stuck open indefinitely, causing our personal hell to freeze over.

“No worries, bro! I’ll order that new part and we’ll have you fixed up and all comfortable-like in no time!”

Can you guess where this is going? Yup, it played out just like the “we’ll fix your elevator right away” ball of tomfoolery.2I really wanted to say “tomfuckery” here, but figured I would spare my mother the shame.

Three weeks. Three ----- weeks. They had that long to get what I presume to be a fairly common part, and yet they failed. By the day we finally vacate the premises, they still hadn’t fixed it.

Were we surprised? No.

Were we disappointed? Most definitely.

Again, I’m left to wonder if they ever even actually ordered the part. And judging by all the other evidence that I’ve presented to y’all over the last several months–and some other exhibits I’ve withheld–I’m very much inclined to say that those cheap-ass incompetent nincompoops never did, and instead they just hoped that future vacationers would never be there long enough to really complain about it…

All that to say, you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m no fan of this place that hath robbed me of a little bit of my soul, and the fools that ran it.

So much so, in fact, that when it came time for our annual late summer beach vacation–and don’t you dare try to tell me that those 5 weeks at the beach were a ‘vacation’–the Boss Lady suggested foregoing our usual spot of Carolina Beach, and finding a place in Oak Island.

I had to sit her down and explain to her that thanks to EC9 and the folks at BBR, I was suffering from a bit of PTSD, and that I never wanted to set foot on that god-forsaken island again in my life. I actually don’t understand how she wasn’t traumatized either, but that might have been because she was focused on her work, and unlike me, wasn’t simultaneously being traumatized by handling all our remodeling shenanigans.

But I digress.

The point of the story is, if you’re ever in Oak Island, NC, and in need of a place to stay, for the love all that is holy, stay as far away as you can from a little piece of purgatory on Earth they call Eden Cove.

Come to think of it, stay far away from Better Beach Rentals altogether while you’re at it. I went back and did some retrospective Google research on them fools, and peeped at some of the less than kind reviews (and there were PLENTY). Big mistake…but a highly entertaining one that I recommend you make for yourself…

Content created on: 17/18 September 2021 (Fri/Sat)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Feasting At El Fiasco Loco

12 September 2021 / / 0 Comments
5 Min Read

A Groupon for a date night at the Melting Pot and the movies? $70.

All the regrettable shenanigans that are bound to ensue? Priceless…

“A Groupon for $100 towards a Melting Pot feast and 2 movie tickets? For only $70? Sounds suspicious…”

I was in the middle of a conversation with The Boss Lady, and on the verge of making a decision that in no way I could ever possibly regret.

“No, I swear that’s The Deal: A Groupon for $100 towards a Melting Pot feast and 2 movie tickets! For only $70! And you know how I love the Melting Pot so…”

She batted her eyelashes at me with that “come-hither-and-dip-your-apple-in-my-melty-cheese” look. A look she knew would melt my willpower just like said melty cheese, and so of course I conceded to her wishes.

“OK, fine…”

Fine? More like fine print. As in, “It’s Groupon, so of course your ass better be reading the fine print.”

What this Groupon actually got us was $100 of credit at restaurant.com, the shady older brother of the (slightly) more reputable restaurants.com. Not a problem in and of itself, especially since it did indeed have Melting Pot certificates in $25 increments. So far so good, right?

Well…just one problem: you could only redeem one at a time, and only towards the 3-Course Meal For Two, which is roughly $100. And, hooo, boy! Let me tell you it’s pretty awkward to find out this fact from the waiter who is impatiently waiting for you to pay your bill. Anyways, if you do the math, you’ll realize that this oh-such-a-great-f*cking-deal Groupon only got us out of paying the tip.

So, to recap: we just paid $70 to have someone else trick us into going to the Melting Pot.

No. No, Honey, this was not fine at all…

All was not lost, though. Although we would have had to blown another $300 just to use the rest of our restaurant.com credit at the Melting Pot, there were a decent number of other restaurants where we could redeem the remaining $75 without having to drop as much cash up front.

I eventually managed to use up $25 of it on some verifiably mediocre meal, but that of course still left me with $50 burning a hole in my pocket.

Well, luck would have it that our annual apple pickin’ trip was nigh upon us, and as a tradition, me and the family would always eat Mexican in nearby Siler City on the way home from out little outing. Ah yes, a perfect opportunity indeed to extract the last bit of value still tied up on our foolish investment.

It wasn’t our usual joint, but I was able to find the one and only participating Mexican restaurant in town–one that we’d never been to before. But hombre, I was super excited because it appeared to be super authentic. And also I was pretty pumped that its deal was $25 off if you spent $50 or more–meaning we could wash our hands of restaurant.com for good after this was over.

Now I had the keen insight to do my research, as it turned out that they only took cash. Accordingly, I made sure to have $40 on hand–more than enough to cover the anticipated bill that would be $25-$30 after the discount. This Boy Scout was coming prepared this time!

We get there, and it turns out that I actually wasn’t prepared for exactly how authentic of Mexican restaurant this place was–in that they clearly never were expecting gringos. I shit thee not when I say that there was not a single English word on the menu. Not a single one!

Oh, and not a single price on the menu either (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Good luck, Gringos!

Ok, that’s not completely true–there was a handmade sign when you came in advertising there especial: various tacos at only $1 each.

“Oh man, this place must be ridiculously cheap!” was the first thought that I had upon seeing it.

And “Oh sh*t, though–I did not anticipate that it would be a challenge to spend enough to be able to activate the discount,” was my second thought.

This was a few years back, so t’was I, The Boss Lady (who was rather pregnant with The Younger), The Elder, and my Mother Dearest. But, even with 4 1/2 of us, I knew we were going to have to work pretty hard to hit $50, espicialmente if we were going to have to do it $1, $2, or $3 at a time.

What it ensued was very much a Seinfeldian “More of everything!” moment, with me basically twisting everybody’s arms to order twice the amount of food they wanted or needed.

“I’m getting our $25 discount if it’s the last thing I do! Besides, you are eating for two!” I hissed at The Boss Lady when she gave me a look for doubling her fajita order.

Although we were flying blind–having no clue if we were even close to spending enough–if I was going to miss the mark, I was dang sure going to err on the side of spending a bit more than $50, amiright?

Well, after seriously feasting on way too much Mexican grub, we followed it with an excessive round of desserts…and we were long past the point of actually enjoying our meal, and well into the land of being extra miserably bloated and engorged.

Finally, the time came to settle up the bill and put this whole matter to rest, and while the cashier is ringing things up I’m like “Whoa, hold up a sec, some of these dishes are $10-$12!” I mean, based on those stupid ----- cheap-ass tacos, I would have never imagined anything in that place would top $7. “Sh*t. Sh*t. Sh*t.” I kept mumbling to myself like the pinche gringo that I was.

In the end the total bill was just over $60, so I was relieved to at least have spent enough…and it looked like I was going to have barely enough cash to cover the bill. Whew!

“Oh wait one sec…I have a coupon here for $25 off!” I couldn’t have been more excited to be such a tightwad in that moment.

The cashier looked over what I had pulled up on my phone, and stoically replied, “Oh, I’m sorry, we’re not participating in that any more.”

…

…

…

You have got to ----- be kidding me. THAT WAS THE WHOLE ----- REASON WE ATE HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE!

“Well, this is embarrassing. I don’t quite have enough cash.”

“Okay…” the cashier stared back at me vacantly.

“Um, can I leave my mom and daughter here as a deposit while I go find an ATM?”

“Sure.”

So I left them just awkwardly loafing about while me and the Boss Lady drove a few blocks to a nearby ATM–which was not without its own set of shenanigans, such as our regular bank’s ATM had been relocated, but nobody had thought to tell Google Maps.

“Dangit, woman! I ain’t gonna pay no extra $5 ATM fee on top of not getting my ----- discount!”

Let’s just say I wasn’t taking too kindly to The Boss Lady’s suggestion to cut our losses and just get the money from any ATM we could find. Whether or not our loved ones got kidnapped in the meantime? If that was the price of sticking to the principle of the matter, then so be it!

It may have only been 10 or 15 minutes later before we finally rolled back up to the Human Pawn Shop, but ----- if it seemed like forever at that point. I quickly hustled my ass through the door, waving the money over my head.

“I got it! I got it! Here’s your ransom–I mean “dinero.” We’d like the other generations of our family back now, por favor…”

The point of the story is, next time anyone tries to cajole you into buying a Groupon, I have the perfect response for you:

“Chinga tu madre.”

Um, just whatever you do, make sure mom doesn’t Google the meaning of that…

Content created on: 19 September 2020 & 11/12 September 2021 (Sat/Sat/Sun)

In The Spotlight Now: Payback Is (Almost) Hell

5 September 2021 / / 0 Comments
4 Min Read

Like the pirate with a steering wheel in his pants once said:

“Argh! It drives me nuts…”

Five weeks. Seven Levels of Purgatory. All courtesy of Eden Cove Nine.

I promise, folks, that I am almost done with my way-too-in-depth vacation home rental review of the infamous fun house known as EC9. For those out there unacquainted with old friend EC9, they can catch up on all the fun here.

And for those of you keeping score at home, you will recall that last week I covered Level 6 of Purgatory. Soo I bet y’all have got your hopes up that this week would be the 7th and final level of the Purg’, right?

Um, so, I have some bad news for you then: I got one more light-themed complaint that I need to get off my chest before we can ascend (or is it descend?) to the 7th Level.

Level 6b: A Thousand Points Of Light And One Heart Of Darkness

“A Thousand Points of Light”…besides being former President George H.W. Bush’s favorite catchphrase, I strongly maintain that that’s what they really should have named this place instead of “Eden Cove.”

Though I don’t have another milquetoast anecdote to illustrate my point, this place was absolutely rife with nuanced bits of questionable design, and the lights were no exception to this.

In addition to the master bathroom lighting shenanigans that I spoke of in Level 6a of Purgatory, EC9‘s illumination situation had two main flaws that would only become apparent to a vacationer until it was far too late.

Let’s shed some light on the first one, shall we? Now, take a closer look at the Figure 1 below:

Living Room
Figure 1: To the untrained eye, just your average luxurious living room…

Looks just like a run-of-the-mill place to relax and recuperate, right? Not so fast, my friend!

You may note that there are regularly spaced lights on the ceiling. Well, I actually sat down and counted exactly how many there were on this level, which comprised the kitchen, living room, and dining area.

Not counting lamps, fridges, bathrooms, and stove hoods, there were thirty-six lights on this floor. THIRTY-SIX! Me-thinks that to be a bit excessive, no?

In fact, it makes you wonder if whoever designed this was over-compensating for something–say, the emotional darkness pervading their insides–right?

But! The Heart of Darkness is not merely a random-ass theory I just pulled out of thin air. There is more evidence to support this crazy idea. And that leads me to bullet-point #2.

As if having an incessant amount of light fixtures baked into the design of the condo wasn’t bad enough, the least they could have done was wire them up to the light switches in an intuitive manner.

As foreshadowed by my previous light-related tale, that was most definitely not the case. Like, there was almost zero correlation between where the light was, and the location of the switch that controlled it. This was especially notable in the kitchen, where the kitchen light switches were located more in the dining area, next to the bathroom, and half the lights in the dining area were controlled by lights in the ----- kitchen.

During our 5 weeks there, I spent many a late night at the dining table working on home-reno related tasks. And for about half of those nights I was on baby-monitor duty, as The Younger is prone to waking up in the middle of the night in a fuss, and will need some comforting stat before she wakes everybody else up.

There were countless times that she did indeed wake up and I needed to hastily shut things down for the night, and almost every single one of them played out like a Benny Hinn Hill montage, with me running back and forth in a panic trying to find the right light switch(es) by trial and error.

Given the sheer number of pairs of lights on/lights off sequences that would ensue, combined with the funky sweat smell that I would work up in the progress, and then add in the rhythmic cries of a toddler coming through the baby monitor…and, yeah, the second level of EC9 would basically transmogrify into Oak Island’s hottest discotheque every other night…

…

Okay, well I guess I did have a milquetoast anecdote in me after all. I have to apologize, as the whole “The system is down…the system is down…”1This pop-culture reference goes out to all of you old-school HomeStar Runner lovers out there. techno beat now playing in my head distracted me from doing what I came to do: reveal to you the theory-of-everything that could possibly explain how such a place like EC9 could even exist (apart from me being stuck in the all-time lowest-rated episode of The Twilight Zone).

Like a seasoned forensic analyst declaring that a crime scene is so gruesome that “it had to have been very personal for the murderer to make such a gratuitous mess”, Mom and I formulated our own hypothesis that EC9, too, must have been an act of personal aggression.

So the point of the story is, if you’re going to invest money in building the most luxurious condos on all of Oak Island, for the love of G0d, don’t hire your ex-husband to handle the electrical engineering…

Content created on: 28 August 2021 (Saturday)

Footnotes & References:[+]

It’s A Trap: The Unexpected Challenge Of Escaping A Bathroom

29 August 2021 / / 0 Comments
3 Min Read

I may not be the best at remembering song lyrics.

But I’m pretty sure it’s “When the lights…go down…in the shitty…”

Aaaaaaand….we’re back! After dropping a few posts about one particular day1Links to those 3 posts can be found here, here, and here. during the Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99, I figured it was time to resume my review of the beach house known as Eden Cove 9 (aka EC9).

Anne Frankly,2Yes, this is a punny reference to the illegal refugees who accompanied as to Oak Island, but whom I can never explicitly talk about. I’m so exhausted from trying to publicly catalog all the weird-ass things about EC9 and Better Beach Rentals, that I’m just going plagiarize myself in the last post with the following disclaimer:

“I assume you know what I’m going on about and jump right in to another round of idiosyncrasies from the 5 weeks my fam and I were refugees at this particular beach house.

In the off chance you are not familiar with good ol’ EC9, then you can catch up on what you missed here. Otherwise, let’s dive right on in…”

Level 6a: The Lighter Side Of Things

“No, Daddy, let me turn out the lights!” Oh, what a deceptively simple request…

We had just finished up bath time and it was time for our 3-year-old, aka The Younger, to head to her adjacently-located bedroom and wind down for the evening. Since she was smack-dab in the middle of her Let-Me-Assert-My-Own-Dang-Independence phase, I wasn’t surprised that she would be eager to turn out the bathroom lights all on her own. Naturally, I obliged and told her to have it.

Master Bathroom
Figure 1: To quote Hamilton again: “The room where it happened, the room where it happened…”

She headed to the nearest bank of light switches–the ones right next to the tub (which you can almost see across the way in Figure 1), and flipped a few of them. The result? Well, kind of like “two steps forward, one step back,” it was “one more light on, but, hey, two lights off,” with the net result of it being slightly darker in the bathroom.

“Oh, it looks like you need to turn off the lights over there,” I gently encouraged her, pointing across the bathroom at the switches next to one of the awkwardly-positioned sinks.

Undeterred, she ambled over and started flipping the switches into the “off” position, but befell the same fate as before, turning on more lights than off.

“Hmmm, that’s odd…okay, try the switches over there.” I guess I hadn’t really noticed before that there was yet another bunch of switches next to the other sink.

But, nay, after trying every combination of switchery, she was still no closer to having shut the lightshow down. We were both becoming visibly discombobulated at that point.

“Son of a biscuit, seriously, how are the lights still on?!?”

At that point, I was starting to get a strong escape room vibe, and I was expecting some secret passage to open up once we got the exact right configuration of switch positions. Was this what it took to finally be able to access the elevator, maybe?!?

“Okay, kiddo, don’t give up–we can do this.”

You know, I never really thought I would ever be in the position where I would have to muster up so much fake optimism and encouragement to help my progeny successfully turn off the lights in a single room, but then again, EC9 was proving itself to be a never-ending cornucopia of WTF situations that simply should never occur in this dimension of reality.

I was in the middle of having such an inner dialogue with myself when I spotted yet a fourth ----- set of switches next to the shower.

…and that’s when I lost my sh*t, flying into a fit of rage as I rushed from one set to the next, violently flipping switches on and off, all teaching my child how to properly take the name of any and all Lords in vain.

I was so sick of this purgatory by now that I was eager to just move on to some form of hell itself–and with my little cursing spree, I’m pretty sure I guaranteed my seat in Hades, no matter which religion turns out to be the true one.

Anyways…I’m proud to say that after 5 minutes of tomfoolery, we finally had ourselves a dark bathroom.

Yes, that’s right: a grown-ass man just gave himself and his toddler a Hi-Five for successfully turning out the lights in a room.

Oh, sh*t. Wait just a minute! Did we just officially enter the TwiLight Zone?

Hmmph.

Well, if it is, it has to be the most boring episode ever…

Content created on: 27/28 August 2021 (Fri/Sat)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Three Farm-Tested Words Of Wisdom For Living A Happy Life

22 August 2021 / / 1 Comment
5 Min Read

Ignore those who will try to tell you “Happy wife, happy life!”

No, true happiness can be found in 3 very different words…

“Sh*t Happens, Okay?”

Oh, how that phrase–the battle cry adopted by The Bard and I during that hot, hot Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99–brings back memories. What originally sprung forth from a round of late-night conjecturing exactly what the hell the “SHO” in “Ford Taurus SHO”1As payment for all my hard work, Dad bought me my dream vehicular…a Taurus SHO. actually stood for,2Or to be grammatically correct: “…for which it stands.” “Sh*t Happens, Okay?” seemed to be slightly less gross than my girlfriends suggesting of “Sticky Hard-On.”

But then, as The Summer waned on, The Bard and I realized that it was the perfect description for the sh*t-show that constantly surrounded us as we toiled away on my family’s farm under Dad’s watchful eye. Nay, there was never a more apt mantra for maintaining a semblance of sanity through all the stray tires, busted transmissions,3I really need to get around to addressing the whole transmission situation, a la our work pickup, but for now all you need to know is that it provided a solid layer of “interesting” to that summer. and world-consuming forest fires we endured of those 3 months.

And to be clear, I’m referring to “Sh*t Happens, Okay?” There was nothing about that summer on the farm that should have been giving anyone a hard-on, of any kind…

Okay, so sh*t was happening alright. When I last left you, I was capping off a day chock-full of, um, “creative” fire-fighting techniques, that had left my eyesight barely functional thanks to all the smoke up in my contacts.

If you somehow missed out on those episodes, you can take a moment and catch up on them here and here real quick-like.

As always, I’ll wait.

…

…

Yeah, pretty messed up, right? You would have thunk that Dad would have taken not-burning-down-the-whole-countryside as a “win” for the day and we would have gone home while we were on top.

But noooooo. We had more ----- wheat to cut, so it was on to the next field!

In the course of moving all our equipment to this very important field ~20 miles away, I got assigned to Kountry Kommodities, our sweet semi-truck. Given that this was by far our fastest mode of transportation at the time, I wasn’t complaining too loudly about this. If I was going to have to drive anything with smoky contact lenses, at least I would be spending the least amount of time in misery rolling in ol’ KK.

Now, for some reason, Dad had me take the road less traveled, and not the highway like he and The Bard planned to do in the pickup and combine. While this sounds like an asinine detail, me traveling solo on some back road connecting Middle Of Nowhere, CO to Middle Of Nowhere, KS was more than enough for things to go even more sideways on me that day.

Ah, yes, now I recall the reason Dad had me take the less busy route: the transmission on the semi was starting to act up, so, you know, he better make sure that his youngest progeny is in Bum- ----- , Egypt if and when anything serious happens with the ol’ tranny.

Oh wait, did I spoil the surprise? C’mon, admit it though: you already knew in your heart of hearts what happened next.

Of course the ----- transmission went out on me in the middle of some lonely stretch of barely-paved highway, with ol KK slowly and dramatically grinding to a halt as it gave up the ghost.

So there I was, no cell phone, barely able to keep my irritated af eyes open, and nothing happening for miles in either direction. Well, this was a super-duper turn of events.

Nothing else to do, I started walking–no, “blindly stumbling”–down the road in hopes of finding some sort of human life that could help me out. Luckily–if you could call anything “lucky” about that day–the sole homestead on that road was only about a mile and a half away, and I ended up only having to blindly stumble for 20-30 minutes.

Some little old lady answered the door, and G0d bless that angel’s heart, she immediately took pity on me and took me in. After a phone call to one of my grandmas that lived about 15 minutes away, my personal angel gave me some wet towels to put over my head in hopes of helping soothe my very angry eyes.

In return for all her kindness, I repaid her the only way I truly knew how: as I waited for the cavalry to arrive, I regaled her with the tales of the clusterf*cky events that had led up to my showing up on her doorstep seemingly out of nowhere.

If hashtags had been a thing back then, no doubt she would have posted #Blessed across all of social media for having been graced by presence that day.

Anyways…I must have blacked out–or maybe it just seemed that way since “vision” was no longer a skill I could include on my resume at that point–because the next thing I remember was it being nighttime as I was reunited with Dad and The Bard on the combine.

And it was the heartwarming moment you’re no doubt imagining it to be, what with me having disappeared without a trace for a good 4-5 hours and all.

…

Of course it didn’t happen like that all. Somehow, Dad was pissed out of his mind at me for the transmission going out. You know, like it was my fault that he doesn’t know how to buy and properly maintain farming equipment.

Therefore, to this day, I maintain that it was an act of grace on my part when, in the middle of our yelling match, I found myself screaming spitting a fireball of Truth at him:

“Sh*t Happens, Okay!?!”

And even though I couldn’t technically confirm it was my two eyes–y’know, on account of the smoke-laced contacts, and all–I just know in my heart of hearts that in the corner of the combine cab was The Bard, solemnly nodding his head in knowing solidarity…4In order to not kill the flow of the story, I haven’t explicitly include how that day finally ended. For some reason, I can confirm that around 11 pm we found ourselves working on some completely unrelated farming equipment at our shop in Rolla, and I remember thinking to myself, “This has to be the longest ----- day in farming history.” I couldn’t have been too wrong, now could have I?

The point of the story is just that: sh*t happens, okay? Sometimes it just does. And while some people love to play the blame game and insist that all the less-than-perfect bits o’life–like faulty transmissions or raging wheat fires, for instance–be somebody’s fault, I maintain that you’ll have much healthier relationships and be much happier in life if you accept that sh*t just happening without much rhyme or reason is really the default mode of this world. Trust me, any sense of control is nothing much more than an illusion.

I just pray that others can acheive this enlightenment without having to endure a summer on a dysfunctional family farm…

Content created on: 21/22 August 2021 (Sat/Sun)

Footnotes & References:[+]

…And Then Suddenly We Were World Famous Fire-Starters

15 August 2021 / / 0 Comments
5 Min Read

“We need your tractor. NOW, MOTHER ----- !”

I got to admit, this was not how I imagined my first tractor-jacking would go. I’ll tell you what though: don’t believe Hollywood’s lies. It’s not nearly as romantic as they make it look in the movies…

Of course. Of course.

Of course the Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99 would have to include forcefully commandeering another man’s farming implement. Exciting as that was, though, that only accounted for ~20% of the sh*t that went down that particular day…

But before we go any further, you really should get caught up on last week’s post if you haven’t already.

Yes, that’s right…click riiiiiiight HERE.

It’s okay. I’ll wait.

…

…

..

Okay, all caught up to speed now? But just in case you have the memory of the goldfish, let’s review:

The Bard–my partner in grime during the Summer of ’99–and I were helping my dad harvest the wheat from the two adjacent fields shown in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1: Two Fields, ~285.66 Acres. All about to go up in flames.

One important thing not shown on this map is that the Cimarron National Grasslands was kitty-corner adjacent to the southeast of Field 2. Not that anything with words National and Grass in its name would be important to this story or anything…

Anyway, in our attempt to burn the stubble in Field 1, The Bard & I nearly set Field 2 on fire. Despite our most valiant exhibition of “The Pimp Technique”, we were ultimately unsuccessful in putting out the unwanted inferno and had to be rescued by Dad, who successfully implemented the “Harvesting The Fire” method and saved Field 2 from premature destruction.

Or so we thought…

Where we last left off, we were all packed into the combine and halfway through taking care of Field 2, when, through my smoke-filled contact lenses, I spotted what looked like Haley’s Comet shoot out of the back of our mighty harvesting equipment.

And now, with Field 2 indubitably about to be ablaze, Dad gave us the very vague instructions to “get help” while he tried to speed-race through the field in an attempt to get as much grain–and therefore moneyz–into the bin before it all burned to the ground…

What do you when you’re in the middle of nowhere, before the age of cell phones, and your dad pleads with you to get help for the raging wildfire that is on the verge of devouring Morton County Kansas off the map?

Heck, I wouldn’t know!

So then it was a dang good thang The Bard had a good head on his shoulders, right? Upon receiving our marching orders from El Jefe, he drug my dazed and confused ass into our not-so-trusty work pickup1Oh yeah, I should get around to explaining that whole situation some time. and started hauling tail due north on the Dusty-Ass Dirt Road.

About 3 or 4 miles up the road–which translates to ~15 tractor/combine miles, mind you–we were fortunate enough to spot a random farmer out a-plowing his field. The Bard took a hard right and straight-up tore tracks across this strangers freshly worked plot o’land to where he was just tuttin’ along, minding his own biz. We bailed out of the truck, barely waiting for him to stop the tractor before climbing halfway up to the cab.

As you can imagine, we were met by one very confused country folk-man, and I was actually a bit surprised that he didn’t hesitate to open the door for us.

“What you boys need? Is something wrong?”

Now, honestly, I can’t remember what The Bard said at this point, but I do confidently recall two things: 1) it sadly did not involve the dropping of the F-bomb, and 2) whatever he said was clearly and convincingly communicated, and before we knew it we were all kicking up dust in a ske-daddle rush back to the source of all that smoke brewing off yonder…

We rolled up to our Field 2 rendezvous point right about the same time as Dad, who, while in mid-air leaping off the combine, yelled to The Bard, “get in there and keep cutting, dammit!!!”2Dear The Bard, I actually don’t know if this is accurate, and maybe you can confirm or deny it. Though, I’m pretty certain I was on the fire-fighting tractor, and I can’t imagine Dad would have let the combine sit idle in the meantime.

To the other farmer, he simply said, “Thanks, I’ll take it from here,” as they swapped out, and once I was mostly inside the tractor cab, he threw it in gear and got down to business.

At this point, we were mostly cutting our losses on the wheat crop, and were just trying to minimize the collateral damage to things like, oh, I don’t know, ALL THE CONTINUOUS DRY GRASS IN SW KANSAS, SE COLORADO, AND THE OKLAHOMA PANHANDLE.3…and NE New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle, too!

Don’t believe me? Just take a gander at this map I stole from an alternate timeline, outlining the hypothetical extent of our series of unfortunate events:4Source: https://www.thearmchairexplorer.com/colorado/comanche-national-grassland.php

Figure 2: We about to cause the Second Dust Bowl up in here.

Now, most plows aren’t meant to be dragged through the ground at speeds more than 3-5 mph,5Reference: https://www.quora.com/How-fast-mph-or-kph-does-a-farm-tractor-travel-when-plowing-planting-a-field-and-how-many-acres-can-this-be-done-in-one-1-hour but it turns out that you can get up to about 12 mph if you really need to. At least that’s what Dad taught me that not-so-fine day, as he made two laps around the perimeter of the field, saving the rest of the Continental United States that wasn’t a body of water from going up in smoke.

On the other hand, our “shallowly-buried irrigation pipe” that ran to the center of Field 2 in Figure 1? Well, we tried to save it, at least. I vividly remember wistfully looking out the tractor window as we vainly attempted to plow out a buffer along either side of it, only to see grotesquely twisted strips of melted plastic intermittently protruding from the ground, much like a broken bone sticking out of an arm or a leg…

Gratuitous and completely unnecessary analogy aside, that was actually a small price, given the potential consequences our escapades could have had, like, oh, say, MELTING ALL OF NORTH AND SOUTH AMERICA OFF THE MAP.

“But how did you fare personally?” you kindly ask?

Surprisingly, by some miracle, we actually ended up losing very little of our precious wheat crop. And by “miracle” I mean the “level-headedness of The Bard, the executive action and thinking-on-his-feet of Dad, and the selfless-sacrifice-of-his-precious-agriculture-implement-without-a-second-thought of That Farmer Who I Had Never Met Before That Day.”

And while we’re here, you might as well give this crew a hearty thanks for, oh, I don’t know, SAVING THE ENTIRE ----- WORLD FROM BECOMING ONE GIANT FIREBALL.

Well, folks, my MasterClass in illustrating the rhetorical device of “hyperbole”6https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole aside, the real point of the story is: avoid growing up on the farm at all costs if you can.

And if you can’t avoid that fate, for the love of the harvest gods, at least don’t drag your semi-city-slicker7Yes, Dear The Bard, back in those days, you very much qualified as a city slicker in my book. Oh how the tables have turned now. friends into your literal dumpster fires UNIVERSE-CONSUMING BLAZES.

As much as I would love to say at this point, “Whew, what a crazy day on the farm! I’m glad that’s over!”

Instead what I heard was: “Welp, now that we’re finished up here, time to head the next field of wheat and start cuttin’!” Dad proclaimed like any true-working-hard-af-farmer would.

Wait, what? This ----- day is “to be continued”?!?

Content created on 6/12/13 August 2021 (Fri/Thurs/Fri)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Insider Tips For Fighting Fires Down On The Farm

8 August 2021 / / 0 Comments
6 Min Read

The field, the field, the field is on fire. We don’t need no water, let the mother ----- burn.

Burn mother ----- , burn…

“Smokey The Bear would be rolling in his grave if he could see us now.”

“First, now is not the time for your witty remarks, and two, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, FOCUS ON YOUR PIMP TECHNIQUE!”

You wanna take a wild guess as to where this already-convoluted conversation took place?

That’s right: in the middle of Kansan wheat field…

Oh, the Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99, that rascal. The idea of me going off to college later that Fall was starting to look like a foregone conclusion: if I wanted a shot at a higher education, first I was going to have to survive all the shots The Farm took at me.

Now you may be under the impression from the Unsurpassed Tractor Tale That Never Gets Tired and its sibling stories that these tribulations were by my hand, and my hand alone. Or perhaps you are perishing the thought that no one else out there has the honor and privilege of regaling their city-slicker friends with such anecdotes.

But take heart, my friend! Just like the catchy af slogan for the hip dating site onlyfarmers.com encouragingly informs us: “You don’t have to be lonely!”

And guess what?!? As you probably inferred from the ursine-of-PSA-fame-referencing, misogynistic-slang-dropping, semi-historically accurate conversation above, I wasn’t always alone/lonely in my existential struggle with our family agricultural enterprise. Sometimes there were witnesses. Or accomplices, depending on how you look at it.

Either way, my main partner in grime was The Bard,1Not his real name, and frankly, an uncreative alias. But I felt if I took this line of nicknaming one step further and called you–yes, I know you are reading this–Billy S.S., that it would be a bit too much to ask people to figure out that it was a derived reference to William ShakeSpeare–another name for The Bard (of Avon), of course. So…that explains all that. a fiend since our days in Kindergarten, fellow fresh graduate of Rolla High School, and, if things went well, future brother-in-law.

In addition to us dating a pair of Amazonian sisters that were both taller than either of us, The Bard would occasionally help me and my dad out on the farm that summer. And since this tale finds us in the thick of wheat harvest, he was naturally part of our 3-man harvest crew.

We were literally in the middle of harvesting two of our adjacent fields when things got, er…”interesting”. For context, I’ve drawn a little map of these fields, because these details will matter later on:

Figure 1: The Field Were It Happened
(That’s…that’s uh, a Hamilton reference.)

We had just finished up harvesting Field 1, and The Bard and I, the peons that we were, were tasked with performing a controlled burn of the wheat stubble, while Dad took the combine over to start cutting Field 2. Simple enough right? Since the stubble was surrounded on all side by either a road or dirt (see Figure 1), all we had to was just light a match and watch the whole thing burn to the ground.

Oh, that critical part about “surrounded by roads and dirt”? I need to make one tiny correction. Of all that’s going on in Figure 1, I would like to draw your attention to that Wee bit of overlap. Here, much like a Venn Diagram, Field 1 and Field 2 shared not an infinitesimally short border of a single point as they should have in a geometrically perfect world, but instead had about 50 ft. of common border.

But really, how much trouble could 50 ft. give us anyways?

Uh…turns out a lot. Let’s just say our attempt at “controlled burn” spun out of control pretty quickly:

“Oh man, the fire is moving quicker towards Field 2 than I expected,” one of us noted with a bit of concern.

“Yeah…no, we’re about to be in over our heads if we don’t slow it down,” the other responded.

“Oh. Sh*t. Too late!”

“Uhhh…grab whatever you can from the pickup–we need something to beat it out with!”

“I think you meant to say ‘with which to beat it out’.”

“NOT NOW, DUDE! You pedantic ----- sucker…”

Moments later, the both of us found ourselves with faces of full of smoke, furiously trying to smack out the flames with burlap work coats we had found behind the seat. Yup, you heard me right: we were using the lesser-known yet surprisingly effective “Pimp Technique” to fight our fiery foe: beating it like it owed us money.

Not that I would recommend it to anyone though: given that the fire was less than arm-lengths away, we also had the delightful privilege of enduring moderate-to-severe smoke inhalation, and what felt like 3rd-degree sunburns. Yet we persisted.

It’s not like we had a ----- choice in the matter, now did we?

“We’re losing the battle! Go get Dad while I stay here and keep beating it!” I hollered over to The Bard.

The Bard scampered back to the pickup, but didn’t get the respite from the smoke he was indubitably hoping for. Nay–and lucky for us–Nostru-Dad-us had actually already foreseen the potential shenanigans in our future and had been keeping a side-eye on us. Sensing that a hub-bub was most likely afoot, Dad was halfway across the field, hauling ballz in the combine in our general direction.

When he got there, Dad–being the problem-solver he was–lowered the combine all the way down til it was scraping dirt, and started cutting as much of the blazing stubble as close to the ground as he could. Fortunately, after a few passes in the Overlap Zone he had it all under control. My Dude had literally saved our bacon.

I was so happy that I found myself crying tears of joy.

No, wait. Those weren’t joyful tears. My eyes were watering like one of Kansas City’s many beautiful ----- fountains, all thanks to the copious amount of smoke that had gotten all up in my contact lenses business while I had been busy Big-Pimpin’…

“Great balls of fire! Uhh…guys, I think we might have a problem…”

My smoky eyes might have rendered me largely sightless and useless, but I was pretty sure about what I had just seen.

With our fire-fighting duties fulfilled, The Bard and I had nothing to do, so there we were, the two of us crammed in the cab of the combine with Dad. How did we perform such a Tetris-Level-20-like feat, you may ask. Well, The Bard got to enjoy the privileges of the extra mini-seat found therein, while I, on the other hand, contorted myself into the only space left: the floor of the cab with my back against the front window.

And thanks to my rear-facing position, I was able to spot what sure the hell looked a lot like a meteor go whizzing out of the back of the combine.

Upon hearing my cry of consternation, Dad whipped our trusty implement around, and sure enough, there was a tiny, tiny patch of fresh stubble burning mere meters behind us. Apparently, some of the burning stubble that Dad had “harvested” early had just been smoldering somewhere deep inside the combine for the previous two hours, and finally decided to make a dramatic exit out the rear, a la a fire-breathing dragon.

Okay, so, maybe not a fire-breathing dragon. More like a fire-farting dragon.

“Oh. Oh sh*t.”

You know it’s never a good sign when you hear your dad’s voice tinged with panic. In this case, Dad was probably panicking because now he had a fire in the middle of Field 2, which was only half okay.

Sure, the 50% of Field 2 that was now stubble needed to burn sooner or later.

But the other 50%? It was still Amber Waves of Grain. By my calculations, that was about $9136.80 about to go up in smoke.2On July 12, 1999, wheat was selling for about $2.43/bushel. Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/2534/wheat-prices-historical-chart-data. The average per-acre yield for Kansas in 1999, was around 47 bushels. Source: https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/k3569432s/ft848s81t/37720f99x/CropProdSu-01-12-2000.pdf And for you yungen’s out there, that’s approximately $14,900.55 worth of today’s coin.3Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1999?amount=9136.80

That was no bueno. No bueno AT ALL.

We all paused for a moment in a state of shock as we watched that tiny, tiny patch quickly grew into a monstrous beast. Then Dad snapped out of it.

“Okay, I’m going to try to speed-cut as much of the remaining wheat as I can before it burns to the ground. I need you two to…well, fuck, I don’t know what exactly I need you to do–just go get help!”

To be continued…(yes, there is more to this particular god-forsaken day).

Content created on: 6/7 August 2021 (Fri/Sat)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Luxury And Lies: The Truth About That Better Beach House

1 August 2021 / / 0 Comments
6 Min Read

They claimed they spared no expenses when they built this place.

If only they had spared me their bullsh*t…

I’m going to have to apologize about the lack of foreplay upfront.1I’m also going to have to apologize for the lack of better analogy than “foreplay”. Sorry, Mom. I’m so exhausted from trying to publicly catalog all the weird-ass things about Eden Cove 9 (aka EC9) and Better Beach Rentals, that I’m just going to assume you know what I’m going on about and jump right in to another round of idiosyncrasies from the 5 weeks my fam and I were refugees at this particular beach house.

In the off chance you are not familiar with good ol’ EC9, then you can catch up on what you missed here. Otherwise, let’s dive right on in…

Level 5: A Real Smorgasboard of Random WTFs

“Three microwaves?!?” Our 3-year-old couldn’t have been more excited to find that our home for the next month had not 1, not 2, but 3 microwaves!

Of course, would you expect anything less from the place that unabashedly bills itself as a member of “the most luxurious town homes on Oak Island“? No, you wouldn’t.

Clearly you would need a fancy built-in drawer microwave in your kitchen, which just screams “luxury!” at you and any of your guests. Also, the bright-ass clock–which you can’t turn off for some reason–makes for an excellent source of light pollution for anyone who might be desperately trying to get some sleep on the couch in the living room, as they take refuge from a vengeful smoke detector.

And what says “I’m so ----- rich” better than completely unnecessary excesses? That must have been the motivation for having a duplicitous countertop microwave in the kitchen, mere feet from the first one. Or–alternate theory here–the first doesn’t work, because hey, it’s EC9.

Lastly but not leastly, is the coup de grâce:2a French phrase that apparently didn’t mean what I thought it meant, but Ima use it anyways the wet bar area featuring–wait for it–another microwave! But this time, with a twist: the plastic trim around the buttons was falling off, and when maintenance was asked to fix it because, hey, you can’t feel fancy with things literally falling apart around you, guess what they thought would do the trick? Good ol’ duct tape. NOPE. I ended up buying some super glue and fixing it myself because it was starting to depress me.

Oh, and by the way, Microwave #3? Never could get it to work. Yet, this turn of events surprises me not…

Exorcising with a screwdriver and a can of WD40:

When we first showed up to EC9, it didn’t take more than one night to convince us all that the place was haunted. Fortunately, it turned out not to be the case, and instead every single door suffered from one of two problems. Either the hinges were squeaky as hell–like, for example, the bathroom door on the kitchen/living floor that everybody used and would open super-slowly by itself if not shut all the way (I’m telling you, “well-maintained” is one word that should never appear in the same sentence as “Eden Cove 9”).

Or, if the door didn’t creak, then it indubitably would look something like this:

Figure 1: Welp, I guess we won’t be using that closet…

That was supposed to be the door to our closet in the master bedroom. But, as you can see from the gap in the upper right, it was not exactly square, and it was ----- near impossible to actually get into it because of that.

The door from the master bedroom to the master bathroom suffered from this as well, but unlike the closet, we really needed to be able to use that door. So halfway through our first week there I made a trip to the local Lowe’s and bought a Phillips screwdriver and a can of WD40. When I got back I set about doing what the maintenance team I guess could never be bothered to do, and did some basic up-keep on the hinges throughout the house.

I was real proud of myself after that, especially for fixing the bedroom-bathroom door. My pride party was short-lived though, as we soon found out that the only thing that had been keeping it shut was the friction with the door jamb when it was off-kilter…when Frank & Anne escaped from their hiding spot in the bathroom and nearly made it out the beautiful balcony doors and onto the roof–OOF!

I thought to myself that would be no problem, and I could just adjust the hinges a bit more so the door would latch when we shut it. But, like Icarus, I flew too close to the sun, and ended up stripping all the wood out where some of the hinge screws were and made things worse–oh, so much worse! In order to get into the bathroom after that, we would have to firmly lift the door knob straight up with all the might we could muster, then throw a shoulder into it, hoping that we had lifted it high enough and wouldn’t dislocate a shoulder.

I attempted to fix my original “fix”, but that ended up only making things worrrrrrrse, and yes, it eventually reached full-on “fiasco” status…

“We’re from the 80s, and we’re here to help:”

From what I could gather, these “newly constructed” townhomes–upon which “no expense had been spared”–were built sometime around 2014 or 2015. Not “newly constructed”, but fairly recently nonetheless.

Pray tell then, how did this hi-tech bit of home audio equipment end up throughout the home:

Figure 2: “Paging Dr. Mix-a-lot, paging Dr. Mix-a-lot…”

Or, how about this very exciting, state-of-the-art piece of home audio equipment:

Figure 3: Wow, a Compact Disc player–for me?!

Now I hope you’re starting to fully understand the Huge Lie that the proprietors/vacation mongers of this insanity-inducing place have been trying to shove down people’s throats: if you’re “newly constructing” a building and “sparing no expense,” then why in the hell are they scavenging home sound systems from early 90’s (at best)? Hmmm? Like, did they run over budget so badly that they had to go hit up the local Habit for Humanity?

Actually, I would like to rescind that comment about Habitat for Humanity. I don’t want to drag their good name into this whole mess. They at least have standards, and wouldn’t accept crappy 90’s tech, much less try to resell it to the public. I mean, I tried to give them our old dishwasher, but they wouldn’t take it…because it was a 2007 model.

Oh, and I need to include one last tid-bit in regards to their paging/sound system. I never could figure out why there was a doorbell just outside the main doors on the first living level. You know, the doors to the balcony. Why was there a doorbell on the balcony?!? Are guests getting drunk and locked out there, and have to ring the bell in order to get someone to let them back in? If you have a better theory, I’m all ears…

Here’s your sign:

One morning I was out for a stroll, and I decided to take a closer look at the big sign just out front that seemed to be promoting the Eden Cove complex.

For your contextual pleasure, I snapped a photo of it for you:

Figure 4: So much to unpack here…

First off: see, I told you they were going all-in on the whole “luxury” angle. Secondly, I hope by now you’re laughing your ass off about them touting there circa-1992 “Centralized sound and paging system.”

But the real fun is when you take a closer look and discover just how on-brand these people are with their half-assery. And lucky you, I took a picture of those-there floor plans on the right, so you can take a closer look for yourself as well:

Figure 5: A Sample Eden Cove Flor Plan

Now, it is very important that you don’t adjust your television sets. The crappy resolution you see is not from my camera, but exactly how it was on this mini-billboard. It appears that the hapless executive assistant over at Better Beach Sales–sister company to our infamous Better Beach Rentals, took a screen shot or picture of the floor plan, then tried to blow it up to billboard size. And not a single soul there could be bothered to think, “Hey, this might just make us look like a troupe of complete ----- idiots to the outside world. Maybe we should call in someone who knows how to run one of the fancy, new-fangled computers and fix this?”

Nah, why the hell would these nincompoops actually give a darn about details?

Details…like my favorite of them all: take a look back up at that last picture. It kinda undermines their whole luxury schtick when none of those ----- -faces can spell “Bedroom” right. And it wasn’t a singular typo, either–they are straight-up selling 4-“Bedrom” condos over here!

Man, and these guys want you trust them with all your Oak Island real estate needs? Sheeshus funking crust…

Content created on: 31 July/1 August 2021 (Sat/Sun)

Footnotes & References:[+]

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