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Author: BJ (Page 17 of 34)

I’m Warning You: The Plumbing Around Here Is Pure Evil

25 July 2021 / / 0 Comments
6 Min Read

I never thought I would be compelled to publicly complain about plumbing.

Yet, here we are…

“D*ck Guillotine.”

No, I’m not talking about the lead singer of the fantastic dumb-rock band, Electric Six. That would be D*ck1LOL, I can’t actually type out d-i-c-k because of my stupid self-censoring WordPress plugin. Hilarious, I say. Valentine. Though I can see how you could easily mix those two up. Instead I’m talking about the Word Of The Day, brought to you by the fine ----- at Better Beach Rentals.

“Better Beach Rentals?!?” you say. “I totally forget that you were still hung up on that bizarro beach house experience you had…way back in March.”

Okay, so I know that my ongoing review of the shit-tastic fiasco that was our 5-week stay at Eden Cove 9 (aka EC9)–which you can read up, albeit in reverse chronological order, here–has been dragging on for a while now. But I plead with you to give me a break–there were more layers to this stinky-ass onion than I had anticipated.

Plus, you know…I’m kinda long-winded about the smallest of frickin’ details, so there’s that working against me too.

All that being said, we really should just dive right into today’s theme without further context…

Level Four: Plumbing The Depths Of Hell

Shower [Severe-Lack-Of] Power!

So keep in mind that EC9 is very loudly touted as a “luxury experience,” and if you look at pictures of the bathrooms, you would be inclined to agree. Even in person, they look pretty fancy for the most part.

But be not deceived. The all suck butt in their own special ways.

For starters, EC9 boasts 3 and 1/2 bathrooms, including 3 very nice tiled showers. Good luck getting a luxury experience in any of them, though.

Two of them suffer from the same problem, and that is the shower has 3 options: the big shower head, the handheld shower head, and the body jets that shoot out right at ya. The issue is that you really only get to choose which one not to use at any given time, so the water pressure is always split between two of them, therefore you never get any decent pressure from any source.

It may sound like folly to complain about this, but I guarantee you, when you (or your insurance company) is paying for “luxury” and you can’t get a shower with decent pressure–it will piss you off to no end.

Eventually I discovered that the Elder’s shower–the least fancy of the 3–only had one option, the big shower head, and thus could actually provide a decent and comfortable experience.

The catch, though? The handle that allowed you to adjust the temperature was…simply missing. Just not there at all. In time I found that I could move it ever so slightly if I really dug my nails into the exposed hardware and twisted, but nevertheless is sure made for several nearly-scalded-scrotal experiences.

Though the most tolerable, Shower #3 still fell waaaaaay short of “luxury.” I mean, how hard can it be for maintenance to replace the ----- heat-adjusting handle? That can’t cost more than $10!

The Impossible Toilet.

Speaking of easily fixed issues that remain unaddressed, the Impossible Toilet is the one thing that made me say, “Really?!? The management and/or owner couldn’t be bothered to do this one thing right? Me-thinks I might be in the midst of a shit-show…”

What is this Impossible Toilet of which I speak, you wonder? Well let me show you:

Gif-ure 1: The dumbest way to get carpal tunnel syndrome.

Do not adjust your television sets. You are seeing a toilet handle that got installed upside down. And remained upside down. Again, I know how stupid it sounds. But this was the moment that the thought “Oh my god, I rented a ----- fun house” first went through my mind.

As you can see from the video, with the handle pointing in instead of out, it actually becomes really hard to get your hand back there to flush it. And once you do…well, nevermind not trying to rub the back of your hand all over the toilet lid–the human arm was never designed to pull up while in that position. I think I pulled a tendon in my arm every time I tried to use that toilet.

And surprisingly, even if when I was motivated enough to put the lid down just to flush, I found that it still hurt my arm like heck to pull up with my arm twisted around in that position.

Yet another reason to leave you wondering “what is up with this place? It’s just so…weird.”

The Back Breakers.

Of all the 4 toilets in EC9, I don’t recall a single one having a stable seat. That’s right: they were all Back Breakers.

A slightly wobbly toilet seat seems silly, but when you have pre-existing back issues? It’s no laughing matter when you’re sitting there doing your biz, when you go to slightly readjust your position and–WHEEEVP!2Because that is totally the sound something makes when it goes sideways. Your torso remains in place while the seat and your hip region slide violently to the side.

It’s not a joke man. That will jack your back up lickity-split.

A quick errata though: now that I think about it, there was one toilet that was nice and stable. But of course, it had two fatal character flaws: 1) it was the only toilet that couldn’t be accessed from a common space (like a hallway), as it was attached to the room where the in-laws would be sleeping, and so I only got to use it on occasion, and then only in the middle of the day; and 2) it had a vent constantly blowing freezing cold air directly at the king (or queen) upon their throne, so long-term shat-sessions were, shall we say, highly discouraged.

The D*ck Guillotine.

Yes, it is the moment you’ve all been waiting for, in which you finally get to find out what, pray-tell, exactly a D*ck Guillotine is.

Let’s start with yet another visual demonstration:

Gif-ure 2: Chop-chop, boys!

Growing up, one of my aunts had a D*ck Guillotine in her main bathroom, and it literally GAVE ME NIGHTMARES. And if you’re of the ilk who like stand when they pee, than you should be gravely terrified of these C*ck-Choppers as well.

As you can see from my demonstration, a DG is a toilet seat that cannot physically stay in the upright position. So if a gent goes to take a whiz at a DG, one of three things happens:

  1. He has to awkwardly hold the seat in the locked and upright position with his non-aiming hand. Not only is the human back meant to never be in this position, it’s just plain nasty to be touching the underside of a toilet seat. Gross.
  2. He tries to out-piss the toilet seat. But c’mon, we all know that you can’t fully empty your bladder in the time it takes for the seat to get to stream-level. This always ends in one way: a violent and ungodly attempt to cut off one’s flow before straight-up pissing all over the toilet seat during its descent. Even if stopped in time, there is the real medical threat of straining one’s urethral sphincter muscle in the process. And nobody wants that.
  3. If one is overly-endowed, the D*ck Guillotine lives up to its name..and pinches your peter in a particularly peculiar position. Ouch. So…three cheers for being an “average man”?

In other words, such a toilet is completely ----- useless to any man who doesn’t have the time and/or functioning knee joints to sit down to pee. COMPLETELY USELESS, I SAY!

The Steaming Pile Of Sh*t.

Instead of ending on the high note of penile decapitation, I’ll leave you with how we left the lone toilet we had on the top floor with our and the Younger’s bedrooms: fortunately, not completely full of shit.

With about 5 days left to go of our 5 weeks stay, that toilet decided to stop refilling itself with water after flushing. Often times this can easily be rectified with just a little bit of fiddling, but not this time, no siree, Bob! The fricking handle to the water valve was frozen in place on top of that, and the last thing I wanted was to break the ----- thing off trying to get it to turn!

So we just learned to co-exist with a toilet that we couldn’t take a dump in for those final days. We limited it to liquid waste only, and then after a handful of uses, would use the Younger’s whale bath toy to haul enough water over to manually induce a “flush.”

Now, you may be wondering: why we didn’t do what any renter should have done and called the Better Beach Rental’s maintenance team to come out and fix it?

I’ve already touched on some of the interactions we had with these guys (the elevator, the smoke detectors, etc), while I’ve yet to share other run-ins and fiascos. Let’s just suffice it to say we were rather frustrated with their seeming inability to get anything fixed in a timely manner.

Anne Frankly, we were simply tired of their sh*t.

The End.

…of the plumbing stories anyway.

Why, but of course there is more. With these asshats, there’s always more…

Content created on: 24/25 July 2021 (Sat/Sun)

Footnotes & References:[+]

How To Be Infinitely Popular In A Completely Asinine Way

18 July 2021 / / 0 Comments
7 Min Read

Don’t work hard, work smart!

Though I admit I’m working on something pretty ----- dumb…

“The Prissy Pet Project”–does that ring a bell? Yeah, I know it’s been a while since I rapped at ya about it, so I forgive you if you have no clue what I’m jabbering on about. But fear not! I’ll bring mostly up to speed.

In long, you can read all about it here.

In short–which is the version you were really hoping for–it’s my long-lived and ultimately unsuccessful attempt at becoming an online kimchi broker, but has so far only really ended with me having a fierce hatred for Amazon and capitalism, along with a totally useless Tumblr blog with about 4k followers.

Originally, that “totally useless” blog with a paltry 4,000 followers was supposed to act as the advertising arm of my Amazon store front, kimchiandketo.com, and all the profits were going to be made by getting a small cut of any Amazon sale made by clicking on any of my advertised products.

But thanks to the greedy forces of capitalism, Amazon decided to make that “small cut” even smaller, rendering my business model completely unprofitable. Hence, rendering my (by far) more successful blog as useless as a bull’s teat.

I have to admit, though…it was kinda nice being sorta popular in at least one part of the interwebs. And part of what made kimchi-and-keto so popular was the use of an automated re-blogging widget called Queue+. Basically it would let me reblog other blogs’ posts en masse, randomly, and on a regular schedule.

Of course, the more you post, the more exposure you get, the more followers you gain, and the bigger you ego-concerning-completely-asinine-and-inutile-things gets. Now back in August 2020, I had just about ran plumb out of what was once a rather generous supply of queued posts. Instead of finding new content to refill my queue, I instead found it much easier to reblog all the posts of the one blog I knew would be full of suitable content: mine.1My Tumblr blog, not this blog you’re reading right now. Recycling all my posts was mildly tedious process, but at the end of the day I had quite a few posts ready to be fired off one at a time, at the frequency of my choosing:

Figure 1: Yes, Jefe, I would say I have plethora of posts in my queue…

At the time, I made a handy little calculation of when my now-overflowing well of posts would run dry, based on various posting frequencies:

Frequency: Posts per Day:# of Days:Burndown Date:
30 min48233.5March 24, 2021
15 min96 117November 28, 2020
10 min14478October 20, 2020
6 min240 47September 19, 2020
Table 1: How long will my popularity last?


Wanting to make this as passive as possible for as long as possible, I opted to stretch things out and set the interval at every 30 minutes. At the time, March 24, 2021, seemed like forever and a day away. But as you know, that date has come and went, and sure enough, the number of posts in my queue drained to zero.

Given that, really, all this is pretty pointless, I never found the time to try to load my queue back up, because, you know, priorities and all. Yet, it still bothered me that I was the owner of a fruitless blog, just gathering dust and Tumblr-weeds.2In all transparency, this was originally an unintended pun.

This simmering & unjustifiable anxiety finally got the best of me yesterday, when I got so sick and tired of my empty queue constantly reminding me of what a failure that the whole Prissy Pet Project has been that I finally decided to do something about it.

And this time, I was dead set on being popular forever. Or at least as long as Tumblr is around. Though that probably won’t be too much longer now.

Are you ready for some asinine details? Okay, here you go…

“Bottleneck.” That is the word of the day. What process really takes up most of the time for a given task? What is disproportionately slowing things down?

You remember how I described the process of adding posts to a Queue+ queue as “mildly tedious”? Well, in theory it should be instantaneous compared to hand-picking and adding posts one at a time. And by that standard it really is. But let me walk you through the process, and I’ll point out where, in practice, bottlenecks happen–and what to do about them.

The process itself is fairly simple. Just add ‘/archive’ to the URL of any Tumblr blog and you’ll get something that looks like this, which is what happens when you type ‘https://kimchi-and-keto.tumblr.com/archive’ into your browser:

Figure 2: What a Tumblr archive looks like.

So this is just a thumbnail gallery of all the posts on a particular Tumblr blog, sorted by Month/Year. Now in the pic above, what you don’t see is the additional options a Queue+ Chrome plugin will give you at the top. In fact, I learned that this particular plugin got banned from the Chrome App store (LOL?), and the only reason I can use it is because I still had it on my 10 year old PC, and it still functioned–much to my delight.

Well, if you have that plugin, you can essentially “Select All” posts with one click, and then add them to your Queue+ queue with another two quick clicks. But…

But the problem is that only add the ones that have had their thumbnails loaded, so the bottleneck then becomes “How fast can your old computer load as many thumbnails as possible?”

I know, I know, it sounds so ----- stupid. And it is. But that’s the burden I gotta bear if I want to stay popular on Tumblr for no good reason.

As it turns out, since you have to either scroll down or use the Page Down key to get new thumbnails to load, this takes forever, at least when you’re hoping to re-add all 11k+ of your posts.

Now, as with most things with me, I 1) don’t accept the status quo, and 2) usually let things get out of hand. Let’s see if I managed to stay true to form?

The first thing I realized was that I could speed things up by making those thumbnails as small as reasonably possible. How did I do this, you ask? By just zooming my browser out to ~10%! And I can’t believe it, but this actually worked:

Figure 3: Zooming out let’s you load a lot more thumbnails at once!

Here’s a time-lapsed gif of loading one month’s worth of my posts (48 x ~30 = 1440), which represents about a minute or 2 in real time:

Figure 4: Loading 1440 posts in under 90 seconds.

Ok, but what about the tedious task of sitting there and Page-Downing endlessly? Well I got you covered there too! I just used a little trick I learned by watching MacGyver growing up.

You see that candle in one of the pictures above? Well here’s what is really going on with it:

Figure 5: A handy hack I learned from MacGyver.

This is what I call the ol’ “Brick on the gas pedal” trick. That’s right: I took a little wood block I had lying around, put it on my Page Down key, then balanced a candle on it, and voila! I could Page Down without lifting (or, technically, “lowering”) a finger!

Given that I my poor computer could only load a limited number of thumbnails before choking, I had to break my task down by month. I had 14 of these, since the blog had been active from January 2020 up until it ran out of gas at the end of March 2021. This still would take 5-10 minutes per month, but towards the end I just said “Screw it!” and loaded all of February and January 2020 and did that in once shot (I was working backwards in time, if you were wondering).

This put me up to ~24k posts:

Figure 6: 24 thousand posts ~= 500 days of free popularity!

At 24k sweet, sweet posts, that should last me upwards of 500 days, or about a year and a half. Nice, but…could I do better?

It was at this point in time that I got another idea…Once I had a batch of post thumbnails loaded–the bottleneck, remember?–why couldn’t I just Select All and Add To Queue+ multiple times while I was already there?

The last batch I had loaded up consisted of about 3900 posts, so I invested another half hour and repeated this process ~10x (remember, my computer is slow–it probably would have gone faster on a more fancy computer).

So by the end of the day yesterday, what did I have to show for my hard work?

Figure 7: 57k sweet, sweet posts.

That’s right, 57,167 posts, ready to be fired off, 48 per day. If you do the math, that means I shouldn’t have to touch things for about 3 years and 3 months!

I should be happy, right? I should just leave it there, right?

Well, I actually did…but just for the evening though!

If we’re going to automate things, then let’s do it right and make the dang thing run until my 3-year-old graduates from high school at least!

So guess what I did with my spare time today? Yup, in between tasks, I loaded up my posts 2 months at a time, and then reposted them 10 times per batch!

“What do you have to show for it?”, you are most definitely wondering. Well here’s your answer:

Figure 8. Trust me. That’s a lot of f**king posts.

269,920 Posts.

5623.3333333 Days

15.40639269406392 Years

It’s not quite forever forever–but it’s close!

The point of the story is: 1) why half-ass things when you can full-ass things? And 2) here’s to all those haters that said that my hours upon hours of watching MacGyver would never pay off. Well, guess which one of us is the most popular girl on Tumblr now, huh?

HUH?!?

Content created on: 16 July 2021 (Friday)

Footnotes & References:[+]

An Unsurpassed Tractor Tale That Will Never Get Tired

11 July 2021 / / 0 Comments
6 Min Read

Attention, all you agriculturally ignorant city-slickers out there!

This one’s for you…

“Oh sh*t. Dad’s not going to be too happy about this…”

I sat there on the side of a dirt road, trying to take a nap in the cab of our neighbor’s tractor, waiting for my dad to show up. In addition to the mid-morning July sun, my ability to snooze was severely handicapped by the persistent thought that, indeed, the patriarchal figure in my life would indubitably be disappointed in the predicament in which I had found myself.

Now, pissing Dad off to no end with my agriculture-related shenanigans and general farming ----- -ups was nothing new. However, I had just taken it to a whole ‘nother level with this here Pirate-Tractor. And I can’t say I was very hopeful that he would give me points for creativity.

Hmmm…I suppose I should back this tractor tale on up and tell you how I got here in the first place, though…

‘Twas back in the middle of the Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99, and I was working full-time on our family farm with my dad before heading off to start college in the fall. We had been having problems with the two tractors we owned breaking down on us, so we had to resort to borrowing a spare one from a fellow farmer for a few weeks.

We’re not ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, so when the left rear tire–one of the big ones, mind you–began gradually working its way off the rear axle, did we complain and ask for a refund? No! Why? Because we had no choice!

Instead, we learned to co-exist with this modest inconvenience by regularly jacking up that side of the tractor off the ground, laboriously moving the tire back in towards the cab, and then tightening all the bolts down with the heaviest-duty ratchet you’ve ever seen.

Well I had finally had enough of that horse baloney after having to do it 4-5 times, so I decided to that I was going to tighten them bolts down so friggin’ tight that they would never come loose again. Fortunately, we had brought the tractor home for the holidays1Before we took a day and half “vacation” for the 4th of July. so I was able to scrounge up an array of steel pipes and bars from around ye olde homestead, and MacGuyvered myself a cheater bar2A cheater bar is any bar or pipe that is used to effectively lengthen a ratchet handle, enabling one to apply extra torque when tightening/loosening a particularly stubborn bolt or nut. See Figure 1. about 6 feet long.

Figure 1: An arbitrary example of a so-called “cheater bar”. Because I knew you were too proud to ask what one was…

Yes, you read that right: 6 feet. Picture a ratchet. Just a regular ratchet, not the one in the figure above–I need to make this as dramatic as possible. Now picture that ratchet, but ~10x bigger. On the wheel of a tractor. With my lightweight ass hanging off the end of it like a hyperactive sloth, with both my feet and hands wrapped around it, bouncing up and down like a regularly-active monkey.

I rinsed and repeated this thorough procedure for all 8 or so of the lugnuts, and upon completion, proudly proclaimed to Dad, “This ----- ain’t going nowhere!”

A few days later, it was time to get the tractor back into action, so early that morning Dad told me to “road”3I.e. Drive the tractor down the highway. it to one of our fields about 20 miles away while he ran errands in town, and then wait there until he got back.

Relatively speaking, it seemed that I had a relaxing morning ahead of me, so you didn’t have to ask me twice to hop up in that thing and haul tail down KS Highway 51. Granted, “haul tail” in a tractor means maxing out around 22 mph, so all in all, I had almost an hour commute ahead of me.

Fast-forward to about an hour later, with a little under a mile to my final destination, I started to feel a slight shaking. I thought it was a bit odd, so I started looking around to see what might be causing the ruckus. Just as I turned to my left, I saw the strangest ----- thing my life: a giant tire speed past me.

What. The. ----- .

You know how in old Wile E. Coyote cartoons where he runs off the cliff, but there’s a split second when he’s suspended in mid-air before he realizes he’s about to fall, and somehow gravity doesn’t kick in until he acknowledges it?

It was exactly like that.

It’s hard to describe the cognitive dissonance I experienced in that moment–how the hell could anything be passing me?!? This stretch of highway was closed for repaving, so I was literally the only traffic for a good 5-10 miles in each direction.

“So where the heck did that tire come fro–“

Oh.

Sh*t.

That’s…that’s my tire.

“But, wait! How, then, am I still rolling down the road uprigh–“

*creaaaaaaak*

“Oh, hello, Gravity,” I thought aloud as the laws of physics reasserted themselves and the entire tire-less quadrant of the tractor plummeted 4 feet straight down.

*THUNK!* went the left side of the axle as it landed hard in the freshly-paved road, making a rather noticeable divot.

I sat there tilted sharply to my left at a 45-degree angle, stunned and desperately trying to comprehend that that just happened, watching my tire roll on down the road without me.

After about a quarter of a mile, it veered to the left off the highway, down the ditch…and out into the smack-dab middle of the field where I was supposed to ultimately end up at. Oh, the irony.

On the bright side, thanks to the highway being closed, there was no oncoming traffic, because if there had been any, I’m pretty certain a rather gruesome and fatal car accident would have ensued. I mean, that’s some Final Destination-level sh*t right there.

On the other hand, the road closure meant the only thing I could do was just sit there and hope the KDOT4Kansas Department of Transportation crew would show up and decide against strangling me for completely undoing all there hard work with the nasty divot I had made.

And eventually they did–and no doubt that was a WTF moment for them when the rolled up to the scene with me just sitting there in the tractor sideways. Lucky for me, they found it more humorous than anything else, and graciously took pity on me. They ended up wrapping a chain around the now-naked axle and then around the teeth of one of their front-loaders and helped my peg-legged little Pirate-Tractor hobble off onto the dirt road right there off the highway. They propped me up by putting a couple blocks underneath the axle, then were like “OK, see you!” They were happy to get me out of their way, but weren’t going to help me out beyond that…so, thanks?

…and that is where you found me at the beginning of the story, anxiously awaiting the wrath of Bob J. upon his return.

Of course, “running errands in town” took him 4x longer than promised, so I had to sit there in that stupid ----- Pirate-Tractor from 10 am until around 2 or 3 pm–almost 5 hours–before he finally showed up.

In the meantime I thought I might have been able to prop up the Prodigal Tire and roll it back to the tractor, and maybe even put it back on before he returned. But one very important life lesson I learned out in the middle of that dusty-ass field was holy crap, tractor tires are heavy! Yeah, I couldn’t lift that a centimeter off the ground, though it’s probably for the better, as I indubitably would have run the risk of getting crushed by the 500-800 lb thing at some point during the hypothetical wheel-wrangling.

No, if you came here for an actual near-death event in this story–my death anways–then that would have been when Dad and I nearly got into a fist-fight over which one of was responsible for it coming off.

You may be surprised to hear that I actually had a pretty strong case against him. As it turned out, back when I was tightening all the lugnuts–remember that?–there was the usual 8 in a circular pattern, and then one oddly off to the side. I had asked him whether or not I should tighten that one, and he told me no, so I didn’t touch it.

Well, as it turns out, that was the one that actually kept the tire on the axle. Go figure.

But honestly, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago–about 20 years after the fact, and long after Dad had passed away–that I finally admitted that, yeah, he was right: I should have been paying attention to that rascally tire. You know, instead of be-bopping down the road like a cool cat without a care and all that.

Anyways, that is the point of the story: pay attention, Dumbass.

Otherwise you might end up being the guy or gal who finally does it–who finally manages, as they say, to put the “laughter” in “vehicular manslaughter”.

Editor’s note: This was one component of the Near-Tragedy Trifecta of the Summer of ’99. You can read about the other two [less exciting] close encounters with grave bodily harm here.

Content created on: 8/9 July 2021 (Thurs/Fri)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Unborn On The 4th Of July

4 July 2021 / / 0 Comments
5 Min Read

What could possibly be more interesting than life on the farm?

Death on the farm. Definitely “death on the farm”…

“He gave his life in service of his country.”

Usually when you hear that phrase you’re bound to assume that a “fallen soldier” is the topic of the solemn and hushed conversation you’ve just awkwardly intruded upon. But what if I told you that’s not always the case? Truly, there are other unsung heroes across the Fruited Plain of this great nation that have laid down their life–or at least came darn tootin’ close–for the betterment of their fellow citizens. Case in point: the Semi-Involuntary Farm Boy.

And I’m here to tell you first hand: the danger is very real and very present…

Let me be real with you: I hated growing up on the farm. Me and agriculture? We simply didn’t get along. But on the bright side, it sure is nice having a tidy collection of Crazy Farming Stories in my back pocket, ever-ready for whenever I need to impress my city-slicker friends.

Amongst my favorite of these are what I call the Near-Tragedy Trifecta: the 3 consecutive1Okay, so technically I think these unfolded over the span of about a week. days in July 1999 where my life played out eerily similar to what I imagine a farm-themed installment of the infamous Final Destination movie franchise would indubitably have looked like–with the exception that I managed to walk away relatively unscathed.

For context, the Summer of ’99 was the summer between high school and college for me, and I spent it toiling away with my dad on our family farm so I could buy a car of my own. Surprisingly, this is the first time I’ve talked about that summer in these parts, because, whew-wee, boy! That was one crazy-ass summer!

In Exhibit A, I present to you here, in non-chronological order, 3 of the several times I probably should have died over the course of those 3 months…

Sunday, July 4, 1999: Around the Fourth of July that year, my dad and stepmom decided to celebrate the birth of this fine nation…at the Prairie Band of Potawatomi Nation, in the finest casino their reservation had to offer, that is! Since said nation/reservation/casino was on the other side of the state, they kindly left me in charge of the basic day-to-day operations of our farm in their absence.

Now, when the farm is in “just keep shit running before you run off to hang out with you honey” mode, one of the primary tasks is to make sure that the crops are being watered, and this usually means making the rounds to check whether all the farm’s irrigation motors and sprinklers are running. On the morning of the Fourth, my grandma and I were hauling tail around Morton County doing just that, me with high hopes of knocking my duties out early and being able to take off to Beaver (Oklahoma) to celebrate the day away with my Amazonian girlfriend, Teri.

Well, the Law of Averages will tell you that if you have 7 irrigation motors, then at least 1 of them is not going to be running when you go to check on it, and sure enough a motor on one of our pumps was in need of being brought back to life.

After some basic maintenance, I went to crank that bad boy back up, and tentatively pressed the ignition button, praying to hear that sweet sweet hum of staying on schedule to see my lady friend.

Engine: “Vroom! Huff-chuff-huff-chuff!”

Me: “Oh, ----- yeah. Ain’t nothing gonna keep me away from Beaver tonight!”

Engine: “VROOOOOOOOOOM!”

Me: “The ----- you say, Mr. Engine?!?”

Driveshaft *Wildly flapping around at a few thousand RPMs*: “Wheeee! Look at me, I’m a helicopter!

Stunned, I sat there staring in awe as it spun out for about 30 more seconds before losing its momentum and coming to a stop…though it took my racing heart another 30 minutes to return to normal afterwards.

After a quick investigation, it was discovered that the bolts fastening the motor to the driveshaft had just straight-up snapped off–ergo the 3000 RPM, 40-pound chopper wannabe that had just been spinning way to close to my cranium.

Fortunately, though, the mechanical failure had been on the motor end of the shaft, otherwise had it came loose from the pump side, the motor would have kept spinning it faster and faster. And, based on where I had been standing, there’s no doubt in my mind that my final, violent moments would have horrifically included getting my skull bashed in and a couple of my precious limbs grotesquely maimed.

The good news is that I ended up making it to my Beaver-based booty call later that day.2PG-rated, that is. Given that I was thiiiiis close to being on the wrong side of a closed-casket funeral, I would definitely call that a win…

Thursday, July 1, 1999 (est.): Irrigation engines must have really had it out for me that week. Mere days previous to the Drive-shaft/Helicopter Brain-Basher incident, Dad had sent me a few miles from we were working to check up on a different pump engine in a nearby field.

Now, on the Farm of Bob J., there were many idiosyncrasies, and this particular engine fell squarely in that category. As I recall, it had a bad battery on it, and so you could only use it to start the engine–but if you left it connected after that it would short-circuit and explode. Fun times, indeed, right?

Also, this engine ran on natural gas, but for some reason we didn’t have a proper valve on the gas line. Now for those not in the know, I guess you have to turn the gas supply down pretty low when you start these types of engines (or something like that). In our case though, we had no flow control and were forced to completely remove the fuel hose and then quickly reattach it once the engine got to spinning.

Anyways, this engine had died, and so again, after some basic maintenance and trouble-shooting, I was ready to see if it would fire back up. But instead of turning a key or pushing an ignition button, I had to bend down to where the battery was inexplicably residing on the ground, and re-connect the battery cable.

This was very confusing to me, though. No, not this oblique and convoluted version of “Gentlemen, start your engines!” It was the fire that was so confusing.

HOLY SH*T, WHY WAS THERE ONLY FLAMES WHERE MY ARM SHOULD BE!?

While my brain was processing the philosophical question of whether or not spontaneous human combustion was for realz, my body was busy getting my perhaps-phantom limb the ----- away from that fire lickity-split! Lucky for my dumb ass, my central nervous system had acted quickly enough in yanking my hand out of el fuego that the only damage done was that all the hairs on my arm had been singed off. Once, I got over the shock, I quickly realized what happened and rushed to shut off the emergency valve to the gas.

You see, when I had disconnected the gas line, I hadn’t realized that it was aiming straight down at the battery. And since it was still blasting that beautiful natural gas, it just needed a single tiny spark courtesy of a freshly hooked-up battery cable to turn that ----- into a full-blown flame-thrower!

I guess it just wouldn’t be the Fourth of July without some fireworks, right? I just wish the Universe would quit taking sh*t so literally though…

Well, Dear Reader, originally I had planned on sharing all 3 stories with you in one sitting, but alas, we are out of time for today. But that’s okay! Near-Tragedy Trifecta Tale #3 truly deserves a post dedicated to it alone.

So I guess the point of the story is you have a full week now to build up yourself some anticipation for…”The Tractor Tire Story”–trump-bump-a-dum!

Oh, and for realz, don’t forget to thank a farmer for sacrificing life and limb to keep your face fed. Perhaps you even know one personally…

Content created on: 2 & 4 July 2021 (Fri/Sun)

Footnotes & References:[+]

You Fool! You Think Murder Will Stop This Beeping Heart?

27 June 2021 / / 0 Comments
4 Min Read

Being audibly abused is never thrilling.

It just might make a nice guy resort to killing…

By now you may be starting to suspect that I’m dead-set on airing every single one of my grievances I have with a recent vacation property we stayed in, the slowly-becoming-infamous Eden Cove 9 (aka EC9), and the crack team of property managers we rented it from, Better Beach Rentals.

And you would be absolutely right. Though, in fairness, it’s more about celebrating the absolute mind-screw that staying at EC9 was, rather than just ragging on a poor defenseless property and property management company.

So far though, it hasn’t been such a terrible mind-screw…yet. Bear with me, though, as I slowly and methodically build my case. For sake of time, I’ll give you a tl;dr1That would be short for “too long; didn’t read”. refresh on the first two Levels of Purgatory that I’ve covered so far: too many stairs, and a non-working elevator coupled with crappy customer service. There, consider yourself caught up.

Now let’s get on with this Never-ending VRBO Review of Eden Cove 9…

Level Three: The Tale-Tell Heart, EC9 Style

“Chirp-chirp-chirp!” *Random amount of time passes* “Chirp-chirp-chirp!”

No, we didn’t have a bird trapped in the house. That would have been too easy. Nope, you guessed it: we had a rogue smoke detector going crazy on us. Just wonderful.

The worst part was that it was on the first level of EC9, where my mom’s and the Elder’s rooms were located. And it didn’t waste any time assaulting them either: it started going off-script just as those two had settled into bed on our very first night there.

At first Mom’s theory was that it would chirp every 5 minutes, but wouldn’t you know it, the second she called me down to desperately ask for help, it wouldn’t follow that pattern. In reality, it was merely lulling us all into a false sense of security. After no activity after 15 minutes of mind-numbingly boring waiting, we concluded that it had gone back to behaving, and Mom and the Elder settled back in for the night.

They were finally drifting off to sleep, and then BAM–it attacked again without warning with another vicious “Chirp-chirp-chirp!”

My poor mother was starting to be honest-to-goodness traumatized at this point in time. But at least she had the good sense to flee her abuser, as she wisely grabbed some pillows, and with the Elder in tow, hiked up to the second level of the house where she sought refuge on the couches in the living room. Not that it completely solved the problem; she later told me she could still faintly hear it chirping from all the way up there, keeping her awake.

Nonetheless, I would say that an uncomfortable night on the couch would be waaaaay better than never being able to fully fall asleep, living in constant fear that the smoke detector could beat the living shit out of your eardrums, unprovoked, at any given moment…

I swear to the Higher Powers That Be that this smoke detector was a legit psychopath. Like, evil genius, there’s-a-special-place-in-hell-for-you level psychopathery. All throughout the next day, it behaved itself and didn’t make a peep. But once again, it was all just a ruse in order to take advantage of over-trusting upright citizens.

Around 6:30 pm that evening, that asshole declared his presence once again with a belligerent “Chirp-chirp-chirp!”

“Ah, hellz, no!” I declared to one in particular as I marched downstairs, and with phone in hand. I wasn’t going to tolerate this tormenting of my family; it was time to bring in the professional, so I dialed up BBR’s after-hour maintenance guy and told him to haul tail over there lickety-split!

An affable fellow, perhaps college age, he and I hit it off as we tried to scientifically deduce what the heck was going on, and how to remedy it. However, what made it so difficult was that we couldn’t repeat the error. This is what was so maddening–there was no way to really know we had fixed anything besides just…waiting. Uggh.

After an hour or so of chasing our tales, all he could do for me was change all the batteries and wish me the best. Of course, most of the time dead batteries are the cause of random-ass chirpings, so we were somewhat optimistic that the problem was solved.

“What if…what if it starts beeping again?” I asked, knowing that it was wise to hedge my bets.

He informed me that if it persisted, the only remedy would be for him to replace it with an entirely new one, and that in the meantime, I had his–wink-wink–“blessing” to go nuclear on it and completely rip out not only the battery but the entire unit if it came to that.

Welp.

You can bet your bottom dollar that it came to that. It only took until about 9:30 that night before that little ----- chirped its last “Chirp-chirp-chirp!” before I ripped its throat and heart out and buried it deep in a pile of towels on the second level.

NOW the problem was solved!

“CHIRP!”

It was barely an hour after my rage-fueled dismembering of Sir Psycho Smoke Detector, and it must have been so traumatic I could swear I was hearing impossible things. I wrote it off as attributable to the PTSD that comes when you snuff the life out of something in cold-blood, and went back to researching kitchen tile backsplash options.

“CHIRP!”

Nope, that was real, and was definitely coming from that pile of beach towels. I must have forgotten to take the battery out…

As I got up to finish off the tenacious beast, something caught my eye. Sitting there on the kitchen counter was a 9-volt battery…the very one and the same that I knew I had taken out earlier that evening.2I truly believed that if I had done what I was about to do next–walk down to the beach and heave into the Atlantic Ocean–that it still would have somehow found a way to make it back to the house and chirp at me, its ruthless killer.

You have got to be ----- kidding me.

Good god, have I moved my family into the Haunted ----- Mansion?

(Tune in next time to hear more…)

Content created on: 24 June 2021 (Thursday)

Footnotes & References:[+]

I Really Wish This Elevator Story Was More Uplifting

20 June 2021 / / 0 Comments
5 Min Read

Now, if you’ll turn in the Good Book to Proverbs 20:17:

“Stolen bread tastes sweet, but it turns to gravel in the mouth…”

“Guess what kids?!? Your Pops just won you a free five-week stay at the beach!!!”

Yep, that’s right, we’re still talking about that one time I outsmarted our insurance company and subsequently found myself and my family taking refuge from our home remodeling project at a beach house in Oak Island, NC.

But not just any beach house! It was the one and only luxurious Eden Cove 9 (aka EC9), managed by none other than the soon-to-be-discovered ironically named Better Beach Rentals. And, today, friends, we shall continue our voyage of discovery as I continue my extended review of the whole EC9, um, “experience”.

First, recall from last time how I shared our initial encounter with EC9: all those ----- stairs. Now, “vacation house has too many stairs” is really an unfair complaint for any beach house. But leave it up to Better Beach Rentals to take a minor inconvenience to–and pardon the pun–a whole new level. Level of Purgatory, that is…

Level Two: The Mystery Of The Moving Closets

“Honey, have you been able to get into any of these huge coat closets? The doors seem to be jammed.”

Since we had brought half our belongings with us to our Oak Island home, I was rather appreciative of the idea of having ample storage space on each of our three living levels, but it wouldn’t do us any good if we couldn’t get into them.

Even after pressing the button next to each door, nothing happened. They didn’t appear to magically unlock them as I had hoped. Nuts.

But after briefly trying and then getting on with settling in, something odd kept banging around in the back of my mind. Back when I was trying to decide whether to rent this place, I had read several reviews for this unit and for some of its Eden Cove brethren. In passing some previous patron had lamented that it was “a pity that the elevator was out of order.”

Holy shit, Batman.

How could I have been so dumb? The VRBO listing wasn’t kidding around about all the luxury that awaited us during our stay at Eden Cove. What is even more luxurious than huge coat closets? That’s right–we had our very own elevator up in the place!

I admit that it took me an embarrassingly long time to put the puzzle pieces together, but there was no doubt about it. That was definitely an elevator.

This realization came at the end of our first day there, and while we had moved most of our stuff in already, we still had several bulky items such as desks that still needed to be hauled up to the top floor. So an elevator was a sight for sore calves indeed!

Of course it couldn’t be that simple could it though? For the life of us we couldn’t get the dang thing to work. The only call button that even lit up when pressed was the one on the ground level, but then it would just flash at us and proceed to do exactly jack squat.

Now, for completely unrelated reasons, I shortly found myself on the phone with BBR’s after hours maintenance guy, and after he solved my problem, I happened to casually ask if the elevators were supposed to work. To my delight, he said that the owners had been making an effort to get them in working order, and that he would happily put in a work order to have it fixed!

Oh boy, Monday couldn’t come soon enough! That night I could barely sleep due to the anticipation of having access to private and convenient elevation. ‘Twas indeed a night filled with elevator repairman fantasies–of the PG kind, of course…

Have you ever sat around and waited for the mail all day? Or otherwise found yourself in a holding pattern while you waited for something important to happen?

So then you know what my Monday was like. Expecting the elevator guy to show up any minute, I put off any task that involved my focus for more than 10 minutes, including important things like going on a grocery run so my family wouldn’t starve. Or fun ones like enjoying with the girls this beautiful oasis that awaited us just out the back door:

It also didn’t help that we were harboring two pets that, if discovered, may or may not have gotten us kicked out onto the street with no refund. Thanks to the presence of Frank and Anne,1Not their real names. the prospect of a stranger coming into our new home had us all on high alert, and I had to constantly be prepared to hide them and all related paraphernalia in the attic at the slightest hint of someone coming to visit.

Anyways, come 4 pm Monday afternoon, and still no there was no sign of the elevator guy, so I called up BBR and asked them what the dealio was, yo. They seemed to be very helpful, and said they would follow up and give me a call back. “What great customer service!” I thought.

Well, come Tuesday around noon–and another morning wasted waiting–and still no call back from BBR. So I had to call them up again to see what the heck was happening. They apologized and informed that the repairman was scheduled to come sometime in the morning the next day, and that, per my request, would call 15 minutes ahead of time.

At this point, I don’t think I have to tell you that I wasted another half day Wednesday waiting for this ----- guy to call. Finally, around 2:30, I called BBR out of exasperation, only to be told that, actually, he had already came and went.2The elevator on ground level is open to the outside, so it is perfectly plausible that one could work on it without ever setting foot inside. The diagnosis was that it needed a new control board, and–good news! The order had already been placed! Now, it just a matter of waiting for the part to come in.

More waiting. Of course, it was more waiting…

Fast forward to our last few days there, approximately 4 weeks later. After having the convenience of a working elevator to make moving all our stuff out a breeze, The Boss Lady and I couldn’t stop gushing the whole ride home about what an amazing, pampered, living-in-the-lap of luxury, 5-star, first-class service that Better Beach Rentals had really delivered!

…

Of course I’m J.K. Kidding.

No, not once did we get to ride in the elevator. Not a single ----- time!

Remember, I asked them to fix the elevator on our very first night there. They had 5 weeks to get the job done. What kind of shit-show ass-clown circus are they running over there anyways?

Though, by the end of our time there, we concluded that like hell we would ride in it had they got it working–no doubt we would have ended up either trapped for a week (best case scenario) or plummeting to the bottom in a manner that most people only have nightmares about.

“So why did it never get fixed?” you might as well go ahead and ask.

Well, I think maybe once in the interceding weeks did I try calling and following up on the “part” that was supposed to be coming in. But, about a week and half in I realized a cold hard truth: they had just been blowing smoke up my ass in hopes that I would either forget about it or get tired of waiting.

There was no part coming. Hell, there probably wasn’t even an elevator repairman. Wait…was there even an elevator in the elevator shaft?!?

I could feel the creeping suspicion that something was off about this place.

“This place is fancy af. This place is fancy af. This place is fancy af…“

That much was clear from the online listing, and I just had to keep repeating that to myself. Then it would have to be true, right?

Unless there more evidence emerged that suggested otherwise…

…

Yeah. That was indeed a foreshadowing of many installments of The Better Beach Rentals Review: The Extended Director’s Cut.

In other words, stay tuned…

Content created on: 17/18 June 2021 (Thurs/Fri)

Footnotes & References:[+]

A New Twist On The “With Friends Like These” Motif

17 June 2021 / / 0 Comments
2 Min Read

As the saying goes “With friends like these, who needs enemas?”

Your friends. Your friends need enemas. Because they’re ass-hats…

“You really worry too much about what people think.”

Well, this had just gotten real uncomfortable. I was a guest counselor at a summer camp for a week, and was hanging out with the full-time counselors when one of them, out of nowhere, decided to start going around the room and laying out uncomfortable truths about each person.

“You have some real daddy issues.”

Awkward.

“You need to break off your engagement. You know it deep down in your heart that you do.”

Shit, she wasn’t sparing anyone’s feelings.

“I bet you don’t even really believe there is a god.”

Damn, the hits just kept coming.

But was I worried? No! Why? Because I only had been there a few days, and this ----- girl barely knew me. What dirt could she possibly have on me?

Though I got to admit that I admired her bravery for telling her friends the hard-to-swallow things that they needed to hear.

“You–you talk about yourself waaaaay too much.”

I started to chuckle before she whipped around and pointed a finger directly at me, “And you too, Buddy.“

Dang, girl, that was stone-cold.

Now, extensive self-centered oration isn’t really that embarrassing…it’s just that she figured out that that was my cardinal sin after only a handful interactions…

More recently, I found myself hanging out with a group of friends. A TV was playing in the background, and it must have been on the Food Network or something because there was a gratuitous amount of meat being shown. Real mouth-watering stuff, I tell ya.

I leaned over to one of my friends, whispering, “Don’t tell anyone, that I, as a vegan, am watching–and secretly enjoying–this show!”

She leaned over and whispered back, “Again, that information has no value to me or anyone else. Can you see how it’s you just talking about yourself even more?”

Damn, girl…

So at this point, you maybe thinking that the point of the story is something like “Blessed be the true friend who is willing to give it to you straight” right? While, sure, yeah, that’s true, there’s one tiny detail that I’ve intentionally omitted thus far: these tales never really happened. Sorta.

The truth is that these were both actually my own ----- dreams.

In other words: it was ME all along!

I mean, how bad is it that, technically speaking, I’m calling myself out for characteristically blabbing about myself at great lengths, and at times, for no real reason?

But I think the real point of the story is: beware, beware, oh beware your dream-self. They might keep running their mouth off, and, like me, you might find yourself thinking “Ugghhh. This ----- guy.1I’ve been watching What We Do In The Shadows on Hulu recently, if you were wondering whether this was a pop-culture reference or something. I wish this asshole would just shut the hell up about myself already…”

[Bonus material, since we’re vaguely referencing The Big Lebowski:]

Content created on: 17 June 2021 (Thursday)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Better Beach Rentals: Blurring The Line Between Luxury And Purgatory

13 June 2021 / / 0 Comments
4 Min Read

To say that it was “A Vacation From Hell” might be a bit of an exaggeration.

Just barely, though…

“Here at Better Beach Rentals we are working to be better everyday. In order to get better, we need your help. Please take a few minutes to review the home and your Better Beach Rentals vacation experience…”

I sat there staring at my computer in disbelief. Before me: an invitation to leave a review for Eden Cove 9 (aka EC9), the beach house in lovely Oak Island, NC, in which we had just spent 5 weeks living in while our regular home was being repaired and renovated.

Did they really want my honest opinion of my experience to be shared with others? I grinned wryly to myself, as I couldn’t help but think that they might just end up learning a little life lesson about “being careful what you wish for.”

Frankly, though, the breadth and depth of things I had to say about our experience with these asshats was so immense, I realized there was no way I could ever write an appropriately succint-yet-thorough enough review. At least not one short enough for the attention span of unwitting potential vacationers who would otherwise be blissfully unaware that Eden Cove 9 is, in fact, quite possibly a Gateway to Hell.

So instead, I turn to you, Dear Reader, to spread the EC9 anti-gospel. Though to convince you, be fore-warned that it’s going to take several sessions…

First, some context though: one must recall how we ended up in such a luxurious beach house for such a long period of time in the first place. The overly-long version can be read here, while the brief version is that I was clever and mischievous, and forced our home insurance company to let us stay in “absolutely the most luxurious town homes on Oak Island” instead of some milquetoast property closer to home, much to their chagrin. And best of all, good ol’ Amica Insurance was footing the bill for our month-long semi-vacation at the beach!

In other words, we were going into it brimming with excitement that were about to live fancy af for a little while. It felt like we were at the foot of the Mountain of Purgatory, and the only way to go was up. “Could this be the beginning of Heaven?” we wondered aloud to ourselves…

Level One: I Guess I’m A Drug Mule Now

Since we have a lot of ground to cover, and I don’t want to take up your entire Sunday afternoon, it’s best that I ease you in gently to begin with. I’ll start off with a rather boring topic: stairs. But oh, were there so many ----- stairs.

Now this one is probably on us. You see, we’re what you might call “Flatlanders”–folks who live in a ground-level single-story home, and the most stairs we have to encounter in one day are the two steps from the sidewalk up to our porch. Yeah, maybe it was foolish of us to rent a place with pictures like this in the listing:

“What a wonderful view!” you might say. Yes, indeed, but did you ever consider the price you might pay to enjoy such a view? We sure didn’t–but we know the exact cost now: 3 excruciatingly long sets of stairs.

And if you’re wondering why you would need 3 sets of stairs for what is apparently only a 3-story townhouse, it’s because what the trees in the picture are hiding is all the carports that comprise the ground level. That’s right: we had to traverse a steep-ass set of stairs just to get in the front door.

Further exacerbating the situation was the fact that they put the kitchen and living room on the gosh darn middle level, meaning that any time we got groceries, we had to heave-and-ho them up two ----- flights, all the while trying avoiding tripping, slipping, and breaking our necks.

Now all of this might have been fine and dandy if we were only there to have a relaxing 1-week vacation. But oh, no, it could never be as simple as hauling a mere 5 suitcases up those stairs. Were we there to relax and relate? Heck, no! We were there to work and live on a semi-permanent basis.

That meant we needed in-house childcare, so at all times we had at least one grandparent living there with us, too. So even more possessions to haul in and out and up and down! Oh joy!1For the record, their contribution to the quantity of said possessions was actually negligible.

In total, there were 3.5 adults, 2 children, and 2 “dogs”2For legal purposes, we can neither confirm nor deny whether or not the pets staying with this were or were not actually of the canine variety. living there at any given time. In other words, we had a lot of shit to move in, and once you throw in the work and school desks for those of who still had to work remotely and attend virtual school…

Well, you probably get the gist already, but let me throw in a visual aid for good measure. Around the time we moved in, my go-to attire for below-the-waist were Adidas jogging pants that had zippers at the ankles instead of elastic bands. Well, the morning after we moved into our new accomodations, I went to put them on only to find that I couldn’t zip them down over my swole-ass calves–nearly busting the zippers in the process!

I couldn’t help but immediately think of an infamous comment3https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/steve-king-and-the-case-of-the-cantaloupe-calves by the dishonorable4The guy got disowned by the Republican Party, for fuck’s sake. So I think it’s safe to objectively state that he was a bit of piece of shit, regardless of your political affiliation. former Congressman from Iowa, Steve King, making a case for keeping any and all Mexicans out of the U.S.:

For everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there who weigh a hundred and thirty pounds—and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling seventy-five pounds of marijuana across the desert…

Politician who somehow managed to be too racist for the Republican party

Well, what a pleasant surprise! I went into this with zero expectations of achieving my life-long dream of developing calf muscles that could scare the shit out of raging bigots, but alas, here we are…

Logically, this leads to one of the topics of the next installment of Eden Cove 9: The Extended Vacation Rental Review: “If only there were an elevator…”

Believe you me, I’m just getting started, so stay tuned!

Content created on: 9 June 2021 (Wednesday)

Footnotes & References:[+]

And Now, A More Wholesome Revelation From The Universe

10 June 2021 / / 0 Comments
3 Min Read

“Tell me what I want, what I really, really want…”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, if you really, really want to know…”

“Cat toys? My bus to work? Another stolen glimpse of the comely young lass waiting at the bus stop? Shit, I have no idea what I’m doing here!”

And thus went the internal monologue in my head.

It was mid-morning, and I was rushing around in a frenzy, but I just couldn’t seem to remember why. Taking stock of my surroundings–my usual bus stop, a nearby Petco, the bougie food shop that popped up where our beloved TCBY used to be–I was doing my darnedest to formulate a theory as to what I was supposed to be up to.

What I was doing just made no sense. Now I was at Trader Joe’s? The heck? I needed to figure this out ASAP. Especially if I was supposed be catching that bus.

I paused a moment to continue my internal dialogue. I guess I decided to cut to the chase–no pun intended–as I wondered aloud: “What is it you’re really chasing after, man?”

Holy shit, was I surprised when, loud as day I heard another voice that sounded exactly like my own reply without skipping a beat: “Self-respect.”

I stopped dead in my tracks, stunned. I about screamed: “YOU WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO ANSWER THAT! IT WAS A RHETORICAL QUESTION!!!”

By this time, I had realized nothing seemed to make sense because–wait for it–I was dreaming.

Just one tiny problem though: the answer that my dream-self gave me? It made waaaaaay too much sense.

The funny thing is, fully-conscious me would have never in a million years come up with anything close to that answer. I was literally blind-sided by my overly-honest sub-conscious. I had just revealed a deep secret to myself. Or maybe it was the Universe speaking to me, through me, in my dreams?

Either way, “self-respect” was, as I like to say, one ----- interesting theorem, explaining way too well so much about so many of my deepest desires and motivations throughout my life, even at a young age. That’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax, though, and maybe I’ll unpack it all sometime down the road.

Moments later, I woke up in a real foul mood. Later that day I had processed this newfound information enough to figure out why this whole ordeal made me so upset and, for lack of a better descriptor, icky.

The answer to that question, if answered at all–was supposed to be more like “financial security” or “the respect of my peers and/or wife.” You know, things that are somewhat beyond my control.

But self-respect? That means all the unhappiness and dissatisfaction brewing underneath the surface? That was my own ----- fault if I didn’t show myself some respect. Even worse was the thought that it was on me if I hadn’t earned on my own respect.

Uggh. No wonder I was angry. I was angry because it was true.

Anyways, I guess the point of the story is you really shouldn’t go around asking profound, meaning-of-life questions in your dreams. You may think that you’re Tom Cruise in the classic hit movie A Few Good Men, but deep down a part of you–the Jack Nicholson part of you–knows better:1Source: https://gifimage.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/you-cant-handle-the-truth-gif-14.gif

https://gifimage.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/you-cant-handle-the-truth-gif-14.gif

Dammit, it was the Napoleon Dynamite Incident all over again…

Content created on: 10 June 2021 (Thursday)

Footnotes & References:[+]

Honestly, It’s Unholy: The Prom Theme Delivered From Upon High

16 May 2021 / / 0 Comments
4 Min Read

Are you sick and tired of prom themes that over-promise and under-deliver?

Well, have I got just the theme for you…

“C’mon! Y’all know my prom theme is da bomb! ‘Ten Steps’ is way more cool than just ‘A Step’. Why do y’all insist on being so boring!?!”

I was attempting to fulfill my duties as a member of the Rolla High School Junior Class Prom Committee, and give the Seniors–aka the Class of ’98–a prom they would actually remember. But no one was daring enough to actually do something cool for once.

Despite the tacit acknowledgment that my idea was indeed pretty ----- awesome, my fellow RHSJCP Committee members wouldn’t take the plunge and commit to my suggestion of having a classic Old West theme entitled, “Ten Steps Back In Time.”

I mean, who wouldn’t want to hearken back to the simpler time when cowboys would regularly resolve their differences in a civilized and gentlemanly gun duel that may or may not have ended in the death and/or maiming of one and/or both of them? There’s nothing quite as romantic as some unnecessary violence, amiright?

Nope, instead we were stuck with “A Step Back In Time”–still Old West themed, but with all the lameness that seems to be obligatory for high school prom themes.

Realizing that I was completely outgunned on this one, I eventually gave up. I had to simply resign myself to the very unoriginal gift that we would be giving to our upper-classmen and -classwomen.

The only solace I had was knowing that “a genius is rarely recognized in their time.”

Wait a sec…I think that is supposed to be ‘prophet’ instead of ‘genius’…

Putting me in charge of putting up the giant letters that would spell out our prom theme? That was their first mistake.

A month or so later, and apparently they had already forgotten that they had picked a super-vanilla theme over my Vanilla-Ice cool theme back during the planning stages of this whole she-bang.

But now it was go-time, and we had to get the lunch room decorated for the party that was about to go down later that evening. For some reason I was deeply unmotivated to do anything, and I found myself just sitting there, blankly staring at the letters in front of me:

Figure 1: The RHS 1998 Prom Theme, simulated here with Scrabble(TM) tiles.

As I kept staring, the letters started to swirl in my mind. I could see a message hidden in there, but I couldn’t quite make it out. Thank goodness I had been playing Scrabble since the age of 6, and in that moment I just knew that destiny had been preparing me for this all along. So I went to work…

Interestingly, this is the point where Present Me had to take “A Step Back In Time” himself, and do a bit of time-travel investigating.

You see, I clearly remember that a very important Message had been transmitted through Teenage Me–a mere humble conduit–but I couldn’t quite remember exactly what it was, only that the Greater Being(s) of the Universe had oddly chosen to include a slight typo in their Message.

Wanting to present an accurate account of what transpired that fateful day, I had to bust out ye ol’ Scrabble game and do a little historical reenactment. And I’m not going to lie: I’m not as spry in the mind as I used to be, and my Third Eye is going a bit blind. It took me awhile, but it was indeed quite the revelation when I finally figured out what very important Message could be constructed using ALL the letters from that lame-ass prome theme “A S T E P B A C K I N T I M E”. The very same Message that was revealed to us rural teenagers, all those years ago…

…

Are you ready?

…

Are you sure you’re ready?

…

I mean, once you have heard such a world-view shattering Message delivered from upon high, you realize your life will never be the same, right?

…

Okay, well, you’ve been duly warned. I wash my hands of anything that happens after this point.

…

Take a deep breath, and prepare to receive the Message:

…

Ok, J.K. Kidding! Call me a tease, but I feel the urge to keep you in suspense a little longer…

It occurred to me that high school proms are like modern-day versions of Araby–you know, the 19th-Century short story by Irish author James Joyce. Just like Joyce’s protagonist, you’re young, full of hormones, and ready to, um, “come-of-age”–and Prom is your very own Arabian market where you just know all of your youthful lusts will be fulfilled.

But does it ever work out that way? No! Or to be fair: Rarely!

It’s supposed to be this super-romantic night, yet for all-too-many youths, it doesn’t exactly go the way they really hoped it would go.

Tragically too often, the evening instead ends with disappointment and frustration…

And this singular thought, pithily summarized by the 1998 Rolla High School prom theme that almost made it past the teachers, passing through their mind:

(Read with the most depressing Redneck accent you can muster in your head:)

Figure 2: Spoken like a true prophet: “I Keep Mastubatin…” (sic).

Content created on: 14/15 May 2021 (Fri/Sat)

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