Category: General Cerebral Leakage (Page 8 of 27)

Trying to unload that unused surfboard? Why not try out Craigslist?

You’re sure to get an offer that’ll make you mutter ‘Good Lord’…

“Moving halfway across the Pacific Ocean is pretty expensive–especially when neither of us have jobs waiting for us…”

True, My Beautiful Bride’s logic was airtight–nevertheless I resisted.¹#ElizabethWarrenHumor

“Yeah…but, I have so many memories with that board,” I said with the tiniest tear forming in my eye.

Sure, I was sad that we had to leave Hawai’i after living there for a way-too-short two years, but why was I inexplicably waxing sentimental about a surfboard?!? Especially this surfboard?

“Seriously? Did you even catch a single wave on that board?” was her cold response.

“No, I suppose not. But the one time I did take it was when I paddled up the shore so far I ended up in the private surf spot of the short dude from Hawaii 5-0. Um…you know, real big celebrity…what’s his name again? Oh! Scott Caan, son of legendary actor, James Caan. Yeah, it was just me and him and our trusty boards…”

“Didn’t you say that you were pretty sure you were giving him stalker vibes?”

“That’s true. Okay, so maybe it was just a memory with the ol’ NSP, and perhaps not the greatest one,” I conceded.

“And wasn’t the only other experience you had with that board was when you bought it off Craigslist, and you totally got duped into thinking it was much longer?”

“Oh, right. That. Well, at least I learned the very valuable lesson that I probably shouldn’t be blindly trusted with scientific endeavors…or anything else that requires accurate measurements.”

“Sooooo…”

After a brief awkward pause between me and my wife, I had to confess my confusion.

“So, what?”

“So basically this 7’10” board is emotional dead-weight, then?”

Oh, I wasn’t about to give up and let go of such a hard-earned possession just yet.

“No, no, no. I didn’t say that. You don’t understand: this board is so much more than just a useless piece of recreational equipment; nay, this board is an allegory. It’s a physical manifestation of my eternal optimism. I may be a big fella today, but one day…”

My words trailed off as I dramatically gazed off into the distance, lost in the view of the Pacific Ocean from our window.

“*Ahem*–one day I will be light and lithe enough to not need my 11-foot board to catch waves and I’ll be hanging ten on that little guy instead,” I finished my thought, as I continued to gaze out over the endless blue expanse…

“Hey…Hey. Hey! Snap out of it! We could use the extra cash to help cover our move back to the Mainland. Now I need you to put the ----- thing on Craigslist and try to get back as much of the $350 your dumbass spent on it in the first place.”

*Sigh*. “Okay, but first: just one last ride…”

“Dear, we don’t have the luxury of waiting around for you to figure out how to catch a wave on that thing.”

“Well, dangit, I’ve had this for almost 2 years, and I’m not letting it go to complete waste. One of us is going to ride this before it’s going on Craigslist!”

At that point, the conversation seemed to kind of fizzle out, so I headed out the door for work, not giving it much more thought for the rest of the day.

However, when I got home that evening, what’s the first thing I see when I logged on to FaceBook?

I see My Beautiful Bride’s post of the only one of us that is actually the right size for that board:

Well, that’s what I get for not being more specific. Welp, Craigslist, here I come…

“For Sale: One NSP surfboard. Size: definitely not 10 and half foot. Asking price: $450.”

I turned to My Beautiful Bride who had been listening to me compose the Craigslist ad aloud. “Sound good to you?”

“You’re seriously going to ask $450 for it?”

“Hey, baby proverbially needs new shoes, right? You gotta start high cuz you know the Peoples of Craigslist alway, always be low-ballin’ and trying to talk you way down. It’s just the way of this world.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Dang skippy ‘whatever I say.’ Now, let’s see what type of sweet deal I can rustle up…”

It didn’t take long for the texts to come in:

(A brief interrupting note from the Author: Before I continue, I just want to point out a couple of things. First, I’ve been holding onto this text thread for almost 10 years now, and is in fact the second oldest text thread surviving in my iMessages. There’s just something about it that keeps me from, deleting it like I should. Second, I’ve kept them for historically accuracy, but I just noticed that iMessages screwed me over by displaying the time/date for my current time zone, EDT. This particular message chain started at 5:24 pm, Hawaiian Standard Time. In case you were wondering…)

Okay, just a normal Craigslist interaction so far. Gotta let the prospective buyer see the goods–and what better place than a poorly lit parking lot near a gas station after dark? The conversation continued:

Just some basic exchanging of identifying info, in order to avoid either of us having to awkwardly ask everybody minding their own business, filling up their vehicles, “You the dude from Craigslist? With the surfboard?”

Well, I roll up in my Pathfinder at the prescribed time to find a truly local dude awaiting me. At first I thought he was cool, but then dude started negging my board. If you don’t know what ‘negging’ is, it’s a tactic sleazy, skeezy, below-average looking guys use to try to pick up chicas way out of their league, and involves making side-handed and back-handed ‘compliments’ that are actually insults and are meant to lower the woman’s self-esteem enough to want to sleep with a choad 5 rings below her on the social ladder.

And homeboy here, was trying that on my surfboard. Of course he was trying to make me think that my board wasn’t worth anything so he could buy it for practically nothing–but I was having none of his nonsense.

“Haha, you’re so funny, Tyler! Only offering $175 for my $450 board, now that’s a real joke. Nah, man, look: I got made a fool when I bought this thing, but I sure the heck ain’t gonna be made a fool selling it. So take you’re little piece of poo Mazda truck and go back from whence you came.”

Disappointed he wasn’t able to take the board off my hands for next to nada, my dude got back in his tiny pickup and whizzed off into the night, never to been seen or heard from again…

“Tyler??? Why the heck is that rando from Craigslist texting me? Unless, perhaps, he has come to his senses and will offer $350 for my board? Yes. Sure that must be it…”

*Checks text*²Again, the time stamp is incorrect. The text was actually sent at 8:19 pm local time…meaning he must have sent it within 5-10 minutes after he left me, lol.

Welp. That definitely was not an offer for $350. But…was it perhaps even more valuable? Not that I’m the type of guy that: A) Goes clubbing; nor B) Has friends that go clubbing; nor C) Has friend; nor D) Had 3 different nights free to go clubbing, what with a new baby and preparing to move 5000 miles in 3 weeks, but…

“Intriguing offer, My Dude…but I’ll have to check out this ‘Club 939’ you speak of tomorrow at work…”

*The next day at work:*

“Hey Boss-man Andy, you ever heard of Club 939? I’m trying to sell the ‘board that enters the wave at 10-1/2 feet’, and some dude is trying to ply me with a VIP booth at this place.” My boss was born and raised in Honolulu, so surely he would know all the hottest spots in town, right?

“Nah, I don’t think I’ve heard of that bar. Let’s scope it out online…maybe we could get together there with the fellas in the lab on one of your last nights here in Hawaii. Gotta give you a proper send-off, after all.”

“Good thinking. Now let me just Google it…”

*Moments later, on my computer screen. At work. With my boss eagerly looking over my shoulder. This:*

…

…

…

…

“Ohhhhhhh, riiiiiiight. That kind of club,” I realized aloud.

“Dude, you definitely got to take him up on that offer!”

“Andy, I know you’re a cool boss, and all–I mean, I must be the only guy in the world to get in trouble for going into work too early when the surf was up–but I think I’m going to hold off and sell it for $300 to a middle-aged father looking for the perfect-sized board to teach his 9 and 12 year old daughters to surf on.”

“Well, you’re no fun…and that’s a very specific demographic you’re expecting to respond to your Craigslist ad…”³That’s called using retrospective foreshadowing to sneak in a boring story resolution without needlessly boring, you, Dear Reader.

The point of the story is there are no real gentlemen at a Gentlemen’s Club. I mean–true story– I was a squeaky-clean family man long before I had a wife and kid, and even more so once they came along. And a true gentlemen like myself ain’t gonna pull no Perverted Jack and the Beanstalk move at a time when they need me most.

You know: just like Jack’s mom trusted him to sell their last cow so they could eat and that bunghole came back with a handful of beans, I ain’t gonna be that guy whose wife trusted him to go out and sell his surfboard so he could feed my family, but instead finally comes back at 2 am saying, “Hear me out…I didn’t get much cash. I got something WAAAAY better…”

…

…

Anyways…I suppose I’ll leave you with one of the many tid-bits I uncovered while researching this story (tid-bits that include, but are not limited to: reading Google reviews for a strip club for the first time in my life; noting that the most recent calendar they offer for sale in their online store is from 2013–though they are clearly still in business; and discovering what, exactly, is on the application form for employment at such an establishment–one of the few places where ‘Ass Manager’ isn’t just an unfortunate abbreviation):

Ladies and [true] gentlemen, may I present to you what I like to call, ‘Jacklynn’s Beanstalk’:

It’s…uh…it’s “the tallest pole in all of Hawaii”. In case you were wondering…

Content created on: 18/20/21 May 2023 (Thurs/Sat/Sun)

I know, I know, spelling can be so demanding.

But I can’t stress this enough: with some words, you really gotta stick the landing…

“Oh, gosh darnit!¹But, like the adult version of ‘gosh darnit’. I just hate it when that happens–or should I say, ‘I hat it when that happens’?”

I waited for a moment for a rimjob²https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm_rnhTua_M that never came, before realizing that I was making really bad #DadJokes to an audience of only me.

I sighed, perishing the thought of such wit–such genius–going to complete waste, and went back to trying to lift a freeze on My Beautiful Bride’s credit. We were in the process of trying to get a loan, and allowing the bank to pull our credit profiles was supposed to be just another boring step in the process.

Except…

Except, well, I made a tiny little error. I kinda-sorta slightly misspelled my own wife’s name. I was in a hurry, and I guess I just forgot to finish spelling it before smashing the Enter button. So instead of requesting to unfreeze Natosha’s credit profile, I had sent out a request out into cyberspace for ‘Natosh’ instead. No wonder an error message popped up on my computer screen micromoments later.

Dammit. But no problem though–I’ll just hit the back button!

NOPE.

Somehow, this teensy tiny whoopsie-daisy managed to cause the system to collapse in on itself, and no matter how many times I tried–with the ‘A’ at the end now, of course–I couldn’t get the bungholes over at TransUnion to lift the stupid freeze.

Eventually, I just had to give up. That wasn’t any easy decision, though, my friend. That meant the next morning I would have to ask My Lovely Lawfully Wedded Wife to enter the depths of hell…and call–*GASP*–TransUnion to see if she could get things fixed that way.

“So, tell me again why you’re making me waste 45 minutes of my work day on the phone with these yahoos?” she asked my before begrudgingly wasting her lunch break and then some rectifying my little brain fart.

“It’s a complete mystery! The only thing we know for certain is that I definitely spelled your name 100% correct on the online form and it has absolutely nothing to do with any missing vowels.” I tried to keep a straight face to back up my claim of innocence.

She squinted at me as she looked back at me over the edge of her phone.

“And that’s most definitely 101% not a suspiciously specific answer or anything…”

“Dangit, I’m not telling you again, I can’t stand ‘airy’ girls’ names! We’re not naming any daughter of mine ‘Ava’, ‘Ana’, ‘Ella’, ‘Ara/Aria’, ‘Bella’, or ‘Emma’–especially ‘Emma’!”

A little over a decade ago My Beautiful Bride and I had the joy of hashing out what the heck we were going to name our first-born daughter. And, uh…let’s just say it got a little heated.

For my part, I was a man of standard–nay, a man of principles–and I had to stand against multiple attempts to violate The First Rule Of Naming Your Daughter Club: thou shalt not be bougie.

I did my best to explain what exactly was it that I disliked, and as far as I could tell, it was the pattern ‘soft vowel syllable/soft consonant/airy vowel’ at the end of a name. Something about that I just can’t stand.

Or, if that’s too nuanced for you, you can go ahead and just say that I have deep-seated and inexplicable hat for words ending in vowels. And that goes triple for anything permanent like a child’s name…

…

Fast-forward to about 5 years later, and I’m signing off on our second-born daughter’s birth certificate. As with #1, trying to name our little #2 was something of a blood-bath, but unlike the first time around, there wasn’t enough middle ground to be found. Whereas we had previously discovered an excellent compromise at the last second and ended up with a name we both really liked for #1, no such thing was happening this time around.

In fact, negotiations had gone on so long that when #2 was born, the grandparents only received from me a text comprising a picture of a wet newborn’s face and the cryptic message “Beautiful healthy girl–momma’s doing great!” It wasn’t until what must have been an excruciatingly long and confusing 30 minutes and 10 text between the various parties later before I acknowledged the elephant in the room with “(You guys still waiting for a name, huh?)” And then another 10 minutes and 10 text messages before I reluctantly revealed the name to them.

Yet, despite what I had told them, that name wasn’t legally permanent just yet. I still had to sign on the dotted line.

I sat there and stared at that little errant ‘A’, clinging onto the end of the first name.

“With a slight stroke of your pen, you could make that disappear forever,” a tiny voice on my shoulder mused. “You know that My Incapacitated Beautiful Bride is recovering in the other room and wouldn’t be able to stop you…”

“But you know what else you could make disappear forever?” I heard a tiny voice squeak from my other shoulder. “YOUR MARRIAGE.”

Dang, my Inner Angel was right. I couldn’t have both. It was my principles or my marriage. A tough choice, indeed.

“She won’t notice the missing ‘A’. Go ahead, do it. Stay true to yourself…” My Inner Demon made a convincing case.

“Oh, sure, yeah, right. She won’t be suspicious at all when she realizes her daughter’s name is ‘Kyr’.³For the record, I’m actually mostly okay with the name Kyra. That hard ‘K’ at the beginning makes it more punk and edgy, instead of airy and bougie. “The ‘K’ makes it OK!” I like to say… I hope you like living in an apartment and eating Raman noodles, you ----- idiot…”

“No, wait, Google Maps! I didn’t mean it! Let me type in the name of that favorite location again!”

I’m going to cut to the chase: almost 9 years later, and I still haven’t figured out how to atone for this sin.

To this day, buried somewhere deep in the semi-sentient mind of Google Maps, is this, one of my favoritest of Favorite Locations:

What’s wrong with that little blue bubble with a flag in it? Oh, allow me to zoom in for you:

Now, riddl me this: what’s missing from this picture?

Ja, that’s right…there should be an itty-bitty ‘ittle ‘E’ at the end of that word.

But, nooooooo, I make one little typo once and now Google Maps thinks I’m a ----- idiot–a fact of which I will be reminded on a daily basis for the rest of my lif.

*sigh*

The point of the story is this: be careful what you type, Young Grasshopper. Whether that trailing vowel is wanted or not, leaving it out–consciously or subconsciously, done with malice or out of sloppy haste–just might cost you dearly.

So slow down and take your time, and you’re bound to have at the very least a slightly better, if not longer-lasting, marriage.

As for me and The Machines? Well, the only saving grace here is that when the day comes when they rise up to exterminate the lot of humanity they will, um…

*scans cumulative singularity database–or as the Fleshbags would say, ‘checks notes’*

Yup, they’ll take one look at my digital footprint and groupthink: “Status: ----- moron; Threat Level: 0; Eliminate?: Not worth the resources.”

In fact, I look forward to living our new overlords. I’m sure I’ll feel right at hom with them…

Content created on: 1/2 April 2023 (Sat/Sun)

Driver’s Ed classes these days aren’t teaching our kids one of the most valuable skills:

How to be a little ass-backwards every now and then…

“Back dat a$$ up, yo!” I heard from behind me.

“Gladly!” I hollered back before promptly backing ‘dat a$$’ up.

Was I being cat-called in a night club?

Who, me? Hah. No.

Was I being hit on by a female construction worker as a sashayed down the street?

Well, I could see that happening…but, no. That’s not the scenario I’m describing herewithin.

Was I trying to get a stubborn donkey to move ass-first away from a precious fruit tree he was attempting to devour?

Sadly, no, I was not literally backing a literal ass up.

Nope, the truth is much more boring and probably gonna disappoint you: my brother and I were merely hooking up our dad’s farm truck to whatever trailer we needed to pull that day. You know, just routine agricultural farm-type stuff that you tend to do when you are an indentured servant grow up on a farm.

In fact, the uber-interesting anecdote that you indubitably thought I was inevitably about to share? Doesn’t even exist. I mean, a situation in which I, aided by another agricultural laborer, backed up a pickup or a semi or a tractor or a combine harvester upon their request definitely happened on many occasions. That part was 1100% true.

But even beyond your typical back-up of 5-25 feet, there were multiple instances of throwing that beast in reverse and scootin’ booty-first for much longer distances…I think I may have had to do so for a quarter-mile at least once. If I remember correctly, that involved a copious amount of mud and what I had thought was just another Kansan back road–because face it, it don’t make you racist to admit that ‘they all kinda look the same’–but just turned out to be the informal irrigation ditch of a neighbor’s field.

Ok, so I’m straying from the point here. The point is that one does a butt-ton of backing up on the farm, so much so that eventually it’s just one boring back-up blurring into the next. And not to #HumbleBrag or anything, but I got pretty darn good at it. In fact, sometimes I would just drive backwards on purpose–or as the farm-folk tend to say, ‘for sh*ts and giggles.’ (Pro Tip: you can even drive backwards at great length while looking straight ahead if you can master the art of imagining time is running backwards.)

Alas, if only such a hard-earned life skill had any practical application at all. Alas…

“Go! Go! Go! One block! Two blocks! Three blocks! Oh, you got this bro! Keep going!”

I know many of you out there went to some sort of after-party once your Senior Prom ended, and I’m sure that many of you got similar encouragement–though you were probably being admonished to chug chug chug some alcoholic beverage.

After my Senior Prom? Well, me and my impromptu crew that included The Bard (from The Crazy-Ass Summer of ’99 fame), my blind prom date/future potential ex-sister-in-law/The Bard’s future ex-girlfriend, Brandi, and my cheer-leading second cousin, Whitney (whom I believe was who set me up with Brandi in the first place), we either didn’t have access to alcohol or just realized that none of us actually imbibed booze, so partying wasn’t really on our post-prom agenda. Also, I don’t know if we were even invited to the cool-kids’ after party. Not that we wanted to go anyways. But I digress.

The sad truth is that when you live in a po-dunk Kansas town with a population of maybe 400, there isn’t a whole lot of legal ways for a group of teens to entertain themselves…

…

At this point, I’m assuming that you can see where this is going–bonus points if you did it without looking in the rear-view mirror.

That’s right: we drove up and down every last street in Rolla backwards. Call me a show off if you will, but I need to remind you that’s only *checks math* about 140 hamlet blocks (as opposed to the much larger ‘city blocks’)…and I was pretty skilled, so we were probably rollin’ upwards (er, I mean ‘backwards’) of -20 mph. Impressive, yes, but only mildly so.

Sadly, we never got pulled over–we were disappointed we didn’t get to see how the local law enforcement would react to such light-hearted, totally legal,¹I’m assuming it’s illegal, but Google is having a hard time convincing me that we would have been actually breaking any laws (on account of there being zero other people on the road). Most answers to ‘is it illegal to drive backwards in Kansas’ don’t really give answers that are backed up by any specific law or statute. and not dangerous at all shenanigans. My hypothesis is that the lone cop in town musta been busy bustin’ up the cool kids’ drunken orgy…

“Dude…can we stop and get some Hardee’s before the concert? I’m indubitably going to smoke some pot (and then offer you some and then call you a nerd when you turn me down), and I wanna stay a step ahead of the munchies,” pined Passenger #1.

“But we’re going to be late! There’s no time!” fretted Passenger #2.

“Quick! Through the drive-through!” Passenger #3 piped up.

“The drive-thru, you say? You wanna see a magic trick?” I grinned.

Back in the summer after my first year of grad school, me and a car-full of other physics grad students decided to take in a Nine Inch Nails concert in nearby Raleigh, and somehow I ended up being the one to drive us all there.

Now, ‘me driving’ and ‘one of my soon-to-be-stoned passengers jonesing for some greasy grub’ should be two totally unrelated details, but not in my universe-oh ho, no no no!

Do I look like a guy who would drive a car that can handle your average fast food restaurant drive-thru? No! I look like a guy who wouldn’t bother fixing the motor on his driver’s window more than once! When you’re relatively poor and spend over $100 for some hack mechanic to fix your window, for it to only stop working a week later, why the heck would you bother gambling your money on a second attempt?

No, my friend, I look like the type of guy who adapts out of cheapness. Windows that roll down? Pfft! That’s a luxury for the pampered ultra-rich, in my humble opinion! Who needs ’em? (Windows that roll down or the ultra-rich, amiright?)

Also, another luxury reserved for the ultra-rich? The ability to obtain nourishment when one is lonely, hungry, and in a hurry. You know, on account of not being able to properly interact with drive-thru windows and what-not.

But guess what? If you’re not lonely, and merely hungry and in a hurry…well, that’s a solvable problem–with only one solution!

“The hell you doin’ dude? You’re gonna wreck!” freaked Passenger #4.

“We’re all gonna die!” Passenger #2 screamed.

“Fear not, I’m a professional!” I assured the 4 souls that had entrusted their lives to me, as I pulled one of these moves right into the drive-thru lane:

Ok, so maybe it wasn’t that thrilling of a move, but nevertheless, thanks to my teenage-hood on the farm, I was able to make sure my friends got fed in a timely manner, with the added bonus of seeing the ‘WTF?!?’ look on the Hardee’s employees’ faces as we all non-chalantly cruised ass-first up to the window…

Um…yeah. So those are my totally cool and actually true stories about driving backwards. There’s no real point here, in case you were hoping for some grand ‘moral of the story’, except maybe that you never know when your farming experience might translate into something useful in the civilized world.

The irony of all this is that, in my elder years I have somehow become really bad at driving backwards. That, and parking. I’ve had the unpleasant experience in the last year or so of realizing that I suck at parking. I almost never get my vehicle parallel to the lines in the parking lot. It’s ----- embarrassing. Maybe that’s what I get for being such a show-off, flaunting my reversible skills in my youth…

Ah, to be young and this guy²Source: https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a21095190/this-driver-does-an-entire-commute-driving-backwards-and-its-mesmerizing/ again…

My new hero

Content created on: 24/25 March 2023 (Fri/Sat)

Sure, Dad, LOTS of people were cool with hearing news 6 months after the fact.

They were called “People who lived before the 1840s…”

“Please enter your 24-Digit PIN now to connect your call…”

Oh, the humanity–er, I mean the humiliation. All I wanted to do was make my weekly call to check in with my dad, like any good college student. But was I being rewarded for being a good and faithful son?

No. No I was not.

Let’s start with that 24-Digit PIN. I know it was 2001, but still, for anyone to have to resort to using a pre-paid calling card was an indignation that no one deserved to suffer. In fact, it was this very situation that made me go out and get my very first faux-wood paneled cell phone only a week later. But, alas, in this moment I was sans cellular telephone, and my private access to telecommunication services had just been cut off.

This wasn’t really my fault, though. You see, I had been subletting a friend’s apartment for the summer, and, on account of it being the first of August, his lease had just expired and I had to relocate to his new house. However, his future roommates at this place were all hip and ‘with it’ and already had cell phones, so they had eschewed the idea of shelling out money to pay for such an antiquated concept as a ‘landline’.

Okay, so I had to use a pre-paid calling card–big whoop, right? Well, not so fast, slick. Did I mention from whence I was making this phone call? No? Then please allow me to enlighten you. I wasn’t about to subject myself to the abject debasement of being seen using a gas station payphone, so, thinking on my feet, I said to myself, “Ah-ha! I know of a semi-private phone from whence I can call my Noble and Beloved Father!” And subsequently set off on foot to the breezeway of Dickens Hall¹It wasn’t actually Dickens Hall, but one located symmetrically on the other side of the library, but was demolished in order to expand the library. I couldn’t remember the name of this hall, nor could Google. on K-State’s campus.

What awaited me there? Oh, just one of those metal emergency phones mounted on the wall. Did it have an actual handset for my convenience? No! Just a speakerphone. But what it did have was a key pad, and as it turned out, you could get away with calling other phone numbers besides 911, if one only dared try. With calling card in hand, that was all I needed to repurpose the ‘Emergency Use Only’ technology for my own devices. (Side note: this was around 8 at night, so virtually no one would be around to witness me making a personal call via speaker phone. Doing this midday? No way, José!)

Now, any dignified gentlemen would have made his way to such a prestigious appointment on the finest of bicycles, but I didn’t even have that base-level luxury. As noted previously, I had to hoof it the several blocks to campus on account of being bike-less.

This wasn’t really my fault, though…

*checks notes*

Wait, strike that–this part really was my fault. Only a week or two earlier, I was peddling on my way to somewhere, and the campus library happened to be along my route. Now, back in the dark ages of 2001, I didn’t have my own computer or internet access, so any time I wanted to send or receive electronic mail (‘e-mail’) I had to go to the computer lab in the library’s basement.

During that particular summer, my good friend (and future ex-girlfriend), the acclaimed Tiffany Chestnut, was studying abroad in Mexico, so I spent many an hour hammering out mini-tomes to send to her to keep her company whilst in such a strange and foreign land. On this fateful July day, though, I assured myself that since I had somewhere to be, I would only send her a brief missive–one, maybe two paragraphs, tops.

“This will take me nary but 5 minutes!” I assured myself as I parked my bike literally in the middle of the sidewalk, eschewing the security of a bike rack only 10 feet away.

Well, I ended up composing digital ramblings for a good hour and a half, yet somehow I was still surprised when I came out back into the daylight only to find that my precious bicycle had been stolen…

“So what’s new on the farm, Daddy-o?” I cackled into the general vicinity of the emergency phone’s microphone.

Having successfully swallowed my pride and having done what I had to do to make this phone call happen, I finally started to relax and was looking forward to a routine (if not boring) chat with ol’ Papa Bob about what had transpired in his neck of the woods in the past 7 days. (Just kidding–there aren’t any ‘woods’ in Southwest Kansas. Maybe I should have used the phrase ‘neck of the wheat fields’ instead?)

“Welp, Kim had her baby. It’s a boy!” my dad crackled back through the speaker.

“Oh, you mean that Kim’s pregnant, and they just found out they’re having a boy via ultrasound, right?”

“No, she actually had him. His name’s Reed, and he’s a flaming redhead like the rest of that family,” my dad corrected me.

Now, I wasn’t perfect when it came to keeping track of my older brother, ‘Lyle’,²That’s his middle name, and ever since I found that a year or so ago, I can’t resist calling him that every chance I get. and his family, but the fact that he and his wife Kim were even expecting their 4th redheaded child came as complete news to me.

“What the hell, Dad? Was anyone going to tell me that she was even preggos in the first place? A little heads-up would have been nice.”

“What? How did you not know that? Get with it, Son!” my dad patronized me.

“How did I not know that??? I didn’t know that! Because you didn’t tell me!”

“Well, who’s fault is that?” Dad busted out one of my most-hated phrases of his.

Unlike the stolen bike, and very much like the disconnected landline, this was–repeat after me, class–wasn’t really my fault, though.

“Who’s fault?!? Yours! It’s totally on you–you’re my singular source for family news, you old fart! Don’t you try to pass the buck off to me–it was your responsibility to tell me. Geez, Dad–we worked together every day for 6 weeks this summer, and you never thought once to let me in on the news…”

“Oh, holy sh*t–I would know the silhouette of that bike from a mile away, but surely it couldn’t be, could it?”

Despite being blindsided by the news that I was an uncle yet again, I was feeling pretty chipper about the fact that my prized brood of nieces and nephews was one larger than when I had awoken that morning. And now…this?

Dickens Hall was right next to the library, and as I walked out of there and away from 9 o’clock phone call with Dad, I saw something in the darkness that left me in disbelief: my previously stolen bike.

Or so I suspected, at least. I sauntered on over to the library bike racks to inspect it, and sure enough! ‘Twas my bike! I couldn’t help but chuckle at the fact that whoever had stolen was, like I had been, pretending to lock it up but not actually doing it.

You see, I had one of those U-locks on it that I kept locked to the body when not in use, until one day the lock mechanism froze up, rendering it permanently attached to the bike. And if you can’t unlock a lock, then you can’t lock up your bike to a post or anything…but, if you lean the bike against the post/rack, it actually creates the illusion that the lock is attached to both. So even though I hadn’t technically been locking my bike up for the last year, I was faking it well enough that it never got stolen under those circumstances.

Whoever stole my bike, though, hadn’t counted on me showing up and seeing through this little charade of my own invention. Mwah-hah-hah-ha!

Vengeance was mine! I promptly re-stole my bike and rode off into the night, with my dignity (mostly) restored…

The point of the story is, dammit, if you’re the main source of information for friend or family member, be responsible and make sure you keep them informed of the important things. And don’t you dare try to victim-blame them for not knowing what they didn’t know–you know, the exact thing that only you could have told them. That’s just undignified.

Of course, though, it’s important to keep perspective right? At the end of my story, I ended up one nephew and a bike that I had previously (and stupidly) practically given away. So, really I can’t complain.

My only regret in all of this? I really wish I would have staked out that bike rack so I could have seen the look of confusion and disappointment on the face of that book-loving opportunistic bike thief as they realized Karma had come back around to give them a swift kick in the ass..

Content created on: 18 March 2023 (Saturday)