The musings of a madman...

(Take me to Da Kaing) ...  and to think I almost Googled an image to use instead.      Anyone who follows me on various social media platforms knows that two things my wife and I do is travel and eat.   So much so that we literally travel to eat sometimes.   That said, one of our now-favorite places to go is Las Vegas.   Funny thing is that we classify “favorite” as “places we will go again before ticking somewhere new off of the checklist.”   We were married in Vegas November of 2018, and semi-revisited the scene of the crime to celebrate her birthday at the very end of January this year. While there were SOME people walking around in masks, this was a few weeks before The Rona had fully gripped the nation.      One of the funny things about Vegas is that “The Vegas Experience” begins the very moment you step off of your plane into the airport.   When you step into the terminal, like before you even get to the food courts and even to the baggage claims, you are bombarded with slot

       I like to think I am non-stop… Despite not having really left my home for any real amount of time but twice in what is now six months, I still find myself doing things like visiting with my family and what have you. I say that to say that encountering these humanoids is inevitable from time to time.      On the way home from one of my two excursions, and as SOON as I arrived back in my own county, some asshole on the highway probably fucking with his phone, swerved and cut me off, I had to brake and he basically kept pace with me so as to not have to look at my face as I passed by. Now usually road rage is to be showered by the person who has been wronged, not the dude swerving all over the road trying to record a TikTok video.   I speed up, he speeds up to stay just far enough ahead to prevent me from getting by.   I try to change lanes to prepare to exit the highway, he continues his weird game of not having to ever actually face me… … then he had to get off on the same

        2017… In 2017, Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey closed up shop and shut down the Red/Blue/Gold lines for good.   I didn’t mention it at the time because I legitimately thought that they would wait a few months and regroup before going “haha, SIKE!!!” and rolling out the new schedules for the next year, then I would wait until February and drag my daughter and now-wife out to the coliseum for a couple of hours.      2018… My only circus options were UniverSoul Plane Circus which usually swings through here but is so small that they’re setting up shop in the mall parking lot and not even in the coliseum or its lot, some localized circuses in places where I haven’t left anything and then there is good ol Cirque Du Soleil, whose shows I have seen two of in my actual-adult-age (over 21) trips to Las Vegas, but not the times the travelling show has come to my city.      2020… (and yes, I skipped 2019) Excusing the universe shitting its collective pants for the world wi

       If I told you I noticed what was happening and specifically planned to do so the way it has unfolded, I would be lying… True Story© has created itself as its own host, as a perpetual virtual novel, if you will.   It was “officially” born on September 1, 2016 as an exercise, a place for me to flesh out ideas and keep my pen game up on the chance that one day I might realize my dream to write for a living.   Comments on The Bookface and a push from a then-girlfriend-now-wife and three other friends who I love dearly caused it to become “a thing.”      “A Thing” became, as is my nature, something I became obsessed with the very production and presentation of to present every available Thursday and I did just that for almost two years before a surprise week in the hospital and the resultant fallout in 2018.   I still WANTED to write, but sometimes being benched can throw things askew.      Two years of sitting still does NOT make a creative mind rest.   I still had ideas.   I

     Times these days are tougher than a $2 steak cooked well done. When “times” don’t allow me much time to go out into the world without my wife in tow, my misadventures become considerably more difficult.   The long and short is that I cannot include her in my little hustles unless she is a willing participant.  With school back in, I get enough free time when she has to go to the school for meetings and such. Some years ago I encountered a video where a dude used some plaster of paris and sand to make a small foundry in a bucket for smelting metal in your back yard for casting on a smaller level or, one might infer, scrap metal recycling.   Some metals can scare up to a couple of bucks a pound, whereas silver and gold can scare up a ton more than that.   The issue at hand is that recycling centers have upped the security bar and questions they ask of you approach with a ton of copper piping and don’t have a professional (and licensed) reason to have it in your posses