The musings of a madman...

       As the two of you may (or probably not) remember, I bumped into a manager from  a company I had previously pulled my time-wasting job interview trick on and wound up getting offered a sham position in order to become eligible to play for their corporate softball league... I am providing passes for forgetting because October was ten months ago, so you can start with this here link and report back to this post to brush up.     Welcome back... Well as promised, I was contacted in late June with my check for seven stacks and a 1099 to file my taxes for an independent contractor position that only technically existed.  In this month and a half since then, I have still not stepped a toe on this company's property since LAST June.  Managing my lawn care schedule and my own work schedule with after-work softball practices and insisting the team meet on Sundays for batting cage visits, I was kind of fashioned as the team's de facto coach....

       Ever had to deal with someone who just KNEW they know everything, despite all evidence to the opposite? Well I do that every day in my full time job, and my desire to not have to do any work again leaves me in the unfortunate position of having to straighten people out every single time, lest they will be back – still wrong – with the same problems but worse.      When I clock out, though? I practice what I like to call malicious compliance, wherein my motto is often “not my monkey, not my circus.” When my responses are tied to how efficiently my mortgage gets paid, I am better-compelled to spend the time correcting or even giving a shit about outcomes. When the barrier between me and homelessness is not being pressed, though? Good luck getting me to give a shit! Matter of fact, I am probably kicking back and waiting on the outcome for my own entertainment.      As a side hustle, I cut lawns… Just lawns, except for in ver...

       So we’re sitting in the living room eating dinner and watching Jeopardy when the alarm panel and both of our phones chime with the doorbell.  I get up expecting to tell the kids across the street that my daughter is with her mother this week.  It is a white man… “Are you lost?  How can I help you?” I ask through the slightly parted screen door. He hands me a manila envelope and says “you’ve been served” before walking down off of my front porch as I stood aghast.      Wife person looking on asks me what is going on.  I sit back down on the loveseat and open the folder. Me: “We’re being sued…” Wife Person™: “What!?”   Me: “Not you.” Wife Person™: “What the hell are you talking about?”   Me: “Me and Moe.”   …  well I’mma explain this shit to y’all now, same as I am to my wife…      Of late, I have been trying to reform Moe Phillips’ public image.  After spendi...

  "If you got soft eyes, you can see the whole thing. If you got hard eyes - you staring at the same tree missing the forest." ~ Bunk Moreland “Soft eyes” is most simply defined as “attentive to detail.” Over my little hiatus I fell into the world of Podcasts, with my favorite genre being “historical humans behaving badly.”  I have some suggestions if you ask me, but we aren’t here for that kind of an aside today. A commonality of the above-mentioned “historical humans behaving badly” is how far the grift would NOT have gone if the scammER wasn’t banking on the scamEE not catching on to the fact that they were indeed being scammed with a simple question or two. “Well shiiiiit, this could WORK!” That’s right…  If you’ve learned nothing from the last several years of my writing, one could consider me a bit of a grifter myself. Lest you thought I bought a new (to us) house and just sat around working from home and paying bills and shit, you’re assuredly mistaken. ...

       If I could use these powers for good, I am not all the way sure I ever actually would… Wait, put a pin in that.   It will come back up on the final exam.        My city has spent the last few years basically criminalizing homelessness.   The able cannot feed them of their own free will unless they have an organization or church allowed to do so.   They themselves cannot have signs specifically requesting money when standing on the corners and the most insidious is that they have to go downtown and get a PERMIT to stand on the corners with the signs! More recently, there have been signs going up on signs in medians that there is to be no standing there.   This was presented as a necessity to keep traffic safely and unobstructedly moving.      In that last point, I saw an opportunity… The “opportunity,” as it were, involved a newly minted lack of competition for eyeball equity on the ...