The musings of a madman...

     So we moved into this house 361 days ago…  Among things I planned to do were to fix the yard (completed in May & maintained ever since) , mancave the garage ( that has been an ongoing project that will never be “done,” but it contains all my fun stuff) , and build a fire pit in the back yard. Wife insisted we add a patio under the deck in the meantime.  Not to bore anyone with tales of an ongoing garage/mancave/home gym – if you were on IG then you saw it – we’re here to talk about that last one.      I put this project off for the longest time, only to find myself upset at how damned easy it wound up being…      We’ll start off by cutting the back yard as we do every Wednesday:   (note: that tree there on the right WAS dying so I cut it down to a stump and now it is growing again, SMFH) Start with twelve cinder blocks arranged into a square.  Standard blocks will give you a 56” outside diameter using standard 16x8x8 blocks.      I made sure to position it at the most leve

       I have been with my current employer since December of 2006… Almost 16 years of productive employment and the merit increases and simple seniority at a well-known-but-ne’er-to-be-named-here company has afforded me a comfort I’d never felt at a prior job.   The seniority thing lends itself to a goodly amount of paid time off as well, which is a fact that makes me as an employee kind of hard to recruit/snipe by other companies.   They can match my money, but they can’t match the amount of time off I receive.      One thing about the above-mentioned time off is that I must use it or lose it, so I frequently find myself forced by my wife at gunpoint to take time off for no fucking reason taking time off for nothing more than my own entertainment. If it feels like I have talked about something like this before, it is because I have . -BUT- This is not that…      Now that you’re back from the sidequest I just sent you on, let us get to why I decided that I was killing too m

       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 corners where drivers become a captive audience. WHAT?!!? Thank you for asking.  

  It is time we confront the fact that “they" have been lying to us our entire lives… For the one among us who can actually stomach the stream-of-jackshit that is my Twitter feed saw this unfolding live in my brain this morning: I would say “don’t ask me why I am thinking about the Three Little Pigs at 11am on a Sunday morning, but I will voluntarily offer that I went to a children’s play of Little Red Riding Hood on Saturday and the idea of the pigs kinda sat in my brain from about 3pm on. It really is the curse of a creative mind. Anyway, I continued to stew on this even as I did my normal Saturday evening routine of “not much” and came to the above conclusion knowing what we know about pigs and wolves. I say “we” because I know it and now you’re about to as well… Let us begin with some simple facts, here Pigs are genetically superior to wolves… Their outcome in the wild bears this out.  We tend to think of pigs as the clumsy and cutesy little fat guys y’all (not me; I

  Okay, so Christmas is in a couple of days here… WHILE we’re bawls deep in Christmas season and selectively filled with Christmas spirit in our second pandemic Christmas, life has to continue moving along as well. In the course of “life moving along,” I find myself in Wal Mart more than any sane human being should ever comfortably be tasked with going to.   One of the benefits of my move is that I am no longer three blocks from a Neighborhood Market and now live less than a mile from a Supercenter. So Monday afternoon on my lunch break, I ran down to grab a few things.   My trip, as far as my own items, was largely uneventful, but as I was leaving self-checkout on the way to the truck, I heard some kind of ruckus coming from the Customer Service Desk and decided to be nosey. Lady Customer: “What do you mean you don’t know!?” CSR: “I mean, I can’t check the stock from up here, you’ll have to ask in Electronics.” Lady Customer: “Well can’t you, like, CALL them for me?” CSR:

       Imagine being a creative being who spends an exorbitant amount of time in your own way while trying to create…      For those keeping score at home, back in 2017 I attempted to make a movie.   I was wrong as shit, using little people labor and never explaining to them what it was I was up to in the moment.   In my own bit of karmic comeuppance, I saw the whole thing literally go up in smoke and almost cost me my whole damned shirt in the process… …   almost… Small (pun totally intended) details in the background saved my ass legally and civilly.      But in the real-real world, I was still found.   Three years ago next week, I was located by one of the involved little parties and accosted for ideas for an “out.”   Just my fucking luck, I know. I cooked up a quick scheme to get him out of his (and my) own way and all is well, right? RIGHT?!!?      Wrong™!        I.ve often joked about the FBI agent across the street from my house in the woods.   I no longer live a

       Welcome back…   We present all new from a new address that a couple of you have visited and gotten fitshaced drunk with me.   The other 5 weeks of my residence have been spent re-learning this as “home” and working to pay the bills in this place.      We closed on 10/20 and 10/22 (dateS plural, you know only if you’re connected to both me and wife person on the BookFace) . In the weeks since, I have been painting, heavy lifting, shutting the fuck up working hard at being the best daddy I can be to Ava in spite of the efforts of my ex wife a woman I had a wedding with one time.      What also transpired in these intervening weeks was our anniversary (11/09) and the now-biannual Thanksgiving beach trip,   I might explain that the Biannual trip used to not have a prefix, but I didn’t have a married-into family who was alive and active until I married an actual wife in 2018.      For the past few years, we lived in a house I’d bought in 2009…   It was the only home that my d