CT scans every 4 months… probably gonna get another nodule in my left lung nuked at some point. Hoping maybe the distended aorta that showed in my last scan takes me out quick so I can bypass all the misery of my advancing emphysema or the lung cancer possibly spreading. Aside from that, I’m just going to enjoy my family. Got three grandkids that are a real hoot right now. Counting my blessings is pretty much the priority…

heh… yeah I remember the boy’s bathrooms in my HS back in the late 70’s early 80’s. No doors on the stalls, and the toilet paper rolls were threaded onto chains that looped through holes in the walls that divided the stalls, with the ends locked with a padlock. There were no dividers between the urinals, and in one of the older buildings on campus, the urinals were big long communal troughs…

fall out of the sky you say…?

we have what seems like about 15 mattress stores along one stretch of road, and we also have a store that sells nothing but bar stools. I’ve often thought that about those places…

About 1984, I got arrested in Cobb County Georgia for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had a little weed on me, which I had shoved into my skivvies before I was handcuffed. While in the holding cell at the jailhouse with a few other new arrivals, I decided I needed to get rid of it before I got processed in and sent upstairs, so I broke it out and surprised my temporary cellmates with a little treat in a home-made pipe fashioned from the foil out of a cigarette pack. It was cool. If nothing else, the 4 or 5 of us were a little less stressed about our current situation. One of the guys in the cell with me was especially memorable, because he had been arrested for drunk driving while he was at a lake partying with his friends, all because his keys were in the ignition so they could listen to his radio. He wasn’t even in the car when the cops showed up.

Fast forward about 2 or 3 years and I’m back home in the Florida panhandle. At that time, I drove a cab for a living and one evening I was out with a fellow cabby hitting up some titty bars and stuff. We’re driving in his car, and I told him the story I just told y’all, down to the details about the poor guy and his DUI. About the time I finish the story, we’re stopping at a gas station for cigarettes or something, and we get out of the car to go inside and out front of the store are two scroungy looking dudes selling clumps of mistletoe (it was near Christmas time). I’ll be damned if one of those guys wasn’t the exact same guy in my story. I recognized him immediately and about crapped myself and was like “Holy shit this is the guy!!” He totally remembered me, and we had a fun little mini-reunion of sorts during which he totally confirmed my story about smoking weed in a jail cell to my friend…

feral? more like fecal philosopher…

…that looks like a tater.

oh for real… I’ve always wanted to ask them what they thought the underside looked like. I picture their simple minds imagining something like loose dirt clods falling off and maybe some roots and shit sticking out like I would have when I was a kid…

got lung cancer… only found it because it had eroded into rib #5 and felt like I had a flaming hatchet stuck in my back. This explains why pacing my den while streaming profanities seemed to help, at least a little anyway…

Ha! I came to post this! I’ve LMAO’d at every comedian I’ve seen on that channel!

going to the grocery store and seeing an employee with a big dust-mop going up and down the aisles pushing along an ever-growing pile of cigarette butts because everyone would just drop 'em and step on 'em and keep on shopping…

I’ve been fighting lung cancer for the last 2 1/2 years, and when I was first diagnosed, the insurance company doctor rejected the SABR radiation that my radiation and medical oncologists were both recommending. To hear my rad doc describing the argument he had with them was unreal. I was already stressed out enough without having to deal with that bullshit too.

this guy used them to power an ebike…

my Dad liked to refer to it as fightin’ gear…

actually now that I think back it was the water pump that regularly went out at 45k, and it was run by the timing belt. The noise coming from the water pump is what usually alerted me and I was able to replace it and the belt at the same time, which spared me from ever losing the motor. I drove that thing til it had over 160k on it, which was a lot for one of those…

I had an '82 Ford Escort. Those things were notorious for lunching the motor if the timing belt ever broke (which they did every 45,000 miles like clockwork) while you were traveling down the road. The valves would stop in whatever position they were in at that instant, and then the momentum of the car would keep the pistons moving up and down, bashing the piston tops in to whichever valves were unlucky enough to still be open, ruining pretty-much everything. At the same time I owned that car, my best friend owned an '82 Chevy Cavalier. We were constantly one-upping each other over who owned the biggest turd…

Back in about '89-'90 I was the assistant manager at a fast oil change place, and we had a regular customer with a maroon '76 Aspen with a bullet-proof slant-six who got his oil changed with us regularly. I could hear him coming. I’d know it was him without even looking because of the distinctive TAP-TAP-TAP -TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP. We’d pull him in and he’d tell us to just change the oil and filter and don’t bother checking all that other stuff, so that’s what we’d do. We’d pull the plug and if more than a half a quart drained out we’d be surprised. After a filter swap, we’d fill it back up and restart it and it would go TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-tap-tap-tap-ta-ta-ta-t-t-t-t-t-t-t- etc and he’d smile and pay and be on his way. Of course, we’d see him again in about 3 or 4 months, same thing, rinse and repeat. The tapping was his signal to get it changed. Fast forward to '97, after working as a manager at other locations I came back to that same station as the manager there and I’ll be damned if that same guy in that same '76 Aspen didn’t pull in for the same service with that same oil-leaking loud-ass tapping slant-six, still hanging in there…

geez… this is something my brain just does. They’re like earworms where my brain gets stuck in a loop or something. Drives me bonkers sometimes. And it’s not just swapping initial sounds. It could be swapping internal vowel sounds or ending syllables. It’s how Bradley Cooper has forever became Boodley Crapper in my fucked-up noggin…

I know at least one in our town that’s turned into a cannabis dispensary. Seems to me a smart business man would figure out how to combine the two…

I would think using that service to plan a route ahead of time would be optimal…