ROAD RAGE

I was pulling out of the convenience store parking lot last night. There is a MacDonalds attached to it, and as I swung around a car came bolting out of the drive through. I nearly hit them. I pulled up to exit the parking lot, and I heard an engine race, a horn honk and someone shouting. They had pulled up beside me, and the passenger of the car had his window rolled down. He was shouting at me. Against better judgement and the possibility of getting shot in the face I rolled my window down.

“YOU NEED TO WATCH WHERE YOU ARE GOING!” he shouted at me. I figure he was about 24, with just a moderate amount of acne and a pubic looking beard.
“Yes, you are right. I didn’t see you. It was my mistake” I replied, and gave him my best grin.
He seemed to deflate a little.
“You need to drive more careful” he tried to shout, but it was half-hearted.
“Yes, I will, thank you. It was my mistake”
He looked kind of embarrassed now. “Okay then” was all he could muster.
This wasn’t going the way he planned.
And now we were two cars plugging up the parking lot exit.
“Why don’t y’all go ahead and go first here” I said.
“Thank you” he said, and they pulled out, hopefully never to be seen again.

BUFFALO CHEST

There is a scene in “Dancing With Wolves” that made me wonder about what it was like to have to rely upon a bow and arrow as a weapon.
It’s the scene where the band of Indians kills Timmons, the wagon driver. It’s a brutal scene and requires half a dozen arrows into his abdomen and several minutes of agony before he expires. The scene demonstrates that unless an arrow pierces the heart, it could take quite some time to die.
It made me wonder how many arrows it would take to kill a buffalo. And I found my answer yesterday in a TYWKIWDBI post.
Unlike most mammals a buffalo doesn’t have a right and left lung; the lung of a buffalo is a single unit and once pierced, death comes fairly quickly.
Another reason to read TYWKIWDBI.
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/…/buffalo-chest-and-american-…

MAKE LIKE A CORK ON THE WATER

Every now and then you think that you learned something. And it makes you laugh. Today I learned that you can't always put everything in perspective, and having accepted that, everything just falls into place. If you can't be consistent, then you better be be flexible.
Simple as that.

It kinda went like this. The boss calls.
Boss "What happens when the PO doesn't match the Invoice?"
Me "Nothing"
Boss "How do you approve the invoice if it doesn't match the PO?"
Me "Just approve it"
Boss "What about the PO"
Me "Forget the PO."
Boss "Really?"
Me "Yes. see the PO doesn't have to match the invoice. The invoice just has to match the PO"
Boss "That makes no sense"
Me "I know. That's what we do here."

MY FIRST VALENTINE

For Valentine’s Day I could talk about all the girls I’ve fallen in love with, or repost the poem about how I fall in love just about every day . With the whole human race. Or I could talk about the month long Tour Of Duty I did with Online Dating, that ended when I asked a girl if she really wanted to be Number Seven this month and she said “YES!”.
I’m just not built for that.
I could talk about Valley’s Day in general, how it started back in Roman days, when Caesar or somebody decided to outlaw marriage. There was a Cardinal that continued to pair people up in an underground ceremony, breaking the law and the Emperor's rule. The Cardinal was eventually found out, imprisoned and when he would not confess, bow down and promise not to do any more marriage ceremonies, Caesar had him crucified.
The Cardinals name was Valentine.

But I guess I’d rather talk about my first love.
We were only four years old, and we took swim lessons and tap dancing lessons together and she was in my Sunday School Class too.
She was the daughter of a Preacherman. Her name was Teddy, she had short and curly
Chestnut hair, just long enough to put into cute little Pigtails. Her eyes were blue, like her swimsuit, which also had little flowers on it. She wore black leotards to our tap dancing class, and I hate to say it but I wore them too.
Sometimes when Mom and I went to the store we would see her and her Mom.
Every time we went anywhere, I would always hope that we would see Teddy.
I always looked forward to seeing Teddy at the pool for swim lessons.

Had it not been for Teddy being at tap dance lessons, which I cried all the way to and from, I would have cried the whole way through those classes, in front of all those little girls.
The only boy in the class, crying like a baby in his black leotard and tap shoes
I kept it together for Teddy in particular.

Maybe that is what love is on some simple level...always hoping to see someone and keeping it together for them when you do.

Painting by Jay Wilkinson.
That’s not me and Teddy, its my daughter, Jay’s sister, and my son who liked his tap dancing costume better than I did.

GREAT POETS OF THE 20th CENTURY

GREAT POETS OF THE 20^th CENTURY

“Ain’t no money in Poetry, that’s what sets the poet free”
And probably why poet Lew Welch turned to advertising to make some clams. Lew made up the slogan “Raid Kills Bugs Dead”, which sold a lot of Raid. He studied Philosophy and took a job with Montgomery Wards writing copy for the lingerie and sporting goods department, and asked for a transfer to San Francisco in order to be closer to Kerouac and the Beat poetry scene. Once there he started driving a cab, as all Beat poets do, living with Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
He married a nice Polish lady named Maria, and became stepfather to her son Hugh Anthony Cregg, III, better known by his stage-name Huey Lewis.


On May 23, 1971, Welch walked out of poet Gary Snyder's house in the mountains of California, leaving behind a suicide note faintly reminiscent of the terse meter of his Raid ad that read only “HEADING SOUTH-SOUTHWEST. GOODBYE”. His body was never found.

LESSON NUMBER ONE

The bigger the rake you buy for raking leaves, the more quickly it will wear your ass flat out.