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…

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…

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

I drink entirely too much coffee, and if I don’t be sure to drink plenty of water on top of it I’ll get constipated. It’s almost like the coffee dries me out or something. I had a chemo nurse tell me how important it was to stay hydrated during my treatments and when I told her I drink several cups of coffee a day, she scolded me and said In that case, I need the water even more. I followed her advice and since then I’ve gotten more regular. I used to think it was just normal for me to crap once every three days, but now I go every day and feel better too…

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…

“trusted bank”

lol

it seems to me, and I could be wrong, that they don’t accent syllables the same way, if at all. Years ago I had a database teacher in community college who was from India and it took me a couple of classes to tune in to her, but after that it wasn’t hard to follow her at all. I’m often in Zoom meetings with a software engineer who immigrated from Vietnam and he was a bit of a challenge to understand at first, too.

Oh yeah… and my cancer doc is from Sri Lanka. That was doubly fun. His heavy accent pronouncing four-dollar medical terms took some serious getting used to. Listening to him dictate into his little recorder for the transcriptionists at the end of our visits is an added treat I always enjoy…

I had a good friend who worked LP for wal-mart back in the '90’s. He loved that shit. He’d burn CD copies of the surveillance videos of his latest escapades fighting with and tackling shoplifters and bring them home for us to see. He was a master of “redirecting” someone running away from him into whatever nearby solid object he had available. I know those big red bollards that keep cars from driving thru the front doors claimed more than a couple of victims at his, um… urging. Entertaining stuff for sure.