Month: October 2005

Since it is nearing Halloween, I guess I better tell this one. This was the house that I lived in as a child, and only until my parents divorced. It was not particularly old, 30-40 years just really isn’t old when you are looking at architecture. The house that I am currently living in (and buying) has been here since at least 1896, the insurance adjuster that looked at the house had to fudge the number to 1986 to get us insured though. Why, I got no idea. This house has been standing in exactly the same place for more than a hundred years. No storm has been able to move it, no amount of flooding has relocated it, it is pretty solid. So solid, in fact, that all of the exterioir walls are 18″ thick, and made of brick, mortar and adobe. No wolf will blow this place down. Continue reading The ghost in the attic→

When I left off, after a very long aside about car wrecks, I made the statement that Hell was now looking to me for pointers. I still consider that to be true. The fact is that I am going to really have to sugar coat this next section to make it possible to post it at all. The people involved are all still alive, all have their livelihoods to think about, and probably wouldn’t want to recount the experience anyway. If I ever get around to writing a story about my life I might be able to recount this all factually, for now I am going to have to settle on vague details and no names. I was on the lam at this point. I would have honestly been arrested if I happened across the path of any law enforcement officer. It is not that I am proud of the Continue reading No hand basket for you!→

My arrival in Arizona was not what I had expected. First of all, the people at Greyhound had neglected to take the difference of time zones into account when they made my bus ticket. That meant that I had arrived in Phoenix just about a half an hour after the bus to Casa Grande had departed, no problem, I could just catch the next one. Problem was that the next one wasn’t until the same time the following day. Call me crazy, I didn’t want to spend the next twenty-four hours in a bus station in Metro Phoenix. I called my mommy. It took them a while to get there to pick me up. While the drive is only about sixty miles, it is over some of the busiest streets I have ever seen. When they did arrive, and I saw the chariot that was supposed to carry me from Continue reading …Still worse…→

To start, I just want to make sure and mention that my driver’s license was actually suspended while I was still sixteen years old, as alluded to in the last entry. I was not able to get my driver’s license back until I was twenty-seven years old (long story). I do hate “the man”. I am going to skip, yet again, the story of the behavior of friends and family after dad’s death. I will touch on a couple of things that happened while my brother was my legal guardian, but basically this is going to be the part where I made horrible decisions that forced me to flee the state. After the last ticket that I got I was no longer able to get insurance at all; the insurance companies all told me that I had too many tickets on my record. The thing is that the majority of Continue reading And then it got worse→

This one will also skip past the details about everyone else’s reaction to my father’s death. It is all about me dammit! It turns out that my knuckles weren’t really hurt all that bad, just horribly bloody. Also the entire problem with my car turned out to be that the alternator worked while the car was running, but it didn’t do anything towards charging the battery (some diode was bad). I was also barely on the upside of the E mark on the gas gauge when I jumped out of the car and ran down to the bottom of the amphitheatre. Lucky the car didn’t roll away, I never set the emergency brake. That was all in the past though. I was now a man. I had come to terms with everything, or so I thought, and I was ready to move on. What better way to prove that you Continue reading And then the man started holding me back→