Category Archives: social

So you think YOU have weird neighbors?

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I am far from what would be considered an average, normal neighbor, come to think of it I don’t think there really are any average, normal neighbors. I may think someone is a nutjob based solely on the fact that he decorates his yard with old beer cans, while he would think I was a nutjob because I don’t. It is all very subjective…Usually.

I always thought that the woman who lived a couple of houses down from me while I was growing up was weird, just because she was a bit of a recluse and had roughly 14 million cats. As the years have passed I realize that that is just standard old lady behavior, perhaps a bit eccentric but completely normal when put on the giant pie chart of old ladies. There was another guy a block or so over from us (I think I wrote about this previously but I couldn’t find a reference to it, probably because I don’t know his name and spoke about it pretty vaguely) that threw all of his spare change into the drain gutter in front of his house. There were some neighbors that I literally never saw; I would see the cars leave the garage in the morning and arrive home at night but never once caught a glimpse of them. It seems weird neighbors are everywhere, probably even right next door to you.

The guy that I met yesterday might not take the cake as the weirdest neighbor ever, but I bet he got some door prizes. Hell, I am sure he would have won it all for best costume, the dude you feel most uneasy around, and the guy that gets the most flimsy excuses for why people have to leave when he enters a room. He seemed pretty harmless physically, but he gave off an aura that your mind interpreted as, “Body! Body! We must exit this space immediately! Let us leave now and never speak of this man again!”

The person in question is not my neighbor, quite thankfully. He will, however, be the neighbor of whoever buys the house that I have been working on in the next town over. The Real Estate company would do themselves a favor to do a Simpsons and just pay the guy to not come outside when there is a perspective buyer there. He is that weird. At least I think he is, but it is all about perspective, right? I am probably just as weird to him. Though I am not sure if his mind can process the word weird, or any other word that has more than one vowel, for that matter.

I have been doing work on this house for some time and had never actually seen the guy until yesterday. I was going to the house to do a bit of touch-up painting and to connect the plumbing lines that the contractor had neglected to do. The guy that was installing the tile and carpet was working on it though so I was not able to do any of the tasks I needed to (you can’t walk on the tile for at least 24 hours after it is installed, also he had removed the vanities and toilets from the bathrooms and they were the ones that I needed to finish). I spoke with Mr. Flooring Guy only long enough to find out when I could come back to finish off my tasks, which would have been today for the flooring being done, but the vanities and toilets won’t be back in until tomorrow. I was certainly done for that day. I made my way to the car.

Have you ever had one of those WTF moments? I don’t mean that in the sense that you text message WTF to someone when they give you a weird response, I am talking about a full on “what the fuck” moment. You see something that is so unbelievable that all you can think or say is “what the fuck?” That happened to me midway between the house and the car, in a big way.

I have been thinking about this all day and I still can’t figure out which way to go with it. The weird neighbor was the one that gave me a genuine “What the Fuck?” moment, but it was his attire that brought that about. The whole outfit was the reason for it, but there were three key pieces of it that had me holding back my laughter as I spoke with him, and backing away slowly. He had crossed the line between eccentric and insane, done a couple of laps around the slackers, then lapped the crazy people a couple of times before he dressed himself, by appearance at least.

Though I saw him top to bottom, I am going to describe him bottom to top. His feet were donning some fashionable, blue thongs flip-flops (the wife has told me that I can no longer call the footwear a thong because of possible misconception). Scroll up a bit (oh how I wish I hadn’t) and you will see military camouflage, unfortunately it is on a pair of shorts that look like ’70s era basketball shorts (if I would have looked hard enough I would likely have seen ass cheeks). He was wearing a very sensible long-sleeved sweater, well, it would have been sensible if it didn’t have a Raiders logo on it. That is pretty weird, eh? That was the normal part of his attire though, it only gets worse.

Much like the Gaydar kicks in when I see someone gay (three or more facial piercings and pants that have a zipper on the back will send that thing into the red zone), this guy set off my whackodar. My best guess is that he was voted most likely to bury bodies in the basement when he was in high school, and he probably followed through on that.

So, he was wearing the blue thongs flip-flops, camouflaged short-shorts, a Raiders sweatshirt, and a British Pith Helmet. He was also wearing a gun belt, which had an indeterminate pistol in it. I have never had rules about it previously, but I invented one yesterday: Always run away from the man in flip-flops, camouflaged short-shorts, a Raiders sweatshirt, a British Pith Helmet, and an unidentified gun. That is a good rule. Keep it in mind.

Thank the random fluctuations of time and space that he is not my neighbor. That guy was just creepy.

Thanksgiving time

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Thanksgiving is the one holiday that I have really never understood. Most of the holidays that we celebrate here in the U.S. are based on mythology that goes back to long before Christianity. Chrsitmas is celebrated because some ancient cult had a festival at the winter solstice, it was sort of absorbed into Christianity as the day of the birth of Christ, as well as some jolly fellow in a red suit. I don’t know why Christmas was scheduled a few days after the solstice,my best guess is that they (by they I am meaning the church in ancient times) wanted to give contemporary cults time to celebrate their tradition, while training their children in both… Bam!, Christmas is born (whether Christ was born anywhere near that time is a hot topic for Religious Scholars, doesn’t matter a bit to me though).

Mythology is where the average U.S. citizen would place the Gods that the people of ancient Greece or Rome believed in. Add a couple of hundreds of years and I bet the Religious Scholars will be laughing about Christianity, then place it squarely in the Mythology category.

There are many holidays that don’t celebrate any religious right (unless you consider secretaries Holy), but Thanksgiving has to be the most obscure of them all.

Thanksgiving is purported to be an annual feast that marks the day that the Native Americans invited the new settlers over for a grand supper. Wild Turkey was involved (whether that was the animal or the drink I certainly don’t know). Next thing you know the Native Americans are being slaughtered to near extinction.

That is not a Holiday. How does that though process go? Let us all celebrate the day that the Native Americans invited us to a huge feast, then we killed them by the thousands, raped their wives and daughters, forced them to move more and more west, until they (the ones who didn’t fight back) were eventually nicely stored in concentration camps reservations. Yeah! Let’s celebrate that! Hell, nobody had anything to do in November anyway.

Thanksgiving has transformed itself a bit over the years. It has become more of a yearly family reunion than a celebration. It is one out of two Holidays, that I can think of, that you really have to be at. Doctors, Surgeons, anyone in the emergency medicine line of work really, Firefighters (though they are likely on call), and 24-hour convenience mart employees have to work that day, the rest of us really have to go to the November family reunion.

I long for those days.

Thanksgiving, for myself and most of the relatives on my wife’s side of the family, is going to be a day spent at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix. The Mother-in-law is still there. She had an additional surgery on Monday (to reinforce one of the bones in her upper arm), there is no way that she is going to be out of the hospital by Thursday. It is extremely important that everyone is there, not because she might die ( fear of imminent death has been resolved long ago), but because she needs to know that we are all willing her to overcome the issues ( some call it praying, but when it gets right down to it God created the cancer, therefore God has the cure, right? I put a lot more faith in my ability to just wish it away, hmm., I guess I am religious).

What is really, truly, sad is that I would likely have never written this post if my Mother-in-law had not been in the hospital. I have no doubt that the hospital’s Thanksgiving meal is going to suck, but I am going to be there eating it anyway. I guess now is the time that I should be thankful that I am not the one in the hospital.

What are you thankful for?

Existential musings

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For the life of me I am not able to understand why it so important to religious people (only in the U.S.) to try to disprove the theory of evolution, or explain it away as only being a “theory” when the natural change of species has been going on for millennia, and is clearly shown through fossil records.

The religious belief that God created every living being seems to infringe on Darwin’s theory, yet even the Pope (sorry for the lack of a link, lost the page. If you google it, send it to me so I can add it back) has acknowledged that evolution would fill a lot of the holes in the biblical record. Sure Noah could not have had 1.8million species on that boat, but he could have had several thousand species, which were created by God, on that boat. Those species have evolved into all the species we have today, over time. Yet, that has nothing to do with the current fight about evolution.

Intelligent design is supposed to be an alternative to evolution. It is an alternative, and also completely wrong. So much fossilized evidence exists to support evolution that it is laughable to try to explain it away. Species on Earth have evolved. Case closed.

The fight that the religious people really need to get into is existential. There is either ‘Creationism’, which relies on believing that some entity built the entire universe one day when he was bored, or there is the ‘big bang theory’, which supposes that the universe was formed when a small meteor hit a huge mass in the middle of space. Both of the possibilities seem pretty false. In either case we have to wonder what created the creator.

If you look at existence logically there would be no existence. Whether you happen to believe in a God, or a ‘big bang’, something had to have happened prior to make that happen. Some one, or some thing, would have to create the God. Some one, or some thing, would have to create the huge mass (and small meteor that smashed into it) to make the ‘big bang theory’ plausible. Human understanding has yet to evolve to a level where we can theorize about it.

Petroglyphs and Hieroglyphs of long dead peoples certainly pre-date the bible, and are very obvious in the oral traditions of most people. Tell the same story enough times and it becomes the truth. But quibbling about evolution is just silly.

Scientists only argue that species have evolved over time, religious zealots have only argued that God created everything, while giving the species free reign to evolve over time. It is only the nutjobs in the U.S. that have argued that God created all 1.8million of them (the species so far discovered) and put them on Noah’s boat.

The existential part of the question is what we should really be looking at. Science doesn’t try to explain away the formation of planets and universes (religion does), science just wants to know who created the creator. Religious people often argue that life can not be created without life, so, who created God?

I don’t have any better answer on the atheist side. Someone had to send the huge mass that turned into the known universe rolling, then had to make a huge meteor hit it. Is there a God? That is an existential question. The problem becomes that, no matter how far back you go, you will never find the person who set the whole world to rolling. Even if you happen to find the creator of the whole universe, who created him?

Who created God?

I was actually looking around on the internet today, I didn’t find much of interest (goat porn sites aside), what I did find was the Sims. In the world of the Sims, they have no idea that you are controlling their actions, but, they do whatever you tell them to. Could it be that the human race is just a huge game of the Sims on someone else’s computer? They don’t know that they are digitally animated little characters, they don’t know that someone is watching their every action, they just do what they do. Were those little suckers to start to think existentially they might rule the world.

It all has to go back to who created the creator though. The most powerful entity of all time can’t possibly have just materialized, there must be evidence of that, right?

Yeah, the bible.

I have duct tape, it is pretty similar. Similar insofar as it is horribly useless, means nothing and can’t be substantiated. Yet, the duct tape performs fabulously, the bible gives way under the smallest amount of stress or scrutiny.

Duct Tape must have created the universe.

The Mystery Machine

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It was in late September/early October that Magazine Man did his giveaway of crap, while I am not the type of person who really needs to add to my extensive collection of crap, one of the items that he was giving away was a signature card of Daphne from Scooby Doo (it wasn’t signed Daphne though, it had the signature of the person who did the voice of Daphne). That was something that I simply couldn’t resist. But what to bid on it?

The spirit of the giveaway was all about giving (thus a giveaway) and what better way to keep in that spirit than to give away something also. The item I was to be receiving was going to be a gift to my young nephew anyway, he is still a little guy but is getting as enamored with Scooby Doo as I was as a child, I decided to just donate a few books to my local library. My wife and I have damn near as many books as they do anyway.

Alas, MM had lost the card before the end of the giveaway. Being a very kind person, he offered to send me a die cast Mystery Machine. The thing is huge! He described it as being about the size of a toaster, I would guess that he is about right, but I don’t actually own a toaster to put it next to for size verification purposes. Also included in the package was a box of Scooby Doo collector cards, while I didn’t actually take them out to count I would guess that there are about 150 different cards in it. All this loot when I just wanted the little signature card… Thanks MM!

I decided on seven books that I would donate to my local library (pictures of the pile of the books and the mystery machine will be coming soon, my digicam has dead batteries that I keep forgetting to buy), a small price to pay for such a Scooby Doo score. MM mentioned that the actual Mystery Machine would probably be far better received than the card I originally asked for, something I am sure he is right about. I can hardly wait to see DJ’s little face when he tears the paper off of that package on Christmas morning. It seems fairly likely that I will not be there to witness that moment; between myself, my brother, and our wives, there are three different families involved in Christmas. While we all live in the same state, each family has different obligations during the holiday season and they often don’t lend themselves to having fifty people under one roof on Christmas morning. I better buy a disposable camera for my brother before the fact just to make sure that I can get a couple shots of DJ and the snazzy new Mystery Machine.

I was hesitant to make any mention of this prior to Christmas, but after talking with my brother I found that he doesn’t actually have an internet connection, doesn’t know the name of my website, and, DJ is only 4 (which I knew), but what I failed to think about was that, at 4, if you can read little golden books you are way ahead of the curve. I will post the Christmas photos as soon as I get them, just guessing here but it might be a couple of months.

I would like to give Magazine Man a huge thanks for the Scooby Doo loot. If I had to name but a single person who was making the world a better place. A man so selfless and kindhearted that he would be willing to do anything to make the lives of others better. Well I would be at a total loss, but the first guy I would ask about it would be MM, he gives great advice!

Perhaps I should start a giveaway of my own. I wonder if anyone would be interested in one slightly used Kleenex…

Big oil laughs at customers

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I saw the news on the internet yesterday, then on the front page of the Arizona Republic paper today, it turns out that the big oil companies really are making a mint off of the oil shortage. That is all well and good, that it to be expected, they are in business to turn a profit, but $10,000,000,000 in profit, for a single oil company, in a single quarter, seems a bit excessive. (that number was later revised to just over $9,000,000,000)

I am no financial analyst, but it seems to me that the oil companies may have been getting a bit too rich off of the oil shortage. Their profit margins seem to indicate that it really wasn’t costing them any more, why did it cost all of the customers more? Stupid supply and demand.

My main beef with this situation is that many commuters can no longer afford to buy other things. We are coming up on the holiday season and your average, middle class family is going to have to spend most of their disposable income on gas and increased heating costs, as opposed to throwing it away on petty crap in the malls. I am betting that this Christmas shopping season is going to hit with a resounding thud. But, the oil companies will have record profits for the quarter, yet again!

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some sort of system whereby the oil companies were forced to follow strict guidelines when gouging their customers? Of course that would have to be a federal act and even I laugh at the thought of the current administration approving any form of regulation for big oil. That would be a serious conflict of interests.

I hope that at the very least, this “oil crisis” will force some staunch republican voters to think that maybe we need to look into funding for alternative energy sources. While there is no way that can truly matter for at least a couple of years, it would at least be something. If, once the current administration is out, the legislation were to pass immediately, wouldn’t that be a nice legacy for Mr. Bush. The President who refused to pass legislation that could possibly take away from his massive oil empire. That has to be right up there with “The Great Emancipator” as far as single phrase summations go.

Tin foil hat time!

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Like most educated people I believe absolutely everything that I read. As a result of that I try to make sure that I don’t read anything that I might disagree with. Keeps me from having to change my thoughts and views on key subjects. That might not all be entirely true, but it is to a point. I probably believe a lot more of what I read than I really should. That is why I am now sporting this aluminum sailor’s hat, I don’t want the government to be reading my thoughts while I type this post (though I guess they could just read the post anyway, maybe I just like the damn aluminum hat. What is so wrong with that?!).

The radio station that I listen to all the time was talking about A JFK Conspiracy Website. Most notably, they were talking about a particular little video clip that was on that particular website. I had to go take look.

image courtesy of jfkmurdersolved.com The image that they were talking about is over there on the right. All that I can say is that there must have been an expert in Photoshop that was able to pull that little thing off. To be fair, it has probably been a few years since I saw the actual footage of the event, this might not look anything at all like the way it actually went down. I mean I know that the driver didn’t do it, but I don’t remember if he turned to look back at Kennedy or other such nuances. Still, I say, that is some damn good Photoshop work.

Since I was already on the aforementioned website, I figured I would just look around a little bit. They have tons of stuff on there. I only clicked through about three of the pages, they go into way more (possible) detail than I care to look at. But damn are they ever thorough. One of the links is (from a different site) an hour and a half presentation of the case for conspiracy, which points directly to former president George Herbert Walker Bush. Incidentally, if you watch that whole video let me know and I will send you my tin foil hat. I skimmed through a couple of other pages, including one page that was an alleged confession from the guy that actually shot Kennedy from the front. Fascinating stuff.

Let me set aside the foil hat for a moment (maybe). I have always found it pretty odd that JFK’s murder was so quickly put onto Lee Oswald. The position that he was supposedly in (you know the one, the book depository) was well behind the car, didn’t have a very good view and would be the least likely spot for a sniper to set up (of course that is exactly why it is assumed that he did it from that position). The thing is, had the sniper been in the book depository, he would have had a much better shot as the car was coming directly at him than he had while it was driving away. If your goal is to make sure that you kill someone, wouldn’t you take your best shot? Why wait until the car turns the corner, which forces a more difficult shot? Just going for skill points?

I don’t believe that the assassination was masterminded by anyone in the government, but I also don’t think that just one guy was responsible for it. The official “Warren Report” seems pretty bogus, but so do most of the government conspiracy things that I read on this website. I am sure that the truth has to fall somewhere between the two. Just where the truth lies (interesting wordplay, that) may never be known.

Now I will put aside my foil hat until I decide to talk about UFOs.

What year is it again?

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I saw this fascinating article today. Yeah! Intelligent Design. It boggles my mind to think that this type of thing is actually being litigated in the year 2005. People are certainly free to their own opinions, but must they try to force them onto completely rational, yet impressionable, kids? I guess we will only know once they rule on the case. For now I will just simply have to laugh at the absurdity of one “scholar’s” quotes:

HARRISBURG, Pa. – A biochemistry professor who is a leading advocate of “intelligent design” testified Monday that evolution alone can’t explain complex biological processes and he believes God is behind them.

…

Behe, whose work includes a 1996 best-seller called “Darwin’s Black Box,” said students should be taught evolution because it’s widely used in science and that “any well-educated student should understand it.”

Behe, however, argues that evolution cannot fully explain the biological complexities of life, suggesting the work of an intelligent force.

…

Behe contributed to “Of Pandas and People,” writing a section about blood-clotting. He told a federal judge Monday that in the book, he made a scientific argument that blood-clotting “is poorly explained by Darwinian processes but well explained by design.”

This is just to rich to pass up. Major props to the guy for trying to at least make it sound like he is not some anti-evolution nutjob. But doesn’t his statement about evolution come across as more of a back-handed insult to science? As if he thinks that evolution is complete crap, but we might as well let the kids learn it since all of those kooky scientists seem to base a lot of stuff on it.

My biggest beef with the whole article is in the last paragraph that I quoted, the part where it says, He told a federal judge Monday that in the book, he made a scientific argument that blood-clotting “is poorly explained by Darwinian processes but well explained by design.” Now see, in order for him to make that scientific argument, wouldn’t it be necessary to present actual facts that support Intelligent Design? Just saying that evolution doesn’t explain it therefore it was God is hardly a scientific argument. A delusional argument yes, certainly not scientific.

Also, wasn’t the whole point of Intelligent Design supposed to take God’s name out of it? Wasn’t it supposed to appease the people who were bitching about their children being taught religion in schools? If it was then he totally lost the ball when he testified that anything that Darwin couldn’t explain was therefore an act of God -to paraphrase-.

Since he brought up God, the gloves are off.

I am going to dismiss the bible outright here, for the sake of religion. The bible is a bunch of folklore that had been handed down in verbal tradition for millennia before anyone got around to putting pen to paper. Once someone did put pen to paper the next transcriber didn’t like it, thus he changed a bunch of stuff, and so on, for all of history. I do find it pretty odd that they left things in there like the story of Noah though. In order to believe that story you must believe that 1) the entire earth was flooded. 2) Someone built a boat large enough to carry two of every living animal species (they didn’t make mention of the species that reproduce asexually). Yeah, picking the bible apart is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel a slut on prom night. So I won’t do that.

What I really want to know is where this Intelligent Designer happens to live. The entity can’t reside on the earth or any other celestial body, since he created all of that. Where’s his pad? Does he have a split-level joint (nice place, has a pool and everything) in in some suburban area in the recesses of a black hole where all of the other Intelligent Designers live?

Who created the Intelligent Designer? It is stone solid fact that life can’t appear spontaneously, intelligence is not something that can be divined from natural means, else evolution would make absolute sense. Then the question would be who created the entity that created the Intelligent Designer, and this would obviously go on to infinity, I don’t have the time to type that all out. I think you will see my point.

Intelligent Designer must not have a lot of friends (perhaps he won’t let them watch the game on his Big Screen, hogs all the beer, who knows), ’cause he seems to have entirely too much free time. What a workload the guy has. In the beginning all he had to do was to set down some genetic codes and DNA for a couple of million species (that is only known species. And only on the earth. Mind you, his design covers the everything in the cosmos). Now he must have to toil away endlessly creating new DNA for every new being, making sure that no two fingerprints are ever the same, making sure that the blood clots, etc.

That was fun.

The argument for Intelligent Design only attacks evolution. They find a hole in the evolution of a species and say “where’s your proof?” They are attacking lines of beings that, when viewed side by side, look like they are slowly changing form. Yet, were you to ask someone who supports Intelligent Design what their proof is they would simply say that evolution can not explain everything. Quite an argument.

What is going to be really sad is that, in the future, we will have found enough fossilized remains to definitively link every bipedal mammal to one another, and there will still be some religious idiots claiming that they (all the bipedal mammals) were on the boat with Noah. Delusion Intelligent Design will probably never go away, but, in a strange irony, I have no doubt that it will evolve. Just as Christians used to believe that God lived in the clouds, then swiftly changed gears once we visited the clouds.

Jogging?

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So as I was walking to the bank today, a monumental journey of about a block, I happened to walk past someone who was jogging, no shit.

I have always walked really fast, in fact if I am with anyone else I have to slow my normal pace quite a bit. Still, I walked past someone that was jogging. Isn’t the point of jogging supposed to be to move at a speed that falls somewhere between walking and running?

I am sure there are health benefits to any sort of physical activity, certainly for those whose only exercise otherwise would be walking to their car, then their desk, then back to their car, then to the couch. Does slowly jogging have any more effect on you than walking quickly? Seriously, I want to know this. She was not lifting her legs high as she went, not running on her toes (a friend tells me that running on your toes helps to build the muscles in your calves), she was just jogging along with strides about 1/3 of my normal walking ones.

It really isn’t my place to question the way someone exercises, of course I have never let that stop me before! Though really I just want to know if jogging slow is somehow better for your body than walking fast.

Old friends

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Having read an ancient post from Magazine Man, I have taken to thinking about old friends. That went from wondering what they are up to now to wondering why we were ever friends in the first place. I don’t mean that to be facetious; I really wonder how we ever ended up as friends at all.

My first “best friend” was a kid named Dean. We didn’t become friends because we necessarily liked each other (though it turns out that we did), but more out of convenience. He was the kid nearest my age on the block. In the world of a child under the age of about, say 35 (that is what you think as a child), you really have to get close to those of the same age that live nearby. Neither of us had yet entered school, which meant that we had lots of time to play around out in the yard. Of course his yard was probably no bigger than the room I am sitting in (though well manicured), so most of the play went on in my yard, but with his toys, as he always had the very best, newest toys on the market. My yard might have had the wonderful little creek running through the back (come to think of it that might have just been a broken water line at the neighbor’s house), a wonderful dirt hill, a huge rock that I was never able to move, yes it was the ultimate playground, but I didn’t have the toys.

We played together damn near every day for at least a year (that being the year that my middle brother had to ship away to school day by day, leaving me alone) and it was a hell of a lot of fun. No offense meant to Dean’s yard, but it is hard to really have fun with action figures if there is not the threat of drowning in the vast river (broken water pipe?), being stuck alone in the middle of the desert (sandy area around the telephone pole where nothing seems to grow), that huge rock (which I am pretty sure was just a piece of bedrock, since there was an actual river only a hundred or so yards away), which sometimes served as a lunar base for action figures, sometimes served as a free zone while playing tag (if someone got a bit too winded they were safe from being tagged while touching it). In addition to that, my yard also offered access to the railroad tracks (less than 100 feet from the house, and with no fence), and a sewer access panel (manhole cover) within inches of the aforementioned ‘desert’.

It is a wonder either of us survived, the same could be said of my brothers.

Dean and I got along pretty good. He had the toys, I had the adventurous back yard. Yet there comes a point when you are playing ‘transformers’ (which he can transform in about 1.2 seconds, while it takes me a good ten minutes and the instruction manual to do the same) that I realize he has me totally out-skilled. Time to play the territory rule… At my house time will stop while transformers, um, well, transform. That was my first (and probably biggest) fight with Dean. He thought that rule was crap. He noted that the entire ‘Transformer’ franchise was based on one team always winning, and that if they all transformed at the same speed it would take away most of the drama ( no, he didn’t actually say it quite that way, his quote was something more similar to “If I let you win one then would it be fair?”). I threw him straight out of my yard! After all, it is not about playing the game, it is all about who wins and loses.

Dean and I were not exactly in constant contact for the next several years. That was due to my parents divorcing though, I didn’t have the luxury of the internet at the time and I had moved a good ten or twelve miles away from him (practically to Siberia to my young eyes). It wasn’t until I called him up, completely out of the blue, several years later that we started to hang out again.

Gone were all of the differences, we were now “men on the prowl”. Men, as much of a man as you can be at 12 or 13, on the “prowl”, thus looking for a simple boob feel. We used a roller skating rink as our venue to hunt the prey (by prey I mean beautiful women girls that were around our age). Both of us would go on to score tons of phone numbers, unfortunately, at least in my case, the voice that answered the phone was certainly not the little hottie I was calling for. It was always her father. And the father never, ever, wants phone sex with a young boy (thank god I didn’t happen across Michael Jackson’s number). Their daughter has to be asleep by a certain time, etc.

When I eventually did get a hook up (and by that I am not trying to imply sex, just a real phone number, for a real girl, that I was really skating with), Dean and whatever other friends were with me remarked that the girl was “way out of my league”. Well, it turns out that, on that night, they were all right.

It took me about four years (she actually consoled me after my father died), one promise ring, one engagement ring (which I actually pawned my guitar to buy, at the time it was like giving up a nut. That, the giving up a nut thing, I would do now, in a second, if my wife needed help, ), so I guess it really was just puppy love. Time will tell though (as it always does).

Dean’s mom didn’t exactly agree to me staying at her house, but she didn’t turn away the money (I think I was giving her 50 bucks a week, though it might have been more or less) when I decided that her garage was the perfect place to get ahold of myself…Ego and all…Thing is that there was no insulation in that garage, it was basically just plywood thrown over a stud or two. It was really frickin cold! Yet this is where Dean, Steve and myself spent the better part of the year (Steve was old enough to buy the beer).

Games of quarters would ensue. That is likely why I am writing a blog, as opposed to writing a thesis.

I know that Dean got married and still lives on that same little street. I don’t know what Steve ever did. Here is to hoping that he is alive and well!

If you are Dean or Steve, and you happen to find me, crack that beer open (or soda, yohoo, spritzer, etc.) and remember the days.