All Along The Watchtower

I once lived on a hippie commune many, many years ago. One of the frequent visitors to our commune were a band of Jehovah's Witnesses, who would show up on sunny afternoons and try to get us heathens to listen to the word of Jehovah. Now if I answered the door, I would just send them away. Not so if one of the other dummies got there first. Let's face it, some of us were usually under the influence of some kind of mind altering substance, from beer to acid, and in that state of mind many of the residents would open the door and invite them in. It was a horrifying experience to come down to our large communal kitchen and find my hippy friends sitting around the table listening in rapt attention to the J. W. spiel. It was a real buzz kill.

My feelings for Jehovah Nitwitnesses knocking on my door are not the friendliest. In past years here at my house in Florida, I have had a couple of J.W. ladies come around. After telling them more than once that I wasn't interested, I finally pulled out the big gun, I told them that I was a Satan worshipper. Before I could get another word out, they scurried away, and never returned. This bought me a few years of relief, until last weekend, when I heard a tap, tap at my door. I opened it and standing there was an old man in his preacher suit, with a younger man behind him. "We'd like to talk to you about the lord Jehovah", the older guy said. This time I didn't wait, I immediately hit him with the Satan worshipper line. His response was, "Is that so?". "Yes, and I'm going to throw a satanic curse at you now.", and with a wave of my hand I sent it their way. Unlike the two ladies however, these guys just stood there and started into the spiel. I didn't know what to do, so I just closed the door and went back inside. Obviously these guys are going to be a harder nut to crack. I think the next time they show up I'll bring Chandler out with me, and give them ten seconds to get to the front gate before I let him loose. Hopefully they won't call my bluff, because the worst Chandler would do is wag his tail, and give them a lick.

Photo Friday

The Nest

Video Thursday

More. Sorry I find it amusing.

Fecal Regatta Redux

I had no story for today so I recalled one of my favorite stories that I have already done. I deleted the extraneous parts, that on second read I didn't like, and distilled it down to just the real poop.

As summer up north is winding down, and I see that the kids are all going back to school, it reminded me of summers when I was a kid and the games we played. One of my favorite summer games was the ’Fecal Regatta’. The Fecal Regatta, was a boat race that was held in the creek that ran through my home town. My brother and his friends would build small boats out of two by fours and other wood scraps, then launch them in the creek near the middle of town. I was on my brothers team and my duty was to run ahead and make sure the boat kept flowing freely with the current. Sometimes this involved stepping into the creek and nudging the boat free from what it had been snagged on.

Back in the nineteen fifties, our town had no sewage treatment facilities, no separate sewer line for storm runoff and no separate sewer line for household sewage. Every time you flushed a toilet, your turds and whatever else you threw in there went directly to the creek that flowed through town. Directly to the creek that we played in. Those ‘snags’ our toy boats got caught on, sometimes were not fallen branches but the raw sewage that we had flushed out of our subdivision that morning. There was also the occasional ‘balloon’ floating along with our boats, at least that's what my brother told me. Balloons? They were huge, bloated things, and all I could think was, where do you get such neat balloons? It was later in life that I found out they sold them in a machine at the corner gas station.

Hippies, Crack Whores, and Drunks, It's a Beautiful Day in The Neighborhood

I have two neighbors who are moving out this month, the family across the street, and the guy in the building next door. Although I live in an upper middle class neighborhood, the actual street I live on is made up of duplexes and triplexes, and whenever you introduce the variable of renters into the mix, things get a little sketchy. The biggest problem is not the folks moving out, they have all been halfway decent renters. The problem is who will the greedy landlords who own the buildings, rent to next. At various times, we have had an old hippie and his dwarf wife living on our block, crack whores, rowdy drunks, bikers, and of course me. Now just the fact that the hippie and dwarf lived across the street wasn't the problem, I have nothing against hippies and dwarfs. It was that they often got drunk and beat the crap out of each other, resulting in cops showing up to break up the loud, profanity laden fight taking place. Besides that bad circus act, just next door to them was a crack whore who used to live next door to me. Every once in a while she would drag her boney ass out into the street to ask passers by for money, mumbling gibberish while standing there with her skinny boobs hanging out. If she happened to spot me walking by, she would come stumbling over, greeting me like some long lost relative. Luckily, I was faster than she was. So I certainly hope I get quiet, clean, neighbors to replace the ones moving out. If they are drinkers, I hope they are happy drunks and don't drag their fights out into the street. I'm tired of seeing the police out there every weekend. I also am crossing my fingers that they don't have too many junk cars that they want to park out front. It only draws attention to the junk cars I have out there.

Urethra Franklin

If you watch the evening news on any network, you might notice that almost all of the ads are for drugs of some kind. My favorite part of those commercials are the side effect warnings. Today I saw an ad for a teenage acne medicine that included possible side effects of hallucinations, suicidal tendencies, and the possibility of death. I know that sounds like fun, especially to old acid heads, but I think the kids might be better off if they just lived with the pimples and the taunts from the other kids of 'pizza face'.

Is it possible that many of the diseases that they talk about in television ads might just be made up so that the pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pills? Really, who ever heard of 'Restless Leg Syndrome' before seeing that commercial on television? For years I always figured all that jiggling before Mark fell asleep was just a weird, nervous tic. Now I know, thanks to GlaxoSmithKline, that Mark has RLS.

In addition to Mark's RLS, I have been able to diagnose one of my own ills thanks to the medical advice of television ads. Since childhood I have had problems with my pee stream. It has been a weak, thin stream since I can remember, making it really hard to win at pee sword fighting. Now thanks to the great Flomax guys out on that golf course, I can safely say that my prostate has probably been enlarged all these years. I admit that it seems a little strange for a child to have the prostate of a fifty year old man, but just like my older brothers clothes, I have finally grown into my prostate gland. The question is, should I take a pill to shrink the thing down to size, and what will the side effects be? I already hallucinate, and I'm getting the normal amount of sex that a person married for twelve years gets, so the trippy part and lowering of my desire to have sex don't really seem to be a problem. I just hope, 'possible death' isn't one of the side effects. That seems a little extreme just so I can pee like a race horse.

Photo Friday

Mark on the Rialto Bridge in Venice.

The Squirrelizer