January 31, 2007

Things I thought about

Originally published September 1, 2003

One of the books I read on the island was George Carlin's Napalm and Silly Putty. That guy should start a blog.

I had one terrible nightmare about some kind of government agency coming to take Quinton away from me because I wasn't feeding him correctly. I woke up in a cold sweat with both of my fists balled, ready to fight. I blame some of my trolls for that dream.

I watched Terminator III when I took a break from the sun around noon on Saturday. I thought the movie was pretty okay. I didn't fall asleep in the middle of it.

I ate some of the best jerked pork I've ever tasted, cooked and served right next to the swimming pool at the hotel. It burned my belly for more than an hour. Just damn! That was good. Nice, spicy black beans and rice came with it, too.

I was sitting by the pool reading a book and some fat little yankee kid did a cannonball right in front of me. He wet up me and my book. I told him, "Hey! Show some manners! Don't splash me again."

He sticks his pissly head out of the water and says, "Oh, yeah? Whatcha gonna do about it?"

Little asshole. Who did he think he was dealing with? I whipped out two water pistols and did my best to put his fucking eyes out. I blinded the rat, then shot him in both ears. "Next time, I'll PISS in the pistols," I told him. "Don't you EVER wet me again, ya brat!" (I cannot stand a smart-mouthed child.) He went to the other end of the pool and never came back. I don't know where the hell his parents were. I never saw them, but I had both water-pistols ready for them. They needed an ass-whipping for raising a disrespectful prick as a son.

After I did that, I heard a woman giggle. "You have children, don't you?" she asked. I told her that I had a son about that boy's age who weighed about 50 pounds less than that BRAT and had one HELL of a lot more manners. She was wearing a purple bathing suit and reading a romance novel. She had red toenails. She was from Wisconsin.

Jerked pork goes really well with Red Stripe beer.

I saw Mars come up from the horizon every night I was on the island. It was really impressive and really red when I watched it rise up from the sea. I also saw it at 4:30 in the morning on the opposite side of the sky. It resembled just another star by then.

I got rained on once. It felt good.

When I was about to take that picture of the sunrise this morning, I saw a woman walking a dog that was uglier than Sugarmama's [Ed. Link borked.]. Not the woman. She wasn't bad looking. But that was one ugly-assed dog.

I thought about going to work tomorrow. I wish that I hadn't done that.

Speaking of bald-headed black wimmen (whom he'd thanked for a link in the previous post)

Originally published September 2, 2003

Go read this post. I didn't follow all the links that led miss Baldilocks to reply, but I understand what she means.

Do I "love" my fellow man? SHIT NO, I DON'T!! I not only believe that I live among some serious shit-asses, but I've seen them PROVE that fact to me. Bejus! Do I like all wimmen? Hell, no. I've met some nasty pisscutters in my time. Do I hate all blacks? Hell, no. But I've met some nasty pisscutters in my time.

Anybody who paints with a broad brush and says that ALL PEOPLE of a particular race, sex, religion or nationality should be hated and despised is an idiot. That kind of thinking is what motivates Islamic splodey-dopes and the Ku Klux Klan.

But to SHUT MY MOUTH and not voice an opinion about some of the things I see wrong in society today because I fear repercussions from the PC police makes the PC police just as bad as Islamo-Nazis and the Klan. I see a lot of crap I don't like and I refuse to excuse it.

Black wimmen are, by and large, the worst goddam drivers on the highway. The only other blockhead who comes close to competing with them is an 85 year-old white man.

A whopping 37% of black males [Ed. Link to supporting news article borked] end up spending time in prison. That's not "society's" fault. The blame lies squarely on the people who choose not to study in school, never learn decent manners and decide that as "victims," they have the RIGHT to steal, rape and rob, then blame their fuck-ups on someone else.

Some Jews are good with money. Do you know why? It's nothing genetic. Jewish parents generally encourage, push and prod their children to learn all they can and achieve all they can. That kind of parenting works.

Some Southerners are toothless, bigoted rednecks. I know a bunch of them. They are losers and use a lot of the same blame-someone-else philosophy young blacks do to excuse their self-destructive behavior. Isn't that interesting? You have two different groups of people failing in life. They hate each other. The black ones blame the white man for "keeping him down." The white ones blame the blacks for "taking all the good jobs because of Affirmative Action."

Not an individual in either group has the balls to look in the mirror and say, "You know, a lot of my problems could be my own damn fault. Maybe I shoulda stayed in school past ninth grade."

I love some of my fellow men. I totally adore a few wimmen. I really respect a few black individuals. I know some good ole boys that make me proud to be a Southerner, where we grow people such as they are.

But I do all of that decision-making on a case by case basis. I love, adore and respect those people because of WHO THEY ARE, not what race, sex or religion they belong to, and I don't do it because the government tells me that I should. I do it because they deserve it. They earned the feelings I give to them.

That's the way it ought to be.

January 30, 2007

Break my heart again

Originally published August 28, 2003

See? I TOLD YOU it was dangerous out here. [Ed. Linked borked.]

Acidman is being an acid asshole.

I know that this man thrives on being a total frigging jerk, but he decided that Melissa was worthy of trampling because she was sending his cancer riddled mother good wishes. And then after Jer, Melissa's lovie, asked him in a very polite email to please remove her link so that the nasty people can't get to her site to make nasty comments, Acidman posts the letter and rips on Jer, saying he has no balls.

"Kiss her sweet wounded ass and tell her that you'll make everything better. She NEEDS a nutless wonder like you. If she put you up to this, she IS a skank and you need to run like hell while you can. If she DIDN'T put you up to this, you need some Fatherly Advice: Goddam, you child. She doesn't have the only pussy in the world. Go find another one before it's too late!!!!"

Acidman shouldn't be calling anyone a nutless wonder when his (small I assume) Jimmy was ripping open just recently. His is the one who has no balls because he is a feeble old man that can only feel like a man if he rips on people who are just being nice to him. He does it, especially does it to women. He obviously has issues with women and according to him can't keep a women, because he has been married twice I believe.

He is a pig. I don't like men or people in general that have no spine and only know how to rip people apart to make themselves look better. He deserves everything he gets in life, because he is nothing. And he obviously doesn't feel like a man unless he has someone to tear down.

I assume that if he were to see this post he would bring his rage on me. But he can't touch me, he can't hurt me, I won't let him. I don't like that he is hurting my friends. He is a bully and I hope that one day there is a bigger bully that pushes him down and makes him cry.

Acidman is no different than those men who shot and stabbed my cousin a few days ago. He hurts people for fun and doesn't care that it hurts.

And to update you on my cousin he won't be getting out of the hospital today. I don't know where he got that idea. He still has that tube in his chest to drain out all the blood that is collecting in his chest.

So if you like go over and tell Acidman what an asshole he is being, not that he doesn't know he is one.

Mel has all ready taken her site off line because of all these Acidman wannabees hitting her site with nasty comments. Be outraged. I am. Misogynists sucks.

Lets see... I'm supposed to shut down my blog and cry, cry, cry. Right? I WAS ATTACKED ON THE INTERNET!!! AGAIN!!! Sob! Weep! Crawl off and assume a fetal position.

Piss on you delicate flowers. That woman insulted MY DICK and I don't give a shit. She's probably never had a good one in her life and wouldn't know what to do with one if she did. I'm supposed to CARE what that dingbat thinks of me? Well... I don't.

My aching ass.

I am "no different than the people who robbed and stabbed" that moonbat's cousin? I call that quite a stretch, darlin. You are NOT real bright, are you?

Some candy-assed blogger stealing pictures from other sites gets insulted ONE TIME and turns to jello. She had to quit blogging and assume a fetal position in the bedroom closet. I have NO sympathy for her or her nutless lover. Life is rough, then you die. That's just the way it is. YOU were INSULTED?

I get shit like that every fucking day. II blog and I still piss off my back porch in the mornings. I just wish that some of the people who write about me were in my back yard. I would piss right in their eyes.

But they prefer to insult me from a distance like the cowards they are. There are a lot of sheep out there that fear a wolf like me.

I growl. If you can't handle that fact, fuck you.

It takes a lot more than an insult to shut ME down.

And if an insult does that to YOU, you are a true PUSSY. You NEED to get off your lame blog and go back to to your job, asking people if they want fries with that. Bejus! Gag me with a spoon. Who the hell gets engaged to a guy named "Jer" anyway? Goddam. He sounds like a Pokiman card.

But he and his delicate flower are both in the closet, curled in a fetal position right now, whining and crying. That's where they need to stay.

If anything I've written pisses you off, well... just kiss my Cracker ass.

One of my dogs

Originally published August 29, 2003

I once had a dog that would drink straight tequila. He was a white mixed-breed that my room-mates and I adopted from a neighbor. His name was "Honky."

He had the misfortune of living with three college students who smoked a lot of dope and thought a drunken dog was funny as hell to watch. We would fire up a couple of joints and pour some Jose Cuervo into a bowl for the dog. The dog would lap it, bark, then lap some more, bark some more and repeat until the bowl was empty. Then, we would give him a shotgun or two of reefer.

The dog's ass always got drunk before his front end did.

He would attempt to walk across the room and his back legs would just quit on him. He would fall on his ass and look at his butt in amazement. The front legs remained functional, so the dog pretended to be sitting there as if he MEANT to assume that position. His tongue was hanging out and his eyes were glazed, but he attempted to maintain a pretense of doggy dignity.

Then, his head would nod a couple of times, the front legs went into Sudden Failure Mode and the dog hit the floor asleep in a puddle of doggy-drool. He always was surly the next morning after a Hard Party night, but he never refused a bowl of tequila.

Honky got hit by a truck and died in the spring of 1974. He saw a cat on the other side of Sullivan Street and didn't stop to look both ways when he went after it. The dog was sober at the time, but he was dead as a doornail after the truck hit him.

Honky was a good dog.

January 29, 2007

My blog

Originally published December 30, 2003

5,678 posts, 23,986 comments, two years and two days, two computers, two keyboards, four mouses (mice?) and Bejus only knows how many words later, I'm still here.

I'm kinda proud of that fact.

Cat wisdom

Originally published December 27, 2004

If you meet my friend Catfish, you'll have an immediate reaction: You'll either like him right away, or you'll hang back with an eye on running for the door because you think he's the craziest sumbitch you ever saw. Either reaction is the correct one.

I remember the bonfire in Daffin Park. They stopped doing that on New Year's Eve sometime in the early 60s, when some asshole shot off a bottle rocket, hit a three year-old girl in the face, and put out one of her eyes. I learned a lesson that night: One asshole can ruin EVERYBODY'S party.

this post may offend some people, but if you've got a bitch, sent it to Cat and not me. He's blogging about Savannah and everything he says is true. His recollections are filtered through brown whiskey, but sometimes those are the best ones. He can tell some stories.

And he doesn't have to make that shit up.

More on blowjobs

Originally published December 31, 2003

My friend, Steve Hamby, was diagnosed with prostate cancer two years before I was. When he came to visit the mini-farm after he recovered from the surgery, he told me some amazing things. I didn't really know that much about the disease at the time.

"The surgery left me impotent," he told me, matter-of-factly. "The nerves that make your dick hard are wrapped all around your prostate, and they are so tiny that not many surgeons can get in and out of there and leave you intact."

I now know from past experience of my own that the "nerve sparing" surgery is largely bullshit. Putting the prostate where it is and giving it the job it does is a design flaw in the human body. Let engineers for GM or Ford Motor Company pull such a stunt when they build a car and lawyers will be all over them like white on rice. BEJUS! HOW CRAZY CAN YOU BE?

Okay. Let's sue God now.

Steve also told me that the surgery involves not only the removal of the prostate gland, but the removal of all seminal vesicles attached to it. I was stunned. "You can't cum anymore?" I asked.

"I can have an orgasm, and it feels pretty much like it did before, except I think my dick has shrunk. Luckily for me, I had some room to spare on the dick horizon. It ain't what it once was, but I've still got enough. But, no. I don't have any of the plumbing to make cum with anymore. I use injections to get it up and I dry-fire when I have an orgasm."

I was totally amazed by what he told me that day. I thought, "Just Damn! I don't want to live like that."

Guess what? I changed my mind.

I went through the same thing. The cancer killed Steve and I lived. I would have traded places with him in a minute if I could have. He was married with two children. I was divorced, with an ex-wife who was running off every weekend to fuck another man. Steve had a lot to live for. At the time, I didn't believe that I did.

Steve was right about a couple of things. You can have an orgasm after prostate surgery, but you DO dry-fire. No more swallowing cum if you give ME a blow-job. You don't have to worry about the taste because there's no there, there. All the pipes were removed.

My dick shrunk, too, even with the bionic Roscoe I have installed now. I once was hung like a stallion. I had wimmen see it when it was angry and gasp. Those days are long gone.

But after being totally impotent for 19 months, having the Energizer Bunny that I have now sure beats what I had during that time. Just push the button, and I'm ready to go. Roscoe may not be what he once was, but he works, every time.

My only real problem is getting the damn thing DOWN now. The implants are still a little bit stiff.

January 28, 2007

A different kind of rumble

Originally published April 29, 2003

Alabama had an earthquake yesterday. Dax Montana got a taste of it where he lives in North Georgia. He must have been fairly sober at the time or he never would have noticed. (His archives are shot. Just scroll)

Hey, Sugarmama! [Ed. Link borked.] Did YOU feel anything? The epicenter wasn't far from where you live.

Never mind. Sugarmama feels nothing but anger, chagrin and a secret admiration for ME!!! (Bwhahahahaaa!)

Nothing happened around the Crackerbox. I live on a giant sandhill, which is a natural shock-absorber. You must have ROCKS to transmit tremors, and if you want rocks around where I live, you have to buy them.

I once started to purchase a small load of rocks off a truck when they were still doing construction in this neighborhood. When the guy asked me where I wanted them, I said, "Just dump them anywhere in the back yard."

"What do you want them for?" he asked.

"For my son and his friends to throw," I answered. He gave me the kind of gaze most people reserve for the Elephant Man when he pulls off his cloak. I ended up not buying any rocks because this South-Georgia, sandhill-dwelling construction contractor just would not understand how much FUN it is to throw a rock. Besides, his rocks were pretty shitty for throwing anyway. They were those irregular granite chunks imported from North Georgia. Shitty rocks.

I suffered TWO traumatic readjustments when I moved from the mountains of Kentucky to the sand-flats of Georgia. The first and most obvious was that THIS PLACE WAS FLAT AS A PANCAKE! Bejus! When you grow to the age of six nestled in the warm bosum of the Appalachian Mountains, this landscape seemed hit by a cosmic weed-wacker and trimmed to the same height everywhere you looked. IT FREAKED ME OUT. It stayed daylight WAY too long here in the evening, and the sun came shining through the bedroom window WAY too early in the morning.

I had a hard time dealing with that.

But the second part was worse. You couldn't find a rock to throw if you spent all day looking for one. Dig, kick the dirt and walk around, and all you'll find is sand. That's when I first learned the term "brickbat." A brickbat is a piece of broken brick that is the closest thing to a genuine stone that you'll find in Southeast Georgia unless you buy a truckload of imported rock.

In Harlan, I was throwing rocks when I was still in diapers. I learned to skip rocks across the swimming hole when I was very young. But rocks were EVERYWHERE, whatever kind you wanted, from the big, round windowbreakers to the smooth, flat skippers. Distance rocks, curve-ball rocks, the ones that would whistle when they sailed through the air. Just pick up a handful by the river and choose the right rock for the throw you wanted to make.

My son will never know that joy. Of course, he'll probably never feel an earthquake, either.

I'm not sure that he's getting a fair trade.

Changing times

Originally published April 30, 2003

I received another email from Smiling Dave today that echoed something that has puzzled me for a while now. He wrote:

"One of our guys showed up about a half hour late to work today. As he was about to depart his home, he spotted some trouble on his block. A twelve year old boy had poured something flammable on his nine year old sister and set her on fire.

Our guy got over there quickly, grabbed the girl, and smothered the flames. She had only minor burns (none disfiguring); but was badly frightened). It took the guy a little while to get the child to her mother and to explain what had happened, so he was late coming in. (No problem. We are not clock watchers here.)

He was talking about it to a few of us, and somebody made a comment about the vicious little shit who did the deed. The guy said, "Aw hell. Don't you remember when you were twelve?" He said it in such a matter of fact and accepting way that it sent a chill through me. What's worse, the other guys present seemed to find his comment unremarkable. It got me to wondering what the hell has been done to us that a homicidal juvenile doesn't even upset us much? When did we all stop protecting children and decide that they'd just have to take their chances, when it comes to living long enough to reach adulthood? And why aren't pint-sized monsters like today's detected early and put where they can't do any more damage?"

I see it this way, Dave: A society GETS MORE of the lowest kind of behavior it is willing to TOLERATE.

Too many parents want to be their child's "friend" instead of a mentor and a disciplinarian. Schools teach "self-esteem" whether the kid deserves any or not. We have bureaucratic minions of the State ready to prosecute a parent as a "child abuser" for taking a belt to a well-deserving rump. Outraged lawyers sue when Little Johnny is called a "pint-sized monster," even if he IS one.

We accept unacceptable behavior today because we are taught not to be "judgmental" in a thousand insidious ways. As a result, we generate more and more unacceptable behavior because WE ACCEPT IT, rather than be judgmental.

Yeah, I remember when I was twelve. By then, I had experienced a rich multitude of butt-whippins from both my mother and my father, who used whatever weapon was handy at the time, when they believed that I strayed from the path they expected me to walk. They steered me back on course with blows to my young ass. I had judgmental parents. They had rules.

They were cheered and respected by other parents, too, as well as teachers and principals. If I screwed up in school, the teachers didn't have to discipline me. All they had to do was CALL MY PARENTS. They would handle the problem from there. My parents did not accept unacceptable behavior. As a result, I grew up flying right. About the biggest trouble I ever got into in my youth was a couple of fights on the school bus.

Very few people raise their children that way anymore. The parents aren't judgmental and they don't make rules. They let the kids make the rules.

That's why you have a 12 year-old setting his sister on fire. I'll bet he gets a real, loving discussion about how wrong it is to "act out" as a result, too, and then some anger-management classes.

That'll teach him.

January 27, 2007

Things I was thinking

Originally published June 30, 2003

Why do people say, "I'm going to take a shit" when they intend to leave one?

Why are farts funny?

Why does it feel good to scratch my balls?

Why does it feel good to scratch my balls while it feels even BETTER to have a woman play with them?

I feel sorry for wimmen. They can't piss standing up in the woods. Well, some CAN, but most don't.

Why do some turds float while others sink?

Why does a cat bury its shit outside then piss on a potted plant indoors?

Why are there cats? I hate them.

Why are there monkeys? I hate them, too.

What is the meaning of my life? Am I merely a meat-eating, carbon unit who is an ugly bag of mostly water? Hell, that can't be right. I ain't ugly.

Why do bloggers take blogging seriously? 95% of meat-eating carbon units who are ugly bags of mostly water never heard of a blog. My urologist flies his own airplane and HE never heard of a blog until I told him about mine.

Why do we sleep at night and stay active during the day? It can't be completely natural because bats don't do that.

What makes you love somebody when you don't love everybody?

What is so goddam special about "diversity?"

It's all a mystery to me.

I am going to play again

Originally published June 30, 2003

I posted a Catfish email about golf and I got a lot of comments, most from people who never played golf. I haven't played since July 5th, 2001. I remember that last round as if it were yesterday. I always remember when I play for money.

I won money that day, with a 205-yard five wood shot over 200 yards of water on the 18th hole that ended up ten feet from the flag. I drilled that fucking shot and then I sank the putt for all the money.

Then, I put my clubs away one week later and I have not picked them up since. My life fell apart.

To me, golf has been the most daunting game I've ever played. It's you against the course. You can't blame anything on anybody but yourself if you fuck up. But if you come into #18 with $80 riding on your next shot and your competitor has carried the water and put his shot on the green 40 feet from the hole, you CAN'T lay up. You also realize that if you fuck this shot up, it's all over but the crying. That's when golf really becomes golf.

You KNOW that you can hit that shot, because you've done it before, and you just have to believe. So, you do it.

When it comes off the club, you know. Before you look up to see the ball you're already saying, "Be the right stick, baby!" It felt crisp when you hit it and it was just right. You watch that sucker headed for the green and say "Get UP, you sonofabitch! Be the right stick!"

When the ball clears the water by five feet, bounces on the rim of the green and rolls up right in front of the pin, you feel almost as if you just had an orgasm. I DID IT!!!

People who don't play golf don't understand that feeling. People who don't play poker don't understand that feeling. It ain't like watching grass grow. It's hanging your ass out there with nobody but yourself to depend on. When you do it right, it is BETTER THAN SEX! Especially when you sink the putt and get called a Lucky Sumbitch by the guy who has to slap leather and pay you $80 because you did what you had to exactly WHEN you needed to.

Golf is a sublime game. It will check your character. Especially when you gamble on it.

January 26, 2007

More "Gunsmoke"

Originally published June 30, 2005

I am addicted to that show now. I confess--- I watch the old reruns AT LEAST twice a day now and I never get tired of them. I love every character on there and I like seeing people who went on to become big starts playing bit parts. You can almost taste the prarie dust and smell the horseshit in a "Gunsmoke" rerun.

Pretty Miss Kitty carries a pistol in her purse. I've seen her whip it out twice now, and once she shot somebody dead with it. It appears to be a small-caliber revolver, a lady's gun, maybe a .32 or so, but Kitty doesn't hesitate to use it. No wonder Matt is so intrigued with her.

Festus Hagin may look like a rube, but don't make him angry. He's a bad-ass when the situation calls for that kind of behavior. Festus will shoot you and THEN spur your eyeballs out if your're looking for a real fight.

Doc Adams reminds me of ME anymore. Crotchety old bastard. Cantankerous old coot. Smart-mouthed and wise-assed. Yep. Me and Doc have a lot in common--- he's just better at medicine than I am.

I'd like to go fishing with every one of those characters. Except Matt. He's too driven to suit me. I don't think he KNOWS how to relax. But he has the balls of a longhorn bull. He takes no shit from nobody, and at last count, I've seen him kill 182 people on that show.

I can't wait to watch it again tonight.

Don't get me started

Originally published June 30, 2005

I could talk for hours on this topic. I believe that I've read everything Robert Heinlein or Ayn Rand ever wrote, and both have affected my personal philosophy a GREAT DEAL. In the end, after thinking long and hard on it all, I agree more with Heinlein than I do Rand.

Rand saw things in pure black and white--- no room for compromise in there. Heinlein posited ideas and welcomed debate. Both thought a lot alike, but they were completely different in how they framed their philosophies.

Don't get me wrong--- I admire both of them. But Rand was like a strict school marm and Heinlein was more like a Socrates. Rand was ready to beat you over the head with her ideas, and she did exactly that in her books. They were GOOD ideas, but she was a battle-axe in the way she expressed them. Some of her work reminds me of screeching fingernails on a blackboard.

Heinlein, on the other hand, was more the type to laugh when you disagreed with him and ask, "Well, my son... WHY do you think that way?" And he wanted to hear what you had to say. He might puncture every one of your arguments with the skill of an expert swordsman, but he'd give you the chance to speak.

If you want to read Ayn Rand, start with We, the Living, then read Anthem and THEN read The Fountainhead. Only after that tutorial on Ayn Rand should you jump into Atlas Shrugged. If you DON"T do it that way, you'll never grasp what Ayn Rand spent her whole life saying.

(That's just MY humble advice as an English Major.)

Heinlein is someone you can read at ANY time in your life and you don't need to take his books in order to "get" what he meant to say. I still believe that The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a POWERFUL book, speaking about what made America great and how that greatness slipped away when people sacrificed their individualism for the "comfort" of government control.

Read 'em both. But don't say the two were alike.

They weren't. And for all you people who think I'm a red-necked. moonshine-making, gun-owning, cat-hating sumbitch, you're absolutely right about me. But I read some, too.

January 25, 2007

My advice? Leave it alone

Originally published June 23, 2006

This friend of mine has a serious dilemma on his hands. I don't fear many wild animals, especially not if I'm holding a loaded shotgun at the time, but Jim has found one of my exceptions to that rule in his yard.

Somewhere buried in my tangled archives is a post about MY Close Encounter of the Skunk Kind when I was camping on top of Blood Mountain with my partners Cop3 and Steve Hamby many years ago. I pitched my hammock between two good trees, put a plastic garbage back over my pack, and secured it up in one of the trees that my hammock was tied to. I hung the pack on a broken limb as high up the tree as I could reach.

I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of that garbage bag rattling (and not from any wind), then starting to tear. I heard that noise and figured that a hungry racoon was attempting to feed himself a midsnack on MY tab. I've seen those clever bastids to THAT kind of thievery more than once before.

I always slept with a flashlight in my sleepinbg bag with me, for just such occasions. I knew that it wasn't a bear I heard, because a bear would NOT have been that subtle. A bear would simply snatch the pack out of the tree, swipe me right out of my hammock to roll halfway down the mountain, and then rip my pack to shreds while stuffing his mouth with anything he could eat.

Naw. That wasn't a bear I heard. Probably a racoon. I just hoped that the thing was NOT rabid as I rolled over in my hammock, shined my flashlight at the intruder, and slapped my hand on the ground. "GEDDOUDAHERE!" I yelled, in my most fearsome, macho voice.

I almost screamed like a girl and pissed my pants next, as I quickly turned the flashlight off and pulled my sleeping bag quietly over my head, until I was fully cocooned. That was no racoon. That was a SKUNK!!!! A BIG, FAT, honking, wildcat-sized, whipe-striped, grinnin' bastid standing there on its hind legs looking like Pepe le Pew hisownself as it grabbed for my pack with its most terrible and frightening business end pointed right at meeeee!, less than two feet from my farookin' FACE!

I would MUCH rather have see a bear.

The damn thing gave up on my pack, but must have become curious about that trembling, gasping creature cowering in the sleeping bag, because it gave me a most thorough and terrifying examination. It hopped up on its back legs again, started pawing at the top of my sleeping bag and making loud SNUFFLING noises as it checked my scent. That skunk never new just how close it came to getting a blast of its own stink-medicine right then. I almost shit my pants.

The skunk did that paw-walk all the way down my body to the other end of the sleeping bag, dropped to all fours, walked UNDER my hammock and hopped back on its hid legs repeated the pawing, snuffling process back up the other side of me. I don't believe anything else so incredibly... uh... thrilling has EVER happened again in my life.

The skunk finally became bored with attempting to scare me to death and wandered down the slope to where Cop3 had gotten drunk on Scotch that night and left HIS pack just layin' on the ground. He turned on HIS flashlight once, too--- but made a sound kinda like a squeaky hinge on an old, wooden door and put that light out fast. The skunk cleaned him out. Ate EVERYTHING!!!

The next day, I investigated a Wilderness Shelter on top of the mountain and discovered a wire-bound notebook that campers had been making diary entries in for a little over a month. Almost EVERY ONE mentioned the skunk waddling through the front door and making itself at home while everybody in the room suffered massive heart attacks.

It was a female with a litter of at least TWO skunklets, because Mama took her young'uns inside the shelter with her on a couple of occasions. I'm glad I never saw THAT!

So, based on my vast experience with skunks, I'm gonna offer Jimbo this expert advice. DON'T FUCK WITH IT!!! If it wants to live under your shed, let it. In fact, if it wants to walk in your front door and raid your liquor cabinet--- LET IT!!!

It'll leave you alone if you leave it alone, and I think that's a damn good deal, especially for a lawyer, because I believe that you have to be related to such animals to pass a bar exam. But trapping it??? I don't think that's a good idea.

Not unless you can hire a got-dam fool to do it FOR you, while you go out of town for a few days...

Chicken man

Originally published June 24, 2006

If I lived where he does, I would have done it a long time ago. catfish got himself some chickens. He told me about his venture into wildlife farming and I responded by telling HIM to build a decent coop. If he lets those chickens free-range, they'll start sleeping in trees at night and laying their eggs 30 feet off the ground. Gravity is NOT kind to an egg laid from that height.

I offered to help him build a good coop and show him how to set it up--- but I've gotta admit. I'll do a lot more engineering than actual WORK on that project, because I simply am not able to do the things anymore that I once did all the time. But I HAVE been a chicken-farmer and I DO know a little bit about it.

He got several different roosters. That's not really a problem, even though people already are warning him that a coop has room for only ONE dominant rooster. I call bullshit on that idea, because I once ended up with FIVE roosters and 28 hens in my coop. The roosters worked out their own... "pecking order," if you will...

I had a big, mean, three-feet-tall Rhode Island Red that was Cock of the walk in MY coop. The other roosters were scared shitless of that mean old bastid, and they stayed far away from him. Usually by flying up in the rafters and never even bothering to eat unless the Tall Dog's back was turned. But when they saw a ripe opportunity, they'd fly down from the rafters, grab a couple of bites to eat, then plow a hen who was scratching and cooing with her ass stuck up in the air at the time.

Then, they'd fly squawlking back up into the rafters before big boy kicked their asses. If they were too slow, Big Red killed them. Life is brutal in a chicken coop.

But I frequently collected as many as 30 eggs out of that coop every day, because my laying hens did exactly THAT. They LAID a lot of eggs. Just provide them with hay and food. They'll build their own nests and lay like gangbusters.

You've got to watch out for your dominat rooster killing the other males if he can catch them, but something else bad is to have a real, dedicated nesting hen go into full mama-mode on you. She'll lay her own eggs and then steal others to fill her nest. Then she wants to sit there and hatch them, even if doing that means not eating for a while.

You've got to watch out for those, because they'll peck the living shit out of you if you reach under her for the eggs. She gets all hormonal and insane from motherly instincts. But the males don't like those chicklets when they hatch and the males will kill them and EAT THEM, just to eliminate future competition.

A chicken coop is a real jungle.

But If I had a place to put one, I would do it again today. You collect plenty of fresh eggs and get to watch a lot of wild, chicken-sex happening all the time. Give them corn and sweet feed to eat, plus dump any kitchen leftovers into the coop for added variety. You'll grow some good chickens and get lots of fresh eggs that way.

But...beware. Roosters like to crow their asses off every morning to welcome the sunrise. Until you become accustomed to the noise, it will wake you up with a case of the cold shivers. After a while, you beome acustomed to it and pay them no attention anymore, but that takes a while.

Two friends who spent a weekend at my house several years ago asked, in all sincerity, "How do you SLEEP with all that racket in the morning?" I asked, "What racket?" because the truth was... I didn't hear it anymore.

If Cat doesn't coop his chickens, his cats and his alligators will kill them all. If they end up sleeping in trees, he'll NEVER get an egg from them. I'm just offering him good advice.

He can take it or leave it. But I KNOW what I'm talking about here.

January 24, 2007

I don't expect the world to be a peaceful place

Originally published February 6, 2004

The very first story in the Bible after the creation is a murder. Cain killed Abel.
We've been killing each other ever since.

That's not going to stop. Just look at the number of despots still operating and the bullshit happening in Iraq today. When I had my layover in the Atlanta airport, I stopped in a bar that had five guys obviously headed back to Iraq. I called the waitress over to my barstool and said, "Let me buy those guys lunch and throw an extra beer on the tab, too. Put it all on me."

She explained the situation the the young men and one of them came over to thank me. "You don't look old enough for that beer I bought you," I said.

"I'm 23 sir, and my buddies wanted me to thank you for your generosity."

He was a handsome black man making his second trip over there. "Who are you with?" I asked.

"Third infantry. I drive a tank."

"UURRAH! I said. "Fort Stewart in Hinesville. You guys are my homies. You fuckers almost ran over me one night, then shelled me halfway down the road. Scared the shit out of me. Just watch your asses and get home safely. Go for the enemy next time."

"Thanks again for the meal. sir. We'll be back on MREs soon enough."

"The meal was my pleasure. You guys are fighting for my son over there. Picking up that kind of tab makes me proud."

"Sir, it is difficult in desert uniform to buy a goddam thing in this airport. If someone doesn't pick up the tab, the bar does. I am amazed."

"Don't be, my friend. You've got a lot of support behind you. Drive the shit out of that tank and watch your ass."

We shook hands and all his buddies dropped by to say hello, too. I fed them hamburgers and beer, then sent them off to war. I hope they all make it back safe and sound. They were strong, young men trained for battle.

My soul went with them.

Lawsuits

Originally published February 4, 2004

I bitch a lot about the idiocy of our legal system, but I don't want to tear it down. I once had a problem with a guy who agreed to do some work for me at a certain price. He didn't get the work done before he had over-spent his bid, so he just decided to quit where he was and stiff me.

I sued his ass and got my money even though the asshole had to sell his truck to pay me. That was a just working of the legal system to me.

A neighbor of mine raises a lot of chickens. He makes a lot of side money selling hens and eggs. But he welcomed a couple of new neighbors who had two dalmations, which definitely run in the top five of stupid dogs. Let them get a taste of chicken blood and they go totally bullshit.

The dogs started digging into Mitchell's coop and kiling a lot of chickens. They ate eggs, too. Mitchell talked to his neighbor twice about the leash law in Georgia and that the fact if the dogs kept running loose and destroying his chickens, he would take care of the dogs. The dalmation-owner seemed to believe that the whole story was a joke.

Mitchell caught both dogs is his coop the next day. He killed both dogs, loaded them into his pickup truck and hauled them over to his neighbor's house. He threw them in the yard and said, "You're dogs are finished fucking with my chicken coop. I warned you, and now you have two holes to dig."

The asshole sued Mitchell for killing the dogs. Letting the dogs run loose cost the man $70 each, because that's the penalty for the leashless law around here. Mitchell, however, conmmitted cruelty to animals and ended up paying a $2000 FINE AND BUYING THE GUY TWO NEW PEDIGREE DALMATIONS.

I would have shot both dogs and buried them quickly and cleanly. When the owner finally asked about the dogs, I honestly could have said "I haven't seen them in a couple of weeks. I don't know what you did with them, but they're sure staying out of my chicken coop anymore."

Mitchell never should have been sued over what happened to him. But he confessed to the neighbor that he killed the dogs. I never would have admitted that fact. In fact, I would have denied the shit out of it. I would have dared a posse to find the dogs, then I would have sued that dalmation -owner for every nickle his dogs ever cost me.

To me, that's justice. I don't give a damn about a deep pocket or who I can fuck out of money in court. All I want is what is even.

And this case sucks.

January 23, 2007

I love blogs

Originally published November 9, 2004

I've felt really good today. Inhaling all that gunsmoke yesterday did did a complete makeover on my psyche. My depression is gone. I've had a hearty appetite. I feel ALIVE and SHARP and HONED.

That feeling won't last, but while it's here, I want to share some snippets of wisdom that I harvested from other blogs today.

"What can I say? I had a sordid childhood." via the "sworded one".

"...they better keep their waxy hands off my butt." via the got-dam mouth of the south. [Ed. Link borked. It was Suburban Blight.]

"Slack. Ass." via this philosopher.

"Ted Rall would be proud." via evil white guy.

"Yes, I'm feeling rather chilled and exposed at the moment." AHEM! I won't speak of the picture that flashed in my perverted mind when I read that here, but stiff nipples were involved.

"It has occurred to me that while I may be an utterly useless human being devoid of all redeeming qualities, there is one thing I do well. No, I don't mean finding choice bits of rare midget porn. Although I AM really good at that. I mean cooking." via this guy. [Ed. Link borked. It was Hog on Ice.]

"For instance, today I was thinking about why the sky is blue, how come frogs croak and where the darkness goes when you enter a room and turn on the light." You'll always find such wisdom here.

"Funny how CBS says that there is no journalism in the Blogosphere. That's exactly what the blogs are saying about CBS." via mad ogre. [Ed. Link goes to front page.]

"But I guess this is how aging, has-been fairies behave. I can call him that because I'm gay and we're allowed to eat our own..." from alphecca.

"If I could get me some Ingrid chili served in a bowl made from her upturned and hollowed out skull I might be tempted to take out a second mortgage on the house." via gramagus. [Ed. Link borked. It was Frizzensparks.]

I like the way bloggers think.

Why I like comments

Originally published November 7, 2004

It's a pain in the ass to de-spam my comments every day, but it's worth the effort to me, because occasionally I get some really good feedback from readers. Take this post below. Johannes, who I assume is German, offers a good look at the European opinion of George Bush, and it's not pretty. But most Americans who pay any attention to European politics don't think Germany is very pretty today, either.

It is dangerous to be a foreigner in your country and you can be sent to prison without reason. There is "America first" patriotism, and you want to rule the world. And the Bush government invented this strange war against non-existent enemy to keep the people following.

This and many more makes us think of "light versions" of Gestapo, NS, Auschwitz, WW II and all this shit we had. We Germans and Europeans are watching you with fear and astonishment, and you become strange to us... Can't you see this?

Posted by Johannes at November 7, 2004 09:38 AM

Yep. We have gangs of government thugs arresting foreigners left and right today and sending them to prison for no reason. It's a goddam jungle out there. We also have a government department responsible for Pulling the Wings Off Flies, too. We'll work our way up to better things when we evolve past "Gestapo Lite."

My aching ass.

Beware an ignorant person who makes up his mind on a subject he knows nothing about. Arguing with such a person is like talking to a wall. You won't make an impact. And I believe that ANY European has a lot of gall to criticize the United States of America for having a set of balls. Those girly-men gave up their cods a long time ago, and they don't WANT them back, because with balls comes responsibility. They chose the illusion of "security" over freedom a long time ago.

I prefer this idea about Americans:

When one examines Brian Reade's anatomy of redneck disfigurements - "gun-totin', military-lovin', abortion-hatin' " - most of them are about the will to survive, as individuals and as a society. Americans tote guns because they're assertive citizens, not docile subjects of a permanent governing class. They love their military because they think there's something contemptible about Europeans preening and posing as a great power when they can't even stop some nickel'n'dime Balkan genital-severers piling up hundreds of thousands of corpses on their borders.

Docility has NEVER been an American trait and I hope it never becomes one. The fact that we are NOT docile and we DO NOT believe in subservience to a governing class are the best guarantees we have that government will not become totalitarian and run roughshod over our rights. Johannes, I hate to tell you this, but YOUR government is more of a menace to you than ours would be if you came here.

As Americans were voting on marriage and marijuana and other matters, the Rotterdam police were destroying a mural by Chris Ripke that he'd created to express his disgust at the murder of Theo van Gogh by Islamist crazies. Ripke's painting showed an angel and the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill". Unfortunately, his workshop is next to a mosque, and the imam complained that the mural was "racist", so the cops arrived, destroyed it, arrested the television journalists filming it and wiped their tape. Maybe that would ring a bell with Oliver James's mum.

Welcome to the European Union. Now, tell me again how the US is "fascist?"

January 22, 2007

Dream. And dream big.

Originally published September 29, 2005

I don't believe since childhood that I ever walked into a room full of strangers and thought that anyone in that room was "better" than I am. Some of the people may have donned fancier clothes and had more money or education than I did, but that didn't impress me. I've known a LOT of educated, rich idiots.

I've always thought that if they just threw a ball up for grabs, I could fight for it with the best of them. Most of the time, I was right.

I bless my parents (especially my father) for teaching me to think that way. He never took a back seat to anybody in his life, and he served as an example to show me and my brother some valuable lessons. If you boil it all down, his advice was simple:

* Get an education. Learn everything that you can.

* Stand up for yourself. Don't let people push you around.

* Always remember that EVERYBODY shits between two shoes, no matter how rich they are. Money does not make a man.

* Don't EVER expect something for nothing.

* You get what you work for. If it was easy, any asshole could do it.

I think that's damn good advice. It's served me well in MY life, and wish that more people today taught those simple lessons to THEIR children.

The world would be a better place.

It all fit

Originally published November 18, 2004

I have everything I'm taking to Costa Rica packed into one bag. This is good. I ain't taking a whole lot with me, but I think I've still got more than I need. I am ready to go tomorrow.

I went by and had a nice visit with my mama today. She and my grandmother think I am very handsome now that I have a short haircut and no beard anymore. Awww... they love me even when I'm ugly.

I arrived back home this afternoon and had a typical polite, articulate message from Recondo 32 on my machine: "Hey, asshole! Turn off the porno movie, get your cock out of your paw and stop jacking off. Pick up the goddam phone, shit-bird!" See how MY FRIENDS talk to me? No wonder I'm so depressed all the time.

I watched a movie that had a hysterical woman in it. If I were a feminist, that kind of shit would piss me off. EVERY movie that has action and violence in it features at least one hysterical woman, you know, the one who goes to screaming pieces at the sight of blood, who can't see through the torrents of tears streaming from her eyes, who walks backward, trembling with fright and whimpering like a whipped dog, until she bumps into something she didn't see and screams some more.

What kind of message does that send? I AM WOMAN! Hear me whine and watch me act with the maturity and intelligence of a three year-old boy in a crisis situation. Got Dam! I can't call 'em "broads" anymore, because that's a sexist term. But Hollywood keeps showing hysterical wimmen by the truckload. Go figure.

I got a holiday greeting card from the US Post Office today. Why? What am I going to do if I DON'T receive that greeting card? Take my business elsewhere for home mail? What a useless gesture. How much did that shit cost?

I almost signed up for an internet dating service today. I chickened out at the last minute, mainly because I'm leaving the country tomorrow, and I want to be around to see what kind of fucked-up woman might be interested in ME when I post the bio I composed especially for the ad. Yeah, I like candle-lit dinners, long walks on the beach and taxidermy. You oughta see my stuffed armadillo collection.

I may have a guest blogger posting while I'm gone. I dared him, and he SAYS he has cast-iron balls. We'll see. He has the keys to the joint.

You gonna miss me while I'm gone???

January 21, 2007

Something to ponder

Originally published July 12, 2003

If we develop the technology is it really an ethical question about whether to use it or not? I think it's more a question of WHEN to use it.

One thing I really like about living in the USA is the fact that our might is tempered by people who vote. We are not a bloodthirsty nation bent on world domination (no matter what some leftist asshats say). We prefer to be left alone, but if you FUCK WITH US, we'll open the most awesome can of whoop-ass you ever saw and feed it to you in one big bite.

With that kind of power comes a LOT of responsibility. You open that awesome can of whoop-ass ONLY when you have to. You don't do it for shits and giggles or just because you can. Our ELECTED government can never do that unless we become a bloodthirsty people, and if we didn't after 9/11, we never will.

I believe my government is picking my pocket right and left, and I believe that it pisses away money the way drunken sailors piss away beer. But I DON'T believe that we will EVER be run by a dictatorship that can get away with murder. The same people who fight our wars go to church, send their children to public schools and VOTE. They have a vested interest in keeping us from being something like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union under Stalin.

We will not be picked on, but we don't pick on others, either. Not many countries in the history of the planet can say that and be telling the truth. We can.

If we develop a "take you OUT in two hours" weapon we should produce it and advertize the fact that we have it. We should demonstrate it when the time is right, just to prove that we are serious. That will make a LOT of assholes in the world think twice about trying to bitch-slap the "Great Satan" when they want to pitch a hissy.

I went to school with bullies, fought bullies on the playground and worked around bullies all of my life. I understand bullies. Implacable, inevitable force is the only thing they understand. They exploit your lack of will to confront them. The only way to handle a bully is to make him FEAR you.

Teddy Roosevelt said it best: "Walk softly, but carry a big stick." Bullies may not know why you walk softly, but they damn sure understand that big stick.

The USA is NOT a nation of bullies. But we are not a bunch of wusses, either. We can get along if you behave in a civilized manner. But if you CROSS US, we'll open that can of whoop-ass on you, every time.

We need to send that message loud and clear to the bullies of the world.

It's what I believe

Originally published July 10, 2003

If something terrible ever happens to me to put me into 19-year coma [Ed. Link borked.] after which I wake up a quadriplegic, I'll want to get out of that bed just to KILL whoever kept me there that long. I mean that.

I believe in quality of life more than just breathing. I don't want to be alive if all I can do is whimper, "milk." Why the hell do you think I went through the shit I just did to get a bionic dick?

I still think of myself as a vigorous man with many good years ahead of me. But if I were condemned to spend them bedridden or limp-dicked and lonely, what good ARE those years? I don't want my son EVER to watch me die the way my father died.

The man I admired most on the face of this planet went out with tubes and catheters stuck in him while he clawed for every last breath. He died ignominously, and I never got over witnessing that sight. I won't do that, and I damn sure won't let my son ever SEE me doing that.

I want Quinton to remember ME the way I think of myself. Strong. Wise. Able. I want him to remember that I taught him how to throw a football, and I taught him how to swim and I taught him how to be a man. I taught him how to shoot a rifle and walk tall and to do what needs to be done. I want to teach him to be tough.

I can't do that by being a shadow of what I once was and leaving THAT PICTURE of me in his mind when I finally cash my chips. Yeah, I wanted the bionic dick for me. But I wanted it more to BE WHAT I KNOW I AM. I was TIRED of being impotent. That was a heavy weight to carry for a man like me. I may NEVER screw (okay... I WILL) with my implant, but just knowing that I CAN means a lot.

I am rambling, but I want to be someone my son looks up to, just the way I did to my daddy. And I don't want to EVER let him down the way my father did me. I had something broken and I fixed it. I did it to make ME feel whole again and I can be a better father to my son because of it. It was a mind thing, but it bothered me a lot.

Yeah, I did the get out of the hospital in six hours and drive myself home today stuff just to PROVE THAT I COULD. I did because most people either can't or won't. I have NEVER been like "most people." I wouldn't have it any other way.

My father taught me to be tough. I once thought that he WAS TOUGH, but he didn't die that way, and I'll always wonder how much bullshit he spooned into my head with the "do as I say, not as I do" crap.

I don't want Quinton EVER to wonder about such things when he thinks of ME. I want to show him. I want him NEVER to have any doubts.

That's why I'll never live 19 years in a coma, either.

January 20, 2007

Things I don't understand

Originally published June 24, 2004

#1) De-Caf Coffee. What the fuck is the point? If you can't cop a righteous energy buzz after a couple of cups, why drink coffee at all? Give ME the thick, turgid, muddy stuff that makes my hair stand on end.

#2) Non-Alcoholic Beer. Again, what the fuck is the point? I've tried NA beers and I'm yet to find a one that doesn't taste like watered-down possum piss. I would rather drink ice water.

#3) Vegetarian Diets. Something is seriously wrong with someone who doesn't eat meat. Human beings would not have canine teeth if Mother Nature herself hadn't designed us to gnaw rib bones and tear great chunks off a pizza with extra pepperoni and sausage. Who are the vegans trying to fool? Shitting high-fiber turds IS NOT what we were put on this planet to do.

#4) Organic Food. The very term is a lie in itself, and anybody who believes that "organic" food is uniquely healthy is a blithering idiot. Hell, they have to be idiots to pay twice the price for products dipped in shit instead of 10-10-10 fertilizer. That's California Dreaming.

#5) "Healthy Choice" TV Dinners. Got-Dam! Does anyone really believe that a frozen brick you buy in the supermarket, after you pass up all the fresh fruits, vegetables and meats, is a HEALTHY CHOICE? Don't get me wrong. The meals aren't bad, but I prefer truth in advertising. Try "Better than that Swanson shit, BUT NOT a healthy choice."

#6) Low-Sodium ANYTHING. Yeah, yeah, yeah... salt is BAD for you. Just try living without it. YOU'LL DIE!!! Again, I prefer truth in advertising, so instead of "low-sodium," the food should be labeled "HAS NO TASTE." That low-sodium crap is more California Dreaming.

#7) "Renewable Energy". That's the new war-cry of asshole environmentalists who don't know jack-shit about energy production. The only really reliable source of renewable energy that we've ever found in sufficient quantity and reliability to make it practical is hydroelectric power, but environmentalists hate dams as much as they hate coal-fired turbine-generators or nuke plants. People who do the la-la dance about windmills and solar panels should be FORCED to live with that kind of power only. After they freeze their asses off in the dark for a year or so, they may stop their California Dreaming.

#8) Saying "Gender" when you mean "Sex". This one is a pet peeve of mine, because it reflects the complete pussification of America that I've watched occur during the second half of my life. "Sex" sounds dirty. EEEEWOOOO! Can't have THAT! "Gender," on the other hand, sounds really neutral, scientific and unoffensive, even to militant feminists, who are the ones I really believe STARTED this corruption of our language. Delicate ears require a lot of insulation lest they hear something they don't like.

#9) Gun Control. If ANY proponent of gun control could show me ONE EXAMPLE of where the idea has worked to make society better and safer, I might listen to them. But they can't, and I won't.

#10) Survivor. I watched one episode of that show long ago and I never felt the urge to watch it again. I've seen enough back-stabbing and politicking in my REAL life that I have no desire whatsoever to come home and watch more of that shit on my television.

There. How's THAT for a Thursday Ten? [...on a Saturday night...]

Money maker

Originally published June 24, 2004

I went to the store today and passed a sign advertising Red Wiggler worms for sale. Those worms make excellent fish bait, especially for bream or crappie. I don't know how much money that guy makes growing worms, but I DO KNOW that it's not difficult to do.

When I first started seriously gardening, I built a compost bin in my back yard. I threw all my grass clippings, leaf-rakings and non-meat table scraps in there and wet it down and tossed the mixture around with a pitchfork every few days. Thanks to aerobic decomposition, that compost produced some of the finest, richest soil you could ever wish for.

It also spawned incredible numbers of Red Wiggler worms.

Red Wigglers are good for a garden. The worms help aerate the soil and they devour nematodes and other baddies that kill your plants from the bottom up. When my compost was just about ready to spread in the garden, I could dig my hands in there and come up with dozens of worms every time. Big, juicy, long, FAT worms, too.

I've got plenty of room to build a large compost bin in my back yard. I could fill it up pretty quickly with grass clippings and semi-rotten vegetables, and I probably could persuade a couple of my neighbors to contribute to the cause, too. It wouldn't take more than a couple of months to have a thriving worm-farm going back there. I'm seriously considering that idea. I'm tired of telling people that I'm retired.

I want to be able to say, "What do I do for a living? I'm a WORM FARMER."

January 19, 2007

Acidman's Fables (Hell with Aesop)

Originally pubilished May 24, 2002

The 76% worshipable woman who sometimes spends the night at my house sent me this message today:

One day a farmer's donkey fell into an abandoned well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do. Finally, he decided the animal was old and the well needed to be covered up anyway, so it just wasn't worth it to him to try to retrieve the donkey.
He invited all his neighbors to come over and help him. They each grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well. Realizing what was happening, the donkey at first cried and wailed horribly. Then, a few shovelfuls later, he quieted down completely. The farmer peered down into the well, and was astounded by what he saw. With every shovelful of dirt that hit his back, the donkey was doing something amazing. He would shake it off and take a step up on the new layer of dirt. As the farmer's neighbors continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up. Pretty soon, the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and trotted off, to the shock and astonishment of all the neighbors!
Life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt.
The trick to getting out of the well is to not let it bury you, but to shake it off and take a step up. Each of our troubles is a stepping-stone. We can get out of the deepest wells just by not stopping, never giving up!
Shake it off and take a step up!
Remember the five simple rules to be happy:
Free your heart from hatred.
Free your mind from worries.
Live simply.
Give more.
Expect less.

Also, the donkey kicked the shit out of the guy that tried to bury him. Which brings me to another moral for this story: When you try to cover your ass, it always comes back and gets you.

I believe she is trying to tell me something in the form of a parable. I don't get it. I believe I will call her tonight and ask her to come over to my house and explain it to me.

Break another little bit of my heart, now darlin'

Originally published May 25, 2002

My young man has fallen out on me. He is asleep, after a grand evening of fun and games with his friends. I just left his bedroom, where I laid my hand on his chest and felt him breathe while I gazed at his handsome face and wished that I had more time with him. I don't appreciate the fact that a bloodless cunt can unilaterally decide that she prefers another man in her bed, screw him behind my back just to make sure, then take me to court and rake me over the coals, have the divorce become final while I am laying like a butchered piece of meat in a hospital bed, and walk away with everything I ever cared about in my life. But the divorce laws of Georgia are set up that way.

Women are victims of society? Bullshit! My bloodless cunt built a revolving door before she made her ultimate move. She tossed me out, moved him in, and never missed a beat in between. One week earlier, we discussed the possibility that I might have prostate cancer. I was waiting on the results of the biopsy (Siso-- you hate details? I could curl your teeth with that story) and she said, "Poof. Rob, you don't have cancer." So, she threw most of my clothes in my truck, packed my other stuff in boxes and filed divorce papers while the dope-smoking lover moved into my home. When I discovered, one week later, that I DID have cancer, she said, "oh, I'm sorry," with all the heartfelt emotion one would expect if I had said "I just lost my Bic cigarette lighter."

I'll never understand that crap if I live to be as old as my grandmother. (When the shit hit the fan, Mommie said,"I always knew she was a bitch, but I thought she was more of a lady than that." The cunt fooled the wisest woman I know.)

I thought she was my partner, my lover and my BEST FRIEND. Obviously, I was delusional. Now, eight months later, I lay my hand on my son's chest, watch him sleep and wonder how HE feels about it all. He made year-long honor roll in school. The babysitter who tends him in the afternoons says he is a wonderful, smart, well-behaved boy. He is all of that and more. He is MY SON!

And I have "visitation" every other week. That unemployed, dope-smoking, hepatitus-C positive (I am NOT making that up) bastard my ex-cunt chose for fresh dick spends more time with my son than I do, and I am not one bit happy about that. If the cunt was going to take a lover, I wish she had aimed a little higher than she did. She is a member of the "Executive Management Team" at work, and she probably will rise higher in the ranks. Still, I would much rather my son grow up to be like ME rather than her, and I certainly hope he turns out better than HIM. I hope my son develops a small streak of integrity, which he will not find in his current environment.

Yeah, HEATHER [Ed. link goes to her May 2002 archives.] I give too many details sometimes. But it's MY blog, MY life and I can screw both up all I want to.

January 18, 2007

Good question

Originally published April 17, 2006

From my interview:

What would I do differently if I had my blog to go back and do over again?
Not a whole lot, really. I never would have used the forbidden N-word--- not because I think I did anything terribly wrong by doing that, but because it just wasn't worth the crap that the post generated. Boy, did I ever get a full dose of sanctimony over THAT.

Talk less badly about my BC ex-wife? Give me a break. I haven't even touched the surface here about what a bitch she really is.

Stayed anonymous? Nah. My ego never would have stood for that. How am I supposed to receive adoration if nobody knows who I am?

Been less controversial? BWHAHAHAHAAA! Next question?

Do I have any regrets about what blogging has cost me? Yeah, some. But those are FAR outweighed by the enjoyment I've had, the people I've met and the pure-ass FUN blogging is for me.

The only thing I would do differently if I had it all to do over again is get my blog started sooner.

Did I have a plan?

Originally published April 18, 2006

Last night I was thinking about my television interview and I worried a little bit. The reporter and his cameraman spent about an hour here at the Crackerbox and they taped a lot of talking for what is supposed to be a fairly lengthy news segment, maybe as much as five minutes long. (I'm not the only blogger they interviewed.)

I know enough about how television news is produced to realize that what I said and what they do with my words may be two entirely different things when the story hits the air. I was open and honest when I answered their questions, and that shit can backfire on you in the hands of someone with malicious intent.

I don't believe that the reporters were plotting any evil, but I could be wrong. Oh, well. If I was REALLY worried about how I look in the story, I could have refused the interview. I didn't, so let the chips fall where they may now. (Hell--- I might not even be included in the story at all. But I believe that I'm so handsome, articulate, charasmatic and humble that they can't possibly leave ME out!)

I revisited this question last night: "Did you have a plan when you started your blog?"

Shit. A PLAN??? I never had a real good plan for my fucking LIFE, let alone a plan for this blog. I just wanted to write and have somebody read me. I had no idea when I started that my blog would be anything other than a vent for my emotions and a reason to write every day. I never dreamed that the damned thing would cause so much trouble and still give me so much joy.

I just threw stuff at the wall to see if anything stuck there. It did. If that's a plan, then I had one...

January 17, 2007

Just thinking

Originally published May 29, 2005

*Did you ever notice that Matt Dillon has no beard? No matter how many days he's out on the trail, he never shows even a five-o'clock shadow. Amazing! How can a guy that bad and that ballsy have a face that never even grows peach fuzz?

*Three of the most absolutely gag-me chunks of cheese you can find in television reruns are "The Time Tunnel," "Alias Smith and Jones" and "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea." BEJUS, but those shows suck! All three were hits in their time.

*I would add "Lost in Space" to that list, but that show managed to become so cheesy that it was it was good, if you like really rancid cheese. "DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!" That series is kinda like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It sucks so bad that it pulls you in.

*I saw George Lindsay as a villain on "Gunsmoke" today, long before he ever played "Goober Pyle" on the "Andy Griffith Show." He acted just like Goober except he wore a cowboy hat.

*I cannot take Larry King seriously. I'm sorry, but the guy just makes me think of a lizard when I see him. If he's a serious "journalist," I'm a goddam jet pilot. The man is a clown, complete with red suspenders.

*My five favorite character actors of all time are Bruce Dern, Jack Elam, Strother Martin, Denver Pyle and Slim Pickins. Close runners-up are Ben Johnson, LQ Jones, Dub Taylor, Jeremy Slate and Dennis Hopper. Did you know that Slim and Ben were rodeo cowboys before they got into acting?

*And YES!!! I am bow-legged. I shoulda been a cowboy myself.

(UPDATE: I don't know how I forgot Warren Oates on my list of favorite character actors. That guy was almost as toothy and nasty as Bruce Dern.)

Nothing pains me more

Originally published May 30, 2005

Forget about my belly-pains. I'm a grown man. I can handle it.

But if you want to break my stone-cold heart, just tell me story such as this one. Yes, tears come to my eyes.

I didn't grow up with all the bells and whistles that a lot of kids have today, but I had a mama and a daddy who loved me and I always knew where home was, even long after I moved out of "the house." That door was always open to me, no matter what.

I pity children who don't know that feeling.

January 16, 2007

Dignity

Originally published July 25, 2003

I don't want to hear any shit about how somebody's dying daddy was SO SICK that marijuana suppositories were the only way to treat Dear Old Dad. I CALL BULLSHIT!!!

I was visiting a girlfriend at 5:00 in the afternoon when I received a call from my grandmother, who told me that I needed to get to the hospital right away. My father had taken a turn for the worse and my mother needed some company. I went to the hospital.

My mom was like a zombie from spending so much time at the hospital and my dad resembled a Frankenstein Monster from all the cutting they had done on him. He was hooked up to a morphine pump, an IV and on his way out.

My mama was hopeful. She believed that my dad, her husband of 40-plus years, was gonna make it out of there.

I talked to the doctor, who was a pissant kid 20 years younger than I was. He gave me the scoop. They could amputate both of my father's legs and MAYBE keep him alive for another month. If they left him alone, he would be dead within 24 hours. My only question was, "Can you make SURE he's not in pain?" The doctor said they would give him all the morphine he wanted and he wouldn't even know what was happening.

I read "Lonesome Dove" then gave the book to my father and he always admired the way Gus went out. I would have no more told that doctor to amputate my father's legs than I would have done the deed myself. My dad raised me better than that.

I made the call. Let him go, with no pain. Then, I told my mother that nobody was going to do anything else for Dad except keep him comfortable. I had to call my brother, who was on vacation in Nashville and tell him to get back home as quickly as he could. He and his wife made it back to Savannah around midnight and Dad died at 0700 in the morning.

I watched my father die that night. And there were TWO THINGS the nurses were forbidden to do, because my family would have ripped them limb from limb for trying, and we made that abundantly clear to the "caretakers" who wanted to do it.

"Hmmm... this IV doesn't seem to be working as well as it should. I want to move it to another vein."

You do and you DIE, bitch. You've poked my father enough. Moving that IV won't make a goddam bit of difference and you KNOW IT. Leave the man alone.

"Hmmm... he's sleeping from the morphine, so I'm going to take his temperature rectally. Would you mind leaving the room?"

Would YOU MIND if I took that rectal thermometer out of your hand and shoved it up YOUR ass? That's what I'm going to do if you don't get the fuck out of here. My father is DYING! He doesn't need his temperature taken because it's becoming ambient shortly. Just GO THE FUCK AWAY and let nature take it's course.

Don't give me any shit about marijuana suppositories. Goddam. What cheap leftist shit that is. YOU would have let them move the IV and stick a rectal thermometer up your Dad's ass as he was dying.

I don't need YOUR kind of compassion.

Canadians

Originally published July 25, 2003

The only reason that I don't just trash pot-suppository-stuffing Canadians without mercy is the fact that Gordon Lightfoot, one of my Primary Influences in music, is Canadian. I cannot trash ALL Canadians without trashing him, and I refuse to do that. My twelve-string playing is all Gordon, and that ain't bad. My finger-picking is a combination of Gordon and early Paul Simon. I also practiced some banjo rolls to go with it, and I believe that I can three-finger pick with anybody I've ever met, except when I'm drunk.

Liquor slows down my twitch muscles tremendously.

Give me an electric guitar and I play BETTER when I am semi-drunk. You don't need as much precision on electric and a nice foot pedal covers up a lot of mistakes. You just let that baby bark, and you always have the luxury of bending lighter gauge strings to get the note where it should have been before you fucked it up. Do it right, and the non-musicians think you did it on purpose. Your correction of fuck-ups sound halfway GOOD sometimes.

The rest of the band may want to take you outside and beat the shit out of you during the first break when you stink like that, but they'll get over it as long as nobody boos.

Okay, now to the point of this post (as if I ever had one). Can anybody name ONE GREAT CANADIAN electric guitar player?

I can't.

What I don't like about where I live

Originally published July 8, 2003

We've had one of those pesky "Bermuda Highs" hovering off the coast for about the past five days. It churns clockwise and pumps the weather you'd expect in Key West right into Southeast Georgia, except it leaves out the breeze.

The air is thick and humid. The temperature is 91 degrees, but the heat index is 15 degrees higher. The smokestacks at work just go straight up into the air and die there, as if they forgot where they were supposed to blow. Everybody gets cranky because sweat doesn't evaporate under those conditions. It just forms a poison running all over your body and it goes straight to your brain. When you are DRIPPING with it, you are not a pleasant person to be around.

I love living down South, because I have enough wonderful spring-fall-winter weather to make me forget about these miserable, sweaty summers until they descend on me again. Then, I must declare that I live next-door to the Gates of Hell. Shit. When the weather gets like THIS, even Satan will offer you a glass of iced tea.

He has more mercy than Mother Nature does.

January 15, 2007

Yankees

Originally published August 27, 2004

I rant frequently about yankees. I truly DO believe that they live a different life than we do Down South, because the manners are different, the weather is different and the food is different. But they remain Americans, just like me.(Unless they put sugar on grits. Then, they MUST be dragged off and shot.)

I learned something interesting in Costa Rica when I was taking Spanish lessons from the bartender in the hotel. She had a book filled with American idioms that she couldn't understand. I can remember a few: "Go fly a kite." "That's a rough row to hoe." "Shoot the moon." "Go jump in the lake."

There were plenty of others and I tried to explain them to her, but eyes started glazing after a while. "It doesn't make SENSE!" she protested. I suppose not. I learned that Spanish has its own idioms that don't translate well.

I also told the bartender that she was talking to an American from the deep South and if she went to New York City (where every Costa Rican I talked to seems to be dying to visit) she would hear a totally different language. She gave me a pen and a bar napkin and I drew a rough map of the USA. I divided it into four distinct regions.

#1) The deep South. People there talk the way I do and they tend to have an accent that nobody studying English as a second language will understand.

#2) The midwest. That's where Standard American English comes from. Just look at how many newscasters and radio personalities come from the midwest.

#3) The northeast. Sweet Bejus!!! Pawk the Caw in the Gawage. Cuber (not "Cuba"). I don't consider New York City to be part of the northeast, because a totally different language is spoken there, but I didn't want to make my bartender any more confused than she already was.

#4) Pure yankee. Those are people from Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois and all parts around there. You want to tell the difference between a Southerner and a yankee? Just ask them to say, "nice, white rice." You can tell right away where THAT person came from.

I left the far west out of my sermon because I hadn't been there yet. I DID tell the bartender that people from California are easy to spot because they use "you know" and "it was like" all the time because they are inarticulate nut-heads.

Then she told me that Costa Rica has four different accents depending on what part of THAT country you happen to be in. Hell--- Costa Rica is about the size of Georgia--- how can THEY have four distinct accents? It was all Spanish to me.

But then I thought... I know the difference in my home state between the people who live below the fall line and those who live above it. WE DO NOT TALK THE SAME WAY.

If you have an ear for accents, the USA is an incredible place to be. If you like diversity in speech, we've got it. It's like music to me sometimes.

But we Southerners are gonna teach those yankees to talk right someday. The blogfest might be a start.

Jawja crackers

Originally published August 27, 2004

When I was young, somebody told me that the term "Georgia Cracker" came from back in the days when Atlanta was still called Terminus, and all the railroads intersected there. Farmers would drive their wagons loaded with cotton and tobacco into town to sell to the factors there.

Supposedly, the people driving the wagons used whips with special tips on the end that make a loud CRACK! when they snapped that whip over their horses or mules. People in the factor houses could hear them coming a mile away. "Here comes another cracker," they said, long before they saw the wagon.

If that story isn't true, it should be. The term "Cracker" today is a racial slur that means an ignnorant Southern red-neck. Or ANY racist bastard with a simian brow, a Confederate flag, four teeth and a chaw of Red Man in his cheek. The same people who are shocked... SHOCKED, mind you, by the notorious N-word don't have a problem calling Southerners "Crackers," and they mean it as an insult.

But that's not what the word means to me. It means good ole boys and pretty wimmen, hot days and languid evenings, sand gnats and mosquitoes, grits and eggs, friendly people and good dogs, pickup trucks and firearms. I LIKE that stuff.

So, I call myself a Cracker. I AM ONE!!!

January 14, 2007

Sea sick

Originally published April 13, 2006

I made my first trip to Key West in 1978 aboard the Blue Fin, the Skidaway Island Oceanographic Institute's research vessel. The Blue Fin once was a shrimp boat, but it was intercepted by the US Coast Guard while carrying a load of marijuana instead of shrimp, and the boat later was sold at auction in Miami. The state of Georgia bought it and converted it into a research boat.

The Blue Fin was 80' long (if I remember correctly--- it might have been 60'--- I thought it was a pretty BIG boat), powered by two humongous diesel engines and equipped with large stabilizing anchors to deploy over the sides in rough seas. The boat had a regular crew of five people, and when we loaded up with me and a few scientists from the Institute, a total of twelve souls were on board for the Key West trip.

Believe it or not, we were headed to the warm waters of the keys to collect a special kind of seaweed, which would be used as worm food in an experiment involving (I am NOT making this up!) harvesting the methane from sea-worm farts as an alternative energy source. (Remember--- this was 1978, Carter was President and we were suffering an energy "crisis." Energy research dollars were plentiful, no matter how ridiculous the research.)

We left Skidaway Island at sunrise on a chilly, overcast morning in October. Cold rain misted from the slate-gray sky and a brisk wind blew robustly from the east. The local weather report carried a small craft warning and predictions of strong winds offshore, with seas 15 to 20 feet. Hell--- when we weighed anchor and left the dock, I was all a-twitter with excitement. I had no idea what I had gotten my ass into.

For those of you who have never been in 20-foot seas, I'll just say this: it's a goddam impressive sight and those waves make for one VERY impressive ride. Even with the stabilizers down and dragging, that boat tossed like a cork on the water. If you hung onto the rail and looked overboard, you'd find yourself staring down into a deep, watery chasm one minute, then staring UP at a mountain of ocean that blotted out the sky the next. Back and forth it went, all day long.

That was a VERY rough ride.

I was one of four people on board who did NOT get seasick. I spent all day up on deck, breathing fresh salt air and getting an occasional glimpse of the horizon between huge ocean swells. Almost everybody else ended up down below, suffering the tortures of the damned.

I tried to make it to my rack sometime that evening, but I took one step down the hatch and had to retreat quickly back out on deck. The smell of vomit in the crew quarters was so strong that you didn't smell it--- it reached out like a gnarly hand and choked you by the neck. I knew that I never would survive a night down in THAT hell-hole.

I ended up spending the night on the bridge, talking to the First Mate, a guy named Zack who pulled the graveyard shifts while the Captain slept. Zack was the son of a shrimper and he had been on the water since he was a little boy. He told me something interesting about seasickness.

Zack said that he had been seasick once in his life. Never as a boy and never as a young man. Never in rough seas or in storms. Never when hung-over and burping tequila fumes. He got sick as a sober grown man in the Gulf of Mexico on a beautiful day when the sea was as smooth as the surface of a mirror. He said that it hit him out of the blue, he barfed and heaved for 24 hours, he prayed for death, he thought he was GONNA die and then... he recovered, never to be seasick again.

"At least not yet," Zach added, at the end of his story.

That's why, although I've never been seasick in my life, I still feel a little trepidation when I head offshore in a boat. Since that night on the Blue Fin, I've met several other bleached-out sea-dogs who told stories similar to Zack's. Evidently, you can be on the water for YEARS and never have a problem, then have seasickness hit you like a ton of bricks for no good reason. (Except maybe to teach you some humility so that you feel sympathy and not scorn the next time you see someone get seasick.)

So, I don't laugh at you lubbers who can't make it out of the sound into deep water before you start talking to Ralph and Huey over the side and chumming the water before we're ready to fish. I'll be nice to you. Maybe my time is yet to come.

You know, I AM planning on a sailboat ride to Beliz this summer... all the way across the Gulf of Mexico...

Public bathrooms

Originally published April 14, 2006

At the risk of pissing off a few people (yeah... I lose a lot of sleep worrying about doing THAT), I want to state a fact I learned the hard way when I was young: Wimmen fuck up a public bathroom worse than men do.

I'm not talking about peeing on the floor--- MEN are bad about that--- I'm talking about doing really disgusting things.

When I was 14 years old, I worked at a hamburger joint called "Chip's Drive In" on Waters Avenue in Savannah. On the night shift, one of my many duties after closing time was cleaning the bathrooms. Bejus! I learned to DESPISE that part of my job. It also destroyed my naive belief in the nobility of mankind.

The public bathrooms at the drive-in were located OUTSIDE the restaurant, at the back of the building. People could come and go as they pleased, without a lot of witnesses. When I went back there with my bucket, mop and disinfectant to muck out the mess, I never knew what I was going to find. Usually, it was pretty bad.

A typical men's room experience meant mopping several gallon of urine off the floor, cleaning greasy fingerprints and urine from the sink, and reading new grafitti, such as "St. Francis was a sissy" on the walls. I could usually handle that job by propping the door open, standing outside with a water hose and washing the place out before attempting to mop. Then, I could just mop, wipe, replace the pull-down towel in the sink rack, put fresh toilet paper on the roller and be out of there.

I always cleaned the men's room first. About the worst things I ever found in there was blood in the sink (probably the result of someone attempting to clean up after a drunken fist-fight) or an overflowing commode, plugged with a giant five-pound turd. Those problems, I could handle, even though I didn't like doing it.

But the ladies' room was different. Open THAT door and you entered an alternate universe, a world of incredibly disgusting filth and corruption. Bejus! That towel rack on the wall? Some sweet flower of Southern womanhood unrolled half of it and left shit-crusted HAND PRINTS all over the towel. How the hell did a woman ever get that much shit ON HER HANDS? And why did she wipe her hands ON THE TOWEL instead of using the sink to clean up?

Overflowing commode? Yep, got it right here, but NOT from a five-pound turd-pluggage. Just half a roll of toilet paper, used to daub the dew from the lilly and then becoming a soggy mass too large for the toilet to handle.

Sometimes, I saw SHIT ON THE FLOOR, something I never saw in the men's room. My Personal Protective Equipment consisted of elbow-length rubber gloves and nothing else. After entering that hell-hole a couple of times, I wanted a level-A Haz-Mat suit, complete with self-contained breathing apparatus, before I opened the door.

Fairer sex, my ass. I've SEEN what you ladies can to to a public bathroom. It ain't a pretty sight.

I've often wondered if cleaning those bathrooms as a young man is the reason I grew up to be such a misogynist today. I've often accused wimmen of possessing a "cleaning gene" that men lack, but they use it only in domestic settings, where they like to put frilly lid-covers on the commode so that the damn thing won't stay up by itself and a man has to piss by grabbing his Roscoe with one hand and holding the lid up with the other.

But they damn sure ignore that genetic "clean" instinct when it ain't THEIR bathroom they're using. I've seen evidence that wimmen can piss on a wall as well as men can, and even BETTER if you consider the contortion efforts involved to do so.

And SOME wimmen will dispose of a used tampon just about ANYWHERE...
But I'm not going to go there.

No wonder I am king of the crap-bloggers. I was tramautized when I was 14 years old.

January 13, 2007

Bullshit statistics

Originally published February 3, 2002

Did you know that someone dies from the effects second-hand smoke every 23 seconds in this country?

OF COURSE YOU DIDN'T "KNOW!" I MADE THAT CRAP UP! But idiotic statements such as mine are reported as fact over and over again by a press that either is too lazy to check the numbers or too willing to run with them because they fit the right agenda. Gun control morons, date-rape scaremongers, anti-smoke Nazis, environmental dingbats and a host of other single-issue advocates simply pull such "statistics" out of thin air, throw them to a hungry press and stand back while the barracudas feed. And a lot of people actually BELIEVE this nonsense.

Think of all the children who have been poisoned by TAINTED HALLOWEEN CANDY and you'll get the picture.

Someone is killed by a handgun every 5 seconds in this country.
Another endangered species disappears from the planet every 10 seconds in this country.
A woman is the victim of domestic abuse every 15 seconds in this country.
And second-hand smoke kills another non-smoker every 23 seconds in this country.

You can't argue with numbers such as those.

Damage control

Originally published February 7, 2002

A few years ago I rode an Amtrak train from Savannah to Orlando. My son was three years-old at the time and my wife (who was still my darling back then) and I decided that a train ride to Bush Gardens would be a lot better for him than a five-hour car ride. The experience was completely miserable. I knew something was amiss when I went to the club car and ordered a Bloody Mary. They were out of tomato juice. So, I ordered a vodka and grapefruit juice. They were out of grapefruit juice. So, I ordered a vodka on the rocks and, you guessed it, they were out of vodka. Finally, I asked, "WHAT AREN'T YOU OUT OF?" The answer was Budweiser and Miller Lite beer.

We ended up spending most of the trip in the club car anyway, because by the time we reached Jacksonville the club car had the only bathroom on the entire train that wasn't fouled with unflushable human waste, overflowing with human waste or marked "Out of Order."

In Orlando we spent a couple of nervous days watching Hurricane Bertha head toward Florida but we relaxed when it turned northeast and spun harmlessly off into the Atlantic. Bertha was churning somewhere in the ocean about 500 miles off the North Carolina coast when we were supposed to catch the Amtrak back home. But all train travel was cancelled because of the hurricane. There we were, stuck in a train station somewhere in the seamy underbelly of Orlando with our luggage and a whiney three year-old. When I asked for a refund for half of my round-trip ticket fare, I was told that the trip south cost more than the return trip back north and I would receive only 3/4 of the ticket value.

I astutely reminded the ticket agent that any fool could look a a globe and see that going south is DOWNHILL while going north is UPHILL, so how in the hell could the southern leg of this incredible journey cost more than the return trip? "That's just the way it is," she replied. So, I cashed the tickets for what I could get, rode a cab to the nearest rent-a-car establishment and drove home. I beat the Amtrak train by two hours. Well, I beat the SCHEDULED ARRIVAL TIME by two hours, but I actually beat the train by about three days, which is how long it took Amtrak to start running again.

So, in the midst of the Enron mudfight, take a look at the GOVERNMENT VERSION of the same thing.

January 12, 2007

I'll have mine rare

Originally published August 27, 2003

I've made no secret of how much I hate cats. I really wouldn't having a problem shooting one. In fact, I HAVE, with a pellet rifle, but I pumped it up only enough to make the cat do a back-flip and stop shitting in my garden.

I would NEVER do this to a cat. Bejus! That's just over the top.

I have a confession to make. I am not as mean as I sound sometimes. I shoot snakes, chop their heads off with golf clubs and kill squirrels all the time. I'll trap, shoot or stomp a rat. Insects I don't like die in my presence. I've shot three rabid racoons and killed a possum once because the bastard was ACTING like a rabid racoon. I've executed more yard-trashing armadillos than I can recall.

But I cannot find the kind of cruelty in my heart that is necessary to seriously torture fuzzy animals for no good reason. If I'm going to kill one, I'll make it quick.

Cat-lovers may have a difficult time with that post. I HATE CATS and I didn't like it.

BWHAHAHA!!!

Originally published August 27, 2003

Whaddaya know? One of the original crew is getting gang-banged on blogrolls. Good for him.

I HAVE met this blogger in person. I got him drunk and then fed him home-cooking in a mountain cabin in North Georgia. He met Recondo 32 and his lovely wife, Georgia. I ALSO almost instigated a divorce between Dax and his wife because of the way I corrupted him.

I'm not certain that he can handle fame.

Once again

Originally published August 13, 2003

I present to you the most under-rated blogger in all of Blogdom.

I had a "pee-pee" when I was little. That's what Mom told me to wash. I tell Quinton to wash his "peep eye." I wasn't raised around wimmen, so I can't comment about their early hygene from any real experience. I always told my daughter to wash her "privates." I didn't know what else to say.

Do wimmen have cute names for their privates? How do you you tell your kids to wash them?

January 11, 2007

Catfish

Originally published April 30, 2005

I like to fish. I am NOT a Bill Dance kind of fisherman and I doubt that I'll ever win a tournament among really good competetors. In fact, my idea of a good day fishing is to sit in a boat and drink beer with my shirt off while I enjoy the sunshine. If I catch some fish, that's fine. If I DON'T catch any fish, that's fine, too.

I've caught a lot of bream around here where I live. Worms or crickets make good bait, but I've seen bream bite on bread-balls, too, if you get into a hungry swarm of them. If you catch them "bedding," you can tear their asses up.

"Bedding" is when the female lays her eggs on the river bottom and the male comes around to squirt his manly juices all over them. They don't have face-to-face sex. The female just lays a few thousand unfertilized eggs and the male swims by to fertilize them. And he won't swim away, either, as long as he still has a stirring in his fishy loins. (Do fish have loins?)

Catch a male bream during the bedding and he feels like he's been greased with vasoline. He'll also jet a stream of cum all over the place while you're trying to get the hook out of his mouth. Those fish are totally hormone-driven at that time of year. Some of the redbreast and bluegills are damn near as big as a dinner plate, too.

Bream are bony fish, but I believe that they are delicious pan-fried. I've learned to pick out the bones and enjoy the fish. Just gut 'em, scale 'em and cut off the heads. They are ready to cook.

But my FAVORITE fresh-water catch is catfish. I usually use chicken livers or some other really funky bait for them, but I don't think the bait really matters. A catfish will eat anything. Just bait your hook and put enough weight on it to make it sink to the bottom. A catfish will find it there.

Once you catch one, the fun really begins. You can't just grab a catfish in your bare hands the way you would would a bream. That cat has barbs behind his gills and he'll throw those razor-blade-like contraptions out as soon as you haul him out of the water. Getting a catfish off your hook without being cut or stabbed is a delicate art. I've seen a lot of blood in a boat from someone mishandling a catfish.

After you catch them, you've got some work to do. Catfish have SKIN, not scales on them. I used to nail their heads to a tree, cut all around the head and then use a set of needle-nosed pliers to pull the skin offa them. After that, gut them, cut the head off and cook them.

You end up with delicious, tender, white fish-meat, with very few bones in it. Breaded and fried, they are incredibly good. For a turd-wrestler, a catfish makes good eating. When I pooted around running a trot-line, I caught as many as fifty in a single day.

You wanna fuck with a rookie over some catfish? Just tell him to stick his hand in the cooler and haul out a fish. He'll get cut by one of those slashing barbs and damn near pull back a nub where his hand once was. I once saw a guy get his foot stuck to the bottom of the boat when he dropped a catfish when the barbs were out.

The fish landed on his foot and one of the fins went clean through his flesh and penetrated the bottom of the boat. He was stuck there as if he had been nailed. What really made it funny was the fact that he was demonstrating a home-made catfish de-hooker at the time. It was a device he made out of a coathanger.

"You just run this loop down the line, find the hook, then twist like this... and... BEJUS! GODDAM! OY, OY OY!"

Actually, his invention was a good one. I have one of my own and I have used it many a time. I like to catch catfish. I just try never to drop one on my bare foot. And I keep a pair of work gloves in my tackle box, just in case.

You ever done much fishing for catfish?

Bill Mahr

Originally published April 30, 2005

I don't know why I ever watch his show. I always end up throwing my TV brick at the smarmy sumbitch. I learned last night that all Southern conservatives are snake-handling jesus freaks. Martin Short was right there on Bill's side to throw in his wisdom about snake-handling conservatives.

One of these guys is an effite jew who lives in California and the other is a prick from Canada. I wanted to thrust myself onto the screen and ask, "How many snake-handlers have YOU ever seen, you self-righteous assholes?"

I already know the answer: NONE!

Some crazy religious people do handle snakes in the South. I've seen such a ceremony twice in my 53 years of life, and both times I went to see it the way someone would pay a quarter at the county fair to watch a geek bite the head off a live chicken. It was a bizarre show--- not what most Southern people do every day.

I resent a fucked-up California asshole and a Canadian asswipe just stating, as if it were pure fact, that handling snakes is a common practice in the South. It isn't. Only a few real loonies do that kind of crap, and they don't have a large following. But the audience applauded like thunder when Bill and Martin made fun of the South that way.

That show is an abortion. The audience is a bunch of kool-ade drinking idiots. Bill Mahr needs to be dragged off and shot. Pompous ass. I saw him retreat twice last night when confronted with actual facts. His response was "Well, everybody knows..." Oh. They DO? He is Ted Rall without a comic strip.

Why is the N-word forbidden while it's perfectly okay for some pasty-faced prick from California to defame the entire South? Why does the audience laugh when these undocumented slurs are cast out like truth?

I suppose that's it's a combination of Bill Mahr and California. Shit plus shit equals shit.

January 10, 2007

Northern chivalry

Originally published May 3, 2002

YOU GOTTA LOVE THIS! I'll admit that I like pretty feet on a woman. I have many fetishes, and that is one of them. I wonder if this bellicose BAREFOOT WOMAN [Ed. Link borked.] wore red toenail polish, which is my favorite. Kick off your shoes and GO, girl!

Can you imagine this professional thug explaining his arrest to his fellow thugs in the hoosegow? "Well, I stole the gold chain, made a run for it, and that little twat chased me down, tackled me and kept me pinned until the law arrived."

All the true felons would play a scene from ALICE'S RESTAURANT and move far away from him, so he has lots of space all by himself on the "Group W" bench. If I were the thief, I would never tell THAT story to anybody.

But I remain amazed that a 95-pound woman, screaming for help at the top of her lungs, can chase a thief through a crowd in New York City and have the crowd simply watch the show and applaud when she grabs the bad guy. Nobody offered any assistance. Nobody felt the absolute, spiritual obligation to DO SOMETHING to help. They simply watched, and if the bad guy had pulled a knife out of his pocket and slashed her throat, they probably would have watched that, too, and done NOTHING.

Call us ignorant, slack-jawed, mouth-breathing, racist Bubbas down South, but that disgusting display of apathy would never happen where I live. Chivalry is NOT DEAD in southeast Georgia. The thief would be tackled by the first man who had a shot at him (or SHOT by the first man who had a tackle at him), the nearest bystanders would join in to thoroughly rough him up, and he would be held immobile, in a very uncomfortable position, until the local law enforcement authorities arrived to cart his sorry ass off to jail. In the meantime, more than one Southern Gentleman would ask the woman, "Ma'am, are you all right? Is there anything I can get you?"

This story really makes me feel badly for the bloggers from New York, who made a great deal of grieving, tumultious noise about how 9/11 changed that city. I have unfortunate news for them: IT DIDN'T! As soon as the cleanup was done, you went right back to that self-centered, navel-gazing unmannered style of behavior you've perfected over many years. You live in a busy city, with a diverse population, with every individual convinced that eye contact, let alone involvement, with a stranger (unless you're trying to get laid) is a sin against nature. I suppose a spark of instinctual humanity is difficult to maintain in such a setting.

That's why I have no desire EVER to live there. I like Effingham County, in rural southeast Georgia, where I lock my doors when I think of it, but sometimes don't. I like having a sweaty newspaper reporter knock on my door and having no fear when I invite him into my house. I like owning lots of guns. I like my garden in the back yard. I like having all the kids in the neighborhood stomp my grass crop into oblivion when they play their games in my yard. I like knowing that if I ask one of my neighbors for a favor, I'll probably get it. And if they ask me, they will, too.

I like knowing that if a barefoot woman screaming for help chases a thief down the street where I live, she will get more help than she needs. I like knowing the THIEVES know it,

Tree rats

Originally published March 8, 2002

I hate TREE RATS, better know as "squirrels" to people who believe these disgusting, destructive pests are "cute" because they have fuzzy tails. I have waged a constant, merciless 10-year war on tree rats, and the only thing I have accomplished is to grow a grudging respect for my worthy foe. Like its first-cousin, the gutter rat, and its brother, the wharf rat, tree rats are clever, resourceful and unbelievably determined to go places you don't want them to go and to do things you don't want them to do.

I first declared war when I put a couple of bird feeders in the backyard of the first home I shared with my ex-wife. I bought some galvanized pipe, fashioned a nice T-bar at the top of a 10-foot stick, and sunk the stick a couple of feet in the ground, where I anchored it with concrete. Then, I hung a big bird feeder loaded with all sorts of bird-goodies on each end of the T-bar. I barely made it back inside the house before both feeders were swarming with fuzzy-tailed tree rats, who raked all the small stuff out onto the ground to get at the sunflower seeds they preferred. Within two hours, they had emptied both feeders, gnawed one of the wooden bird-roost bars in half and ruined my entire day.

I grabbed my cap and car keys and headed off to buy a pellet gun, but my ex-wife protested vociferiously about me shooting any of those cute little creatures, especially in the neighborhood where we lived, which was in a wildlife protection area. I could go to jail. I might miss a squirrel and put a child's eye out. Why would I want to kill a cute little squirrel, anyway?

I've always been amazed at some people's capacity to bleed straight from the heart and drip compassion like tree sap when it comes to a squirrel, then turn around and treat people the way that twisted sister in Fort Worth did the homeless man she brought home as a hood ornament and left stuck through the windshield of her car for two days until he died. My ex-wife is a lot like that.

But I acceeded to her wishes. Instead of a pellet gun, I bought a can of heavy-duty, water-insoluable grease, and I put a thick layer of it all over the pole. The squirrels were bamboozled. They would run up and jump on the pole, then slide down no matter how hard they worked their climbing muscles. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts, they would run away and fall off power lines or out of trees because their greasy little paws could find no purchase. Finally, they stopped trying to climb the pole. I declared victory until the bastards learned to climb the pine tree nearby, run to the end of a limb about ten feet away, and take a wild, batman-like leap at the feeders. If they couldn't hit and hang on, they hit and rattled things enough that a few sunflower seeds fell out on the ground and they could eat them there. I sawed the limb off and they immediately figured out that they could do the same thing from the roof of my house. After that, our placid family life was interrupted constantly by the sound of little tree rat claws scurrying across the roof, followed by the crash of a bird feeder. Since I didn't believe sawing off the roof of my house was a good idea, I moved.

We bought a home in Effingham County, and this time I bought a pellet gun BEFORE I put up bird feeders. I was out in the country now. I had nothing but five acres of woods behind my house. Those arguments about putting out a child's eye and being arrested for slaughtering protected wildlife didn't apply anymore. I hung the bird feeders where I had a perfect shot from the laundry room doorway if another tree rat invasion occurred.

It did, of course, even more intense than before. I thought the tree rats were bad in a subdivision. Now, I had FIVE ACRES OF WOODS behind my house. The tree rats came in swarms. I shot many of them. But every time I killed one, two came to take its place. I must have killed over 100 of them, but thousands remained when I moved away from there, too. That's when I bought my mini-farm and learned that there are things worse than squirrels with which to contend when you plant a half-acre garden. I never stopped hating tree rats. But I learned to hate deer, too.

That's why I find this article refreshing to read. Okay, they might be rats in pajamas instead of tree rats. But rats they are.

January 09, 2007

secession

Originally published November 10, 2004

When liberals don't get their way, they can throw pucker-butted temper-tantrums that would put a two year-old brat to shame. Bejus! It's time to start handing out the pacifyers and the pink anti-cholic medicine to these crybabies. And THEY wanted to run the fucking country? Waaah! Waaah! Waaah! What awesome qualifications they have.

Now some of the sore losers are talking about secession--- as if that's supposed to scare the shit out of people in Jesusland. I don't know if I speak for the majority of my fellow Jesusland citizens, but MY humble opinion is-- GET THE FUCK OUT!!! GO!!! Take your whiny, pouty, self-righteous selves to Canada or France or wherever else you want to go. Just GIT!!!

Trust me. We won't miss you.

The idea isn't just a joke; one top Democrat says, "The segment of the country that pays for the federal government is now being governed by the people who don't pay for the federal government."

Isn't that a wonderful piece of irony? Democrats have been working for YEARS to assure that people who didn't pay taxes voted for THEM, and that the Evil Rich would be raped to pay for all the wonderful government largesse dispensed by generous Democrats. Now that the grand plan has blown up in their faces, they are SHOCKED! How can people be so ignorant?

Or, you get this kind of vomitus:

"You know what? Just let me make one point. You were talking about the map before. If indeed all those blue states all got together and seceded from the union, think what would be left for those red states, nothing. There would be no educational system. You would have nothing. What would be left to you? I mean, where is all of this talent in this country? It's on both sides, the Northeast corridor." -Geraldine Ferraro to Sean Hannity on Hannity and Colmes, November 6.

I wish I could buy those people for what they are worth and then sell them for what they THINK they are worth. I'd give Bill Gates a run for his money. Just consider the sheer ARROGANCE and IGNORANCE in Ferraro's remarks. We in Jesusland are "nothing" without the blue states?

Bull. Shit.

We grow your food, asswipe. We shoulder more than our fair share of military duty in this country. While your rustbucket northeast has decayed, our industrial base has thrived. We CREATE jobs while you lose them. You have Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream. We have Wal-Mart.

Yeah, we have our own schools, too... even colleges and universities. And believe it or not, indoor plumbing, running water and decent medical care are available in Jesusland, as primitive as we may be. Our weather is better, our wimmen are more beautiful and our men are more manly than that pack of botoxed harridans and gelded Alan Aldas you have freezing your asses off up north.

Fuck you and the misguided high horse you ride.

You know the biggest favor you could do for us ignert red-necks? SECEEDE!! Take your spoiled, candy asses to Canada or France and stop calling yourself Americans when you aren't. You people hate the very things we hold dear in Jesusland: Hard work. Self-reliance. Independence. Love of country. Honesty. Minding your own business. Respect for your fellow man.

You people have been holding us back from our true potential for decades. So, do us a favor and get the hell out of our way. But once you leave, don't ask to come back. You never liked it here anyway.

I LIKE it here. I just don't like YOU.

They never grew up

Originally published November 8, 2004

Once upon a time, I was a liberal. Yes, sweet children, it's true. In 1968, I wanted George McGovern to become President. I wasn't old enough to vote at the time, but I was a McGovern fan. I thought the guy had a lot of good ideas.

I was as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.

I remained fairly liberal through my first couple of years of college. I was young, dumb and full of cum, living in a psychedelic world full of idealism and ignorance. I never opposed the Vietnam War, and I never joined a protest, because I knew too many guys fighting there, and to be against the war was to oppose THEM in my mind. I couldn't do that. I played football with a lot of those guys.

But I never volunteered to go fight myself. I won the draft lottery and was delighted with my good fortune. Had I been drafted, I would have gone. But I didn't have to... lucky me.

I don't know when exactly I started to evolve into the person I am now, but I think it started with an English Literature course called: "Existentialism: Man in the Face of Chaos." I got really carried away there. I read every book required for the course, plus a lot of other stuff I ran across in bibliographies. It blew my mind.

People had been pondering "What is the True Meaning of Life" and writing about it for centuries. No two of those great philosophers agreed on what life really means. That's when I decided: That question has no universal answer.

My basic philosophy NOW is, "We're all in this alone. Then, we die." Yeah, I am a jaded old fart, but I try to live a good life, not out of fear of punishment, but because it's the right thing to do. That's MY decision. Once I abandoned the concept of a "Brotherhood of Man," my liberal inclinations drained out of me like used motor oil, but that transformation didn't turn me into an evil man.

I just stopped swallowing the cant and started thinking for myself. I believe that I grew up.

Too many leftists can't do that today.

January 08, 2007

Dogs vs. Cats

Originally published January 6, 2006

Cat lovers may adore their haughty, French-acting felines, but I prefer dogs. Cats act as if they're doing you a favor by living in your house, eating storebought food, clawing furniture to shreds, pissing on curtains and shitting in potted plants. Take really good care of them and they'll display their gratitude by hacking up a hairball on your carpet.

Let's see a got-dam cat do something like this: [Ed. Link goes to same front page as the other Netscape link in the next post does. At least I'm consistant.]

"The dog approached her owner, who was lying on the ground in a pool of blood, and saw the infant... she snatched up the baby's leg with her mouth and rescued him from drowning," she said. [...] "...the boy finally breathed and cried out after the dog licked him on the face..."

Can you see a CAT doing that? I'm trying to visualize it in my mind's eye... Naw... Can't see it. All I can see is a cat walking away with its tail in the air while thinking, "Fuck this crap. None of MY business. I ain't gettin' involved."

The only thing that would bother a cat about this incident is the fact that nobody was around to open the door so that it could go outside and kill baby birds.

(UPDATE: Loyal reader Brian Cost sent me this link to prove, once again, that cats can't be trusted. Especially beware of the ones that scream and attack dogs.)

I ain't believin' this

Originally published January 2, 2006

I don't like cats. I don't like a damn THING about cats. Cats are haughty, rotten, selfish, cold-blooded killers that ALL need to be dragged off and shot.

I don't think cats really like people, either. They just USE people for free meals and a warm place to sleep. Piss a cat off and it will shit in your bed. On purpose, the no-good bastard.

That's why I have a problem believing this story. [Ed. Link goes to front page, not relevant article.] A cat might call 911 to save its OWN ass, but it ain't gonna lift a paw to help anyone else. That's just the way cats are, kinda like the French. Ungrateful shits.

A dog probably made that call and the cat just took credit for it.

THIS is more like a cat:

A Cat's Diary (sent to me by Ruth Moran)

DAY 752
My captors continue to taunt me with bizarre little dangling objects. They dine lavishly on fresh meat, while I am forced to eat dry cereal. The only thing that keeps me going is the hope of escape, and the mild satisfaction I get from ruining the occasional piece of furniture. Tomorrow I may eat another houseplant.

DAY 761
Today my attempt to kill my captors by weaving around their feet while they were walking almost succeeded. I must try this at the top of the stairs. In an attempt to disgust and repel these vile oppressors, I once again induced myself to vomit on their favorite chair... must try this on their bed.

DAY 765
Decapitated a mouse and brought them the headless body, in an attempt to make them aware of what I am capable of, and to try to strike fear into their hearts. They only cooed and condescended about what a good little cat I was. Hmmm... Not working according to plan.

DAY 768
I am finally aware of how sadistic they are. For no good reason I was chosen for the water torture. This time however, it included a burning foamy chemical called "shampoo." What sick minds could invent such a liquid? My only consolation is the piece of thumb still stuck between my teeth.

DAY 770
There was some sort of gathering of their accomplices. I was placed in solitary throughout the event. However, I could hear the noise and smell the foul odor of the glass tubes they call "beer." More importantly, I overheard that my confinement was due to my power of "allergies." Must learn what this is and how to use it to my advantage.

DAY 773
I am convinced the other captives are flunkies and maybe snitches. The dog is routinely released and seems more than happy to return. He is obviously a half-wit. The bird, on the other hand, has got to be an informant and speaks with them regularly. I am certain he reports my every move. Due to his current placement in the metal room, his safety is assured. But I can wait, it is only a matter of time...

January 07, 2007

Encounters

Originally published September 29, 2002

Have you ever seen a real, live porcupine in the woods? I have. I was hiking in the Cahutta Wilderness in North Georgia on a crisp fall day. The trail was fairly steep, overhung with rhododendron, and I was in bulldog-low-gear, holding the straps on my pack and trudging along with my mind engaged in astral projection. I learned to do that a long time ago on steep trails. I keep putting one foot in front of the other, start a song playing in my head, and leave my body to do the grunt-work while my mind soars somewhere far away. The plan was working well that day until I heard a tremedous rustling in the brush on the downhill side of the trail.

I retreived my astral self and stood still, ready to duck and cover, waiting for a wild hog or a rutting deer to come charging out of the woods and run me over. That's when the damned porcupine came waddling out onto the trail right in front of me.

It paid me no attention whatsoever as it waddled and snuffled its way up the trail. I followed for a few yards, then walked right up next to the critter. It still paid me no attention, but I was paying CLOSE attention to it. A porcupine is an amazing construction. It sports several different lengths and shapes of quills all over its body and the bristling array is VERY impressive. No wonder it pays no attention to anything around it.

COP 3 was about 20 yards behind me on the trail, and I yelled for him to come look. He did. "Goddam! That's a porcupine," he said. (Cop 3 is very astute about such things.) We walked alongside the porcupine for about a hundred yards. It stopped occasionally to sniff a particularly interesting scent on the trail, and we stopped, too. It started waddling again, and we followed along. Finally, it made an abrupt left turn off the trail and went crashing through the underbrush down the mountain.

"Reckon you could eat one of those things?" I asked.

"I don't see why not," Cop 3 said. "It comes with built-in toothpicks."

Better to have 'em and not need 'em...

Originally published October 5, 2002

I own several guns, and the 76% Worshipable Woman carries a .38 revolver in her purse. It's a nice Ladysmith, but I told her last night that unless she practices a LOT with it (she has never fired the thing), she had better be able to touch her target with the 2" barrel, or she'll miss.

Of couse, that's not a bad thing. That little hand-cannon makes enough noise that she could point it straight up at the ceiling and fire away if she heard a burglar in the house. The would-be thieving bastard would take out window glass and screen, leaving a shit-trail on the floor as he ran for his worthless life. A Ladysmith is LOUD outdoors. Fire one inside a house and you'll think hellzapoppin'.

She wants another, more powerful and accurate weapon for home protection. I recommended a 410 shotgun.

I don't know if ARMED LIBERAL would agree, but I believe that a 410 is the ideal firearm for dealing with footpads and critters, inside or outside the house. It is easy to handle, you don't need to stick bricks in your back pockets to deal with the kick, and it makes a nice hole in what you shoot at from 20 feet, which is a LONG shot inside your home. And it makes a loud noise, too.

When I played guitar for a living, I carried a Colt .22 derringer, a nice two-trigger, over and under double-barrel. It was smaller than a pack of cigarettes and held two .22 longs. It fit nicely in a jacket pocket or in the back pocket of a pair of Levis. It made me feel warm and fuzzy when I left bars in downtown Savannah at 3:00 AM and carried two guitars down back lanes or through bushy squares to get to my car.

I left the Red Lion Tavern at the Desoto Hilton one night and walked about a block to where I had parked. As I was opening the trunk of my car, I saw a lanky black guy with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth approaching. Behind me, I heard another person coming my way. "Hey, man," said the lanky black guy,"You got a light?" I heard the footsteps behind me pick up their pace.

I pulled the derringer out of my pocket and stuck it in the black guy's face. "I've got your light RIGHT HERE!" I yelled.

"JESUS! HE GOTTA GUN!" the bastard screamed. He turned on his heel and ran, and so did his partner behind me.

I stood there in the street for a moment, feeling downright proud of myself. They were going to rob me, and I scared them off. I was a goddam Clint Eastwood. I was John Wayne. Man, I was COOL! I stuck the derringer back in my pocket and attempted to light a cigarette.

My hands were shaking so badly that I almost set my hair on fire.

If I had NOT been armed that night, I would have been robbed or killed. That's what those two shits intended to do, and a .22 derringer changed their minds.

If THAT gun loomed large to them, think about what the wrong end of a 410 shotgun looks like.

January 06, 2007

Catfish

Originally published August 23, 2004

I've known Joe for a long time, and I know his wife and his children, too. I've gotten drunk at his house and I've showed my ass there. Ain't no big deal to Catfish. He's gotten drunk and showed his ass at my house, too.

I came to be his supervisor because of MY big mouth. I was asked at a "rap session" by a new production superintendent what shift I thought was the worst in the plant. "B Shift," I answered right away. "The supervisor doesn't run that crew. Catfish does." Two days later, I was taken off of "D" Shift and transferred to the B-crew. I wasn't one bit happy about it.

I decided right away that I was going to fire Catfish the first chance I got. I didn't like him at the time and I knew that we would have a... conflict of wills, so to speak. But that never happened. Catfish has a big mouth and he likes to bark, but I discovered that he was pretty damn good at his job. I'd give him an assignment, he'd give me a blast of shit about it, then he would go do the assignment. I can live with that.

I also discovered that B-Shift wasn't as bad as I first thought. I had some good operators working for me. In fact, I actually had a better crew than I did on D-Shift. They simply lacked leadership, and if you think that doesn't matter in how a crew operates, you never supervised people.

When I left Area 3 and went to the Acid Plant/Steam Plant, I recruited Catfish down there as quickly as I could. I was happy to have him on board. He was as loud-mouthed and as full of shit as ever, but he could operate those jobs. Hey, Joe? How many grievances did you file against me? I can remember four right now.

I can remember Joe walking into my office grinning like a mule eating briars. He'd throw grievance papers on my desk and say, "Here ya go, bow-legs. I'll see you at Step Three." Nothing personal and no animosity involved. If Joe thought he was being fucked, he didn't take it lying down. I didn't see anything wrong with that.

I think that's why we still get along today. Neither one of us took a fucking lying down

Wimmen are crazy

Originally published March 30, 2005

Go read this post and follow ALL the links on both sides of the argument. Not a single woman admitted that sex is a WEAPON that she uses to get her way. NOT ONE was honest enough to admit that simple fact.

I don't care whether you fuck on the first date or never fuck at all, but DO NOT tell me that you don't understand the power of pussy and you don't use it to your advantage. That's a goddam lie and you know it. All this "coy" shit is enough to make me want to puke.

It's like Paul Rodrigez said in a joke a long time ago--- "All wimmen are psychic. When you go out on a date with them. THEY KNOW whether you're going to get laid or not."

Men often are accused of lettling the little head do the thinking for the big head and we are ALL guilty of that crime. Men like sex. It's a primordeal drive that we have to hunt and conquer and scatter our seed. We're hard-wired that way.

But wimmen like to fuck just as much as men do, only THEY won't admit it. No, with them, it not as simple as "lets get nekkid and tear up the bed." THEY want emotional camouflage and they wrestle with concepts of "love" and "respect" as long as they're just talking about the concept. That's the stuff of soap operas and romance novels, both of which wimmen love.

But if you cut to the chase, a woman will fuck at the drop of a hat just because she found you attractive and wanted sex. Hell... she might not have found you really attractive... you were available and she was horny as a hoot-owl at the time. She fucks at the drop of a hat.

All you sanctimonious divas can kiss my Cracker ass. You all believe that you have the only pussy in the world and your mission in life is to convince some poor fool that you are correct. HE must also believe that you have the only pussy in the world, and it 's not important if any others exist--- you have the only one that matters.

I fell for that shit once in my life and I found out what that pussy was worth. I had a price tag laid on my ass by a fucking JUDGE, while that "special" pussy was spreading her legs for anybody who would hold still long enough for her to climb. That delicate pussy has cost me my son and about $50,000 so far, and I'll still be paying for years to come.

Don't spout that emotional shit at me. Every one of you "Divas" sit on a god-dam gold mine and you know that fact quite well. That's why a lot of you make a damn fine living selling it, or at least renting it out by the hour. Don't tell me wimmen don't do it, because they do. It's not called the "World's Oldest Profession" for nothing.

If every woman was as emotionally attached to their pussies as you claim to be, we wouldn't have prostitution or adultery in this world. But we damn sure do.

I call bullshit on every one of you.

January 05, 2007

Wimmen

Originally published September 14, 2002

So much for the strength, intellectual clarity and cast-iron asses on feminist women. In a typical little-spoiled-girl snit, Jellybean dropped me from her blogroll. Excuse me, while I go find a tall building so that I may jump off the roof immediately. (Goddess, she dropped YOU, too! Da bitch!)

If feminists were honest to begin with, we never would have corrupted the English language with such an abomination as "Gender Studies," because gender means: 1. SEX 2. a subclass within a grammatical class (as noun, pronoun, adjective or verb) of a language that is partly arbirtary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or a grammatical form in such a subclass.

That's from Webster's Ninth Collegiate Dictionary. I'm certain that the definition will change (if it hasn't already-- my dictionary is 10 years old) to reflect the cowardice of those who prefer to use "gender" when they really mean "sex." You can't say "sex" when talking about the difference between men and women. Women become uncomfortable because that word just sounds so gross!. A Martha Stewart mentality gave us "gender," so we don't have to say "sex," the same way it gave us "choice" to mean "killing a baby." It sounds so much prettier that way. (I am woman. I am strong. I just don't like gross words, especially when they describe what I'm actually doing, talking about or thinking. That upsets me. I want things to be pretty, even when they're not. If YOU won't lie to me, I'll lie to myself!)

Gender is a GREAT word for feminists, when they can't bring themselves to say "sex." Gender sounds MECHANICAL, not PHYSICAL. It's the perfect word!

Now, Martha Stewart can get drunk and have "gender" with a stranger she met in a bar. The world is a better place. So pretty.

Can you imagine a college offering courses in "SEX STUDIES?" Of course not! Every guy on campus (and a few really adventerous women) would sign up hoping to participate in full-fledged orgies in the classroom. Have the politically correct censors start talking about making textbooks "sex-neutral" and every guy on campus will run like hell, cupping his balls in both hands and screaming at the top of his lungs. That "sex-neutral" term brings visions of enuichs and large snipping devices to the front of the typical male cerebellum, and typical males don't like that.

So, we have "Gender Studies" and "gender-neutral" textbooks. When we speak of the difference between men and women, we speak of "gender." It's all so clinical, scientific, and oh, so pretty.

And altogether full of shit.

Next?

Originally published September 14, 2002

Okay, the lovely, red-toenailed JONI [Ed. Link goes to her current blog. Couldn't find related post.] has taken me to task for being a Male Chauvinist Pig. In a face-to-face confrontation, I would argue that point with her, because I don't believe that I am an MCP. I despise idealistic, heads-up-their-butts feminists and their radical, looney-tune denial of the facts of life, just the way I do tree-hugging, manatee-saving environmentalists. I believe that too many people look at the world through the wrong end of the binoculars, so that everything becomes compressed, distorted and totally out of perspective. There's a lot of obsession over trivia out there.

Joni Fisked me, so I'm about to attempt a Fisk Within A Fisk in response. Kids, DO NOT try this at home.

Sorry Darlin? Not Half As Sorry as You Will Be....

Joni said: "I generally like Acidman's self-proclaimed vitriolic rants. But this time, in response to a "feminist" post by Mindscapes, Heartstrings and Soul-Searching, I think he missed the mark. I've excised his comment to her post so I could dissect it here. My comments are underlined."
[Ed. And, Rob's "fisked" comment is italics and his response to the fisk is regular type. Just to keep this straight...]

Sorry, darlin', but I believe you've had your head pumped full of a lot of raw sewage over "feminism." That "women earning 1/3 of what men earn in the same job" is absolute bullshit. That urban legend has been shot down everywhere except college campuses today. NO BUSINESS would DARE pay a woman 1/3 the salary it paid a man for the same work in the US today. The EEOC and a locust-swarm of lawyers would sue the living daylights out of them and WIN. Many incompetent women hold high-paying jobs just so the jelly-bean count will be correct to the Powers That Be.

Joni says: "So you're saying that because there are laws that prevent discrimination, among other things, that businesses are simply obeying them? Haven't you been watching the news or reading the papers? If corporations behaved and went by the books and paid attention to what is legal then my law firm and others like it would be out of business. Corporations break laws like this every day. I still subscribe to the maxim that a woman has to work twice as hard as a man does to get anywhere. But since I'm in a "pink collar" profession, I don't have to worry about hitting my head on that glass ceiling. But don't think for a second that it doesn't happen. I can pull up case after case for you. Not only in your own Circuit, but all over the country. And as soon as I finish this post I just might."

Joni: I have been deposed four times in "sexual harassment" lawsuits brought against my company. We won all four, because the woman in question was a worthless piece of shit and received EXACTLY what she deserved by being fired. But a boss treads on eggshells dealing with that situation. Expect the lawsuit, expect the EEOC investigators and expect a big shit-storm no matter what. Yes, "hostile environment" is the first thing out of a lazy bitch's mouth and she will lie like hell, after being carefully instructed about WHAT KIND OF LIES to tell for maximum effect by a scum-sucking lawyer, who KNOWS that he has a goldbrick for a client but just wants to reap some money out of a fertile field of fucked-up law. I submit that more more innocent people get raped by avaricious "discrimination" lawsuits than victims suffer true discrimination. It's just my opinion, after 23 years of dealing with this shit in a REAL workplace, so I could be wrong. Just keep your paperwork in order, if you're in my position.

That "contraception" nonsense? WOMEN become pregnant; men don't. Who do you THINK the burden of contraception should be on? In an ideal world, the woman would be responsible enough to ensure that no "accidents" happened. But when the law is structured that an illegitimate child is a meal ticket to welfare, child-support and a host of other government rewards, responsibility is NOT encouraged. Hell, I had a vasectomy YEARS ago because women can't be trusted to watch out for themselves.

Joni says: "Well, isn't it just like a man to think he can run around and spill his precious semen anywhere he fucking well pleases and devil be damned the consequences. Women don't get pregnant by themselves. And they shouldn't be required to raise the brat alone either. Responsibility should be borne equally by both partners. You're more of a MCP than I dared dream possible. Bah. Nothing surprises me anymore."

Yep, men are like that, splling their precious semen everywhere they go. It would land on bushes and trees and between the pages of pornographic magazines if there weren't so many horny women willing to harvest it for themselves. Women DON'T get pregnant by themselves. It always takes two to tango. But the woman is the one who BECOMES pregnant, and it ain't rocket science to figure out how that happens, and it ain't rocket science to figure out how to prevent it. You seem to have a very fungible definition of "responsibility." Yeah, I understand that if I become pregnant, I'LL be the one who gestates for nine months, I'LL be the one who delivers the baby, and I'LL be the one stuck with it when all is said and done. So, if I get pregnant, it's YOUR FAULT, too!

Bullshit. I run my life better than that.

Joni said: "Snipped rant about Susan Faludi, whoever she may be. I'm too lazy to look on Google."

You should read her. A true feminist fucktard.

Men and women are not equal, and they never will be. Men, as a rule have more upper-body strength, can run faster, and do more physically demanding tasks than a woman can. Women are just as smart (and maybe MORE devious) and they have the force of government guaranteeing not only "equality," but a leg up in the workplace today.

Joni says: " Well, I know a helluva lot of men who are content to sit on their asses while women support them. And raise the kids. And you completely ignore the fact that it's not WOMEN who are getting all the perks. It's minority men! So much so that the WASP male is probably more discriminated against than any other demographic group there is. (When he bothers to get a job that is.)"

As a WASP male who has worked 23 years at the same place and climbed up the ranks, worked hard, provided for my family, brought home the bacon, put in incredible overtime and saw it all taken away from me by a judge who resembled Howard Sprague from the Andy Griffith show, I totally agree with that statement. So, what? That's how it goes. If anybody ever told you life was fair, they lied to you.

I have a chemical engineer and a mechanical engineer who work with me in my area of responsibility. They both are male, both are hard-working and good at their jobs. Both also talk about graduating from college with 3.5 GPAs and watching recruiters swarm around females with a 2.2 GPA, just to get the jelly-bean count correct. If I were a black lesbian today, the goddam world would be my oyster. That's just how fucked-up things are.
Go out in the real world and see for yourself. If you're half-assed at what you do, you'll go to the front of the line because you are female.

Joni says:" That's pure bullshit. The only way you get to the head of the line is by being good, period. Man or woman. Unless you are unfortunate enough to work in an office like mine where it's more important WHO you know than WHAT you know. I have no pedigree. All I bring to the table is my intelligence and work ethic. Fuck them if that isn't enough."

I am a white, Southern, heterosexual male. That's FOUR strikes against me in the politically-correct workplace of today. I BETTER be good at my job, or I won't last long. Go back and read about engineers.

I live with this shit every day. Rant complete.

Joni asks: "What shit do you live with everyday? YOU are the head of the plant, aren't you? Not a woman? So what woman has trampled your masculine sensibilities (now THERE'S an oxymoron for you) by climbing over you to get to the top?"

No, I am not head of the plant. I am production coordinator for one of three areas of the plant. I'm a boss, but I'm not a BIG TIME boss. I'm more like a Chief Petty Officer or a Top Sergeant than I am royalty in the pecking order. I like it that way. I spend more time dealing with the people and the problems in the area than I do going to meetings and dealing with the royalty.

My ex-wife was a lowly lab supervisor when she recruited me to become her husband (and yes, she did that). I was the youngest General Foreman in the history of the plant at the time, and I ran the "widowmaker," the sulfuric acid plant (does "Acidman" ring a bell now?), the steam plant all all the site services. Once she got her fangs in me, I saw a lot of potential in her and taught her a lot, often in bed at night while we smoked cigarettes and talked about work. I predicted back then that I had probably played my string out about as far as it would ever reach, but the sky was the limit for her.

She had a degree in chemistry (I was an English Major), she was a go-getter, but most important of all, she was an ATTRACTIVE FEMALE. We didn't have enough females in top jobs, and Corporate would be looking for some, just to make the jelly-bean count look better to the government. She was in the right place at the right political time.

I was correct in everything I said to her back then. She is "Manager of Continuous Improvement" today, and she sits on her adulterous, fine ass in a nice office with the Plant Manager just two doors away. She's in Phoenix, Arizona this week, and I don't know why I wasn't allowed to keep Quinton here while she was gone. I suspect she left those duties to her dope-smoking, unemployed lover just to spite me. She does that a lot.

So, Joni, THAT'S the woman who trampled my masculine sensibilities, oxymoron or not. It's been a rough year for me.

Joni said: "Come and get me, Hoss!"

I believe I just did.

January 04, 2007

Well, you're supposed to make yourself "stand out", right?

Originally published August 3, 2002

I just created a form letter that I'm going to mass-mail to every on-line dating ad I find:

Hi! I am a bipolar, dyslexic, hare-lipped, alcoholic dwarf. I really liked the pitcher on your ad, so I decided to rite you. I liked that pitcher so much that I drool, and when I do that it looks like snails have been crawling all over my receeding chin.

If I had a date with you, I would like to bring you over to my house. Well, it's not really MY house. I live in the tool shed out back, kinda like that guy Carl did in Sling Blade. Did you ever see that movie? I LOVED that movie! Some people say that I remind them of Carl, but their joking, of course, ha, ha!

I like living where I do because the place is easy to find, on account of the "Registered Sex Offender" sign in the front yard. Oh, the sign is not for ME! It belonged to the guy who lived here before I came, and he forgot to take it with him when he moved. I decided to keep it. When I drink too much Thunderbird and smoke crack till my eye glazes over (the glass one never feels a thing), I see that sign and I know which driveway to crawl up. Crawling up the WRONG one has gotten me in trouble before, ha, ha.

I like animals, and I like to laugh. Have you ever tied two cats together by their tails and thrown them over a clothesline? Boy, do they ever FIGHT! I can watch that and laugh for HOURS! I like quiet walks on a lonely beach where nobody can see what I do, and I'm really into nature, especially that place in the woods behind the landfill where you could bury ANYTHING and nobody would ever find it.

I'm better at interacting in person than I am over the phone, so why don't you just send me your HOME ADDRESS? I like surprises, do you? I might show up when you least expect it, ha, ha.

Signed,

Your Dream Lover

Another on-line ad?

Originally published August 3, 2002

Wanted: person of the female persuasion to come live with ME, rent-free (strictly Platonic, too) if she does housekeeping, laundry and doesn't invite rowdy friends over when I have to go to bed early, which is Monday through Friday.

Wait a minute... that sounds more like I'm asking for a live-in maid (or a rent-a-semi-wife) rather than a roommate, doesn't it?

Okay, SO BE IT! The rent and utilities are free, since I'm paying those already. You have to talk to me when I want to talk, then leave me alone when I want to blog. You can watch anything you want on TV, because I don't watch it at all, except during football season, at which time I become COMMANDER OF THE REMOTE CONTROL. Otherwise, it's all yours. I keep the thermostat set at 72 degrees, winter and summer, and I insist that you DON'T TOUCH THAT FUCKER! Regulate your own body temperature, not my house. Play anything you want to hear on the stereo, except rap music, and put the CDs back in the box when you're done. Then, pick up all the ones I've left out of the box and put them back, too.

Red toenails are a plus, and if you'll scratch my back on Thursday evenings, I'll fix snow crab legs for supper on Friday night.

It ain't a bad deal. Private room, personal (clean) bathroom and the Master of the House gone most of the daylight hours. I buy the groceries, too, unless you're one of those fruit-loop, organic vegans. In that case, you buy your own rabbit-food to eat.

Damn! Maybe I SHOULD ADVERTISE THIS OFFER.

I'll bet I get some takers.

January 03, 2007

An interview

Originally published July 31, 2005

She sent me an email, and I'm going to give her a link, which she bet that I wouldn't do, and I'm also going to answer the questions--- although I think she could have probed deeper into the Acidman psyche if she had tried.

I think she just recycles the same questions, but here are MINE:

5 questions for Acidman

1) If a movie was made of your life, what would it be called and who would play you?

"The Cracker Chronicles." You'd need at least THREE actors to play me. Jerry Mathers as a boy, Geraldo Rivera as a young man and Ken Curtis as an old fart.

2) What meal would you have for your last supper?

Pussy, and a Shiner Bock beer. If I'm about to die, I want to go out with a smile on my face.

3) Which 3 fictional people would you most like to talk to over a beer?

Dorian Gray. Jack Crabb. Yossarian.

4) List 10 words that describe how you would like others to define you.

That's not a good question, because I know a lot of people who I want to think well of me, and a lot of others that I could give a shit about. I'll give you ten words that I think describe me.

1. Witty
2. Talented
3. Loud
4. Charming
5. Dangerous
6. Intelligent
7. Dynamic
8. Honest
9. Proud
10. Unashamed

5) If you could travel back through time, where would you go and why?

I'd go back to the day Jennifer gave me her phone number and I'd throw that piece of paper into the Savannah River. Calling HER was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life. But I don't think I WANT to go back in time.

Have you ever seen the movie The Butterfly Effect? If not, I'll tell you this--- a guy learns that he CAN travel through time, so he goes back over and over again to "correct" mistakes he made in the past. Every time he tries that, he comes back to the present with a more fucked-up situation than the one he went to correct. He didn't "fix" anything. He just made it worse by meddling.

Now, if I could just go back and live as a frontiersman in the 19th century, I'd go for that. But I'm not interested in changing the past.

See? I'll answer interview questions.

Encore

Originally republished (by Rob) June 30, 2004

I'm recycling an oldie because I like it.
[Ed. And, I'm re-recycling it because I like it, too.]

After my son was born, the then-darling wife and I thought about having another child but decided against it. We figured that we had hit the jackpot with Quinton and we should quit while we were ahead. She had been taking some kind of shot for a couple of months (depoprevara, or something like that. I called them "Parvo Shots") to prevent ovulation and she liked the fact that she stopped having periods, too. But she became convinced that she shots were causing her to gain weight. She wanted off them but was reluctant to start taking the pill again. So, being the Southern Gentleman that I am, I said, "Why don't I just go get clipped?"

I stopped by at work the next day and saw Deniese, the company's Nurse Practicioner, and told her that I wanted to get a vasectomy. She picked up the phone and made me an appointment with Dr. Shook, her choice of urologists and I man I was later to become far too well-acquainted with, but that's another blog altogether. I went by Shook's office after work that day and filled out all the necessary paperwork for my operation three weeks later.

I had to take one form home with me for the wife to sign. In the state of Georgia, spousal consent is required before a married man can have a vasectomy. I didn't think twice about it at the time, but I find the idea incredibly ironic now. I could not go out and get clipped without my wife's permission. But SHE could go out eighteen months later and de-nut me with a divorce lawyer and I didn't have a FUCKING VOICE AT ALL in that matter. Something is terribly wrong with that picture. Okay, that's another blog, too.

On the appointed day, the wife and I showed up at Dr. Shook's office. She was there to drive me home afterward. The doctor had offered anesthesia and I accepted eagerly. As a person who has HIS OWN GAS MASK at the dentist's office, I am a certified anesthesia-hound anytime ANY doctor wants to do something I find unpleasant, and since I find GOING TO THE DOCTOR unpleasant, I just say "yes!" if drugs are offered.

I was called and told to remove my clothes and don a hospital gown. I did. I was led to an examination room and told to lie on a table. I did. The nurse lifted my gown, examined my equipment and said, "You didn't shave."

I had to admit that, no, I didn't shave. Nowhere in all that literature I read about the operation did I see any instructions about doing that, so I didn't. "Well, we'll take care of that right now," she said in a businesslike tone while snapping on a pair of latex gloves.

"I want my shot!" I whined.

I didn't get my shot. I got wet and lathered and shaved by a professional who used a Bic disposable razor. In other circumstances, I might have found the experience to be erotic. Had the wife and I known ahead of time that this procedure was required, we could have played some fun games with it. But having that nurse do it shrunk me like a spider on a hot stove. I was embarrassed, not because of being shaved, but because of what happened to me. My manhood resembled a stack of dimes 30-cents tall. My proud portabella became a button mushroom. I expected to look like a man with two navels any minute now. I was humiliated, and worried that my wanger might NEVER recover.

When the nurse finished, the doctor arrived. I got my shot then, but it wasn't much of a shot. I would rather have had my gas mask from the dentist's office and a nice bottle of nitrous. I watched as the nurse laid out a series of torture devices on the Mayo table next to me, and couldn't help thinking of the movie Braveheart, where the torturers displayed all their knives, hooks and tongs right before they eviscerated Mel Gibson. The doctor picked up a hypodermic needle that resembled a bicycle pump and gave me two shots in a place where no man EVER wants to see a hypodermic needle pointed.

But it wasn't that bad. A slight sting.... then MY NUTSACK WENT NUMB!

That is one hell of an unusual sensation. I believe that most men LIKE feeling their balls, except for those occasions where the cods absorb a sharp blow and you crawl around on all fours (actually, you crawl on ALL THREES, if you're not curled in a fetal position, because one hand will be tenderly cupping your nuts) making pig noises for a while until the pain subsides. Having them just GO AWAY like that is very disconcerting.

The doctor picked up a scalpel and said, "Do you know any good jokes?" (I AM NOT MAKING THAT UP!)

I informed the good doctor that I knew a gazillion good jokes, but he wasn't going to hear one now, because the LAST THING I wanted him doing was laughing like a maniac while he sliced into my testicles. I really didn't think that was a good idea. I wanted him to concentrate carefully on the task at hand.

He did something with the scalpel, did something with with another tool (I felt a slight tug there), then he picked up what appeared to be a soldering iron. I saw a tendril of smoke rise from between my legs, and the aroma hit my nostrils: PIG ROAST! Bejus! I knew it for a fact then. All men ARE PIGS, because I smelled just like a Boston Butt on a spit when the doctor cauterized whatever he had cut down there.

The entire operation lasted about fifteen minutes. I was told to get dressed and apply an icepack to my balls as soon as I got home. They gave me one pain pill and one sleeping pill and told me not to lift anything heavy for the next few days. I went home, took the pain pill, applied an icepack to my wound, sprawled on the couch and watched Willie Nelson in Barbarossa on HBO. I lifted nothing heavier than a 12-ounce beer can the entire time. I took the sleeping pill that night, slept like a baby and awoke the next morning with no swelling, no pain and not even a bruise. Just two sets of two stitches on my scrotum to show for it all. There's nothing to this, I thought.

My wife went out to feed the goats and chickens that morning. She came back and said, "We've got a goat problem." I figured that one or two of the escape artists had gotten through the fence again and run down the road to seduce that slut-goat Elvira at Bob and Sue's house. "I can't go rope them this time," I said. "I'm wounded."

"I think Billy is dead," she said.

Billy was my Alpha goat. He was a big, nasty, ill-tempered, head-butting, beard-pissing, sodomizing stink-bomb, but I was fond of him. He would eat out of my hand and no one else's. I suppose he recognized a kindred spirit in me. I went outside to check and, sure enough, Billy was gone to that great grasspatch in the sky.

The weather sucked. A misting rain was falling, the glowering clouds were battleship gray and the temperature was about 45 degrees with a chill northeast wind. Billy was still limber, so I knew that he hadn't been dead long. "I need to bury him," I told the wife.

"Don't you do that, Rob. You know what the doctor said. Call Ed or Willy and see if they'll do it. They owe you a favor." I said I would, later.

I went back inside and sprawled on the couch. She took Quinton and went to the grocery store. I went back outside and buried Billy in the rain. That was MY job. The other three goats stood in a line and baaaa-ed like a Greek chorus while I dug the hole, dragged Billy into it and covered him up. I was so careful about not hurting my nuts while I did all that that I damned near threw my back out using poor shovel technique. But I suffered no lasting damage from it.

I was at Keller's Flea Market a few months after my operation, and I almost bought a neat belt buckle I saw. It said "VASECTOMY--- ALL JUICE AND NO SEED."

Friday, October 25, 2002
Posted 10/25/2002 09:43:07 PM by ACIDMAN

January 02, 2007

Crickets and frogs

Originally published June 30, 2005

I love the sound those critters make at night. It just sounds like... a Southern night to me. It's music to my ears.

Last weekend at the Catfish mansion, I lit the last cigarette I had in a pack and decided to walk out to my car to get some more. I took one step off Cat's back porch and decided to sit down on the stoop for a minute, just to listen to the Southern Symphany playing outdoors. The frogs and crickets were singing their asses off. That all-day rain had inspired them to operatic heights of vocal lamentation to the stars.

The sound was beautiful.

About then, while I was all wrapped up in listening to the symphony, I noticed that a lot of the cricket noises were coming from BEHIND me, not out in the woods. I went to check it out and found Cat's bait cage in his garage. He must have had close to 200 crickets in there, every one trying to sing his way out of becoming fish-bait. I think they'll all be bream-food before long, but they sure kicked up a ruckus that night.

Cricket-noises are odd. If you hear them outside at night, their mating calls are musical. Get one hiding in your bedroom closet and have him start that singing, and you CAN'T SLEEP with that shit going on all night long. You'll crawl out of bed, find him and EXECUTE his ass with a can of Raid, just to get some piece and quiet.

Crickets belong outside or on a bream-hook on a fishing pole.

Pride or prejudice?

Originally published August 2, 2005

Here is a list of ten things that I simply WOULD NOT DO, on general principle, under ANY circumstances.

#1-- Accept a blow-job from Jane Fonda. I depise the woman and I respect my dick more than that.

#2-- Shake Michael Moore's hand. I watched Farenheight 9/11 last night, and that was one of the most purile pieces of propaganda I've ever seen. It wasn't even GOOD propaganda. Six years-olds are smart enough to see through the shit he filmed.

#3-- Vote for Hillary Clinton. Forget it. NEVER! Not for any office, ever. And I DAMNED sure don't want a blow-job from HER! I think she's the Antichrist.

#4-- Apologize for our military being in Iraq. We don't know how many American lives were saved by us occupying the terrorists over there instead of giving them a chance to attack us here. We never WILL know, but I'm satisfied that we did the right thing.

#5-- Say ANYTHING except "Fuck Jimmy Carter" every time he opens his possum-grinning mouth for the rest of his life. And, yeah, PJ--- there's an "alleged" Southerner who still has all of his teeth. I don't want to be anything like him.

#6-- Give up the guns I don't own. That's all I'm gonna say about that, because it could get me in trouble.

#7-- Live in the north. I just couldn't do it. I'm allergic to snow and I don't like most yankees I've met.

#8-- Own a cat. Sorry, folks. I tried that a couple of times and the cat and I just didn't get along.

#9-- Get married again. I wonder why not? Let's see... how about losing more money than most people see in their lives, TWO houses and some brand-new BMWs for divorce-court lawyers, while everybody else ran away with my money and left me broke? No... two doses of that is enough for me.

#10-- Change the way I blog. I read a person the other day who complained about "internecine blogging" in certain circles. Maybe he was talking about me. If so, I fall back on something I've been saying for years. If you don't have a cast-iron ass, you shouldn't be blogging. If you can't handle heat, get out of the kitchen. Not EVERYBODY is going to LOVE you on the internet.

Those are my thoughts and you can take them or leave them. But that's the philosophy I live by today.

January 01, 2007

Last night (five years ago)

Originally published January 1, 2002

I woke up in my own bed this morning. That wasn't the game plan, but neither my date nor myself became overly intoxicated last night, despite the delicious oysters (which she doesn't eat), the exquisite fried turkey (which she doesn't eat, either) and the assorted fireworks that exploded in unison from several different directions around midnight. Stuffed baked potatos, taco salads, cheeses and crackers (which she DOES eat) were readily available, but I believe she drank enough diet cola that she had no room for the food. I pigged out.

We were sitting in front of the largest of the five different campfires burning in the yard when the sky lit up with rockets and voodoo balls bright enough to obscure the full moon that had smiled down on the evening from the time we arrived. Young'uns set off firecrackers and sparklers, couples kissed, and I almost needed a cable and chain to retrieve my friend, Willie, when his large self overdosed on Scotch liquor and began reeling around dangerously close to the fire. My son knows the "stop, drop and roll!" drill for when you catch on fire, and Willie had everything but the "stop!" down pat last night. His wife took him home shortly after the fireworks display and I pity his head today. I believe he has a bucket of Bloody Marys prepared as a palliative measure for those who overindulged last night, but he may drink it all if he doesn't upchuck in the bucket first. All in all, we welcomed in the new year in fine fashion.

Now, I'm cooking Hoppin' John and turnip greens, which are supposed to bring good luck if you eat them today. My house smells like dirty sweat pants, nasty armpits and stinky feet, which is the aroma that black-eyed peas produce when you cook them with a large ham hock thrown in for seasoning and a pot of greens simmering beside them on the stove. Maybe that smell brings the good luck by driving all the evil spirits out of your life. I don't know, but I feel good, my house smells like an underfunded homeless shelter, and the sky is crystal blue. I love it when that happens.

It's cold outside for south Georgia, but the sky is so clear and blue that it hurts my eyes to look at it.

Mommie

Originally published January 1, 2006

"Mommie" is what I call my 94 year-old grandmother. I picked that name myself, too, when I was a wee toddler of a lad. Everybody wanted me to call her "Mamaw," but I was having none of that shit, even as a wee toddler of a lad. I decided that she was MOMMIE, and I wasn't about to change my mind.

See? I was a budding Acidman when I was still crapping in my diaper. I came out of the box with a bad attitude.

I was her first grandchild, my name for her stuck, and now FOUR GENERATIONS of spawn call her "Mommie." Personally, I think I done GOOD picking that name for her. It fits perfectly.

I paid her a visit today. We talked for a while and then walked next door to my mama's house to visit with my Uncle George and Aunt Doris, who are staying there to kinda keep an eye on Mommie. Hey--- my grandmother is SPRY--- but she IS 94 years old, going blind and never had a driver's license in her life. She needs somebody to run errands for her.

My uncles and their wives are taking turns staying at mama's house to do exactly that. I have a really outstanding family on my mama's side. (I can't say the same about Dad's family, but that's a subject for a different post.)

When I got ready to go home, Mommie said, "Wait just a minute. I've got something I want to give you," and off she went, out the door and back toward her house. My Aunt Doris stood at the window and watched her scurry next door.

"Would you just look at her?" Aunt Doris asked. "I'm 22 years younger than she is and I don't get around like that."

It's true, too. Mommie still motors pretty damn good today. I'll bet she was a real pisscutter in her youth.

I walked over to her house to see what she was up to. She was rummaging around in the cupboard, where she located a plastic jar filled with Frito's Barbecued Corn Chips. She offered them to me. "Do you like corn chips? I think these are pretty good. Take 'em home with you."

I thanked her and accepted her gift. Mommie still has that sense of hillbilly hospitality working in her, and she's gonna either feed you or give you some food to go when you visit her, even if all she has to offer is a stale biscuit. She'd be insulted if you didn't take it.

She is one hell of a woman... and guess what? I'm eating those corn chips as I write. Mommie was right, too.

They ARE pretty good.