Good bye Mom

This isn't funny or amusing, so go on your way if that's what you're expecting.

I got word today that my best friend's mother passed away. This was a woman who helped raise me and who I always affectionately called "Mom."

I think I've finally run out of tears. A grown man isn't supposed to cry.

Good bye Mom.

Goat Rustlers

Seriously, who in their right mind steals a fucking goat?

In my aunt's mind the answer is "Someone, I don't know who, but they're stealing my goats."

Once I stopped laughing at this dillusion and focused enough to cough and ask why she felt someone was stealing her goats, she'd already convinced me to go sit in the graveyard adjacent to her property and wait for the goat thieves.

Oh what the fuck, it might be fun.

So into the graveyard I went and hid behind a gravestone laughing to myself the entire time. I've come up with a bunch of ludicrous ideas in my time, but this one trumped all of them. Even I couldn't think up something this bat shit insane...

My 70 year old aunt sitting on a chaise lounge with a .12 gauge and me huddled behind a headstone waiting for someone to try and steal her goats.

You don't get much more redneck then that.

Golf Balls

This isn't one of my stories, but rather one that was related to me by a former co-worker who had been a member of the Honolulu police force.

Some guy had gone bat shit insane and barricaded himself in a house with weapons and was threatening to kill himself over some trivial matter.

That is not funny in the least, it's frankly very sad.

However about 10 hours into the standoff it became quite obvious to the boys in blue this guy was not going to kill himself and they were wanting to get home to their families. And this idiot was keeping them from their families. My buddy and a few of his fellow officers had taken up a position in a house directly behind the guy. In a bedroom to be exact. There wasn't a whole lot for them to do to ease their boredom of sitting there hour after hour while this guy went on about the brain police or whatever the hell his problem was.

One of the guys found some golf balls in the closet and apparently after 5 hours he'd had enough and decided to put an end to this silliness. Everytime the negotiator got the guy calmed down a bit this other dude would hurl a couple of golf balls against the house and yell "Go ahead and kill yourself you fucking pussy! DO IT! PUSSY!"

And the guy would flip his shit. Again.

The negotiator couldn't figure out what was going on. Every damn time he had the guy calmed down he would suddenly start screaming like a wounded Nar Whale and begin making random threats against society.

I don't mean to make fun of the mentally ill, but sadly if I was there I would've done the same damned thing. You have to admit that it is pretty damn funny.

A Christmas Story

My sister was born in Thailand. It's a long complicated story, but basically my father was stationed there during the Vietnam War and I ended up having a sister.

OK, so maybe it's not all that complicated.

Anyways, about the time she was 20 or so he started to feel guilty and went searching for her. After about 18 months he found her living in the jungle and presumably swinging from trees flinging bananas and shit every which direction. I suspect that more then anything he realized I had a real aversion to children and if he wanted grandchildren he was going to have to look elsewhere, because none were going to be springing forth from my loins anytime soon. But that's neither here nor there.

She made her way to the US and was quickly assimilated into our way of life. After she'd been here a few years we had a Christmas gathering at her house. A traditional Christmas meal of rice and food so hot it induced heavy breathing and sweat. While she was stirring up Satan's Cauldron of ungodly food she told a story about work.

(My sister is a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas.)

Her story went along these lines: "There was a man at work and I get so mad at him. I tell him he no longer play at my table. He don't go away. I get so mad I 69'd him."

I fell over trying to keep from laughing. Literally. I tipped out of a chair and was on the floor in front my aged aunts and uncles doing everything I could to not throw up one of my lungs. I blamed it on a cramp and they went back to eating. I truly wonder about my family sometimes. A presumably healthy young man is laying on the floor holding his side trying to keep his internal organs internal and they go back to eating like that's a normal occurrence. Then again they just heard a girl say she 69'd someone on a casino floor, so my flopping around like a freshly caught tuna was probably inconsequential.

Her comments went pretty much unnoticed by everyone else except my father. I caught his eye while I was on the floor, he'd heard what she'd said but he was able to contain his laughter a bit better then me. He told me later that he had to tell her she got her numbers mixed up and she probably meant to say she 86'd the dude. Of course my dad wasn't one to leave well enough alone, so he gave her a very graphic description of what 69 is. Thank God I wasn't privy to that little conversation.

I really fucking miss you dad.

Damn bird

For those of you that don't know I have a pet parrot.

I've had him for about 15 years now and for the most part he's a horrible pet.

Sure, he has his moments when he's a sweet bird and gently saying "I'm a pretty, pretty bird", but for the most part he screams like hell and throws seeds all over my house.

At the moment I'm dodging corn kernels that little SOB is shooting at me, they're ricocheting all over my damn living room. He thinks the corn kernels in his food are a toy and he has it down to an art of pinching those things in his beak and sending them flying all over the house at an astounding velocity. I've destroyed 3 vacuums cleaning up after him and his "Toys". Vacuums don't like dried corn.

I decided to be nice and got up at 6:30 this morning to drive the 20 miles to Wal-Mart to buy him nesting material, food, and a toy.

When I got home I cleaned his cage, hung up his toy and gave him some fresh food. He stood on his favorite perch watching me the entire time and acting excited about this development. As soon as I left him to his own devices he broke his toy, shit all over his freshly cleaned cage, and started throwing seeds all over my house.

Oh well, he'll only live another 20 years or so, but he makes up for all his nastiness every time I walk in the door and he starts dancing and yelling "Hello Dad!"

It melts my heart every time.

Banned from the NBA

Apparently people are actually reading these musings. I may have to take the time to actually write things out before I post them instead of just blathering away.

I'll look into that sometime, just not today.


My mouth and imagination can be a wondrous thing. They get me into trouble and just as quickly get me out of trouble. I've had friends marvel about my ability to walk up to complete strangers and within a few minutes we're talking like old friends and they'll believe the outlandish shit I say.

One night me and some buddies were driving around and met up with a car full of girls. One of the girls (Let's call her Secretariat) was very vocal, actually it was more like she was braying or whatever the fuck it is horses do. Her parents should've entered her in The Preakness. She was far from attractive, unless you were a mare. A very lonely mare.

Anyways Secretariat was braying and stomping the ground like an angry mule while the humans talked, obviously she was upset because no one would give her an apple and stroke her muzzle. These actions were not lost on me and I saw an easy mark to fuck with so I struck up a conversation.

Me: Hey
Secretariat: I think she whinied or some damn thing. At the very least she wagged her tail.

Me: Did you know I used to play for the Houston Rockets? (For those of you that have never met me I'm 6'7"...I can get away with outlandish lies like that)
Secretariat: Bullshit.

Me: No. Seriously. You can look it up. I'm on suspension from the league because we were going to Japan to play some exhibition games and they found cocaine in my luggage. The whole thing got kind of buried in the media because Steve Howe was busted for drugs again and I was just a foot note.
Secretariat: Really? You are pretty tall. Who are your friends?

(It was about the time Secretariat started showing interest I decided that maybe we should get the hell away. Like right now. Before she got in a rutting frame of mind with me as a target. That would be bad.)

I was able to herd my buddies back in the car and make our escape much to their chagrin. The other girls were actually cute, but I had to deal with the loud horse that was apparently the designated cock blocker. Like they had to designate her for that....genetics had granted her that role many years before. Her ugly personality just cemented her position.

Crash

Back in the 80's I played guitar in a bar band and quite honestly we sucked.

But at 22 years old I thought I'd stumbled into the greatest thing since Moses parted the Red Sea. I got to combine the three things I loved the most at that time...playing guitar, free booze, and drunk women of questionable virtue throwing themselves at me. In short, I was in heaven.

One of the mistakes the bars made in our contracts was the free booze. It's usually pretty standard in agreements with the band that the bar will provide all the booze the band wants while they're performing.

In our case, that was a huge, huge mistake on the bar owners part.

We never once hit the stage even remotely sober and by the third set someone was likely to fall off the stage. We were like a bunch of fucked up monkeys that were fed booze and given instruments. And who on this Earth isn't entertained by monkeys? Especially drunk ones.

We weren't very good, but by God we were entertaining, in a fucked up, drunk monkey sort of way.

We hardly ever kept to the playlist and did whatever the hell we individually felt like doing. One night I started playing the opening riff from "Don't Fear the Reaper" just for shits and giggles and the rest of the band joined in. Then people got up and started dancing.

The sad thing is none of us knew the damn song and by the time our singer tried to think of what the hell the lyrics might be the whole thing fell apart and he had to announce "We don't actually know this song."

The band wouldn't allow me to have my own mic because, and I quote "We can't afford it." I offered to buy my own my mic but was told "No, we can't afford what might come out of your mouth." This coming from a bunch of stumbling drunks and they were afraid of what might come out of my mouth? Jesus, did they think I was going to blurt out that I saw the Pope fucking a dog in the parking lot? (Actually I would've said it if the thought had occurred to me because the whole visual is pretty damn funny. How would he have kept that big Pope hat on while rocking a German Shepard's world?)

In a roundabout way I've been leading up to the story of how we are probably the only band in history to be 86'd from a bar.

We were up to our usual shit in some crappy bar in Bum Fuck, Montana. Our drummer was very fond of whiskey and he was drinking heavily that night, much more then the rest of us. As we finished the next to last set he fell over his drum set with a resounding crash. He was done for the night.

The problem was we still had one more set to play and now we had no drummer. We retreated to a table to ponder our situation and I told the waitress to bring two pitchers of beer. I have no idea what the other guys ordered for themselves.

Somehow it was apparently decided that our lead guitarist would play drums and I would play all the guitar parts. I have no memory of agreeing to this as I was trying to down as much booze as I could in an attempt to kill my brain and not be part of the forthcoming train wreck.

I almost succeeded.

According to people who witnessed the event I gamely took the stage and almost immediately fell over like a tree knock down by Paul Bunyon. I went straight down off the stage onto the hardwood dance floor with my beloved Les Paul strapped firmly to my body.

My Les Paul did not survive. I however had a huge bruise on my chest where she met her demise.

The next morning we were awakened in the motel room by a very angry bar owner telling us we were fired. On a Saturday. Who the hells fires a band after a show like that?

Hunting Ghosts

A couple of years ago my niece moved down here and she shared my curiosity about ghosts.

One night about 1AM we were watching TV and I was bored. (You'll notice this is a common theme in my stories. If I get bored, something is bound to happen.) So I suggested we go to the ancient graveyard across the street from my house with a camera and take some pictures to see if we could catch anything. She thought this was a great idea as she was a big brave ghost hunter.

After about 20 minutes of taking pictures of the darkness and gravestones I once again grew bored. I was holding a cigarette and noticed that when I flashed a picture it gave off an eerie effect with the smoke wafting through the view finder. I showed her my "Findings" and she turned white as a sheet. She decided it was time to go home.

Now.

So much for the big, brave ghost hunter.

We headed back for my house with her walking very fast. Then I saw headlights coming towards us and did the first thing that came to mind...I shoved her into a ditch head first and ducked.

To this day I can't fully explain my thought process that night, but it went something along these lines:

"I'm a 42 year old guy walking along the road at one in the morning with a 16 year old girl who looks nothing like me (My niece is Asian), I've got beer in my pockets and a camera. Yeah, we're the picture of innocence here."

So into the ditch she went with a little help from me. Ok, maybe with a lot of help from me. She climbed out of the ditch with a very understandable "What. The. Fuck?" look on her face.

I told her it must of been the ghost that did it.

Teaching Little Shelby to Shoot

Little Shelby is my cousin of sorts. She's half Filipino and half American, but that's neither here nor there, for some reason I adore the little girl and I think of her as a daughter.

As most of my adventures start out...I was bored and giving her a guitar lesson. She was rather disinterested in learning the guitar and my attention was waning. So I suggested we go shoot.

I'm full of brilliant ideas when I get bored.

She readily agreed and the next thing I knew we were standing on a hilltop with loaded weapons.

Being the kind, thoughtful relative that I am I decided the first gun she should shoot was a .12 gauge, screw this fooling around with a .22, she was going to shoot a real gun.

I don't know exactly what kind of loads I was chambering into that thing but they kicked like a fucking mule. She saw me shoot a couple of them and after a couple pointers on gun safety I chambered a round, handed her the gun and told her it was hot.

She put it up to her shoulder....then I had her make a few adjustments so she wouldn't get hurt by the kick...and then she pulled the trigger.

BLAM!

She was all of five foot nothing and weighed about 100lbs at the time. Those loads were knocking me back and I knew they'd really do a number on her, so I placed my hands on her shoulder blades to keep her from being ass first in the dirt when she pulled the trigger and that thing barked.

As soon as the thing fired she screamed like a banshee and doubled over. Oh God, the neighbors heard a gun shot and a scream from my property, that's never good. I was horrified thinking maybe I'd given her more then she could handle, then she started giggling and looked at me with wide eyes and asked "Can I shoot it again?"

And that's when I knew she was related to me. Well, that and the time I spun my 300ZX in the middle of the road and as I was trying to get my heart to resume beating correctly she said "That was awesome! Let's do it again."

That's my girl.

It finally happened

After years of abuse, I think my body has finally revolted against my treatment of it.

My God damn legs won't work properly. I can deal with a lot of things, but if I can't walk, the fucking game is over. I will not be an invalid relying on others to take care of me. Fuck that noise.

My mother has MS and I can see the warning signs that it's incubating in my system. When your legs quit working that's a pretty big fucking warning flag. Jesus, I can't take more then 7 steps (I know because I counted) without stumbling and losing all muscle control and flailing about like a drunken mentally challenged two year old. This will never do. It's fucking embarrassing.

My body and I are about to go to war. If it thinks I've done horrible things to it in the past, it hasn't seen shit . If it's going to fuck with me then I'm going to fuck back even harder. I believe I have some D-Con in the cupboard. Maybe I'll eat it....how would you like that body?

Jesus, I might be developing schizophrenia on top of everything else. I may just have to go after my brain for revolting too. It is nice to be able to distance yourself from your body and brain though.

Something Evil This Way Comes

A few days ago I put on my mad scientist smock and made what is commonly called a ghost box ( http://angelsghosts.com/ghost_box ) .

It's a simple hack using a Radio Shack pocket radio. I'd bought one a few months ago, paying good money without realizing how easy it was to do myself. (I payed %55 for one off e-bay, this one is the same damn thing but I only paid $30 for the radio, spent 5 minutes of my time to remove 6 screws and do a little Voodoo to.) And by do a little Voodoo I mean I bent a wire. It's that simple.

If I had an inkling of sense I'd be selling these things on e-bay at $55 (Plus shipping) a pop. But God did not grant me that sense.

So now I'm sure you're all wondering if the thing works. I have no idea. I used my last one out in my old cotton field and scared the bloody hell out of my niece.


She was mortified and crying while I was laughing my ass off talking to the thing. She finally demanded that I take her back to my house and spent the rest of her trip not sleeping, which was not an easy task given that it was another week or so.

So, what did the box do that scared her so bad and made me laugh?

Here's a transcript of my "Conversation" with it:

Me: What's your name?
Box: Lucifer

Me: What's your name?
Box; Satan

(At this point I figured it was an anomaly, so I continued asking the same question)

Me: What's your name?
Box: Satan

Me: What's your name?
Box: Lucifer

(Obviously me and the box were going in circles at this time and it was just giving me random names for Beelzebub. There's no way in hell Satan was sitting in my cotton field talking to me through a modified Radio Shack radio.) I decided to throw it a curve with the next question and see if it answered "Satan." It didn't.

Me Where are you from?
Box: Fire

By this point my poor niece was in hysterics and crying like hell. I was laughing my ass off. I got to ask it one more question before she flipped out and demanded to be taken home.

Me: Is it hot where you come from? (Oh c'mon, did you really think I was going to ask it the meaning of life?)
Box: Yep.

That did it. My niece freaked out and demanded between the tears that I take her home. To this day she can't understand why I was laughing so hard.

I'm a horrible uncle.