Category: My stories

Shelley was a great actress.
One of the greatest.
Winning awards, and losing jealous actor husbands over them.
She packed on a lot of weight to play a role, won an award for it, and then found she couldn’t shed those pounds.
Leading roles for older fat women doesn’t exist, so she dove into supporting characters and made them her own.
Cranky, bossy, and always funny.
Never holding back.
And winning more awards.
A heart attack left her bedridden.
Where she watched her old movies and many appearances on chatshows.
Sipping her water, smiling, and remembering the good old days.

If you can’t afford to rent a building to start your restaurant, you can always buy a used food truck and outfit it for your concept.
Park in a good spot, get cooking, and people will come to you.
If you’re really good, businesses will invite you to their private parking lots for a food truck day for their employees.
A bankrupt mall came up with an idea to turn its parking lot into an open air food court.
Rows and rows of food trucks.
But they left no space for customer parking. Or seating.
And it rained a lot.

There isn’t much to do in Foster, Missouri.
Foster is a street of nice old houses, a school, a post office, a general store.
People sitting out on their porches, reading the paper or the bible and sipping lemonade.
Maybe go out for a stroll.
Folks on the south side walking east, on the north side walking west.
At the end of the street, cross and stroll back.
You don’t walk west on the south side. Nor do you walk east on the north side.
One guy tried that in 1965.
Nobody who knows what’s decent has done it since.

The idea of doing three events together in a triathlon, but the events themselves don’t appeal to me.
If I wanted to run a marathon, I’d run a marathon.
But I hate running.
I hate swimming worse than running.
I barely passed my high school swim test, and I avoid the water as best I can.
As for cycling, well, the less said the better.
Maybe if the events were ping pong, the javelin throw, and twirling that ribbon around.
I admit, I wouldn’t be good at any of those, but they sure do look like a lot of fun.

Looked across the room and saw three dots on the router.
Oh, is the connection down?
Nope… connection seems up.
Instead of getting up to look closer, I pulled out a flashlight from the drawer and lit up the router.
Sure enough, a cardboard box was blocking the bottom two lights.
I leave a cardboard box out for the cats to play or nap in because cats like boxes.
No cats in the box at the moment.
One’s on the bed, the other is preening on the arm of the sofa.
Still, the box is there if they want it.

“You’re reinventing the wheel,” people were always telling Ted.
They meant it figuratively, of course.
But after hearing this dozens of times, Ted decided to reinvent the wheel.
He bought a huge wheel of Parmesan Reggiano, analyzed it, and developed his own cheesemaking process.
The cows, the grazing fields, the milking machines… down to the caves to age the cheese in.
But Parmesan Reggiano is a protected name, and it only applies to cheese made in Parma Italy.
So, Ted reinvented Parma, Italy.
The buildings, the streets, down to every resident.
And lawyer.
“I’ll see you in court!” shouted Ted.

It’s hot in the summer time. Really hot.
Over ninety. Sometimes it’s over a hundred.
When it rains, it cools off a bit, but not much.
Just enough to go out on the patio under the umbrella and sit out for a bit, sipping tea.
If the chairs aren’t wet. I forget to slide them in under the umbrella sometimes.
So, okay. Every other time I go out, the chairs are wet.
When the rain lets up, now there’s heat and humidity.
Like a steam bath.
So, I go back inside, forgetting to slide the chairs back in once again.

None of the pigs on the farm have names.
They have numbers in a database, and they’re tracked with a tag that’s punched through their ear.
When the pigs eat and drink, they’re scanned.
That ensures they’re eating and drinking enough.
When it’s time to harvest a pig, they’re scanned into the processing system and the tags are pulled out of their ear.
The tags are reprogrammed to new numbers, punched through new pigs’ ears, and the cycle begins again.
The farmer tracks everything.
Until the farmer is harvested, their ear tag removed, and it’s allocated to a new farmer.

Once a year, the entire neighborhood holds a collective garage sale.
Everyone puts put all the clutter and crap they don’t want anymore.
Which makes more room for them to buy more crap which will clutter up their homes.
In the end, the clutter and crap just migrates from home to home.
Sure, some people come from outside of the neighborhood.
Which offers an exit strategy for some of the same crap in the neighborhood getting passed around.
But then, people in the neighborhood go to other neighborhood garage sales.
Importing a fresh supply of crap to keep passing around.