I’m waiting for the new video cards to become available.
Sure, they’re been released by the manufacturer, but everybody wants these cards.
So, anywhere they appear, they become unavailable quickly.
Bots and scalpers and resellers.
Buying all the cards up.
Some stores, they only let you buy them in person.
But they use bent and crooked methods.
Like handing out line vouchers to friends and family.
Until the factories ramp up production and the distributors meet demand, there’s no point, really.
Just wait them out… until the next generation is available.
And this shit happens all over again… and again.
Jack gets jacked
“Take care of my wife and kids.”
Jack pulled the sheet over his dead friend’s face.
And he did. He got back stateside and married the widow.
And he was a good father.
Raised the kids well.
The son, he became a real estate billionaire.
Got Jack and his mom a nice house.
Then, his mother died, left Jack alone.
But Jack found someone new. brought her down to the house.
The son was livid.
When Jack died, the son sold that house, and kicked out that second widow.
Imagine if someone had done that to his mom years ago?
Graduating
Tomorrow, we’re graduating.
So we took our beers out to the football field, laid down at the fifty yard line, and lit up our joints.
And we talked all night.
Who’s going where?
College, or the Army, or a job?
Bobby got drafted by the Dodgers, he’s going rookie ball.
His dad wants him to do college ball first, but Bobby thinks he’s that good.
Who needs another beer?
Who needs another joint?
The cops left us alone.
The campus security left us alone.
When the sun came up, we all went home.
And we never saw each other again.
Weekly Challenge #848 – CROSS COUNTRY
LISA
No one
His room didn’t smell good, a bit like the changing rooms after cross country. The only light was pushing its way in through a slit in the curtains.
“Who knows you’re here?”
It felt like a throw away question. Like he didn’t even care what my answer was.
That made it so much worse.
As soon as I answered his little smile made me wish I’d thought first, made me want to grab the word back, swap it for another one.
Change it for a comforting one like Mum or Dad.
A lie.
But sometimes they were OK. Weren’t they?
LIZZIE
Taking the cross country path was a last minute decision. And it looked like it was the right thing to do.
It was lovely out there. The trees, the birds, the stars. They even found a pathway where all the trees had exotic colorful lamps, guiding them through.
In their oblivious enchantment, they reached the end of the pathway.
“Great, now we have to turn back…”
They didn’t know it yet, but they didn’t have to, no.
The light mist lifted slowly. It looked so magical, so beautiful.
When they noticed the copious amounts of skulls, it was too late.
RICHARD
Bill
Bill was always a bit of an idiot.
Always with the hair-brained plans to follow the path less trodden.
“It’ll be fun! We’ll leave the trailers at the park entrance and hike cross-country. We’ll catch rabbits and eat wild berries for food, and camp under the stars.”
Like I said, a bit of an idiot.
After parking up, we complained it was too hot to hike, but he was insistent, so we left him to reconnoitre, while we threw some burgers on the barbecue and opened some cold beers.
That was three days ago. No sign of Bill.
NORVAL JOE
Billbert eyed each of the students in the classroom surreptitiously to see if he could determine which might be members of the Guild of the Dark Knights. They all looked like normal kids to him.
He was dubious about Sabrina’s claim and challenged her on it as they walked to their second period class. “Is this alleged guild active in Eureka because your witch’s club is here?”
Sabrina scowled at him. “No. There’s a cross country network from here to Salem. Everywhere we have an established coven.”
Billbert shrugged. “A Dark Knight’s Guild sounds cool. Maybe I should join them.”
SERENDIPIDY
This place irritates me. I call it Cross Country – but you probably know it as ‘The Bible Belt’. However you choose to refer to it, the people around these parts are clearly out of their minds.
I call it Cross Country, because the minute one of the natives comes my way, out they come with their silly crosses and crucifixes, waving them in my face, or better still, crossing their fingers in front of me, like some magical hex!
As if that’s going to work.
It’s like wagging your finger at a mugger!
Crosses don’t scare me – I’m a demon!
PLANET Z
Zane ran cross country in high school, and he was really good.
He received a stack of scholarship offers.
Looking through maps, he chose the college with the best weather.
A campus near the ocean, with great beaches and restaurants and clubs for partying.
When he wasn’t out running, he was walking the strand and tipping hot bartenders with his book money.
Four years later, he spent the last of his money to buy some papers and exams, and barely had the grades to graduate.
Flipping burgers and waiting tables.
Who the fuck needs a professional runner of 5K races?
For dummies like me
I’ve been using gMail as a mail client for years now.
I just point and click things.
Today, I accidentally hit the question mark in gMail.
It brought up a keyboard shortcuts page.
I’ve never seen that shortcuts page before.
Not that I’d use them. It’s pretty simple to point and click things.
Although there’s one shortcut I know I might use.
The question mark.
It’s right there on the page.
Maybe if I’d known about it, I’d have used it.
Which is why they put it on the keyboard shortcuts page in the first place.
For dummies like me.
Bad advice
I’m not what you would call the most stable person.
I don’t deal well with change.
So, I bought a bunch of self-help books.
You know the kind:
Throwing the elephant.
Who moved my cheese.
Don’t sweat the small stuff.
Those kind of simple wisdom things that work well when you’re a rich author who’s hoodwinked people into buying your crap writing, but doesn’t work in practice.
My shelf is full of these paperbacks.
And over the years, the sun has bleached the spines so they’re all faded and white.
Which is fine. They’re all the same useless crap anyway.
King Walter
Walter was never meant to be king.
His older brothers were all given titles and land and trained how to rule.
Each built castles on their lands and liked them so much, they never came home.
While Walter puttered around the royal castle, kicking the dirt.
When Walter’s father died, the brothers went to war with each other for the crown.
And the winner was… Walter.
The brothers and their armies had all destroyed each others castles and killed each other.
Leaving Walter with the crown and the royal castle.
He hired good advisors and puttered around, shrugging and smiling.
Bob’s Promotion
Bob got a promotion.
Now, he’s training and mentoring all the new employees.
And he’s doing a good job of it.
In fact, he’s doing too good a job of it.
He’s trained a whole lot of new employees.
Especially now that a bunch are leaving.
Bob’s trained them up way too good.
And Bob’s been coaching the employees to find a better place to work where they will get paid for their skills.
“The more new employees, the better I get at my job,” he says.
Just as he turned in his notice.
For a better-paying trainer job elsewhere.
Warrant
Lucien Sloan.
A real piece of work.
We’ve tried to put him away for all he’s done.
But nothing sticks to the guy.
Literally. Nothing sticks to the guy.
No matter what you throw at him, it slides off.
It’s like his skin is made of Teflon.
Turn a hose on him, and he’s dry in ten seconds.
Same goes for blood… none on his hands.
That bandage on his finger.
That didn’t stick, either.
It’s how he got that infection.
The antibiotic patch he was prescribed?
Slid right off.
We picked up the body this morning.
Cancel the warrant.
Bandura
As a young boy, researcher Albert Bandura was attacked and molested by clowns.
So, later in life, he conducted experiments on clowns.
Adults beat the crap out of blow-up clowns, then the kids would be left alone and observed.
Sure enough, the kids learned from the adults, and they beat the blow-up clowns too.
They even learned from videos of adults beating on the blow-up clowns.
People point to this research as groundbreaking, demonstrating the power of media to influence children.
But the truth is, Bandura hated clowns, and he wanted to raise a child army to beat all clowns.