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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • About 1984, I got arrested in Cobb County Georgia for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had a little weed on me, which I had shoved into my skivvies before I was handcuffed. While in the holding cell at the jailhouse with a few other new arrivals, I decided I needed to get rid of it before I got processed in and sent upstairs, so I broke it out and surprised my temporary cellmates with a little treat in a home-made pipe fashioned from the foil out of a cigarette pack. It was cool. If nothing else, the 4 or 5 of us were a little less stressed about our current situation. One of the guys in the cell with me was especially memorable, because he had been arrested for drunk driving while he was at a lake partying with his friends, all because his keys were in the ignition so they could listen to his radio. He wasn’t even in the car when the cops showed up.

    Fast forward about 2 or 3 years and I’m back home in the Florida panhandle. At that time, I drove a cab for a living and one evening I was out with a fellow cabby hitting up some titty bars and stuff. We’re driving in his car, and I told him the story I just told y’all, down to the details about the poor guy and his DUI. About the time I finish the story, we’re stopping at a gas station for cigarettes or something, and we get out of the car to go inside and out front of the store are two scroungy looking dudes selling clumps of mistletoe (it was near Christmas time). I’ll be damned if one of those guys wasn’t the exact same guy in my story. I recognized him immediately and about crapped myself and was like “Holy shit this is the guy!!” He totally remembered me, and we had a fun little mini-reunion of sorts during which he totally confirmed my story about smoking weed in a jail cell to my friend…










  • I had an '82 Ford Escort. Those things were notorious for lunching the motor if the timing belt ever broke (which they did every 45,000 miles like clockwork) while you were traveling down the road. The valves would stop in whatever position they were in at that instant, and then the momentum of the car would keep the pistons moving up and down, bashing the piston tops in to whichever valves were unlucky enough to still be open, ruining pretty-much everything. At the same time I owned that car, my best friend owned an '82 Chevy Cavalier. We were constantly one-upping each other over who owned the biggest turd…


  • Back in about '89-'90 I was the assistant manager at a fast oil change place, and we had a regular customer with a maroon '76 Aspen with a bullet-proof slant-six who got his oil changed with us regularly. I could hear him coming. I’d know it was him without even looking because of the distinctive TAP-TAP-TAP -TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP. We’d pull him in and he’d tell us to just change the oil and filter and don’t bother checking all that other stuff, so that’s what we’d do. We’d pull the plug and if more than a half a quart drained out we’d be surprised. After a filter swap, we’d fill it back up and restart it and it would go TAP-TAP-TAP-TAP-tap-tap-tap-ta-ta-ta-t-t-t-t-t-t-t- etc and he’d smile and pay and be on his way. Of course, we’d see him again in about 3 or 4 months, same thing, rinse and repeat. The tapping was his signal to get it changed. Fast forward to '97, after working as a manager at other locations I came back to that same station as the manager there and I’ll be damned if that same guy in that same '76 Aspen didn’t pull in for the same service with that same oil-leaking loud-ass tapping slant-six, still hanging in there…





  • Back in the late 70’s, my dad ran the local branch of the Humane Society, which, at the time, was responsible for all animal control duties within the city limits of our town. During that time, our area had a big influx of Vietnamese immigrants settling in. The amount of calls that came in accusing our new immigrant neighbors of stealing and eating dogs was unreal. Dad was a special deputy tasked with investigating animal cruelty cases, so he would look into these at first, but there was never any solid evidence that it ever actually happened, and they eventually just started ignoring the calls. I have to imagine that a lot of them were probably just racially motivated attempts at harassment…


  • When my wife was pregnant with our first-born, my mother went with her to her first ultrasound appointment. To add a little back-story, I had a baby brother who was born when I was about 4 (1967). He had multiple birth defects and so many things wrong that he only lived 16 days. Needless to say, this affected my mom deeply. My wife told me that my mom cried while seeing her soon-to-be grandson on the screen and told her that if that technology had been available when she was pregnant with my brother that she would have terminated the pregnancy without a second thought. When I think of the pain and depression she lived with for pretty much the rest of her life, and then think about how the repukelican party want’s to force other women to go through that same agony too just makes me want to start hurling molotov cocktails into a trump rally…