sm62704's Journal: The Hamish

previously:
Double trouble coming?
Home Again

Half an hour after talking to Patty Thursday evening I left Felber's and went home to greet her. She'd arrived from Ohio the day before but hadn't gotten home yet. She got off the couch and we gave each other hugs.

"Who's here?" she demanded.

"What? Nobody's here. Just me and you."

"There's a woman living here, I can tell. The place it too clean!"

"Well, I told you Tami was staying here. She was a godsend after my eye operation, I don't know how I would have gotten through it without her."

She got a troubled look on her face, and I could see she felt bad about not being there for her dad. "Where is she?"

"I threw her out for you. She's staying with some friends while you're here."

"Thanks, Dad."

We had dinner at D'Arcy's Pint, and she went out galavanting with her friends and I got Tami and drank at Felber's some more, and took her where she was staying and went home. Patty called, she was spending the night at her friend's house.

So I logged on to slashdot.

Slashdot's helpful hints at the bottom of each page are often fucking retarded. Incredibly stupid.

"Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe."

OK, that one was a deliberately funny play on "measure twice, cut once". Judging by most commercial software, "Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe." is the first rule of programming. Like another Slashdot Handy Helpful Hint for (karma) Whores says, "if houses were built like software, they'd be built out of matches".

But this one pretends to be serious:

"Can you buy friendship? You not only can, you must. It's the only way to obtain friends. Everything worthwhile has a price. -- Robert J. Ringer"

Note there's a supposedly famous author that made that incredibly stupid statement. But he's not famous enough to have a wikipedia entry. He's famous enough to be on google, but so are you. If you want profound sayings, look no farther than 1970s popular music. There's a Billy Holiday song made famous by Blood, Sweat, and Tears that says the opposite of the incredibly stupid Bob the Dumbass Mammon Worshiper:

And when you got money, you got lots of friends crowding round the door. But when the money's gone and all your spendin' end, they won't be round any more, no no

These "friends" are called "fair weather friends". Anybody will be there when they're in need. When you have a friend that's there for you when you're in need, then you have a true friend indeed. Anything else is just an associate.

The only way to obtain friends is by asociation, not by spending. Only a fool tries to buy friendship.

As to "Everything worthwhile has a price", How worthwhile is air? What is its price? I get sick of my country's obsession with money. True friends not only can't be bought, they're priceless.

Why do people listen to this garbage the mammon worshipers spew without giving it a second thought? When I was young my mom told me "Steve, you think too much". I disagree, I think everybody else should think more.

The computer is dog slow; it's one I dragged out of the basement after the last one I built five years ago died from heat exhaustion after getting filled with cat hair. I fell asleep at the keyboard. The phone woke me up about the time the alarm clock would have if I'd actually set the dumb thing.

It was Tami's alien husband. I told him where she was and hung up. He called back half an hour later wanting the number; I gave it to him.

I met both my daughters at Top Cat's for lunch. I stopped by the bank afterwards, and as I was running late I didn't stop for gas. I ran out two blocks from work. I called Patty and Leila and asked them to bring me a can of gasoline.

No sooner did I get the car back to work and Tami comes walking up. She had some errand or another to run and wanted to borrow my car. She'd been walking all day and was dead tired. The people she'd been staying with had been fighting and "I just had to get our of there before I went crazy".

I told her she had to go to a gas station before she went anywhere else and gave her a ten, and to be back by two because I was going to take a two hour vacation. She came back and we went drinking.

Patty called; she was absolutely spending the night at my house that night. Tami was going to be out of luck again.

Saturday morning found Patty asleep.

I drank my coffee and sat on the pot, and the phone rang.

It was Tami. "Whatcha doin?"

"Sitting on the toilet and drinking coffee. What are you doin'?"

She laughed. "That's not a pretty sight. I have to get out of here, can you give me a ride or something?"

I told her I'd call her back after the bank.

I finished my business and woke my daughter up, and told her I was going to the bank and the gas station and she might get a call if I ran out of gas. She loanded me a twenty until I could get to the bank.

I filled the gas can halfway up and put the rest of the twenty in. It didn't even give me a quarter of a tank.

If you are an oil company executive, know that you are the scum of the earth and everyone on this planet hates your filty guts, hates the air you breathe, hates you with a passion unmatched by anyone. The Jews didn't hate Hitler as much as the world hates you. You are the lowest of the low.

If you meet an oil company executive, please beat the hell out of him, cut his balls off and shoot his family.

IMPEACH THE OIL BARON. Then try him for treason, find him guilty, put him in front of a firing squad and shoot the son of a bitch. And his vice Baron, too.

And then charge his family for the bullets like they do in China.

If you own stock in an oil company, sell it - your very soul is in peril for owning oil company stock. If you work for an oil company, quit your job.

BLOW UP A REFINERY TODAY!

There was a news item a month ago about one of the Arabs that own a gas station on Cook street getting shot in the ass. It's the first time I ever read about someone getting shot that I actually cheered the shooter. If I'm ever on a jury where someone is on trial for murdering anyone that has anything to do with the oil industry, they will be acquitted.

Anyone having anytyhing to do with today's oil industry is selfishly inflicting misfortune on the entire world for their own greedy benefit. It's just plain evil.

I went to the bank, cashed the check, and called Tami back. I dropped her off at Farley's with ten dollars for beer money. "I sure hope Danny isn't here!" she exclaimed. Danny is her son's father, a friend of mine of several years who had introduced her to me. He says he still loves her, she says he always used to beat the shit out of her.

I then went to the dollar store with my list of things to buy. Everything cost twice what it did the last time I was there.

The price of everything is dependant on the price of oil. Almost all plastics are oil based. Everything must be transported. Nothing fuels inflation like the rising price of oil. meanwhile they claim untruthfully that "corrected for inflation" oil is as cheap as it was in 1980. That's a joke; everything else (except labor) since rose to match the price of energy, which is required for manufacture and delivery of everything from food to trinkets. A more meaninfgul metric is the Federal Minimum Wage. Compare how long a minimum wage earner had to work for a gallon of gas in 1980 to how long they have to work for a gallon of gas in 2008 and you'll see just how meaningless that "adjusted for inflation" metric is.

Nixon and his economists blamed the 1970s inflation on labor. What a bunch of lying sacks of shit. If economists aren't snake oil salesmen, why are there poor people?

I'd planned on doing an entire journal on mowing the lawn just to see if anybody complained, but decided not to. OK, actually I forgot but I'm already this far so what the hell. I'd planned on getting about five or six paragraphs at the beginning, at least, wiith "you're still reading?" before anything more noteworthy was noted, but I blew it.

I changed the oil in the lawnmower, filled it up with the $3.95 per gallon gasoline, and pulled the ripcord. It started right up.

Sometimes it does pay to pay more for an item. The lawnmower I had before that one cost about $150, and my elderly (now deceased) neighbor (at the time; I've moved a couple times since then) liked it so much he bought one exactly like mine at the same place I bought it, a week later. A year and a half afterwards, it died from metal fatigue.

A week after my lawnmower died, the neighbor's died the exact same death as mine. I replaced it with the name brand mower that cost $450, but it's self propelled and convertable between a bagger, mulcher, and side blower. Or was; most of the parts got lost in the move from the house on 7th street. The thing's almost ten years old and still starts on the first pull.

The noise of the lawnmower was enough to get my daughter woke up. I gave her the twenty back, and she went out to visit her friends. I went up to Farleys.

Tami was playing one of the damned poker machines. I was annoyed. I'd given her drinking money and here she was feeding it to a gambling machine that was only in the bar because that sort of gambling is a losing proposition to the gambler. And you can't single out Farley's, as every single bar in town (at least the ones I've been in, and I've been in most) has them, despite the fact that they're illegal. All the bars have signs that read "for amusement only" but all the bars pay out if you win.

But it turned out she was playing for Tammy, the bartender.

Danny was there, and he was drunk. I hadn't seen Danny much in the last year or so, ever since he wound up homeless. His stuff is all stored in my basement. Every time I've seen him he was in a bar, drunk. He'd been staying with some friends, had gotten drunk and gotten himself tossed out and was homeless again. I poured him a beer out of my pitcher. He handed me a pipe full of some of Pippin's best pipeweed.

Yes, there is a fellow here named Pip, but Danny probably bought the weed from someone else. I don't think Pip sells weed any more. Actually I don't think he even smokes it any more; he got a job where they piss-test.

In the US, if you have a menial job like janitor or fry cook or something equally harmless they test you for drugs, but if your job is, say, Senator or Bank President or some other occupation where you can fuck people's lives up real good, you can snort all the cocaine (that people doing menial jobs can't afford) you want with impunity.

I know people who were formerly pot smokers, but switched to crack because their employers test for drugs and the drug dealers tell them that cocaine only stays in your system for three days while pot stays in your system for a month, so the formerly productive members of society who stopped using the least harmful drug in existance became unemployed cocaine addicts.

Marijuana doesn't lead to harder drugs, the "war on drugs" does.

Nobody tests for alcohol. Funny, that.

I went into the ladies' room to smoke Danny's weed, because the lock is broken in the men's room and since there's no toilet paper in the men's room there would be no reason for anyone to spend that long in there unless they were smoking.

It's illegal to smoke in a bar in Illinois. Esecially if you're smoking pot.

There didn't used to even be a seat on the toilet in the men's room there. I guess the health department must have said something.

Tami and I finally wound up at Felber's, a far more respectable, nice little redneck bar that is, as I've mentioned, in the ghetto. Where else but Springfield would you find redneck bars in the black part of town?

By then Tami had figured out what the ladies had meant earlier by the "keep one eye open when you sleep and a rolling pin next to the bed". After she explained that my bringing Amy in was no secret, that Tami and I weren't lovers and we were all friends, one of them told Tami "We'll tell you if he brings another woman in here!" I said "hey, tell me if she brings her husband in here!" They all laughed at that, Tami laughing harder than anyone. I told them "what's bad is first I brought the girlfriend, then I brought the wife. Unfortunately for me it's not my girlfriend and not my wife!"

I have lots of girlfriends. Unfortunately I have no lovers.

I took her home after a couple of drafts. The beer is cheaper than Farley's and better tasing because they clean the lines at Felber's often. I doubt they ever clean the lines at Farley's.

Shortly afterwards she called and asked me to pick her up again. Apparently there was some other ruckus where she was staying, my guess was that her "psycho bitch from hell" had come out and gotten her booted from where she was. I couldn't leave her in the streets, so I called Patty and informed her that Tami would be there that night.

The next morning after getting up, Tami told me that Patty had schlepped in about 5:00 am. I dropped the fat lady off at McDonald's and told her I'd meet her at the library downtown, and went back home.

Patty was up. She went and got a new tattoo, and after a tearful farewell started her trip back to Ohio.

I can actually spell "Ohio!"

I pictured Tami breaking into song at the library.

What's wrong, what's wrong now?
Too many, too many problems.
Don't know where she belongs, where she belongs.
She wants to go home, but nobody's home.
It's where she lies, broken inside.
With no place to go, no place to go to dry her eyes.
Broken inside.

I've always

[Slashdot Parent]

I've always promised myself that I would never respond to something with just the four letters, "TLDR".

So I won't do that.

Re:

[sm62704]

Darn, and you're one of my more faithful readers, too.

Re:

[dysfunct]

Meh, I'd guess there's many more of us who read your stuff. Hell, I even read you at +6. But this is slashdot, so you can't expect people to comment with "nice story" and similar one-liners.

Re:

[sm62704]

True. And thank you for putting that blue dot next to your name! That goes to everyone on the "blue dot" list.

Wow. Just wow...

[The Insane One]

Please check your medication. Rather than directing your wrath towards the oil companies, perhaps you should look at the environmental lobby. I also disagree with your mother. You do not think enough. "blow up a refinery" indeed. That's a great idea, Einstein. You WANT to pay $7 a gallon for gas?

Like I said, wow. Just wow.

Yes, my trollfu is on maximum tonight. I normally just lurk but damn, I think it's time for you to step back a little and gain a new perspective.

Re:

[sm62704]

Relax, I'm just venting. I'm on no medication (took the last eyedrops this morning), but I am under a lot of stress; there's the price of gas, the price of food, the price of medical care even though I have decent insurance (I just had that vitrectomy operation last month to keep from going blind in that eye) and the mortgage company has started foreclosure proceedings. Is it any wonder I vent like that once in a while? better in a slashdot journal than somewhere I might go to jail.

But the environmentalists