A New Years Eve story.

Really it's not a New Years Eve story, the police report surely said January 1 on it.  It was around 3:00 am., and it is THE biggest money making shift of the year.  I took a ride out to Orchard Ridge, and I'm coming back to Verona rd. on Raymond rd.  We have 6" of fresh snow on the ground, it fell in about 2 hours time, so most places, no tire tracks.  This car is coming up my side of the boulevard the wrong way.

Normally when I face somebody going the wrong way on a one way street, I force them over to the left curb.  They normally get the idea, wave, do a U-turn, and get on another piece of pavement that is the right way.  Not this car, she climbed the curb, showed no sign of even slowing down, and ticked the bottom of my outside window as she went past.  She's dead drunk.

Most drivers would zoom downtown and make some more money.  The responsible citizen thing to do is to get her off the road before she kills herself or somebody else.  I do a fast U-turn and follow her until she turns, then I force her into a cul-de-sac and she stops.  My cab is blocking her path.  I go over to her window, and as I already knew, she was dead drunk.

"Lady you're too drunk to continue driving.  Your car is legally parked.  Give me your keys,  I will give you a free ride the rest of the way home, see you to your door, and remind you to lock the door when you enter.  You can come back tomorrow and get your car, I'll write down the location on a business card for you."

"I can't do that."

"Lady you're either going home in my cab, or going to jail in a police car.  Either way, this car is not moving from this spot tonight.  Come on, let me give you a free ride home.  Give me your keys."

"I can't do that."

"Lady this is the last offer.  You get a free ride home in my cab, or you go to jail.  Now give me your keys."

"I can't do that."

"OK, you're going to jail."  Dispatch called the cops, and told me I was an idiot for punching an hour hole in the most profitable night of the year.  That's OK, it's the responsible thing to do.  The cops actually got there pretty quick.  I told them what happened.  The cop scraped a little of the white paint she left on the bottom of my mirror into an evidence bag, and they took her to jail pretty quick.  No field sobriety test or anything like that.  She was totally blotto.

She got so many tickets.  Wrong way on a one way street.  Drunk Driving.  Leaving the scene of an accident, causing an accident because she's drunk, and who knows what else.  And I would have given her a free ride home. 

Drunk and stupid doesn't stop in college.

Tiberius

When Roy Boy's son became a driver, the dispatchers pestered him for what nickname he wanted.  They were probably thinking along the lines of Roy's Boy.  After about a week, he came up with Tiberius.

Turns out, Brian T. aspired to be an actor.  And it turns out that Tiberius was probably played by Shakespeare himself, in a play called, Sejanus His Fall, first performed in 1603 and ran through part of 1604.

Everybody thought Roy Boy was a cruel enough man to give his son a middle name as off the wall as Tiberius, and let it go at that, and that's what we all called him.

Then, a couple of days ago I ran into Roy at the supermarket, and asked him how Brian was doing.  He said that Brian was a leading actor locally, and had performed with every theater company in town, doing lead roles.  Tiberius indeed.

NEVER let a friend or relative move into an age restricted, elderly apartment building. NEVER!

Let me count the ways.......  Retirement, YUCK!!  It's enough to make you go back to work!

A friend who lives in another building like this one that's about a mile away told me this story, and as he chuckled, he kept saying, "I can't make this stuff up."

There are these 2 old lady's in his building (everybody's old, of course) who live across the hall from each other, and hate each others guts.  So, at roughly 3:00 am., the old lady in one of those apartments goes out in the hall and takes a dump in front of the other old lady's door, so she'll step in the pile when she exits her apartment.  To make sure it happens, and maintenance doesn't clean it up and prevent it from happening, she then pulls the fire alarm.  Did she get kicked out of there, the story is she did.  What fun, eh?

What's really sad is that if she'd started a grease fire on her stove before she pulled the fire alarm, she wouldn't have gotten arrested, and it would have been tough to prove who crapped on the hall way floor.

Is it like that where I live?  According to my friend, worse stuff happens here, but I kind of think that's going to be hard to top.

On the bright side, I just may have a job lined up, doing some traveling construction work, and I'd really, really love to do that.  The only reason I got a degree from the University of Wisconsin was because they let me in.  What I wanted to do when I was 21 was be a welder, and I still love welding, burns and all.  If the construction thing happens, I'll leave here and move back into something that is more like reality.

What's wrong with where I live, post #1

I was all set to say, what's wrong with America, but the state I live in has some SERIOUS issues.  How so?  Maybe all states have the same issues and I'm just picking on mine, but I don't know.  It turns out mine is worse than some others, but it's bad everywhere.

The Drivers Privacy Protection Act is a federal law that makes it illegal for the DMV in your state to give out your information.  BUT!!!!! That information is available other ways.  Court records and voting records, in general are available.  It's appallingly easy to get all your information, right up to your address and birth date.

Google is crapping on us yet again

Claiming they're making it better they've tried to tie blogs to Google+.  Google+ is the worst idea they've tried to shove down my throat to date.  Oh, it's gotta be friendly for cell phones, and instant messenger.  Screw that!!  That's not why I blog.

Oh well, I guess I have an another huge argument for turning this blog into that book, and series of short stories sooner than later.  And believe it, good blogs do that before you get a chance to finish reading them.  The blog I liked was one by an American in Columbia, and one day it just wasn't there anymore.  Did I ever find the guy's book?  No.  I'll bet it's out there, but there are so many titles out there.

Advise to anybody out there who is blogging, NEVER touch anything you look at and say, "I wonder what that is and how it works?"  Rest assured it's some big brotherish crap dreamed up in some office cube in someplace like Sunnyvale, by some clueless ass hole who could give a shit about anything but paying his car payment.

Halloween at Xanadu

Xanadu was a co-op in Ann Arbor.  The best dance floor in the organization was the living room/dining room in Xanadu.  I recently ran into some Xanadu names on Facebook, who were at the great Halloween party.

My friend and I were wearing mostly greasepaint.  All she was wearing was a short pleated skirt with no under ware, I was wearing a Speedo tank suit.  Her torso was painted silver grease paint, she was a topless dancer.  When she twirled, that skirt went out horizontal.

Dave Stewart got the job of painting her, in the second floor bathroom.  She sat on a bar stool in front of the mirror and Wazoo (Stewart's nickname) was painting her.  In walked this really straight laced Chemistry major named Lisa.  Lisa has red hair, was painfully skinny, wore glass's, and looked the part of a Chemistry major in general.  Lisa went into a stall to relieve herself and Wazoo hollered, "Hey Lisa!!  Whacha wearing to the party?"

Lisa replied, "I don't have a costume yet."

Wazoo, "Why don't you go to the party wearing what Nell's wearing?"

"What's she wearing?"

"Greasepaint.  I've got plenty, I can paint you too."

She came out of the stall, looked at Nell, and said, "I don't know......"

But Stewart talked her into it, and she sat down on the bar stool, took her blouse and bra off, looked away, and let Wazoo begin to paint.  It didn't take very long to paint that skinny torso, but Wazoo smirked the entire time.  When he finished he told her to look.  She slowly turned and looked in the mirror.  There she was with her naked scrawny torso painted silver with greasepaint.

Without saying a word, she got up and went into a stall.  In the stall she washed the grease paint off with the water in the john.  Put her blouse back on, and with bra in hand stalked out of the bathroom back to her room.  Nobody saw her for 3 days.

Nell, on the other hand had the wildest party of her life.  She rubbed that greasepaint off on every guy on the dance floor.

Free advise

I got a lot of free advise yesterday.

A landlord told me in so many words that I came off as a scam artist.  Sweet.  How do I change that?  The truth doesn't work.  The "scam", letting people check with a good friend who convinced me he would help me find a place to live doesn't work.  What did I do that was so wrong?  It all started close to 10 years ago.

I moved into the place on Kent Lane so I could get a dog, and I adopted Gromit.  We lived there for about 5 years.  During the first year, there appeared a spot of mold on the ceiling above the windows in the living room.  I kept an aquarium right below that spot, and feared it was the result of the humidity from the aquarium.  It was much easier to look at it in fear than it was to do something about it, and I suppose in retrospect the smart thing to have done would have been to have scraped it off and painted over it.  Dunno.  Anyway over the course of 4 years it got to be about 24" in diameter.  It was caused by snow melt that formed something called an ice dam.  When the management finally got around to inspecting the apartment, which they should have been doing on an annual basis they told me I had to leave at the end of my lease.

Then I lived on HWY 19 between Marshall and Sun Prairie.  My landlord thought he was going to make a small profit off living there and renting the rooms out, but it was a real primitive place to live AND he was losing money on it.  My fault?  No, it was his fault, but he wanted to break the lease after about 7 months.  We didn't get along very well, he lied about the place when he rented it to me.  He finally said he was going to evict me.  So he filed an eviction action against me and thought I wouldn't find out about it.  I did, showed up in court with a lawyer, and it was dismissed.  Now, when people look me up on the internet one of yesterday's free advice people told me they don't bother to notice it was dismissed.  So, I now have a prior eviction when I never got evicted.  I just checked it, and sure enough, I react the same way when it's not me.  You have to press the "Court Record Events" button to see the dismissal.

Then I lived in a string of motels, and that was OK, but it's not the same as having a lease and considering the place home.  Then I lived in Orfordville and that was weird.  Then I lived in Lake Mills and that was totally off the wall.  Now I live.....

God, would I love a decent place to live.