Busoms of Pugnacity

From ITPT

Postmark Kentucky: Noodling for Dummies

From ITPT

A Man's Gotta Breed Too

From ITPT

Heartache and Longing

I parked next to the evening receptionist’s car yesterday. Her bumper stickers include:

1. Bush/Cheney 2004
2. Happiness Is A Republican President
3. My ♥ Belongs To A Trucker

On the passenger side seat, in plain view, was an open box of Tampax and a carton of Camel cigarettes. Oh, how I wish I could work up the nerve to ask her out on a date.

Truck Sellin’ Music

No more hits of the 80s. It took me a day and half to realize that the Sirius channel playing over the PA here had been switched to country music. No more absurd juxtapositions of 20+ year-old pop music and inane statements. Most of the things I overhear on the lot fall into line with a Nashville pop score. I’m disappointed, but heartened to know that I retain the ability to almost completely block out country music, as evidenced by the amount of time it took me to notice it.

World Cup Runneth Over

From ITPT

Nooooooooooooooo!

From ITPT

Dealership Quotes of the Day - Week of 06/05/06

06/08/06
“Looky here! What’d ya say there, Easy Money?”
--directed at me during Doctor! Doctor!, by Thompson Twins

06/05/06
“Y’all are a bunch of crooks.”
--overheard during Suddenly Last Summer, by The Motels

Dealership Quotes of the Day - Week of 05/29/06

More browbeatings and non-sequiturs, set to hits of the 1980s.

6/2/2006
Coworker (unsolicited): “This packet of balloons here? These cost twenty dollars.”
Me: “They blow up into funny shapes?”
/confused silence
--directed at me during The Glamorous Life, by Sheila E.

5/31/2006
The men’s room stall garbage can strikes again. I just noticed a discarded pair of tighty-whiteys sitting in the top of the receptacle. I can’t say whether they belonged to an employee or a customer. Most disturbing, however, is that I had an internal debate lasting 30-45 seconds about whether or not I should find something to prod the orphaned undergarment in order to survey the full extent of the damage necessitating abandonment. Someone send help.
--found during The Tide Is High, by Blondie

5/31/2006
"It doesn't get more professional than a manager with Enter Sandman as his ringtone."
--said by me, during Rain in the Summertime, by The Alarm

5/30/2006
"You need to get off your fat, fucking ass and get out there and move some metal."
--overheard during Heart and Soul, by Huey Lewis and the News

The Depths of Eduardo

From ITPT

Ultimate Fight Club

From ITPT

Dealership Quotes of the Day - Week of 05/22/06

The dealership quote of the day will submitted with little or no context, and will not be daily.

This week, the Big 80s channel on Sirius Satellite is being played over the PA.

5/26/2006
"See, that's why I say we should still have debtor's prisons."
--overheard during Danger Zone, by Kenny Loggins

5/25/2006
Unsolicited, context-less statement from Itsbeginningtolookalotlikechristmas:
"Gosh, I can't believe that...Next year, I will be out of high school for 30 years."
--Somehow, this statement makes me want to kill myself.
--directed at me during Saved by Zero, by The Fixx (again)

5/25/2006
Me: "I'll look it up. How do you spell the last name?"
Coworker: "Goddamn, I've know the man ten years and can't spell his name. Name's Guido. He's an Italian fella." (prononunced AYE-tal-yin)
--directed at me during Get Into the Groove, by Madonnna

5/23/2006
"Woo-wee. Fancy urinal cakes. I feel like I'm at a movie theater (pronounced thee-ATE-er)."
--overheard during Stand or Fall, by The Fixx

5/22/2006
"You got an irregular (prononunced ur-regular) heartbeat? Me too."
--overheard during Destination Unknown, by Missing Persons

Now With Less Than Quarterly Updates!

A Cinco de Mayo Carol: Parte Dos, Electrico Insecto del Loo

From ITPT

A Cinco de Mayo Carol (Bah Insecto del Ronquido)

From ITPT

Teaching the Teachers

From ITPT

Postmark Kentucky: How to Lose an Election 101

From ITPT

Placenta: It’s Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

From ITPT

Field Report: Tawdry Talabama Teacher Tryst

From ITPT

Those Who Can, Do. Those Who Can’t Teach Teenage Boys How to Do It

From ITPT

And on the 1,000,000th Hit, She Rested Again

From ITPT

(Must We All?) Suffer for Their Art

From ITPT

The Best a Society Can Get

From ITPT

Not Biden Into It

From ITPT

I Have a Dream #4: Extreme Home Makeover Edition

Three weeks into the new house, I had yet to remember a single dream until the night before last. I attribute this to sound sleep, as a result of going to bed exhausted on almost a nightly basis. But on Tuesday night, I’d had chili cheese fries at EZs, which caused me to toss and turn all night. Also, Eli decided sleep on the bed with me, but instead of sleeping on his side with his back to me, he slept with his legs toward me. He must have had chili cheese fries too, because around 3 AM, he had a dream that made his hind legs jerk and kick me repeatedly in the small of my back. Anyway, restless sleep usual correlates pretty strongly with crazy, memorable dreams for me.

As with my last memorable dream, last night’s falls into the my-recently-purchased-house-has-all-sorts-of-problems category. Again the house I had purchased was in the neighborhood in which I was raised. But instead of it being the Yocum house across the street from my parents, this house was located several blocks away on Gateway Drive. I can’t remember clearly any of the actual houses on that particular stretch of block, but for some reason, that nondescript stretch of neighborhood makes frequent appearances in my dreams.

I was moving into the house, with the help of most of my extended family (Shröats, not Müllikins). The house looked like many of the homes I looked at in Allandale and Rosedale. Specifically, fifty to sixty year-old shit-box, teardowns for which I’d basically have had to pay $250,000 for just the lot.

As I began to unload my moving van, I noticed an elderly black woman, with her own moving van, directing movers toward my house. She kept saying, “Make them drapes down to nine quarter inches, make them drapes down to nine quarter inches.” I immediately confronted her, and demanded to see her “papers” for the house. “This isn’t your house, old lady, this is my house. Why do you think it’s your house? Where are your papers, where are your papers?” She seemed confused, and I noticed that she had a large retinue of elderly black women with her. Some were morbidly obese; others were shriveled crones; many had walkers; and all had facial hair in the form of random, irregular whiskers. Despite their collective confusion, I continued to berate them and their movers, finally bullying them back into their moving van and away from my house. I don’t suffer from white, liberal guilt in slumberland.

After dispatching Pearl Bailey, I entered the house to find a host of problems. The house was a duplex, and the smaller, “rental” portion was a mess. Upon seeing it, I told my mother, “this is all kinds of fucked up.” Most of the flooring was either rotten wood or rotten linoleum with dangerously large holes. The previous tenants had left their crappy furnishings in the house and most of it was damp and sticky.

The other half of the duplex was marginally better. Most of the rooms were reminiscent of the basements in houses from my childhood neighborhood, with stucco sprayed, concrete walls and small, long windows at the very top of the walls. Of particular note was the kitchen, which was entirely pink and fuchsia. The walls were textured to resemble hardened, rosy meringue waves.
As with my last dream, this house also had some bizarre plumbing choices. In my bedroom, directly adjacent to the head my bed was a brown, metal, pedestal style drinking fountain. The fountain didn’t drain properly, and using it caused my pillows to become soaked. In short, the house was going to need a bit of work.

So compelling was the dream, that I actually fell back into it after getting up to drag Eli’s lanky ass off of my bed and onto his own. Again, I had to confront the elderly black woman who still seemed determined to have my drapes altered. My house doesn’t have, nor ever will have, drapes. But since the dream, I’ve been keeping a closer eye on my window treatments. I can’t be certain, but some of my Venetian blinds seem to be missing slats.