A blog with a warning label.  This blog is brought to you courtesy of bourbon.

Val's out of town, on girls weekend.  So I thought to my self:  self, why not do some of the things you enjoy?  I agreed with my self, of course, since I'm right, and it'd be considered crazy to argue with your/myself, esp when I'm right.

Still with me?

So off I went to Wally Mart.  I took Val's cane from last year, and when I saw a shapely lady wearing a skirt bending over, I hooked the skirt and lifted it up to see what was underneath.  She didn't agree with me on that, but I promised I'd not do it again and lied to her, saying that I was sorry.  You see...it wasn't that she minded me lifting the skirt, but my aim was off and the handle went right up her.....well, you know it doesn't matter where the handle went, it was going to have to be washed.

Luckily, someone was there with his service dog, and he licked it off.  The DOG licked it, not the blind guy.  Although he seemed to want to....he sniffed in the general direction of the cane and said:  "I didn't know that Sheila was coming here tonight."

So I walked around some more, trying to get some sympathy with the cane, but...once you know where that handle's been...[bygones]  I did find some children that needed guidance, so I scared the hell out of them and got out of there before I got into trouble, and went to the liquor store.  You know, for the longest time, I was BEER ONLY.  I would not touch a mixed drink or a shot or a glass of spirit neat.  This is because I'd never been around any good booze.  It was always the bottom shelf cheap stuff, the canadian whisky blends, which is another way of saying "it's CRAP!"  Windsor, Canadian Club, VO, Black Velvet, etc.  yuck.

I had a mission in mind when I went to Andy's, I wanted a bottle of Jesse James bourbon.  Holy crap, I had a goal!

Secretary, write that on the calendar, put it on my to do list and mark that fucker done!

This Jesse James bourbon is promoted by the long haired dude from Full Throttle Saloon, "sings" (screams) for the Jackyl "band".  Funny how it says on the label Established 1882, when it was introduced for the first time in August at the Stugis motorcycle rally thing.  Like it says down below, it's pretty good, lots of leather and caramel and charred toasted oak.

Seems like we've discussed beer before here on the bloggy thing.  I also seem to recall thinking of about 40 more things I wanted to tell you fine people, but I forgot.

The liquor store that I go to is less than half a mile from my house....handy if I ever become an alcoholic.  They go to the various distilleries and buy barrels of whiskey, and get a special label put on the bottle.  That bottle on the left.  It was barreled 11/15/01, #784; bottled on 9/22/11.   86.6proof.  It is very good, btw, a single barrel, it hasn't been blended with other barrels to make them taste better, which is most of what is available.  The middle one is the bottle I went to get, and since it is made by Heaven Hill, it is quite good as well.  I have found that I enjoy sipping them neat.  That means no ice, no water, no damn coke.

A guy at the store, Mike, was telling me about all the barrels they have bought and are coming in in the next 5 weeks, sounds like I'll have to be drinking  lots of bourbon to keep up.  And because I was getting a bottle of the Evan Williams, he gave me a whiskey glass.  Nice, huh?  Oh, you're wondering about the water in the pic?  I find that a feller should drink a lot of water when drinking bourbon.  Did you know we have a reverse osmosis water filter?  Takes the chlorine taste out, takes out rustyness, all sorts of stuff.  You should see those filters when I take them out.

I don't know who is writing this damn thing, I went to the liquor store today. So after WallyMart, I went to John Hardy's for dinner, talked to Trav for the time he was there, then sat down for dinner.  After that I went to The Canadian Honker because I knew there was live music.  So I ordered a beer:  Goose Pee, which is Schell's Amber with a fake name.  You can get this beer all over town, Glynner's, WhistleBinky, Beetle's, JohnHardy's, just to name a few...they all call it something different, and they all price it differently.  You can bet that I will NOT be getting any more of it at the honker...they charge $6.37 for a 22oz glass.  Whistle Binky charges $2.50? happy hour, Beetle gets $4 or 450.  Bunch of bastards.  It's good beer, but not that good.  I got there about 8, damn place is packed.  I should have taken in my book, but it's kind of fun to watch people too, sometimes.  I've gotten in trouble for watching too intently before.  Can you imagine that?  The PeanutButter pie is quite good there, but best shared and drunk with coffee.

I will say that I did not do all that I wanted to do while I was there.  I wanted to tell my waitress that she had a great smile, and that if it wasn't genuine that she was a great actress.  Good job, Steve, trombone dude, keyboard dude and singer dude.  Good band.  I should have requested "Ain't no Sunshine".

thru Kelly's, I thought:  Damn, I used to sometimes give 5 or 6 of these a day!  Girl's weekend is all about what I want and want to do, right?  So then I went to the titty bar.  Well, close.  I went to Big Lots, and bought some stuff.  Rochester doesn't have a titty bar, and I'm not sure if the one in Austin is still open.  Next closest would be close to an hour drive; at $3.75/gallon/15 mpg not sure I can afford that.

Are you still awake?  Made the mistake of buying a small bag of malt vinegar/sea salt chips.  They make the bourbon taste different.  Where's that damn cat.

Yeah, ok.  Kelly was my only plan for Saturday.  If the weather forecast turned out like they said, I thought I might go for a ride.  I thought maybe Gracie might come over for a massage, I considered getting a massage, but I bought bourbon instead.  The other BBQ joint is having a soul food buffet, and I have a GC.  I'll have to lay off the bourbon before I go, of course.  It'd cost a fortune to take a taxi, and 2 fortunes if I got a DWI.

I think the salt or the vinegar from those damn chips ate away the top layer of my tongue.  Good thing I can't find the cat, after all.

Where is that little black bastard, anyway?  Hope no one stole him.

What's on for Sunday?  Glad you asked.  How about a motorcycle ride thru the fresh country air, seeing the leaves coming out onto the trees, seeing the grass green up the countryside, smelling the ever-so-fresh manure being spread onto the fields.  We'll cruise down to Chatfield, have lunch, ride around some more, then stop for ice cream at DQ.  Why DQ?  I have a gift card!  that means that I'll spend some of tonight looking at a map, deciding which way to go, but first!  Another volunteer for my massage table.  I'm not sure if she's the lucky one, or me.  I've always said that I do the massage for free, but people find that to be creepy.

I could go on and on, here, but then I'd have to make up stuff, and I know how you hate that.  This is a nonfiction bloggy thing; here's where you find the truth, justice and the American way!

Every now and then, I ponder the meaning of life.  Whether or not there is reincarnation, it doesn't matter; you have to start over; nothing you do today or tomorrow  or next decade will matter.  Sure you might read about it in a history book, assuming you come back as a human.

What if you come back as a worm?  You'll never know, so it won't matter.  So, really...what is the point to getting all excited about everything, you know the person, has a to do list as long as her leg, and it keeps getting longer.  Not because she never gets anything done, but because she keeps adding more and more stuff.  Yeah, part of that is due to the kids and all the stuff that they want to do now.

You know, I was a kid once.  Hard to believe now, but I think everyone was at one time.  "what do you want to do when you grow up?"

I never had an answer.  Oh, yeah, at one time I thought I wanted to be a pilot.  Got glasses in 2nd grade, someone said:  you can't be a pilot if you wear glasses.  I thought I wanted to be an archaeologist.  I don't know what caused me to give that up, maybe I saw a show of how boring it is.  For a while I wanted to be a farmer, a mechanic;  actually went to school to be a mechanic and a welder.  Kind of interesting, but no real drive to it. I toyed with the idea of being a maintenance man for several years, working at a couple places doing that, and I enjoyed the work.    As many of you know, and apparently a lot of people don't know, which is odd since I've used the name massagemick for a lot of years, (like since 2004); I went to massage school in 2002.  I didn't really realize that the majority of massage therapists are liberal tree huggers that wear flowered socks or have very light loafers (if you know what I mean)...the discovery that the main teacher and owner of the school I attended didn't shave her legs or pits should have been a clue...but I didn't really fit in to the industry...there's not really a lot of people that WANT a fat hairy old guy to rub oil all their body.  Never mind that he's the best at it in town.  In some regards.

Hell, I don't really want a fat hairy old guy to rub my neck when it aches or when I have  headache, but I do it anyway, because I don't like to reject myself.

No, there's not YET a reality show to determine who is the best massage therapist in the world, but give them another year or 2....

What the hell was this about?

Oh, right, the meaning of life.  I read FiFi's blog the other day and commented on it:  going thru life w/o goals is just coasting.  Our goals include:  becoming debt free and going on vacation.  Well, of course, doing the vacation will not help us accomplish the debt free thing, so it's a vicious cycle of constant failure.  Sort of.

Somehow I made it thru 40 years without making goals or learning how to set a budget.  I recall talking with a advertising person once and getting kind of mad when she asked about my budget...and she was good enough to explain how it was supposed to work.  Yes, this is why my massage business did not thrive.  Well, that plus the fact that I needed a lot more customers each day than I was getting.

So, I'm 42, fat and hairy; what should my goals be?  Lose weight so I can live longer?  What's the point?  I've got everything I want right now.  Feel free to leave a comment.

Edit:  seems as if I always forget to type in something...I keep asking the kids on the bus:  What are you going blah blah...not that I care what they're thinking, but I'm looking for ideas.

My old bus suffered a malfunction the other day (turbo sucked in an oil seal and commenced to blowing a tremendous quantity of smoke).  The interesting thing is that the engine ran great--better than it's run since Christmas--or maybe I was simply distracted from it's lack of power by the hilarity of the massive amounts of foul smoke.  Turns out it was spraying unburned oil out of the exhaust pipe which adhered to the back of the bus.  Fun stuff.


Of course this means that I had to have a spare bus.  I don't like spare buses for many reasons.  For example, some spare buses have had raccoons.  Pigeons are a regular participant in early morning exercise.  Can you imagine an old fat bus driver trying to chase a damn bird out of a bus?  How about an old not too fat man cleaning raccoon crap off the driver's seat?  


I'm not going to discuss the shop's attentiveness or ability to repair the buses, we'd be here all day and then I'd probably get fired.  Put simply, a spare bus gets driven a lot, driven hard with little attention paid to it's health or well being.  Oh, sure, we have to perform a pre-trip inspection, but not as much attention to detail is paid to a spare compared to an assigned bus.  


I've never felt unsafe in any school bus.  Stop calling the DOT.  They hassle us enough as it is.  The bastards sometimes sit on the street outside the bus barn flagging down each bus as it leaves just so they can check if we have our drivers licenses with us.  Ok, sure, that dumbshit that didn't have hers TWICE could be to blame, but the DOT has been doing this for years.  Somehow they always know when a bunch of buses will be parked waiting out a field trip.  Boy, they raise hell then.  Any little thing wrong....


So anyway, today's spare bus had a gob of sticky gunk on the steering wheel that I was unable to clean off of it.  I tried to clean it off, too...I'm thinking one of those old men sneezed on the steering wheel, OR maybe he was a little sick the other day, was using a cough drop and decided to save damn thing, you know, like old people do; they save stuff.  Some people save EVERYthing, and they're called hoarders.  Some people save useful stuff, but get a little out of control with it.  Often it's excused due to having live thru the depression when there was uncertainty where the next bale string or margarine bowl was going to come from.  


Back to the cough drop.  I think the old fart had been coughing coughing coughing and finally broke out a cough drop, and since it was near the end of his shift he decided to save it by tilting the steering wheel as horizontal as possible and then stuck it on the area right next to the door open/shut buttons.  Yes, the door controls are on the steering wheel.  Pretty sure the engineers that designed this were union employees.  This bus is parked outside in the sunshiney delightfulness, which causes cough drops stuck to the steering wheel to melt and adhere to the steering much like the snot the old guy had sprayed onto the windshield....well, let's just sum it all up by saying they could use the stuff to retread tires.  BTW, there was suck a coating of something on the inside of the windshield that I was able to write a message for the next poor bastard that has to drive that bus.  


I didn't expect to get my bus back for at least a month, but I was surprised with a call on the radio, which I expected them to say:  hey, you fat bastard, you're late getting to the school! but they said that my old bus was done and I could retrieve it/swap at my convenience.  I agreed that I would.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that they also repaired the hood of the bus; one hinge had fallen part...which I discovered the other day.  Ok, I discovered it a few weeks ago on the first really warm day and actually considered fixing it at home.  But....I really didn't feel like donating a bolt to the company.


So maybe I should have quit before that last paragraph...because it wasn't funny at all.  If you'd like your money back, just ask...you can have the cost of admission to this amusement park returned to you if you fill out the form in triplicate, mail it to my POBox, but I can't return it to you for at least 6 weeks, and I don't mail to PO Boxes.  Sorry...it's the least I can do.

Maybe the thing to do here is to just do it.  Seems to work well for Nike.  This is in reference to the lack of posts...just have not had any interesting things to write about.


March.  One of my favorite months, it's in the top 12.  March 6, 1981...went roller skating in Creston IA with Jim Meikle and the 4H(?).  I was not comfortable nor confident skating, but I tried anyway.  Fell down a couple of times, but was getting more confident.  Then they turned on the black lights and the floor lit up with all sorts of stars, moons, all sorts of shit.  Yep, fell down again, and of course got right back up again, but other than to get to the side, didn't move under my own power for a while...turns out I broke my ankle.  We determined that the NEXT day when we went to the ER.  Seems like they stuck me in a bed and didn't cast it till the NEXT day because the swelling was too much.  I was in that damn hospital for 5 days.  A cast from my toes to mid thigh, didn't come off until May 2...which happened to be a camping trip for the boy scouts.  Also got my first bath in those 2 months, there must have been half an inch of yellow gunk/dead skin on the sole of my foot.  Keep in mind that my knee had not bent more than a tiny bit in that cast, imagine if you can the pain when it did bend to 90*.  Holy hell, nearly pissed myself.


Here's a short list of things I like this week:

• the softness of new pine needles
• the perfect minitureness of a brand new maple leaf
• magnolia blossoms 
• going out to eat with friends
• smell of hyacinths
• the sound of my motorcycle

March 9, 2004 started like pretty much any other day, and ended fine.  It had a rather bad couple hours in the middle, however.  It was one of those weird weather days, a little below freezing, high humidity, which caused a very thick slippery frost to develop in some areas.  Yep, you guessed it...crashed a bus.  It was so slippery that the ambulance guys were trying to get stuff out and kept sliding back away from the ambulance.  Only one person was actually injured and only wanted his medical bills paid.  Interesting note about the bus:  they did not repair it; it was fairly near retirement, so insurance totaled and paid what it was worth.  The other 3 buses like that one they sold as scrap.  I wonder if the difference paid the medical bills?  6 weeks later I was put on "on call status", they never called again.  Coincidence?

March is typically motorcycle maintenance and modification month.  In 2009, I tore my old Honda apart.  I put in wheel bearings, steering bearings, new brakes, new wires, new bulbs, I had a lot of fun with that.  In 2010, I did some electrical mods to Val's Honda,as well as hard saddlebags.  In 2011 I put new saddle bags on my Yamaha, added some lights which look like crap because I'm a cheap bastard.  This year, it's more saddle bags, but on Val's new bike.  I put in new batteries, new brake fluid, and a new license plate light.  (that'll be tomorrow.)

What's next? Oil changes, new brake fluid for my bike, see about the luggage rack for Val's bike, too.  Plus whatever else I've forgotten to tell you.  Nice that this year it's been warm instead of huddling over the soldering iron trying to keep warm.  I think that speeds up the process, a little sweat makes it go back together faster.  

I have no idea what I'll do next year to the bikes, I guess all there will be to do is maybe brakes and oil changes.  Hmmmmmm.  Won't that be too bad...no spending $600 on stuff.

Heard an odd name for a jr high kid; I think she won't lack for sexual partners when she's old enough, no matter what she looks like.  Her name?  Heaven.  EVERY guy is going to want to say:  Heaven, I'm in Heaven, and my heart beats so that I can barely speak....