The Frozen Tundra, Halloween Edition

Is there anything better than driving back to Colorado from the endless monotony of the California sunshine on a day when not only does a blanket of fresh snowfall cover the state, but the temperatures stay below twenty degrees Fahrenheit for the last 7 hours of the drive?

The answer to that question is yes, of course there is...thousands and thousands of things are better than that.

Sun-Baked & Weather-Beaten

A Few San Diego Things

I Can't Find The Sheet Music, But I Can Hum The Tune

I attended the wedding of my youngest nephew this afternoon and it was a beautiful ceremony, start to finish.

He married a wonderful young lady and it was impossible to miss not just the love that they had for one another, but the esteem that they had for one another. 

I am not ashamed to admit that I got a little misty-eyed when they exchanged vows. It really was quite nice.

The wedding (and reception) was held at a winery located in the small mountain town of Ramona, about an hour east of San Diego. The day I arrived in San Diego there was a wildfire raging in that area - a wildfire that was literally halted at the gates to the winery.

The fact that the wedding was able to be held was nearly miraculous, and the coincidence of the venue's name being "Milagro" (Spanish for miracle) was appreciated by everyone who attended the wedding.

I thought of the wedding of my nephew's mother and father as I watched my nephew and his Fiancée become husband and wife and somewhat marveled to myself about how wonderful it was to have been part of their wedding and to now be witnessing the marriage of their son.

Later, at the reception, as I watched my sister and her husband dancing alongside of their son and his new bride, I made a silent wish that the newlyweds would be as good to each other as their parents had been to one another, and that one day they too would be able to dance at their children's weddings.

Man, I love weddings...as a spectator, that is.

Beach Chair Don't Care

Murals Depicting The History Of Las Vegas New Mexico From The Perspective Of The Respective Muralist

Rain Or Shine, The View's Always Fine

Just Filler On Page 18

Looking for a good place to waste a night
Ramblin' on about how he was blindsided
Maybe if he gets lucky there will be a fight

Downtown, where there are plenty who know
The familiar story he will tell
Of betrayal, lies, deceit and woe

Going to drink that damn bar dry
'cause he just found out
That everything he loved was a lie

Girl leaves boy is old news
Nothing to get excited about
Nothing to do but whistle the blues

A paragraph of despair that would just be
Filler on page 18

Learn To Dismiss The Often Overwhelming Voices Of The Critics

Living To Be Older Only Has One Result

She had spent almost half her life wanting to be older
Because being older meant freedom
Freedom to participate, freedom to indulge

When she was a few months older than 15
She started proclaiming she was 21
Started dressing like the older girls
Started talking like the older girls
Started going out with the men
The older girls preferred

It occurred to her in her late twenties
She had grown up much too fast
Couldn't believe how much time had passed

But she quickly let that rumination slide

Her two kids were in Elementary school
The father of the first one had been buried last year
And she couldn't remember the last time she cared

When she was a few months older than 15
She loved being able to get into clubs and dance all night
When she turned 21 she was still feeling it
When the Judge gave custody of her children to her mother
Said it was for the best
The best for the kids, at least

Now she was 24 days past her 33rd birthday
At least her corpse was
That's as old as she ever got to be

With a needle in her arm

Somebody Is Having A Most Decidedly Bad Day

Twisting In The Sun

Like a tornado in the desert...

The Last Slam Dance In Los Angeles

He's got a lot on his mind
Will it rain tomorrow, will he ever climb Kilimanjaro
He just wants to let loose
Without havin' to worry that he'll cause anyone sorrow

So he drives out to east Los Angeles 
Home to the last good Punk club in Southern California
He goes out in hopes of finding 
Like minded dudes harboring the same idea

To ramp it up 
Smash it up 
Tear it up
Rip it up 

Without having to wake up in jail the next morning

Stare Down

The man across from him held his gaze as if his life depended on it.

Eyes the color of the early morning sky on a cloudless day. Intense eyes, the type of eyes that draw people in.

The gun in the staring man's left hand looked heavy.

Cold and heavy.

He looked at the gun for less than a tenth of a second before his eyes again locked on the eyes of the man opposite him.

He tried to stare back with an equal amount of intensity but thought he was looking more foolish than intense. Foolish and scared.

He hefted the weight of the gun in his right hand and instead of the feeling of reassurance he was hoping for, he instead felt fear...dread, to be exact.

The man did not flinch, did not blink, did not waver. 

Just stared at him as if trying to burn a hole through his head with imaginary lasers coming from the early morning sky blue eyes.

For a moment he thought he saw the man grasp his weapon a little tighter, which made him draw his breath in sharply. 

He wanted to turn away, to look in some other direction, but he couldn't. 

The eyes were just too compelling.

Minutes passed in bunches. It felt like hours had passed since this stare down had begun. 

He wanted to turn his head to look at the clock but he didn't. He couldn't.

Suddenly he heard noises, a mix of sounds emanating from somewhere outside the room.

Then the door was opened and the noises stopped abruptly. It was a few long seconds before a voice called out:

"Good god man, why are you holding a gun while staring so intensely into the mirror?" 

The Extremely Careful Ghost Hunter

She had spent the entire afternoon installing the cameras and audio recorders in every nook and cranny of the three story late 19th century Victorian.

For her it was just another easy paycheck. Gullible people who had been sold a bill of obviously fraudulent goods. 

A haunted house. 

That was how this particular masterpiece of 19th century Victorian architecture had been marketed, and that was how it was sold...as a genuine, money-back-guaranteed, haunted house.

The sellers had seemed normal enough, a married couple with two children, quite rational in appearance and practice, yet they insisted to their Realtor, and to all prospective purchasers, and especially to the young couple who had finally purchased the house, that it was indeed haunted.

Which was why she had been hired. The young buyers had tracked her down on the internet. She had billed herself as an investigator of the paranormal and had boasted that she could disprove any claim of a haunting.

The young couple had hired her to do the exact opposite, however. They wanted her to prove that the house they had just purchased was verifiable as haunted.

She tried to talk them out of hiring her, showing them the DVDs of all the purported hauntings that she had disproved - DVDs that explicitly detailed how all the hauntings had been faked, and even including confessions from a few of the Charlatans.

None of which deterred the young couple. They wanted proof that the specific house they had just purchased was haunted, and the checkbook they put to her head was loaded - so she took the job.

So she now found herself staring at 14 different monitors, each one of them covering an entrance to the house or a room inside the house. There was not a single square inch of the house that she could not see.

The 24 different microphones she had placed inside and outside of the structure were all wired directly into her primary PC, and she heard every sound they picked up.

Which was crickets, mostly. Or nothing.

It was now after three in the morning and as she sipped on her fourth can of Red Rush energy drink she thought about the vacation she was going to take with the money she was raking in from this job.

At least that's what she was thinking until she felt the firm grip of a strong hand around her ankle...

Available From The Factory As Customized As You Desire

It had arrived in an easy to assemble kit. At least that's what it said on the box. "Easy To Assemble" right next to "Use No knives".

He had carefully opened the box (using a pair of Surgeons scissors to cut through the plastic straps that encircled all four vertical and horizontal sides of the package) and removed the contents.

The torso was laid out in the middle of the living room, in the spot that had been previously occupied by the coffee table. 

What he discerned to be the head was placed directly above what looked to be the neck, and what he believed to be the legs were placed next to each other just below what he hoped was the bottom of the torso.

On either side of what could not possibly be anything but the shoulders were placed limbs that just had to be arms, and at the ends of each arm he placed mitten-like appendages that could not be anything but hands.

After he had it all laid out, he inserted two short copper rods into the holes on opposite sides of what he thought was the head (the "earholes" as he called them), and then connected the negative and positive alligator-clamp-tipped ends of a pair of jumper cables to those copper rods.

Stepping back a few feet and ducking behind a counter he glanced about the room one last time - not so much to check to make sure anyone in the area was out of harms way as it was a paranoid reaction.

Then he flipped the switch.

An action he immediately regretted.

Find A Stronger Camel

The straw that broke the camel's back

Must have been at the top of 

A most peculiarly tall stack

The Entertainment Fraud

Professional sports.

The biggest fraud in the entertainment industry.

Sixty or so years ago there was big bruhaha made about payola - radio disc jockeys being paid to play records of a specific label's featured artists. The payola scandal resulted in people losing their jobs, even going to jail.

Sixty or so years ago there was also a big bruhaha made about quiz shows - contestants who were deemed to be appealing to viewers were being fed answers in order to keep them on the show as long as possible. The quiz show scandal resulted in people losing their jobs, even going to jail.

Tonight I watched a National Football League football game that featured a manipulation of the game's outcome by the only people who literally have absolute control of the game - the officials.

It was glaringly obvious that the officials were doing everything possible to ensure that the home team would receive every advantage possible, and it was disgusting.

Which is okay with me, as hockey has started, and hockey is still not corrupt...I hope.

The Sculpture In The Roundabout

There's no plaque up to reveal the name of the artist or what name has been given to the sculpture ("Aspiration?" "Ecstasy?" "Three On An All-Time High?" "Hold On For Dear Life Because It Gets Very Windy In Superior?"), but this piece that was recently installed in the middle of a round about in Superior, Colorado, gets two thumbs way up!