If I Had a Hammer

If all of my tears combined and melted into a river, that would not equal the sadness that I feel now you have left me.  If I could only take a sad song and make it better, then I could cheer myself up, but then again, if I had wings, I could fly.  For only having two letters, “IF” is a mighty big word, because it can affect so many things, and it actually changes reality.  If pigs could fly, that would have made Lewis Carroll very happy, but I tend to think that he was probably very happy from doing too many drugs.  If the pigs could stretch out their skin and swallow a lot of air and somehow become lighter, or be propelled by gas from flatulence and float around in the air, that would be a sight to see.  If these pigs only found a way to contain all the gas from burping and farting, then they would fly away and the cost of bacon would rise with them.

When you eat something very fast, people say you are eating like a pig, because pigs are always hungry and when they eat, they make a lot of noise.  When pigs eat fast, they swallow a lot of air along with their food and this leads to borborygmi, those fun noises that come from their stomachs and intestines.  Sometimes I like to pig out on snacks while watching TV, but I am not fond of pork rinds.  If I could eat whatever I wanted, then I would be as happy as a pig in the mud and these animals actually do enjoy frolicking around in the mud, because it keeps them nice and cool, and then they won’t be sweating like pigs.  I have been riding high on the hog here and trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear and I am hoping that I don’t make a pig’s ear out of this post, but if that is the case, then I will just squeal away.

Written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday where the prompt is to start your post off with the word “if”.

How Much is a Lid?

I remember buying nickel bags and dime bags of weed when I was in High School, because I was not able to scrape up $40 to buy a whole ounce, which was also called a lid back then.  A nickel bag was less than an eighth of an ounce and it only cost $5, but it was usually loaded with sticks and seeds, which you can’t smoke, well at least I didn’t.  An ounce of pot was also called a four-finger bag, as people would hold up the bag and judge the amount in it by placing their fingers next to the bag to see how tall it was compared to your fingers and if it didn’t measure up to four-fingers, then you were shorted.  No one actually weighed the pot that they bought, it was all done by eye.  A kilo of pot, later called a key came in a brick, marijuana that was packed tightly together for smuggling purposes, and before my time, pot was measured out and sold in Prince Albert tobacco cans that had a lid on them and the lid became an ounce.  After I got out of High School, I had a much better connection, who had really good stuff and I bought in greater quantiles then, like quarter pounds and pounds of weed.

My friend lived in Greenwich Village and he knew this guy who was a writer for High Times Magazine, so he had to write reviews on all different types of pot.  In order to write about it, he had to try it and he had all different types of cannabis and sativa, which he gave to my friend to sell.  Most of the marijuana was green, but he had black, red, orange, purple, yellow and gold and a lot of them had names like Skunk, Kush, Wacky weed and he also had Thai Stick every now and then.  I had my own scale, so I could break down the pounds into ounces, but my particular skill was being able to roll the perfect joint.  When we went to my friend’s apartment in Greenwich Village, he would always hand me a bag of weed, like an ounce and tell me to roll it up.  I could get 50 nice size joints out of an ounce, so this was an all-night effort for me.

First you have to clean the weed, which means getting rid of all of the sticks and seeds, so the joint will burn properly.  You need the right touch for this and many armatures would grind the weed into powder, which would make the joint snake down one side, so you need to be careful when you are breaking up the buds.  You have to crush them gently between your fingers and I would pull the buds apart, which leaves you fingers very sticky, that is if it is good weed loaded with resin.  This may be where the Rolling Stones got that name for their 1971 album, but with that working zipper on the cover, it probably has a sexual meaning.  It is an art form tearing buds into the right size pieces, so that they maintain a certain consistency, (small enough to be rolled without ripping the paper and not ground down into powder) and this only comes with practice and patience.  I am a two-handed steam roller, so I need a surface to roll a joint on, although some people can do this with just one hand and no surface, which always amazed me.  Back in the day, I guess I was pretty much of a wild child, but somehow, I managed to live beyond the age of 27.

Written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday where the prompt is lid.

Perspire

Just trying to be different, which comes natural to me, as does being satisfied with the current status of my miserable life.  If I had some aspirations, perhaps my life would improve as it took off on a different course to better myself, but I aspire to sit on my ass and write today, which makes it like every other day.  I have no need to be any better than I already am, as it is hard to improve on perfection, not that I think I am perfect, but I am much better than a lot of others that I see out here in blogland.  I usually find a way to get inspired and I guess it is possible that I have my own personal muse, but it is not like we are always on speaking terms.  Maybe I will find some direction around the next corner where it is waiting to meet me and this inspiration will move me to write something outstanding that everyone will enjoy.  It is also possible that something that I have written will inspire another person after I am gone, as it is inevitable that one day I will expire, but how and when that will happen remains a mystery to me and until then I will just keep truckin’ on.

Written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday where the prompt is to use the words “inspire/aspire/expire”.

Time and Distance

Far out, time keeps on slipping into the future, so things that seem far away, eventually end up being right around the corner.  Take my cellphone provider for instance, as they told me that they will no longer be covering my phone in October, because it is a 3G and the only service they will have, would be for 4G and 5G phones.  I figured that I would need a new one eventually, but that time which seemed far off is rapidly approaching.  I sprang for the 5G, which I guess is better and since October is very near now, I ordered this yesterday.  Near and far are relative terms, as what is near to one person might be considered far to another.  I know that Halloween is coming, as I have already seen some decorations set up and before you know it, Christmas will be here.

Your nose is always visible to you, because it is right on the center of your face, however your mind will ignore it through a process called Unconscious Selective Attention, so even though it is close, it seems so far away because it is not seen, thus being out of sight puts it out of mind.  A person with bad depth perception would not be able to tell you for sure if an object is near to them or far off.  Astronomy is a weird subject and anything that is out in space, I would consider to be far away, but that would mean that objects known as near earth objects are far away, which does not make all that much sense.  Objects that are further away should be smaller, if both objects are the same size.  The astronomical unit is a convenient distance unit for measuring stuff in our solar system, but when we go beyond that we switch to light-years and parsecs which is a bit farther away.  Our Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years, or 30,000 parsecs across, which seems like a relatively far distance, but compared to the known or observable universe this distance is close or near.

Written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday where the prompt is to use the words “near” or “far” and if you start your post with one word and end with the other word, you will get the bonus points, whatever they are good for.

Numbered Dots

My mom always valued math and she helped me with my homework when I was young.  She was a bookkeeper and she worked as a comptometrist before calculators and computers became popular.  She understood how to work this special machine that performed mathematical operations for accounting and I guess since not everyone knew how to use this, she got paid pretty well at the time for a woman.  She helped me with all of my subjects, but she thought that math was the most important subject for me to learn, so when I was little, she got me all of these connect the dot puzzles.  I enjoyed finding the numbers and when I joined them together with a pencil, they turned into pictures that I would show to my mom and she would give me a treat for solving them.

It wasn’t very difficult but it helped me to see patterns and that is why I was able to do calculus later on in college.  I had to take several courses in calculus in order to get my Electrical Engineering degree and I absolutely hated this subject, because I didn’t understand it.  All the other math courses that I took before calculus made sense to me.  Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, Algebra, Geometry and Trigonometry all had rules that I understood and even though Calculus had rules, I never saw the purpose in any of these problems, but I was able to solve them because I saw the patterns.  I would look at the problem and see if there was something similar to it and then I would notice how they differed.  I made a puzzle out of every problem, adjusting this problem to fit and even though I fumbled my way through this subject, I did pass.

Working on the connect the dot puzzles enabled me to visualize the outcome of the pictures that I was drawing.  I feel that it went beyond that, by helping me to develop a spatial relationship between the dots that I was connecting and the objects that the pictures turned into.  If I were to draw a line from number 3 to number 5 instead of number 4, the picture would not be correct and the hidden shape would never be revealed to me.  I had to take responsibility for connecting the dots in the right order and this taught me that there were consequences for doing things the right way and for doing them the wrong way.  These puzzles became a stepping stone for me to learn how life works.

Written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday where the prompt is to use the word puzzle anyway you like.

I Got the Job

On September 11, 2001 I drove 90 miles to go to a job interview at Wyeth Ayerst up in White Plains New York.  I had been out of work for a while and I was desperate to get another job, because I only had 6 weeks left of unemployment benefits.  I did not want to work that far away from where I lived, but a man has to do what a man has to do.  The interview was going well in my opinion, but as the interview was wrapping up, the guy who later became my boss told me that there was one more person that he wanted me to speak with and this person was currently in a meeting.  He asked me if I could go out to a coffee shop and come back in 45 minutes, which I agreed to do.

I saw a coffee shop right down the street so I parked my car, went inside and I ordered a coffee and a Danish.  They had a TV and the news was on so I started watching it.  I was completely shocked to see the first plane hit the world Trade Center, as was everyone else in the coffee shop.  They showed it over and over again and then they showed the second plane crash into the other tower.  That was it for me, I was blowing off the interview and I just wanted to be home where I could feel safe.  My cell phone had no signal, so I couldn’t get through to my wife and I could not pick up a radio station for my long ride back home.  I finally reached my place, called my wife on the land line and watched the news intently for the rest of the day, not being able to take my eyes off of it.

Two months later the guy that got me the interview called me back and told me that I got the job.  I was coming in as a contractor and I worked out a deal with the agency where I could work four ten-hour days and they paid for a motel room for me to stay in on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights.  I had a long commute on Monday morning and Thursday evening, but I had a three-day weekend, every weekend.  It was a crappy motel, dingy furniture, highway noise, but beggars can’t be choosers and I was happy to finally be back at work.

Written as my second attempt for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday where the prompt is to use the word where anyway you like.

Where Am I Going With This One

I have been off the wall lately, like a steam locomotive that has run off the track, with no direction home, but I don’t plan on changing any time soon.  I enjoy pushing the boundaries to see how far I can go and what I can get away with.  Provocative, outrageous topics intrigue me and that is what makes writing so much fun for me.  When I start writing about something, I don’t heed a destination to restrict me to where I am going.  I look for the opening and draw back on my life experiences and then let spontaneity take over, so where it takes me is usually a surprise.  I should probably tone it down a bit, as I don’t want everyone hating me, but my real life is boring, thus I live my fantasies out in my writing.

I write plenty of stuff that is more modest and less exciting and would not be termed as click bait and I love to explain things.  I have written about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle which simply states at the quantum level, you can’t know everything.  This means that the more you know about a particle’s position, the less you will know about its momentum and vice a versa.  Isaac Newton defined momentum in his second law of motion and that is the product of the mass of a particle and its velocity.  The particle’s position tells you where it is.

Written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday where the prompt is to use the word where anyway you like.

Stick a Pin in It

Hold on to that thought and we will circle back to this later said the boss as he felt there were more important topics that needed to be discussed.  Jacob asked the boss if he should stick a pin in it, so everyone could sleep on this and gather up their ideas for the next meeting.  The boss told Jacob that the topic was postponed for now and he didn’t want any further discussion, so he should just put a sock on it, be quiet and shut his mouth, as he was starting to get annoying.  Jacob spoke again and said that he would mark this topic for the next agenda as old business.  The boss became furious and said that trying to tell Jacob anything was like talking to a brick wall, as he is like a dog that gets hold of a bone and will never let go of it.  The boss told Jacob that he was driving him up a wall with his going on and on, and Jacob said that he could mark a spot on the wall for the boss with a pin, so that everyone could know how high up the wall he had been driven.  Jacob was the boss’ brother-in-law and he knew that his wife would not stand for him being fired, but the boss wanted to teach that jackass Jacob a lesson, so he told him to stand next to the wall and then everyone could play pin the tail on the donkey with him.

Written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday where the prompt is to use the word pin and have fun with it.

Possessive

My oh my, what a beautiful day.  Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!  She is not my Sharona, she is her own Sharona, just like my girl doesn’t actually belong to me.  I guess your kids are yours, till they grow up and become responsible for themselves and then they are their own individual selves.  All humans seem to like having possessions and that is where the word “my” comes from.  This sense of attachment either stems from a fear of loss, or basic insecurities.  The rich get richer and they want to have more and more.  Donald Trump wanted to hold on to the office of the president, even though he lost the election and there are still a lot of people around who say that, “He is my president”, refusing to let go and swallowing the Big Lie.

The urge to accumulate your own stuff is not just a people thing, as this can be seen in the difficulty of trying to take a bone away from a dog, once it has one.  Most animals are fine with not having any possessions, but as Madonna said this is a material world and people just can’t seem to find happiness unless they acquire things.  I remember when I purchased my first house and my wife said that the garage was hers and I let her have it to make her happy.  I had the driveway to park in and I could come and go as I pleased, but with her having her car in the garage, she had to wait for me to move my car out of her way.  People will always want things to belong to them and I am fine with things that are yours being yours.

Written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday where the prompt is to start your post with the word “my” and you can pick up bonus points if you are able to end it with the word “yours”.

Ode To the Commode

Nobody really cares if you shave your pubic hairs or not, and during the pandemic many people let their pubic hair grow.  When I was attending college, I got a part time job as an office cleaner.  My boss seemed to think that it was my job to clean the bathrooms and I hated doing that.  I had gloves, brushes and other cleaning products and mostly it wasn’t that bad, but I was always grossed out when I saw crotch hair on the toilet seats.  I can understand pubic hair coming off a person’s body when they take a shower, but I had no clue why it was always on the toilet seats.  I was not sure if the people that worked in this office were just really hairy, or if they were leaving their pubes there intentionally, just to creep me out.  I have a basic understanding of quantum entanglement, but I couldn’t figure out why every time I went to clean the commodes, that I kept finding pubic hairs left on the seats.  There were never any really nasty stalls covered with poop, like I have seen in some public bathrooms, but I just didn’t have the stomach for this job.

I quit that job, but I do enjoy a clean bathroom and the more often you clean it the easier it is to do the job.  I know that a lot of women complain about men leaving the seat up, but I always put it down along with the seat cover, and I started doing that to prevent my dog from drinking out of it.  My dog is gone now, but I still always lower the seat and the cover, because I don’t like looking at the insides of toilets, as I feel that they are filled with germs.  I realize that the chances of getting an STI from a toilet seat are slim to none, but I guess you could still get lice and crabs, so I prefer to sit on something that is clean.

Written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday where the prompt is to find a one- or two-syllable word that rhymes with “ode,” or use the word “ode.”