This Used To Be My Playground

WITH APOLOGIES TO TONY HAWK

You can follow me on Facebook at “I am Dazed and Confused” or Twitter – http://twitter.com/kbmrg

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Gas Station Condoms And Rumors of Infertility

It’s very strange that I had no problem buying liquor or illegal drugs when I was underage but I was too embarrased to buy condoms in a drug store.

In the group of friends I hung out with, fear of pregnancy was very high.  I think we would have had less of a problem calling our parents to bail us out of jail on a minor drug offense than to come home and tell them you had gotten someone pregnant or were pregnant (my female friends, not me).

My solution to this dilemma was to buy condoms from a vending machine in the bathroom of a gas station that was at the end of the airport runway.

I finally got over this fear of buying condoms publically when I was about 18 and moved in with my now wife and she had no problem sending me to the store to buy her “feminine hygiene” products.  Once I tackled that fear, condoms were no problem.

The fear of pregnancy followed my wife and I through our 20’s and 30’s.  We were never ready to have kids, didn’t have enough money to have kids, we should have done that last year, all the usual reasons.  We then realized one day we were too old to have kids.  Probably not biologically but definitely psychologically.  We were selfish and self-centered. 

Children can’t be let out in the yard to play until you get up at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday because you were out at a club until last call the night before.  Dogs can. Cats don’t even need to be let out, you can ignore them.

 We never talked about our lack of desire to have children with family very much which led to the following encounter between my wife and her father when we were in our late 30’s –

My father in law had some sort of surgery and my wife had gone to Florida to be his “nurse” during this time.  As he woke up from the anesthesia, she was standing there and he asked her “Have you had Charlie tested?”  her response was “for what?”.  He then said “well you’ve never had kids”.  Her final response –

“I guess it might help if we stopped using birth control”.

End of discussion.

As always –    

You can follow me on Facebook at “I am Dazed and Confused” or Twitter – www.twitter.com/iamdandc    

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Earache My Eye – Alice Bowie

EARACHE MY EYE

Performed by Alice Bowie

My momma talkin’ to me tryin’ to tell me how to live
But I don’t listen to her ’cause my head is like a sieve
My daddy, he disowned me ’cause I wear my sister’s clothes
He caught me in the bathroom with a pair of pantyhose

My basketball coach, he done kicked me off the team
For wearin’ high-heel sneakers and actin’ like a queen

—— lead guitar ——

The world’s comin’ to an end, I don’t even care
As long as I can have a limo and my orange hair
And it don’t bother me if people think I’m “funny”
‘Cause I’m a big rock star and I’m makin’ lots of money
money, money, money, money, money, money
Ahhh! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…

I’m so bloody rich! Ha ha ha ha
I own apartment buildings and shopping centers! Ha ha ha ha
And I only know three chords! Ha ha ha ha

If you don’t understand this and need an explanation check out the official Wikipedia entry for Earache My Eye (Click Here)

As always –    

You can follow me on Facebook at “I am Dazed and Confused” or Twitter – www.twitter.com/iamdandc    

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Six Toed Cats Get Short Shrift

Pissed Off Looking Six Toed Cat at Ernest Hemingway's House in Key West

It was announced that the Key West Home of Ernest Hemingway has been named a “Literary Landmark”.  The home is the location where he wrote “For Whom The Bell Tolls” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”.  There is no doubt that this is a deserving and long overdue designation by the “American Library Association”.

That part is a good thing.

The part that bothered me was that neither The Huffington Post or the AP Release they cited as source material mentioned the other famous thing about this property –  The Six Toed Cats on the property that are descendants of an original cat owned by Hemingway (click here for more info).

Ernest Hemingway

Naming something as a landmark is GREAT but if we REALLY want to encourage people to go visit, we need to remind them about the Six Toed Cats.

I’ve been there with my wife and I have toured the property.  I don’t remember much about the house but I do remember the Six Toed Cats.

How excited do you the think the kids are going to be about going to see a dead author’s house when the Carnival/Disney cruise ship stops in Key West.  Not Very.

Tell the kids that it is – THE MUTANT CAT HOUSE!! – They will be racing to see who gets there first.

Sneaky way to get your kids edumacated so they can be sophisticated writers like Hemingway.  Not writers of shlocky blogs.

As always –  

You can follow me on Facebook at “I am Dazed and Confused” or Twitter – www.twitter.com/iamdandc  

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The End Of Civilized Society

Jabori Harris - Soon to be unemployed - Macy's Wrapper

I saw an article over the weekend that made me sad for the future of American Society. 

Macy’s will be ENDING their gift wrapping service in all but a few stores. 

Due to the popularity of gift bags. 

Maybe I’m just Old School but I find this vulgar and an affront to proper civilized society. 

Are people going to put their gifts of wedding china and silver in gift bags? 

Maybe it doesn’t matter – don’t most people register at Target and Crate and Barrel nowadays? 

I’ll admit, I haven’t used the service in years but it was nice knowing it was there. 

If I want gift wrapping I guess I’ll have to go to Belk in Canton, GA. – YECHH! – It’s hard to act Hoity Toity when you are giving a gift from Belk. 

  

As always –  

You can follow me on Facebook at “I am Dazed and Confused” or Twitter – www.twitter.com/iamdandc  

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Crack Houses – Social and Affordable Partying

DODGED A BULLET ON THIS ONE

Background – I was never really that big a partier even back in the day.  The reason for this was not big moral issues.  The primary reason was that I didn’t have much money.  Especially during the 80’s.  Since I was in college and started my work career at the time of  “Bright Lights Big City” (not to be confused with the porno movie “Bright Lights Big Titties“)  and all that folklore, a lot of people assume I was heavy in to cocaine.   My crowd didn’t participate because that was expensive. 

I am not the only one who has expressed this view.  I remember (but can’t find the source) when the actress Patricia Heaton who was on the TV show “Everybody Loves Raymond” was asked in a magazine interview about living and working in New York in the early 80’s.  She replied  that she didn’t get in to the heavy cocaine scene because she was too busy working to pay the rent and couldn’t afford it.  Same here.  

I did walk near the edge of getting involved in an even worse problem.  One night in the mid 80’s I remember being at a friend’s apartment and all of us being very “dazed and confused” (weed).  When someone brought up crack houses which we were just hearing the first stories about. 

We all agreed this sounded very cool.  New version of cocaine (affordable)  and you went and smoked it at a house (social).  This whole idea intrigued us. 

Luckily it didn’t intrigue us enough to try it.  Especially since we didn’t know where any of  “these Crack Houses” existed.

The real word on Crack came down not long after that.

Dodged a bullet.

As always – 

You can follow me on Facebook at “I am Dazed and Confused” or Twitter – www.twitter.com/iamdandc 

cs

Prison Poetry

“IMAGES”

by

Tyrone Green

 

Dark and lonely on the summer night.

Kill my landlord, kill my landlord.

Watchdog barking – Do he bite?

Kill my landlord, kill my landlord.

Slip in his window, Break his neck!

Then his house I start to wreck!

Got no reason…What the heck!

Kill my landlord, kill my landlord.

C-I-L-L …   

My land – lord

 

As always – 

You can follow me on Facebook at “I am Dazed and Confused” or Twitter – www.twitter.com/iamdandc 

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