Aside from waiting for my very dead cellphone to resurrect, I have been doing laundry; white clothes, towels, and a shower mat. I’ve also been indulging myself with podcasts.

It started after I saw a social media post from my friend Lisa Jovicic about a podcast, where she talks about her photography business.

You can listen to the podcast here.

As I listened, I took in some of the things she suggested for “entrepreneurs.” I put that in quotes because I am by no means one of those, though I know many.

As I listened, I thought about this blog and how underutilized it is. Then it dawned on me that I should be doing “man-in-the-street” interviews, creating a short podcast of my own, which I can also supplement with my blog and more photographs directing people to the podcast.

Perhaps it is time to change direction. I’d like your ideas and thoughts on this idea.

For the past couple of weeks, I hadn’t seen my bartender friend. Her temporary replacement said she was on vacation, so I left it at that.

Finally, she returned.

“How was your vacation?” I asked.

“Wonderful,” she answered, adding, “Oh, I have something for you.”

“You shouldn’t have,” I said, secretly excited that she thought enough of me to get me a gift while on vacay.

“It isn’t much,” she replied. “But here.”

She handed me a postcard.

“Oh, cool,” I said. “How did you know I collect postcards.”

” I didn’t,” she smiled. “I jus’…”

I looked at it. The picture showed two giraffes on the Serengeti and Mt. Killmanjaro in the background, above the word “Tanzania.”

“You went to Tanzania for vacation?” I interrupted.

“No,” she smiled sheepishly, “California. Found it at the post office here.”

My Cousin Elmo says, “With all the smoke from the California fires blowing into Nevada, I’m beginning to think that black is the new green.”

Mark Twain is thought to have said, “A gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar standing on top of it.”

That attribution is unconfirmed and possibly itself a fib.

Twain did say in “Roughing It,” based on his personal experience of silver mining in Virginia City, Nevada: “You could … get your stock printed, and with nothing whatever to prove that your mine was worth a straw, you could put your stock on the market and sell out for hundreds and even thousands of dollars. … If the rock was moderately promising, we followed the custom of the country, used strong adjectives, and frothed at the mouth as if a very marvel in silver discoveries had transpired.”

One must be this many years old before learning the viewfinder their Dad brought home long ago, warning us not to destroy, which we did, was never a viewfinder but a set of paper binoculars.

We tore them up trying to figure out how to fit two slides in it. And once we had forced the transparencies in it, they never matched up, like the rendering of the 3-D image that the classic plastic viewfinder created.

A friend whose father was a Northern Nevada alcohol distributor following World War II gave a 1948 set to me today, advertising Old Crow Whiskey.

Instead of the “Mandela Effect,” it should be called “‘Pataphysics,” a  “branch of philosophy or science that examines imaginary phenomena that exist in a world beyond metaphysics; it is the science of imaginary solutions.”

Thoughts?

He saw the pair exit the dark-colored sedan as he walked across the parking lot. They separated, the smaller of the two heading for the far door of the hardware mega-store and the other following behind him.

He was there to buy a kit to fix a broken shower hand, chalk, and a new caulking gun. He saw the small man at the end of Aisle 14, where the plumbing supplies were.

Fortunately, an associate and a customer entered the aisle, and he was able to walk by him. Though he refused to look, he could feel the man’s eyes burning into him.

In paint supplies, on Aisle 43, he picked up a tube of caulk and the necessary gun. He also saw both men entering the far end of the aisle.

“Time to take it outside,” he thought as he wandered out into the gardening section.

Finally, he found an open space between the ornamental trees and the decorative stones. There was are enough to move, and it was relatively secluded.

The small man rushed him with a carpeting knife. He side-stepped to the left, crouched, and came up swinging the hardened plastic casing holding the shower parts.

The plastic edge caught the man in the neck, and blood began squirting. He’d cut open an artery.

The larger of the two men grabbed him as he turned to face him. The man slammed him into one of the legs holding pallets of decorative rock and stone.

Having already developed a plan, he’d used the new gun to snip the end off the tube of caulking. He had loaded the caulk into the gun and charged it as he’d walked to the far end of gardening.

As the man continued to beat him against the shelving, he lifted the gun overhead and rammed into the man’s back beneath the left shoulder blade. Squeezing the handle, he watched as the man grew weaker as his lung filled with the silicon.

Finally, gasping for air, the man dropped to his knees, releasing his grip.

Had he not been so involved in daydreaming, he might have avoided the palletized rocks as they fell on him.

My Cousin Elmo says, “Soon we’ll have the COVID-19 Manero variant. It will give you a fever only on Saturday nights.”

The second-longest corridor in the VA hospital led to the mental health clinic. For Tom, it had always felt like a walk of shame.

This time he stopped dead in his tracks as he came around the corner. On his right was a long line of black and white photographs of happy, smiling female veterans. Tom read the words embossed on the first picture.

“I am not invisible,” the words read. They all read the same.

Tom stepped back from the wall and looked up and down the hall. There was no one was around.

Tom suddenly felt perfectly invisible.

A friend of mine, Valery Lyman, is on assignment and shared some prose that moved me to write a haiku and create this haibun.

the traveling nurse
must smoke, drink, tell bad jokes
no mask is required

this hotel is full of traveling nurses. they drink heavily at night and smoke cigarettes. ever so human in the morning. we’re all in a little lifeboat. such good company, i’ve never lived with so many hotel dwellers.