All posts by X Teri

Airbnb, Lemon Moment, Personal, Travel

Stolen Saturday Moment

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I’m in Springdale at a beautiful Airbnb. Erika found it, of course. It’s a large beautiful house on Tara Street. My favorite part are the hidden Narnia rooms upstairs. I’ve been walking the streets since 3:30. The sky is flashing and rolling with lightning. Though no rain had reached me yet, the crackling of thunder occasionally surprises me. It’s gorgeous out on the wide expanse of Don Tyson parkway with almost no traffic. It’s as if all of it coalesced just for my private enjoyment. It’s definitely a stolen moment, one impossible to plan. The rain started at 4: 43. I made it back to the house a few minutes later. One of the best people at work, Carlos, brought delicious dark coffee back from his trip to El Salvador. It’s brewing now. If you’re a coffee lover, I probably don’t need to describe how delicious it smells as it’s burning. As is the case with these moments, I wish time would stand still for a few hours.
Love, X

Humor, Work

A Little Revenge

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Several years ago, when I worked at Cargill, one of the guys that worked In my department took pleasure in telling one of his favorite stories. His brother’s application for continued residency was denied. His brother had bought a decent vehicle from one of the pay-as-you-go car lots. After his brother returned to Mexico, my coworker continued to go in and make the payments. After making the payments for several months, he went in to pay the car off. The car lot suddenly decided that because the car wasn’t in his name, he could no longer have it. It’s not that they were wrong legally. You get the idea. My coworker was angry, but didn’t argue. He jumped in the car and drove it home.

That’s where he got creative.

A couple of days later, a truck pulled in with a very simple towing bracket to repossess the car. The tow truck driver was expecting an argument. He pulled up quickly and attached his tow truck to the front of the car. My coworker went outside and was very polite to the driver and said he understood that he was just doing his job. He told the driver that something had gone wrong with the car and that a mechanic had been working on it. Further, he told him he should check it to be sure it was safe to tow. The driver still acted like he didn’t trust him. He didn’t get out of his tow truck to do once-over on the vehicle.

The tow truck drove away quickly.

While my coworker did not get to witness the ensuing mess, he did get an angry call from the dealer who owned the car lot. At some point while towing the car, the tow truck driver realized that both of the rear wheels of the car had come off during transport. He did not however realize this until he was most of the way back to the car lot. Dragging the car directly on the pavement evidently did not increase the car’s value.

The dealer was belligerent and angry. My coworker told the dealer what he had told the tow truck driver. And he reminded him that he was not the owner and was not liable either way. The dealer threatened to call the police. To which my coworker replied, “Make sure and include the part where your tow truck driver failed to check the car for safe transport before he drove it.”

He listened as the dealer cursed at him and used racist language.

A couple of months later, my coworker went to the lot with a friend. His friend had thousands of dollars of cash to buy a car. They negotiated the sale and right before closing, my coworker said, “We’re not actually going to buy the car. We just wanted to make sure you understood how much business you lost for what you did to me and my brother. Make sure and tell (owner’s name here) that I said hello.”

They both got another racist cursing. But they left laughing.

Humor, Personal

The Color Purple

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Never buy hair color at Dollar Tree. The box clearly indicated it was supposed to be sort of purple. No, I’m not in the habit of coloring my hair. I don’t have enough to warrant such foolishness. I literally applied the coloring as indicated. It struck me immediately that it was about the opposite of purple. But of course I left it in for 30 minutes. When I got out of the shower, I saw an adult male version of a ginger ferret looking back at me. Since I’m more tan than I’ve been in 10 years, the color looks even more striking. The only thing missing is even a hint of purple.

X

Lemon Moment, Personal, Photography

The Excitement of COULD

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After the Pennsylvania trip, I took a roll of 35mm film from 1977 to Walgreens to send through Fujifilm to be developed. The mystery of what might be on it enthralled me. No one working had seen an undeveloped roll of film that old. Walgreen never contacted me so today after work I went to inquire.

I paid almost $10 for the packet. As I walked to the car, fingers crossed, I opened the packet. Inside was a cd without prints. It turns out that the roll of film had been exposed to some sort of radiation that rendered the prints to all look exactly the same. That’s the picture attached to this post.

While the outcome was disappointing, it was worth the time and money, given what COULD have been on the film.

We’ll never know.

But for a while, I was hopeful and excited about the idea of the unknown.

Love, X

Lemon Moment, Personal

Swing Away

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I went to the creek to have an adventure. Still barefooted, I walked over to the swings about 60 yd away I’d express that in meters but this is Arkansas and I don’t wish to cause a riot. A couple of younger boys were at the far end of the swings. I began to really exert force to climb higher and higher. I knew the two boys were watching. They had no choice but to join in. It’s hardwired in our DNA. Within a minute, they matched my height and then exceeded it. “Can’t get any higher,” one of them asked me. Before the ever-elusive common sense caught up with me, I said, “Not legally.” They both laughed. I pulled back hard and laid forward on the chains to slow my forward progress. Without hesitation, I jumped from the seat and landed on the ground. I took a bow. The two boys tried to do the same. Except they didn’t slow their forward momentum. Both tumbled as they hit the ground. “That’s experience,” I told them. “What goes up must come down. It’s like a law of motion or something.” Both boys got back on the swings to make another attempt. I cheated by nodding at them both and scampering off.
X

Holiday, Humor, Opinion, Personal

laugh?

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Fireworks. I love them. I still love setting them off up close and personal but I haven’t done it in a while. As I got older, it’s sunk in how much they affect some animals and some people. If you’ve ever known anybody with PTSD, it’s hard to enjoy them knowing that there are people out there that are terrified. And that some people have to take extraordinary pains and caution to minimize the effects on themselves on their animals.

On a local board, someone caught hell for asking people to respect the lawful parameters of using fireworks. Obviously, fireworks are a good example of an occasion when people are going to ignore the law. And that’s okay.

I have a couple of skills. And one of those skills is finding people. It’s very tempting to make a list of those belittling other people for asking their neighbors to be reasonable.

It would be hilarious and educational to go buy a huge quantity of discounted fireworks. And bide my time. Wait until Sunday night at midnight and light an apocalyptic amount outside their window. A 10,000 string of firecrackers, for example. How could they complain?

It’s no more illegal to set them off on Sunday night than it was last night at 2:00 a.m.

I have this weird feeling that such people who previously belittled others for asking for reasonableness would suddenly start arguing the other side of the consequences if they were awakened at midnight with 6 minutes of firecrackers.

In my younger days, I would have taken great delight in doing this sort of thing. To see if people would recognize their hypocrisy, even as they shouted in anger at the audacity of someone setting off fireworks outside their house.

It’s tempting!

X

Humor, Personal

3 a.m. Battle

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WD-40 is versatile. It even protects idiots. I should know. My next door neighbor wrote me last night to tell me there was a wasp nest outside my apartment. Since I moved in here, I’ve been the de facto wasp warrior for everyone. It turns out there was a nest directly above where I usually sit and stand outside my door on the landing. It turned out that they looked more like yellow jackets to me. It had to have been built quickly but I wonder how many times I had stood out there with them working right above my head without me knowing. I was going to eradicate the nest later today. But you know me. I decided to go to war at 3:15 in the morning in the dark. I opened the door with my can of WD-40 in hand. My cat Güino took advantage and ran out the door to the right. He is familiar with my idiocy  and probably wanted to stand somewhere out of the way and enjoy the morning. Even if screaming ensued. I covered myself to be more protected. Just kidding. I went out there shirtless and in shorts without shoes. Peering upward at the nest directly above my head, I calmly sprayed the burgeoning nest with a barrage of WD-40. Luckily for me, the yellow jackets didn’t know what hit them. The WD-40 saturated them before they had time to move. Not that I cared. I knew that once I started spraying that running probably wouldn’t be much help. Especially in the dark. I would like to thank my neighbor for the early morning adventure.  I’m not quite sure how I would have reacted had I been standing out there later today only to be to have been bombed by multiple yellow jackets. I’m pretty certain that the result would have been a lot of cardio for me.

X

Behavior, Fayetteville, Lemon Moment, New Word, Personal

S i n s e t

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Sinset

The word is deliberately misspelled. Much like the actual word “misspelled.” An excess of letters to convey meaning. I’ve been rightly accused of the same, using purple prose and needless words to convey stories. To which I often reply that only criticism from avid readers and writers speaks to me. The TL;DR crowd is not my tribe. If you’re unfamiliar with that acronym, you’ll be disappointed. The explanation is ironically long. Yes, I realized I committed the same sin Alanis Morissette did in her trademark song by phrasing it that way. I’m being self-indulgent with my jokes. That some people don’t understand that they’re jokes is an inside joke in itself.

As for the title of this post, Sinset, It’s a word I coined to convey the likelihood of misbehavior once the sun sinks below the horizon.

A lot of people wait for the dark to commence their personal bacchanalias. Most of these people control their hidden impulses during the day. They meet their obligations, go to work, and avoid gluttony of all kinds. But when dusk is upon them, they fling open the fridge and eat all of the things. They pour a shot of whiskey and then foolishly open up their web browsers or apps and become internet warriors or guilt-ridden OnlyFans patrons. Night  tends to peel away the mask for some.

Thankfully, the next morning arrives. An almost clean slate except for the shadows of the consequences of the previous day’s choices.

Last night, Erika and I heard the onset of what seemed to be a large private fireworks display. We went outside and sat on the deck, the porch light for once temporarily extinguished. Though the trees blocked some of the beautiful array of colors, it was beautiful. The booms echoed relentlessly against the barrier of our l-shaped apartment. We were surprised when we noted that none of the resident’s dogs sang the song of their people against the cacophonous and relentless explosions. It was a large fireworks display that emanated somewhere near the beautiful new houses nestled against the protection of the railroad tracks running parallel to Gregg Street. This morning, because curiosity overwhelmed me, I drove through to see if the remains of the display were still there. They were. A series of carefully placed fireworks boxes still remained on the dead-end street. Someone spent a fortune to provide onlookers with a temporary spectacle. Though people with animals cringe with such displays, for me, it was a beautiful surprise, one up close and personal without the need for travel or discomfort.

Love, X

Humor, Personal

Wise?

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I wanted to share a goofy anecdote from someone I used to work with. He came from California. No, he did not have a banjo on his knee. I asked him what the craziest thing he saw was. I’m paraphrasing:

I lived in a rougher part of Los Angeles. I was standing outside talking to an old man who was my neighbor. A dark Oldsmobile Cutlass pulled up about 30 ft away. The windows were down. We both looked up because the engine was really loud. The man in the car calmly lifted a gun from his lap and aimed it. He shot once. I was already scrambling to hit the pavement. My old neighbor didn’t flinch. The bullet went between us. Or would have had I not been laying face first on the asphalt. The Cutlass roared away.

“What the hell was that? Why didn’t you duck?

The old man laughed and said, “Boy, you can’t dodge bullets. And whoever that was is afraid right now. What are we going to do, call the police? So they can ask us a bunch of questions that we don’t know the answer to?”

I had a lot of questions. My coworker didn’t have the answer to any of them. He couldn’t figure out if the old man was the bravest person he ever knew, or the wisest.

X