Michael Kindt's Blog, page 130
May 1, 2015
"This works perfectly. Let’s change it!"
- every computer programmer and web developer in the history of ever.
Just got told by the city that they’re putting in a new sewer...
Just got told by the city that they’re putting in a new sewer system on my street.
They’re going to have to tear out all my hedges. They’ll keep them alive for me, but I’d have to replant them.
Do I look that ambitious? It’s 1:30 in the afternoon. I’ve been up since 10. When I’m done writing this, I’m going to go take a nap, the first of two.
I might plant my ass on a couch, but I ain’t planting no hedges.
Or, the city says, they will give me a new tree and throw the hedges away. They will plant the new tree for me as well. They had a tree pamphlet with like a dozen varieties for me to choose from. I already have an apple tree on the other side of my yard, so I decided to get another, but the guy told me it was a fruitless apple tree.
What? A fruitless apple tree? Is that some kind of a joke? That’s like a sexless marriage. Tasteless beer. A loveless dog.
“Oh,” the guy says, “they’re really nice. They flower just like an apple tree, but you don’t have to clean up any fruit.”
We were standing in my yard when he said this, about ten feet away from my fruitful apple tree, which has hundreds of rotting apples under it.
LOL.
So I selected the above, a Japanese Lilac (stock photo). I am something of a Japan-o-phile, plus love me some lilacs. Seemed to make sense.
So, for half the summer, half my yard will be a trench. Gee, I hope I don’t get drunk and fall in.
April 30, 2015
This tastes like root beer. I’m not kidding. It’s...
This tastes like root beer. I’m not kidding. It’s like smoking a bowl of root beer.
Apparently, this was what Hugh Hefner smoked (back when he did), but I bought some anyway. Personally, I think Hugh Hefner is gross–the silk pajamas, the plastic blonde ball boob girlbots: YEESH. But he had interesting taste in pipe tobacco.
Root beer!
I don’t inhale pipe tobacco. To me, it’s like wearing incense on your face. But I do taste it and, wow, root beer.
Did I mention this stuff tastes like root beer? It’s weirdly fascinating. I kind of can’t get over it.
I still wouldn’t let Hef in the house, consigning him to the shed or dog pen, but I’ll smoke his weed.
Root beer!
April 29, 2015
This gif had over 500,000 notes before I stole it.And the reason...
This gif had over 500,000 notes before I stole it.
And the reason I stole it was because it falls ever so short. I mean, if we don’t allow people over 65 to vote, why are they even here? They’re not voting. All they do is take up space, consume resources. Wouldn’t it be better, for all of us, to “euthanize” them? They’ve lived their life. They’re done. Why go on?
Perhaps we should pick an age that everybody but liberals get to live to, and then, when they reach it, we kill them. Except liberals, of course, who are super super smart and know what’s best for everyone, even people over 65.
April 28, 2015
Looking at the state of our country right now the most surprising thing is that Obama is black.
I mean, seriously, think about it. What a weird dichotomy: electing a black man as the leader of your country, while at the same time lynching, via police, other black men.
Only such bizarre, bi-polar behavior could occur in America.
I believe in American Exceptionalism, but not as it’s presented by the right wing fucktards.
America is a land like no other.
Ever.
In the history of the world.
Not only is no country in history even remotely like us, no country in the imagination is either.
Let’s not drop the ball on this, huh?
I was lying in the story. I actually have two.I will always have...
I was lying in the story. I actually have two.
I will always have them. I even wish to be buried with them.
Why the fuck not? Pickled Beets!
Got word that a friend of mine who I didn't know very well passed away.
Years ago, I wrote a story about her and it was published in my first collection. It’s called
PICKLED BEETS
When I was seventeen, my mother threw my ass out of the house. I was a major fuck-up. I dropped out of school, wouldn’t work, partied, sold pot, and never did the goddamn dishes, even though my mother worked forty hours a week at a bank kissing ass and wearing one of those goofy woman suits with the shoulder pads.
This was the first time I was homeless. I had a little money from selling pot and my grandma gave me some cash. I also got a job washing dishes and prep cooking in a shithole restaurant. I slept in my car for a while, showered at the gym, and ate fast food. In a few weeks, I was able to rent my first apartment. Well, it was a motel room that had been converted to an apartment. It had a two-burner stove and no oven. I lived there for a year or so and about once a week, I came home with a frozen pizza, only to throw it away because I had forgotten I didn’t have an oven.
I met Steve Lindy in those days. He lived in the same building, was an avid smoker of the weed, and played blues guitar like it was going out of style, which, of course, it was.
He was a hell of a guy. I liked his parents too, Jack and Elayne. Good, solid Midwestern folk. Now that I’m older, I can really tell the difference between the freaks and lunatics living all around the edges of this fucked up country and the completely normal people living in the heartland–you know, people like Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer.
Anyway, Steve was close to his family and often went to their place for supper. After we became friends, I would accompany him on these once or twice monthly excursions into Home Cooked Meal Land. His mom Elayne took a special liking to me, finding me hilarious and charming, of which I am both in spades. She also felt sorry for me because I was such a vast loser with no money or prospects. At the end of every meal, she bestowed upon me any leftovers.
“Take it, Mike,” she’d insist, and I would, thanking her vigorously. In time, I had a tall and very unstable stack of Elayne Lindy’s Tupperware in my apartment that I kept forgetting to get back to her.
One Fall evening, Steve came over, banged on my door, and said, “Mom’s fixin’ spaghetti and meatballs. Hungry?”
“You bet.”
Jack and Elayne lived about four or five miles out of town on the way to Pringle in a pleasant single-story house. They were not rich folks, but ranked somewhere in the upper part of the lower end of the middle class. At Jack and Elayne’s, you ignored the front door and went in through the side door, directly into the kitchen. This was the heart of the house. They had a living room, but no one, as far as I could tell, ever used it.
I was excited for some homemade spaghetti and meatballs. It had been a few weeks since I had been out to the Lindy’s and I had been subsisting on various burritos and burgers in the meanwhile. Homemade spaghetti and meatballs. Nummy.
We entered the kitchen as usual through the side door and stopped dead in our tracks. Every available surface area was covered with jars, clear glass jars containing a dark and mysterious purpleness.
“Oh, hi boys!” called Elayne from over by the stove. “I pickled my beets!”
“Her and her goddamn beets,” Jack said from behind his paper. He was sitting at the table. This table was also covered in the glass jars. There must’ve been a hundred of them all told.
“I know Stevie hates ‘em, but what about you, Mike? You like pickled beets?”
“Um, sure, Mrs. Lindy,” I said, even though I had never seen, much less tasted a pickled beet before. I just wanted to please her. She was such a sweet lady and I wanted to be on her side.
“They’re nasty,” Steve said.
“And all over the place,” Jack added from behind his paper. “Everywhere you look, a jar of goddamn beets.”
Since Elayne had been busy all afternoon pickling her beets, supper was a bit delayed. We didn’t finish up until half past eight. The spaghetti and meatballs were delicious. Elayne had also made salad and crusty garlic bread. There was a slice of homemade apple pie for desert.
It was heaven.
Sitting there, my mouth covered in succulent residue, I asked Elayne to please, for the love of god, adopt me.
“Oh, Mike,” she cackled. Later, she sent me home with another piece of pie and two jars of pickled beets.
The next day, around 11 am, I cracked open one of the jars and ate, for the first and last time, a pickled beet. Actually, they were pickled slices of beets. It was tangy and sweet and vinegar-y and slimy and made my eyes water and was, yes, absolutely nasty. I took the opened jar of beets outside, walked a ways away from the apartment building and poured them out onto ground, knowing that no grass would ever grow in that spot again.
I lived in Custer another five years and every time I came into contact with Elayne, which was at least monthly, she would give me some more pickled beets. I never refused them and always thanked her vigorously. Sometimes, she’d give me a single jar, sometimes two. Around Thanksgivings and Christmases, she’d give me four or five.
Over those five years of living in Custer, I moved probably six or seven times, and each time I did, I had more and more pickled beets. New apartments or trailer houses had to have enough pantry or cupboard space or I simply couldn’t rent them.
“Yeah, I’m sorry. The rent’s great and I like how there’s only one hole in the roof, but there simply wouldn’t be enough room for my real food and my pickled beets. I’ll have to keep looking.”
It wasn’t until I was leaving the state that I considered getting rid of what was, by then, my enormous collection of pickled beets. I had packed them into boxes. Six boxes.
“You know,” I said to myself, “this is getting kind of ridiculous.”
But I left most of my books and kept all of the pickled beets. You’re damn right I did. A very nice lady named Elayne had, for half a decade, made it her mission in life to make sure I had enough pickled beets and I simply couldn’t just throw her success away.
I lugged those motherfuckers around with me until my late 20′s. I eventually did get rid of them. Well, all but one jar. It sits in my pantry as I write this, just beyond the spaghetti sauce.
Iran Supreme Leader: ‘Ridiculous that even though the US President Is black, there are still such crimes against US blacks’
How about you stop executing gay people before you start moralizing, you hypocritical scumbag?
dasdingansich said about RIOTER DISCIPLINED BY HIS MOTHER: I started to love her, but then it...
dasdingansich said about RIOTER DISCIPLINED BY HIS MOTHER: I started to love her, but then it popped into my head to wonder if that sort of treatment is part of what taught him to respond with violence in the first place? Chicken and egg sort of situation. If that’s not the case, though, she’s brilliant.
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I didn’t think too much about it. just thought it was hilarious: THAT AWKWARD MOMENT WHEN YOU’RE RIOTING AGAINST THE MAN AND YOUR MOM SHOWS UP AND GIVES YOU A WHOOPIN’.
Hahahaha.
VIDEO: Angry mom beats son suspected of rioting in Baltimore
A suspected rioter in Baltimore got the smackdown of his life Monday by his mom on live television.
Haha. Oh my God. I love this woman.
