I’ll Tell You Where You Can Park It!

Yet another day and one more parking ticket from some fat ass wanna-be cop who couldn’t take the time or make the effort to walk all the way around my car to get a look at  the display side of the meter and see that it was showing FAIL, with the coin slot jammed with a bent coin placebo.

CSI research lab?

It’s not too hard for the meter cops to find their way back to their place at the trough, they only need to follow the trail of  bread crumbs that dropped from their chins  (i.e., more chins than a Hong Kong phone book), while on the way back  from their morning donut break.

I can’t recommend that anyone should do this since it’s not legal, but if people that were pissed off enough were to stop by some little hardware store and buy a spray can of paint and spritz a bit on the meter’s small window so it can’t be read from a car by some doughnut munching walking water bed driving by in his little Honda enforcement vehicle.  But if I was suggesting doing such a thing to someone, I’d have to add that mid tone grey makes a great choice as it is hard to see that it’s even there until you’re right on top of it.

The more militant ones out there might want to get hold of one of those             battery powered self defense taser sort of  hand held shocking device and press it against the metal housing of the meter, but again, as (history quiz here) that Cox sacker Richard M. Nixon said so often on his Watergate Tapes, “that would be wrong”.

The  +/- 50 thousand volts those sort of devices spark out with could whack some strong effect on the micro chip inside the meter that regulates the timer, not to mention the LCD display that might go black (and never go back).

Not that I would know about such methods.

Insult now added to (wallet) injury!

It’s been a week since the event described above, and I decided to pay the $55.00 fine using the online option listed on the back of the ticket, and in doing so I discover that there’s now a $2.00 “processing” fee to be added on. Since I’m the only carbon based life form involved in this payment “process”, why can’t they at least be honest and say “We’ve decided to bone you in the ass just one last time”? Or should I just be happy it’s not a $500.00 “processing” fee?

N.B., The ownership of any and all photos, opinions, and/ or quotes above (including those of mine) belong to the material’s creator(s). Credit is given when it’s known, but because success usually has a million parents and failure is an orphan, blame will not be so attributed. 

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P.S., check back for occasional updates and rewrites….

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In Fear of Charly’s return……

If either the book with the title “Flowers for Algernon”, or the film known as”Charly” that was based on that book, a movie that starred Cliff Robertson, happen to ring a bell, perhaps you’ll understand why I have an issue.

Full disclosure; I’ve been doing crossword puzzles on a daily basis for years, and not far from the beginning I became aware that both the Los  Angeles Times and the New York Times puzzles start out easy on Monday and get progressively more difficult until you reach the Saturday edition, which by most peoples standards is a bitch killer. To quantify things, the Monday puzzle used to take me about 7 to 10 minutes, and by Saturday those times were more like 20 to 30 minutes, and on occasion I’ve even burned off an hour on one. Or maybe two with the NYT edition.

Several months ago I started taking an over_the_counter dietary supplement I found at Costco that, since I don’t get a penny for saying the name of it (nor even a discount), will go nameless here. Except, I will say that a photographic term will figure in there if you dig a bit.

A few weeks into taking 3 or 4 of those capsules a day, I noticed that my elapsed time to solve a puzzle seemed to be dropping, and after a few more weeks I found that I was finishing in less than half of my previous time. I no longer suffered from TOTT syndrome (this is my name for Tip Of The Tongue, that failure to be able come up with a word I know that I know, and I’m trying to think of). Words that I want to remember now will float to the surface like that triangle sort of thing that was in the middle of those old black magic 8 Ball party fortune tellers with a window on the bottom, the part that told you “yes, no, maybe, or ask again later” when you inverted the ball. I’m also speaking faster and hitting my marks on jokes that I tell, both are things I consider to be good. I’m not saying that I’m a Robin Williams, but hey, even Robin Williams isn’t exactly a Robin Williams any more.

Still with me? A quantum jump in my synapse firing speeds barely describes it, everything is clearer, sharper, and I feel like I’m really, really functioning. In effect, I’m pushing my personal throttle forward to what we called  the “Military” position when I was in the Air Force, a setting that went beyond 100% and was not supposed to be used except when shooting at the Vietnamese farmer’s water buffalos or doing evasive maneuvers to dodge enemy missiles and such.

And now for the catch. Many years ago when I indulged in experimentation in what I’d like to call psycho-active products, it was always with the idea that I could quit at any time. Which I did…. Eventually…. Several times. So, what has me worried is that if I were to quit being a user of, ah, let’s call it FF, I might go through what happened to Charly, a return to a slower state of being at a time when my brain functioning at full speed is necessary for me to just keep in place, much less pull ahead. I was never the retard (the film’s unfortunate and not very PC choice of a descriptive word) that Mr. Robertson played, other perhaps than in the opinion of my 2nd ex-wife, so a drop like this would be scary but not fatal. I just don’t want it to happen, so I seem to have a new life long addiction to deal with.

I guess the high (no pun intended) point of all this is that it’s not any kind of a  legal issue this time. After all, these days I’m buying my “meds on my American Express Card, not sniffing stuff off of it. Wish me well…..

P.S.

Yet another disclosure: I’ve worked with Cliff Robertson (one day on an ATT commercial) and Robin Williams (2 seasons on Mork & Mindy and a special on the Universal Studios lot for Spielberg to make a video birthday card for George Lucas) in the past, both guys were (and I have to presume still are) very nice, warm, and intelligent people.