Month: January 2022

I never had a threesome. I haven’t had lots of things. I haven’t ever flown and SR-71 Blackbird. Tons of things are out there that I frankly haven’t, nor will I ever, do. It’s not because these things are unrealistic. People do have threesomes. People do become pilots, and some do fly the SR-71.

But…

I’ve done some things that may or may not occupy an adolescent fantasy. I have gone white water rafting. I’ve insanely jumped from an airplane on my one and only skydive. I nearly drowned in an underwater cave somewhere in the Everglades. I’ve pet a rattlesnake. Heck, I pooed my pants under the aurora borealis in bfe Alaska while starving. I probably could have left the bit about the poo out of my tale. I didn’t and won’t. We had come unaware upon a polar bear. Poo seemed the appropriate response. Don’t judge me til you’re there.

The things I haven’t done I don’t regret. The threesome that did not happen involved a young lady and her friend I barely knew. I went to high school with the young lady. She had dated a salutatorian, a wannabe fighter pilot, and would eventually go in to marry, and I assume eventually divorce, a valedictorian. All except the young lady’s female friend were people I’d become good friends with in high school and college.

A female on female erotic media video was playing. The ac was turned so cold we had to huddle beneath blankets. Alcohol was involved. I demurred, even though like many young adult males, it was definitely on ‘the list’ of things that I wished would happen but only happened in movies. I demurred because I wouldn’t have been able to look one or more friends in the eye afterwards. You don’t hurt friends or family even when vague fantasies are involved.

I lost my chance to become a pilot when I found out I had the slightest touch of color blindness.

I don’t regret those things. What if isn’t the way to live life.

I look to what I have done.

Eaten a stack of pancakes 15 inches high in under 90 seconds while unable to drink anything. I’ve helped apply a tourniquet and knew enough to loosen it to keep the limb alive. He kept his life and leg. I have kids and grandkids, biological and step. They’re all mine, DNA irrelevant.

Much of life is mundane. Much of what we do doesn’t matter. I choose to not think of it that way. I do what I do because to do otherwise is to be untrue to myself and others.

Like anyone else, I’m not a saint. Nor am I a devil. We all at points in our lives make mistakes. All of us make choices we rejoice about later as having chosen well.

I will take holding true to myself over a fantasy any day.

Now to see what happens when I attach this bare wire to the portion of the generator that says ‘do not under any circumstances touch’. I doubt anything bad will happen.

Peace.

I don’t know all the answers. I know the answers are likely infinite, so I decided to reverse engineer it and phrase the question.

What time is it?

It seems like the simplest of questions. Like the formula for relativity, simplicity can be deceiving.

A man on the street might tell you ‘around 4’.

If I was asked, I’d likely pass along whatever time my watch or phone told me it was before including a smart assed phrase along the lines of time to get a watch.

A nerd, also like me, might state it was four thirty three and 38.2 seconds.

Morris Day and the Time could answer it was time for jungle love.

I can pick different people places, times, whatever. My list would merely be limited to how many different scenarios my imagination constructed.

None of the answers is wrong. None are absolutely black and white. All are equally correct. So many pointed questions are virtually identical to ‘What time is it?’

I leave you with some alternative answers not used above. Ah, none of the answers above mentioned whether it was AM or PM. A darkened room or a resident of somewhere nearer the north or south pole where at times the land is in utter darkness or 24/7 sunlight… And which time zone are we in? Eastern, Greenwich. Are we asking about the time here or from where we call home?

My fingers are tired.

Peace.

I love automated telephone menus. Nothing like getting on with your life while keeping whatever hold music the company chose as part of the mathematical formula to have so many irritated people give up before getting to either a live person or having their problem addressed. It makes me giggle. I have done phone work in the past. The center directors or the scheduling department could recite to the tenth of a percent how many callers would choose to disconnect after giving up. The payroll savings become quite staggering over time.

Anyway. I had recently changed my homeowner’s insurance from a company that uses a live or CGI animal, a rather large bird, to one that often used a CGI reptile. I was attempting to set my policy to non renew.

17 minutes and 38 seconds after calling and continuing to get on with my life, I reached a live person. It may have been a robot, but I was answered.

They tried valiantly. They didn’t probe, but I figured because both they and I had informed the other party that the conversation may have been recorded for quality purposes, I might as well allow anyone who might review the conversation later to finally hear why I was switching.

I told the lady about how it was extremely difficult to navigate the automated telephone responses to reach a live person. She seemed nice, so I didn’t bother to inform her that the please wait on the line for the next available representative portion of the automated menu failed repeatedly to connect me to anyone live but instead looped me back in to the beginning of the pre recorded menu options. Nor did I inform her the only way to get out of that and successfully reach someone live was to hit a combination of buttons, in this case the asterisk followed by the zero. I doubt she’d have cared. 17 and a half minutes. A live voice. I’d heard about this in ancient mythology. I was living the dream.

I further went in to explain how I had when reaching a live representative after… See above until you reach this step. I explained how each representative during the phone call asked me to repeat the same information multiple times. And yes, during several of the phone calls, I had to ask for the next person down the line, or in many instances without introducing me to the person in the correct department, I was unceremoniously dumped to the next person and had to explain my situation a second or third or fourth, or in one instance, the sixteenth time during that phone call.

I left out the part about during most of the calls receiving an answer that basically translated to tough luck, you’re stuck. I was bibberty not stuck. I also left out the part that many times the rep disconnected the call during the transfer or stated that they’d solved the problem only to have me find out later that was the furthest thing from the truth.

I did include that every 2 to 3 days I requested a supervisor contact me to hopefully solve my problem. I also included that I had been told on at least six calls that a supervisor would be contacting me and I’d not heard back a single time despite being informed during each call that I would definitely hear from a supervisor within 24 to 48 hours.

She asked questions after I wound down and tried despite how I’d informed her of why I would not be renewing my policy unless perchance free root canals without anesthesia were being offered as a perk to new and existing customers. In that case the chances would be between snowball in hell and zero. I was careful not to lambaste the poor girl. As I said, I’ve done customer service rep work on the phone in the past. I’ve been lambasted.

I did, as an afterthought, inform the young lady of the over two hundred dollar a year increase in the yearly price despite filing no claims and not asking anyone to increase any coverages on my property. I also let her have it with how excited I was with going with the company that also insured my automobile with the new policy was nearly 250 dollars a year cheaper and had what I considered better property coverage. She again tried to save the policy to no avail.

The whole time we were conversing, I was thinking about important things like what time is it? This rant is now long. I will break the answer to that question into another blog. It’s a cook one. Plus still stuck on my fiction chapter and clearing out my head with blurts helps.

Peace