Heidi Taking Charge

I come back from the laundromat and Heidi is acting like the cat who ate the canary. There was a puppy in my Command Center.

“Well?” she asked. “Don’t you just love him?”

“He’s blue,” I said.

“Of course he is,” she said. “Why his name is Nuke.”

“No. It isn’t.”

‘We’ll see.”

She said.

Poking Around

Yeah. Come back to an old place, especially from your youth, and everything seems smaller.

When you were a kid, the Coca Cola cooler seemed big. It's not. It's also rusted and broken. But that's  okay. If you have an Amex card, you can still get a cold king size glass bottle of coke. Right. If you're a billionaire.

I'm tired of pretending. Even the ones who think they know don't. Intellectually maybe, they have some appreciation of the dire circumstance. They see Godzilla emerging from the sea at the city's edge. What they don't see, and never will, is that everyone alive now beckoned Godzilla, asked him to come in one way or another. By the fights they refused to fight, the narrow ambitions they pursued while the giant stomped closer, the semantics they used to deflect responsibility from themselves because all they cared about was their families. As if families will exist when freedom has been extinguished by a reptilian moron.

Got a scuffed old cowboy boot with a bone boot chain. Propping it on the porch rail. Want to fight? I welcome it. Come. Fight. All you millennial slackers. I'm the elder now. And I don't care about your feelings anymore. Such freedom. You have absolutely no idea how much more I know about everything than you do.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh. I can breathe again.

It's not incremental. It's factorial. I'm breathing this tremendous sigh of relief. The cars go by. Very infrequently. I've shown you my work and you don't comprehend it. You drive by. I breathe. Do you understand that? It makes me free. Now, when I dream, my dreams are not so bad.

I've got an old Triumph here. I'm kick-starting it now. But I'll be back in an hour or so for a king size Coke unless there's a 16 oz RC Cola in that magnificent artillery bottle.

As I said, you have no idea what all is in my head.

Garage for Sale

Coming back here after a long absence. It's in the nature of Jersey boys to wander. But there comes a time to return home if only to plot the escape. Where we are now. Everything's dusty. Everything smells of stale gas and maybe death.

A lot of you are fans of the Walking Dead TV Show.  What you don't know is that you ARE the walking dead.

I've written millions of words about who and what we've become. Some people even agree with me. But they can't stop thinking of the brains they can eat. Give them a problem at work, a promotion, any tiny distraction, and they're back on the brain hunt, staggering forward in search of a juicy new bit of bloody gray matter to consume.

Nothing whatever can attract their attention away from eat, eat, eat what's right in front of them.

Why Johnny's Garage is finally up for sale.

I'll be listing the available inventory in parts. I won’t pretend Heidi isn’t behind this. Don’t tell her I’ll never sell.

I am the King of the Junkyard here.

1953 Chevy Pickup Truck

King of Junk period actually. Junk house, junk land, Heidi is not scornful, but she’s a pusher. She keeps asking why I have so many wrecks spread over a dozen acres. I don’t have a good answer.

REO Speedwagon Tow Truck

1957 Ford Pickup Truck

Another one of my uncle’s Chrysler station wagons

This one’s just plain not fair. Can still do 140 mph.

She’s agitating. I don’t like young girls who are agitating. They make it hard to hide.

Then she just changed all the rules on me. Not just a camera girl but a painter. She laughed out loud when she showed me this. “You’re stuck,” she said. “I’m Christine, and you’re still Johnny Dodge.”