News you can use:
Promiscuity gene identified?
Or maybe news that you can’t use.
Pursuant to that train of thought, or one of them anyway, Kinky Friedman’s Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned? Page 83, beginning of chapter 12:
“No creature in this world is more smug and satisfied than a writer having written.”
I didn’t write much, but I was working when a certain red-headed Capricorn enlisted me to help shuffle her vehicles around. She bought a new trailer, she’s stayed here at Shady Acres twice, and I’ve failed to keep up with all the coming and going, the events that lead to a trailer in the first place. So I spent the better portion of my afternoon in Buda, at Camper Clinic, watching, looking, listening, and for a moment, having a flashback.
She was getting her towing rig adjusted. Or something. So I wandered the lot and thought about a new house.
They had one on sale, only $34K, down from 44, I think is what the sticker said. It had the nicest layout, and if I could only trim my library…
Check out the Airstream in the bottom picture. That was there, at Camper Clinic.
But that’s not the flashback, the flashback itself was another image. When I walked into the shop portion of the place, it was that smell, that appearance, an open-air steel building, garage doors on three sides, open. Chaos, except, there was a sense of order in the confusion. Three different pieces of equipment were in various stages of being rebuilt, modified, or “made ready.”
The shop, its disorder, the shop foreman, kindly, smiling, jovial, good-natured & good humor. It felt all so familiar, being there on the Texas plain, listening to the shop talk and background noises of wrench, hammers, saws, grinders, air compressors, all making a little melody. Suddenly, it was as if I was in a familiar place, all over again. Took me back to a shop in Ft. Worth, a shop in Dallas, a shop in Austin, in the summer’s heat, a foreman of sorts blustering in, a salesman checking on a new unit about to be delivered, and it was as if all was okay in the world. For a brief, shining moment.
We had some lunch in the back office, a spare waiting room, and I sat in there for an hour, reading a book I’d brought. With one ear, though, I was listening to the salesman’s chatter.
“No we didn’t get than one funded, like I said, you should always take a back-up offer on anything.”
I made it home in time for Bubba Sean and I to venture forth unto Sandy’s for an evening’s repast. He got a giggle out of the much put-upon-by-our-antics girl in the window, “Kramer? He’s like this when he’s not on his medication.”
He stole that line, but I was kind of amused.
- Aperture: ƒ/1.5
- Camera: iPhone 14 Plus
- Flash fired: no
- Focal length: 5.7mm
- ISO: 40
- Shutter speed: 1/120s
