FERRERMAN- AGAIN?

 I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that Facebook is a 3rd world shithole of a site and that I, and millions of others, wish that there was a site like Facebook that wasn't like Facebook.  With that out of the way, I'll tell you that I found another friend on FB! Or did I? I was on a paint thread when I noticed the name of a guy I worked with in Memphis years ago. Mikey was alright. I had actually found his page a few years ago and was pleased to see that he had gone out on his own and into business for himself. He seemed to be doing OK. Now, I could have tried to friend him back then, but I have to say that our friendship was never that serious where we'd need to keep in touch like that. I could say that about hundreds of people I've worked with. My FB is mostly family- siblings and cousins that I've known all my life, with a few schoolmates and a few women who know other family members and like my posting. Also, several deceased family members that I just c...

Though happily retired, I've been doing some painting lately. The landlord asked me several weeks back if I'd be interested in doing some maintenance-type painting. It's always a good idea to keep the landlord happy, so I said yes. He assured me that there was no pressure to accept nor to hurry through the jobs should I accept. I'm pretty damn good at it so I didn't run the risk of screwing anything up and jeopardizing my welcome here. Everything was outside too, the garage doors of rental properties he has in town. Nothing was more than two minutes away from my home! Why not?  I finished up the garage doors last month. They were pretty rough. In fact, as I drive the streets here, I see a lot of sorry looking garages, and I amuse myself by wondering if Tom owns those properties. The reality is that a lot of people let their garages go because, why spend the money? That's where you store the junk that won't fit in the basement. Maybe you put a car in there. T...

 Inspired by my muse, Maggie, I went down a Facebook rabbit hole on the slim chance that I might find my old republican friend Paul. I don't think Facebook had been invented yet when I last heard from him in 2008, and I seriously doubted that he would be on it, but you never know about people. The key for me in finding people on FB is to begin by looking for known acquaintances that you know  are on FB and seeing if they continued their relationship there. In 2009, everybody was on FB, at least for a hot minute until they figured out that they hated it. I quickly found two good suspects- Glenn and Frank- whom Paul and I had worked with that he may have friended. No go though. Found some other miscreants that I knew back in the day, including the horrible lesbian I had worked with in Memphis and a guy I thought might have been fucking the ex-wife back then. How the hell did Frank know those two?? The lesbian is stories for another day, and the guy is very unimportant to any sto...

 This has stayed with me for decades, and I wasn't sure why until now. Robert Moore was a soft, chubby, bespectacled kid in my third-grade class, who started to cry one day. He was a fat kid by 1960's standards, which wasn't very. Our teacher, Miss Kozak, was an awful person. Matronly, you would think she had it together as a teacher, given her age and experience, but you would be wrong. She ate yogurt all day in class while us kids weren't even allowed to chew gum. Worse, she'd blow her nose and stuff her snot rags up her sleeve for later use. She was a Nazi. Decades later on my town's Facebook sites, dozens of former students would agree with me. So, it wasn't just me.  She asked Robert why he was crying. Sobbing, he reluctantly confessed that that morning there hadn't been any milk for his cereal that morning.  THAT was it?! I think most of the class thought the same thing. What a loser! Frau Kozak went in for the kill because that's what Nazi bit...

Though quite obviously a Ferrerman, I'm actually half-woman. That's on my mother's side.  I stole that from comedian, Jena Friedman.  Check her out on YouTube. VERY funny and woke. I like her delivery.  It's weird because I always thought of myself as 'woke' even before the word came into common usage and vilified by republicans. With a mom and four sisters, I knew early on that women were different and needed to be treated different and protected by us fellas, and from us fellas. Back when I was tending bar, I created the Waitress Protection Program (WPP) because I knew that our girls often had difficult exes looking to give them trouble. On top of that, they were walking out to their cars with like a hundred dollars in cash any given night. And it was optional as we were available on request. Though we worked in a nice, west suburb of Chicago, crime can happen anywhere, anytime. Women probably know that more than men. They have to be alert for rapists. Like, a...

 This might sound odd coming from a guy whose favorite team just went down in two in the NL Wild Card playoffs, but I like the WC format. There are two ways to get a slot in the WC in MLB. You earn it by coming on strong at the end of the long-ass season like the San Diego Padres did, or you default to it like my Chicago Cubs did by floundering at the end, defaulting to wins and losses. All through September it was a given that the Cubs had the WC in the NL Central Division. Their mission was to play for the best record and attain homefield advantage against their opponent. That's big. That's what the Padres fought for and that's what they got. The team with the better record gets all three games in front of the home folks. In any sport that's gold. Home cookin'! Everybody wants it. It helps.  I didn't expect a lot from the Cubs back in Spring Training. Two of our star pitchers were hurt and out for the season. That's tough on any team. You don't make pl...