It’s dry on old Manasota. How dry? So dry that the lizards are literally drinking my sweat!
This morn, as I stopped at Blind Pass Beach to rest on my daily bike ride, a lizard actually darted in between my feet. The little devil startled me so that my natural reflex scared him away. But as I sat on the bench he reappeared in a few seconds. As I watched in disbelief, the lizard tried to lap up the sweat that was dripping from my forehead onto the wooden deck. Now, in several hundred stops here over the past two years, I have NEVER witnessed that before. Since my sweat is probably a thousand times saltier than the sea, the lizard soon scooted off.
But anyway. . . .
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The Right to Keep and Bear . . . Baseball Bats? Bikes? Maybe Midgets?--According to a report, because it is beyond the means of most people now, cocaine consumption in Florida has tanked. Since addicts will be addicts, however, and In keeping with the suck economy, most have turned to cheaper drugs in their quest to microwave their minds. Meth slamming, paint huffing, glue sniffing, and now incense smoking are street sports among Florida’s mildly underprivileged and wildly underintelligent underclass.
Up the wide estuary at Port Charlotte, a sixteen-year-old got into a tiff with his old man the other night over something, over anything, over nothing--what do it matter? Seems junior had been frying away what little remained of his brain by smoking something called Kryptonic. This crap is apparently a cheap incense now in vogue among the poor-of-purse but rich-in-stupidity Beavis and Butthead addictive personality types.
Now, junior’s old man might guzzle Bud Light with the best of his beer-bellied friends but all this illegal drug stuff just didn’t seem American to the seldom-sober patriotic dad. And so the arguments began. One thing led to another and finally the whacked-out son grabbed a sword and tried to skewer his surprised sire. From that point, the race was on.
After chasing the old man up, down and around the house for a spell, the teen pitched the big blade and seized a baseball bat instead (after all, it is major league play-off time). With junior right behind him and swinging for the yard with every strike, the desperate dad dashed from room to room. Finally, the old man flew out of the house and into the night. By now, junior was totally pissed off at his inability to kill his dad. Dropping the bat, he grabbed his bike. Of course, using a bike as a weapon makes no sense but nothing about this story makes much sense. Flinging the bike at his father, junior quickly reached for the crossbow. No luck. No arrow. It then occurred to the spazzed son that he might sic the two pit bulls, “Bonnie and Clyde,” on the old man. But alas, and of course, the canines had broken their fence earlier that day and were off killing things in another part of town.
Finally, the half dead drunken dad was able to reach a phone and call 911. The cops came, the cops caught, the cops cuffed, and the cops carted junior’s sorry ass off to the jug. Junior was charged with plenty, including aggravated assault with more deadly weapons than the cops could count!
This type of stuff is no big deal down here. It happens all the time. As Old West newspapers used to say about local shoot outs, "It has become too common to note."
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Dumb Joke of the Day
Two termites walk into a bar and one asks the other, “Is the bar tender here?”
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Another “Good” Pit bull—Despite what owners of canine killing machines called pit bulls argue, the only time we normal folks can be sure these things “wouldn’t hurt a thing” and are “great around the children” are when they are dead. Up St Augustine way, “Sampson” got loose for the three or four hundredth time the other day and immediately set out looking for something to sink his teeth into. The playful pooch had already bitten a dozen or so humans in his earlier history and today it looked like Sampson wanted to take it up a notch by killing someone. Unfortunately for Sampson--and fortunately for all Florida life forms--he picked a cop to kill.
When the dog saw the policeman he did what any self-respecting pit bull would do, viz., he attacked. After clubbing the animal’s rock-like head several times with his baton, the cop drew his pistol and let Sampson have it eight times, transforming the "sweet-natured" and “great with kids” critter into indeed, a truly “good” pit bull.
"Once I got home, the dog was lying over there on the concrete. He was dead and you could see where they shot him at pretty close range," said twenty- or thirty-something Michael Mickler, Sampson's owner.
"He meant the world to me. He was my best friend," Mickler added. “He pulled me to the store on my skateboard and whatever. I just wished they could a just, you know, tased him or something.”
Sorry about losing your “best friend” Mikey, but this country needs cops who can shoot straight a hell of a lot more than it needs “best friends” whose sole mission in life seems the destruction of every living thing it encounters. Now hurry up and smoke your meth Mike, or you’ll be late for the cock fight.
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Clock of the Day
