Ever watch a talk show and wonder what the host and guests are talking about while going into or coming out of the commercial break? Ever wonder if an actor tells Jay Leno he’s really not that funny anymore or the women on The View call one another names? Me too.

While looking for another photo, I happened upon this one of Hillary Clinton and Willie Herenton In the long tradition of re-writing headlines from Maxim magazine, Fark.com and others, here is your chance to imagine the conversation Hillary and Willie are having.

Here’s what the CA ran, but I know you, the good people of Memphis, can come with something much better.

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gets a hug from Memphis City mayor Willie Herenton as she enters Mason Temple Friday morning where she spoke to a Panafrican Leadership Summit.

I rent an apartment from a buddy of mine and it is a bit “under construction.”

Which is fine because he’s my buddy; and I lived like a squatter for years, so no big whup.

But I recently re-remembered an old bit of squatter know-how called, “turn off the friggin lights.”

Primarily because light attracts insects. And if you leave the lights on in the bathroom and there’s a bit of open wall in your house… it will fill with flies.

Which isn’t a big deal either, but it reminded me of a good repressed memory.

This was about six or seven years ago and I lived in one of those creepy awesome 100 year old houses on Young. One of my roommates had this disgusting, hateful monitor lizard, and he fed it mice.

(Never in my life have I had such an overt animosity with an animal. That thing would start hissing at me whenever I entered the room. The feeling was completely mutual.)

One day Bob fed it too many mice and it killed one and stuffed it under a rock.

I’ll spare you the biological details, but that dead mouse turned into about 10,000 flies.

I walked into the bathroom that morning; and while today’s little surprise was mildly annoying, that was like something out of the twilight zone.

There were thousands of flies covering the walls and the ceiling. Big green meat flies that are all slow and stupid and don’t even move when you swat them.

I walked out of the room and shut the door. I was about 40-45% sure what I had just seen wasn’t real. (It happens.)

I opened the door again and looked inside. There they were, a shifting green curtain of bugs.

I thought “Well… nevermind.”

Then I went back to bed.

The end.

Sorry that’s the best story I could think of today… if you have a better one I’m standing right here listening.

It speaks to how mainstream body modification has become when the news stations can fixate for a couple of days on nipple rings. I had a bunch of piercings when I was in college. I’ll spare you their locations.

After college, I started working for a computer repair company in Hickory Hill. Because of the high value and small size of the components on laptops, we were required to go through a metal detector every day when leaving the building.

You can tweak the machine’s sensitivity to detect a range of objects from steal-toed boots to the the fillings in your teeth or the rivets in your jeans. Going through the metal detector every day, my piercings never caused the metal detector to beep, even with all eight of them in. This includes going through various scanners at airports and security facilities. Only high-end scanners will detect stainless steel, which is used to make a lot of body jewelry. Body jewelry can also made of wood, acrylics, and even plastics, which of course wouldn’t be detected at all.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some people go to work smiling in the bright sunshine and think about all the great things they are going to accomplish that day.

I am not one of these people.

It’s not that I don’t like my job, I do. I like my job more than I think most people like their jobs.

But it’s a different deal. I slip into this office in the dead of night and turn on the police scanner like a vulture watching a migrant train pass through the desert.

Someone is going to fall; it’s just a matter of time.

I listen to this thing and hear all manner of urban dystopia nightmare stories. And then again some calls are quite simple.

Heart attacks, brain aneurisms, strokes. Some people just stop breathing.
It happens all the time.
And I get to hear it all. Like the ever aware autistic kid in a Stephen King novel.

Are these stories less important than a young man being shot in a botched robbery or drug deal in South Memphis?

Not really. It’s still someone’s dad, or someone’s daughter.

It all makes for pretty bleak fare to go with your cheerios…

But not today.

Not one person was hurt on my brief watch today, on “good friday” morning.
Not one. Not one I heard, anyway. And I usually hear em.

Seriously. That’s amazing.

I had thought that I wasn’t very emotionally invested in what comes across my little squawk box here. It’s not like I have any control over it.
And that’s professionalism, right?

Well… I’ve been wrong before.

Go tigers.

I think that I’m doing a very good job of listening to the president’s speech and not throwing anything at the television this morning.

I’m not even parroting back the more illogical (or… let us say, factually challenged) statements, as I typically would.

I DID have to pace around for a second, but the majority of the online department is more or less trained to ignore my strange behavior.

I am, however, attempting to the draw the line at dialog or violence with inanimate objects.

I took a brief hiatus from “contributing” (which is, I suppose, debatable) to the M3mphis blog for a minute.

People absorbed by their own issues tend to talk about themselves. Which is generally lame.

And not that I’m going to stop doing just that. I’m just going to be better at it.

I carried over this flawed mentality somehow that the readers here are people I know. And you are not.

And I am a normal person who sometimes thinks dumb things.
And I also sometimes “say” dumb things. You yourself have probably said at least one thing that is really stupid.

But the people that do know me already know EXACTLY what I think about EVERYTHING anyway.
So we can put the megaphone down, I suppose.

And push on a bit. I’ve been given a tiny little soapbox here, and with it comes the old monkey and the machete analogy.
Once the monkey gets the machete, he’s not always willing to give it back as easily as you’d hoped.
I think that’s how it goes…

Anyway, I’ve decided I want to share something with you very fine people, many of whom I don’t know, this morning.

I have red hair.

I am about the redhairedest dang person on the planet. At least top 10.

And I exhibit a large amount of those traits typically associated with such. The Scotch/Irish ancestry, the temper, the weakness to sunlight, the instilling of terror in babies and small animals… all that.

I don’t know if it’s a recessive gene thing or what.

But here’s the kicker.

It is March 17th.

And I don’t feel like drinking in the slightest. Not even a quiver.
Nor is there a merry caper in my step nor a twinkle in my glassy eye.

Now THAT should be illegal. I’m sure somewhere it probably is.

Could be that it’s only 9 o’clock in the morning…. but I still feel really guilty.

I’ll be sure to let you know how this BREAKING NEWS develops!!!

You guys be careful out there today. Don’t do anything stupid.

Over and out.

-Bret

I stopped smoking the day my dad died two years ago.

I patted his cold, gray hand, which only hours before had been warm and full of strength, left the hospital room to mourning family, and rode the elevators to the first floor with my friends and smoked one last cigarette.

I smoked off and on and with varying intensity for 10 years, but it was that single event that allowed me to quit for the last two years.

Like many who want to quit, I talked about it and half-heartedly committed myself to it a couple of times but with little success. Even my family history couldn’t get me to stop until I saw my father lying in his hospital bed and I felt the warmth leaving his body.

My dad, who was 57 when he died, outlived his own father by four years. My dad smoked and drank, a little, he said, while he was in the Army, but I’d never seen him do either.

Read the rest of this entry »