I saw this on Instagram today.
As the owner of an electric car who hasn’t visited a gas station in two-and-a-half months, seeing this put a big smile on my face.
This Makes Me Happy
Month: October 2021
Whatever You Need to Tell Yourself
“So you want me to aid and abet you getting out of showing up for detention after school tomorrow?” Hank said to his best friend, Johnny. “That’s gonna be tough, pal.”
“I know, but you can’t procrastinate on this, Hank,” Johnny said. “I promised Kate that I’d help her decorate the gym for the Halloween dance and she needs my help to make the place look really spooky.”
Hank thought for a minute. “I have an idea that might just do the trick,” he said. “I’ll tell the teacher who assigned you detention that you’re really sorry for being such an asshole in her class and if you ever behave like that again, you’ll volunteer to go to detention everyday for a month. All she has to do is cut you loose tomorrow.”
“I think your suggestion sucks, but I’m over a barrel. Kate will never forgive me if I don’t help her, so give it a try,” Johnny said. “And, for what it’s worth, I wasn’t that much of an asshole in class.”
“Yeah, Johnny, actually you were,” Hank said. “But hey, whatever you need to tell yourself.”
Written for these daily prompts: Your Daily Word Prompt (abet), The Daily Spur (detention), My Vivid Blog (tomorrow), Ragtag Daily Prompt (procrastinate), Word of the Day Challenge (spooky), and Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (trick).
Who Won the Week — 10/31/2021
The idea behind Who Won the Week is to give you the opportunity to select who (or what) you think “won” this past week. Your selection can be anyone or anything — politicians, celebrities, athletes, authors, bloggers, your friends or family members, books, movies, TV shows, businesses, organizations, whatever.
I will be posting this prompt on Sunday mornings (my time). If you want to participate, write your own post designating who you think won the week and why you think they deserve your nod. Then link back to this post and tag you post with FWWTW.
First of all, Happy Halloween. Second of all, I’m declaring Mr. and Mrs. Fandango to be this week’s Who Won the Week Winners. Why? Because today is the day that my son and daughter-in-law are bringing home our second grandchild. This time, it’s a girl! So now we have two grandchildren, a 17 month old boy and a newly minted girl. Baby and mother are doing fine. Father is a nervous wreck.
My wife and I will be spending most of the day today at our son’s place entertaining the older child and greeting his little sister.
So enjoy your Halloween Sunday.
What about you? Who (or what) do you think won the week?
Song Lyric Sunday — The Rock Flutist
For this week’s Song Lyric Sunday, Jim Adams has given the theme selection over to Maggie at From Cave Walls. Maggie chose to challenge us with songs that feature wind instruments, which include brass instruments (horns, trumpets, trombones, euphoniums, and tubas) and woodwind instruments (recorders, flutes, oboes, clarinets, saxophones, and bassoons. My first inclination was to go with “Yakety Sax” by Boots Randolph, but that song has no lyrics and since this is Song Lyric Sunday…. Still, I’ve attached a video of that song at the end of this post.
My actual pick is “Living in the Past,” a song by the group Jethro Tull. It features, as do most Jethro Tull songs, flutist Ian Anderson. So my representative instrument for this prompt is the flute. But before I get into the meat of this post, a quick story.
Back in the early 70s, I scored two tickets to a Jethro Tull concert. I had been on a few dates with a girl and I asked her if she’d like to go with me to see Jethro Tull. She looked at me with her big, brown doe eyes and said, “Oh Jethro Tull. I love him.” Wrong answer. You see, Jethro Tull was an 18th century British agriculturist, and the band’s booking agent, a history enthusiast, eventually christened the band “Jethro Tull” after that agriculturist. The girl I asked to the concert may have been referring to Ian Anderson, the band’s lead vocalist, flutist, acoustic guitarist, and principal songwriter, thinking his name was Jethro Tull. But the fact that she thought that Jethro Tull was a musician and singer and not the name of the band was enough to make me lose interest in her. Anyway…
“Living in the Past” was a song by British progressive rock group Jethro Tull. One of the band’s best-known songs, it was released in the U.S. in October 1972 and became the band’s first Top 20 hit in the U.S., peaking at number 11.
According to Anderson, he wrote the song after Jethro Tull’s manager, Terry Ellis, challenged him to write a hit single, “to keep the pot boiling.” To humor him, Anderson replied, “Sure Terry, just give me a couple of hours and I’ll run upstairs to my room and write a hit single.” Anderson said that he “fiddled around with an acoustic guitar and a flute line, and it was done, really, in a couple of hours.” He added that “to further humor Terry and amuse me, I decided I’d write the least commercial thing I could by using an uncommon 5/4 time signature and a definitely not-trendy title, ‘Living in The Past.’”
About the song, Anderson explained that it was a critical reflection of the hippie lifestyle and a general naivete of the era. In an interview he said, “Lyrically it was a bit of a rejection of the swinging fashion of that post-Beatles, slightly hippy idealistic period. There were a lot of people talking pompously about love and peace and revolution and, you know, people then as now were quick to jump up and scream and shout, but they’re not actually really quite sure what they’re stamping their feet about.”
Here are the lyrics to “Living in the past.”
Happy and I’m smiling
Walk a mile to drink your water
You know I’d love to love you
And above you there’s no other
We’ll go walking out
While others shout of war’s disaster
Oh, we won’t give in
Let’s go living in the past
Once I used to join in
Every boy and girl was my friend
Now there’s revolution, but they don’t know
What they’re fighting
Let us close our eyes
Outside their lives go on much faster
Oh, we won’t give in
We’ll keep living in the past
Oh, we won’t give in
Let’s go living in the past
Oh no, no we won’t give in
Let’s go living in the past
And, as promised:
FOWC with Fandango — Trick
Welcome to October 31, 2021 and to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).
Today’s word is “trick.”
Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.
Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.
And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. You will marvel at their creativity.
#6WSP — Death
Distraught over her husband’s sudden death.
Written for Shweta Suresh’s Saturday Six Word Story Prompt, where the word is “death.”
Also for Your Daily Word Prompt (distraught).
Weekend Writing Prompt — Vellichor
My mate works at a used book store and invited me to a Halloween party. “Wear a costume.”
Once there, I smelled something horrific. I whispered to him, “what’s that smell?”
“That’s the vellichor.”
“Is that an apparition?”
“No, it’s the smell of old books,” he replied wistfully.
(Exactly 48 words)
Written for Sami Cox’s Weekend Writing Prompt, where the word is “vellichor.”
Also for these daily prompts: The Daily Spur (mate), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (costume), Word of the Day Challenge (horrific), My Vivid Blog (whisper), and Ragtag Daily Prompt (apparition).
By the way, I don’t really think the smell of used books is horrific. Just musty,
Kinky Boots
My bookie invited me to go to a Halloween bash out in the boondocks. He said there would be a lot of booze and babes. He said to think of it as a booty call. So I told him to book me for it.
When I got there, though, things seemed to boomerang. Most of the people at the party were aging baby boomers who were into kinky stuff. I saw one guy dressed like a boogeyman beating another guy with a bamboo stick. A woman was running around topless with the word “BOO” written on each boob. This party was not for me.
I searched for my bookmaker and when he saw me he yelled out, “Boom! You made it.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but I ain’t staying. This place is filled with old farts with strange fetishes. I’m not into the taboo games goings on here. Did you see the guy in the corner dressed like a baboon and masturbating? I’m outta here.”
“Listen to you,” my bookie said. “I thought you were a gambling man, but here you are with some bugaboo up your ass about a little bit of kink. Go on and leave before I give your ass the boot.”
“I will,” I said, “and I’m also going to reboot our situation and find myself someone else to make book for me.”
This silly bit of nonsense is sponsored by Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday, where Linda asks us to “find a word with the letters ‘boo’ in it or use ‘boo’ as is and base your post on it.
MLMM Tale Weaver — Big Mistake
Pat was my best friend in high school. He had recently just started going steady with Mary and Mary thought it would be fun to fix me up with her friend Claire. I was never a fan of fix-ups, but Pat persuaded me to go along. “It will make Mary happy,” he said. “And besides, dude, Claire is totally hot!” So I reluctantly agreed to the fix-up. Big mistake!
The night of the big double date came. Claire was indeed a babe, but I didn’t really sense much chemistry between her and me, so I was kind of glad when the night came to an end.
Pat and I had just dropped off our dates and we were heading back to our neighborhood when a car pulled up next to mine at a quiet intersection. The driver honked his horn and both Pat and I looked over and saw a guy in the front passenger seat move his hand and arm in a circular motion, signaling me to roll down my car’s window, which I did.
“Are you the dickheads who were out with Claire and Mary tonight?” The guy asked.
“Oh shit,” Pat exclaimed. “Hit the gas.” I punched it, but the engine of my 1961 Chevy Corvair trembled and I felt the car lurch forward a few feet before the engine sputtered and the car came to a halt.
My stalled car was now surrounded by four rather large, thuggish-looking guys. One of them on Pat’s side of the car asked “Which one of you assholes was with Claire tonight?” Without hesitation, the guy I thought was my best friend pointed towards me.
“You, huh?” said a voice coming from my side of the car. I turned my head around to look at the guy who was talking just in time to feel a fist punch me hard in the mouth. “Stay the fuck away from her or next time you’ll wake up dead.” With that, he and his buddies jumped back into their car and sped away.
I was literally seeing stars. The pain was intense and I felt blood running down my chin from my mouth. I looked in the car’s rear view mirror and saw that I was missing one of my front teeth and the other was loose and almost hanging by a thread.
“What the fuck?” I said, looking at Pat.
“Yeah, sorry dude,” he said. “I probably should have told you that Claire’s married. The guy who hit you is her husband.”
“You probably should have told me? Are you fucking kidding me? Why would you and Mary want to fix me up with a married woman?”
“I dunno,” Pat said, shrugging his shoulders. “Mary said Claire wasn’t happy in her marriage. It seemed like, you know, a good idea at the time.”
This post was written for the Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Tale Weaver prompt in which Stephanie Colpron invites us to write a tale about a mistake and how we grew/learned from it even though it felt like something insurmountable. A true experience or a fictional story.
Sadly, this is a true story and I learned two things from this experience. First, never to go out on a fix-up date ever again. Second, always make sure, before asking a girl out on a date, that she’s not married.
FOWC with Fandango — Costume
Welcome to October 30, 2021 and to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).
Today’s word is “costume.”
Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.
Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.
And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. You will marvel at their creativity.
Facts, Fictions & Fantasies 