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For further investigation

I don’t know if the root cause was related to any of:

  • Mislearning
  • Typo
  • Cleverness
  • AI slop
  • Speech recognition snafu

but the phrase “Busch league” has captivated me

We need a new genre of poetry

A la “beat poetry” but let’s call it “dad poetry”
If you’re wondering what that is, look no further than our competitions:
Instead of poetry slams
we’ll have poetry shuts

Obviously, each competition should start with the MC saying “I’d like to open this shut…” Then, to the (even nonexistent) lighting guy: “Hold the light steady”

If you get eliminated or don’t make the next round or whatever you “shut the bed”

They don’t really end, we just shut them down

Naturally, they’ll begin and end at a sensible time. Never during “the game.” Always plenty of parking.

And don’t think for an instant that this isn’t the kind of bullshit I couldn’t be goaded into picking up and launching. This is me, for fist’s sake, and I’m in Austin.

This may be the first time my “happy place” is not a metaphor

Not a single other human visible from horizon to horizon. No cell service, either

As you can probably see from the featured image, not a human visible from horizon to horizon. No cell service, either. It took me 10 weeks to prepare enough to try this again, as I worked to eliminate the pain points I identified from my first trip:

  • Problem: I forgot to bring a long lighter, and the wind made using a shorter lighter a… non-starter. Solution: the most wind-proof stove with a piezo-electric igniter. Worked perfectly! (Also got the 5-lb propane tank so I don’t have to keep using disposable one-pounders)
  • Problem: cheap cooler filled with ice still had ice, but everything had thawed. Solution: dry ice.
  • Problem: when packing up to leave, rolling the tent and sleeping bag back into their stuff-sacks was an exhausting pain-in-the-ass. Solution: a few large gym-ball-bags, mesh.
Birds flying high, you know how I feel
Sun in the sky, you know how I feel
This rainbow was short but bright
The biggest ghost crab who found the shade under my truck
Making his burrow deeper
First and last time I camp near a mile marker
Don’t camp near these mile markers, that’s where folks don’t clean up their trash like they should
This fella kept coming back to the shade under my truck
A few miles further south than last time

Oh, looks like that panorama above isn’t showing the edges. So, here it is again:

Not a single other human visible from horizon to horizon. No cell service, either

Not in Egypt, but we had just crossed a river

Saturday morning, headed to breakfast. Tooling down the road in the right lane, taking it easy with radar cruise on, passing a bunch of pickups towing empty trailers in the left lane. Grey GMC SUV was obviously getting frustrated and passed one of them using the suicide lane – almost living up to the name while swerving in to my immediate left yet still stuck behind another in the same apparent caravan. Truckavan? Nah. My passenger said “Whoa!” I, while gesturing at the model of Yukon on the side replied: “They think they’re going to get ahead of these trucks before the light, but they’re in Denali.” I apologize, and you’re welcome.

Truckaflatbed? Hell no, that’s worse, almost obscenely specific. What is the collective noun here? A clot sounds aggressively judgy. A queue implies less motion than there was.

It’s long past the time

…when we should start referring to the number 10 as “a metric dozen.”

Obviously, that makes 8 a binary dozen, right? Or do we round that one up to 16?

Finally

Finally found the proper neologism for my Hawaiian shirt and cowboy hat style:

Y’alloha