The Night Land Journal

This piece cribbed from today’s AP:

Everett Eahmer, 80, of St. Paul, Minn., said he’s been playing the lottery “since the beginning.”

“If I win, the first thing I’m going to do is buy a (Tim) Tebow football shirt, and I’m going to do the Tebow pose,” said Eahmer, who bought five tickets Thursday. “I’m with him in honoring a higher power.”

The higher power of what? Statistics?

inre: Tim Tebow. Now there’s a guy in dire need of a prayer closet.

This bit from the LA Times, in reference to when the Mega Millions jackpot was a mere $540 million (i.e. early this morning):

By the numbers, you have a 1 in 175,711,536 chance of picking the winning numbers and scoring a record $540 million jackpot.

Put another way: If you buy 50 tickets a week, you will win the jackpot every 68,000 years.

No, I did not buy a ticket.

I’ve decided to delay the submission of my resignation for a few days, possibly even a few weeks. The latest I’ll submit it will the middle of May, which would make the standard two weeks’ notice. Again, the only thing I’m 100% sure of is the fact that I will be resigning before the first day of June.

I’m delaying because I’m concerned about tipping my hand too early. People are jealous, and when they find out someone is leaving they sometimes do things to make the resignee’s life as difficult as it can be before his final exit. This meddling will occasionally result in the short-timer being questioned about comments he’s made, rules he hasn’t followed to the letter, or other jabs the frivolous horde might give in retaliation for a perceived “short timer’s attitude.”

Of course the delay is also not written in stone. I may submit my resignation in the middle of April instead of in May. It all depends on what comes my way within the next two months.

Yesterday I was thinking that the pleasure I get from selling one paperback book is significantly higher than the pleasure I get from the entire paycheck I earn at my other job. To say that I’m in the wrong kind of regular work is to utter the grand understatement of the millennia.

Today I had my studded tires taken off and my regular tires put back on. I refused to sit in the tire store’s lobby while I waited for them to get to my vehicle (only so much Crocodile Dundee I can watch). So I went for a walk instead. While walking I was thinking of the old joke about the guy who was having trouble losing weight. Apparently the guy had tried jogging but kept running into restaurants (bah-dump-bump). My thing is that I try to save money but keep running (or walking) into bookstores and thrifts. I hit two of those stores today and would’ve been to more if I’d had more energy.

Give me your tired, your poor, your Lurking Fear and Other Stories. Give me your sea-washed sunset gates, your Tales from the Crypt and your Gentleman Junkie. Give me the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, your Lust is a Woman and just about anything else by Charles Williford.

Follow me through the golden door of the Inner-Inner Sanctum. Lift your lamp…yes, that’s it. And now to read…

Today I walked into one of my favorite bookstores carrying a sack full of books that I want to use for trade credit. At the counter was a young lady who was asking the store owner about a book she was looking for. She was telling the owner that the book was the second part of a three book series. The lady then told the owner that the first book was so good that she absolutely had to have the other two or else she’d die.

The owner was telling the lady that he didn’t have the book in stock, and that he couldn’t order it for her because it was out of print.

Young lady turned to me and my bag of books and asked, “Do you know ‘V is for Vermschwiller’”?

I had no idea what the hell that was. At first I thought it might have been something by Sue Grafton, who’d written all the alphabet books—“A is for Alibi,” “B is for Burglar,” “C is for Corpse,” and so on.

“Who wrote the book?” I asked.

Of course she had no idea. I thought this odd, considering she’d already said she would willingly (and most melodramatically) expire for a chance to have the remaining books in the series. Had she been so enamored by the story that she’d never noticed the author?

The owner mumbled something about the book being written by “V” somebody.” I thought that odd as well. Didn’t he just look it up?

Ah, memory. You are but the itch of an amputated leg.

Interesting story on MSN about a lady who was busted for public comments she’d made about avoiding jury duty.  She’d been dressing up as a crazy person and doing other things that would make a judge think she was unfit to serve on a jury. Unfortunately the woman showed further bad judgment by revealing her scam on public radio, where it was overheard by the very judge who’d just dismissed her from duty. Now the woman’s facing another kind of jury, i.e. PERjury, in two counts.

I once knew a guy who bragged about throwing away his jury duty notices. “I get those notices all the time,” he’d say, “they go straight into the trash.”

Good citizen that I am (cough), I should’ve turned him in. I didn’t like him anyway, the big braggart. But I didn’t turn him in, and neither did anyone else. We couldn’t, in fact, for within a short time Mr. Bigmouth had experienced the rather unfortunate occurrence of finis, i.e. finality of person, id est quietus, that is, death. Fell over in the shower, he did. Finito.

Talk about serving it cold.

I’m sure I’ll get another jury duty notice by early next year. I won’t throw the notice away or pretend (as many do) that it was lost in the mail. I’ll put in my usual year’s worth of extensions, which, if granted, will keep me out until early 2014. And then I’ll go, kicking stones and grumbling all the way.