Mona Voldemort

If you like Harry Potter, you will LOVE this site (see link below).

Via Fuck Yeah Voldemort

At the Speed of Speculation

Facebook is dangerous-ish.

Just sayin.

Strangled @ Work, Pt. 2

I almost never start off conversations like this but . . . the SECOND time I was strangled at work, I saw it coming a mile off.

Let’s begin with a bit of background. I was living in Belgrade, MT and attending grad school at Montana State University-Bozeman. How I ended up in Montana was that my now ex-wife is from Montana. That’s important because Montanans make very strict distinction between what they call “native” and everyone else, excepting the Indians.

Natives are chided for leaving the state. However, they are lambasted for bringing back foreigners. Foreigners who just wander into Montana are generally ostracized. My next strangler wandered into Montana from Ohio, just after getting divorced, losing his job with Delta, and suffering through both a mid-life crisis and a mental breakdown. Apparently I was meeting him at the finest moment of his life. His name was Steve, and I was to be his arch-nemesis.

Being a 30-something year old military veteran and master degree-holding adult, I obviously took an hourly-wage job at a local FBO [in the interest of not being sued, that's all I'll say]. We had quite the eclectic crew of social miscreants. Collectively, those of us who worked the flight line were known as Line Swine. We were generally loathed by everyone. Mechanics thought us incompetent brutes. Most pilots thought us parking lot attendants. Passengers thought us panhandling bums. In all fairness, some of us deserved those labels. And you couldn’t help but agree with their assessments, as we were *ahem* supervised by Steve.

The job was physically demanding, but it was brainless really: fuel planes, dump lavs, carry luggage, tow aircraft, etc etc etc. It was grunt work. But it afforded us opportunities. We learned a lot about flying, some of us even became pilots. We also had a band of merry men approach, as a certain personality type gravitated to this work. We all loved to play hard in Montana’s great outdoors. And we all loved to party. Some of the pilots loved to party, as well. This is how we ended up flying to Las Vegas and Lake Havasu and other far-from-Montana locales. It’s also how, on one occasion, we dined on freshly steamed Maryland blue crabs in Montana.

Our cavalier and perhaps idiotic approach to business is best evidenced by the following story . . .It was late one winter evening when the evening crew wasstaging cars and aircraft for the next day. As a full-service operation, we pampered the uber-rich. We provided nearly any convenience you can imagine, and many others you cannot. My buddy, this good-looking and wonderfully charismatic ladies man, began shuttling cars back to the main hangar. One of the cars belonged to one of America’s wealthiest men. Earlier in the day we had put his studded snow tires on, Ladies Man did not know this and proceeded to race down the runway, tear through the ramp area, and then do donuts.  Besides leaving huge black swirls on the concrete, he also shot a snow tire stud through the lobby’s 30 ft. tall, double-paned, tinted window. From what I was told, inside the building it sounded like a gunshot. The reaction was more telling than the incident. The Ladies Man steps out of the car looks at his coworker and says, “I say we go get drunk.”

Being at home, I didn’t know any of this . . . until my phone rang and the voice on the other end said, “Ladies Man is getting fired. We’re at the bar. Bring your ass.”

OK, so that was a tangent.

Anyway, that’s the scene. We were a rowdy bunch, but we were also good people.

Steve couldn’t control us, and because of that he was always angry. His anger was legendary. Almost as well-known as his incompetence.  So, my boss was the angry, incompetent guy who was struggling through a mid-life crisis and had recently suffered a mental breakdown.

On the day in question I was sitting in the hangar, warming myself and talking to a coworker. We were complaining how bitter cold it was. We’d been outside in the freezing cold, fueling airlines and de-icing planes. Me, I was nursing a torn rotator cuff after nearly falling to my death from the wing of an Airbus a320.  Steve was standing just a few feet away talking to another employee. Steve was a very animated talker. Very. So his arms were flailing. And his face got so red when he was flustered. He was always flustered.

Intermission.

DRINKING THRU B’MORE – PIX

Rolling to B'More - CLWho as Marilyn Monroe.

CLWho, eV, JLo & Me.

Corey & eV @ M&S Grill

There were A LOT of pickles involved. A LOT.

eV <3s the Lil Lemon Head Thingy.

Then we wandered into Max’s Taphouse.

The Interview Goes Horribly Awry, But My Clothes Stayed On.

This One. Her.

These Two Played Whispery Fuck-Fuck Games All Night.

The Quote Stenclied on the Wall Reads, “In Wine There is Wisdom. In Beer There is Strength. In Water There is Bacteria.” – German Proverb.

All Kinds of Dead Shit. Great Sight as You Leave Drunk.

One Night Only

I will be appearing (read: drinking & singing) at Max’s Taphouse in Fell’s Point tonight.

One night only.

Totally worth missing.

But Max’s Impressive Beer List and Corey’s entourage of lovelies are totally worth showing up for.

Pictures to follow.

Reborn on The Fourth of July

Transformational.

Kristi & Justin's House: Craigsville, VA.

You cannot conceive just how important this weekend was to me.

Alyssa & Kristi

Its impact was monumental.

Fog rises after a cold nighttime rain. 

And this one particular moment . . .

Dreaming about what's down river. 

–which from the outside looking in most likely seemed sedate and ordinary–

Alyssa, Trout, & Kristi. 

. . . it has been with me since the very second it happened.

Flower petals & rain drops. 

I want to go back and live in that moment forever.

Frankie, the Porch, & the Blue Swing. 

My happy place is the big, blue swing (pictured, background above) . . .

A guy, a beer, & a view. 

. . . with a beer in hand, arm around a good friend, staring at the mountains, and just swinging in the breeze.

Alright already, we'll all float on... 

To be quite honest, I cannot recall the last time in my life I was that at peace.

And I -- I took the one less traveled by...