Category Archives: Anecdotal

Rumination No. 1

Actually, we’re okay with mediocrity, trickle down and less than perfect, and we’ve never met a billionaire who paid no taxes or stole anything. We think corporate medical providers, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance companies are the bane of society, along with most of the politicians in Congress, and global money cabals we don’t even know about. Thing is, we don’t see a path to a world free of these cancers that doesn’t pass through a rough period of anarchy. Some might argue that what we have is preferable to that. And the sheer weight of momentum may preclude any course adjustment sufficient to result in meaningful change. Still, we may be able to improve some aspects of existence, if we can get the numbers to do it. There’s the rub. Too many people ultimately rely on the military-industrial-financial complex, Big-Med, Big-Pharma and Big-Insur for their paychecks. It defies human nature to sacrifice a vested interest, however small or, even, demeaning. So it goes (to quote one of our favorite authors).

Absolute Painting – Lawrence, Kansas

A friend of Bandolero recently hired Absolute Painting to paint the interior of a house in Lawrence, Kansas. Despite indications of incompetence after they started, the friend allowed them to paint the entire inside, walls and ceilings. Big mistake. One only needs to see one room to know they were incompetent. Turns out they were not only incompetent, they used watered down paint. It’s going to cost our friend several thousand dollars to fix the damages and get the place good enough to show prospective buyers. Bandolero really hates when somebody claims to be a professional when they are not. Even worse is peddling watered down paint! Bandolero issues this warning to the good people of Lawrence, Kansas: stay away from Absolute Painting. If you’re a bad person, hire them; you will get what you deserve.

Snow Blower

One day Bandolero awoke and thought he had died and gone to heaven. Everything was white. Bright white. And he couldn’t feel anything. It seemed as though he was numb all over. He had to think awhile about this. He couldn’t remember getting shot, or falling off his horse, or having a heart attack, or anything that would account for being dead. While going through a list of possibilities he heard something strange. It sounded like “mmmph, mmmph, mmmph.” Suddenly there was a whoosh and Blacky the outlaw was staring down at him.

“Are you dead, too?” Bandolero asked.

“Don’t be stupid, Bando, it snowed last night! Get up!”

And, indeed, it had snowed, and snowed a lot. This explained everything, which was very reassuring to Bandolero since it meant he had not lost his memory, after all.

“Y’know,” he said to Blacky, “we’re gonna need a snow blower to get the horses out of the stable.”

“No problem,” said Blacky, “there’s one lives two houses down.”

“Very funny,” snorted Bandolero. “But that’s not exactly the kind of snow blower I meant.”

Which was true, it wasn’t.

“Ha-ha!” laughed Blacky as they unpacked shovels from their saddlebags.

[Read more in the Bandolero Memoirs]