In junior high, that's middle school for you whippersnappers, I listened to the radio a lot. That's when I discovered U2's Pride (In the name of love). Then Joshua Tree came out. Then some years passed, and I found myself dating a big U2 fan in college. It seemed like the relationship might be going somewhere (it did, and that "somewhere" has been pretty freaking nice for the last 27 years), so I borrowed her cassettes and CDs and made myself a U2 mixtape.
In case you aren't up on your US geography, I had a professional artist work with a professional cartographer to mock up this sophisticated image...just for you!
It wasn't in a race or anything, but for fathers day one year, my wife got me a driving experience.
It was my 40th birthday, 2012. The world didn't end because of the Mayan calendar thing that in fact, never predicted the end of the world at all. So that's probably a good thing.
Being a milestone birthday, it seemed like a fine idea to get onboard a tiny airplane and jump out of it. It may not have been such a good idea after all, but I went into it with plenty of unearned optimism.
Well, ultimately, children belong only to themselves, and they are just lent to us for a little while. So from that perspective, someone lent me a literal person. He is the best birthday present ever in the history of gift giving, and I get reminded of it every year on my birthday because his is just one day after mine.
This is a sad story.
My father-in-law bought a couple hundred acres in rural Tennessee. He carved a road with a tractor, cut down a lot of trees, milled a whole lot of wood, and built a house. Damn, that's a manly man. Ron Swanson had nothing on Kendall Patterson.
There's not a lot to this story, but it's moderately interesting. I'm from Tulsa, Ok. I'd lived my first 28 years there; went to the same school from 1st-12th grade, and went to work at my old high school after college which was also in Tulsa. Yeah: Tulsa, Tulsa, Tulsa.
