Its No Wonder I Turned Out this Way

My idea to sell plants door-to-door didn't really work out. I was listening to something the other day and someone was making the point that there are reasons for crappy stuff in our lives, but they don't have to be excuses for continued crappiness. The point the speaker was trying to make is that people have the tendency to blame the crappiness in their lives on things that happened and that were largely out of their control. Well, first of all, the guys and gals handing out this motivational hooey usually have experienced much less adversity than the smucks they're lecturing to. So while it sounds good in theory, you really had to be there to test out the hypothesis that setbacks make us tougher. I am fully the sum of the lessons that I learned growing up. One of the important lessons I learned early in life was that it's difficult to order a pizza from a payphone. They think you are doing the fake order. Unfortunately, this lesson is no longer relevant, since working payphones are rarer than Dodo birds and the pizza places all have caller ID anyway. When I growing up our home telephone was frequently shut off for non-payment, very frequently. Also my father was frequently sitting in a bar drinking up the vast Sneed fortune, which left me and my mother to watch old movies, get drunk (her not me) and plot to get pizza. This was only after we were certain that the younger kids were asleep, so that they couldn't get their grubby mitts on our pizza. Seniority has its perks, even in a loony bin. In 1964 you could buy a large pizza for about $3. That was twelve glasses of draft beer in those days, using the official Sneed rate of exchange, so we're talking serious money. If Mom had squirreled a little something away from the grocery money or if I had some cash from mowing lawns, we would go in on a pizza. Sometimes she would say, "I'll buy us a pizza" or "let's go in on a pizza (if she didn't have the whole $3)", but the ending was always the same, if you go get it. The nearest place to get pizza in those days was at a place called Marco's Pizza, which was a couple of miles from our house. This conversation always took place about 10 at night. Sending a child out at 10 pm to get a pizza seemed perfectly normal at Casa de Alcholicos Loco. I would get on my bike and ride to a payphone to place the order. Then I would have to wait at the payphone until they called to verify the order. I learned the hard way that it is a bad idea to be honest when the guy asks if you are calling from a payphone. If I didn't have the money for the phone call or I the guy wouldn't take the order, I would have to go place the order in person. This was bad because pizza-making technology was far less developed in those days and I would have to wait at Marco's for about 30 minutes while they made our pizza. Pizza in hand, I would balance it on the handlebars, as I pedalled home in the black of night. Once in awhile, if neither of us had any money, my mother would tell me to go to the usual bars that my old man frequented, to ask him for pizza money. This was not an effective strategy. My dad would just be so humiliated in front of his drunken, lout pals that his urchin kid hunted him down in a bar, that he might smack me one for good measure. The lure of hot pizza makes a kid agree to do screwy things. I don't blame my unusual upbringing for my sometimes boorish behavior. In fact, growing up I got a real lesson in what not to do, so that's something. Merle. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgemental and cranky Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor