Greetings and Salutations!
Maaaan
LOTS of great comments about the Broken Toofus. I appreciate ALLLLLL the suggestions! Y’all rock in that respect. I do have a couple of observations regarding this…
One of which was a conversation I had with Wirecutter. Yeah Kenny from Knuckledraggin My Life Away who I regularly chat with via DM along with a couple of other Bloggers on the regular. Kenny apparently has suffered from some of the same issues that y’all and myself have had regarding the teeth being alllll sorts of fucked up DESPITE our best efforts to insure the longevity of said-teeth.
As I mentioned, and I figured I’d post as I was able to find it, was the ABC Public Service Announcement that used to be broadcast during Saturday Morning Cartoons back in 1973 through 1975… and yeah, for whatever I remember it, hence it’s mention. Aforementioned “Yuckmouth”:
Holy. Hells.
Man…
1) That takes me back.
2) OMFG I’m old!!!!!
OLD!!!OLD!!!OLD!!!
Damn yet again if’n I’m not dating myself.
So yeah, Kenny and I were talking about the various issues we’ve had over the years, and as we went on, well he laid THIS on me towards the end of the conversation:
My teeth weren’t bad when I was growing up. I started having to get root canals when I was in my early 30s, but I still had ’em all.
I asked the dentist one time why I was having to get what seemed like a root canal a month and he told me most of the time it was trauma, then he asked if I’d been hit in the mouth. I asked him, “Recently?”
He said, “No, not recently. Ever. Have you ever been hit in the mouth?”
I laughed and told him, “You might as well do a root canal on every single one of them then. Kind of a PM thing, you know?”
Have I ever been hit in the mouth….. sheee-it. Who the fuck hasn’t been hit in the mouth?
Man… God Bless the man… Talk about an opening.
My response was pretty much what you’d expect:
“…Who the fuck hasn’t been hit in the mouth?”
FAAAAAAR too many ‘Democrats’ LOL
<Mic Drop>
I’d say that summarizes it pretty fucking well.
And yeah, I asked if I could put this up…
His only codicile was for me to explain a LOT of those “punches to the face” were due to his propensity for loose wimmen in dive bars back before he met Miz Lisa. With Wirecutter, I’m sure the majority of y’all are like “Tell us something we wouldn’t have known/guessed!”
Truthfully, it’s something -I- never contemplated.
Probably means I have a LOT more toofus trouble coming sooner, rather than later, despite my attempts to NOT me a “Yuck Mouth”
My concern is that in the Infantry, bar fights were a way of life before the Army got all Uber-Militant-Anti-Fun in the late 1990’s. In fact one of the three Field Grade Article-15’s I got was specifically for brawling in a bar. In THAT particular one, I got off exceptionally light.
NO loss of pay, NO loss of Rank and ONLY 15 days extra duty which consisted of me taking the trash out of the Battalion Commander’s office and the Command Sergeant Major’s office at close of business, and then sweeping and mopping said-aforementioned offices. That took, in total about 20 minutes.
Yep. That was it.
In fact the CSM told me the reason I got off as light as I did was BECAUSE I had jumped in when a fellow member of our Unit (one I didn’t particularly like… he was a bit of a douche) BUT! He was a member of our unit, and as my attitude was that I would be damned if he was going to be beat down by a bunch on Legg Non-Jump Punk Ass Engineers… The CSM told me that unit integrity was MORE important than what I had done, so ergo, I got a minor ‘cooking’ instead of being deep-fried…
I did that bit of extra duty with a bit of pride if I do say so myself… Especially because I refused to rat on who else was in the fight. In this particular brawl, I had the unfortunate issue of getting caught under a dude who’d I had been grappling with on the floor of the bar. I still have no idea who coldcocked him, but the fat fucker was out cold on top of me, with me trying like Hell to get out from his ‘corpse’ so to speak when the MPs showed… It was a shitshow as there were a LOT of folks on the ground rolling around and fussing and fighting, and me struggling with this fat piece of deadweight laid out cold on me…
And when we got to the MP station, I clammed the fuck up.
I wasn’t going to ‘cheese’ on any of my fellow soldats.
Guess it paid off in the end…
So anyways…
Today was a very interesting day.
Gretchen and I went out for a civilized lunch to discuss our issues, and see what needed to be done. Better to be in public and have everything be cool so to speak. It was actually VERY pleasant. We went for some Arabic/Turkish food. When we got there, well… let me tell you. This is a place I frequent when I’m in that part of town (near the VA) and when I have the $$$ to do so. It’s called the “The Dough Show”
Seems there’s a few of them… it’s a new chain.
The place IMO is unreal. It’s located by MOSI (Museum of Science and Industry) and across from the Tampa USF main campus… Turkish Fahteer is the specialty, which is a filo dough sort of cheese and meat stuffed pizza. I mean it’s hard to describe. They have a location in Orlando, one here in Tampa and the newest in Jacksonville. They also have traditional gyros, shawarma, kofta and kebabs. All 100% halal.
ALL 100% absolute AWESOMENESS in eating.
A fahteer looks like this:
Like I said, a filo-dough pizza.
UBER Thin Dough.
The reason it’s called “The Dough Show” is when the chef is prepping the dough, he whips it around in the air to s-t-r-e-t-c-h it out to it’s fullest and thinnest capabilities. Once it’s almost paper-thin, he lays it out on an olive oil soaked mat, and adds all the filling, and then spindle’, folds, and mutilates it and stuffs it in a wood-fired baking oven. It’s a bit pricey BUT OMG!!!
So when we got there, it was standing room ONLY. Wall to wall people. Like more than I’ve ever seen there. In fact Gretchen went to the bathroom, and I after ordering copped a squat at the last table left available in the place. I sat down and found myself next to a gentleman named (as I found out) named Ricky.
Ricky is a naturalized US Citizen from the Philippines. He told me that while he knew of and had been past the Orlando location, he’d never had Arabic food. I was more than happy to explain the chow to him as I having lived there for numerous years, and the fact I knew it was going to be a loooong minute before our chow (both his and ours) was going to be ready, I was more than happy to talk to him. I gave him a breakdown of the various food(s) and the background of them (as far as I know from my limited intel…)
Long story short: Dude was awesome.
He’s a gentleman of the Old School Variety. He was here from Jacksonville visiting with his college aged daughter who was attending an activity at USF (which is right across from the restaurant). He’s retired, and is an avid traveler, hence our ‘common ground’ if you will… Traveling Internationally is almost as bad as a heroin addiction, let me tell you. We both (Gretchen and myself) got along with him like gangbusters. We ended up spending almost two hours waiting on our chow… and yeah it was THAT busy… which led to something a bit out of my ordinary experience..
Without going into it too in depth… all I can say is this was a really strange encounter in that by the time we had to leave… Gretchen opened up in ways she’d never done before… for me or anyone else… maybe the ‘strange shoulder’ or something, but deep down, even -I- felt some weird vibe… well… let’s just say God and Jesus work in seriously mysterious ways, and that Ricky helped Me and Gretchen in so many ways that I don’t even know if he realizes it… or maybe he does…
I dunno… I didn’t go into things regarding us and our current situation… we just sort of left it that we had some serious problems we were working through, and man, he offered support, and advice, and had Gretchen crying openly in the restaurant from some of the thing he pointed out to her regarding our relationship… some of which have been issues that -I- have been pointing out for the past year, year and a half, to no avail… It was like having a mindreader there or something…. Like I said, a very strange but welcome encounter…
VERY helpful and cathartic…
Maybe it took a total outsider to point it out…
Or maybe it was a Divine Intercession…
I have no idea…
But I will say…
Truthfully
Something odd happened today.
Something good
Something that gave me hope
Something that gave me peace in a turbulent time…
All because of some wild assed random meeting in a Haji restaurant that Gretchen didn’t even want to go to… and that afterward, she was grateful that we had gone….
I gave him this URL and warned the guy…
I mean fair is fair amiright?
No idea if he’ll check this out…
But if he does, all I can say is man…
Ricky, you did a world of good today whether you know it or not, and you have my utter and absolute thanks. My own personal NORMALLY cynical POV on this one encounter today tho? All I can say is that Angels don’t always have wings yannow?
Leastways not ones you can see…
And on that broken-tooth note, I’ll talk with you all tommorrow.
More Later
Big Country
You know I hear of things like that more than you might think. Sailors (real sailors, merchant seamen, not the navy, who places ONE quarter-assed (not even half-assed) sailor on board each ship, the bosun, who must struggle to be a mediocre able seaman) talk, but of course we don’t overshare except with friends.
I had a shipmate call me at home to ask where a pipe patch was in my spares lockers.
My wife and I were 6-7 years married and about ready to call it quits, just waiting on the other to pull the pin. I had only talked a little about it with 1-2 guys at work. He was married with kids and a bit strong-opinionated, being a hoodbooger from the projects, but an alright guy. I had my wife answer my
He calls me at home, 3-4 times while I’m laying fiberglass in the garage, and I can’t stop or I ruin the piece, and my wife brought me my phone so I tell her to open it for me, put it on speakerphone, as it was obviously an emergency, but I had epoxy and fiberglass on my gloves. I answered his question and he found the pipe patches, and with my wife right there he asks how she and I are getting along.
About 15 mins later I’m done with my work and the gloves are off and he’s giving out absolute world-class advice and getting us talking. We talked, the 3 of us, for 2 hours. It just happened.
It wasn’t a magic urnaround but that talk got us listening to each other, finally, and we both give the guy enormous credit for being the catslyst to us building a wonderful marriage together.
Right place, right time, right people. I’m happy as hell you had that happen to you, bro. Whatever comes of it, it sounds like you both feel better spiritually.
Indon’t think anyone needs to be an angel to do God’s will or to be a divinely-inspired intervenor. My friend I talked about? He got divorced a few years later. Couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.
Right place, right time, right people. I hope Ricky knows he done real good.
BCE, if you and you know who can come to an agreement and split the property and then have a simple dissolution then it would be waaay cheaper, easier and faster if you want to go the divorce route.
Since you are dancing around possibly going the reconciliation route, in the end you know how she is, how you feel about her and your marriage and what you want to do and in the end it is your call of course.
I just urge caution !! My ex wife and I tried marriage counseling twice in the years leading up to her cheating on me and the divorce. My ex was all gung ho for counseling and the first few sessions she would go on and on about what I did that pissed her off. Then we’d get into what SHE was doing and both times she denied everything, got pissed off and stormed out never to return to the counseling.
You know who has massive red flags, MASSIVE. Her enabling DC has put massive strains on your marriage and made your life a Hell for years. Is she willing… I mean really truly 100% willing to give DC some tough love ? When things blow up with soon to be Grandkid #3, is she going to want to jump in like she did with Gran 1 & 2 ?
It’s obvious that you love her and the Grans and you were done when you were pushed beyond your limit.
The thing is that you have been with her for long enough that she is how she is and at her age she’s not going to change. I have seen it over and over that people will SAY they will change and they will for a month or two and then it’s back to how they usually are.
You have to ask yourself if she will truly change and what YOU want out of life and do you want her in it.
It’s tough I know because your heart is saying one thing and your head is saying another.
Marriage counselor to him: “She says you have never bought her flowers.”
Him to counselor: “So help me… I never knew she sold flowers.”
Youre nuts dude. She will lie, beg and steal to get out of the suck ass situation she caused for herself. Remember, its not just her, its her whole psycho family that comes with the deal. Run away as fast and as far as you can.