This colored-pencil picture is called “The Wings of Imagination”.
What I would like to know is… how do you think outside the box if you don’t understand what the box is… and where it is? Do you have a box inside your head that you normally think with? Is it a cardboard box? Mine is probably iron. I do a lot of rather thick thinking. Like now. Trying to come up with a clever and new idea for what to write about after I have been squeezing my idea-maker with both hands while doing all the necessary bankruptcy paper work that proves I don’t have enough money to even be considered poor. And how do I do that paperwork if I am already using both hands for squeezing? Did I magically grow a third arm? Or did I learn to write with my feet?
I waste a lot of time watching YouTube videos from the BBC with David Mitchell the comedian. He doesn’t waste any time with a cardboard box in his brain. He is a thinker after my own heart.
What I would also like to know is… what words should I use for talking to city pool inspectors so that I can properly express my thanks for causing me to have marital troubles and bankruptcy paperwork to do all because removing a defective pool is more expensive now than putting pool in was twenty years ago? I mean, of course, words to properly express it without getting arrested.
Tim Hawkins’ Handbook would appear at first to be useful here, but telling him to “Shut your pie hole!” might still result in further tickets that I can’t afford to pay and possible jail time in prison cells with other inmates who had to talk with city pool inspectors.
I kinda like the epithet, “You son of a motherless goat!” That’s a Steve Martin line from the movie The Three Amigos, probably my favorite western movie of all time.
But I have to do something about my increasing use of foul language, dag nabbit! I swear and use profanity too bleeping much. Unlike Mark Twain, I don’t particularly care for the taste of it in my mouth.
But what I would really like to know is… the ultimate answer to the age-old question, “Mary Ann or Ginger?”
After all, the biggest burning unanswered questions in my life are questions I have had since boyhood, and they don’t burn any bigger than that one. I fell in love and married one that turned out to be more Ginger than I thought at first. And I am not sure I ever really got to know or date a Mary Ann.
And another burning question I have had since childhood is, “How the great googly moogly does a question catch on fire?” I would really like to know the answer to that one. But I keep those kind of questions in the iron box in my head. That should be safer than cardboard, because cardboard is flammable, and besides, I have to do my thinking outside the box where there is no danger of catching on fire from burning questions.
i guess if you don’t know the box exists, then you are already outside of it, luckily. i love the alternative swear words list, dadgumit!
Thanks for confirming I’m not stuck inside the box now that all those questions are burning in there. And I like that list of malarkey an awful lot too. 😀
Answer A) 1. Ask the inspector how many others in the city are in the same kind of mess that you are – and get their names/ph #s. 2. If you’re lucky, between all of you you can get the trucks full of rocks and dirt necessary to fill the pool; have them come over, ready. 3. Invite the inspector to see your solution. 4. Pipewrench. 5. Fill the pool with the aforementioned rocks and dirt. TahDah!
Answer B) 1. Make yourself and your wife tenants of the house – cheap rent – with a 20-year lease fixed price rent. 2. Quitclaim the house to the city. 3. Sue your landlord for failure to fix the pool.
Yep, suing my own wife would probably help a lot with the fire in the box. 😀
Huh? I meant if you gave the house to the city, then the city is the landlord!
Oh! My wife would never agree to that!
Or would she? Maybe I should ask her.
Can she fix the pool????
No. I’m the expert crack patcher, and I already fixed all the leaks, but the electrician told us that bringing the electrical system for the pool up to code would cost a couple thousand more than getting it removed. So we were forced to go with the last resort option, which makes the city happy.
I have thought about your solution of making the city our landlord. It would work if the city didn’t evict us immediately. They don’t seem to like us very much though. There are 30 other pool owners with non-functional pools, and according to my wife’s survey, we are the only ones being treated like this.