This Saturday I won $18 betting on the greyhounds at the dog races. Sweet. I also made money off of the Preakness the weekend before last.

Note to self: look into professional race betting as career

My dad and I took a little road trip to the middle of fucking nowhere in south east Kansas on Sunday for a little nostalgic trip to the farm his uncle used to own when my dad was a little kid in the 1950s. He says that some of his best memories are from this place.

If you ever have an opportunity to go to Elgin, Kansas, don't. It's a toilet hole of a town.

The best parts of the trip were the barely on the map back roads we took to get to the farm. At one point my dad turned to me and said,"Do you hear banjo music?" and I'm pretty sure that I did.

Other highlights: a sign in a field with the silhouette of a cowboy kneeling in prayer with the text 'Evenin' Lord'... if ever I were to start praying on a regular basis, this is how I would start all prayers, goat farms, this beautiful stone arch that was built into the side of a wooded hill for no apparent reason... there was a creek running through and maybe at some point it had been a bridge, but it didn't really look like anything had ever been there except for a hill and a creek... I still can't figure it out but it looked really old and pretty.

What I learned is this: I love car rides... like a dog. I just like to be driven places and I like being in charge of the map. Sometimes when I'm at home by myself I like to read maps... I have a lot of them: the World atlas, the North American atlas, the New York City Atlas, the European driving atlas, maps of Cape Cod and New England, Italy and Spain, maps I have saved from old issues of National Geographic of things like the Roman Empire in Turkey and the Mayan empire, etc. I love maps.

But I also like to read the dictionary... so clearly there is something wrong with me.

And then yesterday I went to the book store and as I was casually browsing I came across a book I had loved as a child called The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge. I must have checked this book out of the Valley Center Public Library 15 times as a child, but I had completely forgotten about it. And I'll be goddamned if there wasn't a recommendation on the cover of the book from J.K. Rowling herself. So now I'm re-reading it.

And it's put me in a mood to rediscover books that I read in elementary school. So I'm browsing the past nominees and winners at the Newberry award and William Allen White award sites and.... ahhh the nostalgia: Hatchet; Number the Stars; Sarah, Plain and Tall; The Pinballs; The Riddle of Penncroft Farm, On My Honor, Maniac Magee... God, I could go on and on.

Reading... look into it ; )

I have a very non-tempestuous, on again off again relationship history with video games. I could take them or leave them with the exception of a few months obsessing over Super Mario Brothers 3 with my best friend Tiffany (We BEAT it, Bitch!... with the help of Game Genie, of course... I'm sure many of you game afficionados are not as impressed as I am with myself, but we were like 10 and it was a huge deal to us) and a few weeks spent with Tomb Raider (I find this game to be strangely stressful... the dinosaur scared the shit out of me so I just stopped playing).

The first video game I ever played was a Sega game called King's Quest that my brother had in the late 80s. Good Lord did I love that game. It was probably originally one of those games for the computer where you would type in an instruction like: FEED APPLES TO TROLL... except that they had adapted it for Sega.

There isn't really much of a point to this post, except that man do I wish I could find a Sega and play that game all fucking day.

Since it's prom season (and since I'm bored and require entertainment)...

Tell me a prom story. Funny. Not so funny. Yours. Someone else's. Completely made up.

Let's hear it.

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My prom non-story:

I didn't go to prom. Everyone kept telling me that I would regret not going, but I still don't regret it yet.

However, I did go to after-prom and won a tv and vcr. Suh-weet.

And I got into a battle of wills with a magician.