A.G.E's Joint

Monday night and it's late. The Busch cans are stacked on the table in front of me and the last thing  I remember is  a fast food law commercial before drifting off. "Over $1 Billion recovered. Call today to get your best settlement..." ******************************************************** I find myself in a large room, maybe a warehouse. A stack of storage containers sits in the corner of the room, each contains a dream.  Eenie, Meenie, meinie, moe. I choose a pink one, the second one from the top. The effort it takes to pull it out is exhausting. I hesitate briefly. Is it showtime in my dreams? Will it be comedy or tragedy? The room goes dark. A light flickers to my right and I enter it. I am in a river gorge, Palisades Shoals. Teenagers are climbing the cliff that runs along the bank. At the base is a group of girls dressed only in twelve-pack beer cartons, daring each other to jump naked into the water. Some boys nearby overheard and began to cheer: "Show us! ...

In the early years of our marriage, my wife and I loved to go out to eat.   It was just something we did every Friday night after work.   I’d pick her up at the train station and we would head out.    One fall Friday, we chose one of our favorite places, Good Ol’ Days .   It was a bar with an outdoor patio that we loved to sit on cool nights. It was a converted Dairy Queen that sat between a tire store and another bar on a very busy road.     I’d had been a regular customer and an employee of this place long before our marriage and the management always extended the best in southern hospitality to us.   Even to the point of a cold pitcher of beer being at the table any time we were seated.     But this night was going to be a bit different. As he handed us our menus, our waiter, Karl, nodded to the table behind us where two very drunk guys were sitting. They had a hard time keeping their heads erect and It looked like they w...