That's Interesting, Hoss. Not.

Here in The Home for the Wizened and Otherwise Wrinkled, Harold Halfnuts is on oxygen. Like me. Harold Halfnuts, NOT like me, continues to smoke.

I wonder what the explosion is going to be like. Will it be a big one, or just a little "poof"? How far will the body parts fly? These are important questions. I think I'll get the Administrator to put up a closed circuit TV out in the smoking area. Might be a hit on "America's Funniest Home Videos" when Harold blows.

Maybe we can get one of them TV cops, sayin', "Keep moving people, nothing to see."

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I can't get enough of me:

68. The night I graduated from high school, I drank a half pint of whiskey en route to a senior class party at Suttle Lake, 30 miles west of Bend. The next thing I know, I am back in Bend, in Drake Park, propped up against a Ponderosa pine, wearing somebody else's shoes. Other than getting drunk about 1,000 other times, it was the second worse thing I ever did. But I am done voting for Jim Beam.

69. This is the worse thing I ever did as a child: One Halloween, in about 1939, the "gang" I ran around with went out and tipped over two outhouses. Not everybody had flush toidies. I guess it would have been okay if the owners of those things had been pedophiles. Hell, maybe they were. I feel better already.

70. Two Halloweens later, the "gang" stole a horse and let it loose in the high school for an overnight stay. It has just now dawned on me that I can add "rustler" to my resume.

71. In 1948, in the summer between finishing high school and going on to college, four of us found a 1916 Model T sitting in the front yard of a Bend, Or., residence. We bought it for $25. Our fathers refurbished the sucker. We drove it over a 4,800-foot pass from Bend to Salem, and gloried in our treasure all year. Then the father of one of us "owners" repossessed it because we never paid for the tires. So it goes.

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My favorite word today is insouciance. n. hossism. Def.: The glassy-eyed look of the owner of a dog who is shitting on your lawn.