My life is a Whirlpool right now!!! I should have gotten a Maytag...

You'd suppose that times would be tough for the Address Curb painting business. But things are going good. I've been doing this for 27 years on my own and it's been this way during each economic downturn. People don't mind paying a reasonable amount for a superior paint job. It's not like I'm installing plasma TVs at some ridiculous hourly wage! Now that's a business model that's probably not recession proof. Although I don't know if I could survive a full fledged Depression.

Max Shulman did a bunch of growing up poor in the Depression comic novels but researching them did nothing to educate me regarding my business model. But I did learn that young men during the depression couldn't get laid as often as they would have liked. Which was my experience entirely growing up.

I'm very personable, and a good listener, which goes a long way towards explaining why, among other things, I have children. It also means that after contracting with a homeowner to paint his or her address, in the color scheme of his or her choice, on his or her curb, I'll often be the target of that homeowner's need to get something off his or her chest. (It's seldom a brassiere, but hope screams eternal.)

I've heard some real doozies in my time. And yes, for the gutter-minded among you, when I was too dumb to know better, I got laid twice. Thank god both times they were females. I've come to realize that sex should be avoided at all costs unless you've paid the ultimate price, your freedom. You can take that to the bank, but you won't, until you're at least old enough to not be able to remember where you bank.

The other day I had a lady tell me about her son getting drunk and borrowing a friend's truck. Her son jumps in and takes off, not knowing that there was a couple in the bed of the pick up doing something beds are famous for. The guy in the bed of the pick up became incensed at the distraction that her son's driving was becoming to his partner. She was screaming, but it wasn't all about him, and this always pisses a guy off. So the guy in the bed of the pick up crawled to the rear of the cab, reached through the open rear window slider and started choking the lady's son. He panicked and hit the brakes. His seatbelt saved him from any injury. The guy reaching through the rear slider window was adequately braced against the rear of the cab, so he was doing okay. But the young lady wasn't at all restrained and the motion which will continue until acted on by an outside force translated into her body sliding on her naked bum into the rear of the guy who'd moments early been lubing her crankcase and the force of the impact to the back side of the guy smashed his dip stick into the rear of the cab, severely damaging it.

Now her son is being sued and apparently the plaintiff set a great value on his dipstick, declaring it to be irrevocably damaged and asking for a whopping big sum of money, exceeding the amounts available through the friend's insurance and their own insurance.

So I'm sitting there stenciling and painting and she asks me for advice... See? I must have a great personality.