![]() Great Monday morning to everyone! Hope you’re alive and well and survived the weekend! It was a busy one for Cousin Fred and me. He was missing Gigi, the hairdressing hydrologist, who had flown back to New York to get The Trump’s coif in good shape for the Republic National convention this week in Cleveland. He had been moping around The Compound for days. Nothing would revive his spirits, believe me I tried. I made an attempt to get his mind off of Gigi by moving ahead with our plan to drill a well that will supply water for a permanent Lake Mountebank. In fact, we were meeting with an engineer on Friday afternoon about augmenting the sandy soil around here with clay to form the lake bed. According to the engineer, if we left things as they were, the lake bed would constantly be draining back into the ground at a rate faster than we could pump water to fill it. And, of course soil augmentation comes at a steep price. He immediately whipped out a U.S. Dept. of Agriculture pamphlet about a grant program that helps farmers build stock ponds. The grants are in the amount of $600,000, which coincidentally is what the engineer is telling us that it will cost to move forward with his plan. The program, called Ponds Across America, comes with a lot of strings attached. For starters, they actually expect you to have cattle using the pond. There was little (okay, nothing) in the literature about naked slalom skiing at night (soon to be an Olympic sport assuming DISH ever lets us watch Olympic coverage again). As the engineer is explaining all of this, I note Cousin Fred staring off toward the northeast with a wistful look in his eye. Suddenly, he grabbed his phone and was working on something. As I waved goodbye to the engineer and promised to get right back to him, Cousin Fred is waving his phone in my face and telling me that it’s only a 17-hour drive from The Compound to Cleveland. Cousin Fred wanted a road trip. Who am I to deny him? Besides, the route would take us through Grayville, IL and my favorite bar, The Paradise Bar & Grill at the Fairbridge Inn Express…and my favorite bartender, Pedro, whose real name is Tom Collins. I’m not making that up! Pedro’s claim to fame is that he was struck by lightning…twice…and lived to tell the tale. Okay, I was in! We left that night and drove on through the night, not stopping in Grayville. Cousin Fred promised that we would stop on the way back to Oklahoma. As we’re moving along, I had Cousin Fred trying to find us a hotel in Cleveland. I knew it would be nearly impossible with 75,000 people descending on the city for the convention, so I had him searching for rooms in the suburbs. Finally, after searching and searching, he found two rooms at the Moon Over Inn in Parma, only 10 miles outside the city. I should have known…it was too close to the city to be available. I figured we’d be stuck some 30-40 miles out. Cousin Fred showed me the photo on the motel’s web site. It looked okay, but I pointed out that all of the cars in the pic were 1950s vintage. Eh well, we had rooms within 10 miles of the city. I thought, what could possibly go wrong? We rolled into the Cleveland metro at around noon on Saturday and decided to see if we could get an early check-in at the Moon Over Inn. As I guided the car along the boulevard near the motel, I noted a huge white wall up ahead with the words HOURLY RATES, ADULT FILMS, CLEAN SHEETS in huge purple letters with yellow outlines. It was our home in Parma for the next week! Gadzooks! Out front was a woman with huge hair dressed in a bikini top, very short shorts, and knee-high snakeskin boots. She held in her hand a…ummmm…rubber representation of a phallus which she was waving at the cars that passed the place. She squealed with delight when we actually turned in off the street and parked outside the office. I was handing over my credit card to Omar, the desk clerk, when my phone began ringing. I looked at the name of the caller…it was Brooklyn Hodensack, the virginal vegan from Southern Living magazine who had made my life in L.A. so miserable. With some hesitation, I answered. She immediately asked where I was. I told her I was in Parma, Ohio. She told me to come on into the city. The magazine had a suite at the Ritz-Carlton downtown. Apparently, Southern Living had hired a writer to cover the national convention for them, but he failed to appear in Cleveland. I was the second choice, but an expense-paid stay at the Ritz? I’ll take it. I snatched the card from Omar’s hand, grabbed Cousin Fred and we left. The woman out front expressed her dismay that we weren’t actually checking in and threw her rubber phallus at our vehicle as we turned onto the street and drove toward my destiny! Comments are closed.
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