Happy Spring. Hope you are enjoying, or at a minimum, adequately enduring, all that spring brings to your world. I had a fairly productive garage/pub spring cleaning, so the Gashole is now officially open for the 2022 season.

The “Gashole” is a pub that I built in our garage a few years back. It’s actually spelled with two s’s, but I’d hate to offend thine eyes of those fond of being offended. The second “s” is reserved for bar patrons, and the perpetually immature.

When someone says they have a bar in their garage, I would imagine it brings forth a variety of images in each of our individual mind’s eyes? Unless, of course, it’s an individual of the entirely unimaginative sort, then…well, I can’t imagine. Perhaps they were poked in the mind’s eye as a child, and never fully recovered?

I suppose an activated imagination, and a wide-open mind’s eye, is dependent upon the topic presented to the individual? We all have things that lull our imaginations into a stupor and leave our mind’s eye glazed and droopy. Math, politics, and board games are cognitive kryptonite to me, perhaps talk of garage bars is yours? Poor soul.

Actually, “talk” of garage bars isn’t all that thrilling, it’s the sharing of them with family, friends, and other categories of some humans, that put the “tick” into garage bar talk.

So far this season, traffic has been light in the Gashole. Just the regulars, myself and Mort. Mortimer J. Snerd, as the IRS knows him. Mort’s a dummy, but he’s a good listener, and possess a constant welcoming (albeit troubling) grin. He’d probably tell you the same about me, if the string that moved his lower jaw was still fully functionable.

So, he sits, slack-jawed and silent, smelling of cigar smoke and saw dust. So it goes.

Mort and I go way back, about 40-years I suppose. Our paths first crossed Christmas of 1982, when my parents entertained my dreams of becoming a ventriloquist. A dream that thanks to a rerun of episode 98 “The Dummy” of the television series The Twilight Zone, soon became a nightmare.

From that point on, Mort and my relationship was a bit tense and tempestuous. I’m pert near 50-years old, but I still have an occasional nightmare involving my pal Mort not being so pal like. The nightmares do seem to have subsided since I hired him on as the night watchman at the Gashole. We all need a purpose in life.

Mort’s factory issued rubber shoes were lost years ago, so I outfitted him with a pair of cowboy boots I wore when I was a wee toddler. He looks snazzy, and I figured that the “clip and clop” of cowboy boots would make it harder for him to sneak up on me. A win-win.

Swing by the Gashole sometime. Mort has put together quite a selection of Spring Specials. Snacks to please the palate and libation to loosen the lips.