Candy nobody wants

When I think of the word candy the first thing that pops into my head is a butterscotch sucker. I don't even like them. The smell of butterscotch alone, is enough to make me gag and choke back my vomit. Butterscotch is just to damn rich for my blood. Never liked it, never will.

Around this week every year we have to start deciding what kind of candy were going to buy for tricker treators. Don't be that asshole that couldn't take a 5 minute detour out of your hectic schedule to buy a freaking bag of candy!

It's a major decision in my household every year. I always have to remind Allyson not to get anything with cocoanut in it. No Almond Joys or Mounds please. Truth is I'm probably the one who picks up the candy, and I can assure you it will be from Hershey. You can tell a lot about people from what they give out, and I don't want to be judged by the kind of Candy I give out so I play it safe and go with Hershey every year.

Just think back to your own experiences. Fuck you penny giver! After four hours of intense tricker treating the last thing you want to do is count out a $1.27 in change. Fuck you fruit giver! I'm not eating a piece of fruit from a strangers house... I've heard all the urban myths about razor blades and apples. Last but not least, fuck you evangelist. I certainly don't need to be reading the propaganda you through in my candy bag with a butterscotch button tied to it.
When I take my kids out tricker treating I'm going to take notes. We'll know what houses to avoid, that's for sure!

As for the trick part of Halloween I've never seen it pulled off successfully... I suppose I could invite all the tricker treators who come to my place in, and make them watch 5 minutes of Armageddon, that would definitly horrify them. It did me.

Baby it's cold outside

In the past two days the temperature has dropped like 20 degrees. Tonight's low for Louisville, KY is expected to be 34 degrees. The leaves are starting to change color and were already into the second Quarter of Football season. Autumn has officially arrived!

Tonight would be the ideal night to celebrate my love for Allyson. I can just picture it now... A nice little fire in the place that people put fires inside a home. Obviously a bottle of Merlot. Nothing under 10 bucks, only the best for my baby! I wouldn't even be to concerned with the vintage just as long as the wine gave me rosy cheeks and a warm fuzzy feeling in my stomach.

I think a Wilson Phillips CD would be a can't miss for an occasion such as this. Dimming the lights and sitting on the couch with our shoes off goes without saying. Gazing into each others eyes like we did all those many years ago, and then finally consummating the night by going into the bedroom, what a night that would make for. Unfortunately, romantic episodes like this only take place in my head and on Time Life infomercials.

The brutal dismal reality of tonight is that I have to work. No Wilson Phillips. No Merlot. Not even a fire in my imaginary fire place. Just me leaving the house and heading off to work in the cold and lonely night. As a matter of fact I don't even have a coat to wear.

I used to have a coat just like the one in the picture up above, but that was years ago long before I met Allyson . I'm sure some of you remember my green coat. During the 80's I lived in my beloved green coat. It had all sorts of pockets and it was really warm, and unlike my Time Life fantasy it was real.

Willsix used to make fun of me for wearing it all the time. I can remember passing him in the hall ways at school or eating lunch with him and listening to him berate the Kleenex stuffed pockets of that beautiful coat (I had pretty bad allergies due to leaf dust and chalk dust when I lived in NJ, hence the need for a box of Kleenex stuffed in the pockets of that green coat at all times).

As the years went by I had a couple of other coats that I liked. One from an Amoco gas station where I worked that had my first name stenciled on it. Corky. A couple of Buffalo Bills jackets. One was like a white poncho and the other one was blue with buttons. Both very nice jackets but nothing compared to the green dream. Last year I tried breaking in a new jacket but the first time that I wore it in NJ the Birdman called it a Triple Fat Goose. That's basically the last time I wore a jacket. Allyson tried to tell me that she didn't like the jacket either but she is a little more sensitive then the Birdman, and didn't put it so frankly.

With all of that said, I'm still very excited about the cold weather and the first night of Autumn and don't worry too much about Coatless Captain Corky, I have plenty of sweatshirts and a lot of very wonderful sweaters.

The Obsessive couple

Sometime in the mid 90's I moved out of my parents basement and into a bomb shelter in Bethesda Maryland with my friend the Grumbler. I think we paid about 800 dollars a month for rent in this apartment. Today I think they are selling for like 350,000.

This joint as far as apartments go was amazing. It had sound proof walls. The Grumbler and I used to get drunk and then blast his Bose CD player while we alternated CD's and played brooms standing on couches and tables at 1:00 am. It was a lot of fun (I heard that this was similar to a game that people used to play called band in the 80's). For the most part we never heard complaints from any of our neighbors about the amount of noise we made and we maid a lot of fucking noise. It was weird but cool. Another guy that used to live in the neighborhood named Logan used to come over and we would throw steak knives into the walls of the living room. Good stuff.

Obsession was the name of the game when we lived together. The Grumbler was practicing tae kwon do really hard, 6 or 7 hours a day. I would practice TKD sporadically, but I was doing a lot of drinking at this point in my life. Three cases of beer a week. When we weren't obsessing on our particular passions we were eating at very expensive restaurants like Ruth's Chris Steak House for example. For two people not making a whole lot of money I don't know how wise it was to spend all of our money at expensive restaurants. There were a couple of times when our money situation got so rough that we ate pancakes out of a box for like two weeks straight. I'm amazed that I can even eat a pancake today. There were times when I had to close my eyes, hold my nose and force those things down my throat.

When we weren't eating, drinking or practicing TKD we were watching military themed sitcoms. Hogans heroes and The Phil Silvers Show(my favorite military sitcom of all time). Both shows were brilliant. At the end of our very exhausting days it was nice to come home and watch a Hogans Heroes mini marathon.

From time to time we would have house guests that would stay for months at a time and not pay a dime in rent(cheap fucking bastards). They stayed in our walk in closet in the living room. Three of our favorite house guests include Skiver, C Fike and the Apologist who would eventually become our third room mate at our next destination. C Fike even set up a TV in the closet, I was impressed with his ingenuity. Good stuff.

To learn more about Captain Corky and his amazing friends, his incredible wife, and his extremely bizarre life, stay tuned for the next installment of Corky's log.

Pride

This has been one of the most emotionally draining weeks of my life and it's know where near being over! First on Tuesday night, Jeter goes 5 for 5. The game had a paralyzing affect on me, I couldn't move I was speechless, spellbound and drooling on myself. I finally felt the pride, that's the only way to explain it! I got it. I can't believe It took me this long. Why didn't anyone tell me? Then last night I was all prepared to play hooky from work so I could watch the second game. I had my peanuts and my crackerjacks and I was ready for another dose of the living legend but then the fucking rain came and washed all my pride away.

I was furious! I almost missed a night of work for this sport... All of a sudden I was 9 years old again and starring out the window watching the rain wash my baseball game away, helplessly.
This is the real reason why I'll never become a baseball fan, rained out games bring back to many painful child hood memory's of afternoons that could have been. I played the wrong sport when I was a kid.

Even though I'm not a real big fan of any sport that doesn't play in the rain, I do understand that Jeter will be classified with the greatest sports figures in American history. That's pretty impressive.

In my mind, Jeter's plugging a pack of Kools, timeless.

Captain Carpetbagger

Tonight at work I was training a guy who just moved to Louisville from Philadelphia. He told me that this was the first summer he didn't go down the shore to Wild Wood NJ. I could see the tears welling up in his eyes as he told me his sad tale, I'm just glad that he couldn't see mine. Never take the smell of the ocean for granted people!

As I was training him I decided not to tell him about the time that I called out sick because I was at an Elk convention in Wild Wood, NJ on my 3rd day of a new job. In that particular moment I used my better judgment, but I did wrestle around with the idea for about 15 minutes in my head, "Should I tell him or shouldn't I tell him"?

It's always a pleasant treat to meet someone else from the hood, ( Livingston and Philly might as well be around the corner from each other out here). This guy seemed pretty excited to be here and just to be alive for that matter. I can kind of understand where he's coming from. He didn't really have any prospects in Philly. Heck, he didn't even have his GED up until about two weeks ago and he happens to be married with three kids. Could you imagine living in Philly married with three kids and never having had a job that pays over 10 bucks an hour? That would suck ass. This kid is desperately hungry for a better life. He is currently working three jobs. Now he has an opportunity to turn his whole life around. It's really a heart warming story in the making. I wonder if we can get Mark Wahlberg to play this part too.

My move from DC to Louisville is really quite similar to the story of the kid from Philly that I just told you about. I was working in DC painting houses and I started to think about the custom chrome designs I was going to put on the Harley Davidson that I was fantasizing about buying, that's when the alarm went off, I needed a break from the blue collar life style that I had become so comfortable with. (Insert four years of history with a girl from Kentucky who was living in DC here) and off to Louisville I went. Two days after I got here, I was hired by the company I work for now. Three years after that I was married to Allyson, so obviously (voice of the birdman) there was a real reason for me coming here and if you don't buy into all that soul mate shit, I'm just a very lucky guy.

Why Kentucky?

There are lots of times when I find myself asking the same question that Ms. Tuesday asked me in the comment section of the previous post, "Why Kentucky Corky"?

It's funny Ms. Tuesday, I can't quite recall how I ended up here. There are a couple different theories floating around out there that I can share with you. Maybe it could shed some light on the subject for both of us.

Theory 1 is that I'm a fish. I was actually born in North Carolina and raised in NJ and every time that I have made a major life decision I find myself inexplicably living further and further into the south. For example when I was 24 I was living in my parents basement and realized that I needed to do something, anything different with my life. Fortunately at the time my friend, the Grumbler, was looking for a room mate and we had mutual friends in Washington DC so I decided to move down there with him, and just like that I was roughly 220 miles south of where I had been for the previous 21 years or so. Plenty of stories that I have yet to tell about my wonderful years in the District of Columbia.

Now that I live in Kentucky my mother says the reason I'm here is because I'm searching for my roots. There might be some truth to that. At this point I'm probably here to spawn. That's really why I compare myself to a fish. I know I can't go any deeper south than Louisville, sorry North Carolina. I have heard people from Georgia and Alabama call Louisville the north and that scares me, a lot.

Another theory is that I'm basically this centuries Moses. One night at work I was talking to a co worker/ bible thumper about a problem I can't remember if I was talking about myself or my hatred of all forms of organized religion, but somehow he wound up comparing me to Moses. I remember thinking to myself all this guy does is relate every moment of his life to some moment or character in the bible. For anyone that knows me a little, understands that I ran with this shit in my head for a couple of minutes. I can see it... The adoption thing the exodus thing. Instead of freeing the Jews maybe I'm here to free all the meth addicts. Don't really know what I'm here for, it's all really god's plan anyway.

I actually like living here sometimes, it's cheap and it's really good for my blood pressure and panic attacks. Plus if you've never played Bingo you haven't lived yet. Yes folks, I think me and Allyson own a bingo dauber.

I hope this helps you paint a little broader picture Ms Tuesday. For the rest of the story ask me next time.