I do it for the attention

This is a somewhat dumb commercial for Spider Murphy's tattoos. I've left them a bit of my blood and they've left me a bunch of their ink. Heath Preheim gave me a tattoo depicting my great grandfather's boat, The Onward, sailing in front of the large orange bridge. It's on my right calf. I got it for a lot of reasons relating to family and history and stuff like that, but it's the tattoo that people seem to notice the most.

So I'm eating a very late breakfast in Sam's For Play Cafe, and the waitresses all like my tattoo. One of them stopped everything to take a picture of it. She said it reminded her of her Dad who was a merchant seaman.

Waitresses are a wonderful institution. If you're a regular, and polite, and tip reasonably well, they are nice and friendly and female and offer great comfort to single men. I've seen over the road truckers fall all to pieces because a truck stop waitress was nice to them. I don't mean a beautiful truckstop waitress. I mean a human female. I'm sure that was as much human contact as those guys had in days and it might have been the most contact with women that they'd had in weeks. Being a man is a lonely business sometimes.

I wonder if there's anything similar for women. I don't think so. A lot of women ride the bus. A lot of them are single, but for a lot of them, the car and the gas money is reserved for hubby. I try to greet everyone in a friendly way, but women seem to really appreciate it. I've only dated one passenger. That was a long time ago, and there's quite a story to it. I think that women deserve a group of men who serve the same function that waitresses serve for men. From what women tell me, bus drivers don't fill the bill.

By the way, I have no illusions about waitresses. A while ago, I walked into Sam's and the waitress, who didn't seem very young, was just beaming at me! "Oh, I just love to see you." she said, "You look just like my dad!" She looked about twenty five years older than my stepdaughter. I still took as a compliment. I like compliments sometimes.

I think I have about 5 regular readers and two of them are in Canada. You guys are used to seeing a ship like my great grandfather's. It was a Grand Banks Fishing Schooner from Newfoundland. Fish a dime out of your pocket and look on the back.