6710 Grand

Someday is safe, far into the future. I don’t have to face it’s problems today Or know all of its details.   I don’t have to have its blueprints laid out. I just have to know it’s there. The promise off possibility. It is a place for my dreams Out of reach and protected. Maybe I’ll get there Maybe I won’t Someday…

I have spent all sixteen years of my life in Hannibal, Missouri and I don’t plan on ever leaving. It’s not the greatest city in the world, but it’s a sufficient place to live and I like it. I’m just your average high school kid with plenty of friends, who likes to go out on weekends and watch a lot of TV. There’s nothing abnormal about my upbringing or family life, and I’m not harboring a secret passion for anything strange like worshipping dogs. But a couple of things happened last summer that are worth sharing. Summer, at last, was here. It arrived as uneventfully as it had left nine months earlier. I remember in my younger days (it was so long ago) we would run and shout out of the building on the last day of school. Now, all I had ahead of me was late nights and early mornings at my burger-flipping job. My parents decided that it was time I learned some adult responsibilities and started taking care of myself. I don’t have to tell you that I didn’t particularly like t...

Things were going amazingly well for Crazy Angie and me that I could hardly believe it.  I kept waiting for something to go wrong.  Our liquor license wasn’t completely established yet, so that was foremost in my mind.  I must admit that it had occurred to me that Judge Larson might have agreed to help us simply in a drunken stupor.  This may well have been the case, and then we would quite frankly be in a bar without a license.  You can’t have a bar without a license!  That’s the simple truth of it!  I tried not to worry about it.  If nothing else, I would simply head over to Bill’s Bar and Grill and seek the judge out myself, and demand that keep up his end of the bargain.  Of course, if he refused, there was nothing I could do, but I wasn’t about to let that get in my way.  We had come this far.  I wasn’t about to give up so easily now.   Aside from the liquor licen...

The bar needed a tremendous amount of work.  I hardly knew where to begin.  Even after all of the cleaning, the building was in horrible disrepair.  The windows were cracked, the floorboards were creaky, there was no water into the building, there was no actual bar (which is kind of important in this line of work), and various other odds and ends that needed fixing up before we could even think about opening.  Given that this building was just walls, I decided that Crazy Angie and I needed to formulate some type of design.  We needed to decide how we wanted the place laid out.   “Ok,” I began.  “We have to figure out just what we need in this place.” “Whaddaya mean?” “Well, we can’t just have a bar and stools.  We need to decide if we want to have a kitchen, a bathroom, entertainment facilities, stuff like that.” “Oh.  Yeah, I think all that stuff sounds good.” “Ok, well it takes a little more work...

Crazy Angie and I went back to Jim Silo’s office and paid him for our building.  I signed the title, given that there could be no meeting of the minds with someone like Angie, since she had no mind.  It was all completely legal.  We were now the proud owners of 6710 Grand Boulevard—a bar.   The place was a wreck.  It was pretty much just four walls and a roof (bonus!).  We got to work sprucing the place up right away.  I did most of the work.  Crazy Angie had one task, sweeping the floor.  She had quite a bit of trouble.  I now know what a mistake I made in putting that request upon her.  She couldn’t figure out which way to hold it or just how to coordinate the actual sweeping.  Then there was the dirt—what on earth to do with it?  She was absolutely pitiful.  Needless to say, I did the sweeping—and the mopping, scrubbing, cleansing, scouring, disi...

I hate big banks.  They seem to find every possible way to charge people to access their own money.  I mean, don’t they make enough money on interest from loaning out my money?  Why should I have to pay to make a cash withdrawal from the teller line when the ATM is out of order?  That just doesn’t seem right.  Why should I pay them for not keeping enough money in my savings account?  Shouldn’t they be paying me to let them loan out my money to other people?  I won’t go on any further about banks, but I will say that it was my dislike for large financial institutions that led me to the local credit union.   I already had a very miniscule savings account there so I thought it would be most convenient for me to remain their customer.   I walked in the door and waited at the receptionist’s desk.  The receptionist was a young woman with big hair and long nails.  She was chewing gum v...

Research      Crazy Angie and I often found ourselves amused by visiting the unemployment office.  People there were so interesting.  I had thought that perhaps it could be a step in curing boredom, but decided against it when I realized that the people who were there without jobs weren’t nearly as amused as we were.  Aside from the amusing nature of the U.O., we had several friends there; one of whom we thought would be most helpful in our quest for the cure.        We needed to keep things confidential, though.  We couldn’t very well broadcast to the neighborhood that we were planning on starting up a bar.  That would likely lead to suspicion and consequently, investigation.  I could not be bothered with a strategy on how to defeat such an investigation, so I thought it best to conduct our research in such a manner as not to attract attention, thus, keeping things on...