Suit jackets and funny shorts

From time to time, when you see bad writing, a person will equate it to a monkey pounding away at a typewriter. When I was trying to come up with an analogy for my writing style, this was what I came up with.

It's like putting a keyboard at the bottom of a hamster cage and seeing what happens when they scurry across it while trying to get to their water bottle.

For the most part, none of it will make any sense, but one day, after a vigorous turn on the exercise wheel some hamster will stagger towards their food and by complete blind luck, you might actually see something that makes sense and speaks to you. Either that or you might find hamster crap.

Today is one of the latter.

I'm not what people would call a world traveler. My typical idea of an exotic weekend is choosing Olive Garden instead of TGI Friday's. I've only left the country once and it was to go on a week long vacation in Bermuda.

My sister was lucky enough to get a deal on a timeshare, that her boss owned, in Bermuda. So Sarah and I, along with my sister and her brother-in-law, all decided to go down there for a week in April of 2000.

Sarah and I did a lot of fun things during that week. We went on our first SCUBA excursion. We got a chance to spend some time up close with dolphins and I got to play golf on a course that overlooked the ocean. It was a wonderful week and I really don't think that Sarah and I have ever felt more at home, then we did during that week in Bermuda.

The one thing that really sticks out to me about that trip is one particular person that we met there.

Part of the deal with the timeshare that we were using was the fact that we had to spend a certain amount of money at either the country club restaurant or at the bar. I'll give you one guess as to where the two current and one former Wisconsinites chose.

When some people travel they have the tendency to treat every person from that place like they are some sort of servant that is there to service or help them whenever they need assistance. For Sarah and myself though, we actually like to sit and talk to residents when we travel so that we can get to know the people and the place where we're staying a little better. That's not to say that we walk up to any person that we see and start grilling them, but if we're out having dinner, or out shopping, we like to actually talk to the people. It's just something that we like to do.

One of the bartenders that we met while there was named Madison. It's pretty easy to remember the name of a person when he shares the name of the place where you live.

There aren't a great many people that I've met throughout my life where I can remember entire segments of our conversations verbatim, but for some reason Madison really spoke in a way that made you remember what he had to say.

One of the things that he said was just so entertaining that it's burned into my brain. It's one of those things that you could easily see someone saying to a tourist just to get a laugh, but you could also see it as something that they actually meant.

On our last night at the resort, we told Madison that we'd be leaving the next day, but planned on coming back in the future.

"Well, if you come back and I'm dead, don't bring flowers to my grave. You didn't bring them to me when I was alive, don't bring 'em to me when I'm dead."

The way my mind works, one minute I'm laughing at a fart joke on Family Guy and the next I'm trying to plan out how my funeral should be taken care of.

So, if you're around when I go and wonder why my will states that there will not be any flowers, now you'll understand.