Parties at druid labs feature a lounge on the deck for smoking guests (Spontaneous Human Combustion! Oops, there goes another one...). To make it easier for folks to find the lounge, especially after one or twelve Magic Margaritas™, we've labeled the patio door with these signs.
Alfonso Georgino Rafael Pintscrew Fresco IV - "Al" to his friends - spent most of his life, and all of his inherited millions in Fresco Snake Oils and Noxious Nostrums, Limited, in a search for a woman who could share his special view of the world. Sadly for the world, he was unsuccessful, and spent the declining years of his life roaming the backyards of suburban families looking for love in all the wrong places. All he found were some skunks and raccoons, none of whom found pink hair attractive. Al eventually moved to Seattle and joined the underground music scene as a post-industrial, neo-punk, proto-Brooklyn cookie specialist, and finished his career as a Holiday Design Specialist, Third Class, for the Archway Cookie Company. He was well ignored by his peers throughout his life and died in a snowstorm in the Himalayas while researching All Souls' Day wafer preferences among the Buddhists. He isn't missed, except by one skunk currently under heavy medication, and people who wander too far into the dark back yards of their lives.
Alicia Fresca, wife of the Torquemada Loan Company tycoon, Al "Chubby" Fresco, was a rail-thin woman, often found hiding behind lamp posts and deck supports, especially after drinking Magic Margaritas. Her angular exterior hid a woman screaming to get out of the broken glass that was her psyche, and she married Chubby to be the chauffeur of her escape. Which is the problem, you see, as no one knows where she's gone. In the time-honored tradition of naming public spaces after people that compare unfavorably with your ex-spouse's yapping lap dog, we dedicate the druid labs' smoking area to her. Don't go too near the posts, OK?
Al was a great man, a guy's guy, dedicated to the outdoors in ways not readily apparent to the more mundane among us (including more than a few therapists), a man, who, if he wasn't in the fresh air, found himself amidst the noxious odors of his own emissions. But we digress. Al, for all his apparent (and actual, come to think of it) failings, was beloved by at least one person, or was at least tolerated by that person (well, OK, that person refrained from throwing the bricks and rotten cabbages that the rest of the human race would toss if they could find anything similar within easy reach). Anyway. As you pass through these portals, we ask you to remember Al, the person you would cross the street to avoid, especially as you breath the still, night air, or wet, musty basement mists, or even the yellow driftings from that paper mill just up the road. Remember, and weep, that Al is still alive and lurking in the bushes.
Don't go too far away from the light.
Copyright © 2000-2002, cathy & mike carroll