Egads, forgot to mention this anywhere. Today and tomorrow, BOTH my novels, Arnesto Modesto and my 2018 short story collection, are free on Amazon!
Arnesto: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DM7SBPB
Short Stories: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07NDL478X
Minor update:
- Need to edit Time Travel Romance: As Written by a Twelve-Year-Old Boy Purely for the Money. Also, for the first time, didn’t really separate by chapters, so need to, well, separate into chapters.
- Working on new multi-part story, Single Elimination Earth
- Yesterday, wrote a 600+ word nonfiction short, A Quick Neighborly Problem
You know what, here, enjoy the world premiere of…
A Quick Neighborly Problem
This story happened a few nights ago and is as true as I can remember it (which is pretty well due to the circumstances about to be laid out before you).
While rounding the corner while walking my girlfriend’s half-Corgi, half-Pomeranian dog Fawkes, a car with three or more people cruised past. “That’s my dog,” said a young woman out the open window.
As I had the only dog in the vicinity, it was clear she was talking about Fawkes. However, I strongly believe she was not talking to me, but rather, to someone else in the vehicle. Also, I don’t believe she was claiming Fawkes was hers. I can think of two possibilities: either she was implying she had a dog just like Fawkes, or she wished to own a dog like Fawkes. This sets up the fact that the speaker may not have had the most complete grasp of the English language. Also, intra-car relations seemed friendly at this time.
Just then, Fawkes and I hit a stretch of pavement less than a block’s length. As there’s nowhere for her to comfortably void her bowels in this spot, we like to jog to the next intersection, and in doing so this night, caught up to the car which had stopped. Also, intra-car relations had incurred a most serious degradation.
One young, female occupant (I believe a different one from the one before) had decided she would no longer co-occupy aforementioned vehicle any longer.
“Get out of the car, whore!” she screamed. This was in the late evening in the parking area of an apartment complex. There was little other traffic aside from one other car that approached from the rear, changed his mind, then backed away from the scene. In other words, the scene was perfectly quiet except for this verbal battle surrounded on all sides by apartments mere feet away.
At this point, there was a prolonged and open exchange of increasingly lengthy barbs and slurs between the two young women which brings us to the problem at hand. A couple more examples:
“Fuck you, whore ass!”
“Get out of my car, bitch ass whore!”
Fawkes and I rounded the corner and observed from a safe distance up the next street. It was there that I wondered in my nerdy fashion how many combinations of these insults (only counting the single slurs) they made without repetition.
The stipulations:
- One cannot repeat the same word twice in a row.
- “Whore” was definitely preferred to “Ass,” however, for simplicity, equal weight is assigned to all three words.
- The words are Bitch, Ass, and Whore.
Due to no repetition, it’s easy to see that for length n, the number of possibilities is 3 (for the first word) * 2 (for every word thereafter).
Length 1: 3. Bitch, Ass, Whore.
Length 2: 3 * 2 = 6.
Each of the three can only be followed by one of the other two:
Bitch Ass, Bitch Whore, Ass Bitch, Ass Whore, Whore Bitch, Whore Ass.
Length 3: 3 * 2 * 2 = 12.
Length 4: 3 * 2 * 2 * 2 = 24.
Length 5: 3 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 = 48. And so on.
Ah, but what if we want to know the total number of possibilities up to and including length n? Forgive my lapsing math skills, but as this is a short story and not a formal mathematical proof, I’ll skip to the end: 3 * (2^n-1).
For length n:
- 3 * (2^1-1) = 3
- 3 * (2^2-1) = 9
- 3 * (2^3-1) = 21
- 3 * (2^4-1) = 45
- 3 * (2^5-1) = 93
We can verify by adding up the lengths from the first part of the problem above: 3, 3 + 6, 3 + 6 + 12, etc.
Conclusion: before the one woman pulled the other woman out of the car and departed, I heard up to and including 93 unique insults without immediately duplicating slurs in combinations from length one to five of Bitch, Ass, and Whore.
Life of an Author 