Al Sabo
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Posted:Mar 15, 2015 4:34 pm
Last Updated:Nov 8, 2015 8:34 pm
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Yesterday was another gorgeous March day. Anything above forty and sunny is heavenly around here after a cold spell of thirty days. we hiked in the preserve again and had sun in a deep blue sky dotted with clouds. It was windy so we stayed in the forest and avoided the meadows- weekends are crowded anyway in the biggest meadow. I like to let Gracie run there but if she gets distracted she won't hear my commands, and she's easily distracted by people and dogs. some of the girls out there distract hell out of me too...so I can sympathize with her. We hiked the Lookout trail by the marsh and circled east along the creek before following the ravine bank back south again. Lichen is reappearing from under the snow, and star moss. Ah, hell, just enjoy the photos. I don't have that much to say today.
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14 March
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Posted:Mar 15, 2015 4:19 pm
Last Updated:Nov 8, 2015 8:33 pm
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I see why there's a ten picture limit. It's hard to even get ONE photo to stay up. This is like "Naked Lunch"...things and people flit and flicker in and out of existence, sometimes reappearing as themselves and sometimes as unrecognizable entities. you can start at the beginning or the end or begin in the middle and read your way out on both sides- the message is the same. Did you read the piece about the guy who taught his asshole to talk?
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The Melt
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Posted:Mar 14, 2015 10:27 am
Last Updated:Nov 8, 2015 8:33 pm
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We've only been to Al Sabo Preserve a couple of times in the last month. We've been walking every day but we've been hiking along Portage Creek on the Bicentennial Trail. February and the first week of March were very cold here, with temperatures regularly below zero at night, but it wasn't the cold that kept us from the Preserve- it was the heavily traveled trails. They get packed and icy unless there's regular snowfall and they're hard to navigate. You can still ski those trails but you have to talk your wife into it first. I did get her to put on snowshoes this year so...one thing at a time.
The forest trail is narrow and when we're bundled up against the cold we can't hear, so we hike Al Sabo in winter quietly. We pretty much have to put our faces together to speak and be heard, but we can do that at home in the bedroom. The Portage Creek Trail is eight feet wide, paved and plowed, and it was a nice change to be able to walk side by side. We can hold hands now and then and we spent the month talking. As long as it stayed cold we had little company on that trail, and Gracie could roam around on her long lead. We occasionally met other hikers- more than in the Preserve, and it gave her good practice minding her manners.
The last week has warmed us up- high forties and low fifties- and the occasional walkers are out. Everyone's tired of being cooped up indoors and all of them are out and walking at the creek. We don't need complete solitude, and I LOVE watching women, but It's getting too crowded and I have to constantly keep Gracie on a short lead. She's behaving very well, and returns to me at the approach of other hikers and other dogs but it gets frustrating for us both.
This is the ragged end of winter- it's been a pretty good one. We had plenty of snow and cold, but now it's winding down and the snow is melting quickly. Most of the ice is gone from my skating rink driveway. This is also my least favorite part of winter. I don't really like to see it go. We've had the outdoors mostly to ourselves but now that it's warming up there are assholes appearing in OUR outdoors. We can't be alone. I like people but they should know their place and keep it- inside whining about the snow and cold, while we're outside enjoying it.
PD lost twenty five pounds this winter by sticking to a strict diet and hiking every day. She has already outlived her parents and her doctor was bugging her about her numbers: cholesterol and blood sugar. The hiking is fun, the diet is brutal. That food is so bad Gracie has given up begging from her and switched to begging from me- even though I rarely give her anything. Much of what PD is eating is not recognized as foodstuff by Gracie, who is relatively democratic in her eating habits. Lentil soup. Brussel sprouts. Arugula. No fat, no sugar, no starch. The diet and exercise worked. her last blood test was a smashing success and she looks fucking great...literally. I was quite pleased with my old wife, the one I had in November, but now I have a new one. And it's fun!
We hiked at Al Sabo yesterday and it was like greeting an old friend. Neither of us realized how much we had missed the place. The carpet of snow in the forest is getting thinner and is littered with debris from the trees. Moss is beginning to appear on the banks where the sun shines. The trails are soft and slushy and on some slopes are a sloppy little glacier flowing wetly downhill. The geese in the marsh are multiplying. There were dozens in the water and on the ice shelves and they kept up a honking racket. The muskrat who lives by the outlet was out and working- I caught him swimming back to his den.
we will still visit the Bicentennial trail now and then this spring and summer. It's good for Gracie to keep her skills sharp and be reminded of proper protocol. But it felt wonderful to get back to the Preserve. I'm getting excited about spring now.
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My First and Only Home
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Posted:Mar 6, 2015 5:45 pm
Last Updated:Mar 25, 2020 9:39 pm
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A blogger here who I like- sensualpassion72- posted a photo of an old Italianate farmhouse that reminded me of my first house. There was an old brass doorbell, operated by a handcrank, on the front door of that house, the door no one ever used. It was the house my parents took me to after I was born, my grandparents' farmhouse. The second story had five bedrooms and my father and grandfather had converted it to an apartment for my dad and his young family.
They built a balcony and stairway out back, leading from ground level to the old maid's room. That maid's room had had a separate staircase leading from the kitchen to a single room upstairs, and that was the only entry to or egress from that room- if the farmer wanted to sneak into the hired girl's quarters late at night he'd have had to creep quietly up that stairway. The room was opened up to the others upstairs in the renovation, and we used it as a kitchen.
A kerosene stove and a wringer washer with galvanized steel washtubs faced each other from opposite sides of the new door to the balcony and sat on a new red linoleum tile floor. That stove was the only source of heat in the four rooms we lived in. The stove had a reservoir for kerosene on the side of it and my older sister had dipped her tin cup in it and taken a healthy swig of kerosene one day. It didn't kill her so I suppose it must have made her stronger.
There was an old single door refrigerator in there too, the kind with a tiny breadbox sized freezer in the top center, and it had to be defrosted often. The old master bedroom was the largest and it became our living room, complete with a table top Philco TV that had a little twelve inch screen. We watched Gunsmoke, West Point, Topper and The Twentieth Century with Walter Cronkite. Robin Hood was one of my favorite shows, and Davy Crockett, with Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen.
My sister and I shared a room, sleeping on Army surplus bunk beds unstacked as singles. a chimney ran right through the center of that room, but my dad tore it down when we were still small, so the room was quite cold in winter, and we had a chamber pot. During the daytime there was an outhouse and you had to descend the outdoor staircase to use it. As we were not fond of that trek, especially when it was cold, and we often caught hell for soiling a freshly cleaned chamber pot in daylight hours.
There was a cabinet door on the exterior wall of that bedroom, next the window, and there was a honeybee hive inside it, in the wall of the house. When you wanted honey you opened the door and took your honey straight from the bees.
On the back of the farmhouse was a large gabled addition, that was original to the house. It had been the summer kitchen and still had a dry sink on one wall. Sometime after the first acquisition of an automobile it had been converted to a garage and had wide swinging doors added, and a concrete ramp to those doors. But by 1951 cars had got much heavier than a Model T or a Model A and couldn't be safely parked on the wood floor, so I never knew it as a garage. A pot bellied woodstove was installed and we had our family feasts there on holidays when all the aunts and uncles and cousins, and the grand aunts came to visit.
I had three favorite grand aunts, my grandmother's sisters- Opal, Alene and Leone. They were an endless source of colorful sayings, many of which I wasn't supposed to repeat. "If the hadn't stopped to shit he'd have shit a-runnin"…this was to dissuade you from saying, or wishing "If". "Battin' his eyes like a toad in a hailstorm" in case I blinked overmuch. "Your memory's so good you remember stuff that never even happened"- usually aimed at each other, or my dad. "Hellfire , wipe that cowshit off'n your shoes OUTside"…self explanatory. "Hornier than a two peckered billy goat"…I caught real hell for this one. I wasn't supposed to get it. "Shakin' like a shittin' a peach seed" if one tended to vibrate excessively. And my personal favorite "Shit fire and apple butter, but you're dirty!" It was well worth geting dirty to hear this one.
My Aunt Leone was quiet and diffident and didn't say a lot, and when she did she said it softly. She was the youngest by quite a few years, and the one who never married so that she could stay at home and care for their aging parents. She was considered the homeliest of a good looking group, but she was my favorite of favorites and I always thought she was the prettiest. She was quite dark, with olive skin and black, black shining hair and the darkest brown eyes I've ever seen. When I poked through the boxes of family photos I was able to see her as she was as a girl, and I yearned for those days. I was a bit sweet on my Grand Aunt Leone. She must have been in her late thirties and early forties at that time.
In the warmer months we all gathered on a windowed porch on the east side of the farmhouse, and listened to the old ladies argue about whose memory of an event was right, and who had been a 's ass and who hadn't. They humored me telling my 's tall tales about hunting buffalo and fighting Indians, and they called me Buffalo Bill.
Leaning onto the back of the old summer kitchen was a pumphouse, with an old brick well. It had been filled in til it was only twelve or fifteen feet deep and had an electric pump and storage tank installed, and the well was then a pipe driven into the floor of that old pit. The well was always needing work of some kind and all the men in the family got together to help. I was fascinated by the well pit and was constantly being cussed out of the way when they were working- I just couldn't stay away from that brick hole.
There had been a cupola on top of the old house but it was removed before I came along and you could still see, in the walkup attic, the newer boards and rafters that covered the opening where the cupola had been. I was irritated that they had removed the old cupola before I had a chance to see it- I wanted one. The attic was fun in its own right, but I wasn't allowed up there alone to rummage around through stuff, and I did get smacked for sneaking up there from time to time.
We had a swing in a pine tree in the front yard. And I had a barn with a sheepshed attached, and an enormous haymow to play in, except during haymaking when I was supposed to stay out of the way. The horses would pull a wagon under the mow door in the south gable end. They would then be unhitched and driven to the north end where they were hitched to a rope that pulled the hay fork. The rope ran to a trolley which traversed a track in the very peak of the roof. The fork was lowered to the haywagon and gripped a stack of hay, and the horses pulled it up to the mow door, where a was tripped and the hay travelled the length of the loft to the proper spot. It was then lowered by backing the team. When the tension was off the forks could be pulled out and it started all over until the wagon was unloaded. And the team- Frank and Daisy- then pulled the wagon back to the field where the men pitched it full of hay again.
We left the farm when I was about seven. My old man had a new job wearing a suit and a necktie, and I wasn't much impressed by it. Men drove teams of horses and sheared sheep and cut hogs. But we had to move to a new house in town. I was told it would be "our" own house…but where the hell had I been living? Wasn't that "our" house? I didn't want to leave my grandfather or my grandmother, and I was not consoled that it was only five miles and we still would visit.
We were deserting my father's family and moving to an old turn of the century foursquare in my mother's old neighborhood, known locally as Spaghetti Boulevard. The street was lined with homes full of Binandos, Granzottos, Simones amd Giacabones. There were Ferraottis, Barberis, Dalpontes and Bessones. They weren't alien to me, they were my mother's people. But they didn't feel like mine yet. They would come to be mine in time, but I was bereaved and heartbroken and I couldn't see it ever happening.
It was the first great loss of my life, estrangement. I spent weekends visiting the farm, until well into my teens. I hated to let it go. Even after the dream of making it mine had long been understood to be impractical, that farm still had a hold on me, and I on it. In my late teens my grandfather sold the farm and they moved to a ranch house in town. I didn't expect it to be so wrenching, but it was. Strangers would live there and I would not be welcome, even to visit. I had moved on to other things- drinking, reefer and women, and raising hell but I still had vague hopes of regaining my only real home, the only place I thought of as home. And now it was to be just a memory.
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When I was a boy...
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Posted:Mar 2, 2015 7:28 pm
Last Updated:Mar 25, 2020 9:34 pm
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When I was a , I spake as a , I understood as a , I thought as a : but when I became a man, I put away childish things.- 1 Corinthians 13:11
No, that last part didn't happen. I'm just a big with white hair. I still love dogs.
But, I was a reasonably cute , I think. And the thing about dogs started early. My mom sent me these on my last birthday. She's eighty six now. Other than staring at them myself, I don't know exactly what to do with them. I don't hide anything else, so here they are.
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Warning Signs
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Posted:Feb 22, 2015 7:53 am
Last Updated:May 10, 2018 12:34 pm
16372 Views
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Warning Signs Is The Topic For The Fifth Virtual Symposium
Warning Signs by P.D.
If you can't be an inspiration, be a warning.
I am not good at very many things, but I do have one true gift: I can sense any horrible situation coming a mile off and throw myself into the middle of it without thinking once, never mind twice.
If you want to know what not to do, ask me: I've not only done it the wrong way, I've done it in every wrong way it can be done and other wrong ways nobody has even imagined yet.
No point in being modest. I know my strengths.
I know you've heard this parable:
One day a man walks down a street, doesn't see that there's a hole in the pavement, and falls into the hole. The next day, the same man walks down the same street but sees the hole too late, and falls into the hole again, cursing himself as he falls. Finally, on the third day, the same man walks down the same street, sees the hole, but this time he sprints toward it singing show tunes at the top of his lungs, and throws himself into the hole face first.
That hole was a lethal sinkhole. It went all the way to the center of the earth and out the other end to a bok choi field somewhere in central China. Every so often some white person crawls out of that hole and starts asking the local peasants for directions to the nearest AA meeting.
So of course, when Bill told me I had a chance to share my accumulated warning wisdoms this week, I was more than happy to step up. It's the least I can do, and I mean that. The least.
Let's begin:
• Never go on a second date with a guy who pays for two 89 cent Cokes with a major credit card. If same guy pays with same credit card and it is declined, marry him.
• If you wake up on a strange front lawn with a bad hangover and no dentures, do not go door to door asking random people if they have found a set of teeth recently. Go home, throw up a few times and wait. If a woman knocks on your door, presents a pair of pearly whites and says, "I know this seems weird but did you lose these?" marry her that day. Fairy tales do come true. It could happen to you.
• Marry unwisely and often. This will insure you remain unencumbered by the crushing weight of wealth and money, which as we all know, is the root of all evil.
• If at some point you find yourself with , you must take care of them. This is not a joke. Every day ask yourself three questions: Is anyone bleeding? Is anyone naked? Is anyone on fire? If you can honestly answer no to two of these three, you are doing OK.
• Stay away from men who wear berets, English Leather cologne, or three piece suits because, dude, seriously?
• The man should never be prettier than the woman. The leads to trouble every time.
• If your grad school advisor tells you that you are the most brilliant student he has met in all his years of teaching, he wants to fuck you, stupid. All beautiful young grad students are brilliant. Your task is to find a way out of that rat hole with a credential in hand. Rots a ruck.
• I myself was way smarter when I was younger and prettier.
• The best way to meet the love of your life is give up on men entirely. Wear sweats to the grocery store. Eat cereal for dinner. Cuss in public. Drive a beater. Within a week guys will be all over you and one of them will actually be Mr. Right. Men can smell desperation at 100 yards or more, but consign yourself to a wonderful life without them and they will fight each other to beat a path to your door.
I could go on, but why give this stuff away for free with there are people making gobs money in California as pet psychics and feng shui consultants? If you have any specific concerns that require the application of my gift of innate batshit self-fuckery, shoot us an email along with a $500 retainer in my Pay Pal account and we'll talk.
You too could have all this---whatever this is.
All you have to do is ask.
Midland China is beautiful this time of year.
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Linda
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Posted:Feb 21, 2015 4:13 pm
Last Updated:Aug 7, 2019 9:57 pm
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Warning Signs Is The Topic For The Fifth Virtual Symposium
Linda, a short story.
Also a cautionary and not particularly edifying tale.
When I was in my early thirties I had a quiet contemplative time of sober reflection, re-assessment and re-education. It was miserable. I was not yet thirty five and had two failed marriages behind me. As radical as my thinking might be the radical part didn't extend to marriage. Marriage was supposed to be forever and you were supposed to like each other. Mine didn't pan out that way. I did place the blame squarely on my spouses, but I was the one who chose them and I was feeling pretty uncomfortable with what that said about my intelligence.
I was alone in a big two story house with my two dogs and in a poor economy I was chronically short of money. That first winter I closed off all but three rooms to save heating that barn- the kitchen, bedroom and a big formal dining room were where I hunkered down to hibernate through the dark months of winter. I burned candles a lot, but not for lighting and not for brooding while listening to the somber music of the acoustically lovelorn. I had begun meditating again, and practicing yoga. A dimly lit room helped to clear my mind and suppress distractions- I wasn't doing transcendental or candle meditation, I was just trying to turn down the volume on the harsh light of that somewhat incandescent room.
I lived in a small midwestern town and I worked by day in a brickyard so clearly these were activities I kept to myself. I had enough fucking problems without alerting people to the idea that I might have an intellectual or an emotional life. Some things just aren't done in certain locales, and I was in one of those locales.
I started re-reading the beats…Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg- and I studied the writers they referenced too, like Spengler, Spinoza and Kant. I read Baudelaire and Verlaine and Rimbaud and I felt better educated…but not exactly better. There's a reason beatnik women dressed in drab black and brown and grey and ironed their long black hair- they're fucking depressed from reading the stuff written by the men they're fucking. There's light that shines through Kerouac, especially in little books like "Tristessa" and "Visions of Gerard". Those two are his best books but not his most acclaimed. What makes them stand out is the love he keeps in himself for those two characters, and that he was so eloquent in sharing it with the reader. But Kerouac is also morose and there is a grieving that runs as a constant theme through all his writing. Ginsberg too is giving voice to a lament, and Burroughs of course is one sardonically blunt -of-a-bitch.
So these were the perfect literary companions for me at that time, bound to help me wallow in my isolation and alienation. I had enough sense of self not to style myself as a brooding poet or writer though. Low as I might feel, I couldn't indulge my self-absorption that much.
Even though I was habitually broke and spiritually bereaved I allowed myself one more indulgence, one luxury. I ate all my meals out. There were two spheres in my world, work and that dark and empty old house, and I needed to at least be in the same building with other people daily, so I frequented the only restaurant in town, a national chain that served breakfast around the clock and had pretty much run all the little greasy spoons out of town, except for a couple of hangers on down by the river and near the factories.
It was an unlikely and an incongruous place to carry a copy of "Une Saison en Enfer". Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud would not have cared for the place and probably would have broken the dinnerware, shit on the floor and masturbated into the bleu cheese dressing. But it was brightly lit and had a crew of pretty waitresses and while I wasn't actively shopping for one I did like to look at the shiny menu. Anyone who noticed my reading material might be either intrigued or confused…I'm not sure exactly what I hoped for. Mostly I just got indifference.
A woman in her late forties also dined there often, with her on-again off-again companion. The bright lights of the place didn't flatter her- she was pale and cynical, with a brown page boy and she looked oddly French- she chain smoked Camels and exhaled smoky, sour and disinterested responses to anything said to her. She was Linda.
Linda had been beautiful and she was broken. She was still beautiful, in a seedy and jaded way. The friend she showed up with was getting a bit longer in the tooth than she- a bit shabby and disheveled, grizzled and ill tempered- probably a lot like I look today, and they bickered back and forth just audibly enough that everyone could overhear. It was embarrassing- whenever I saw her there her face lit up and she spoke to me in a soft and sultry contralto. That barely husky voice was all kinds of sexy, and Linda was sexy- but she looked and sounded like trouble, and a pain in the ass. She emanated a warning sign- she might have been wearing a sandwich board blasting "Danger, Will Robinson!" She gave me the feeling that she might go off at any time for no discernable reason. I didn't overtly encourage her, but I didn't exactly discourage her either. I am not an atypical male, I don't care how this story makes me sound. I was just going through a rough spot. So, like most typical males, I'd have done Linda, if I thought I could get away undamaged and unattached. But she WAS scary.
There was an exquisite young Latina girl waiting tables in that place. I thought she was the most beautiful human creature I had ever seen, and I was terrified of her. Even in my current melancholy I was still able to talk to other folks, and to women, but I couldn't talk to her. She would speak to me and flash that glittering smile, having said something clever, or mysterious, or simply incomprehensible- we all know how young women are- and she walked away leaving me wondering what she had just said. I was barely able to coax a word out of my own mouth. My brain and all its speech centers locked up when she looked at me and I was paralyzed under her gaze. I had sworn off beautiful young women, and she was much younger than me, and exhilaratingly pretty. If you need a firmer diagnosis of my unhealthy condition, I don't know what that might be. But I knew if I could get it together to even speak coherently to this diosa I was a goner.
Petra warned me about Linda one day, in a conspiratorial, joking manner. She told me Linda was sweet on me, but she was fucking nuts. I managed to laugh with her and I said I knew that. Do I need to say how wonderful and exotic it is to be forewarned of danger by an excruciatingly lovely young woman who is also somewhat cryptic and mysterious?
One Saturday morning I tromped in with a "Season in Hell" in my hand and settled into a booth, and within five minutes Linda entered, alone, and plunked herself down at the table facing me. I thought, "Fuck." She started talking to me right away. I tried to be polite, and not too cool. But I wasn't going to let her hit on me with the diosa on duty and watching…and she was bugging me that morning anyway. So I kept my responses short and non-committal and kept burying my nose in Rimbaud. If you're familiar with Rimbaud you'll get why that isn't an entirely pleasant thing to ruminate on.
All of a sudden Linda got the picture. In one ferociously lucid moment (It should have been obvious from the start) it dawned on her that I was blowing her off, and she got pissed. She exploded. We weren't even more than casual acquaintances and she went off like I had left her pregnant at the altar. She slammed dishes and threw tableware, all the while cussing me for an insensitive prick. "I'm sorry I bothered you, you bastard! Just stick your face back in your goddam precious book, and fuck you! I won't ever annoy you again!" I can't remember all the things she hollered at me…but I'm pretty sure everyone else in the place could. If it hadn't been me I'd have been laughing my ass off. Everybody enjoys a good scene.
She stormed out of the restaurant and I suddenly felt like I was alone on stage…and I had stage fright. I felt like I had been fucking Linda in the darkened high school gymnasium and suddenly all the lights went up and the house was packed and Linda had stalked off mad leaving me with my pants around my ankles and my slick and shiny dick bobbing up and down. And as she ran away she was shrieking "I told you not in my ass, you -of-a-bitch!" Seconds later Linda stomped back in and paid her check. She might be down on her luck and mad as a hatter but she wasn't any piker. Besides, it gave her a second chance to slam the door and make another grand and dramatic exit. As soon as I figured the coast was clear I left my breakfast unfinished and I left too, somewhat more inconspicuously.
Sunday morning I grabbed a copy of the Chicago Sun-Times (They had Mike Royko, and I went where Mike went) and marched right back to the scene of the crime for breakfast. I sat down at a table and Petra came over and talked to me. She was smiling ever so slightly. She wasn't sure how mad or embarrassed I was going to be about Linda. "I watched your Linda Incident. I saw it." she said. And I started laughing, and that broke the ice for me. We talked for about ten minutes. It turned out she had asked if she could take her break and sit with me when I came in and they said sure.
The best possible ending is that we saw more of each other and fell in love…at least briefly. But that isn't what happened. She married some shallow clown who used her badly and the last I heard of her she was married to a much older man with a lot of money. I hope she's having fun, and I hope she's spending all his money- I spent a lot of sleepless hours dreaming about her. To this day, whenever I think 'stunningly beautiful' I see the face of Petra……. and that was thirty years ago.
There are warning signs all over this thing and you can pick them out for yourselves. But lately, I've been having a feeling of deja vu.
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A postcard for intendadiversion..
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Posted:Feb 19, 2015 4:24 pm
Last Updated:Feb 21, 2015 3:17 pm
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I received this today from Boston and thought I should pass it on to my good friend [blog intendadiversion]. I reckon it also applies to all my other wonderful Canadian friends.
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Mail
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Posted:Feb 17, 2015 9:41 am
Last Updated:Feb 19, 2015 4:39 pm
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The site is not delivering my mail. Messages will have to be posted here in the private message post, above this one.
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The Unadulterated Truth
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Posted:Feb 12, 2015 5:56 pm
Last Updated:Jul 31, 2015 2:06 pm
16302 Views
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There are times, when we relate stories about our selves and our lives, that we edit. We all do it, even when we think we aren't doing it. We aren't even aware of it most of the time. You go to a party and you slam back a couple of drinks, and you hit it off with somebody- I don't mean that you necessarily want to hop in the sack with this particular person, unless you're male and she's female and then, yeah, you'd probably hop in the sack with her. How late is it getting to be, anyway? (You glance at your watch and swing your gaze around at the other prospects.) But you're getting along, socially. You're trading horror stories about the fucked up silly corporate bullshit that you put up with in order to pay the bills, and you do it every day, and so does she. So you have an instant rapport. She tells a story, you tell a story.
And we edit those stories. We can cast ourselves in any role in our stories- they're our goddamn stories, right? And we'll tell 'em any fucking way we want to. We can be the hero, we can be the victim, we can be the innocent bystander. We might even decide we want to be the prick. I'm creative- in many of my own stories, I'm all four. When we edit our stories for public consumption, we aren't lying. The facts are straight. But we do leave shit out. You don't have time- you might not have the floor all that long, so you have to make it quick, and you do want to make an impact. You are trying to make a point after all, or at least reach the punchline, and you don't want anyone's attention to wander. They might move on to another group and a less entertaining and a less poignant story than your own. It's part of being a good conversationalist and also part of getting invited to more parties. "Have you listened to that bitch? She's fucking crazy!" or, "That motherfucker don't care! He's nuts!" So you try to tell your story in a compelling manner, so as to rivet the attention of your audience.
And every story with a moral needs a bad guy. We all want to hear about the villain. Hell, there are villains and enemies galore in all our own lives and it feels good to hear that everybody else is fending then off with flaming brands snatched from the fire themselves. We're surrounded by man eating werewolves if not zombies and we want to know we aren't alone in the struggle. The werewolves and zombies and vampires are a metaphor for something else that's going on. But that's deep. And you don't want to get too deep, or these drunks will stop laughing. And the only thing as bad as a mean drunk is a somber drunk. He's scarier than the fucking zombies. And a lot more boring.
So you tell the story about the time you dropped your pants and mooned your boss. Most of the people listening aren't going to believe you, even if they want to. It's a true story- my boss was being an asshole and I mooned the dumb -of-a-bitch. Some of the audience is thinking "This fucker is so full of shit!" and others are just gobsmacked that you'd advertise that kind of depraved and demented behavior and then there are the ones who don't give a shit one way or the other, they just appreciate a good liar. But, my boss was ranting and raving and carrying on about some silly non-sensical horseshit and he kept saying, over and over again "Let me ask you….." It didn't make any difference what he was asking. It was rhetorical. He didn't expect an answer, he was just being pompous. And NO ONE was taking him seriously because we all suspected that what was really going on was that his wife wasn't blowing him and his were flunking school and he was gonna take it out on us. So I dropped trou and grabbed an ass cheek in each hand and, ventriloquist like, said "Lemme ass you a question…" while moving my ass cheeks back and forth like big fat lips. Not adult behavior I'll allow, but we were not adults. We were blue collar workers with a screaming chair throwing dick for a boss.
He was a frustrated basketball player and coach with a Bobby Knight fixation. Treat me like an adult and I'll act like one. Treat me like a six year old…well, in that case you've picked the right guy because I can act like one. This guy used to call a meeting in the morning and we'd all file slowly, reluctantly, into the drivers' room to listen to the lastest canned bullshit from the corporate headquarters and hear about what a money wasting pack of losers we were, and how the gate was right over there in the southwest corner if any of us pussies didn't like the new program. Our boss was six foot five with red hair and a face that went beet red when he got worked up…so it was beet red a lot of the time. Most of the time that he was speaking to me it was beet red, then, because I knew where all his buttons were and which ones to push if the room was feeling a bit chilly. I knew just how far I could go, and that was pretty far- a lot farther than most of the other drivers.
We had established a relationship. We were both assholes and we didn't give a shit. I discovered this one day when he was harrassing me and I grabbed a wooden box and got up on that box and screamed right back in his face. I'd had enough and I didn't care if he fired me, I was going out swinging. We looked like two drill instuctors trading different perspectives on proper etiquette and flower arrangement. I found out that day that he enjoyed it, because he told me so. Sort of a professional respect of one foulmouthed prick for another.
Back to the meeting. So, we'd glumly trudge into that drivers' room and wait for the show to begin. If it was going to be a good one, an entertaining meeting, he'd start out by slamming a folder full of statistics and random numbers on the table, and for added affect he'd grab a molded plastic chair and pitch it across the room. The folder was full of data purporting to reveal just how goddam much money we were costing the stockholders of the corporation, and were a prelude to instructing us, as the boss so eloquently put it, that the fucking party was over. Meaning put your sorry fucking noses to the grindstone you lazy misbegotten gold-bricking teamster shitheads. We are here to make a profit, and it had better be a big one. Most of the drivers sat in bored silence. Some of us would laugh. Every now and then a driver or two would get up and walk out, affronted by such uncouth behavior. I usually stuck around for the finale. If you could touch just the right nerve arguing with him there were bound to be fireworks, and his exit would be just as explosive as his entry.
He was a hard -of-a-bich to like. The only way to get along with him was to call him out on his bullying, and to fuck with him on a regular basis…but randomly, so he'd be a bit off balance. He respected that kind of underhanded shit. Even on this site I don't feel exactly comfortable about revealing all the things a couple of us said to him, and called him. It was Glengarry Glen Ross, blue-collar version, with the gloves off.
Eventually the corporation got weary of that management approach, and decided to project a kinder, gentler image…fatherly. They wanted a "Family Oriented Business". So he saw the handwriting on the wall and got out before they fired him. Almost everyone was glad to see him go, and I won't deny that he had made his own bed, and behaved abominably. But I felt a bit sorry for him. Even in this essay I have cast him as the unadulterated villain of the piece, and in so many ways he was. But because I had stood up to him, he cut me some slack at times when my job might have been on the line. He stood up for me at least once when another boss wanted my head on a platter with an apple in my mouth. He knew he was acting like a dick- he had a hard time stopping himself. He didn't know how else to behave- he had learned it at home.
He rode with me one day on my route- it was at that time part of a manager's duties to do that periodically. We stopped at a favorite customer of mine to pick up a shipment, and I introduced him to the shipping clerk. The clerk said "Oh yeah. I've heard Bill talk about you a lot." And my boss said "Damn! I bet I was a prince of a guy in those stories!" So he knew.
Sometimes even the guy we all perceive to be the villain is just some poor schmuck who's in over his head and doesn't know what to do. He doesn't want to get his hands dirty or ruin his back so he angles for promotion and finds out he really hasn't enhanced his prospects at all. Instead he's just made himself more visible to the headhunters from headquarters and now he's just trying to eke out the days to retirement without getting caught masturbating in his office, or busted for playing golf on corporate time.
I worked with guys who were a lot more pleasant. I had bosses who behaved immeasurably better. But strange as it sounds, I miss the -of-a-bitch. I haven't talked to him for fifteen years, but I just might look him up and cuss him for old times' sake. He wasn't all bad.
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Muskrat Love
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Posted:Feb 5, 2015 8:15 pm
Last Updated:Nov 8, 2015 8:31 pm
17633 Views
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PD put her foot down today, and it didn't have a snowshoe lashed to it. She wanted a break. Maybe Gracie and I have been pushing her too hard. It might be time for dinner and a movie. Or, we could get Chinese takeout and watch "Jeremiah Johnson" on DVD. Anyway, we walked at the Portage Creek Bicentennial Trail today. It was seventeen degrees but it felt cold with a breeze out of the south- we were walking right into that wind.
We saw a lot of deer and geese and I tried hard to get a shot of a female cardinal who kind of tailed us, but no luck. There were patches of blue sky with clouds scudding overhead and we walked in brilliant sunshine at least part of the time. And I spotted a muskrat munching on bark in the creek.
They do a lot of their foraging at night, or at sunrise and sunset, but it isn't that unusual to see them during the day. Muskrats aren't really all that closely related to common rats. They're rodents, in the same family as lemmings and voles and mice, and they're native to North America. Ojibwa lore says that the muskrat was the animal that helped create the world.
Nanabooshoo was the only man to survive the Great Flood, and he decided to fix the earth, and rebuild it, so he dove under the water looking for earth, but the water was too deep. Next the Loon, who was a good diver, tried but he failed too. He never found bottom, and nearly drowned. The Mink and the Turtle tried next, and they failed too. The little Muskrat spoke up, and said "I can do it" and all the bigger animals laughed. But Nanabooshoo told him to try, if he wanted to. And the Muskrat reached the bottom, weak from lack of air, and grabbed earth in his paw and swam for the surface. He was gone so long they all thought he had died, when the animals saw Muskrat float to the surface. Nanabooshoo pulled the Muskrat from the water, and saw that he had died, but he had a ball of mud clutched in his paw. Nanabooshoo called on the winds to blow on the ball of mud and the earth was made from it. Muskrat had sacrificed his life to re-create the world.
Muskrats fight in spring for females and for territory, and sometimes die. They raise litters of six or eight kits, three or four times a year. The adults grow to a pound and a half to four pounds or so, and reach fifteen to thirty inches long. I've never seen a muskrat thirty inches long. Half of that length is tail of course, which is kind of flat and scaly. The tail is their primary motor source in the water, although they do have webbed feet, like a Labrador retriever. They can dive for as long as fifteen or eighteen minutes. Fifteen minutes without air! They commonly dig burrows in creek and river banks, or build huts of mud and twigs in marshes. They aren't thought much of in our modern world, but the Ojibwa knew that they were one stout little animal.
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