An easy day
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Posted:Dec 23, 2014 4:45 pm
Last Updated:Mar 7, 2016 6:15 pm
10124 Views
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Yesterday we hiked further than usual, at Al Sabo. it's hard to tell, on the meandering paths. As the crow files it was only a couple of miles out and a couple back, but the path wanders around a lot, so who knows? Four or five miles, maybe. Maybe less. Anyway, it wore us out, and even Gracie was tired. It was a gloomy drizzly day. So we took it easy today and did a circuit around the prairie at Asylum Lake. It was sunny and warm- fifty degrees. We met a buddy of Gracie's, Jaeger, a yellow Lab. They were very happy to see each other. It only takes forty minutes to do the loop, and we took nearly an hour. I like screwing around and taking time to look at stuff, and take pictures.
And one picture of the South Haven Light, just because I love the photo. I didn't take it, but I wanted to share it.
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Woodpecker
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Posted:Dec 22, 2014 7:48 pm
Last Updated:Mar 7, 2016 6:13 pm
10369 Views
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We saw a pileated woodpecker yesterday! They are native to this area but I haven't seen a lot of them just the same. They grow up to nineteen inches with a thirty inch wingspan, about as big as a good sized crow. The one we saw was maybe twelve or fifteen inches, and he didn't want his picture taken. He kept circling around the tree trunk and I had to do laps in the undergrowth trying to get him. I never did get a good shot of him but I got enough to prove I saw him! There were Elvis sightings around here back in the nineties, and rumors that he was holing up in the tower at the Kalamazoo Regional Psychiatric Hospital but they didn't get pictures. I did.
There's a new weather girl, Ellen Bacca. She says we might get snow for Christmas. I think I'm developing a serious infatuation for her. She's definitely got an Ellen Barkin thing going on. She was raised around here and went to school just up the road from our place. Yummy.
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Progress
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Posted:Dec 20, 2014 4:53 pm
Last Updated:Mar 7, 2016 6:11 pm
10218 Views
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We continue hiking every day. We mix up the trails we take a little bit. We started doing thirty to thirty five minutes a day- Gracie was so obstreperous neither of us had the energy to wrestle with her for longer. We've worked up to an hour or an hour and a half, sometimes more, sometimes less. Gracie would like to set a fast pace. She'd gallop through the woods if I let her. Now and then I let her speed things up a bit, but I'm not a runner and I don't intend to become one. I like to dawdle through the woods, taking my time and taking it all in. When she is trustworthy we'll both get to do what we want- she can sprint...and I can watch her do it. I'm in no hurry to get where I'm going.
Every day she gets a bit better, more obedient and more attentive. And she will do very well for a half hour and then come all unglued when she sees another dog. It was bound to happen some day, and today was the day. She performed flawlessly. The Preserve was kind of busy. I don't mean crowded like a county fair- this place is big- but we passed a fair number of hikers, single, in pairs and in small groups. And we encountered a number of other dogs. Gracie came to heel and stayed there at every meeting with hikers. She sat or lay down at the approach of every dog, and did not jump to say hello until given the OK. She came when called (all while on her long lead) and she took the trail when ordered. She took the trail to the right at "Gee!" and she went left at "Haw!" When it was time to head back I told her we were going home and she followed the path home. She can pick out a little used trail where I have trouble following it in places. We are very nearly at the point where I can trust her instinct and her nose when the path isn't clear to me.
I'm so proud of her I could bust. She will undoubtedly backslide, and misbehave now and then, but every has her day and this was Gracie's first perfect score. She is one fine and she's going to get even better.
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USA recognizes Cuba!
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Posted:Dec 17, 2014 9:17 am
Last Updated:Jan 28, 2015 5:44 am
10515 Views
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I'm watching the news right now. President Obama is speaking about normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba, and establishing an embassy in Havana. Since the revolution in 1959, when I was eight years old, we have been mortal enemies. It hasn't helped either nation- on the contrary it has set us both back. I'm glad I got to see this finally happen!
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Counting down......
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Posted:Dec 15, 2014 6:23 pm
Last Updated:Mar 7, 2016 6:09 pm
10568 Views
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Our Christmas shopping is done. We usually don't buy much except for the grandkids, but this year we spent a little extra on each other. Some of the gifts I bought for PD are sort of for me too, but if she plays her cards right there's something in it for her too.
We hike every day rain or shine- and we've been getting sunshine! I can't repeat enough- this is ordinarily a very gloomy month in southwest Michigan, and usually much colder. So the sun is a welcome change, and I'm sure we'll pay for it later.
Gracie has been a handful to walk on a leash. She's very smart and also very easily distracted. For her first year PD walked her while I worked, and PD complained about how uncontrollable she was. So, when I started working with her she was a hardened criminal and a confirmed scofflaw. I reached deep inside myself and brought out my inner prick. It seems she wanted to behave in a willful and infantile manner....and I can do that like you wouldn't believe. She's gotten a lot better, and I had to be an asshole to get her there.
She disconnects from everything but the chase in the woods, so she wasn't even aware that we were there and giving her commands. It was harder than I thought it would be to get her to pay attention. Now she looks back for approval and direction....now and then. But it's a huge change. As late as September she was pulling on the lead and choking hell out of herself, and still throwing tantrums when thwarted. Now, she will actually heel and keep pace, if I demand it. Mostly I let her wander a bit on the lead as long as she doesn't charge ahead, and I bought a twenty five foot lead so she can range about a bit. I want to get her to the point where she's obedient enough to run free- it'll be more fun for both of us.
I tried positive reinforcement- treats when she was good, and when she wasn't we would just stop- no walking till she came around. It had no effect. As soon as we took off again she was right back at it, trying to charge ahead. I've never had a that hard headed- or smarter. I finally went back to the old school. I didn't want to, but she wouldn't respond to kindness. When she pulled ahead with all her might, I hung her up by the collar and MADE her heel. She wouldn't sit patiently and wait for other hikers or dogs to pass by- she had to run at them, uninvited. I hung her up some more. Now, she's catching on. She isn't ready for obedience trials. I don't think that's going to be her forte. But, most of the time, she will sit or lie down and wait as commanded.
We're also working on "gee" and "haw" as commands for right and left, and on learning to "whoa". She has had some issues with "come" as well. It has to be instant obedience to satisfy me or she won't be able to pull me on skis. She has learned "trail", which means "get your sorry Lab ass out of the brush and stick to the path". The biggest improvement is because she's finally maturing. She was allowed to run amok and go berserk and she didn't want to give that up.
We went through some rough days getting here. She did some sulking and I threw a few hats. But now that she's finally starting to get it, we're even closer than before. We walk together in the woods- no free lancing. She still tries now and then to get willful and take control, and I'm still, on occasion, a mean tempered prick. Apparently we were made for each other. It's sort of a love story.....right?
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Sunshine!
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Posted:Dec 10, 2014 3:18 pm
Last Updated:Mar 7, 2016 6:08 pm
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The sun is fairly shy in this part of the country, at this time of year. We haven't been getting snow but it's still been gloomy. Today we had sun and about thirty degrees. We hike in the late afternoon when the shadows are getting long. It's hard to explain how good that sun feels after it's been gone a while. The textures in the woods are different too, especially in the long pale daylight before sundown.
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About The How We Met posts
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Posted:Dec 3, 2014 8:41 am
Last Updated:Oct 31, 2016 6:16 pm
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mcmaniac asked about a week ago if I'd be interested in posting about how my wife PD and I met. I have commented about it in other folks' blogs, and I've alluded to it in posts here in my own blog, but I never really told the story. How we recall events can be really interesting- look at the different perspectives on what happened in Ferguson, Missouri. People witness an event and recall what they saw, but often when a video recording is played that doesn't appear to be what happened. Or they witness an event and they remember the version stored in their brain but they get to hanging around with someone who interprets that same event differently, maybe with a certain slant, and a new version supplants the one stored up in the mind and takes over- and the old version is gone. This isn't about attempting to deceive. It's about how our brains and our memories work. People who record testimony know this already. Cops, insurance agents, court recorders- all kinds of people do this for a living and they have to get kind of skeptical of people's memories, and their ability to accurately recall what actually happened. You can ask six witnesses and get six different answers.
This is not a serious issue in a "how we met" story. This ain't Ferguson, Missouri or The War Between the States. I don't think there'll be any protests, or any grand juries. Unless my ex-wife gets wind of it. But I got to thinking that it might be fun to do a "he said, she said' pair of posts, and see what happened. So we did. They follow- the next post is hers and mine finishes up below that.
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Posted:Dec 3, 2014 8:40 am
Last Updated:Aug 7, 2019 11:56 pm
16580 Views
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In 2001 after my third marriage ended it occurred to me that I couldn't possibly be any worse at picking men if I'd gotten a degree in failure.
OK, that's a bit heavy.
Let me put it this way:
If I were to accidentally walk into the International Prince Charming Convention, a room filled with all the nicest, kindest, handsomest most eligible men in the world, I'd walk right up to a pickpocket working the room and say in my chirpiest girl voice, "Hi, my name's PD! What's yours?"
First I cried a lot. Then I did lots of things people do in this situation.
I quit drinking. I saw a therapist. I got on some decent antidepressant medication. I got a real job and bought a car and bought a house and bought an oriental rug (is it PC to call it that?) and finally, one day, when I'd almost quit thinking about myself I realized I felt pretty good.
Maybe I wasn't so good at finding Prince Charming, but at least I was totally over Prince Alarming. That guy was no longer welcome. I knew what he looked like. I had his number. And he was going to have to torment some other dim chick next time.
I was as happy as I'd ever been.
I did not need another loser to make my life interesting.
I had hired a psychotherapist with the mutually agreed upon goal of never doing this expensive miserable thing again. No more loser marriages. My third husband had completely cleaned me out both financially and in terms of my stuff.
I had no stuff. I had to get all new stuff.
This happened not because he had such a good case to steal every damned thing I owned, but because he was crazy and dishonest and I didn't feel like arguing with him over toasters and Christmas ornaments. I just wanted out. I left with my clothes, my car, and an Apple computer.
I figured, since I was starting over in every other way, I might as well start over with men too. But I knew I needed help.
My therapist said that finding the right man was as simple as learning to say no to the wrong man.
What a revelation! Like many women of my generation and from my neck of the woods, the right man was any man who liked you who wasn't a drunk or a convicted felon. And actually, those things were negotiable if the guy has money. One of my sisters met her husband when she was 14 and he was 24, and my parents were thrilled.
Today, that guy might be arrested. But I guess it's good he wasn't, because they are still together.
The point is, I had zero practice saying no. The very concept was alien.
So, by way of practice, my therapist got behind the idea of me trying online dating. If done safely, this would afford me lots of opportunities to meet guys, size them up, maybe go out if they passed the first meeting, and then say no to the ones who didn't measure up.
I'd never done this. I Basically marry every guy who approaches me. So me sizing THEM up, that was different.
People like to talk about how dangerous online dating is.
Hey, dating MEN is dangerous no matter where you attempt it--online, offline, at church, anywhere, any way.
With this in mind, I set some basic ground rules:
I always set up the first meeting at the mall food court. Plenty of people. Security guards. Etc.
I did not give my last name or address or phone number until I felt fairly sure it was safe to do so and often, never.
If the meeting progressed to a date, I met the guy in my own car so I could get up and get out if need be, on my own.
Finally, I discussed my adventures with my therapist and if a guy came up short behavior-wise and I didn't pick up on it, if he showed any assholio tendencies at all, I agreed to practice my 'get lost' routine.
I was never rude or mean though. I don't like it when people are rude or mean to me, so even in situations where I thought, "whoa," I was polite in my "no thanks" responses.
I have to say, I had fun with this. It was a grand adventure for me, and even though it was 90% not that productive romantically, I got a lot of insight into male insecurities and idiosyncrasies, and in the end, I felt a lot of compassion even for the men who were awful.
This surprised me, and it was, in and of itself, a worthwhile experience to have.
But I also enjoyed 'shopping' on my own terms, for what I wanted, instead of trying to fit myself into what some man wanted.
What I wanted was (I thought) pretty easy: 1) I wanted someone to who would go to the movies with me, 2) Someone who wouldn't make a lot of demands (marry me, cook for me, live with me, clean my socks, etc, none of that), and 3) Someone who might enjoy having sex with me every now and again. And then go home. To his own house. And his own socks.
Men say this is what they want. They are all the time saying that.
It's crap. It's not what men want.
No one tells the truth about what they want.
Including me.
The first man I met at the food court sat down, pulled out a piece of paper, and started interviewing me in a ridiculously no nonsense way. After half a dozen questions, the nature of which I do not recall, he laid down the law.
"You will not date anyone else while you are dating me. I am sick of sluts."
At that point I busted out laughing, which I am pretty sure was the wrong response, because after that he excused himself and left. I felt a little bad for laughing since it was my intention to be polite, but when someone is being ridiculously inappropriate sometimes it just happens.
I definitely dodged a bullet there. That guy might have had bodies stacked up in his garage. He had that vibe.
Then I met a guy who had been chatting with me for awhile. In his profile, his photo looked very nice, and I felt I knew him a little better, so I met him at the business he owned and ran.
To my surprise he was horrible deformed by some crippling chronic illness, perhaps rheumatoid arthritis. He could not stand up straight. His limbs and hands were twisted. He could not walk without a walker. He shook my hand while I stood there in shock and then stuck it down his pants.
"Whoa! Seriously!?" I said, (or something to that effect).
I felt kind of sorry for him and now, if I didn't go out with him, he'd think it was because of his disability, which would be only half of it.
I met him at his house for a movie date. He fell asleep on the couch. I left, more annoyed than angry.
He called later and apologized and asked me if I would come over and cook dinner for him. I am embarrassed to say I actually did this. He had this stove with a timer on it that beeped non-stop He didn't know how to fix it so he didn't.
It was crazy making.
He asked me to move in with him rent free in exchange for cooking and some care taking. I told him this was not what I had in mind. I was looking for movies and sex and and he had not been up to either one. He said he actually kind of liked me and I thought, wow, such a romantic.
My therapist vetoed that guy, of course. But I felt bad for him. Not only was he horribly disabled, he was a real crab ass. He'd been on the dating site for five years.
Round about this time I got an email from a guy who lived about seventy miles north of me who said he thought we had a lot in common.
RIght. I shot back an email that said something like, "Oh yeah? Like what"
We started emailing each other though. He was easy to talk to, (he was the only guy I met through the dating sites who was easy to talk to, and the only one who seemed the least bit interested in me), and as we were both kind of engaged in the same search, I told him about my "interviews" (I'd come to regard them that way), and he talked about his own life and occasionally his bad marriage.
He said he was going to leave his wife. I thought, um. Sure you are.
I knew we would never get together because of the distance and the fact that he was married, and I told him this, but we kept talking because it was fun and soon I was looking forward to these talks and to sharing my latest adventures in internet dating land.
I met a lot of guys but I went out with only a few. One of the most common questions I got was, "How many dates do we have to go on before we have sex?" (Answer: Now that you've asked that question, an infinite number of dates, billions and billions of dates...)
OK, I never actually said that. But I thought it.
I went out with a newspaper editor who let me pay for everything and fell asleep during the movie we saw. (This was becoming a theme.) I went out with a seven foot tall black man who kept reminding me that he was a seven foot tall black man. Like I could miss this. That guy did have a huge dick, which was useless because he also WAS a huge dick.
I met a guy who was 5'5" who made $70,000 and went to Disney Land every summer. If I played my cards right, I could be a part of that, he said.
I didn't have any cards.
One night, I was chatting with my friend from up north about my latest dating exploits and he began talking about the woman HE was dating.
Whoa.
It felt like my stomach fell through my shoes. He can't be dating anyone! In about a second and a half I realized I was stuck on this guy and we hadn't even met. But how could it work? He was far away. He was married.
We planned a meeting and from the first it was like getting hit with an uber-strong narcotic. We were like on a love drug. It was ridiculous but wonderful. I had never, ever, in my wildest dreams thought I would experience something so right, ever.
But here's what I remember most (besides the amazing sex): When I asked him what he wanted from this he said, "I want to love someone. I want to love you."
Oh my god, I thought. That is the right answer.
In all my life I had never heard it.
Ten years later, we are still together, still happy, still talking.
Sometimes we even go to the movies.
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How I Met PD
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Posted:Dec 3, 2014 8:38 am
Last Updated:Aug 8, 2019 12:29 am
17229 Views
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I was in a bad marriage for eighteen years. I'm not suggesting there were no good times, but I'm not going to write about them, and I'm not going to write about that marriage at all. It was my third. You can get to feeling like maybe you're doing something wrong, or even that there's something wrong with you, when you've failed at marriage three times. I had got tired of packing up and moving on, and tired of splitting up possessions, too. I liked my possessions. I had some nice ones- an old brick house on acreage in wine country, just east of Lake Michigan, four dogs with three acres fenced for us to run and play on, an old barn that housed my antique woodshop, and a pile of old tools that I used in it. But for the last ten years of that marriage I had pondered ways to get out of it that wouldn't hurt too much. There weren't any. It was going to hurt. I finally realized that, and that I was going to have to bite the bullet and take the pain. Once I did I began looking at other women. I had never been a cheater or a philanderer. I always had an eye for a cute ass and even more an ear for a smart and entertaining woman, but I kept a lid on that and didn't fool around until I decided my marriage was over and not coming back.
I met a woman online- she messaged me ten years ago on Thanksgiving morning, in fact, and we met and then spent time together and had sex. She was a lot of fun, and I liked her. I didn't spend much time thinking about where that relationship was going, or whether it was even going anywhere. It was just nice to spend some time with a woman that wasn't all argument and recrimination, that was just fun. We saw each other when we could for a couple of months, but by then I was used to reading women's profiles on dating sites so I kept at it, and never found much that caught my eye, especially. Not that it mattered much. I had decided my marriage was done and all I was doing was killing time while I got my ducks in a row to file for a divorce. The woman I was seeing now and then asked me what was going to happen with us after I was divorced and I answered that I didn't see any reason why anything should change. We could go on liking each other and having lunch together and fucking once in a while. But I wasn't interested in having another wife or even a live in partner.
On the thirteenth of February 2005 I saw a profile on what folks here call a vanilla dating site for a Cat Owning Democrat, a woman in South Bend, Indiana, about fifty miles from the little town where I lived and seventy miles from where I worked every day. Not a real likely proposition- the logistics of a thing like that were bound to be tough. But I read the profile and she sounded kind of fun so I sent an email to her suggesting that we had a lot in common, just for the hell of it really. I never expected to even get an answer, let alone a response that would change my life, heal my bad attitude and result in the best sex of my life. She sent a response to my message: "We have a lot in common? Like what?" But she had also sent at my request a copy of a short story she had had published in a local literary magazine featuring local writers, "The Loosestrife Man". You can read it in this blog- The Loosestrife Man. I loved it. I can't write like that. I don't think like that, but I loved that she did. It was Valentine's Day, as I recall.
So I replied by listing the things we might have in common: three marriages, an interest in creative writing and in thought provoking literature, a love of good movies and even sometimes bad movies and that we were both lefties down on our luck. I even like cats. I had three in my house and one in the barn. She told me that her requirements were not particularly demanding. She realized that no one falls in love with a fifty year old woman and she wanted someone to go to the movies with and maybe fuck her once in a while. I figured I could do that much. And every word she sent my way I liked her more. She was blunt and could be kind of a smart ass, at first. She wasn't really trying to shock me so much as laying it out for me that she wasn't suffering any illusions about what might come of this online dating thing. She had met and dated a number of guys she'd first encountered online and it was all over the map except for that one place where the guy wasn't just looking to tick off items on a shopping list of requirements he had before he'd do more than stick his cock in her. She told me it boiled down to "you have a pussy, I have a dick to put in it, let's get together." A question that came up a lot was how many dates they had to have before they fucked.
I told her I was married but planning a divorce and she asked me not to tell her that because she wasn't going to believe it. I could see her point. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first guy to tell that particular lie. In my case I wasn't lying and I'm also sure I wasn't the first guy to believe that either. But she decided that maybe we could have a date or two, what did she care? We lived too far apart for this to go anywhere except a couple of movie or dinner dates and maybe I'd turn out not to be a total loser in the sack, if she decided to go there. We made talk about meeting, and she joked that if I did anything weird like showing up with a donkey she was out of there.
So we chatted online and talked about ourselves and asked lots of questions and we made a date for early in March. We met at fast food restaurant in Niles, Michigan and it was a glorious Sunday that comes every now and then around here, with sunshine and sixty degree weather. I brought her a stuffed donkey, the Shrek donkey. You squeezed it and it made wise cracks in Eddie Murphy's voice. She stuck around anyway- I was wearing my most attractive black crew neck sweater. Neither of us wanted fast food so we drove to a Greek restaurant south of there, the kind with a ten page menu and terrific food but not fancy, where the families that were just getting out of church took Grandma every weekend. It was crowded and she and I did not notice that right off. I couldn't see much of anything but PD that day. After eating we drove to a lovely riverside park downtown and walked along the riverbank. She was an awful driver, and she told me that her hated riding when she drove. I lied and told her that she was doing just fine. In truth her driving made me nervous as all hell. She would stomp the gas and then let off like she was driving a Model T and there were no slow and measured stops- she stomped the brake pedal with the same enthusiasm that she used to kick the accelerator into submission. Her driving wasn't a deal breaker- I made a mental note that I would be driving during any future engagements. She had a couple of qualities that trumped automotive expertise. She had shining short red hair and beautiful round full breasts and was very pretty in a tight red knit shirt that I was sure she had found in an oriental boutique.
That afternoon was magical. We talked and walked and sat on park benches and kissed and people smiled at us when they walked by because we were oblivious to anything but each other. At our age, no less! We only spent a few hours together but we made a date to meet again in two weeks. This time she would drive to me. In our chats during the weeks following that date became a meeting in a motel. I had wanted to fuck her from the minute I set eyes on her and it was incredible to me that she was just as eager.
PD booked a motel in Kalamazoo for a Saturday and I got there early. She was late. She got lost and drove right through Kalamazoo and headed for Battle Creek, but she stopped and called me, and I managed to talk her in like an air traffic controller when the pilot and co-pilot get food poisoning and an exotic dancer has to land the plane. One of the bad movies.
Her birthday was coming up and I had brought presents. She gave them a perfunctory examination- one was a book on how to have an affair- and showed me the movies she had brought for when we were done having sex. Yep. She really brought movies. She thought we'd spend fifteen minutes fucking, if it was good, and that would be that. We didn't watch them and she didn't do any reading. We spent six hours in that shitty motel room with nail clippings on the floor and every minute of it we were touching. We didn't fuck like porn stars. NOBODY fucks like porn stars. We fucked like who were falling in love with each other, and that's how we both felt. PD was the someone I could talk to that I had never had. She understood me as if we had known each other forever. And when she talked I wanted to listen- she actually had something to say. It was like coming alive. It really was spring, and it felt like spring. Suddenly life had possibilities. I went from trying to extricate myself from a bad situation and maybe hooking up for sex now and then to knowing that I wanted to spend forever with this woman and that she would make everything worth doing. She had fixed me in about four weeks. PD gave me hope again.
I knew that there couldn't be any waiting. I filed for a divorce that week. It didn't matter if I was prepared or not, I knew I did not want to live without PD and that was the first thing I could do to show it. That decision cost me a lot, but it gained me everything. I could play it over a million times in my head and I wouldn't change a detail because I found the love of my life, my soul mate, and there's never been any doubt about that.
This was all random dumb luck. We each had a history of making bad choices in love. If you go over all the steps that led to us meeting it's obvious that it's just chance, and no one would have given odds on the two of us. We weren't even figured to place or show let alone win. Never give up. The experts and the statisticians know nothing.
At the end of May I moved to South Bend. It was a seventy mile trip one way to work in Kalamazoo. I had to get up at three thirty Indiana time to make it to work by seven Michigan time. But it was either that or spend the whole week without PD, and only see her on weekends. I made that drive for twenty three months, through the snow belt. Some of those trips took me three hours in a blizzard. I thought about transferring to South Bend to work and she looked for jobs in Kalamazoo. I'd have had to give up my nearly twenty years seniority in such a transfer, and they offered me a couple of supervisor jobs that I didn't want and turned down. I kept driving to Kalamazoo, a hundred and forty miles a day. Weekends were heaven, and a blur. We went to movies. We went out for breakfast. We had pizza at Polito's, and almond duck at Hi Ho Chop Suey…really, that's the name of it! I taught her to drive a stick shift- and we never argued. We bought second hand furniture for her empty house at the second hand stores. She bought sexy clothes to seduce me and we wrote erotic stories just for each other. We spent a lot of time in bed.
I was at the end of my rope after a snowy February in 2007 when every trip was taking me more than the hour and a half it should have. It snowed constantly, it seemed. Something had to change. I was seriously considering the transfer, when PD got a job offer at a big international bank in Kalamazoo. She'd have to take a pay cut for at least the first couple of years, but she hated her job in South Bend and she jumped on that job offer.
So that's how I reformed a lifelong Hoosier and brought her to safety north of the border. The rest is just trivia and details. She's learned to love it as much as I do here. But when I think back on that two years I lived in the decaying post industrial hell that South Bend is fast becoming, I don't see it as the rough going that it actually was, and I don't think of the place as a rotting midwest factory town. I have fond and warm memories of the place. It was only eight years ago but I have a nostalgia for the place as if it were the cradle of my childhood. For us it was like being drugged, we enjoyed each other so much. We cherished our time together and made the most of it and the most of it was quite grand. In our fifties we had done the impossible and fallen in love and that's all we acknowledged about our lives- how grand it was and how much fun we had together. It continues.
We're comfortable with each other, but we were never un-comfortable once we got past the "Like what?" phase. I told her very early on that I wanted someone who actually liked ME- not my steady job or my paycheck or my stuff. I wanted someone I could just hang out with and fuck around with and have fun with. I wanted a woman I could listen to, who had ideas about things and thought about something besides what color the drapes should be or whether someone at work got something that SHE should have got. I didn't care what had happened in her past- I wanted to know her but I wasn't about to start a checklist of thing she could and could not be guilty of having done. My own slate isn't exactly squeaky clean and I wanted us to start fresh because we liked each other in addition to loving each other.
I have never liked another human being the way I like my wife. I love her deeply and unreservedly and I still love seeing her naked. But maybe more importantly, I like hiking in the woods with her, and going to a movie with her, and I like just sitting inside on a cold winter night and shooting the shit with her. I like my wife and I like my life.
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Prodded onto the bandwagon..
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Posted:Nov 30, 2014 6:32 pm
Last Updated:Dec 4, 2014 10:32 am
11770 Views
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Ok, I give up. I'll do it too.
Four jobs I've had:
Strander in a wire mill.
Trade show setup manager.
Roadie.
Truck driver.
Four movies I've seen more than once:
Cool Hand Luke.
Lincoln.
Secretary.
Paul.
Four places I've lived:
Kalamazoo, Michigan
Toronto, Ontario
AnnArbor, Michigan
Phoenix, Arizona
Four TV shows I'm currently following:
Last Week Tonight (John Oliver)
The Colbert Report
The Daily Show
Nova
Four Places I've been:
Quebec City, Quebec
Mill Valley, California
Fort Huachuca, Arizona
Copper Harbor, Michigan
Four people who email me regularly:
A genealogist friend in Coconut Creek, Florida
The Democratic Party, wanting money (They don't get any.)
My mom.
[blog kathynj]
Four of my favorite foods:
Macaroni and cheese.
Sausage and cheese stuffed ravioli.
Focaccia with marinara sauce.
Lasagna.
Places I would rather be: (This doesn't really apply- I'm happy here.)
San Giorgio, Piemonte
London
Amsterdam
South Haven, Michigan
Four things I'm looking forward to in 2015:
The solution to all America's problems by the new Congress!
Hikes!
A new woodshop...maybe.
Another 365 days with my wife PD.
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Happy Thanksgiving
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Posted:Nov 26, 2014 6:08 pm
Last Updated:Mar 7, 2016 6:07 pm
11232 Views
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I love Thanksgiving. I've said many times it's my favorite holiday. Yesterday and today Gracie and I hiked, and I'm posting pictures tonight of some of the things we're most thankful for- fresh air, clean water and trees! Have a great holiday!
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Driving while stoned
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Posted:Nov 24, 2014 9:48 pm
Last Updated:Nov 23, 2022 3:45 pm
12432 Views
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Occasionally young people have been known to experiment with mind altering substances. It is not only young people who have done this, historically. We might not have the magnificent and beautiful poem "Kubla Khan" if not for Samuel Taylor Coleridge's dalliance with opium. Thomas de Quincy has left us a small mountain of fascinating literary entertainment in addition to his famous "Confessions of an English Opium Eater". We would probably have less of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald to trouble our souls and our sleep if not for drink, and we are also the richer for the pot and booze addled recollections of the Memory Babe Jack Kerouac. William S. Burroughs is not for everyone, but he was instrumental in forming my own philosophical and political thought with his books from "Junkie" and "Naked Lunch" to "The Place of Dead Roads".
Young people consider this sort of thing to be avant garde and romantic and when they "discover" an old drunk or junky who managed to scratch out some half garbled message in coughed up blood or the little bubble that remains after a fix it is like waving a bottle of Ripple before a wino- they will do anything to partake of it. It is as the forbidden fruit to them. That their parents and elders warned them off only prods them to more frenzied pusuit of the stuff and staff of life and knowledge.
My friend Bob K. and I were like that once. The lure of such suffering, such exploration, and the creativity it would spawn was too much for us. Bob's knowledge of both classically great and cutting edge literary work always amazed me, and I flatter myself that he saw me in a similar way, but we each felt that the other was more accomplished and more erudite and we fed off each other and encouraged each other to greater heights of understanding. And Bob could write! I was in love with the way he could bore to the essence of a subject and say so perfectly what we both were thinking.
There is another way of looking at what we were doing. We were getting high. Sure, no one in the circle passing the joint knew what the fuck we were talking about, but then, they didn't understand anyone or anything else either. Of the six sharing a doobie four figured that we were full of shit. Bob and I knew better but we didn't condescend- we explained stuff. And then they knew we were full of shit, because it didn't mean a fucking thing to them.
But we were given status as the intellectuals of our little group of Freaks. Stoners didn't emerge until later. The slang term stoner probably originated in the thirties in black slang, but it didn't come into general usage until it had been popularized in movies and comedy routines like Cheech and Chong. Back then, we were Freaks, and it was a badge. It identified us, and categorized us. It was a pejorative when employed by greasers (the Vitalis crowd- they worshipped Elvis and Merle Haggard and Hank Williams) and juicers (who worshipped Pabst Blue Ribbon). We called ourselves Freaks too, but with a capital F. When one Freak referred to another pothead as a Freak, it was understood that the word had a big F in front. My Brother! Like a long haired 1968 hippie version of Cornel West.
This story was headed somewhere once. And it still is, I just haven't made up my mind where yet.
What got me to reminiscing and recollecting was a post by mcmaniac containing some select pearls of wisdom, among them being the reaction one has when being stopped by the fuzz while drunk, or, in 1968 much worse, while stoned. You can check it out yourselves if you think I'm too drunk or stoned to remember it correctly. [post 3530692] . My immediate reaction was "Yeah. Been there, done that." As to "fuzz", yes, we called them that, and worse. They wished to chain our wrists closely and detain us in jail cells with criminals for igniting a plant and inhaling the smoke. What would Jesus do? We didn't do that. We usually lied. None of us wanted to end up like Jesus. Unless we happened to be stoned on acid and even on acid I didn't want to take that trip.
See, the story is still headed somewhere, it's just that none of us knows where that is- except me. It has changed direction, as often happens when I am reminiscing and recollecting and writing.
I got to thinking aout the many times I was stopped by Peace Officers (See? I have evolved.) while under the influence. But, one of the more weird things that happened to me while wasted did not involve my own interaction with any official of any kind. So that's the story that came out of what is left of my brain, and that's the one I want to tell. The other stories are still there so there's no need to get snippy about it, or morose as if I had reneged on an agreement, even though that's technically exactly what I did.
One evening in winter I dropped a hit of acid with Bob. This wasn't an experimentation with a mind expanding drug- we were getting high. We walked the Kalamazoo Mall. It was one of the early malls in the country and it wouldn't impress anyone now. They had closed the streets in the downtown business district and paved it for walkers and you could wander up and down without the hassle of traffic and crossing streets, and they festooned the trees on the mall with lights at Christmastime. It was open and out in the weather and cold when it was cold outside and hot and sunny in summer. But there were no cars. So we played under the Christmas lights as will and we studied an historical mural in the bank that portrayed an Indian running along the Kalamazoo River. That mural really came alive for a couple of freaks stoned on acid. I bought a grape NeHi and my friend bought the orange one and we switched off sharing each other's drinks because when you took a swig of grape everthing turned purple and when you followed it with orange it all went to orange. Pretty fucking cool.
But eventually it was time to go home. I lived in the country, down a meandering and wooded road that wound through fields and forest along a creek. And I noticed that all the road signs seemed to be a looooooong way off in the distance. There were a lot of signs, because there were a lot of curves. I knew this road well. I had driven it, ridden it on a bicycle and a motorcycle and I had walked it many times. I knew the distances on that road and it had been stretched out so that it took a half hour to go three hundred feet. I could read those distant signs perfectly, I just couldn't seem to get to them. There was an old mill pond about half way home, and you navigated that part in a series of S curves, going over a couple of bridges and around the two ponds. As I came around the first curve I saw light where there shouldn't have been light. It was out in the pond below the waterfall, shining up through the water and kind of aimed west. I said to myself what any stoned freak would say in that event…."Whooooaa! Cool!" I had no fucking idea what I was looking at. I finally got to the bank and stopped my Volkswagen on the side of the road to get out and get a better look. There were white lights and red lights and smaller yellow looking lights, all under the water and shimmering and rippling with the little waves. And then I was paralized, too transfixed to move. A thing, a creature, was slowly wading toward me, arms out at its sides and trailing pond lillies and pads and grasses, groaning and grunting as it came. I wasn't scared exactly. I was simply too mesmerized and dumbstruck and stoned to understand what I was seeing. And that creature circled around me and my car, opened my passenger door, and got in!
Holy fucking shit! I bent down and peered through the still open driver's door and the beast was peeling lily pads and pond weed off its face and slinging them on the floor of my Volkswagen. It was joe Smith, the asshole who owned the local chevy dealership and he was hammered drunk. And the bastard had just helped himself to my car. The lights out in the pond were a new 1970 Chevy Impala sedan and Joe had missed the curve and plowed fifty feet out into the Coon Hollow mill pond. And he was now sitting in my car flinging pond shit and muck all over.
Take me home, he says. By now I'm thinking "Fuck you, you juicer prick" but the damage was already done, and I WAS pretty fucked up myself, so I took the -of a-bitch home. He lived in a posh place on a lake near me, so I drove him there. The conversation was a bit stilted during the drive. He did point out that I was driving five miles an hour, which perhaps explained why it took me so long to reach all those road signs. Between the two of us, him three sheets to the wind and me still tripping mightily on that hit of acid we navigated our way to his house.
I momentarily had visions of solidarity with someone from the other side. I was rescuing a drunk business man from a watery grave and delivering him to hearth and home safe and sound at three A.M. But when we got there the fuckstick fell out of the Beetle without so much as a kiss my ass and crawled across the lawn to his front door. I shoulda left the fucker in the goddamn pond.
I guess if I was a better liar there would be a lyric poem or a meaningful life lesson in there somewhere. Samuel Taylor Coleridge could have spun this thing into something worth reading by people who don't get stoned, only to be discovered a hundred years later by people who do.
Then weave a circle round him thrice
Close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honeydew hath fed
And drunk the milk of paradise.
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To link to this blog (kzoopair) use [blog kzoopair] in your messages.
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