Just Being A Hero

What to write... What to write...
What’s been happening? Works been fine, home life is good. The yard is looking nice.
Here’s the most exciting thing that has happened recently.
My lady and I were out walking the dog around the block. The dog is getting up there in years and we can only take her on short walks so we walk her and then I’m walked for a bit further (you know, to ward off my inevitable heart attack).
You need to know; I am afraid of dogs, not a little afraid of dogs, fuckin’ terrified of dogs, or at least, historically, I have been. I’ve been bit chased, and cornered by more dogs than most people. I have so many stories of being tortured by dogs and it has developed into a fear that is so bad I often won’t walk past a dog that is not contained or on a chain. They make my ass sweat (why do my fears always cause some sort of butt reaction (sweat, pucker, etc)?). So I am not a fan of dogs that I am not acquainted with and even then, if they ever growl at me or get aggressive in any way they are off the Christmas card list.
So we are walking the dog and just being the picture of suburban loveliness when I hear the unmistakable sound of dog claws scraping as a dog hurriedly charges. I turned around to see my worst fear. Charging pit bull. I’ve known pitbulls, I’ve even been friends with a few, so I historically have no prejudice against them, but I am scared of them. I like my nuts and I like my dick and I am very scared of them being bit/torn off by dogs and I have always figured with their cock-level-height (with neck extended and slight jump) and the whole razor sharp teeth with lock jaw thing, that a pit bull would be the best candidate from the dog party to bite my wiener off. There is a fairly common picture of a pitbull that is charging at the camera with it’s gums flapping in the wind and it’s mouth agape showing it’s many teeth. Have you seen it? Anyhow that is what I saw. Then I saw it killing our dog, probably injuring my lady as she tries to fend it off and me getting my wiener bit off in there somewhere. So I kind of ran at the dog and tried and as tough as i could said something "No, no, no get out of here." I think I probably screeched a little bit. So before I can stop it, the pitbull jumps up on our dog and puts her mouth around her neck, so I charge at it (like a fuckin’ super hero [speaking of which, it’s new comic book day and they are killing off the Flash today, so it should be interesting}) and it jumps off her and starts to run home before it actually clamped down. And you’re right, I am very tough. So, I hear the fuckin retard who own the dogs (because let’s face it 99 out of 100 pitbull owners are total fuckin’ idiots) who is underneath his car doing something shouts at his daughter to get their dog. So they come and grab it. So I’m feeling tough because I am and I take a look at the dog. It’s not quite the harbinger of death that I first saw, it was a little fat, had really long nipples (because idiots don’t spay their dogs and as I said, it’s mostly morons who own pitbulls) and I think I may have noted cataracts. The little girls are trying to get the dog to come home and apologizing, more than I can say for their fuck-tard father, and then dog makes another rush. So I do my retard dance and scream and it is again scared and the little girls get it home.
The really funny part is our dog and my lady did not even turn around during the whole thing and there were like ten kids playing baseball in the street who watched it all, but probably didn’t see the many toothed monster charging at my beloveds or see it try to bite the coolest dog I know. So I just looked like a big fat tard stomping my feet and saying "hey, hey, hey".
But I’ve gotta tell you, my dick feels just a little bit bigger than it did before.

SWM seeks a Muse

Is it just me, or is everyone afraid of being inspired? When is the last time that you saw people stand in awe at the sound of another’s voice or words or images or sound? When was the last time people were activated by another or by an event? The last time I can remember was on September 11 and I think I was a little disgusted. It seemed more like a purchasing frenzy of everyone scrambling to buy the most flags to hang on their houses. And that’s the thing: The only thing that people seemed to be inspired to do is buy stuff.
Inspiration is something that paves the path to a life less ordinary. It’s our compass to discovery and to creation. Maybe it’s because I never leave my house, but I just see the channel flipping glaze in everyone’s eyes and I don’t exactly see people having a desire to create or experience much of anything. What I tend to see is a love of consumption, but then this is America.
For so long the only message pumped at us from every angle is "BUY, BUY, BUY!!!" and I’m not really sure what to do with that anymore. I want to live and I want to experience a genuine life, but it becomes so hard in the face of push to consume and the push to brand myself or to shove myself into a marketer’s key demographic.
I just wanna live, man.
Maybe it’s because when I think of the past (not in my life necessarily, but the good-ol`-days before I was born), I think about it in the context of these great writers who communicated an image that is perhaps overly romantic or fails to mention the bill boards.
The other day, I went to this place that I’ve gone to for years to have lunch. I got a cup of coffee and they had commercials for local businesses on the cup. Nothing is sacred.
I just would love to hear the words of someone or see something that made me feel something new. Maybe it’s my fault, maybe I don’t search it out. Maybe I should stop waiting for a muse to float angelically through my ceiling and whisper the magical words of epiphany to me. Maybe I need to cast away all of my earthly belongings and wander off into the sunset and find it. I don’t know. I’m at a loss. It seems like wonderment, awe, and moments of epiphany are in short supply these days. Is this just me? Am I letting society and Coke have too much control over my life? How do I stop it?
Chime in people because this is eating at me.
I hate the world.

Driving Around

This weekend, my lady and I went for a drive in the mountains. We were going to go camping, but we had forgotten it was father’s day, so we just went to scope out camp sites. The two of us are compulsive planners (every day the question "what’s the plan?" comes up at least five times between the two of us) so we figured we could take the trip over this weekend to find camp grounds that we dug and return next weekend when to go camping.
Saturday morning was the perfect kind of day to be in the mountains. It was overcast and drizzling and cool enough that a hooded sweatshirt was in order. Perfect Pacific Northwest weather (if you don’t think so, stay the hell out of here, because it’s pretty much what we have). So we packed up stuff to make a hot lunch and packed up our little "to go" dope kit and hit the road after a bong hit.
We started east on Highway 410. Chinook pass was a childhood terror of mine and one of the things that proved several times a year that my father feared nothing. He would be calm as our car drove just a couple of feet from drops that were sure to kill us all. I would pretend to be asleep so that my bother wouldn’t tease me about not looking over the edge. My mom would also pretend to be asleep. I had driven over Chinook Pass alone for the first time last year and I am happy to report that it, like many of my other childhood monsters, has lost some of it’s hold on me. It’s just a road with a couple of spots that make my asshole pucker.
So we drove and we had our little glass spoon pipe with a bowl loaded in it close at hand. I was taking a hit or two every 45 minutes, just enough to keep the world looking pretty and to make me feel like I was in a fond memory. My lady indulged a little more as she wasn’t driving and I believe that she has a couple extra lungs that require a bit more dope than me. She had never been over chinook pass before, so the first time we came around a bend where you really get a sense of how high you are, she screeched and buried her head in her pillow. It was pretty funny. She accused me of purposely not telling her about how crazy high it is up there and she was probably right, I did know that she would freak out a little.
The top of Chinook was foggy as hell and there was snow on the ground (not the road) that appeared to be a couple of feet deep yet. I hate driving in fog, especially when the stuff you can’t see is generally drop offs of a few hundred feet, but what are you going to do? We reached the summit and then began to drop down into the pine forest of Eastern Washington. It’s funny, when you cross over onto the other side of Washington, it seems like everything becomes less crammed together: the trees, the population, the cities. Everything just seems to be a little more spread out. I think that is why it feel so much less tense than the west side. It’s nice.
We drove and smoked and snacked and checked out a bunch of camp grounds and we made notes about each one and even went as far as to note the best camp sites in each one for the purposes of making reservations later. We agreed most the time on the best spots on each and it was a lot of fun. I think we checked out just shy of ten camp grounds.
We stopped to have lunch at a trail head. I set up the camp stove and started to re-heat a couple of burgers that we had barbequed the night before, while my lady set up the chairs and went and pissed in the woods (for which I am very proud of her). There was a obviously man made (or at least man altered) pond that was kind pretty clear and I asked her to watch it and tell me if anything jumped or rose. I had brought my fishing stuff and planned on making a cast or two somewhere that day and if this pond had some stockers dumped in it, I’d be happy to get a quick fix in. As soon as I turned back to the camp stove, she hollered "One just jumped." I turned and she pointed "Right out in the middle." So I decided that I’d fish a bit after lunch.
We ate and the burgers were good, just as they were the night before. I had been keeping an eye on the pond hoping that I would be able to confirm that fish did indeed have residence in there and then the sun came out and I hit the water and I said "One should jump just to let me know someone’s home." And I’ll be damned if one didn’t jump. I’d say a little 6-8 inch trout and so I fished while she sat and read a book. I tried a dry fly for a while, and then a couple of different bugger type patterns. I never caught anything, but I hade fun watching the newts swim up for air or whatever the hell they do. And I’ve never seen so many tadpoles in all my life. There were tens of thousands of them all along the shore line swimming all togther in slow ovals. It just looked like a black cloud until you actually looked and then you saw that they were indeed infant frogs. I hollered and my lady came over to look and even snapped a couple of good photos of them.
After that we headed home. We saw a couple of elk on the side of the road and I think I may have caught a glimpse of a whole herd sitting in a clearly, but I didn’t turn around to confirm it.
Truly, one of the best days I’ve had in a while. It’s nice to know that the world is still out there and essentially unchanged even as I have grown and forgotten so much. A really great day.

Wind, Cutthroat, And A Little Dope - A Nice Weekend In The Desert

I was driving in eastern Washington this weekend and from a ways off it looked like there were a bunch of balloons or maybe large birds clustered in the air over the freeway. As I got closer, I saw that they were tumble weeds caught in a dust devil. The thing was about thirty feet tall and formed right over the top of the freeway, it was pretty impressive. There was about thirty tumble weeds spinning in the air but there wasn’t a ton of dust so it just looked like they were circling around one another and rising and falling. It reminded me a bit of that scene on American Beauty with the bag floating around, only this was a little more ominous, though still quite nice to look at and it gave me this odd feeling like when I’m dreaming and in my dream I see something that isn’t suppose to be there, like a flying saucer or someone that is suppose to be dead. As I drove through it, the car shook and a large tumble weed smacked the windshield. It’s funny. I’ve always seen dust devils from afar, but they usually just contained dust, but this time it was right there for me to interact with. As I approached it, I was kind of amazed and I felt very pleased with the world right then. When I drove through it, it just kept twisting and blowing the little pieces of bushes, up into the air. It didn’t notice me.
The dust devil reminded me of another sight that kind of took my breath away this weekend. A friend and I were fishing this lovely little river. I was alone fishing this hole at the base of a large rock cliff. My friend had wandered up stream. I saw a fish rise, so I tied on this real pretty quill bodied blue wing olive pattern that I had tied for a trip last summer. I cast to this slick where I had seen a trout rise a little before and I watched as this nice sized cutthroat materialized from nothingness rose up and ate my fly, I could see the entire fish, looking like it was forged from gold or maybe glass. I watched as it opened it’s mouth and took in my fly and then lower itself perfectly back to the bottom of the pool like it has probably done thousands of times. It always amazes me the way that you can stand a look at a pool or a slick and not see a thing. The fish just sit there invisible and then all of sudden they let you see them and even from a distance you can see that they are pretty and bright and it makes you wonder how they can stay camouflaged against such a subdued back ground. I almost forgot to set the hook.

This weekend I also remembered how wonderful it feels to sit out side and smoke dope on a summers night. There is nothing else quite like that.