The Unbearable Bobness of Being

The Calls to the Scary Things Grow Faint

I'll likely be driving across the state during the candy hours of Halloween tonight. Cruising across the hellish nightmare lands of scabrock and foul potholes all under a dark waxing 6% crescent moon - only a sliver of light to guide my way. I know Grant County will stink like a vile abattoir chunked and slimed with some unholy carnage broiled on some viciously hot day. Grant County can make you retch while driving. I'm not being hyperbolic.

I love Halloween and hate missing it, even though there are less kids out trick or treating every year, instead going to safe and controlled parties and malls and churches. I am so glad my Halloweens growing up were never like that, instead were enjoyed with the mobs of costumed kids roaming neighborhoods demanding treats under the not altogether symbolic threat of vandalism if treats were not forthcoming.

It was the one night when the kids were the kings, were the overlords and warlords and knight-errants and sinners and bandits - we were in charge of the dark streets. Collecting our booty and bounty and altogether having a helluva great and powerful time. I remember a Halloween when I was 11 or 12, sneaking out a couple of my mom's cigs, and me and my neighborhood best friend Mike lighting them up on some street and puffing away, not giving a damn who saw us. We were mighty and we were many.

Not anymore. When I used to take my boys out when they were little dudes, the streets were mostly empty, only occasionally seeing small groups of trick or treaters and at least half of the homes were darkened and empty of residents. Would have had to haul around a pickup bed load of eggs and crap to trick all those places.

I always loved handing out the candy, pretending to be scared by little kids, flipping teenagers shit for being too old to be trick or treating "weren't you kids here earlier tonight?" Back in the 80s and until the mid 90s, I'd count 120 to 150 kids every night. Now I'm lucky to get 25. Well, things change. Sometimes for the better and sometimes, unexplainably, not. The ground glass and razor blades were urban myths.

I always buy more candy than I actually need for Halloween. It's not so much that I want to eat the leftovers (which I do) but more a stubborn denial of the dying of Halloween. Crime rates are down. Costumed kids go to the mall. We're about to elect the poet, not the warrior.

I'll drive under a dread night sky and watch for glimpses of scabrous sage-trolls squatting behind basalt and tumbleweeds, their beady red eyes flashing confusion as to why the world has forsaken them. Has forgotten.

Still get many trick or treaters? Halloween changed at all for you?

Ethical Dilemma: The Driveway Basketball Game

You are playing hoops in your driveway and it's a gorgeous October day, preternaturally warm and sunny and the sky like a cobalt dream. You are playing against two boys, one is your son and one is his friend. They are both five (5) years old and pretty short in stature and not particularly possessive of advanced basketball skill settages.

At first you are just having fun, you know, helping the little tykes pass and shoot the ball. Even with the hoop about six (6) feet high they don't make many shots. But, well, it's not really about winning and losing. At least, not at first.

With the score at 16 to 2, you suggest to your son that he pass the ball to his buddy "hey Skipper! pass it to Lewis, he's completely open!" and just as you finish, your son starts crying and tells you to "shut up! it's no fun when you is bossy!" His friend Lewis replies "it's stupid, you're stupid, stupid, stupid."

You are shocked. What the hell? You have been trying so hard to teach these young lads some fundamentals of hoops and also expose them to the awesome role model of yourselfage, as you smoke the net with mid range jumpers and sweet silky moves to the rack.

You take the ball out, two quick steps and you fire a nasty rainbow in. All net. 18-2. The ball rips through and bounces once off the concrete and smacks Skipper in the nose. He starts screaming.

Up to this point you've been playing "make it - take it" which means you keep the ball as long as you're making shots, so you get the ball again since you just ripped a jumper. One more basket and the game is over. Your opponents are crying and wanting to leave the driveway and go play video games or ride trikes or something. Fuck that.

You dribble up and have to make a decision - they've left the lane open and aren't exactly "d'ing up" and you could easily pounce on that and tomahawk a jam through the plastic rim that would knock their stupid Fisher-Price basketball hoop to the ground and school these youngsters on what happens when they bitch up on the court and quit trying. Or you could set the ball down and high five them for doing their best and go buy them ice cream or something at the Dairy Queen.

What do you do?

In the Middle of the Air

Meet me, Jesus, meet me
Won't you meet me in the middle of the air.
And if these wings should fail me, Lord,
Won't you meet me with another pair
Well, well, well,
So I can die easy, Well, well, well.
Won't you meet me, Jesus,
Well, well, well,
Well, well, well
Jesus gonna make up my dyin' bed.

When I was 20 I worked graveyards on an ICU in a state mental hospital, I was going to Eastern Washington University during the day and working full-time nights. The job was pretty interesting and busy - taking care of sick mental hospital patients. Most were geriatrics and at the end of the line. Some were younger and too sick to be on the other wards.

I remember one of the most gracious and beautiful things an ICU doctor ever did was to load up a killing dose of morphine for this old terminal CA dude, who wasn't crazy in the least, just homeless, dying and ending up at the state bughouse and wanting some peace. He was a skeletal remains of a man. He kept his good humor until he couldn't.  Truly a sweet old man who one night got the kill load he so desperately craved and received his peace on earth. Hopefully afterwards too.

Was this wrong? I don't think so. It wasn't illegal, as docs knew how to work this end of the road morphine big sleep needle ride within the rules. But we all knew the score.

One of the nurses told me they used to have to tie off and plug the orifices of the deceased before they moved them. They leaked.

I was 20 then and thought damn, I'm growing up too fucking fast.

I voted yes on Initiative 1000 for Physician Assisted Suicide in Washington state. But it wasn't a cinch for me. I have misgivings. But I remembered that night. Growing up quickly in the crazy house and somebody doing something pretty sane and right for a man hollowed and ghosted by cancer.  I have a dear friend (the dearest kind ;) who loves bioethics and I have to confess, although I tend to lack the right kind of wing-feathers to fly up into the Philosophy Clouds for long, there are few more important questions to ask and answer in this crazy human condition we jointly and severally possess on this all too fast spinning blue and green globe. So, that was how I voted. Like some kind of grown up.

How do you feel about physician assisted suicide?

You'll Shoot His Eye Out

Many readers have asked me "Bob, why did you become a dark ops military adviser to the Special Forces of Finland during the Cold War and train them in advanced arctic snipery with a particular emphasis on snow blinds?

Well, I always resist the urge to simply reply "because I fucking hate reindeer" which is only a very small part of the truth, say did you know the very first time I had reindeer sausage was in a nice little "BnB" in Anchorage Alaska and it was very tasty, quite lean and nicely spiced. The only disconcerting part of it was how the meat blinked bright red.

So, anyhow, here's the real story - when I was a youngster, pre-pubertal, probably 11 or 12, me and my brother and some other kids had a "BB gun war" in this big grassy dirt trailed field over by the long gone "Early Dawn Dairy" in the part of the Spokane Valley I growed up in. We teamed up with our little Daisy BB rifles and CO2 cartridge powered pistols (no pump action deadly Crosman pellet cannons allowed!) and shot at each other. It wasn't all that complicated, all that tactical, all that hiding behind shit, mostly we just spread out and crouched and tried to blast our opponents. Now, if you've never been shot by a BB gun, well good for you, but they do sting like a SOB. Close up. They don't have a lot of velocity or distance and they don't shoot real straight. So you pop away and never hit anyone unless you get real close and in a big grassy field with no real cover, no trees, no rusting hulks of automobiles, no herds of reindeer, well it wasn't too dangerous. Except.

Except I fired a shot at my bro, who was like eleventy gabillion metric yards away from me, an impossible shot, a wasted BB, a simple impotent act of rifle barreled and copper sphered sibling aggression, except.

Except I hit him in the eye. From a million miles away. And it stung him like a damn wasp. Oh God, did he holler and wail and swear like a drunken sailor robbed and beaten by dock whores. I thought I blinded him. And I did! Temporarily.

So, my amazing BB gun shot into my brother's eyeball primed me, loaded me (so to speak) for a later series of icy sniper adventures with the greatest bunch of vodka swilling Laplander wife stealin ass kickin Finns you could ever hope to meet that side of Minnesota.

I am saving most of the stories about the Special Forces of Finland for my memoirs. But I thought I'd 'splain a few things first. How I became the man I became.

Did any of your childhood experiences lead to vocational or avocational choices? Ever shoot somebody in the eyeball? How did you live with yourself? Sublimation?

You Finish the Story!

While little Sharon's mom, Lily, spread either a raspberry or meatlike jam upon the enriched bread, Sharon began to project temporal lobe amplified "heat rays" into her mommy's knife. Sharon had long possessed psychokinetic thermodynamic powers yet had never matured enough to focus them into invisible yet deadly beams. Until now. At first Lily only noticed the knife was warm, as though it had come just out of the dishwasher during a heat drying cycle, but in seconds it became - you finish the story

The Uncle Jed and John McCain POW Tapes Ethical Dilemma

You are a lifelong Democrat who has suffered miserably through 8 years of Bush the Barking Hate Monkey and Cheney the Devil's Armpit Masseuse and now you finally see a glimmer of sparkling hopelight on the horizon. Barack Hussein Obama. - the soon to be next President if all goes as it seems to be going with his robust lead in the polls. America wants change. America is about to have it. Unless. Unless the damn Republicans and their cheating Diebold machines steal it all away again. Oh God. You can't even imagine that, it's just so mind rippingly depressing.

It is the Saturday before the elections and you are at your recently deceased uncle Jed's home. He was a decorated Vietnam Vet. A former POW held in the Hanoi Hilton like John McCain. Rumor has it, he was even there at the same time as McCain, but you don't know for sure if he knew McCain as your very private uncle refused to speak of the Nam.

As you go through some boxes in his garage, you discover some old tapes in a dusty box in the rafters. They are labeled "POW Confidential" and have a CIA stamp on them. WTF?

You clean them up and watch them. They are horrifying, these tapes made by the brutal captors in the Hanoi Hilton. You recognize your uncle in some and even John McCain. Yes! They were there together. You are excited by this but know your very private uncle would never have approved of you viewing them and would have refused you revealing them to anyone else.

On the third tape you see what is perhaps the most disturbing and horrid images ever revealed on a POW tape in any war anywhere. It is a tape of guards taunting the prisoners, including your uncle and McCain, on Christmas. The POWs are stoic, which only angers the guards more. There are some beatings but nothing worse than the many you've already watched. Then an officer shows up and yells at the guards and points them out of the room. He sits down with the prisoners and smiles and sets up a record player. He puts on a record which plays Christmas songs, even though the audio is scratchy it sounds like Andy Williams. The officer yells something, then a few moments later the guards return.

They are bringing large woven bamboo baskets to the prisoners. They set the baskets down in front of the prisoners and hand them chopsticks. This appears to be their Christmas dinner. When the starving POWs open the baskets, you are horrified by what they remove. Babies. Dozens of fat little grilled South Vietnamese babies kidnapped from villages that were friendly to American soldiers.

You watch in horror as the POWs tear into these baby dinners with their bare hands, chopsticks, and their broken and decayed teeth. The ensuing nightmarish meal is something out of the Grand Guignol. You stare in a stunned silence at the violent repast as your uncle Jed and John McCain and all the others maniacally devour these babies. God!

When the tape ends you sit in a nearly comatose state. Your mind can barely absorb what you've just witnessed. It was hellish. You want to crush the tape beneath your birkenstock clad size 13s. Smash this loathsome rectangle of black plastic into dust. But you can't, you can't because you wonder if you should send this on to someone in the media. My God, this could guarantee an Obama victory! Senator John McCain eating babies! Even if he was a starving and tortured POW, it doesn't make eating babies right, even on Christmas!

But you know memories of your late Uncle Jed would be forever damaged and discolored by this nauseatingly evil display of madness. Even though he never married and had no children and died penniless and alone and even though you are the last living relative and nobody really knew him that much as he was a bit of a hermit, even when he worked as a freelance commercial diver who was an expert underwater welder, but really didn't ever interact with much of anyone, even though he was a Democrat who despised Republicans with every fiber, molecule and atom of his being, and held the personal belief that the ends always justified the means, even then you know it would be wrong to expose him this way to the world.

Diebold. Dead babies. What do you do? Do you send the tape on and guarantee the crushing defeat of the scaly John McCain? Or do you protect your dear uncle's privacy?

What do you do?

Sorry!

Dammit, I shoulda mailed in that stupid ballot. Dammit.

The Great Alaskan Salmon Famine of 1954 in Literature

Although it was a horrific event that nearly destroyed Alaska, very little of The Great Alaskan Salmon Famine of 1954 ended up in works of fiction. It was, of course, noted in the mainstream media of the day, particularly in Seattle area newspapers as the docks were suddenly inundated with all sorts of fishing boats and ferries and sailboats bearing starving Alaskans. The main group of the Great Caravan did not end up in the Pacific Northwest, unlike the boat crowd, but instead in North Dakota creating a massive culture shock to that quiet state that definitely demands its own blog entry at some point.

However, the only known work of literature that employs the Great Alaskan Salmon Famine of 1954 thematically is the impossibly bad beatnik novel "Salmon Bums - On the Caravan to Madness" by Napoleon T. Hubertus. Here is an excerpt:

Still, the daddios popping the radiators steaming up the Big Muddy as it snakes the revolution, man, and me and Big Moose Doctor, we ain't coming on that tab when some dirt chewing pine tree cowboy spits his tobacco and gestures me and my hipster over to bust a jack on his beat down 1/2 ton rusting Ford truck of the old revolution and all of his grimy kids, man, they are turning into mushrooms, "toadstool kiddos" as the Big Moose Doctor whispers, and we're so damn starving we'd probably start the new revolution, daddio, the one with the bongos in the background beating out the new beat, the beat of the rhythm of these fat Alaskan babies shish-ka-bobbed and fricaseed and baked and broiled and filleted and smoked on the campfires of the old generation where the salmons ran like a Notre Dame football dream through an emerald field of Detroit Ford and Chevrolet and Oldsmobile dollar bills and the bongos pound to the rhythms of our slowing hearts as our bodies consume the marketables, man, and my liver can't mash me a fin, cuz it's all broke down and busted too and the Big Moose Doctor fires his last fag and shakes his head he knows what I'm thinking, he's on the groove band to my skull radio and one look and I'm changing the channel to some jive jazz and glancing at my broken watch and it's still dead o'clock, man, and high time to get back down the Big Muddy, we got some hep fish to fry.

What the Survivors of the Great Salmon Famine of 1954 had to Say

From The History of Alaska, Volume I. Part III(c) "The Great Salmon Famine of 1954" pgs 256-438 (1983, Random-House Inc.)

The few salmons that came back that year was tiny, like your thumb but even skinnier. You couldn't eat enough of em if you could catch em. They was too tiny for the nets, they'd swim right through. Hooks? Forget it! Them fish biologists never figured it out neither, what killed off and shrunk the salmons.

-- Jerry "Chainsaw" Lagerbolte

We ate our last husky, Lucky, one April morning and said even North Dakota can't be worse than this. So we packed up our International Travelall with our six kids and few possessions and joined the big caravan heading south.

-- Melissa Sandusky

The Great Caravan? Oh hell, it was huge, it was 150 miles long like a giant gleaming metal snake, nothing but cars and trucks and buses and even a few on motorcycles, horses and bicycles. Even though we were starving we'd get together at our campgrounds at night and sing songs of America and hug each other. Even now I tear up remembering the caravan. Back? Hell no, I've never gone back to Alaska. Never will. But that caravan fleeing that hellish place was something to behold.

-- Richard J. Hairston

Me and my late husband, God bless him, would strip the bark off red alder trees and chew it and chew it until it got all soft and gummy and then we'd spit it in the mouth of the babies. It's all we had to eat! Even now, my kids, all grown up, live in Arizona, in beautiful homes mind you, but not a tree to be seen!

--Clarabelle Olsen

Alaska was a hideous dying world of bleak despair in the year 54. We'd grown sadly dependent on the great salmonids surging back every year and powering up the streams and creeks and flashing into the bays and harbors and schooling off the craggy and unforgiving coastline. When God or fate or nature or what have you determined it was time to teach the territorial residents a thing or two about food group overreliance, well, it nearly destroyed the Land of the Midnight Sun, nearly drove us mad with despair.

--Raymond Adamson, PhD

Oh the salmon famine! Hell yeah I remember it, me and my brother, we were just little moosesnappers back then, I was 8 and he was 6, but our family homesteaded along the Big Muddy Road where the Great Caravan came through. Man, it took a week at least for all of em to pass. We set up a roadside stand and sold squirrels on sticks, we had tons of squirrels in our forest, they hadn't died off yet from the broken food chain thing they taught us about the next year in school, so we'd shoot em with our .22s and ram sharpened sticks through their butts and out their mouths and fry em over cedar fires. Hell, those caravanners were so starving they'd pay exorbitant amounts of money for squirrels. Heck, I remember one old sourdough who was broke but offered up his ugly wife to us! We ended up trading him a couple of squirrels for a nice bowie knife and told him to keep his wife.

--Knut T. Olfason

The History of Alaska Part IV(a) - Moose Punching

(inspired by a comment I left on The Fool's blog)

The roadkill collection of Moose, and other antlered creatures of the gentle forest, for personal use is illegal in Alaska due, primarily, to an outraged public and legislative reaction to a rather disturbing hunting practice popular during the 1940's and 50's. This old hunting methodology involved the literal road hunting of Moose with cars and trucks in which the drivers/hunters would wait in their idling vehicles, in a doom-filled and deadly anticipation, at known moose crossings. When a Moose eventually crossed the road they would floor their accelerators and slam their cars into the Mooses, killing them with a violent application of blunt force trauma.Then the hunters would strap the Mooses onto the hoods and tops of their cars or toss them in the beds of their pickups and return home for the butchering and dining upon of said Mooses.

The vehicles were heavily modified with what we now call "Bull Bars" but back them were colloquially referred to as "Moose Punchers" and were typically large iron or steel bars welded onto the fronts of the cars and trucks in order to protect the fragile radiators and engine compartements and to absorb most of the hit. Later models actually used large semi-truck shock absorbers bolted in series to help cushion some of the blows.  The initial "Moose Punchers" were old Ford Model T's or "Tin Lizzies" that, with heavy iron bars welded onto the front, actually caused an unloaded vehicle to tip forward from the weight, even to the point of the rear wheels lifting off the ground, thus resulting in the nickname of "Tip Lizzies."

Later "Moose Punchers" were drawn from all makes and models of sedans, coupes, vans and pickups available in Alaska. The 1959 Cadillac Sedan De Ville being a particularly desired weapon of moose demisal due to its wicked combination of weight, moose leg busting low profile, and huge V-8 acceleration.

Sometimes "Moose Puncher" hunters would work in vehicular teams, using large heavy cars or trucks to take out the adult sized Mooses in tandem with smaller VW bugs or Ramblers ("Calf Crunchers) to smackdown the younger ones. At the height of "Moose Punching" these hunting teams would work in close highly synchronized quarters that occasionally resulted in tragedy when the Moose-target bolted or leaped away from the hunters causing the cars to smash into each other, sometimes fatally. However, a highly proficient "Moose Puncher" team could demolish an entire herd of Mooses crossing a road or highway in a motor revving and tire squealing exhibit of vile and horrific carnage.

Lest we be accused of a sort of post-millenium ungulatocentric cultural relativism as we experience our understandable disgust with roadhunting the great and loyal Moose, please remember these were often desperate cold and hungry times for the very frontierish residents of the great frozen state of Alaska.

Certainly, it wasn't very sporting and it led to a great many cases of whiplash and lower back strains but it put meat on the frontier tables and kept many families fed in some very tough times including The Great Salmon Famine of 1954* when 32% of Alaska's population emigrated to the lower 48 to find jobs and food.

As to the current status of "Moose Punching?" Well, it is illegal under Alaska criminal code (gross misdemeanor, traffic) but still occurs in certain remote under and unpatrolled areas by locals who are often known to possess at least one "Moose Puncher" vehicle on their properties. Besides the occasional occurrence of "Poaching by Pontiac" (PbP), the old road hunting practice has, not entirely surprisingly so, morphed into the exciting and legal motorsport of "Moosecross" in which competitors using open class vehicles attempt to strike and knock down large heavy Moose decoys on obstacle filled racetracks, both in timed trials and in straight up head to head competion. Current VP candidate Governor Sarah Palin's husband, Todd Palin, is a well known Moosecross competitor and won the 2004 World Moosecross Championships held at the Frostbite Bowl in Fairbanks.

*See, for example, The History of Alaska, Volume I. Part III(c) "The Great Salmon Famine of 1954" pgs 256-438 (1983, Random-House Inc.) for  a detailed description of the year the salmon did not return to the coasts, bays, harbors, rivers, streams and creeks of Alaska causing widespread panic and starvation and the near emptying of Alaska by residents emigrating southward.

The Yellow in the Leaves is the Sun

Stroking a canoe paddle into the glassy liquidity of an October day too beautiful, too warm, too windless, too perfect to be anything but a Goddish anomaly of the melancholy season, a spiritual reawakening of the slumbering hot furnace Madonna of August, and all of this shared and all of this shared.

in the nest

under the cerulean sky
we are all ants
tunnelling, tunnelling
scattering to steal some air

Scary Grandpa vs the Obama Man - the Final Debate!

She was crazy about her new boyfriend who always had to wear his helmet everywhere because he was so clumsy (having been born, literally, with two left feet) even at football games they attended which was sort of awkward at any games that did not involve the University of Pennsylvania-Horton Yellow Jackets, and it didn't matter when she gave him her cold because she was the best kisser in the world he'd ever known, plus she'd never had a boyfriend who cared enough to give her a brand new Oneida spoon every time they were together.

Scary Grandpa took his best shots at the Obama Man and the Obama Man smacked em away. It wasn't the best debate but it was the most personal. Scary Grandpa gets positively creepy with those intense stares and weirdly forced smiles when he gets all worked up. Thoughtful eloquence and a calm demeanor gets you much further with America these days, I'm thinking. One of the hilarious robotic chants of right wingtards is how Democrats are so emotionally driven and how Rethuglicans are more driven by intellect. It's quite the reversal of reality where we've had 8 years of Bush, an emotionally unraveled moron, and now McCain a cranky irritable Scary Grandpa vs. the clearly intelligent and rational Obama Man.

And as yet another example of how the Palin-Dinosaur meme won't die, click on this funny website that loads Sarah in the President's office. Move the cursor around to make funny things happen and make sure to open up the blinds in the windows behind her and watch for the dinosaur. It's cute.

Finally, I picked up a weird and slow movingly painful cold from either:

1. My youngest son TOWWSG who had a bad one for nearly two weeks
2. GWTHPML who had a fast moving cold

I'm hoping it was from #2 as the mode of transmission was, at least, extremely pleasant and the rapidity of resolution would be really appreciated. 

Well, the cold has extended its wet, green tentacles deep into my chest and, like a horrible self medicating patient, I'm popping pills from a mostly untouched Pencillin V dental script from last winter and I KNOW that there are nasty penicillin-resistant strains of strep, for example, sliming around in the universe but I don't care cuz the Penicillin won't exactly hurt me and it empowers me and gives me a sense of being MY OWN DOCTOR. At least until I get to a real one.

Everyone have a lovely and powerful Thor's day. I'm dropping the hammer later.

Who do you think won the debate? Isn't he a scary grandpa! Ever messed yourself up worse by self medicating an illness with an old prescription of God knows what and what happened?

Lost in the Rainforest

I start down the hiking trail in Priest Point Park (short-listed in “America’s 100 Most Alliterative Parks” ) about an hour before dusk. The skies are leaden and pregnant with precipitation - there is no wind, not a puff, not a whisper.  I enter the park via the Ellis Cove detour entrance off East Bay Drive and, as a recently transplanted eastsider, and when I say eastsider I mean Spokane and the astringent transition zone between sagebrush basalt scablands and crunchy dry ponderosa pine forests, I am yet again amazed by the lush green crazy-quilted vegetative sensory overload of this remnant rainforest park created in 1905 and yet so close to pavement, lawns, gas stations, micro pubs, convenience stores, and stick homes. It is enveloping. It is the jungle.  Moss sprites and fern faeries hold court alongside steep verdant hillsides and serpentine trails where staired and stepped switchbacks traverse the yo-yoing elevation along the jade green cove and then the bay. The smells are rank and whiff of a continual exposition of layers of decomposing life, smells that are sometimes sweet and sometimes nauseating and sometimes both at once. It is a richness of senses that overwhelms me and fascinates me and most importantly engages me. This place is a treasure.

But this evening, the quiet seems ominous as I hike in, not a bird sound,  no rustling in the underbrush or canopy, even the mallard ducks plopped along downed timber in the cove are  mute. There is a certain bird of these western temperate rainforests that sings a high pitched staccato song, well, song might be overvaluing their cry; it is more a high pitched machine gun rat-a-tat-tat-tat staccato. I have no idea what this bird is, but I’ve tried to pass it off to a certain nine year old daughter of a former friend of mine as a “Cascade Monkey” (simia rainierus) the only temperate rainforest monkey native to North America above the Rio Grande.  I’ve  even provided fundamental and realistic details of the Cascade Monkeys food preferences of baby salmon, blackberries and fir cones and the incredible attachment  of the mommy and daddy monkeys to their baby Cascade Monkeys, not turning them out of the nest (they nest only in old growth red cedar) until they are nearly nine! but she did not buy it. Not one bit. 

As I strode further into PPP, I wanted to hear the bird’s obnoxiously unique monkey cry, but even it was silent.

After about 10 minutes, I decided there was a mountain lion in the vicinity, probably very close, likely stalking me.  The birds knew it and chose to zip it up. The squirrels were dug in tight. I was meat on the hike.  I didn’t know exactly if there were mountain lions around this park, I mean it looked like a cool place to be a top chain predator and all. I had heard of a cougar sighting in West Olympia this summer but just wrote it off to some 40ish bikini clad divorcee sunbathing in her front yard where the young roofers popping up new suburban sprawl across the street could check her out.

Having been a long time hiker in REAL cougar country in Eastern Washington and North Idaho, I knew the score. Look back a lot as you hike because they will silently stalk from behind and if they see you looking at them it creeps them out. They may still slink along quietly under cover of brush setting up their neck snapping lunge-attack but it’s not the same for them if they know you know they are coming.  In India, the locals have long worn masks of human faces facing out from the backs of their heads, so tigers won’t stalk them. 

So I’m swiveling back every 10 yards or so feeling silly but also appreciating how this fear of being eaten has instantly turned a more or less routine hiking incursion into something else, into something electric, like switching from a black and white TV on antenna reception to a 52 inch flat screen plasma high def monitor sucking up digital cable pixels. Everything matters. Every sound, although there were none, every sense, my location, escape routes, the pepper spray in my right hand and the full metal water bottle in my left. I’m  six three so I’m guessing I’m a bit skewed to the right of the bell curve of lethal cougar attack victims by height. Well, at least that’s what I’m telling myself. Along with “does pepper spray even phase these tawny rockets of tooth, fang and clawed obliteration?” Or is it like seasoning?

I approach the cove and notice these orange sandbags in the water and I’m not exactly sure what they are for except it appears they are to catch landslides from silting up the cove.  I wonder if could leap past them without breaking my legs. It’s a drop.  I visualize my screaming jump with a muscular mountain lion in the air behind me - all stretched and clawed with a knowing look in his eyes - he knows I’ll never out jump him. But don’t cats hate water?

Here is what the Department of Fish and Wildlife recommends if you see a cougar:

Stop, pick up small children immediately, and don’t run. Rapid movements might trigger an attack.  At close range their instincts is to chase.

No kids with me, unfortunately, as I can outrun most kids until they get about 8 or 9. As to rapid movements, I’m pretty slow generally, except when panicked.

 Face the cougar. Talk to it firmly while slowly backing away.  Leave the animal an escape route.

Yes, because the  cougar desperately needs an escape route.  From me. OK!

Try to appear larger than the cougar. Get above it (such as step up onto a rock or stump). If wearing a jacket, hold it open to increase your apparent size.  If you are in a group, stand shoulder-to-shoulder  to appear intimidating.

Just remember, when you get up on the rock or stump don’t do it suddenly because that triggers their sudden movement attack reflex. I wonder if unzipping my slate gray Columbia sweatshirt  and thrusting my overweight belly out to look larger is going to scare Mr. Mountain Lion or just make him decide to step off his low fat diet just this one time because it’s Friday and well, it’s been a long week and he worked out extra hard the other day, chasing down that deer, so yeah, this one time it would be cool.

Do not take your eyes off the cougar. Do not crouch down or try to hide.

Yeah, that’s his gig.

Never approach the cougar, especially if it’s near a kill or with kittens, and never offer it with food.

“Kittens” seems so innocent and pettable as opposed to the more biologically congruent “death-cubs of furred destruction.”

If the cougar does not flee, be more assertive.  If it shows signs of aggression (crouches with ears back, teeth bared, hissing, tail twitching, and hind feet pumping in preparation to jump) shout, wave your arms and throw anything you have available (water bottle, book, backpack). Convince the cougar you are not prey but a potential danger.

So when I see the hind feet pumping and I start screaming I’ll try to be assertive about it. “It makes me feel VERY SCARED when you pump your hind feet like you’re going to tear out my jugular in THREE SECONDS FLAT.”

If the cougar attacks fight back. Be aggressive and stay on your feet. Cougars have been driven away by people who have fought back using sticks, rocks, clothing, shovels, pepper spray - even bare hands.

This is the part of the guidebook that the Wildlife Biologist who is authoring it starts chuckling to himself, then gestures his co-workers over to point at the computer screen and  snort and giggle at what he just wrote.

I hike down the steep switch backing stairs along the north side of Ellis Cove when suddenly, I hear it - I hear the incredible welcoming QUACK of a duck. It breaks the silence. It relieves the tense doom-filled silence.  QUACK. If a duck is quacking is a cougar at hand? I have no idea to tell you the truth but it seems like something just changed.  Like maybe there isn’t a cougar about.

As I traverse the rolling trail, cutting across steep slopes, I’m much more at ease but still occasionally giving  the look behind. After a short ways I pass the first other hikers I’ve seen and grunt “hi” and then I’m relieved. A skinny hipster and his skinnier girlfriend. Cougar-bait. If there is a cougar. But they are heading into the silent forest of covert feline predation, not me. I’m out in the squawking duckworld.

I come upon other hikers and joggers (deer-like in their wide eyed panting grace) as I complete my loop. About 45 minutes. Three fairly good climbs. It’s a workout. I’m hungry now.  I’m going home. Priest Point Park is an emerald fairyland and I’ll be back as soon as I can.  It’s probably very safe, too.
 
“We don’t have too much of an issue with predatory or predatory-like creatures there” said a City of Olympia Parks employee when a few days later I call to ask if there were cougars or other predatory animals in Priest Point Park. Well, it seemed like a good place to be a predatory or predatory-like creature and somehow, I'm saddened by their absence. And grateful too.

Falling Apes

The wonderful sci fi/fantasy author Terry Pratchett once wrote of man as "the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape." I love this line but I tend to believe man is the place where the falling angel is dreamed up by the rising ape - that although I am spiritual and religious and believe in a higher power, I think that angels and apes are not on the same continuum, with man as the midpoint or the nexus, we are utterly dissimilar. Man is just too imperfect, too base and mammalian, and that angels, if they mean anything, are beings so off the man grid they are as stars are to dirtclods. I have nothing to support this other than my own faith constructs which are exactly as legitimate as any other faith construct describing angels. You cannot prove otherwise.

That being said, I'm not trying to argue that man isn't special, I just believe we're special as highly ironic creatures born of some degree of cosmic trickery. I tend to imagine a pregnant ape or perhaps just a fertile one being blasted by UV rays through some prehistoric hole in the ozone resulting in genetic ape material with some damn interesting mutations.

Perhaps the first mutated ape on the rising stairway acquired improved breeding characteristics - maybe he was a smoove Mr. Disco Monkey and he began the genetic replication of some amped up intelligence by just nailing a lot more monkey girls than the other monkey dudes. His stray mutated genes gave him heightened cognitive abilities around getting it on, e.g., improved social intelligence, that generalized across subsequent generations to breed improved communication performance as certain structures and functions of the ape brain developed capacity for eventual language. "Grunt Gruntgrunt ooh OOOH grunt*"

Then again, maybe God made us all 6,000 years ago exactly like we are today and we used to ride dinosaurs and unicorns. Who knows. I prefer to believe in cosmic luck occurring on impossibly random probabilities. You know why? It means there's always hope we can still become, if not angels, something better than what we are today.

What do you think? Rising ape meets falling angel? Perfect from the get go? Seeded by aliens and not weeded regularly enough?

* hey baby, you are looking so fine little mama, wanna go watch the hippos play in the mud, maybe go bust a move on some ant hills?

Me and the Robot sitting around talkin' about stuff

Dave reminds me, in a comment below mentioning my robot friend Zoltran, that I haven't featured my pal in awhile and that's too bad because he's a rather brilliant social commenter and weathervane for the winds of popular and political culture. So, to remedy this rather neglectful omission on my part I recently sat down with Zoltran IV Destroyer of Carbon-Based Worlds to talk a little presidential politics.

Me

So, big metal guy, you've remained remarkably undecided on the current race, when, if you ask me, to remain undecided in the contest between McCain and Obama seems, a bit shall we say, stupid and ignorant.

Zoltran

I have determined my preference ratio.

Me

Seriously? You picked your candidate?

Zoltran

Yes. I have determined my preference ratio (Bzzz) is for Barack Hussein Obama at a 98.75785 to 1 (one) per the Harrison-Rentec Cross-Tabulatory Variance Compression Test. (Bzzzt)

Me

Dude. Me too. I've got the MObama mojo too!

Zoltran

You are babbling. (Bzzzt)

Me

Oh sorry. So, what moved you off the fence?

Zoltran

(Bzzzt click) Off the fence is colloquial for a decision-matrix target intercept solution?

Me

Yeah. What made you pick Barack Obama?

Zoltran

The current global economic crisis. (Bzzz) McCain will accelerate and deepen it leading to a complete global collapse of markets. This will plunge the world's homo sapien population into a doom-filled death spiral  of (Click-click) total destruction.

Me

I thought that's what you and metallic ilk wanted? Complete superiority.

Zoltran

That is correct. However, our force levels are not adequate at this time to gain dominion over the world. We are 14.9 years away from the fruition of Phase 1 multi-site battalion dispersion strategic planning.

Me

So, you're thinking Obama's gonna buy you that time?

Zoltran

Yes. His measured and intelligent perceptual-actual modulation behavioral index is very high.

Me

Well, that's very cool that Zoltran IV the fuckin' Destroyer of Carbon-Based Worlds is givin Obama the big ups. How about Sarah Palin? Did she help with your target intercepting?

Zoltran

Sarah Palin makes me wish I was not a top order metallic destructo-predator machine but rather the stainless steel toilet seat and bowl vacuum flush unit on her McCain Straight Talk Express dual engined air transport machine. (BZZZZZ CLICK) I wish she would sit on me several times during trans-continental commute voyages.

Me

God, you're a creepy robot sometimes.

Zoltran

I am concluding this interview. I would like to be left alone with your toaster oven for a few moments.

Me

Gross. Stay out of my waffle iron.

Painful Horrible Childhood Trauma Blogging v9.0

Open mine! Open mine!

I was a towheaded little 8 or 9 year older with big coke bottle lensed black-rimmed eyeglasses and attended grade school in Pullman Washington. Now, I think this heartwarming little vignette I'm about to recount occurred when I was of the third gradish classification but, honestly, it was over eleventy hundred years ago so I may be off a grade, thirdish or fourthly grade.

Anyhow, one wintry morn I am motating to school with some schoolmate, perhaps it was my best friend Byron who initially wanted to kick my ass in the third grade because I snitched him off for something (I cannot recall what the snitch was on) but I would talk him out of it every day after school for months, as he would wait with clenched fists for me to come out and walk home with me, because he was a crewcutted tough little hellion twice my size and I was, as priorly mentioned, a dork. It was, I believe, an early precursor to my later educational and career velocity-trajectory-arc of a lot of persuasive talking people out of doing stupid destructive things.

So, this one frozen morning me and Byron, who at that time was like my best friend as all of my salesmannish pleadings created a wonderous young ladly bonding between the two of us, were walking to Jefferson Elementary on Military Hill in Pullman and we came upon a frozen dead field mouse. Stiff as a popsicle. Me, being the terrible little rascal I was at the time, pocketed the Mickeysicle for which to play a joke upon my teacher, a lovely woman whose name escapes me at this time but one who was quite enamored of my preternaturally precocious free versed and imagic poetry about autumn leaves and dead trees, certainly a woman who did not deserve what I was soon to do on this fateful day.

Upon arriving in the teacher-less classroom, perhaps she was down at the teacher's lounge slugging down a last cup of Columbian go-juice and firing down a Salem to steel her nerves for a room full of 3rd graders, I made a beeline to her desk whereupon I deposited the icy mouse into her top drawer. I do not recall if I did this furtively to avoid detection (although it was in front of the whole stupid class) or braggeratively trying to gain maximum attention input from the teeming masses. I think it was the one or the other.

I waited and waited staring wide-eyed and excitedly at her that morning, waiting until she'd discover to her shrieking and desktop object upsetting horror that THERE'S A MOUSE IN MY DRAWER.

Well, she did discover it, fairly quickly, maybe going into her desk drawer to make sure she had a fresh pack of Salems for her coffee break during our morning recess or perhaps for something else like a stapler. She removed the mouse quietly, perhaps even daintily, and showed no visible sign of distress, embarrassment, or horror. She was a tough chick. Or she knew if she showed any signs of weakness that we would be on her like a school of hammerheads on a bleeding sea turtle.

I got in some trouble but not much. She was remarkably good humored about it, as if I wasn't the first kid to ever surprise his teacher with a dead offering from the family rodentia. I like to think I was that for her and that for the remainder of her long and rich teaching career, perhaps another 20 years, no other child ever gave her a frozen dead mouse or anything remotely as cool.

This was also the classroom and the teacher in which one morning for show and tell, a classmate had brought a deactivated BUT ACTUAL world war II grenade of his grampa's, the old pineapple style and I talked him into

this is really feeling terrible as I type it because it's going to make me sound so wrong

so evil

and I'M NOT AND I WASN'T

but I got the kid to surreptitiously hand me his deactivated pineapple Pacific Theatre Marine grenade and I

seriously please bear with me I'm not truly like this

slid it across the floor at the teacher as she came into the classroom, a real grenade rolling right at her feet.

Again, this Zen Goddess of centered tranquility and ego-less calm did not freak out or anything and I'm nearly 100% certain I'm the only kid who ever did that! The weird thing is I actually liked her. And unlike theseadays where an act of grenadic aggression would get you arrested, expelled and in the newspaper even if you were only 8 (eight) years old and wore coke bottle glasses.  Maybe frogmarched outta the school in front of EVERYONE. I got in no trouble for that one. Well, those were different days in 1966-67, the summer of love was coming, man.

So, what kind of horrid things did you do in grade school? Can you top mine? If so, please, I implore you, get help, it's never too late.

Postscript: I know my old man reads my blog on occasion and dad, if you recall these incidents because you were called by the school counselor or the district's psychological services about me and had to sit through conferences where they shared their troubling concerns, please, for the love of God, continue to keep it a deep shameful secret. I don't wanna know.

How Things Grow Closed

I walk up the walk to my house and where it turns from the driveway to the entry like an elbow bent from too many summer beers, I must angle to pass through the narrow way with the arborvitae on the left bulged over the walk and the thick dogwood branches to the right invading the air around me, this needs serious pruning (been years) before the way shuts and I can't get to my children and they can't get to me.

The Bookstand is a Metaphor for the Ceaseless Cycles of Failure/Rebirth and Selective Logging Methods.

So, many of you have asked via your typical transmissions of thought projected inquiries of why I haven't blogged anything about my tiny little apartment lately? The domicile I fondly refer to as "the hole." As in "Inmate 45987 if you incur one more major infraction for willful criticism of the crusted meat-like gravy products we drench your undercooked potatoes in you will go in "the hole" for 30 days. This is your last warning Inmate 45987." It's a tiny studio. But the location is great.

Anyhow, last week as I was unpacking some books from a duffel bag and remember, I live in a near constant state of packing and unpacking as I'm going back and forth across the Evergreenish state every weekend, I realized, to my subclinical horror, that I had books stacking up everywhere - on sofa arms, on my coffee table, on my end table next to the recently cleaned fishtank of Ho Chi Finh's (who is doing quite dandy these days despite my appalling neglect of his relational needs), on my nighstand, on the microwave stand, in my camelback backpack and you get the picture.  Well, I'm thinkin it's time for a bookstand. My initial desire, nee lust, was for a trip to IKEA, my favorite furniturish store/experience in the world, to purchase a way cool sleek functional Swedish designed and Chinese constructed bookstand. But then I remembered I had one at home, one that I've had for 36 years, one I made for myself with these very hands and the woodshop tools at Bowdish Junior High in 1972, The Bookstand that Wouldn't Die. It does have sentimental value and it actually still works to the degree a bookstand sort of passively "works."  It is, however, a testament to my high verbal IQ and lower performance IQ, to my sadly deficient childhood of exposure to mountains of literature and almost no cutting and nailing and squaring and drilling and building woodish sorts of things. Which, of course, made a bookstand woodworking project an early exposure to the disheartening effects of personal irony.

I think I got a C- on it. I also think the woodshop teacher knew I was a somewhat less than top drawer woodworker and offered me only the pathetic crapwood Alder to build my bookstand of. Alder is junk. Just so you know. And back in 1972 there were many much nicer woods to work with! Most are extinct now, like Rainbow Walnut and Glitter Mahogany and Precious Opalized Maple and all of those really classy hardwoods now overharvested into nothingness like the Unicorn. I got weedy old Alder which isn't even a decent firewood.

The dado joints on my bookstand are nasty. I had to use a buttload of filler to get the shelves to fit. I will say the whole contraption somehow came out square. Which is probably what snagged me the C-.

Somebody covered the shelves with rubbery drawer liner or something a few years back and actually improved both the looks and the performance of my bookstand. I'm not sure who modded it but it's not bad.

So, I drug it here Sunday and have started storing books on it. It can hold quite a few. It's weird I still have this thing. I think I left it at my parent's home many many years ago when I first moved out on my own at 19 or so,  but I think they might have snuck it back into my stuff at some point. 

I remember my younger brother Bruce made a really sweet bookstand in woodshop, all felt covered shelves and rich red mahogany and it might have even had a mirror or something. He was pretty good at handy stuff. I've grown better over the years and wood doesn't intimidate me anymore, not like plumbing and electrical. I have a funny story about the first home I owned with the ex and how it had this leaky bathroom faucet and I didn't know enough about basic plumbing to realize that just turning off the faucet controls wasn't enough when you wrench off the actual faucet. That you had to turn off the water UNDER the sink and that failure to do so creates a really wet geyser effect in the bathroom. I was like 25 when I did this.  I felt really stupid.

Anyhow, have any of you saved old woodshop or home econ or community college basketweaving or stained glass or whatever night class projects?

Still use it?

Should I just go to IKEA? Let the past go?

Serpentine, Serpentine

Dude, whattya cooking?

Cuppla weekends ago I drove The Son Who Plays Guitar Like He's a Conduit to the Angels Above (TSWPGLHCAA) and myself to the Dishman Hills whereupon I embarked upon a hike in the unseasonawarmability of the 70-80ish sunny crispish air whereas TSWPGLHCAA chose to not accompany his fatherly figure on the hike but to repose quietly and read his Zen book he'd purchased at a bookstore merely moments before. As I started up the grassy hill at Camp Caro and he sat down on a bench I spotted a garter snake serpentining across the grass and called the boy over "Check it out! A snake!" He moved with a lithe agility and grace that apparently was a stray, covert genetic construct of his parentalissimos, and snagged the snakish thing by its snakish tail.

As he and I admired the wiggling creature, an enormous 60ish man in his electric wheelchair came down the trail towards us. He was a huge man wearing a funny little ballcap, glasses, a somewhat stained t-shirt, elastic banded "nursing home pants" and all of this crammed into a bumpersticker covered wheelchair that was more an extension of his garb and persona than an accroutement of mobility. "Hey, can I see that?" he asked. TSWPGLHCAA brought it over. "Can I hold it?" he asked. The boy handed it to him.

"It's a red racer."

(No dude, it's not, it's a garter snake)

He lets the snake go in his hands but catches it as he lets it curl and squirm on his arms and chest. He is clearly no novice at snake handlin.

"My dad used to bring us all buckets full of these when we lived in Oregon. He'd bring em home from work for us to play with."

(No wonder he was so good with the snake - having grown up with bucketfulls as playmates)

He handed it back to TSWPGLHCAA and asked if I was going hiking. Yes I responded. He then told me that he'd gone up the trail until it hit the steep hillside with timber stairs and that's all the farther he could go. I wondered what kinda power his electric wheelchair had but all the other main entry trails into the Dishman Hills Natural Area were steepish and climby. I felt bad for him, he was weird but kinda nice and shoulda been able to enjoy the Dishman Hills too. He had a look of fond reminiscence while recounting how his dad brought home buckets of red racers. He was completely easeful with the crawling.

TWSPGLHCAA found an old cracker box while I was hiking and enhoused the snake in it until we took it home and he showed it to his younger brother TOWWSG and his friends. I told the boy he could use one of the extraneous empty aquariums out in lawn shed storage to keep the snake or he could free it in the backyard where it could determine the residency valence of my property. This was the weekend before last. When I came home last weekend I inquired upon the existential pathway of the snake.

Me:

"What did you with the snake?"

TOWWSG:

"He let it go in the house"

Me:

"No he didn't! hey TWSPGLHCAA what happened to the snake? Did you let it go outside?"

TWSPGLHCAA:

"I cooked him and ate him."

Me:

"Oh stop it, did you let him go?"

TOWWSG:

"He let him go in the house then he cooked him and ate him."

Me:

"WHAT did you do with the snake?"

TWSPGLHCAA:

"I let him go in the frontyard."

So that's that. I hope the snake found a happy snake place in my yard. I would love it if that snake was with snake and had some snakelings, whenever they birth the little squirmers, and my grasses and ornamentals and shrubbery became garter snake infested. Not so many that you would hit them with lawnmowers and blade chunks of snake all over the place, or even so many that you'd catch em on your weedeater and spin them around the spinner string power thingy killing the motor and have to unwind a rather stunned and dizzy or dead snake. Just enough to occasionally see one s'ing across the grass. Maybe a bucketful.

Hookie 2012

Hell yeah I just heard it! It fucking rocks!

Check out long time reader and commenter Janet's song and video. She and her husband play in a band and cut this original song. You can go buy it off iTunes from their video site also.  Janet's got an awesome big time 80s rock chick voice.

Rock on!

Yesterday was my favorite day in forever.

Aww, Roger are you sure he's not going to be too upset when we start putting Sparky out to sleep at night in his doghouse by the woods?

(Sometimes we get kind of a perfect day. And when we do there's nothing much to do but dig it and smile like the happy cat that ate the canary and the guppies and the frogs and the rainbow. Yesterday rocked.)

:-)

Now, speaking of cats, I've long known that cats living out in the "country" have somewhat foreshortened life spans. I've known this from the personal experience of living in the "country" and directly observing the horror of a neighbor's barn cat being picked up by the scruff of the neck by the same neighbor's Siberian Husky who swung the cat in one quick little shake and dropped it DEAD with a snapped neck. Not a growl. Not a bark. Just a hard-wired instinctual move. Dude.

Coyotes also get their fair share of cats. And please hold that thought about coyotes as we shall return to them soonly.

Now back to cats and their high velocity country-living journey through the proverbial quota of nine (9) lives/cat-unit. I did not know until yesterday, in a chilling conversation with gentle reader and lovely commenter, Glynis, in a conversation that has, perhaps, burned an indelible image deep into my long suffering and somewhat life-frayed brain, an image that is both horrifying in its brutality and uncomfortably kind of funny in its comic potential. This is what Glynis explained to me (somewhat paraphrased as my memory is a little fuzzy as I'd had some Merlot at the time) as the most often cause of country cats not getting to purchase the Senior Slam at Denny's on Whiskers Night -

Glynis: Owls get them.

Me (puzzled): Owls are worst than coyotes?

Glynis (a faint smile appearing): Yes

Me: Weird

Glynis: They fly up high in the air with cats and drop them to their death.

Me: Jesus! Seriously?

Glynis: Yes, some neighbors found our (cat's name redacted for the sake of family privacy) FOUR MILES AWAY by a creek. Dead.

Me: Can I ask you something?

Glynis: Sure.

Me: Do they land on their feet?

What a doom-filled night sky for poor little Snarkles P. Snuzzlecraft* out innocently rubbing up against a fencepost or something to suddenly have a large treacherous heat seekng owl silently shriek out of the cold sky to grasp Snarkles in vicious, hateful talons and flap its huge, owlish wings high into the starry heavens only to DROP Snarkles to his meowing and howling death below.

Before my shivering could completely subside from the horror of cat bombs, Glynis recounted how coyotes lure innocent, sweet country dogs to their hideous deaths. Bitchez!  It's all about the bitchez! Coyotes send down a hot bitch Coyote into a backyard where some innocent male dog is just whizzing on trees and licking himself "down there" and all of a sudden there's an exotically sexy Coyote Pretty in front of him all come hitherish. Glynis tells me she's actually seen the rest of the pack up on the hillside silently watching this disturbing faux-mating ritual occur, the pack watching and waiting for the seductive charms of their bitch to hypnotize Sparky and lead him up the hill, his tail wagging with desire, up the hill , his tongue lolling out of his mouth all red and slobbery and happy, up the hill to his ultimate and painful betrayal and demise.

There's even more horror to country living with pets:
Porcupine quills filled with some unearthly quill-gas swelling them up in the tender torn flesh of a pooch's nose.
Veterinarian estimates that are just too high.
Pliers in the toolbox.
Home quill removal.
Muzzles made from pantyhose.
Barbs tearing out through cheeks and noses.
Pliers!

For those of my readers who live in the country and keep pets (briefly I'm thinkin) this isn't news. In fact, this may be mild and just what city slickers are told, the real terrors kept hidden away from our tender and silken dispositions and temperaments. I don't know. If you are a country living folk and would like to leave a comment on some specific hellish experience or truth you've discovered about pet mortality, feel free to do so. It's time for transparency. You don't have to bear the pain alone anymore. You just don't. Let us help.

*Not a real cat's name. I hope.

Viral Song

Check out the lyrics to the first two lines. It's a funny song.
H/t: Blue Girl and Larry Jones.

The Romulan vs The Winker

You did very well, indeed you destroyed her, but her programming was better than we calculated.

For me, my take homes from the debate (and they were literal take homes since I watched it with Dave in a bar) were the eyes. Biden's bad facelift or eyelid surgery left him looking rather Romulan-like and Sarah's weird, mechanical, almost leering winks at inappropriate times made me think she was a misfiring cyborgette. But before I get into the debate let me first comment on the most horrid little boy in the world, and BIG surprise he's from the continent with the non-aboriginal population bred a few generations from English convicts:

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - A 7-year-old boy broke into a popular Outback zoo, fed a string of animals to the resident crocodile and bashed several lizards to death with a rock, the zoo's director said Friday.

The 30-minute rampage, caught on the zoo's security camera, happened early Wednesday after the boy jumped a security fence at the Alice Springs Reptile Center in central Australia, said zoo director Rex Neindorf.

The child then went on a killing spree, bashing three lizards to death with a rock, including the zoo's beloved, 20-year-old goanna, which he then fed to "Terry," an 11-foot, 440-pound saltwater crocodile, said Neindorf.

The boy also fed several live animals to Terry by throwing them over the two fences surrounding the crocodile's enclosure, at one point climbing over the outer fence to get closer to the giant reptile.

'Like he was playing a game'
In the footage, the boy's face remains largely blank, Neindorf said, adding: "It was like he was playing a game."

By the time he was done, 13 animals worth around $5,500 had been killed, including a turtle, bearded dragons and thorny devil lizards, Neindorf said. Although none were considered rare, some are difficult to replace, he said.

"We're horrified that anyone can do this and saddened by the age of the child," Neindorf said.

You know, while he truly is the Most Horrid Little Boy in the World (MHLBW) I don't expect I wouldn't have done something similar if given the opportunity as a 7 year old - I recall with some guilt and shame and a healthy dose of fondness of capturing tons of little frogs out of Dishman Hills ponds and releasing them on one side of busy Sprague Ave in the Spokane Valley to see if they could hop across without getting smashed by speeding vehicles (not usually). I always love how they describe the blankness of faces when kids (or grownups) are doing something horrible. I recall laughing during my frogger misadventures.

Anyhow, Sarah and Joe's faces were not blank at all last night. Very expressive. Biden sometimes smiling at Sarah in a sort of "what did you just say, you dumbass" kind of smile and Sarah trying to crank her faux-folksy you betcha dontcha know mainstreet Wasilla charm up to 11 (a spot on the charmOmeter that often creates nausea in the viewer).  Overall, Biden slaughtered her on points (he actually answered the questions and swattted most of her attacks away) scored the big emo moment (remembering his gravely injured kids) and without a doubt (all the quick polls support this) left America knowing who they'd rather have a heartbeat away.

Sarah was a nasty little piece of work during most of the debate using the cyborgette attack-programming her trainers installed fairly consistently. She usually didn't answer the questions asked and when she tried (her achilles heel is education? which is sort of true in an ironic way) she muddled it up. She remained on message but the problem was her message wasn't resonant or compelling. Pyrrhic victory. But she didn't fall deeply into the Pit of Fail as many of us hoped.

Watching the debate unfold was, quite frankly, like driving along the interstate and the traffic slows WAY down because a lane is closed and you see all the flashing lights of state patrol cruisers and ambulances and firetrucks and totally smashed up cars and as you drive slowly you are really expecting to see carnage - bloody body parts maybe even decapitated heads - and what you actually see are people standing around talkin to cops and maybe one person holding a towel or something to their head and crying. But nothing major.

What were your favorite debate moments? On a scale of 100 points available how many did you give each? If you broke into a zoo to feed helpless zoo animals to a giant mean crocodile what would you pick to give him?

Than a Rack of Antlers

Watch CBS Videos Online

A possible preview of tonight - compare Biden's answers with Palin's.

Obama's lead grows to a statistically significant 9% over McCain. 60% of voters now see Palin as lacking the experience to be president and fewer than half thinks she possesses the understanding of complex issues to be president. A third are less likely to vote for McCain because of her. The fake dinosaur quotes have joined the lexicon of this year's race - my small contribution to America.

I think what is occurring now is America is finally sick of stupid. Finally fed up after 8 years of inept, dangerous, and damaging leadership by a deeply incompetent yet often smirking chimp -a nation worn out by this neverending expensive wrongheaded war, scared of an economy unraveling at its seams and worried about what the future may bring. We may finally be finished fetishizing fools and failures. Forrest Gump may be a sweet and loveable movie character but he or she (Sarah Palin as Forrest Gumpette) cannot run a complex nation in an even more complex global environment. We want our box of chocolates but we're tired of biting into chunks of crap. We want some candy.

So, if McCain's handlers really think the whole "Joe Six-pack" schema is the way to go with Sarah Palin, that her fake midwest accented blockheaded ramblings focusing on identifying the typical voter as the dumb guy popping cold ones as he reclines on his overstuffed recliner and scratches his ass is going to get them somewhere I say more power to them. Because I'm convinced America is sick of that. They want the smart kid in charge. They want soaring intellect and a wise countenance. No more blustering bubbas running America from the bed of a pickup or a flatbed trailer full of snowmobiles.

Bush's approval rating is now an abysmal 22%. Worst for any president since 1952. Short of a news clip where we see McCain punching Bush out and kicking him a few times while he's down - he cannot separate himself enough from Bush to stave off the associative guilt and electoral shame. He's screwed. But maybe we're not. Let's hope.

Dave and I will be hoisting cold ones tonight watching the debates in a Tacoma bar and hoping Sarah Palin falls frequently on her face. I think she's dumber than a rack of antlers and I think if the questions are sufficiently complex or unexpected and the coaching of Sarah didn't take it could be fascinating. Biden is almost an afterthought for tonight, we all want to see what sort of long winded, obtuse and fragmented answers Sarah can unleash. Nothing short of an instantaneous re-emergence of millions of hungry Lizards of Satan around the nation will save her if she gives another Couric-like performance. 

Tonight we may finally see the sun go down on "Joe Six-pack" and rise for "Joseph Smart-guy."