Instead of having a boy zipping around outside on his Razor Scooter he won at his boy's club, or running up occasionally to my room for smooches, he could have ended up as a pile of components in scarlet ichor, in a stainless steel sink in an abattoir somewhere. Yes, the wife and I would have been denied some of the hardest, most gut-wrenching years of our lives. But Nat wouldn't have a big brother to play Sorry with, and a buddy to help her make forts in the living room.
If a child dies after birth, it is a tragedy. If it is torn from the womb and killed, well...
Here you go, folks. And you better play nice, cuz she's my daughter. Plus, her writing kicks your writings' ass. I know she's giving me a run for my money. Every father dotes on their child, but telling them 'you can do it!' is just cruel, if they can't. And sooner or later, they will figure out that you are a lying asshole.
About four of you know who she is. Keep it to yourself, or face oblivion. Sweet child O' Mine, might I suggest you unlimber a credit card, and pay the whopping $12 fee for a Haloscan Premium membership? Nobody (including me) likes to do that word verification bullshit to comment.
He rushed in, just barely ahead of grasping dead hands, and slammed the door until the bolts clicked. He noted several gray fingers wiggling on the floor, like grubs, still trying to get to him. He whooped in great gasps of superheated air, air that actually hurt his lungs, but he had just run up ten flights of stairs, and even hot air was precious.
And then the usual pounding began. Relentless dead fists, that would, absolutely would not stop until their owners were feasting on his torn flesh. He knew better than to lean against an entryway wall...they sensed you there, and went into a frenzy...and then the first fist broke through the door, the hand reaching blindly for...anything. Something to eat. Him.
He pulled his razor sharp machete and lopped that arm off at the forearm, like cutting a dried salami in half. As the hand headed towards the floor to join its much smaller brethren, still wiggling there, he noted with some detachment that it was a right hand, that the arm did not react or bleed when it passed over the jagged teeth of broken wood, and then it pulled back, and he began to hear the exposed bones of the forearm cracking against the outside of the door in concert with the other hungry, pounding fists.
The man sprinted as quietly as he could into the far left bedroom of the apartment. He had known that this day was likely inevitable, and he didn't want them to see him, if possible. His mere presence drove them crazy, when they spotted him, it drove them to superhuman efforts.
He climbed the ladder that he had set up to a hole he had made previously in the ceiling, and as quietly as he could, he pulled the ladder up after him, and positioned the piece of ceiling over the hole, and then lit a small, scented votive candle both to mask his scent, and give him light to traverse the crawlspace that led to the roof.
Once up, he quietly made his way to the shelter he had made out of opaque Visqueen, where a refrigerator and a small A/C hummed quietly, well away from his gas cans and other supplies. Outside, a Honda generator hummed. When he had first turned all this stuff on, his dead friends had gone berserk, clotting the streets below, but unable to get in, because they couldn't figure it out. They're dumb, they're all messed up. Eventually, they wandered off, and sometimes you'd hear the horrified screams of some unlucky survivor. Or survivors.
Now, he was pretty sure he was alone in the city.
He went to the fridge and got a cold beer, and a couple of slices of baloney, and some canned bread, and sat down on his canvas lawn chair and let out a long sigh as he chewed. He had found a butcher shop with its own generator, running, and he had been nurturing it with fuel and regular maintenance ever since. He'd be dead before their stocks ran out. He went and got some French's mustard and slathered it on, and all was right with the world.
Except for that whole Walking Dead thing.
Al Gore had been full of shit. Everybody had been full of shit. Nature hadn't turned on Man, some men had taken a shot at other men, and turned 99% of all mankind into what was likely shuffling around in the apartment somewhere below him about now. Sniffing, looking for that rich, fresh meat.
He listened to ham radio at night, when the asphalt heat sink of the city allowed him to venture out on the roof. Sometimes he heard broadcasts where the broadcaster abruptly stopped, then the screaming began, until the signal disappeared. There was at least one man, at the SETI array, away from it all, who claimed to be a scientist. He also claimed that someone had re-engineered the rabies virus, and that when men in towel hats released it all over the world, well...
The man thought that sounded as plausible as anything else he had heard. Whatever it was, it certainly was infectious. He dreaded winter. He'd have to reinforce his shelter against the weight of snow, and the battering of the wind.
His last thought, as he began to doze off, there in his chair, was "Damn...all things considered, I would have chosen Global Warming."
And things shuffled, blind and hungry, below him...
The kids and their youth group get together every Wednesday at a different park (and we have lots of parks) here in town for a 'play date', and to picnic together.
Last week, some kid punched her in the shoulder. As I understand it, she pretty much waxed the park with him. Today, another boy took his shot. Admittedly, she was apparently being a little bitch about taking turns, but you don't hit girls, especially when you are bigger and older than her.
I hear that she pretty much tenderized him, and he ran off to his mommy.
I don't care what I write, what stand I take, someone (and likely more than one) will dig and dig and search and search until they find that one (and always iffy) exception that apparently thusly invalidates the rule. Jeez...
I don't care what it is, either. I could come out against infant cannibalism, and they will attempt to come up with a position that it is okay in some situations. You watch, in the comments to this post, at least one person is going to tell me that they agree with me all the time, so that invalidates the entire post somehow.
These people used to be the kids in school who 'knew' all the answers, and insisted that everybody recognize that fact.
Oh well, takes all kinds, I suppose. No it doesn't! Yes it does! No it doesn't! Yes it does!
Cats are nasty animals, and dogs are even worse. They lay around with their bare assholes hanging out, and lick them, then lick you with the same tongue...and you nasty fuckers who let your dogs lick you on the mouth just let that little factoid settle in...why don't you just lick your pet's asshole clean for them? Cut out the middleman?
Anyway, your pets rub their assholes on you, and stick them any damn where they want. Let your cat(s) get up on the kitchen counters? Hey, Fluffy just went and took a shit! And buried it with her hands! And then licked them 'clean'! I've told you about my cat Rex, who was sitting on the windowsill looking out at the birds, and I noticed the worms just falling out of his asshole as if it was a pasta maker.
I just opened the window, and chucked him out (we lived in a second floor apartment). Free cat.
So why not pants-train them while they're babies? Of course, dogs would likely look at a diaper as if it was a bag lunch. But when I was a kid, I had a Woolly Monkey, and my Grandma made him some diapers out of cloth diapers, with Velcro tabs, and they worked great. We couldn't let him in the house without them, cuz it was just a nightmare of monkey shit.
I'll likely have pets no more, forever. Well, except fish. And then only if all I have to do is look at them. Birds? Fuck birds. They shit if you look at them funny, and squawk at inopportune times. And the bigger so-called 'smart' birds need more attention than a woman. I'd end up stuffing a pillow with it.
My Daughter-In-Law has a fucking Guinea Pig! They die if you look at them hard, and throwing them is out of the question. At least you can throw a cat. That's how I've trained all of my cats to stay off my bed, and the kitchen counters. And table. A few times of getting launched into the nearest wall, and staggering away going 'meow fuck, oh meow fuck' and they get the idea. Especially as I increase the velocity of the throw each time. Do or die, kitty, your choice. If they refuse to learn, they get a date with Mr .22, and a free dumpster ride.
Anyway, cats: pants. Dogs: no tongue. That will be all.
...and thanks to the ACLU, they can all be your neighbors in New Jersey.
Twice, since I moved here, several police agencies have done sweeps of registered sex offenders, who number in the low thousands around here. Guess how many offenders they find at the addresses the offenders report?
0. That symbol stands for 'zero'. Zip, zero, nada.
The wife is off cleaning an apartment today. I am always stunned at the money she makes doing it. Crap, if I'da known that, I woulda started a business doing it a long time ago. Get a big apartment complex with a high turnover rate, and just work that sucker.
And I ain't giving no 10% of what I make to any church. I tip for value and service received, and a sore ass and a pretty good nap aren't enough to deserve 10% of my income. And besides, God lifted that requirement a long time ago. It drives me nuts when Christians begin to act like they're Jews from 3,000 years ago. Cut it out, it's embarrassing.
The wife and I do not and will never give to a charity. Well, I give to the DAV when I can. They do good work, and I have benefited from them before. What we do, is wait for God to put us in a situation, usually a store, where the woman in front of us is scrabbling through her change purse, finds she doesn't have enough, and starts putting things up on the counter from the cart, as her skinny kids look on sadly.
I'll get the cashiers attention, and if I can, I just pay for the whole cart. If I can't, I offer to pay the difference. The gratitude I get from the little family there is enough to fill up my little black heart for a year. The wife did that one time, paid off the whole cart, then ran into the woman down the road later, sweating as she pushed her cart full of bags towards wherever she lived. The wife pulled up just in front of her, parked, and went and opened her trunk. "C'mon, I'll give you a ride..."
Turns out she and her husband and kids were staying in a garage attic of friends, because their house had burned down, and taken their car with it. Her husband took the bus to and from work as he tried to make enough to start over. The wife went to her friends, and found one of them had a property they could hold off on getting the rent for awhile, and she got their husbands with trucks to move in donated furniture (and some of it looked suspiciously new) and toys and appliances and a decent old car that was just clogging someone's driveway, and...
That's how you do it.
As to the title of this post, when I was a kid, we had everything, and we had nothing. I got a harmonica for my birthday, once. It was a Hohner, and I still have it. I worked my little butt off picking fruit and selling it to housewives door to door. I used to stand under the exhaust vent of the bakery while walking home from school, bathing in that fresh-baked bread smell. That was as close as I got to a donut, unless I collected my pennies, and bought a day old. Which I would nibble on all the way home, which was a goodly distance.
Some kids thought I was rich, because I had a bright yellow slicker, and red rubber overboots, and didn't arrive at school shivering and soaked, like some of the other kids did. But my family couldn't afford the extravagance of a 50cent hot lunch, so Mom made me a lunch every day. Some days, commodity peanut butter and jelly, some days commodity cheese. Some days cottage cheese and sliced olive sandwiches. All sandwiches made from thick slabs of home made bread. And every so often, I got a nickel for milk.
I thought I had things a bit rough, until I heard my grandparents and other old folk reminiscing. About the piece of penny hard candy they somehow managed to buy, and they would pass it around the circle, each child sucking it for a bit, then passing it on. Or a piece of gum, that always started with the eldest, got chewed some, then passed on down, until the youngest could just chaw away.
Then he or she would stick it on the bedpost for the next day, and they'd all get into the bed, oldest in the middle, youngest on the outside. And a fat thunder mug under the bed, that was full of shit and piss by morning. The father usually took on the duties of emptying it, to avoid disgusting accidents. And oh how the old folk would chortle when they related tales of their various fathers having hilarious accidents on the stairs.
Baths, once a week, in a wash-tub, Mom first, then Dad, then the kids from firstborn on down. And when you see pictures of those families, all skinny, looking like refugees...hey, they were normal, healthy American families of the time. Look at photos of WW2 trainees on their first day of basic training. Have you ever been in that good shape?
Well, I'm boring myself, so I'll stop now. I may or may not see you again today.
I had a chance today to go see that new Hellboy movie, and I just did not feel motivated to go through the effort of getting ready, and driving there. Besides, it is devilish hot today...or so I told myself, even though I would have been in the 'new' car which I am told has wonderful air conditioning.
I just checked the temp, and it's 92. Too hot to walk to and from the car in. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. By the way, folks, and apropos of nothing besides my gratitude; thanks for the donations that have allowed the wife to get the new tie-rods she needs and have them installed. She has been a little white around the eyes, lately, worrier that she is, because work has not been coming in for she and her boss/partner.
I guess old folk just up and croak this time of the year, when it's hot. Oh well, people with money and guilt always have a family member dying, who they don't want to take care of themselves.
I have a weird way of communicating with the wife. It used to annoy her, then she got used to it. She'll ask my opinion on something, and quite often I could care less either way, so I'll say 'We Report, You Decide' or something equally lame. She knows now that if she is talking about the minutiae of life, that I am only looking at her to be polite, and that I don't hear a fucking thing. Go talk to the toaster, honey.
Oh, have you ever wondered why I call her 'the wife'? Well, because I am too damn lazy to capitalize the first letters. She'll be the last one I ever have, no matter what, and I am crazy about her. Sometimes I realize that I haven't shown her that enough, lately, so I tell her, and then do my best to show her. She lives like a single woman, free as a bird, and she has a husband and two kids.
She went through enough with Johnny in those first several years of his life, that...well, it would have broken most women. Or at best, left them bitter and pinch-faced. I began to discern a need, and when I felt that Johnny had stabilized enough that even a boob like me could take care of him, I started encouraging her to take breaks. So, her church ladies, who did stuff all the time, like go to retreats and such stepped in, and that is what began to refill the wife's soul. Men, no matter how close you are to your woman, she needs two things: A) girlfriend time, and B) alone time. No you, no kids, just her, doing whatever she wants. And men, you wouldn't understand what they want, so just let them off their leash and let them run.
Remember? Girls are different than boys? And in far more ways than just plumbing.
So, anyway, this is what has percolated in my fevered mind today. Just one last word: if you don't want to throw her down and put your brand on her, don't get married...date. Heck, live together. Roommates with privileges. To me, every woman I ever met was the one.
I just spent some time with Johnny watching a Blue Oyster Cult video of 'Godzilla' on YouTube. We clapped to the beat together. He was in Heaven. As I've said, he's a great, enthusiastic clapper.
I used to think he was a retard, because he would hoot like an ape, and clap his hands at the oddest times, seemingly without control, or reason. I finally asked him about it, instead of just shutting him up, and in his Johnny Way, he explained to me that he liked the echoes it made. I noted where he did it, unusual architecture spots in the house, and on the covered front porch, and he pointed out the exact acoustical spots he was working, and sure enough, when I put my hands at his level and clapped in those same spots, I got perfect echo-location feedback.
The wife was relieved when I explained him to her. Oh yeah, she's at the funeral of a dear friend, right now. Just an aside.
And John is in Heaven when we take him to the mall. Those high ceilings, that linoleum floor...Echo Heaven. He marches in, and cuts loose, and fuck you if you don't like it. If it is a dark night, and the power goes out, I am convinced he could echo-locate us to an exit. The way his mind works, I am sure that he has a map of everywhere he goes stored in a special file in his brain.
Sometimes 'special' is an insult. Sometimes it just means they can do stuff you can't.
He was my age, and now he's gone, never to grow another day older. At least in this lifetime. I mostly liked him, thought his political stance was too moderate for me, and he had to at least pretend to support the policies of that asshole President of ours. Yes, ours. Yours. Deal with it. And he kicked ass on the yellow-dog press like nobody I've ever seen, which I hope will be an inspiration for successive Press Secretaries.
Well, God Bless Tony's family in their time of loss, comfort them, and take your child home.
...and my nausea wants to go puke. And I am pretty sure you all are tired of reading about this bullshit. Okay, I'll try to stop.
But I write about what I see. What I feel. What I've seen and felt. Me me me me. What, you want me to write about the kids? About how the wife and Nat were out on the porch today, cracking walnuts, and Johnny blundered out and kicked the entire bucket of freshly cracked walnut meat all over the grass and the dirt? And the wife made him pick up every damn one of them, on pain of death?
Or the heat we suffered through today, which will be ten degrees hotter tomorrow?
Or how it feels to have the sights of your 30-30 Winchester centered on the temple of the driver of the car that brought the guys to steal your car. How you want to squeeze it off so badly, but you say hey, not worth it, so you raise the sights a few inches and pull the trigger, and a tongue of flame leaps out into the night a good thirty feet, and their car, well, parts of it, explode into a cloud of shattered glass and torn window fittings.
And the gang leaps through shattered windows with their legs hanging out like shrimp, if shrimp wore blue jeans, and they speed away, and hey, thanks dudes! For leaving me a nice jack.
Whatever. Tomorrow promises to be hotter than the seal between Rosie's thighs. If I can survive til Monday, it should be back down to the 60's and 70's.
BTW, I put up a vid of a band video a while back that had a black guy as the lead, his band was white, and he was doing anti-jihad rap-metal. Anybody remember who they were? It has been driving me nuts all day.
Update:
Never mind, I found it: Stuck Mojo, doing Open Season.
Well, my family hasn't been there for months, for this very reason.
That's too bad, too, because McDonald's has always been my family's go-to place for junk food. We went there (well, drove through there) all the time, and spent lots of money. Oh well, they'll either learn the lesson it took Ford two years to learn, that America is a Christian nation, or not.
I hope they surrender like Ford recently did, so I can get my fish sandwiches again. Until such a time, McDonald's, you are dead to me. It's up to you whether you prefer the business of the tiny 1% or less of faggots, who probably don't even eat there, and if they do, they just buy a salad, over the business of the enormous Christian majority of this country, who buy several bags of food there at least once a week, and likely more.
You choose. Well, you chose once, and you chose wrong. We're a forgiving people, though, so we'll give you another chance, like we did Ford.
Now that there I vote as 'Title of The Day'. From this article.
Shit, I would absolutely go into an authentic Chinese restaurant and order the Dog Plate. I've eaten dog, and it is wonderful. It was a Black Lab, as I recall, caught and stewed by hobos, who shared with me their bounty (they had caught in someone's yard) during one of my frequent forays into vagabondom during my misspent youth. I rode my thumb everywhere, in those pre-serial-killer days.
I will eat just about anything, except testicles of any sort, or seafood with spikes and/or appendages. Donkey is mentioned in the linked article, and I would not eat those, either. I have been offered horsemeat, but was put off by the smell. I will not eat any rodent, insect, or turtle. I might consider eating a snapping turtle. Mean bastards.
I have eaten many snakes. Though I would never eat frog for any reason.
The drugs I have to take have stolen much of my sense of smell, and most of my appetite. And what taste I have left has been altered, so foods I used to relish, now smell like crap, and I crave foods I would never have touched before. And cooking pancakes, once a pleasure, well, now they smell horrible to me. This is probably the worst part of my decline and fall.
You owe it to yourself to wangle a visit to an American artillery range at night. Especially if they are practicing 'troops in the open, fire for effect' drills and suchlike. When the KARUMP! KARUMP! starts, and rounds streak outward, and the far horizon lights up in flashes like God is angry, and bringing down the fire and lightening, well...
When the ground under your feet is juddering and shaking, and it feels as if Gimliesque dwarves are hammering your boot-soles from just underneath the earth, and you have to bend at the knees, and hold your arms out to retain your balance, as each big gun fires in its turn, maybe a second...or two apart. And most of these are combined arms drills, with targets coordinated between tanks, 155 howitzers, heavy mortars, along with 81mm's providing flare illumination, mixed with HE.
And, oh My Dear God, who could think to stand against this? Tankers are weaving long serpentine lines of tracers downrange, both .50 cal and 7.62 coax, and the wall of lead going out is magnificent, and terrible, and nothing grows there, ever again.
And I and my company were formed into a column of twos, called to attention, and marched along just under a berm where multiple tanks were parked in a line, and given the command "Forwhordddd, Martch!" And we did. They had been kind enough to allow us our ear plugs...
The Gates of Hell opened above us, and I doubt the tankers even knew we were there. The tank commanders started rockin and rollin with their .50 cals, and big hot brass came tumbling down the bank, and then the big guns began to kick off, one at a time, in rapid succession, all down the row, as we marched, at shoulder arms, bayonets fixed.
BOOM! and the entire tank would raise up some, and the bore evacuator would pump out a huge belch of smoke that would waft down and over us, and then the line would begin to belch like angry dragons again, a constant stream of high explosives thundering out and ripping the air not more than 20 feet above our heads. The pressure wave felt like a wooden oar being slammed across your shoulders.
What we thought was snot running down our faces, we later found to be blood, running out of our noses. Your cheeks would flap back when the main gun fired, and make you grin, whether you wanted to, or not. I used just my eyes to peer out from under my helmet, and watched the spectacle.
My words are too poor to describe such a thing. Perhaps one word works: Majesty.
To their credit, our NCO's went with us, then gathered us up at the far end, and had us use EE (Escape and Evasion) techniques to get back to our camp in the woods. Part of our orders were to stay hidden from the MP's that guarded this section of road, and the artillery range. For two days. We did it.
As squads of us staggered back into our camouflaged tent area, we all noticed that each of us was black with gunsmoke. We left our clothing draped over our tents, crawled in, and left consciousness behind for awhile.
I've been saying that more and more, lately. Walking past the computer, and just saying 'screw it', and moving on. And as my life slips away, I fear it is taking my intellect with it, bit by nearly imperceptible bit. I just want to sit on the couch and pet a kitten, and watch cartoons.
My memory is fading, and lately I have developed the alarming habit of reacting to things I dreamt the night before, during the next day, as if they were real. Realistic, but not real, I keep telling myself. I have asked the wife to keep an eye on me for that crap, and treat pretty much everything I say with suspicion. It is very weird continuing a conversation you thought you had the day before, when in actuality you had it that night, in your sleep. At some point, I may ending up unloading all of my guns, and giving them to her for safe keeping. All of my weapons, for that matter.
Blood runs out of my nose whenever it wants to, and I vomit at least once a day. Or more. And as I type, sometimes the letters put themselves where they want to, and I have to really settle down and edit myself. And I just shake my head at the childish errors.
This is not me, and I am only staying around because the wife won't let me go. When I sense she is prepared for me to go, I am gone. Watching myself rot around me is more than I choose to bear, except for her, I will.
I believe in an Afterlife, though what form it will take, I have no idea. And I will leave on a wake of terror, driven by the boatman, terror for what might happen to my family once I'm gone. The wife already feels that terror, and is clutching at my tattered soul to keep me here.
You must be at least this tall to ride this ride
Friday, July 18, 2008
