I Heard The Owl Call My Name

I heard the owl call my name

Yes, it is indeed one of my most favourite books. I like the simplicity of the logic, and the reasoning of the religion.  I was an atheist for quite a long time, now I consider myself to be more agnostic, partially due to this short novella.

In the meantime, my owl has discovered the joys of hooting in a travertine marble tiled house. The echo effect is incredible. It is even more incredible at three or four in the morning.

“Whooo-Hooo” resounds throughout our peculiar demesne, scaring the cat sometimes, and making the dog turn her head at odd angles.  I have to answer back, which irritates the Lady S. to no end, because now you have two echoing owl calls going back and forth.

This morning, she thought that a houseguest had stepped upon her cat, due to a series of harsh calls. I explained that while entertaining the guest last night, I had completely forgotten to give the owl his evening series of rats to feast on, and he was pissed off.

Trying to find rats at four in the morning while not waking up your houseguest is somewhat hard though.  I thought I had put them in one spot to thaw out (I get them frozen) and had not. No, I do not thaw them out in the kitchen.

After stumbling about with a pen flashlight for a while, I finally discovered them in my studio underneath a plastic bag. Owl is fed.   S.’s alarm goes off fifteen minutes later.  Damn owl.

Anal

O.K. There are some things I am anal about, I know.

Dishes are one of them. I wash the dishes, then put them in the dishwasher. A spot on a glass can cause a major meltdown in the kitchen for me. I scrub, polish, and damn near sandblast everything.

Our plastic glasses are now somewhat cloudy.

What  really gets my goat, however, are the dials on the dishwasher. Why the hell isn’t there just an “on” switch ?  I have this dial that can rotate all over the place (how many of us really need ‘extra rinse cycle’ ?)  without really telling you if you have hit the right spot? 

Turning on your dishwashing machine is like dating a girl who fakes her orgasms. You just never know if you are doing it right or not.  In the end, the dishes are clean, but you walk away from the event feeling somewhat puzzled, and you have to go back and check to make sure it all worked out correctly.  Of course, this is easier with dishes than a woman.  They will slap you if you try to do an inspection.

We have a microwave that does not have settings below 1 minute. Yes, it is pretty, and looks good next to the other myriad kitchen appliances, but come on !  If you want to nuke something for 30 seconds, you have to hit the minute button and then sit and listen to the beeping.  I once forgot a burrito overnight, as I had gotten bored and wandered off someplace. I opened up the microwave door the next day to heat up another burrito. Yikes.

I fed it to the dog, and she had the runs, unfortunately in the stairwell.

I hope someone from the mainstream dishwasher corporations figures out that making washing dishes simpler would ease up on my worry load. Yes, I am running the washer right now, so I have to go check and make sure I got the dial in the right spot.

Good Vibrations

Good Vibrations

The first album I ever owned in my life was by the Beach Boys.  I know every single lyric by heart of every song they did.  Yeah, I know, most of it was junk…but it still makes me smile.  I had a hand-me-down Datsun B210 back in the day. The kind with a hatchback. It went everywhere.

Seriously.

It forded rivers, slid down highways, and went off the snowy roads in Flagstaff. We could just all get out and pick it up and put it back on the road.  Peter (PeePee) and I would get all dressed up in Hawaiian garb, grab a cheap bottle of rum and some cigarillos, then go do doughnuts in the grocery store parking lot near NAU.   We were the only ones insane enough to drive during a white out, and had the Beach Boys blaring from the speakers.  Youth. 

Oh yeah, we also had Slim Jims for sustenance.

I never had much experience with real vibrators until I met some college girls in the 80’s.  I don’t see what the fascination is, but they sure seemed to like them a lot.  I can’t move my tongue at 9,000 rpm, but have done o.k. with the “vowel” technique.

A-E-I-O-U.  Repeat as often as necessary.

I’ve found that horehound drops help keep your jaw muscles from hurting too much.

Anyway, I was gifted with a c-ring that vibrates.  Unsure about it, I thought of what my grandfather always had said “ try everything at least once”.  O.k.

It was certainly interesting.  Today, I did not go jogging as usual, if that is a clue, and still can not cross my legs.  S. seems to be alright, she went grocery shopping and is making a tossed salad.

I wonder what is up tonight?

Hotels and Owls

Tucson Animal Show September 09

Or, Try Sleeping with an Owl in your Hotel Room

Owls are not meant for hotel rooms. 

The passerby glance at them through the windows and do a double take, hence the need to draw the curtains completely. This makes the already somewhat depressing residence even more so.

Owls wake up at three in the morning. It must be an instinctual thing, so they can glide about and catch rodents and whatnot. In a hotel room, they try to glide, but instead cause quite a racket, and leave a lot of feathers for the maid to clean up.

The owl glared at the side of the large television for over two hours. It wasn’t on. I kept on looking at the side of the tv to see what was so fascinating, but couldn’t. I do believe he was mad because it was not turned on.

I did turn in on, but the only thing playing was “Basketball”…a truly horrific supposed comedy that should have been banned in all theatres. The writers would have been ritually flogged, tarred, and feathered as they were ridden out on the rails of the god damned trains that came past the hotel every 20 minutes or so, hooting much louder than the owl, but causing him to respond.

I felt sorry for the people next to me.

In another room, just to clear things up. Hey, my wife reads this now and again.

BANG !  BANG!  Yep , that is your owl at 3:20 telling you that it is now time to try to fly to some other hotel room that may be more comfortable, or perhaps hit the Jacuzzi which unfortunately has already been closed at ten p.m.  You try explaining this to a four year old owl.

I dare you.

a somewhat tawdry look at seagull love...

 Ms. Jonathan Livingston Seaquell

My wings were warm, they had touched the sun early that day, as I flew about the park near the ocean. 

A spirit in rest needs to be taken sometimes, so I landed onto the strand, amidst the Styrofoam cups and sticky ice cream wrappers left by the little innocent children.

I picked up a limp condom in my beak, and shook it about with great vigour. Salty spray flew everywhere , and the kittywakes scampered all about the beach, leaving gentle imprints in the sand and broken glass.

There was a bit of kiwi laden hamburger, still in the beautiful bun, underneath the platform that supports Mr. Halleywell’s fruit stand and bait shop. I took this up to the verdant lawn, and gently ate it while young ladies in thongs skated by. They looked so heavenly, I squawked once at them, letting them know that I had seen their camel toe.

With the smell of fish so overpowering, I once again took flight.  Beneath me was the boardwalk, the ocean, the people.  I knew what I needed, and my sharp eyes sought it out.

There he was, a bright white male, proud in form. I alit next to him and presented my rear. Seagull courtship is something that is not talked about in polite society, but can be brutal in a very fun way.

He took off his ComicCon t-shirt, and with a quick movement, slid aside his black speedos, and impaled himself into me. Never have I felt such exquisite pain !

We ran together, me flapping ahead, and fanning his extremities, while he tried to keep up with my furious adour.

When he finally exploded, near the FizzGrill Stand, I launched off like a missile, full of joy and a little bit of soreness.

artist

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September Fourth. Sleepy Time.

Do you ever sort of wonder what goes through your significant other’s mind during the night?

Frequently, I am awakened by a stab to the ribs. No, not with a knife, but with stiff fingers. I do snore, but not as much as my brother or my good friend T.   She poked him in the eye when he snored in the motel room at Tonmocon 1.

Sometimes, I can’t sleep, and just watch the fan for a while and think of things to write later on. Now and again, she’ll wake up and jab me, insisting I was snoring, even though I was awake.

I think she does it just to keep me on my toes.

                                              (s. sleeping in "starfish configuration")

If I do get up to urinate, or get a drink of water, she sprawls across the kingsize bed like a starfish that has been flung up onto the strand. I have learned to move very quickly when I do get out of bed, and get back fast, before here extra-sensory system has figured out that I am no longer next to her. In this fashion, I can sometimes get as much as six hours of sleep.

Now and again, she'll wake me up to see if I actually was asleep. I guess there is some sort of fear, or hope, of me not breathing.

I suppose time will tell.

4:30 Exercism , Sort Of...

My wife has gone off on a tangent after receiving the latest batch of exercise dvd's. I keep on waiting for her head to start spinning around while spewing out vomit, but instead am woken up early in the "o-dark-thirty" so she can perform her whirling prior to going to care for the patients. Who I hope are patient...

"the early morning dance routine"




I have no problem with exercising at all. I like to do it too. Just not at 4 bloody thirty in the morning.
We have a treadmill, but she won't get on it because she saw a spider underneath it once. I guess it was a big one.  She really can't stand spiders.  We are selling the treadmill to a friend of mine's daughter who rolled her truck last winter up north. Yes, I will make sure it has no spiders in it at all.

S. is not much of a morning person, unless she is exercising.  Normally, she wakes up at around the crack of noon or so, and asks if I have made coffee yet. Don't get me wrong here, the reason she is so exhausted is because she works too many shifts, and then gets a few hours of sleep so she can do her dvd workout.

It must be a fun workout, because she complains constantly about it.

Thintelligence

Thintelligence

I think that Crichton was the first to coin this phrase, back in the good old days of “Jurassic park”, regarding the basic lack on intelligence of some people in regards to modern development.

As of late, the brew-ha-ha has been wrapped up in global warming. Some just flat out don’t believe it exists. This one is most puzzling to me. Look at a map from the 1950’s, and one from last year. Do notice that the ice shelves are different, please. They are “smaller”. This means that the temperature near those ice shelves is “warmer”, hence the term…’global warming’.

I had a bit of an argument with some women last week who, for some odd reason, have decided that vaccinations are not for their children. At first, I didn’t even know what to say. Umm…polio or tetanus anyone? The false rumours about the vaccines causing autism have been proven over and over to be just a bunch of crap, but these “mavens of the modern age” just stick to the weirdo websites that spout this misinformation. They probably read that dung when they aren’t out worshipping trees or whatever it is weird chicks do these days.

I went in last year to try to buy some Mercurachrome for a cut that was infected, and the lady behind the drugstore counter gave me the funniest look when I complained that I couldn’t find any on the shelves. “Sir, mercury was outlawed a long time ago”. I guess that is why it stung so much?

Thintelligence. I do believe Michael said it was a case of “doing something because you can, not because you should.”

I’ve seen a lot of people trying to shy away from the modern age. People I know spend more time fencing and making ren-fair outfits than they do learning how to shoot a gun or drive defensively. Trust me, oh Romeo, my 357 is much faster than your “blade”.

Now, don’t get me wrong…I have nothing against hobbies at all. Hell, I fence daily and build a lot of weird models that I put on shelves to irritate my wife. If the house is broken into in the middle of the night, I will probably reach for a shotgun, not a claymore, though. That bloody sword would really wreck the drywall.

Sex.

Sex and the Single

 

   It isn’t the same as shit on a shingle, which I actually do happen to like to quite a great deal. If you get the creamy sauce just right, chipped beef on toast can be miraculous.

   Of course, typically, it is an over-salted congealed mass of jism that makes you want to hurl. Do not order S/S at IHOP for any reason, at any time. Trust me. I have seen those prep cooks, and their swarthy demeanor is nothing to be shaken at. No, I do not mean the skin colour, but rather the attitude. Sometimes, they even have swedes cooking at those places !

  Prepared correctly, as with just about any other dish than “game pheasant”, shit on a shingle makes a wonderful dinner. My mother in law has threatened to make it for me for a few years now, but I feel a bit of Poe in her, and that makes me nervous.

  I wonder if they wouldn’t find me under the floorboards…

   Game Pheasant, however, does not. Hanging a bird up by the neck in the sun, covered in flies, until the neck snaps due to the rottening, does not, in my book a least, count as actual “cooking”. Yes, I know, the flesh is tender…cooked by the farts of the bacteria eating away at the fatty acids and whatnot. If something smells that putrid but still tastes good, I have to wonder about Homo sapiens.

   The smell leaves you wondering if you forgot your foot powder that night. My family has a history of having smelly feet. One of my brothers was reduced to wearing sandals continuously due to the odour that was presented by normal sneakers…but has overcome that dilemma, and now can wear whatever he wants.

  As long as you aren’t eating nearby…then he should have sandals, unless, of course, you are having game pheasant, in which case his foot odour could enhance the experience.

   Anyway, sex and food to seem to go together. You can drizzle chocolate or honey on your significant other, or just make a nice tasty meal, but it seems to reinforce the bonds that keep a couple together. People who eat out too much (especially at IHOP) are bound to be more distant than those that prefer to dance naked around the kitchen waving a spatula or two. Stay away from the pasta maker, though. Personal experience.

    Male Bower birds make elaborate nests in Australia, hoping to entice a female into the little hovel, where they can hump them, and have them lay little eggs that turn into more Bower birds. Ah, evolution !

   I have found that cooking is a much better way of selecting a mate, rather than having a showy new house or car. It says “ Hey !  I actually give a crap!”  rather than , “Look how much crap I have!”  This also helps to weed out the weirdos, who are after all, just looking to take your crap.

   Carlin had a good bit about “stuff”. Prior to hooking up with someone, I heavily recommend listening to it. I don’t know, do a youtube search or something.

   Sex. That is what the whole relationship boils down to, doesn’t it?  If you aren’t attracted chemically and physically to someone, there is no point in pursuing the bower making, no matter how good of a cook they are. Unless you are a 400 pound behemoth that exists on food, and the idea of an orgasm is a two-for-one special at McDonald’s.

   Aren’t people somewhat strange?

 

Crickets

   People who like crickets irritate almost as much as the little chirping bastards themselves.  “Oh, don’t they sound lovely and romantic?” I have heard before, typically at outdoor functions peopled by somewhat overweight singles desperate for a mate.

Not to me. It is like listening to twenty one year old males at a bar bragging about being a sniper or an Army Ranger, all trying to outdo each other with the most consistent noise as is possible, to try to attract a female crotch for the night. Christ, if every guy you heard talking about being in the Special Forces really had been, there wouldn’t be a bloody army, just a shitload of paratroopers, all jumping out of C-130’s with knives clenched in their taught jaws.  Who the hell cooks the food? Who does the paperwork? To fire a friggin round you have to fill out something in triplicate, and submit it to a number of interested subcommittees.   I write a lot of military history articles, and the last time I heard one of these crickets, I did get my back up. I started asking about muzzle velocities, and preferred ammunition, to which he had no answer, because he didn’t know a sniper from a snipe.

Now, I happen to really like snipes. Like most birds, they are fascinating to me, the little skittering movements and the large doe-like eyes just catch me off guard every time I see one. Unlike crickets.

I typically like to type my notes while reclining in a warm bath, which is a necessity in Phoenix in July, as you can not get cold water unless it is from the refrigerator, and that is just to many steps to hump water up. I will suffer, thank you.  I have re-occurring dreams of being stabbed to death, much like  Marat, though it is too hot to have a towel on my head, whilst I am writing away.  If there was a revolution, I suppose I would write about it too. Prior to being stabbed.

So, I am happily typing away about the benefits of porcelain tile, when out of the vent above the bath comes down a chirping cricket. He did miss the bath, however, landing on all points near the commode. Leaping out of the bath, without tumbling my laptop into it thank the heavens, I managed to corner the little son of a bitch and squash him before he could even make one chirp.

Some people dislike ants, because they think they are mindless. I like ants, not because of their communistic socialism, but because they are quiet.  This is also why I like Archimedes the owl, my fish, and the snakes. I revel in quietude. Crickets are idiotic little breeders who have to constantly shout “Here I Am!” just to be noticed by the feminine crickets, who are probably more interested in the roach who just moved in down the street, or that cute Katydid outside working out all the time.

If I want noise, I will put on “Screaming for Vengeance” by Judas Priest or anything by Laibach.  That monotone “chirp chirp chirp” eats away at my sanity, and it is not unusual to see me cock my head sharply and race up the stairs to confront a male cricket who has decided to start crowing from the second floor. Hop all you want, you little bastard, I’m coming to get you.

Clothing Optional

   I typically don’t wear much in the way of clothing around the house, normally nothing, though this does end up with some odd stares from the neighbors if I decide to take my morning tea on the balcony.  Worse than being nude, though, was the pair of light lavender shorts I had, so worn that they were basically tissue paper. I had a light purple penis.  When I saw them in the garbage can,  I figured that the Mrs had decided that enough was enough, and I rarely argue with her reasoning. It is entirely possible that the neighbors had complained, so now I go completely “combat”.

   This has come back to haunt me though, recently, as living with an owl can definitely have an impact on your life. No only does he glare at “Mr. Winkie” (my wife’s terminology , not mine, and yes it does make feel somewhat insignificant) , but he also has, as owls do, have a habit of throwing the heads of his food items off to the side. It is like twisting off the head of a beer bottle, twist, snap, spin.  

   So, if you walk into the studio, you do run a certain risk. O.K., you have a four pound owl glaring at your testicles, and then on top of that, there may be gerbil or hamster heads flung about. He does like to really fling them so !

   Well, I managed to step on some sort of a sharp bone which, even through my very thick soles ( I like to run barefoot), punched a hole. Ouch. Well actually, I said something far different and not safe for the internet, at least for those of you with kids and didn’t have a father who served in the Marines.

   Luckily, I was able to get some antibiotics quickly and shove them into my maw as fast as possible. Gosh, I love the American health care system.

   So, here we are, two weeks later, and not so much of a noticeable limp, though the right calve still aches a bit. Yep, blood poisoning, I would imagine. Bloody owl and their silly bloody head ripping.

  I guess the point of this is to say:

“If you are around an owl, wear shoes.” 

This is a great recipe we've come up with, named after a dear friend with great taste!

Elisa Bisque

No, do not cook up your next door neighbor, but rather, how about a rather simple bisque to make that will make people want to be living next to you?

Ingredients:

2-3 very ripe tomatoes

Tomato paste

½ cup table wine

1 jar of Marinara sauce  (regular pasta sauce works just fine)

Hot sauce

6 cloves of garlic, minced

1 cup of cream

¼  cup of vanilla ice cream (save this until the end)

Fresh Basil and Rosemary

Sautéed Mushrooms (6 ounces or so)

Two tablespoons of brown sugar

Salt and pepper

Cooking time:  1-2 hours (the longer it sits, the better the end flavour)

 

Bisques can be quite intimidating to the cook, though if you follow some simple rules, they really never fail:

 

1: Low heat.  Do not boil the living hell out of the food.  Take your time, and let it simmer…besides, the home smells better afterwards too !  Think of it as a sort of incense.

2: No Low Fat Milk.  Look, we are making a rich soup here, don’t skimp. Half and Half is as light as you want to go…pure cream is better.

3: Fresh Ingredients.  Yes, you don’t want to use a whole lot of dried up desiccated things in this.  No canned mushrooms if you please.

4: Patience.  Just like Guns and Roses sang…this just needs some time to really simmer and let the flavours meld.

 

OK. Enough of the H.S., let’s get on with it:

Step One: Searing the garlic.  If you just mince up raw garlic and try to make it into a sauce, soup, or a stew, you end up with little pockets of “übergarlic” that will shock your diner’s mouths. Searing the chopped cloves until they are golden brown in olive oil is the way to go. I like to add a little bit of brown sugar at this point, just a pinch.

Step Two:  The tomatoes. Slice them, dice them, jump and down on them if you want, but get those fruits knocked down to size (about ¼”) !  Dump them right into the pot with the now beautifully browned garlic bits, and listen to the sizzle.  I heavily recommend adding fresh basil, or at least re-hydrated basil  now too. 

Step Three: Fluid. The tomatoes have probably started to shrivel a bit, they are drying out, so it is time to re-hydrate them with a good stock, or in my case, a mediocre wine and some water. The pan should be bubbling and steaming by this point. Let the stuff simmer for quite a while, a good fifteen to twenty minutes, this allows the flavours to meld together.  I like to put in some tomato paste as well, just to thicken thing up a bit. Flour in a bisque makes me naseuous.

Step Four:  If you want to add in meat, such as the traditional shellfish, you will want to do it now. Tonight, we are serving vegetarian.  Shellfish cooks quickly, and can become rubbery in texture if you let it sit too long…I would recommend not more than five minutes prior to serving. I guess you could put in cured anchovies, but that would be really disgusting.  This is a good time to add the rosemary, too.

Step Five:  O.K. You have a pot of simmering, not boiling (!) red liquid that smells heavenly. Is it ready yet ?  NO ! We still have to add the cream (or milk for you pansies out there), and it is a very crucial step to making a bisque. This is why we have not boiled the mixture. Boiled cream = gross.

Step Six:  By now, you should have a terra-cotta coloured liquid that needs little else but some sizzle. Pick your favourite hot sauce ( I like Amore or Cholula) and season to taste. Make it hotter than you would normally like it, trust me here.

Step Seven:  Here is where we really deviate from the norm:  the addition of ice cream. I put several healthy scoops of a good quality vanilla ice cream into the seasoned mixture, and stir it up. This completely calms down the spice, and at the same time transforms it into a wonderfully complex soup that you will not believe.

Step Eight:   Salt and pepper as necessary, though I usually use neither. Let the mixture cool down slowly on a low heat setting until it is just warm enough to be palatable.  I like to serve it with a fresh loaf of French bread, we like to dip the bread chunks into the spicy soup, and then finish off the rest with a spoon.

Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Still Life with Owl

 

   Being around Archimedes is sort of like having a permanent four year old that follows you about asking “why?” to everything. 

   Yes, it is endearing at first, and you admire their curiosity for a bit, but after a while it becomes somewhat annoying. “Why is the sky blue?” Go ahead and try explaining refraction or the reason clouds are white to a four year old, I dare you. “Why?”

   I just walked into his mews with a chunk of meat and bone for his evening tyering, and he looked as startled as a child who had just woken up from a nap and found out  that they didn’t know where Brussels was, or why they happened to be out in a field outside of it. That is to say, nonplussed.  It is the same way every time I pick him up, or take him out for a ride in the car.

  He does indeed like to drive about in the car. Actually, he only rides in it, I drive, though he might be more patient with some of the other people moving about on the road than I am. He bobs his head and swivels like a Hula Girl’s hips as we pass other vehicles, occasionally  “HooHoo!-ing” , especially at skateboarders. He seems fascinated with skateboards, and we do own two of them, I suppose I should make a perch for one and see if he likes it ? “Why?”

   Watching me skate is a daunting prospect, I carefully judge the wind conditions, and if the coast seems clear down the block, launch myself off at a safe and sane speed. Sometimes I hit a bit of rock and go ass over teakettle , the longboard gleefully sliding into the distance while I look up at the sky and wonder why it is blue. I am sure Archimedes, observing from up in the studio, gets quite a laugh out of it.

   For some odd reason, he not only is fascinated by skateboards, but also by the military programs on television. I have a tele in the studio so that when I am painting, there is some sort of fluff on besides the awful radio to keep me from falling asleep in the oils. I’ve learned quite a lot about how we are making all sorts of weapons to keep the world at peace, and how a bunch of generals in different battles really managed to screw up. I think he likes the airplanes the best, especially the biplanes of the Great War. This makes me nervous, as he has already attacked a 72^nd scale Backfire bomber model, and is now eying the row of rigged  airplanes. He is quite a strong bird, and it isn’t uncommon for me to wake up at two in the morning, and dart into the studio to make sure he hasn’t untethered himself and made a right mess of the place.

  I always get the same dumfounded look of “who the hell are you?”, and then he stares at my penis, which can be unsettling.  Everyone asks me why I look so tired, and when I explain, I think they are just asking “why?”

Stop Look Listen. And You Will Learn German

Growing up in Minnesota, derived from Danes, of course we were subject to a number of foreign languages. English, French, and German. Swedish didn’t count.

There is no more insulting thing ( I actually did spell it “ting” at first) that you can accuse a Dane of than being Swedish.  Why? Oh hell, I don’t know. Someone back in the early A.D.’s got their panties in a wad and since Sweden looks like a flaccid penis, I guess it some sort of an insult.

Personally, I like Swedes. Especially the women who like to travel to our fair arid state and do “explorative” hikes. Their cheerfulness and ‘happy go lucky’ attitude seems to me to be a great way to gather information about the rest of the globe. Lots and lots.

Anyway, back to the Deutsch. 

Learning German was something that every kid in Minnesota was expected to do in the 70’s. I do not know if that is true now. I had a great teacher, who’s name I can not recall right now,  that was very passionate about the subject.  To this day, I typically talk to my brothers, all four of them, in a sort of slang Germanic…you see, they had the same teacher. We frequently talk, and it usually begins with a horrible stream of gutter Germanic , though my second oldest brother seems to have a very firm grasp on the teachings of  that lady, and will correct you soundly for a mis-spoken phrase.

A good friend of mine came up with a marbled language, that being “sperman”…part Spanish, part german.  I tell you, it works wonders to confuse the hell out of any porter in south America.  We had grown tired on the “no English” ting, and we decided to fight fire with fire. Hell, if they don’t understand us, then we will not understand them either !  Why I didn’t get elected as G Dub’s viceroy is beyond me.

I could have set world affairs back by decades.

 

 

Mexico Two

Mexico Two

 

That cabin of the Steinbeck’s became almost a haven for me for a while. There were no phones, no lights, no motorcars, not a single luxury (well, they did have a series of cisterns for running water).  When I needed to escape the grind of Phoenix, it was a refuge, a place to go and think, a place to go and remember, which is why I suppose I am writing this .

Once, when I lived in Oklahoma, where the fucking wind really did come sweeping down the plains, I remembered the time spent down in the Sea of Cortez.  Remember that girl I mentioned earlier? Yeah well, I woke up next to her one day, but she didn’t really seem to care to remember me much, and no, nothing had happened.

I call myself a slut. Hey, I like having sex, sorry if that bothers you.  Anywho, other than a bit of necking, nothing really transpired, and even that was pretty lame, as we had been enjoying Herr Steinbeck’s libations to quite the 9^th degree. Boy, that Mexican mescal will come back to bite you in the ass…literally.  I really didn’t get much action in Mexico. Maybe because I cared too much for these people to just let them only interact with me for a short while. I am not kidding when I say that I loved, and still love, each and every damned one of them.  They are the best of the best, and my life is so much richer because of them, So, here I was surrounded by a bunch of people that I really didn’t know, and guess what? I felt completely at home instantly.

We danced until the sun came up, or slept until it went down on that hot concrete, and we were content.  Yeah, we had our moments. Someone put cinnamon on N’s face one day and the poor girl had red eyes for the rest of the week, and I helped place an entire tube of toothpaste on John while he was dozing in the afternoon heat. (Sorry Papa J )

The flies flew about as we drank our drinks, the chess pieces moved as Jorge steadily ate through everyone’s defenses except for Jimbo’s. I never could stay awake long enough to watch the two of them finish a game. Jorge’s loquacity is only met by his intelligence, and the two seem to meet at a whirlpool that would make Hedley Lamarr (that’s Hedley) blush…listening to him and Jimbo yap is the equivalent of pure sleeping potion. It’s all in monotone, with the occasional “hehehehehe” from Jim, and the rest of the rhetoric is housed by the spirit of cigar smoke and the clink of glasses.

I know it sounds boring. I loved every minute.

Most of us kept on coming back to the Casa every year, or even more often, as we grew older. There was a certain quietness that floated about there, it made you feel like you were doing  o.k., and the universe really wasn’t out to really get you.

I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds nice.

Of course, you sort of had to be quiet in the summer, as there was no air conditioning at all. Shit, there was no electricity!  A blow dryer was something that was done by consensual adults on the back porch, typically after an early morning fiasco at JJ’s Bar and Cantina. (if you are ever down there, apologize to them for knowing me)  A fan was something imported from China that you had to wave about or made out of a used Sport’s Illustrated mag from underneath the table.  Hell, a cup of cold water could get you a kiss from the girls in the house.  I always ended up making the coffee.  I’m not stupid.

I think the only skill that I did perfect, and I still will put my mitts up against anyone’s on the planet, is that of shucking shrimp. I can de-shell a shrimp faster than anyone I know, and yes, that includes the vein.  I couldn’t afford the bloody things, so in trade, I would skin those little bastards in blinding speed. Spanky came close to me in how many per minute, but with a  bit of Steinbeck Go Juice, I became a master of the shrimp scalping!

On a side note:  Spanky, who I have not seen in a number of years, and do miss horribly, made the best toasted cheese sandwiches I have ever tasted. Mayonnaise. Yep. He puts it on prior to placing the pieces of bread in the skillet, with just a little bit of oil to brown the bread, then toasts them to perfection. He can actually do this even after suffering a head injury, as he did while trying to get to a “naval war” game too fast while we were in Ensenada, Mexico. The stairs were obviously not meant for someone that is 6’2”, and boy, did he clip the hell out of his forehead!  We have a photo of him cooking with a big bloody rag on his head for proof.

Bandage and all, he continued to make sandwiches for all of us, and there were a lot of us, all night long, as we watched yet another game of something (I don’t remember) go terribly awry.

When I play “liar’s dice”, I play to lose.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yucatan One

 Yucatan

   Yes, the Yucatan peninsula is indeed in Mexico, though parts of it are also owned by other countries that change their names a lot. The British Honduras became Belize in the space of a week once, then back again, and then back again.  Rebel troops from southern Mexico are always troubling those fun and friendly federale’s with their lovely M-16’s and Ingram’s.  Some hotels will warn to “not venture out at night”, and I don’t think it is just because of the mosquitoes.

   Speaking of mosquitoes, those little blood sucking bastards, I did manage to contract one of the world’s most popular parasitic infections from them in the Yucatan.  Ignoring the signs that I could not read, I plunged into a swamp in search of Belonosox belizianus, the live-bearing pike minnow. We had a new exhibit opening at the zoo, and I wanted a pair, at least.  Mosquitoes rarely bite me, in fact, my roommate slept with nothing but her nose and fingers above the sheets during our stay, whilst I slept on top of the covers, in my birthday suit, with nary a bite! She, however, had dozens of raised lumps on her fingers every dawn. I think that the bugs figured I was some sort of a trap?

Anyway, I did end up contracting some sort of malaria, though the species has, to this date, never been properly identified. I kept on getting blood drawn from different doctors, to the point that I felt like some sort of a Danish pincushion, all with no firm results. Suffice to say, when those little flying vampyres are about, most of the people who know me tend to stay far, far away.

Enough about those pests, though, and onto the lovely Yucatan!  I had the best French Onion Soup at a resort’s restaurant there, near Akumal, staggering distance down the beach from our condo, as well as some fantastic sort of ‘monte cristo’ sandwiches that were trundled by every day by a very quaint lady who also tried to sell me blankets. Blankets? It was about 99 fucking degrees at this point in the year. I guess if you came out of the surf at midnight, you might be able to use the blanket to lay down so you wouldn’t crunch all of the hermit crabs on the beach as you made your way to the sliding glass door that let you into the blessed coolness of artificial air conditioning. The same electricity that powered that unit also gave us the ability to crush ice for margaritas, which led to the staggering, which led to the stumbling…well, you see, it was indeed a vicious cycle.

I don’t mean there were a few hermit crabs. Not at all. There were hundreds of thousands of them, clicking and clacking as they ate whatever had passed out or drifted up on the beach. I know for a fact that one German girl only talked to me once, and I never saw her again. Of course, it could be that I was talking to her topless figure, though. My roommate smacked me in the back of the skull for that incident. It was that smack that made me look up ( “I see stars!”) and notice the incredibly huge spider that had made a nest way up in the Palapa hut. It must have been at least an inch wide at the rear, and in a good three foot wide web, about 3 meters up off of the bar at the apex of the hut. I asked the bartender if it ever came down from there.  “ not yet, senor.”    They are very phlegmatic in the south.

The snorkeling near Akumal, which is about 60 or so kilometers to the south of Cancun  (forgive me for the latitude of my mileage, I didn’t drive) is absolutely phenomenal. Phenomenal !!!  There are fish there that would scare a normal person straight out of their trunks and onto the beach.  The cute little damsels will try to eat away at your ankles if you have painted nails, as my roommate and her friend found out, and they are fascinated with people who have had too much of that great French Onion Soup and perhaps a plate or two of Garlic Shrimp, as I found out.  O.K. Let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?

   The first night at the condo, I had two platters of garlic shrimp done on the local barbeque side-of-the-road-stand.  I woke at about four in the morning with that strange feeling in the lower stomach that usually precludes something that is certainly promising to not be so pleasant. It wasn’t. I could have bought stock in the local “toiletpaper-eria”, except I think they were using all of the excess sandpaper to polish the yachts that occasionally drifted up to the southern pier, and disgorged a slew of people who did not eat at road side stands.

After a day of the squirts, I became fed up with sitting in the bathroom while my roomies played around the playa outside. Racing past the large iguana who had taken a liking to my beach towel, I did make it down the white sand beach and manage to plunge into the crystal clear water before leaving a chili surprise.

Now, even my mother will tell you, animals actually do like me. Some of them want to kill me, but that is just because I look tasty. Ask Archimedes.  The fish in the cauldron of the Akumal reef were no different, they greeted me with open fins!

I swam about with a cloud of thousands of my new, bestest friends in a lovely arrow positioned in a huge delta just three feet or so from my rear end, which, since it was no longer on the porcelain, was free to just sphincter away as it willed. It had been anyway for at least two days by this point. In a school of blue, red, yellow, and purple I meandered above the verdant corals and live rock structures, without a care in the world, and had many of my new accompanying feasters swim up by my face, as if to ask, “Have you tried the French Onion Soup yet?”

(I really should add, at this point, that an extremely good man that I know, in fact, the minister at my wedding , is staying near Playa d. Carmen as I type this…Jorge, if you have the Onion Soup, don’t wear your wetsuit and stay near the beach!)

Yes, the soup was fantastic, and day after day the little fish would come out to greet me. I was the fucking St. Paul of the Ocean !!!!  I could envision little fountains all over southern Mexico with little sculptures of me and the clouds of little fish coming to feast from my buttocks!  I was a fish God !

Normally, when you are snorkeling, you tend to look down unless:

A: you have a fancy floaty bubble-thing that blocks water from coming in, or

B: you can breathe salt water.

I can’t do/didn’t have either. I can however, hold my breath for up to four minutes at a stretch sometimes, and still talk or whistle. I’m still working on the harmonica thing.

I actually can do the entire “got no satisfaction” Devo version without having to breath at all, though I am purple and sometimes swerve a bit in traffic.  Anyway, so here I am, chumming away  placidly in my little cove, when my escort suddenly just disappears. “What the hell?” I know that there was still a bunch of brown goodness that was flowing from my parasitic-ridden arse to keep the little bastards happy, but they lit out on me!

Bump.

I looked up, saw an eye about two inches in diameter, and yes, breathed in through my snorkel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For those of you who missed it:

http://www.azfamily.com/video/gmaz-index.html?nvid=350392

Mexico Adventures: Part One

   In college, I was invited to attend a spring-break gathering by a close friend of mine, Jimbo. We called him Jimbo since his name was Jim, and the “bo” part just seemed to fit rather well. I had only been out of the continental United States a few times prior, and this was to our friends north of Minnesota, the French Canadians. Personally, I have never been much impressed with the bits of Canada that I have seen, but I haven’t seen very much, mostly rest-stops and blue plate diners that always have chicken fried steak as the special.  My father always insisted that the Canadians were rude and unsociable, and none of us would ever point out that as a former Marine Commando type, perhaps it wasn’t just them?

    I typically get along with everyone, except for a select group of southern baptists who did not care for my changing of the verses in some hymns to reflect my love and adoration of the sea god Cthulhu in 1983. I was politely invited to not attend the church again (I was only there at a friend’s request anyway).

   Anyway, I found myself in the back of a dark brown pickup truck driven by a friend of  Jimbo’s, actually his roommate, named “Trey”. He was named Trey because his legal name was Steinbeck, and yes, the parents had given him the John treatment. That sort of thing can scar you for life, I wonder what  mothers and fathers are thinking sometimes? In my youth, I often complained about being named Greg. Greg the egg. Greg the egg, and Dede Dorfmann sitting in a tree…”k,i,s,s,y and g !” I made a promise once, that if I ever had children, I would come up with a name that no one could make fun of. Good luck, the closest I have come to is “Severian”, which my wife insists sounds like a gay broadway dance producer.

   No one made much fun of J. Steinbeck, as he was much larger and stronger than any of  us, and after all, it was his parent’s house we were goin to be staying at. This house, or cabin if you will, was located on the Sea of Cortex in beautiful Mexico. At least, that is what the brochures said.

   Trey’s father ran a summer outreach program for students interested in zoology and oceanography, and the little two bedroom cottage would hold as many as 30 people in a pinch, due to several massive cement porches. Mexican cement porches are different from most cement porches, as they have shells and whatnot embedded within them. Workers show up with bags of cement and a mixer, and then use the beach sand to mix it with. Once, I tried explaining that the salt content in the sand would hurt the integrity of the lime based concrete, but my Spanish is poor, and I mostly just caused a lot of delays. Sometimes I think they thought I was trying to tell them to bury their dog in the cement.  After ten minutes or so of gesturing, they would just get back to work, and leave me a little red faced in the sun, with my arms waving about like a drunk heron.

  So, sitting in the back of a dark brown pickup truck in southern Arizona, heading towards the border for the first time, I was somewhat uneasy. Uneasy as well as extremely over-heated. The hydration mostly came in the form of beer, which led to some seriously bizarre conversations. I do remember one girl leaning out of the cab (the women folk got to ride up front) to get a couple of cold ones, and letting me see heaven for a moment, more on that later.  It turns out that most of the people headed down to the beach resort were of the military bend, air force, navy, even a marine!  All of them were quite genial, and since they were all in ROTC (reserve officers training), were extremely well educated. By the time we hit the border, most of that education had worn off due to a fair amount of inebriation, I am not casting stones at glass houses, I am proud to say I was right in the trenches of combat with them. We had met the beer, and we had prevailed.

   I was of a positive bend until it came time to hit the liquor hut. These people were buying a serious amount of stuff, and I had come down with some top ramen and maybe fifteen bucks, holy cow, I was completely unprepared for what was to follow.

Rats in the Refrigerator

 

   Most people, when they say that they do have a rodent population in their refrigerator, are troubled by them gnawing at cables and getting stuck in the cooling fans and such. I’ve heard it creates quite a smell.  A friend of mine had a series of chest freezers go offline once in the summer, unfortunately, they were full of dead emus being stored for “further use”. He didn’t find out that the freezers had blown the circuit breaker for a few days, after all, how often do you check on frozen emus?  The  odor was indeed astounding, I am sure that he had vultures circling his house for a long time after opening the first one.

  In our house, our cold rodents are much more of even temper, since they are all dead, and stored in little Ziploc freezer bags, nicely arranged in even rows, like German troops in the Great War.

    When one takes care of exotic animals, such as Archimedes the owl and my wife’s python, Princess, you just get used to having the little things next to the leftovers.  The rats, of course, are kept in plain brown bags also, and most people know not to ask what is in the packages. My Great Aunt Kay, and I do mean “Great”, was the only one to open one without knowing  the contents. Great Aunt Kay sort of billowed about a house, in her bright red and yellow muumuu’s, often commenting about the lack of any spirits of decent sort in her current highball glass. She was a very high-minded lady, and used to discuss the 1920’s with a curious aplomb that often left me quite winded by just imagining the high-jinks she got into.  She was brazen and extremely honest about life, wonderful qualities in a Great Aunt, but was horrified to see, at a  modern motion picture, that the actress had “shown her knees!” Thank god she never saw any of Kubrick’s films, she would have become catatonic.  In her house in California, she had a marvelous pool with an octopus tile mural at the bottom, I keep on trying to find a photo of it, but am stuck with only the memory so far.

 Once while out visiting, she volunteered to get some chicken that needed to be thawed out for a future dinner out of the freezer in the garage, and no one thought to mention that the brown paper sacks marked “chicken” were in fact baby chicks, pullets, destined for the gullet of my Reticulated Python. My parents knew, I knew, even my girlfriend knew, that it was best to avoid opening up the bag and seeing those little faces staring straight up at you. I think she expected a fryer or something. To this day, I still think she fainted not because of the sight of baby chicks, but the thought that those were the chickens we were going to really have for dinner.  Sort of a “poor mans” game hen.

Vapid Confessions of an Aquarist

 

Greg Ewald 2009

 

   There is something about depression that is, well, incredibly depressing, isn’t there?   Dealing with the daily squabble to make ends meet, trying to keep a smile on your face when someone walks through the door, it can be very difficult. I guess that is why they call it life.

   Take the  Hawaiian Lionfish for example.  Here you are, floating about the lovely coral reefs and snacking on some shrimp when some pus bag with a net scoops you up and sticks you into a meter long aquarium. There are probably some of those dodgy toys in there too, though you might like the one with the pirate skeleton and chest that bubbles. Now, how does that fish cope with depression?  He may nip about the tank and harass the other inmates that he hasn’t swallowed yet, and make the occasional attempt to spear the aquarium keeper with his poisonous dorsal spines, but other than that, he seems content to float about the coral and rock and stare off into the distance. 

   The reputedly intelligent octopus from the same bay may well sulk for a month or two, coming out from a shelter to nab an occasional passing crab. When you see them in their little grottos, they glare at you magnificently, and thrash around their arms while turning different colours. If you rip one of these out of the wild, they rarely last long, many dying trying to get back to the mother ocean and drying out on your carpet while you are out picking up a new filter.

  Piglet, my bichir, I have had for, jeez, I guess 20 years so far, and she seems quite content to gulp down her pellets in the morning and attempt to bite the cat that likes to sun herself on top of the tank.  The light from the western window shines in perfectly on top of the tank, filtered by one of the largest Pothos plants ever grown in an aquarium, I think it is about nine feet long now, with foot wide leaves, and goes in and out of the tank as it wills. That plant is not depressed, and neither is Piglet. She gets very excited when I come in through the door with a bag of goldfish for her (the fish kind, not the snack) and races back and forth across the tank just waiting to get her sharp teeth onto them. I’ve never eaten one, as I refused to be part of a fraternal organization in college, but they must taste pretty darn good.

  If my wife or a friend came through the front door with a bag of goldfish, I don’t think I could summon the same enthusiasm.  Even if they were the cracker sort.

   The snakes I have known do get quite happy when they smell mice. Note: if you have recently handled mice, do not attempt to pick up your juvenile Reticulated Python unless you have a large supply of cotton tissue and duct tape nearby.

   Some people insist that animals can not feel joy or happiness. I think this is a pile of rubbish. You can not tell me that my Collie is not extremely happy rolling around in a dead mouse, and probably eating it in preparation to vomit it up at around two in the morning on one of the carpeted sections of the house we live in.  Puking on the tile would be too easy to clean up, and therefore, not as much fun.

  My owl, on the other hand, does seem to suffer from the same sort of depression as I do, and looks very dour most of the time, unless there is a cat nearby. He becomes quite animated around the cats, why, I don’t know, as they are completely indifferent to him, as if he was one of those plastic ones seem people mount on top of their houses for the pigeons to crap on.  Now and again he will hoot at me, but for the most part, just glares a lot, typically at the back of my neck. It is like writing in the studio with an accountant who never will believe that you misplaced one of the documents needed prior to the 15^th of April.  That dead silent glare.

   The freshest of dead mice ( I will not torture even mice, but buy them frozen and thaw them out on my desk, much to the chagrin of my wife at times) fails to even arouse the slightest bit of happiness from him. In fact, he looks at you such dripping contempt that you feel obligated to go shower, though that is probably not a bad idea after handling the dead mice anyway, and come back cleansed with a big smile on your face. 

Maybe if I brought him some goldfish?

   I myself find that now and again I succumb to depression, and tend to look to the animals to see how they handle it so well.  Of course, my bichir doesn’t have a house payment due in three days, or has to talk to the credit card company for hours on end to find out why my bill is so ridiculously high (all of the goldfish) and why they persist on sending out bills two days after they are listed as “past due”.   I do believe the owl understands a bit, he could probably be quite a good therapist for someone who likes to talk at three in the morning.

   The fish seem placid no matter what, except for the goldfish , and swim merrily about their tanks, and reproducing much more than they should.  They even seem to like the sunken ship ornament, and the little “no fishing” signs placed there. If the lights come on, they are happy, if they get fed, they are happy, and if nothing happens, they still just bang about the tank looking at whatnot and seeming to be quite content, I envy them so much.  I suppose that is why so many dentists put them in their parlors, to give a sense of calm contentment to the people who are willing to have a complete stranger bore holes in their jaw with a fancy Dremel tool. I think the dental practices use the aquaria to cover up the sounds of screams and bone dust flying via the loud filtration too.  If you have a large external filter running, it sounds somewhat like you are about fifty yards from Niagra Falls, and even the sound of people running in abject terror can be covered up.