Maybe I'm a man

Maybe you're the only woman

Who could ever help me

Baby, won't you help me to understand?

-Paul McCartney-

 

I've heard this song a trillion times since 1970. As a kid it was a sappy love song. As I got older I'd hum and sing along to it w/o bothering to really listen to the lyrics. I do that with a lot of songs. There are songs I've heard that I've never bothered to learn the lyrics to and most times that's because I can't understand what they're singing.

Today, “Maybe I'm Amazed” came on WCIB and w/o thinking about it, I listened.

I thought to myself, “God...remember when you thought a girl would 'Save you?'”

In my 20's, I, we all had, deficits we knew intimately. None of us is perfect. Also I'd think that if I met the right girl, if we hit it off the right way, this would somehow fill the gaps in my life that I had a hard time filling myself. The “Perfect Love” that was somewhere out there, I just had not found it yet.

I'm wasn't alone in these hopes. Everyone I knew back then thought similarly but would never dare divulge that information.

Yeah well...you come to find out people are messy, imperfect as hell and they can't “save you.”

What I did come to learn was a little better than that fantasy.

If I was in a healthy relationship, where it was easy to be open and completely myself, the girl would allow me to bring forward the best in myself. The holes in me remain unfilled but I brought forth the best I owned already with abundance. That is growth. Someone I knew called that “blooming.”

Women have great perception. I can remember years ago, when I was 19, sitting on the front steps of M's house with his girlfriend when were just talking. We really didn't know one another well enough to give one another eye opening revelations to one another. Well, I didn't have any to give to her, I was a guy, and by definition, dense as a brick.

“”Ron, you are so ready to bloom now. I can see it. You ought to just move out on your own and it'll come.”

I was quietly shocked and I kept that reaction to myself. How the hell did she know what was eating at me? I never told anyone. Women and their X ray eyes....she knew.

I too, could bring out the best in others.

I remember C. She came off as a dumb blonde but wasn't really. It was a role that seemed to bring her the things she needed in life. One time at Scarborough, as we sat on the benches watching the surf, she pointed to the horizon and said those cumulonimbus clouds out there were headed our way.

“Cumulonimbus?” I thought to myself. I had no idea she understood weather nor had any use for Latin prefixes and suffixes. There was a side to this girl I never knew about and I turned to her and smiled and asked how the hell she knew that. She said she learned it from being a Girl Scout long ago. This side her actually made her more pretty in my eyes. I figured she felt comfortable enough with to drop the duh-duh blonde routine and let her real self come out for a bit.

It was simply feeling comfortable with one another and that's huge.

At my age now, I still own some of those old deficits in my personality. I may own them still if I reach 94 years of age. But, those things are like holes in the road, you fill them in as you can and sometimes it takes forever. The only person who can do that is you and not your loved one.

I was struck by a few lines in the Lincoln movie that came out last year. In one scene, he's arguing with his wife, Mary, about letting their oldest son join the Union Army. Mary would have no part of it since she lost one son already. She threatens Abe with Holy Hell if he dies.   After being berated by Mary, Lincoln says;

“I must make my decisions and Bob (their son) must make his, you yours. And bear what we must. Hold and carry what we must.

What I carry within me, you must allow me to do it.

Alone, as I must. And you alone, Mary, you alone may lighten your burden or render it intolerable. As you choose.”

Our lives are our own and that dream of being saved, fixed when I was in my 20's was a nice dream.

And “Maybe I'm Amazed” is still a good song.

AH HA!

I am a fresh air addict and I am still refusing to close my windows at night despite the low early morning temperatures. In order to close them, I'd have to admit that summer and the best of autumn have been defeated. I will have to resign myself to it one day as I always do, but I don't like it.

There is another reason to shut your windows but it's a rare one. Skunks.

I awoke around 4 am this morning to a horrible stench that was so bad IT probably was the reason I woke up. I lay there, knowing exactly what that foul odor was and figured the neighborhood skunk had ambled across my backyard, leaving a trail of perfume, or had sprayed something nearby. I tried to go back to sleep but that burnt garlic odor kept rousing me. So I use a trick I learned as a kid when we drove past pig farms in Seekonk, I breathed through my mouth. That does the trick!

There used to be a joke shop in Downtown Pawtucket. I never went to it being so far away and too young to go alone. My older brother and his friends did however. My brother's friend, nicknamed Burnsy, bought a bottle of Skunk Perfume. It was some sort of sulfurous compound that spread through the air like perfume does. The point was to open it up stealthily and let the liquid vaporize off and stink up a room, car or whatnot. You then can accuse anyone with you of not showering or what have you. The stuff really did reek as Burnsy managed to sucker me into taking a good whiff of the stuff when I was five. Ugh!

What he had done with it, I thought pretty creative and cruel. After leaving the joke shop, they went to a diner on Main St to get some burgers. After they were done eating, Burnsy quietly opens the bottle and lets the vapors drift off down the line of patrons seated at the diner's “bar.” He and my brother told me several of the customers started coughing and gagging to the stench. One got up and left w/o paying his bill.

What a nasty thing to do! While people are eating, you gas them with man-made skunk. When I was told of this, being five, I roared with laughter, as did Burnsy and others. I had to ask if anyone puked as that would've made the joke even funnier. These things are humorous to boys who are under twelve you know.

Burnsy then decided to use the rest of it by pouring some if it in one of those old plastic squirt guns, mixed with water. Without saying anything, he pumped the thing about six times into the chest of Rachel M. who was standing with us. She nearly puked herself from the odor. His chosen targets were any of the girls in neighborhood, since they were most likely to be completely disgusted. He managed to get three of the girls who couldn't run away in time.

We all had a good laugh until two of the girl's mothers came walking down the street. We all became pretty quiet when they both walked up to Burnsy's house and disappeared inside. About 90 seconds later we heard, “ROBERT!!!!! YOU COME HOME RIGHT NOW!”

Burnsy was cooked. His Mom had been informed of his misdeeds.

I could tell you of the many 'stink bombs' some kids lit off in Goff Jr High near the end of the school year, but that happened on such a regular basis it became dull.

I saw this and it was gross, but funny. Boys are notorious for doing anything particularly low to one another for comedy.

We had a kid on this street, Kevin who was a year or two younger than my cohort, and six years younger than the guys in my brother's group. Kevin was needy, loud, annoying and always tagging along wanting to be included. Our group included him but my brother's friends just tortured the poor thing.

Chubsy, my brother’s friend, was drinking a Coke when little Kevin asked if he could have some. Chubsy, then with a compassionate lilt in his voice said, “Sure!”

He says to Kevin.

“Open your mouth and close your eyes I'm gonna give you a big surprise.”

Now since Kevin was much younger, naïve and in desperate need for some liquid candy, did exactly as Chubsy told him too.

Then I saw this.

Chubsy, from deep down in his throat, hacks up a glob of very thick mucous and spits, literally fires the thing into Kevin's mouth.

Kevin didn't quite know just what he had received until he saw the rest of us either laugh or stand there in open-mouthed in amazement. Chubsy couldn't stop from laughing.

Poor Kevin, his little child like mind finally figured it out and he spit out Chubsy's spit. Once more, Kevin runs crying home.

This wasn't a practical joke but it displays the real boorish behavior that was fairly endemic with our group so long ago.

Supanic (and I use his real last name!) and my brother are driving down Hamlet St when, up ahead, they see a little girl on her bike take an awful spill on the sidewalk. My brother told me she perfectly went SPLAT onto the concrete.

Supanic, who was driving, pulls over into the opposite lane to get real close to the girl and then points at her from his open window and let's go some riotous laughter.

“AH HA HA HA HA! AH HA HA HA!”

The poor girl, crying from smacking the sidewalk now has to put up with a 17 year old's sense of humor.

When told of this, I too laughed at the gall it took to do this. Then in the same thought, the poor kid and how she grew up waay too fast that afternoon, learning about callous teens.

*****

Ya know, growing up in my neighborhood and the schools I attended gave rise to a few thoughts in me. I would witness things, like cruelties and how teachers in our classes would spend a quarter of the time telling us to SHUT UP. I began to think there was something not quite right with my generation. Or at least far too many examples of weird behavior. I don't know. I have no idea if the kids of today are just as bad, perhaps they are.

The Other Good Use for a Lunch Bag

Time heals all wounds they say. I guess so. I can look back on some embarrassing moments and not feel uncomfortable about them. Actually, some of them seem humorous now. Here's a small sampling of when I blew it.

Before three girls, one of whom I really liked, they handed me a pull-out car radio that wasn't working properly in the hopes I could fix it. So, I kept toying with it and felt a sneeze coming on. I thought I could sense it felt like one of those dry sneezes. The ones that feel like Alka-Seltzer has gone off inside your nose when you do it. No problems. I let the sneeze fly.

Out of my nose, came this shooting rope of snot that must've pitched and veered like one of those rope swings kids have over the local pond. I felt it finally land across my lips and could see the rest bobbing below my chin. I have to admit the girls did their best to “not notice” but c'mon! I turned my head away, wiped off the goo and just could not think of a witty comeback to prove I hadn't done this on purpose. Christ. It's amazing how situations will arise that give the perception that you're a pig.

I swear, I really did think it was going to be a dry sneeze.

I handed the radio back to the girls with the un-snotted hand and walked away. I had blown it and it was too late.

I like looking back on my life as everyone else does. You see things in a different light after you have packed on the years. When I look back at being fourteen, I realized how much childishness I still had in me and the self-centered attitude that comes with it.

June 25^th 1978 was my Mom's 48^th birthday. My brother and I had just finished dinner and we got up, plunked our plates in the sink and headed to the living room to watch the old Star Trek series. As I sat there, watching another Red Shirt get phasered to death in the first four minutes of the show, a creeping realization came over me.

“Ken...I think we forgot Mom's birthday!” I quietly whispered to him.

He then had this look of astonishment and then became red faced. We both sat there, not knowing what to do as any birthday in this house was celebrated immediately after dinner and we both had left the kitchen as if were just another day. My brother then got up, went out the front door and left in his car. I just sat there feeling if I admitted anything to her, it would only make the situation worse.

My brother came back after a twenty minutes with a Cherry & Webb $25 gift coin. He motioned to me to come up into his room to sign a card and hoped we could come back down, greet Mom in the kitchen with the one hour belated gift.

“Happy Birthday Mom!” my brother said. I was probably holding the worst poker face, all ridden with guilt as he handed it to her.

“Oh...thanks.” Mom said. As she place both items on the table and took another sip of tea.

We blew it.

You know, as I write this, I still feel a bit bad about that.

I had told you about the time I vomited in a restaurant, so I'll skip that one.

You want the truth out of me? Then pour vodka in to my mouth. That works each time.

My parents were not on easy terms with every neighbor and the DiMeo's were enemies to be hated. Since I was the son, I aped my Dad's views on them as well. I have written about this a long while back so I won't go into the battles fought.

When I was a teen, major snowstorms on weekday nights were great because I was assured that school would be canceled the next day. It would be for all of us and that meant it was a party night! We'd find a runner to get us some cheap Popov vodka and we hung out, in the near blizzard getting soused. We roamed from friend's house to friend's house, getting thrown out of most, trying to have some fun. We finally made it to Gails' house when we saw Gail and this other girl standing out in the driveway, watching the storm. Gail's house was across from the DiMeo's.

Now the two girls were bundled up like Eskimos but only Gail was talking. I could recognize her from her face and the voice. I didn't recognize the other girl as she was silent and wrapped up in hats, scarves and what not.

I then turned around and saw the DiMeo's house and launched into a drunken tirade against the parents there. I laid it on pretty heavily when Gail, asked me if I knew who was the girl standing next to her.

I didn't.

“Ron! That's Charlene!”

“Oh...Shit.” I thought to myself. I know exactly who this is. There was only ONE Charlene I knew at all and it was Charlene DiMeo, the only daughter of the Evil Parents my Dad disliked.

Yeah, I tried to take back all I said with my best self effacing ways. It's of no use when you're gooned on cheap booze and you over act your part as most drunks do.

As Jimmy pulled me away to go to his house, I could overhear Gail and Charlene say, “Asshole...Yeah, ain't he though?” As walked further away there was a louder, “Fuck YOU!” aimed at me and it wasn't Gail's voice. I could recognize the other one clearly now.

In all fairness, I had nothing against Charlene at all as she had NEVER wronged me in any way.

I blew it again.

This next one is very intimate and personal. Well, screw it, I'm a roll...I'll just come out and say it.

I was fucking Pamela (obviously not her real name) when she asked me something. I really didn't hear her and I responded with a, “Huh? What?” She never repeated her question. The next morning, I remembered she had asked me something so I asked her what it was.

She said dryly, “I had asked you if you loved me.”

Deep inside my brain a loud alarm went off with an , “UH-OH!”

I said nothing. What could I say to correct a faux pas like that?

Well, I now have to defend my half of the race. Girls, NO conversations please! We boys don't want to think. We can't think as we are so incredibly wrapped up in the totality of sex. It's overwhelming to us. Our entire focus is absorbed by it and having Q&A sessions will not work!

“Huh? What?” I have to admit that's the funny now that I look back on it. She may still be miffed by it though.

I still blew it though.

I'm going to end this here as a lot of other examples are cropping up. Jesus...if I can think up this many times I looked the fool, put my foot in my mouth or otherwise tripped over my feet and fell flat on my face...what the hell are you going to think of me?

Ok, one more. And I'm not alone in doing this.

Typing class, 8^th grade in Goff Jr High. We're all typing away to the tapping rhythm of Mr Travese's ruler as he dictated the letters. “G-H-G!” “A-B-C” We'd type out as best as we could and the sound of twenty badly worn Smith Corona typewriters filled the room with a factory like clatter.

When that little exercise was over, it became quiet again. I could feel a fart trying to escape me but I had managed to block the bugger. I had then shifted in my chair when the thing slipped by my defenses and announced it's birth into the classroom rather audibly. Mr Travese then turned his head to me. Of course, I couldn't deny anything as my face went red as a beet. Sandra, a girl sitting in the next row, gave me a look like I had stomped on her pet kitten. Johnny behind me snickered. Our class clown, Mark, grabbed his throat and groaned like he was a WW1 soldier choking to death during a mustard gas attack.

“Aright, Mark...Cut it out!” Mr Travese bellowed.

I sat there, feeling as if every single human being on the Earth was looking at me. Ah well, these things happen.

Ahh, I Can't Think of a Witty Title...

 

I'm nobody! Who are you?
 Are you nobody, too?
 Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
 They'd banish us, you know.

 

 How dreary to be somebody!
 How public, like a frog
 To tell your name the livelong day
 To an admiring bog!

 

-Emily Dickinson-

The world keeps getting smaller. People you knew years ago can show up while you're minding your own business getting the dull, ordinary chores done. What can surprise you from your half-asleep attention are the ends these people from the past came to.


There's a Quickie Mart in Seekonk I always use due to the lower taxes on gasoline across the border. Generally I don't run into many people I know while gassing up. On occasion I'll spot someone I know on the other side of the island and we spark up a quick “What have you been up to?” conversation that ends when the tank's filled. One time I ran across Morris who I hadn't seen since high school.


Morris was easily recognized. Back then, he had straight, flat and what looked like greasy hair that resembled the fur of a sick cat, collapsed and dull. He always had this and would constantly be brushing it from his eyes as it routinely kept falling across. He seemed annoyed by this.


Saint Raphael Academy was typical of your prep schools then. It wasn't Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire where you have to cough up $40,000 a year but there was an exclusionary taste to it, at least with some of the people there who felt they were privileged and made sure you knew it as well. The culture was odd at times too but then again, DeLasallian priests ran it. Those guys are a hair less crazy than the Jesuits.


Our senior year I noticed this. I witnessed some of the Brothers, in hallways, publicly comment on the futures of some of the graduating class. Of course, the ones who came from money, high on the social list or shone in some other way were commented on. One of the kids I saw lionized was Morris.


Morris, in comparison to the rest of us, was a genius. He excelled at pretty much anything academically and it was easy for him. He had a talent which afforded him an ability to work a little and gain great results. Morris on the other hand wasn't a looker and failed sort of miserably on the scratch test when it came to high school social standing. But, he still had an air of superiority about him due to his academic standing, sometimes grating as he served this to you with a quiet, insulting demeanor. It probably was all he had to show and tell and hold high. At times he would betray his inflated rank in the school by following some of us, like a puppy, trying to ingratiate himself with us, out of loneliness and wanting to fit in. He wasn't a bad kid, just another schmuck trying to make his way through high school realities.


The last I saw him, talked to him, he told me he was accepted to CalTech. Apparently his SAT's and recommendations from our school were enough to do it. “Jesus H. Christ” I thought to myself. That is one of the most demanding universities to get into. It's so restrictive that, as a student, you needed an FBI security clearance to work on some of your projects, as CalTech runs the JPL laboratory in Pasadena. JPL is where most of our space probes to the planets are controlled from. If you still don't understand this, think of Carl Sagan, he worked there for decades. If you weren't going to CalTech, you went to MIT or Cornell or nothing at all.


So, we graduate and we scatter to the four winds, each of us building a life and forgetting most of our classmates from high school as they aren't relevant in our lives anymore.


Then comes the day I'm gassing up my car in Seekonk several years later when I recognize the collapsed hair of the guy on the other side of the island.


“Morris...?” I ask.


Yep, it was him.


We talked a bit about the old times in high school of “What happened to this one and that one” when I asked about him and his life. He gave an evasive answer and tried to shift the subject to my life real quick.


Well, that was a mistake. I'm a nosy one and doing that to me brings out the detective in me.


I slyly pressure him into telling the truth, I can be good at that.


He had failed at CalTech and miserably too. He was bounced out nine months into his career there. I had asked if he discovered partying as that is usually a great reason to bomb out of college. But he said it wasn't that at all. I believed him as he wasn't the type in high school either.


He didn't outright say it but I discovered the jist. He was competing against the best the world has to offer when it comes to undergraduate science students. Kids from Korea, Japan, Germany and all over managed to spar against him easily. He wasn't good enough to survive the insane rigors of Caltech and was cut from the team in nine months.  That's quick. He told me he was now living back at home and working, at then popular, Block Buster video.


I was then reminded again, back in Saint Ray's, of how a Brother said somewhat loudly that Morris would excel in life, that his future seemed assured. I wonder how much of a disservice that might have been. Then again, if you are the largest frog in a small pond and then you move to the world's greatest swamp and you get your head handed to you, it should be of no surprise. I can't imagine what it must feel like to have been King of the Little Pond only to be shown, to be proven beyond a doubt, that you were just mediocre.

JPL's a small city unto itself. Cal Tech is HUGE and this is just a small part of it

Better Living Through Chemistry



 

Click the Picture and See the Old Commercial

Polyvinylchloride, acetone and red dye #2 were a daily occurrence when I was a kid. My friends and I came of age when the EPA was founded too late.  Prior to that, DuPont and Dow substances, which nature never thought to make, were making their way into our lives.  I sometimes goof on various news stories about the latest cancer scare. “Drinking anything out of plastic bottles has been proven to give rats toe cancer!” I think to myself: “Well, so what, it's too late now, not with the exposure to all the crap I came in contact with as a kid.”


My friends and I, for about a week, played with the substance you see in the video I posted above. I'll tell you something though, even as seven year olds, we suspected something was amiss because Bubble Plastic gave off such a powerful odor that we all thought it was made by the chemical plant near our homes, Teknor Apex. It wasn't but we weren't too far off in our suspicions that it was no good. I can remember trying to blow a bubble with the stuff, it wasn't easy. Not only that, you held it two inches from your mouth and couldn't help but inhale the weird smelling stuff. If you let it dry somewhat, there were some kids who chewed a drop of it like bubble gum.


Snakes. During of Fourth of July there was this firework that looked like a large, black Tums tablet. You placed a lit match near it for a few seconds when it started to fizzle and this long, strange lava-like ash would grow out of it. While it did this, a huge cloud of acrid smoke would be produced that enveloped us kids and we breathed it in. That too stunk of Teknor Apex. I suspect we may have lit 100 of these things due to their being very cheap to buy.


I once nearly ate one. In our TV room, there was this cheezy, TV table tray that I had a pile of M&M's on. I had filled up my pockets with them and followed my brother outside to see what he was up to. I would place the M&M's into my mouth by the score and when I had bit down on one, there was this odd crunch and mouth feel. It was like I had bit down on a Kingsford briquet. I then realized what I was chomping on and spit the entire chocolate mess onto the driveway. My brother gave me a disgusted look as he had no idea why I would spit out a mouthful of brown goo and saliva. I ran inside to brush my teeth. I had foolishly laid my collection of fireworks on the same table as the M&Ms.


Being young boys meant we had a sometimes natural cruel steak. I can remember one hot summer afternoon we watched as John snuck a can of Raid from under his mother's eyes out of the kitchen cabinet. He sprayed ant hills, anything moving under flat stones and spiders with the stuff. We'd have our heads up close to watch the final death agonies of beetles, earwigs and flies. Of course, we'd be so close as to breathe in that other worldly smell. God knows what Johnson & Johnson made Raid out of in 1970. It probably wasn't too far off from the stuff they sold to the Pentagon during the Viet Nam war.


There were probably a hundred other substances we came in contact then and we'll never know about. Oh well. I don't remember any of us having suddenly occurring childhood cancers though. I can't say how many of us, at our age now, have come down with strange maladies.


The world was safer then? Our parents left us to our own devices a lot of the time and we found trouble as a means of fun, even chemical fun. Today the world seems unsafe and kids today are in virtual CDC environmental suits and monitored through their own cell phones. You choose.


This isn't a Dow Chemical story but it illustrates how we lived back then. Every kid had a bike. We all rode them w/o helmets and in the street as we wished. We used to make ramps to jump the bikes into the air as well.


It was late August in '73, I was riding my bike down the sidewalk as fast as I could when I lurched onto the street I lived on from behind a parked car, without looking of course.  We rarely looked. I made it out ten feet into the road when suddenly a car came at me. I swerved in just enough time to miss the steel bumper but caught the headlight assembly and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back, looking at the sky, with the sounds of neighborhood wives screaming. I stood up and found myself with just a forehead abrasion that wasn't that painful at all. In less than a minute, a lynch mob had formed around the shaking driver who had stepped out of his car to see if I was dead or not.


I admitted what I had done, which was to shoot into the street without looking. I too was scared silly and I couldn't come up with any reason to lie. Also, I and my bike were pretty much safe. The guy's headlight was smashed though. The crowd calmed down and left the poor guy alone. Thinking of this now, I feel sorry for him. That guy thought he killed an eight year old from the looks of him.


Twenty minutes later, us kids were riding our bikes again, in the street, up and down curbs and playing like we always did, in the street.

Animal Planet

Ever seen a red fox? I have twice. I mean live ones, not the dead ones you see squished in the middle of the road. I find it funny that being a city raised kid, that most of my introductions to critters I've heard about were first seen on the side of the road, flat and mangled.


“Huh, that was an opossum. Now I've seen what an opossum looks like, sort of.”


I never knew red foxes were that small and compact or that their coat is a dusky red. I was walking along a trail by the reservoir several years back, at sunset when I noticed some movement about fifty yards ahead of me. I looked and in time too, the thing had come to a dead halt and stiffened into a statue. I stood there in some small amazement at seeing and learning that real foxes live here. We both stared at one another for about forty seconds when I wanted a closer look. I took one step forward and the fox sprung off into the brambles. I tried to track him but I lost sight, only to hear that rustling and snapping of twigs as he bolted.


Owls. Owls are stealth fighters. You cannot hear them fly. Along a northern branch of the same trail, again I was ambling along when I saw, not hear, but saw a large bird drift over my head and rise up to land on a bough about 20 feet above me. It sat there with that tell tale owl face, looking down at me. For a second I thought he had swooped down onto me. Perhaps I walked near a nest and threatened it?

I stood there, again both of us looking at one another and was astounded that I heard nothing as it came by. No wonder mice have no chance against this.


Blue herons have come back to the river that runs by to the east of me. These things look like Section 8 housing. Broken down, ragged and unkempt. The one I saw was in the middle of the river, on one leg as they do stand and fairly large as well to my surprise. They really are blue, a dusty blue. You don't see too many blue animals in this world. But what a ratty looking bird.


Racoons, ubiquitous raccoons. These creatures are as common as starlings now. I swear they have figured out that living in suburbia is a lot easier than the forest. Why hunt for your food when you can have KFC and Spaghetti-O's by knocking over a garbage can? So much easier. One day, raccoons will have been discovered to have clogged arteries and diabetes.


On occasion, I'll find one or possibly two rummaging through my cans. The last time I saw them, I had gone out there to toss away a bag of garbage when we surprised one other. I took a few steps back as these things are known carriers of rabies, and then started making a lot of noise, stamping my feet to scare them off.


The two looked at me, blew me off and went right back to digging through the can. What balls.


“Pssshhh..another human...When we're done gorging...we'll hit up the Markenson's house, they have old food from Chello's!”


I have found out racoons don't like being sprayed with garden hoses. The took off after I tried that. They kindly left me a wonderful mess. Perfect garbage pickers they are as they open up every bag, pull out every item and then leave it scattered on the lawn.


Squirrels? Who cares. They're are a billion of them here. Chipmunks as well. They've smartened up and let themselves be domesticated enough to snatch tidbits of food from your hands now.


*****


New England really doesn't have any dangerous animals. I suppose smacking a moose at 60mph might qualify. You take out their legs and the two tons of moose meat comes crashing through your windshield, on top of you. I once knew a guy who hunted moose with a 444 Marlin. This thing is canon with it's 44 magnum slug powered by a huge amount of gunpowder. Dirty Harry's 44 is a bb gun compared to this thing.

“You can do two things. Walk up to the moose, press the muzzle into the side of the thing and fire, as they don't run. Or...come across one and you better be able to run if it's in a bad mood, they can overtake you.”


Years ago, my second attempt to climb Mt St Helens was thwarted by a landslide that had blocked the road. Since I was so far out it was a waste of time to find an alternate route, so I turned around and dicked around some smaller roads. I found one and followed it, on the south face of the mountain which surprisingly wasn't as destroyed as the north. The dirt road came to an end on an Alpine meadow filled with 20,000 ankle high flowers. I'm guessing the altitude was about 7,000 feet.


I parked the car and walked about 100 yards out, sat down and before me, the Cascade mountain range spread out for miles.


I'm a city kid. My idea of forest is Foster for God's sake. It slowly dawned on me that I wasn't in Foster when an admonition from my Portland friend, told me to stay alert for cougars. I sat there and realized that IF a cougar made a lunch of me, no one would probably know for weeks. They'd find a rental car and that's about it.


As I frightened myself further, I slowly got up, walked back to car, barely looking to the left and right should I let any cougars see me looking and blow their chance at a perfect stealth kill. They'd have to make the run now had I discovered them.


This was the real forest with real creatures, not my backyard with obese, self-entitled raccoons.

Neck Beard

David Thoreau, dying of tuberculosis at his aunt's house...


When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded: "I did not know we had ever quarreled."


*****


I've read, I think, three of Thoreau's works. Everyone has heard of Walden, or Life in the Woods. Everyone read that one. The other two I read were Civil Disobedience and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.


Each time I read him, it was like reading Morse Code for the first time. “.... . -. .-. -.-- -.. .- ...- .. -.. - .... --- .-. . .- ..-”  I had to translate. I read Thoreau slowly, as he chooses words that don’t seem congruent to the sentence he's constructing. I'd go back again, reread the previous sentence, then the next, then finally finish the paragraph. “Ah, I get it now.” I'd think. Or, he'd go off on a tangent for eight paragraphs, leading me to an antique Greek god, only to come around and tie that to the dragonflies he'd see outside his door. I found it slow going.


I can attribute that to the writing style of back then. Read Charles Dickens and you'll feel it in spades. Thoreau sat in his shed on Walden Pond, with all the free time in the world, cramming as much meaning into a sentence, as a calories in a eclair. He managed wring as much as you can out of that style from the 1850's.   You have to chew it slowly.


I came across people who read Walden and then had a short-term epiphany that how they were living their lives was all wrong and it was time to “Get back to nature.” Ok, fine. But what I knew of getting back to nature I learned from living near some woods and what camping was like. It's messy, dirty and at times pretty uncomfortable. The sun shining brightly over Walden Pond with a hawk flying by is a book cover. Live there in January when it's frozen solid and you'll have a better appreciation of getting back to nature.  That's, “Living deliberately,” as Thoreau says. Want to try on simplicity? Live there in winter as he did, and you'll realize all that matters is firewood, food and re-caulking the drafty leaks in your poorly made shed. Your life will be pared down quite drastically and you'll find some aspects of how far you go down, as shocking. Thoreau wanted to strip away life's dross and find out what it's like. So will you if you decide to try it.


To tell the truth, I came at the book Walden at the wrong angle. When I was told “This is the Answer to Life,” I approached it that way, being quite open about that idea, which, of course, fucked up the book for me. I came away from it not with any life changing views, but I appreciated Thoreau's balls to tell his peers to go fuck themselves, which was what he was doing his entire life, at times enough to land his ass in jail too. This book is not going to save you but it equates conformity with spiritual death. I suppose it would save many people from that, but they're not the type to pick up this kind of book anyway. I liked Thoreau due to his gumption to remain his own person and stubbornly resist those around him.


New England Transcendentalism was incredibly loosey-goosey then. I won't define it for you because I don't quite “get it” after reading about it. It's all over the map and the only thing you can take away from the whole movement is, “Tune In, Turn on to Nature and Drop Out.” If you read about the Transcendentalist authors from his time (and Thoreau was one), you'll find out that they were proto-hippies. Some of them created and badly managed 1850's communes (Yes, there were communes back then!). They failed because since everyone was too busy being their own particular person, no team effort could be applied to get the corn and wheat crops in the ground. Eventually, everyone drifted away because starving isn't much fun. Want individuality? You're better off doing what Thoreau did and live alone. You'll only have yourself to argue with.


If you want something a wee bit lighter than that, read his Concord/Merrimack River book. It's a travelog, but he'll describe the way the water splits around the bow of his canoe for a while. Even so, the descriptions of a New England that exists only in upper Maine now, are pretty cool.

Most times when I see portraits of "back then," I'm hit with the sober seriousness they all seem to show. Well, grainy black and white pictures can do that.  That and the fact NO ONE washed their hair back then. But even then, Thoreau blew convention off by wearing a  'neck beard."  Apparently he got a lot of guff from those around him wearing such a singular, goofy style.