Underwear and Garbage Liners

Underwear and garbage liners are two things that are worth spending a little more for higher quality.  Best to avoid a blowout, it could be very messy and embarrassing.

A or B

When a cat blissfully sleeps on the folds of your blanket preventing you from making the bed, do you...

A)  Pick the cat up and toss it to the side in order to make the bed, suffering the wrath of the cat.

or...

B)  Let the cat lie, and suffer the wrath of your wife from the unmade bed.

Age

As I grow older, I've noticed a few things that my age has given me.

1). My feet aquire an odd smell by the end of the day.

2). My hairline is balding only on the left side of my head.

3). All that lost hair has taken to growing inside my nose.

4). I enjoy corny action movies twice as much.

5). I have taken to drilling holes in anything any chance I get.

In the Presence of Ghosts

Last night, in the very late hours, I found myself alone in the dark and quiet (and haunted) warehouse where I work.

I have decided that the ghosts are extremely human.  I felt as if our presences to each other were very apparent, yet very anticlimactic.  Like two people taking a shit in adjacent stalls.

Detail

When I stare out of our second story window into the top of our decades old juniper tree, it gets me thinking.  Thinking spurred on by my read of Robert Frost's 'Design' this morning.  It got me looking into things, deep into things.

The way a juniper tree has not needles nor leaves, but rather scaled clusters of aromatic green.  Slender reptilian fingers that offer up the dry and gray-blue berries few creatures desire.  These smallish 'berries' aren't actually berries at all, but rather cones with flesh instead of scales.  I think back to when I was younger, playing in the back yard.  "Berries are for eating, this is a berry, I'm going to eat it," I thought.  I retained a vivid memory of that taste, and of spitting it out, and of my dad telling me it was poison.  That same taste is used to flavor gin, one of my least favorite spirits.  I just now put that together...

The bark looks like its been through hell and back.  Dry, gnarled, gray and cracking.  Dead strips hang onto the living tree, life protected by death.  The tree has always grown straight.  Perhaps it was planted in a good spot, perhaps it has good tree genetics.  Our juniper tree is an athlete among juniper trees, it reaches higher than the eaves.  My vision is lacking, but I try and stare even deeper at the cone-berries.  I think of one that I cannot see, of one that is in highest bows, held close in the shade by the trunk.  Perhaps this cone-berry is infected.  The seed of the tree replaced by the seed of some parasitic insect, now a nursery for a larvae that is soon to emerge into the Spring. The larvae with so many macroscopic pieces, bug organs and bug hair, so intricately put together within its cone-berry.  Nature's attention to detail, to design.  When this bug emerges, chances are it may be instantly gobbled up by a robin or a magpie.  Flushed down through an avian intestinal tract, ending up hours later as a mostly white plop on the hood of my car that was made in South Korea.  A car that has traveled so many miles to get where it is at today, further by itself than it will ever carry me.

Up Late

The final whir of the printers fade.

The moans of a hungry stomach,

a language I can't speak

yet my body does.

My hands dry and bleeding

out from the cuts and cracks.

Hours on my watch

worth less than minutes now.

Tired,

yes.

Broken,

no.

A job well done,

always and again.

Pride less in what I do,

more in how I do it.

Tomorrow my list

greets me with my coffee,

always.

Fix this,

file that,

clean this, 

buy that.

Life's routine,

as much out of the office

as in.

To take on more?

There's only one shot

we're given.

Yes,

always.

Cancer

When I see other people dealing with cancer it always hits me close to home.  A coworker of mine, a really cool guy who I haven't known for very long, has been in Seattle a few days coming to terms with a diagnosis on his three year old daughter.  He needs to be there with her more than he needs to be dealing with work and all of life's regular bills.  That's not to say that the bills won't stop coming.  I doubt he will ever read this blog, but I jumped on donating all of my accrued paid time off to him to lessen his burden and buy him a few days at least.

I just wish I could do more.

Sheep Mountain

Last evening, while enjoying a majestic game of folf on Sheep Mountain in Clancy, MT, I stopped to urinate from atop a boulder.  Looking out over the landscape, I awed at the still snow-covered mountains in the distance and the boulder riddled hills we were within.

I couldn't help but smile at the beauty and the relief from taking an overdue piss.

Note:  I always forget to take pictures (not of the piss, but of the view).

Fingernails

These days whenever I clip my fingernails, I seem to take them back just a little farther everytime.  Today I paused to wonder, at this rate, will I even have fingernails when I'm old and grey?

Yeti Tracking

Sometimes my dreams reach a certain level of vividness that amaze me.  They feel as if they last for days or weeks.

Last night I was deep in the Crimean wilderness heading an expedition to track and study the effects of global warming on the local Yeti population.  We hiked for days through waste deep snow and biting cold to rendezvous with an elusive hermit who was an expert on the matter. His cabin was full of yeti artifacts; bones, fossilized poop, and fur.  We reached a tattered fence that was the boundary to their habitat, a fence the hermit warned us not to cross.  Some jerkoff on my team crossed it anyways and was promptly ripped to shreds by a female yeti.  He shot the yeti in the process, which triggered an entire herd of the beasts to come charging at us.  We retreated to a local bar, where a group of drunken revelers took turns trying to dance with the raging yetis.  They were all ripped in half in their attempts, but nobody seemed to notice.  I finally managed to appologize to the alpha-yeti, through a series of grunts and hand gestures.  They left the blood soaked bar and went back to the mountains.

I awoke, and looked at the clock.

1:30 am.

I had only been asleep for 2 hours.