Dewy and Ham

It was a low mournful howl that woke me up. Not all that loud, just mournful in a hungry lonesome way that lost hungry dogs have when they’re lost and hungry. I haven’t been sleeping all that well lately anyway, what with Swearing Man and the boys both having colds. But it did wake me right up out of a dream in which I was trying to find a train station.

I found him over at the Adler’s place rooting though the garbage cans, just as rail thin and mangy as any dog you’ve ever seen. The Adler’s live in Arizona during the winter months and they had yet to come back to Tacoma and open things up. So needless to say this pup wasn’t finding much to eat.

He came right up to me when he saw me. Most stray dogs are a little skittish at first, but not this one. I don’t know if it was the hunger or the cold or if he was just to damn tired to put up any resistance, but the moment he saw me he came right up with his tail between his legs and wouldn’t leave me alone. He followed me back up the road to the mobile home, the whole way with me shooing him in the loudest voice I could use at two in the morning. He wasn’t too impressed with my scare tactics either, parking himself on the stoop right outside the sliding door after I went inside.

I thought perhaps if I left him alone for a while he’d leave to go find some food elsewhere. I thought if I climbed back in bed I might drift off to sleep and deal with this whole problem in the morning. Clearly at two in the morning I don’t do my best thinking.

I had forgotten about the cats.

I was just drifting off to sleep when I heard the first hiss. Zane had been suspicious when I left the first time but now was doubly so as it appears that I brought a dog home. She was not amused. At first, in that half-asleep, half-awake kind of way, I thought the dog had made it inside somehow and that there was a battle going on in the kitchen. But as I came around the corner I could see that Zane was standing on the table looking out the sliding glass doors. The dog just sat there looking pathetic.

Then I had an idea. And not to toot my own horn or anything but this was a pretty good idea for a I-haven’t-slept-and-it’s-two-in-the-morning if I do say so myself. I gathered up some food and water from the fridge, put the cats in the bathroom and headed back outside.

Dewy and Ham had never gotten rid of the little doghouse that they had bought for Pepper. Which was strange because I don’t think I ever saw him use it or anything. In fact the only times I can remember him not being right at the feet of Dewy, was when he was eating, but they had kept it just the same.

I found an old pan to put the water in, put the food inside the doghouse and left him there hoping that he would find the little house comfortable enough to spend the night and in turn let me get some sleep. I never heard another peep out of him.

In the morning when I went out to get the paper, Ham was just pulling up in her car and unloading a large bag of dog food. Dewy was toweling off a small thin rat of a dog who had just taken what might possible have been it’s first bath ever and the sun was just coming over the stand of cedars at the bottom of the hill where the road turns.

I said good morning, but I don’t think they heard me. I could hear Dewy in that high pitch voice saying “what a good boy you are” over and over and Ham laughing in that cigarette-rasped voice she has. I grabbed the paper off the stoop and went back inside to have my cup of coffee and a little quiet time before Sweetie and the boys woke up.

Besides, I didn’t want the dog to recognize me and have to explain to the girls how he got over there in the first place. There’ll plenty of time to tell that story in the future, after he gets fattened up, gets his shots and everyone’s had a chance to get to know one another a little bit better.

The Thea Foss

There was a Russian sub in the Thea Foss waterway. It wasn’t a commissioned sub or anything. It was built in 1973 and a Canadian entrepreneur had recently salvaged it from the scrap heap. He had had the brilliant idea to fix up the insides with some cans of paint, decorate the state cabins and galley and charge people an entrance fee. Now for a few crisp tourist dollars, one can take a tour of the submarine and see firsthand how 70 men could live in a little Russian metal tube no larger than an elementary school bus. It’s also testament to Russian use of old technology as there is nothing at all modern in this little trap and if I had been told it was built 50 years ago I would not have been surprised. My understanding is that this pissed off the Russians who had thought it was to be used as scrap metal and not as a tourist trap but by that time there wasn’t really anything that they could do about it.

In some roundabout way we are friends of friends of the port commissioner in Tacoma. She had invited them to see the submarine while it was in port being painted and so they in turn, invited us. We thought it might be too difficult for the littlest one to go through it but would be a great diversion for the older boy.

It was raining like crazy but we got everything packed up and off we went to get our first look at the inside of an old Russian diesel-and-battery submarine.

The sub was almost directly under the 12th street bridge and though it was easy to see from the road it was a little more difficult to actually get to once we had gotten to the other side. We found it down at the end of a dirt alley past the dilapidated warehouses that line the north side of the waterway. Down a long slippery gangplank and up a ladder that looked like it was part of the original sub purchase.

Flat black with bright red hammer and cycle on the side. It is at once both larger than you would think and smaller than you would like it to be. Probably not one of Mother Russia’s crowning achievements in the cold war of the early 70’s. The insides were a mess of dials and cramped quarters. No fancy computer screens or anything, just big round hand crank dials and a periscope. It brought to mind how unpleasant and closed in it must have been when it was submerged and running on battery power.

After the tour we stood outside in the rain on the little dock and looked at starfish that had attached themselves to the pier. We weren’t in any hurry to get home and even though the rain wasn’t slowing down we hung out for a while. I think we were just glad to breath fresh air and watch the little rings form when the rain hits the water: standing next to a boat that was too far from home, both physically and politically.

Swearing Man

It was a nice slow quiet week this week. No car bombs or drunken fistfights going on down the road. No police chases thought our park, no new car stereos tested at two in the morning. No parties down at the sandbar or by the quarry. Sometimes that kind of quiet is all about peace and tranquility, and sometimes the quiet is in a weird light like the sky before a thunderstorm.

Last night Swearing Man was back.

He only seems to come by in the summer months. I don’t know if this is because he doesn’t have a good raincoat or if he has use of a car from November to April or what. But when the nights get warmer Swearing Man takes walks down our road.

“GOD DAMM YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!” “You fucking motherfuckers!” He screams at the top of his lungs. “You fucking bastard cocksuckers! You fucking bitches can go FUCK yourselves!” He yells as he walks off down the street. This is almost always between one and three in the morning, when usually nothing short of a bottle-rocket breaking your kitchen window and exploding in the sink of dirty dishes can wake you up. It’s mostly on the weekends and he’s always on the move.

I haven’t figured out if he starts swearing right outside our bedroom window or if that’s just when it gets loud enough to wake me up. And let me just say that “wake me up” is a gentle way to say “jumping a foot into the air and having a freaking heart attack”.

For those of you who have never experienced being roused out of bed from a deep sleep by a stranger insanely shouting expletives right outside your bedroom window it feels something like this. You just had a dream where you’ve fallen from a high building and before you hit the ground, in a sweaty panic, someone starts screaming that you’re a goddamn motherfucker and then you wake up. As you lie there with your heart pounding and your adrenaline racing through your system, you try to assess what part of that last bit was a dream and what was real. You feel your pillow under your head, then the bed and just as you’re calming down a bit cause you’re not dead, but before you realize the “goddamn motherfucker” WAS real, you hear “YOU FUCKING MOTHERFUCKERS! YOU FUCKING BASTARD COCKSUCKING MOTHERFUCKERS!” And your head hits the roof of the Airstream.

I’ve never even seen Swearing Man. By the time I’ve gathered my wits about me he’s gone off down the road. You can hear his swearing getting fainter and fainter as he makes his way home, or goes to find his drinking buddies, or maybe to just finally find that person who did him so wrong all those years ago and set things right.

I have fantasies where I get my ass out of bed and chase him down and stuff a sock in his mouth, but those are always in the morning after I’ve had my cup of coffee. I’m far too sideways both physically and mentally at two in the morning to move fast enough to even get a glimpse of what he looks like, much less getting my finger bit off in some sock-stuffing escapade.

Beside, like the wind rustling though the new leaves on the birch trees or the smell of warm rain and fresh cut grass, Swearing Man is becoming, in his own way, another little sign from the universe that the days are getting longer and before we know it, summer will have arrived. I just wish it were a little easier on my heart.

1st Aniversary

Well this week marks the one-year anniversary of my web site. I’ve written 31 forums in 365 days. I’ve re-done the site two or three times, writing close to 13,000 words and unknown amounts of html code to get to where I am today. I’m averaging around 300 hits per month which considering I have neither naked pictures, nor a particularly funny writing style, seems pretty good to me. This week the site reached the 3000 hit mark.

I’m trying to remember what caused me to start this web page in the first place. I think I was reading a story about blogging and I thought I would look into it. At any rate, I’ve longs since dropped the blog part of my web page as I found it too lightweight and fleeting than the style I was interested in creating.

Besides I need spell check otherwise I get cranky and use small words.

I can honestly say that I haven’t written this much since high school, being that I chose a fine liberal arts education where large amounts of writing weren’t a prerequisite to graduation. Not that I graduated or anything. For a reason that seems far away and distant, I left school three credits short of a diploma and never went back.

Today just seemed like a nice time to stop and thank everybody for coming by and hanging out for a bit. It does make a difference to know that friends come by and actually read this stuff. It’s worked to help my songwriting as well I think as this last year was one of the most proficient I’ve ever had in both output and quality.

I’m hoping that one year from now I will still be writing at my post Christmas pace of one forum a week. I know that it’s made me a better writer and I’m sure it will continue to improve if I keep at it.

This week I’ve added a comments area at the bottom of the page where you can leave me a message if you’d like. I’d had one on this page a long time ago but I discontinued it due to lack of posts. I’ll give this one a couple months and see what happens.

See you next week

Birthday Dreams

Today starts my birthday week. Since my birthday is on a Friday this week, I thought I would wait until Monday of the week proceeding before I would start it. This would avoid the post birthday letdown occurring over the weekend: a common occurrence when planning for a whole week celebration of the date of my birth.

Narcissistic? Undoubtedly. But it’s only once a year and I don’t think one week of narcissism out of a possible 52 is all that bad. I don’t harbor any beliefs that I deserve it more than other people who only celebrate one day out of the year, but as Clint Eastwood said to Gene Hackman in “The Unforgiven” right before he shot him, “Deservings got nothing to do with it.”

My goals this year include there being less of me at next years birthday week. I simply must get my lazy fat ass under control.
To write more music and spend more time recording.
To kiss my Sweetie more often, whether she wants me to or not.
To play with the boys more often.
To eat better tasting food.
To remember the mantra, though love and beauty are everywhere, they are found in the strangest of places.
To get to bed earlier.
To realize that watching the Styx “Behind the music” for the fifth time is probably enough even though it’s still just as funny as it was the first time.
To eat less chocolate but enjoy it more.
To read more books.
To become a better writer.
To redesign my web page.
To become a better guitar player.
To go to sleep and wake up happy.
To enjoy my dreams, but not enough to bore you with them.
To pet the cats more often.
To watch at least one sunrise in a good mood.
To get out to the ocean more often.

This list is by no means complete. It’s just a few things that came into my head as I sat down and wrote this. Perhaps I should make a tally so that next year I will be able to look back and evaluate my progress of me making me a better person. Then again, maybe not. I wouldn’t want people to get the wrong idea that I spend any more than one week a year in a self-indulgent frenzy.

Sometimes opening the door to reveal ones limitations can be like dumping chum off the back of the ship; there seem to be enough sharks partying off the waters of ego island without supplying them a written invitation to dinner.