Well, I ain’t sure where this is gonna end up- it is hopefully gonna be a comedy smooch for several different lady dopers, ya’ll know who you are…
I gotta explain a few things first off:
I am, at the best of times, no Mr. effective pants at dealing with life, and it goes downhill from there. In particular, germane to this post, is an intermittent condition I suffer from, which I will call ‘Happy-Ass LaLa Butterfly Child’ and it is best described thusly: A bad to very bad thing is fixing to happen to me, or is at that very moment happening to me, but it’s pretty in the lead-up, or while it’s happening. I get caught up in the prettiness, and don’t have a clue as to the impending badness.
A couple of f’r instances, one real-life, one made up jsut for illustration purposes-
I (years ago) am in a bar. I fair get drunk. When I get drunk, I get little guy complex and my innate fear/dislike of large men comes to the fore. Put these together with the facts that I feel bullet-proof and always consider myself wittier than large men, and the following scenario happens, over and over again:
I see some large man, probably a nice guy, sometimes not, and engage him in a conversation wherein I gradually start to make fun of his intellect, physical brain and penis size, belief system and sexual prowess. He ripostes. Continue, continue, continue.
Until, completely to my suprise, as I am totally caught up in and suicidally enjoying the excellent (on my deluded part) word play, I absolutely fail to notice the large fist which appears out of the blue, (or black light, often as not), drops me like a stone, and puts me away for the rest of the night. Since I have a head that is on bar record as being kind of hard, often times the first impact didn’t do it, and I would then put up a groggy, weaving counter-attack, and be further damaged, before I was dropped like a stone and put away for the rest of the night.
After enough times of this, my drinking buddies and the occasional waitress noted this tendency and took steps to save me. They would punch me and knock me out too, but they did it gentler. To them I owe a great debt of survival.
Example No. 2-
Say I am in traffic, afoot. It’s a nice warm sunny day, my favorite. I am feeling relaxed and at peace with the world, and in love with everything.
Well, there is a big fucking large huge truck coming my way, and there I am, staring in wonder at the way the sunlight glints off the pretty chrome and absolutely entranced by the way I can refract said glints into the colors of the spectrum if I squint my eyes properly.
You can see how unfortunate this is for me.
Happy-Ass LaLa Butterfly Child.
Another thing is the car I am currently driving- to put a nice face on it, it’s an antique Subaru. To be more realisitic, it’s a piece of shit that rolls. The motor has no high end, by which I mean it takes me a good 5 or 6 minutes to get up to highway speeds on flats. on uphills, I pretty much may as well be walking. Although on downhills, hey, fahgeddaboutid, it shwings- I’m up to 65 in almost 3 minutes flat, if I accelerate. Couple that with the fact that I live in Montana, which was recently a vacation spot for out of staters for the sole reason that we had no speed limit there for a while, and you can see that I would be an anamoly on the highway. I have found a complete transaxle/motor I can get cheap, with a set of heads, which need worked, and I may do it, but I kind of hate working on cars anymore, so we’ll see…it probably would fix the problem though…
Yet another thing is my hair.
I’m getting older and admit it. But I still have a few vanities and one of them is my hair, which is almost, but not quite as long as Satans, although of a different color and set. I am going to grow it to my ass, see if I like it. It’s thick and kind of unruly, sort of like Claire Daines’ hair when she lets it grow out, like in ‘Polish Wedding’. The friday before the weekend I am speaking of, I decided to try some new shampoo and conditioner, called Mane and Tail. It was cheap, I figured, ‘hey, I live in Montana, this is kind of a Montana/rough guy rural thing to do, what the hell’… (as an aside, I was looking at the bottles and noticed the conditioner has been around since 1970, while the shampoo only has been on the market for 25 years- so there’s a few years there where somebody was buying conditioner for their horses’ manes and tails, to make it all soft, but no shampoo to clean it. Why would they not clean it, but condition it? Thinking about it, that the people who boughtit must ahve spent enough time around their horses that they would be into it enough to buy and use conditioner on them, to get their tails and manes all soft, I had to stop myself from further speculation as I was going in the ‘hey, you’ns got a purty mouth on yew’ direction).
Anyway, so, from what transpires later on, I am thinking that since this stuff was and still is for horses, it must have a scent that animals find pleasant.
And I have these 4 fairly large, boopy-faced part chow dogs…
Let me see, have I set the stage yet?..
Ok, wait a minute- There’s this other thing about me- If something ‘stupid’ happens to me or I do something I consider stupid, I get incoherent with rage and very childish and tend to have these dialogues where I blame god for it all. I still have not put together a comprehensive definition of what constitutes ‘stupid’- it seems inconsistent at best…
This tendency, I am happy to report, is getting better, but still occurs in brief flashes…
If I need to refer to this particular trait again in this narrative, I shall do so using the name ‘fucking crazy-head man’, ok?
Ok, so hair, dogs, car, HALLBC, FC-HM…
k, I think that about covers it for now, we begin:
I been wanting to pick up things I used to do, when I was younger, before I started drinking and using and made those two things my life.
I used to be in the mountains quite a bit- I would have my parents drop me off for a few days, with the family dog, Sheba, a small, fierce german shepherd. She would invariably find a skunk, lose a confrontation with it, and then come snuggle with me in my sleeping bag. To this day, I love catching the first whiff of skunk in the spring- I know summer’s coming on…
Anyways, so I like being outdoors (to which these frikkin boards are the biggest anathema I’ve run across, not that I’m bitching, but it’s hard, y’know?) and work with a couple of guys who are mountain freaks. So, I’ve been talking with them, and the upshot is, I’ve decided to try snowshoeing.
i can’t even believe I’ve told you what I have so far, and am going to…
Anyways, so last weekend, I go rent some shoes and poles, go to the store, pick up 2 pounder bags of peanut m&ms, a couple red bell peppers and some other odds and ends, come home, load the dogs up and head out, to the only place I know of around here so far to get into the mountains.
Well, I haven’t taken the dogs anywhere for a couple of weeks, except for the daily walks, and they’re excited and all back and forth and hoppy and shit in the back of the car.
Then it wears off, they calm down a bit, and notice my new shampoo.
Now, I’m driving on this old hiway, and it’s nothing but up and down, pretty much.
So here I am, being passed by all these ranchers and other sundry sunday drivers, I’m a long hair in a crappy old subaru, and I’m kind of weaving, as the dogs are all bumping/sniffing my hair, and I’m trying to hold my head steady so I can drive and holding it at some spastic angle to try to get away from the dogs, all the while yelling at them to get off me, blindly and inefectually swinging my arm behind me in the hopoes of swatting them on their noses, all of which they heed not. While going at a speed at which an elderly bicyclist could pass me.
Imagine you are one of the people passing me…
So, after a bit, they (the dogs) back off some, jsut coming up for the occasional sniff, which is allright, and we settle in some and begin to enjoy the drive, wierd, impatient looks from the passers-by not withstanding. As we get further down the road, i really enjoy it, the snow is melting off the fields, it’s sunny out, and I’m thinking of spring/summer.
At this point, you might be asking, ‘well, yeah, that’s all well and good inor, but aren’t you going snowshoeing? Aren’t you a little concerned about the marked dearth of snow that seems to be happening?’
And you would be completely within reason to do so. I can only plead HALLBC syndrome.
As we near the turn off to where I am going, it does dawn on me that this large lack of snow might put a crimp in my plans, but I persevere, hoping against hope ala the hard head I mentioned up above there…
Well, we get there, and it’s like you would expect. Pretty much no snow, except for little tiny pieces here and there that have survived due to being in the scant shade from a sage bush or other prairie/mountain flora.
This is where FC-HM syndrome briefly kicks in, and I’m afraid we have to take a little trip inside my head here. Everybody have their shots and Dramamine handy?
Ok then, lets get this unpleasntness over with…
::inor, thinking. cast of possible characters: inor and a laughing god::
O god DAMN this, God DAMN you god! What the fuck is this shit!!! Why’d you let me do this??? HUH? Well, y’just know what? huh!!! I’m gonna snowshoe any way!! Yup, I’ll just walk around on the Fuckin DIRT!!! and make little sound effect noises cause I DON’T FUCKING CARE!!! How do ya like that! you pissbag??? I know you don’t like me, so fuck you, i don’t like you BACK!!! COME DOWN HERE!! I’M GONNA KICK YOUR ENTIRE ASS!!! YOU BIG CHICKENSHIT!!!
imagines self strapping on the snowshoes, walking around on the dirt, making little snow-crunchy sound effect noises, pretending he’s having just a blast, cackling madly because he’s getting back at god…[/inor thinking]
Well, everybody ok?
That’s good then.
So, we had a nice time anyway, the dogs and I, traipsing around for a while, and came back home.
Now, here’s what happens. I am not giving up. So, during the week, I asked one of the guys for directions to one of the places he goes to. And, a couple days before, he’s talking to our supervisor, telling him about his latest hike, and all the cat tracks he ran across, which then brings up the subject of how cats aren’t afraid of people, will stalk and eat them, that one needs to really use caution when going into an area which is known to be inhabited by cats, and that thisarea has one of the highest cat populations around.
Guess where he gave me directions to.
Cavalierly, I might add.
So, I’m off today. With my 4 dogs, who will often weave themselves in and out of my legs, generally making it very difficult to stay upright, either on snowshoes, for the first time, or in snow that while it isn’t good for snowshoeing, will be enough to impede rapid travel if on regular feet. And if they’re not tripping me up, they’re off scaring up the wildlife.
OOooooooh.
This oughtta be good…
Smooch
