Jujy?

Random memory brought to the front today…

I think because going to the movies was such a major event when I was a kid, the nearest theater was 30 minutes away, not only did I get my greasy popcorn and my carbonated sugar water, but I also got one of those mega-ginormous, movie size boxes of candy.

Even though I don’t really eat candy much anymore, when I think of movie snacks, it’s still there in the li’l Billy dictionary in the back of my head. Popcorn and candy… Typically Jujyfruits are the candy that pop to mind first.

I know that I often got Junior Mints, which I would probably have listed as my favorite candy as a kid if were pressed. And pressed hard… And I know that Red Vines and black licorice were often a movie staple, but Jujyfruit are defined as movie candy to me.

I might be that I never ate them anywhere but the movies. It might be that I equate getting that occasional magical lime flavor with those occasional movie moments that shock and surprise you. It might be that I’m enamored of the image of my seven year old self holding this odd, fruit-like shape up in a darkened theater, trying to catch enough projector light to tell which flavor it was…

Deep Bluey-Gooey Sea

I have fish on the brain. Not literally, that would be weird, but today is one of those days where my mind keeps returning to the idea of fish; live ones, not necessarily swimming, but not battered and fried either.

I’m not going to try to pretend that I know what that’s about, but a possible explanation may be the “ooze tube”

This is the “ooze tube” as it’s properly called, but we here refer to it as the Bluey-Gooey.

Heavy into the Bluey-Gooey am I. What is now an “office toy” was what we affectionately called a “trip toy” back in the day. It’s the sort of thing that I would have spent hallucinatory hours watching as slow moving ooze and bubbles percolate.

As hallucinogens are frowned upon at work, I watch it sober, but it still has the same power to draw me in and slow down and ease my mind. There’s constant shifting, constant subtle changes, and occasional big changes like a giant bubble floating to the top of a sludgy sea.

I’m also a little obsessed lately with getting the correct earphone in the correct ear; making sure the one with the little “R” goes into the right ear. This is not so I am assured the correct aural experience, but that I am worried about a time/space rift opening in my mind if the left ear is filled with what was meant for the right. For some reason, I think this would happen while listening to the band Phish.

I’m so high right now…

We Love You Bib, Oh Yes We Do

So, I was doing shroomies… I love starting out a sentence in this way. I was doing shroomies with my roommate and we climbed to the top of the Escher-esque Student Union building at San Francisco State University where there is a little fenced in seating area.

We’d been up there for awhile when I began to notice what I thought were voices yelling up to us. It is difficult to tell these things when you’re tripping balls by the way. I looked over the side, and sure enough, there was a cop down below. He could have been doing a medley of songs from Bye Bye Birdy for all I knew, but I figured it was best to go down and face said music.

I managed to make it straight down to where he was, but ol’ roommate of mine got lost along the way. While he was wandering the geometric oddity that is the outside of the SFSU Student Union, I stood in front of the cop and smiled politely.

“I didn’t read that,” his shoulder patched radio crackled. “Did you need backup or not?”

I put my hands out in a placating fashion and tried to reassure him in my calm, fuzzy, head full of psychedelic mushrooms voice that, no he did not need backup; we were not going to cause him any problems.

The roommate finally tumbled over and the cop asked if we were students here. We were. He asked if we knew we weren’t supposed to be up on top of the Student Union at some wee hour in the morning. We probably did, but feigned ignorance. He proceeded to ask us for our personal info, addresses and phone numbers and stuff.

I did fine, but here’s a little secret about me: Shroomies are about the only drug that I have taken where I can deal perfectly well with the straight world. Your face may be pulsating slightly, but I can carry on a conversation with you and even smile doing it.

Roommate was not faring so well. He was spiraling into a bad trip and I was trying to mediate in hopes of appeasing the cop as well as keeping my friend from some god awful hallucinatory freak out. When the poor guy couldn’t come up with his own home number, the cop got suspicious. I told him it was the same as mine, that we lived together, but the cop was upset that he couldn’t come up with it himself.

“How many times do you call yourself?” I asked the cop. This miraculously seemed to work for him and he eventually let us go, telling us not to come back after hours.

But it was too late for the roomie, he was bad tripping something fierce. I tried to rap him in blankets and put on mellow music and Fantasia, but nothing was working. The kid had an evening of working over his own demons and fears that all the normal reindeer games were not going to fix.

Thinking back, I probably should have known it was going to end in tears. A few months prior, under very similar circumstances, my roommate managed to lose my Bib Fortuna action figure up on the Student Union.

I miss him…

$1000

I don’t normally like to do this, bring one of my work cases kicking and screaming onto the screen here at Billy Cleans His Plate, but this one has me so urked that I need to vent a little bit…

Okay, first, one of my biggest pet peeves is the inability for a lot of people to take responsibility for their own actions. Couple that with the repulsive greed that seems to plague this country and you have, in my eyes, justification for hunting humans.

A customer writes us to let us know that she burned her tongue on some hot, green tea. She equates the tea to lava. She is seeking compensation for the dinner she couldn’t taste as her tongue was badly scalded. She is seeking compensation for the items she bought at out location – no reason provided, so I guess she assumes it must be obvious why they should be free. She is also seeking compensation for the “painful experience”.

Okay…

Lady, hot tea, just so you know, is fucking hot! You might realize this as the word “hot” is right there in the beverage’s name. While most of us learned at an early age – 2ish – that if something is hot, you let it cool down before ingesting it. What you do not do is swallow it full force like the fat, greedy whorepig you are. Oh, also, when you see steam coming off something you are about to consume, that means that thing is hot and you might give it a little minute. We really should post that inside all of our stores, but that’s unfortunately too many words for most customers to read before they lose their battle with attention deficit.

I would by the way, really like to see a paper cup that could hold lava. And, by the by, if you swallowed lava, your mouth, neck and chest would be evaporated in fiery agony. Just so you know ahead of time not to drink lava.

And the $1,085 you are looking for us to give to you, apparently to award you for the fact that you have the intelligence of… what? A corpse? Most living things at least have enough survival instinct to know that something called hot, something steaming hot, something that comes double cupped and with a fun little cardboard sleeve to protect your fat, grubby fingers from being burned will fucking hurt you if you put it in your mouth right away.

Grow the fuck up!

This I cannot say however. The prevailing thought is that freeloading retards such as this are worth keeping as customers.

12

I am not a big football fan. I’m not into it. I can try to feign interest in it, but I usually fail miserably. The truth is that football bores the piss out of me. I’ve noted that to football fans and have been treated to impromptu lectures that usually involve –

1) How can it bore you? (In a shouting, incredulous and angry tone)
2) The beauty and ballet of battle.
3) Being accused of being un-American and gay.

As a child, my father regularly dragged me to football games, and I have to hand it to him for his dogged perseverance. I dreaded these days as they were HOURS of mind numbing boredom for me, but he never understood this because he loved football. One time, I brought a book with me to read during a game.

I have never heard the end of this. Even to this day. In fact, my non-football watching was brought up at my wedding reception…

All of that being said, The Seahawks, the Seattle football team, the team that I “rooted for” as a kid (due simply to my geographic location), is going to the Superbowl.

While I didn’t watch the entire game, I did tune in to watch the last 10 minutes or so. And I have to say that I got a little emotional watching this team win the game. I was suddenly flooded with Seahawks knowledge that I had picked up and forgotten as a child. I remembered quarterback Jim Zorn coming to visit my first grade class because he knew my teacher somehow. I remember it being a big deal that Steve Largent was featured on a bag of chips or something. I was amazed that I remembered all of this despite my inherent dislike of the game.

I felt proud for this team, proud for the fans that had waited so many years to see this team go far. I felt excited for the coach, taking this team to the Superbowl for the first time in the team’s history.

Who knows, I might even watch me some Superbowl this year. My dad would be so proud…

The Ocean

At the moment, I’m sort of at a loss for words – in a weird sort of in between space which reminds me of floating in a huge expanse of water.

Okay and that’s weird, because that feeling came to me as I was typing that, and I’m being haunted, or inundated, or deluged (the right word just doesn’t seem available to me right now – it’s not threatening, but persistent) with images of water.

I try to let go with my mind, to get gears moving, and when the doors start to dissolve, the water pours in. I see myself up and looking out over an ocean, a dark and calm ocean. I start to get that panicky feeling that I associate with people who have a fear of heights when I consider how deep that water really is.

I see myself swimming out in the middle of it, no land in sight, but calm nonetheless.

And like a lightening bolt across a dark sky that I hadn’t realized was stormy, completely removed but somehow still part of it all, I realize that there’s an amazing and blurry magic in the creation of anything, but I feel it especially true of music.

I feel a flurry of something inside myself when I think of a group of musicians starting at silence and working together and building something out of sounds, something you can’t even see, building something that has the power to move you.

That magic is pure and it’s holy somehow. It shouldn’t be judged, I know this, but there is still no fucking reason to go out and buy a Kelly Clarkson CD.

Boom Chicka Boom.

"We Did Dance Though..."

At the moment I’m having these strange coincidences bouncing around with bad 80’s bands. I’m apparently also having a stroke as it took me no less than five times to type that first sentence correctly.

Okay, we were at Chez Gaudy the other night and somebody brought up the band Shalamar. Yup, Shalamar. They were doing a nice Dennis Miller, obscure reference thing, and I knew exactly who they were talking about. Wait for it, I’ll come back…

Skip ahead to me researching the band Re-Flex (not just a flex people, a RE-flex), that one hit wonder that wrote “The Politics of Dancing”. Their song was going to go into Footloose, but do you know what the producers went with instead?

That’s right, Shalamar’s Dancing in the Sheets. See it’s clever cause it’s like “Dancing in the Streets”, but it’s sheets instead. It’s a double entendre for sex. It’s so fucking clever…

For those of you not familiar with Footloose, for fuck’s sake do not pollute your mind with it now, Kevin Bacon or no, fun and boppy Kenny Loggins theme or no. It’s too late for the rest of us.

And for the rest of us: The scene where bad girl and preacher’s daughter Lori Singer sneaks an elicit “rock” tape into the drive thru and all the kids start dancing to the groovy tune, especially the guy that looks like he’s having some sort of relations with the Pac-Man machine, the song playing on the soundtrack is Shalamar’s Dancing in the Sheets.

I’m not sure what the point of this is, only that I can only assume that KajaGooGoo will turn up in a conversation soon…

The Politics of Oooh, Feeling Good

We got some correspondence here at work from a couple of teenage girls in the Midwest. They love us, with little glitter-pen hearts over the i’s and everything. They love us so much that they were bursting with love enough to write a letter. They love us so much that they sent an 8 x 10 picture of themselves, enjoying us.

Now this is the sort of treatment I expect rock stars to receive. And I’m feeling a little like a late 70’s/early 80’s hair metal rhythm guitarist/lead singer right now…

Would it be wrong to tell them that just from looking at the picture I can tell that the one biting on the straw has a hungry, hungry mouth and that the one with the braces is into leather? Would it be wrong to tell them that I know they can work a bone better than a paleontologist? Would it be wrong to tell them that I have already made sick, filthy love to their 8 x 10? Twice?

Of course it would be. That was a test you sick dogs!

It did not however stop me from putting all of that into a letter to send back to them. Sometimes you need to live dangerously first thing in the morning on a Wednesday. Sometimes you need to throw in the fear of unemployment just to enjoy your day.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: House of the Rising Sun (the version done by The Animals)

The Politics of Dancing

Some folks I know went and got themselves married after knowing each other since high school. They eloped in Vegas and had a party at their place to celebrate with friends. As the day for the party neared, I was beginning to feel like I didn’t really want to go. I get uncomfortable in party situations, I hate having to make small talk with people I don’t know and will probably never see again. It’s gotten better in the last few years; I’m not as much a neurotic mess and sometimes I meet people who are fascinating and are able to skip over that whole inane small talk thing.

But I went, and it turned out better than I thought it would. It usually does. I had some drinks, which I expected. I talked to some folks I didn’t know, which I expected. I got a lesson in office politics, which I didn’t expect.

I learned about who hates who, about who thinks so and so does a terrible job. I learned about how some folks got into the power positions they’re in through means that were not hard work and dedication. I learned that there are nattering, bitchy forces behind the scenes that get decisions made. I learned that despite upfront smiles and friendly tones, there is more than likely shit talk and back stabbing happening not far away.

It reminded me of high school. It was a little overwhelming to realize that this shit still happens among “rational” adults. But here is the silver lining that, if I had a therapist, they’d be happy that I gotten there – and then charge me a lot of money.

I didn’t care. At all.

And this wasn’t the same sort of nihilistic “I don’t care” stance that I took in my early twenties. That was this defense of not wanting to be involved in any of the societal bullshit and figuring I’d remove myself from it. That was cowardly, that was a wall against being hurt, that was immature and useless.

So how is this “I don’t care” stance different? I think it stems from a confidence in myself that was busy being built when I was younger. I know that I work hard, I know that I do a good job, I know I cannot separate myself from the nonsense, but I can tell it to lick my ass. And I don’t define myself by this job, my vested interest is pretty low. If there are people who want to say shitty things about me, so be it. I’ve had plenty of people come across the gates who haven’t liked me for one reason or another, oh well, fuck ‘em.

I’ve got the team on my side, people that I respect and people that I love. I know the power of unconditional love, I know the power of amazing friends, I know the power of shaking my ass to Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy.

Beware, I’ll come to your house and demonstrate…

April

You can almost see ghosts rising off; trapped in the scratches, below the lacquer. They are confused and angry and shamed by how certain the world seemed at the time.

You can almost feel the dread pulsing just out of the corner of vision. Can you tell something miserable is going to happen by winter’s end? By next winter if this drags on longer than it should?

You can almost hear the white static whine of misfired connections and excess energy. It gears up to near shouting voices, made completely unintelligible by the sheer vehemence behind it. It drives those to fear and madness who have not learned to control it, or ignore it.

Do You Believe In Magic?

Things have been a little busy today, so I apologize for the delay in posting.

This comes from the venerable Dougie P:

The disturbed looking face in this frightening, frightening picture belongs to a Christian magician. He teaches the gospel truth to kids and adults through magic; which beats the hell out of doing it through breakdance, which is where I failed.

Yup, teaching the gospel through cheap trickery and the occult… always cool.

Okay whatever, I’m not going to beat up on the guy for his life choices, I myself attempted to attain wisdom by going to college, I’m going to beat up on this guy for his picture.

This picture does not say to me, “Hey, hire me to come inform your children in the ways of Christ through the entertaining medium of magic”. It says to me, “Hey, look at my handy work when it comes to tying things up, like your family. And this no-make-up-mime, demented, serial killer smile is the last thing you’ll see, coated in your own blood, before you die”.

If I saw this guy at my door, especially if he were tied up with his “oh silly me” hands out like that, I would piss and shit myself to death. I get the feeling, just from this picture, that this guy should not be allowed near children, or adults, or pets, or farm animals, or deer, or fish and sea mammals, or sentient creatures from nearby galaxies.

Just A Little Rain

We’re coming up on a record here in Seattle. We’re nearing a 33 days of consecutive rain record, and to hear people and newscasters talk about it, you would think that this was one of the signs of the coming apocalypse.

It’s not, for those of you not up on your Book of Revelations. Hilary Swank and Chad Lowe breaking up is though. Seriously, check it out, it’s near the back of the book…

And okay, when you first hear it, 33 days of consecutive rain sounds like a lot. But this does not mean it has not stopped raining for 792 hours, it just means that at some point during each day, it has rained.

Nearly the whole of Seattle have become whiny bitches. And I want to point out a few things to them:

1) It’s winter time. This is a time, typically, when weather gets a little cold, a little wet, a little miserable. It’s why we look forward to summer.

2) It’s Seattle! It fucking rains here! When I talk to people from across the country, they often ask if it’s raining here – they know the reputation this city has. And you fucking live here! If rain is a problem for you, I’m going to suggest not living here. I’m also going to suggest not living in the whole of England. Move to LA, it’s drier and they love complainers. Try the Sahara!

We don’t get killer hurricanes, or tornadoes or blizzards here. We get overcast skies and pissing rain. This is not a new development due to global warming or the bird flu or the fact that terrorists hate our freedom, it’s what has always happened up here.

Sorry, I’ve been needing to get that off my chest. Now seriously, let’s all pray for Hilary and Chad, they’re having a little too much rain in their lives right now…

This Game Determines Who Enters The Next Round Robin

So I’ve joined a bowling team here at work. Tuesday nights, fellow employees funnel into the West Seattle Bowl and drink beers and bowl. Now, I’m not much of a “team” guy, and I’m not a great bowler, but I am a huge fan of The Big Lebowski.

I really do enjoy me some bowling though. I have no form, I have no real skill and if I hit pins it’s usually fairly accidental. But still, there’s something about heaving a weight down a slick floor and trying to knock things down that really sings to my five-year old self.

I was totally awash in memories of my folks hauling my brother and I down to some godforsaken bowling alley in Federal Way for their bowling team nights. We would ingest greasy, deep fried “food” and we would try to find our way through the haze of second hand smoke to the basement arcade to put that dollar worth of quarters to good use on Tempest and Frogger.

I remember thinking to myself even then, looking through my yet non-jaundiced eyes, that the bowling alley people were a little sad. They were pale, sort of grey, and had eyes that belied some soul crushing defeat in their past that had landed them here at the Sea-Tac Bowl-a-Rama. I imagined them as creatures that lived in that bowling alley, ate the miserable fried food, drank the Budweiser as advertised by neon, occasionally looked sadly out the side door at the empty, trash filled lot next door that eventually faded away to darkness out of the reach of the mercury light.

Bowling has always seemed to speak to the middle class, you don’t see a lot of debutantes throwing rocks. It is a sport that seems to have spoken a little more loudly to the hipsters of late; the bowling crowd is a little better looking, a little better dressed than the one that I remember as a child.

I had a good time though, even though the team shot that night was some sickeningly sweet bitch-pop called a “Buttery Nipple”. Yikes. I ended my last game with a 117. Shut up, it’s a good score for me.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: Or one that I’m really digging right now anyway – Murder for the Money by Morphine

Dripping Pan

This last year, I have been into the Casserole; heavy into the casserole. I don’t know what it is exactly.

I can do a little cooking, I know my around a kitchen a bit. Still, I have been inundated with this desire to throw noodles and sauce and odds and ends into a big dish and bake till bubbly.

I’m going to release an EP titled that, “Bake Till Bubbly”.

Tuna noodle casserole? Oh shit yeah! I’ll throw some peas in there in a lame attempt to make it feel healthier, diced red peppers as a way to gussy it up… I have been obsessed lately with making homemade mac and cheese.

It’s cheap, it’s filling, it’s comfort food, and it makes me feel like a mother in the 50’s when I make it. It doesn’t help that I wear a housedress.

When I came to work this morning I had this picture taped to my monitor:

It had “What’s she laughing at?” scrawled across the bottom.

I will tell you now, she is not laughing. She is amazed by my two story “beef-a-roni” casserole.

Cosby Would Cringe

I’ve always had this in the back of my mind since I was a kid. I’ve always held onto it, and it will occasionally bubble up to conscious thought from time to time:

I want to swim in a pool filled with pudding.

Not to eat it or anything, I just want to dive into all of that thick squishiness. I want to work really hard to fling myself down to the bottom and back up again, pushing my body through all that clinging, heavy, snot-like “fluid”.

I imagine chocolate when I see this in my head, thousands of gallons of chocolate pudding. And this might be cool ‘cause I could pretend that I’m drowning in mud. But honestly, butterscotch would work just as well, even freakin’ vanilla.

If I become obscenely rich through some fluke, I’m totally going to do this.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: Renaissance Pleasure Faire by Dieselhed

Night Sharks

I have a thing for sharks, which I believe I have discussed before. Something in my brain just fires off the right way when I see a shark, I’m fascinated. They’re amazing, beautiful creatures that peer from out the shadow of fear in the depths of my mind.

In conjunction, I loved the movie Jaws as a kid. I still like it now, but it just doesn’t have the same pull it did when I was younger. By the time I was 12, I am sure that I had seen the film at least fifty times. Swimming, something else I love, has always been tied in with the film. Even in swimming pools, my imagination kicks in and I imagine sharks erupting from the deep.

One summer holiday weekend, we were out at my grandparents place on Hood Canal doing a little night swimming. My cousins, my uncle, my brother and I were goofing around in the water. Uncle Paul, big drunken jokester that he was, began doing the Jaws theme, trying to freak us out.

What Uncle Paul had neglected to take into account was that it was high tide. During high tide, things that are normally visible on the beach are now under water. Things like, say, the piece of piling that stuck out of the ground a good three feet, were now submerged.

With the 2 note theme coming out loud and proud, and with us kids yelling at him to knock it off as it was freaking us out, Uncle Paul swam backwards and away from our splashing hands. When he hit his back on that piling… Man, I had never heard a grown man scream that loud. He pushed off the bottom and flew at least 2 feet out of the water.

I laughed until I peed, which was okay as I was in the water.

Thursday, On The Boardwalk

She looked at me through her Louis Vuitton bag. She had cut two eyeholes in the bottom of it and was looking through the thing as if it was a pair of binoculars that used to cost thousands of dollars.

“It must be difficult to keep your pill bottles in there, what with the holes,” I stated in the perfect way I have of stating the obvious.

“I don’t keep my pill bottles in this bag,” she said. She flashed her glazed eyes through the frosted glass of her Louis Vuitton sunglasses. Her lips looked like an oil tanker had run aground there and then sprayed KY all over the place either as a way to hold the mess in, or as a perverse ‘fuck the world’ statement on top of destruction already laid out. The reflected summer sun was blinding what with all of that glimmer and shine.

“This is my spy bag,” she said with a tone that was part sleepy, German schoolboy and part Rick James.

I was about to ask what she needed a spy bag for when she pulled out a yellow paisley handkerchief and a bottle of chloroform. I calmly watched her pour some chloroform on the handkerchief, place the bottle back in her spy bag and approach me with the damp rag.

Okay, it was one of those moments like when you see in movies and you cannot believe it’s actually happening and you sort of freeze in disbelief; like when someone threatens you with a weapon and asks for your money, or when a car spins out of control and flips and everyone gets out okay, or when two heavily made up ladies with enormous breasts go down on you at the same time.

I watched her approach and put the rag over my mouth and nose. I put up very little resistance as I couldn’t believe it was actually happening. By the time my fighting instincts were aroused, it was too late. I could feel the strength running out of my limbs.

She looked at me calmly as my eyelids got heavier and heavier, and she whispered, “I make the most amazing meatloaf.”

I looked at her with my best bewildered look.

“I use ground chuck, it’s gotta be ground chuck, and a little ground pork for flavor. But my secret ingredient…”

I tried to hold on, I really wanted to hear what her secret ingredient was. But alas, I went under without hearing a thing, and with only the smell of yellow paisley to keep me company.

Reach The Beach, Part 2

So, we got back to the house fine. My finger hurt something awful, but I considered myself lucky as none of the things on the bad list from yesterday happened. And Jason found my glasses…

We regrouped (well, Jason and I regrouped; Mandy had gone to bed and now so was Beth), we re-drank, and we set out again for the beach, this time by a stable road.

See, the original plan was to watch the sun come up and enter into the New Year by jumping into the North Sound. Well, that was my original plan anyway. That was before I realized I would have to enjoy a fifteen minute walk back to the house, dripping wet from a body of water that is shockingly cold in the summer, when it was ass cold outside as well.

Jason and I set off in the dark and got to the deserted beach somewhere near 7 in the morning. We stared out at the silhouettes of other islands, at the lights coming from Canada. Jason tossed a small, red glow stick into the water. I don’t think he was being malicious, I think he expected the waves to bring it right back to him. But that spooky, round the island current hit the thing about a foot and half out and yanked it. That glowing red plastic pulled out in the deep like it had a motor on it, like it was harpooned to a shark that was taking it to Vancouver, the fucker went out faster than I ever thought it would be possible to.

We watched it go, following that radiant red pulse down the beach until we couldn’t see it anymore. I thought about the fish perhaps being pulled towards it by the excitement of this new, glowing visitor to their domain. When we couldn’t tell if what we were seeing was actually the glow stick at distance, or if it was just fantasies of our addled brains, we just stood staring out the dark water and talking.

I love being near the water, standing at the verge; it always feels momentous somehow. And it always feels like home.

We talked about religion, and we talked about god and we talked about whatever entered our heads to talk about, but we mostly stared out into that water. At some point I noticed that there was a tiny bit of phosphorescence in the surf, little green sparks that came alive in the water. I was trying to point them out to Jason, but he thought I was tripping. I was beginning to agree when we saw some more and I started grinning at being able to be there when he saw it for the first time, remembering my uncle pointing it out to me when I was a kid.

The wind picked up and the waves got pretty large for the Sound. If it wasn’t getting to be uncomfortably cold, I probably could have stayed out there for hours. As we were leaving we both thought we might have seen the glow stick coming back in, riding the surf, returning to wish us a Happy New Year and salutations from International Waters.

Reach The Beach

I welcomed in 2006 from a cabin/house on Orcas Island that had a disturbing number of heron artifacts in and around it. For those of you who are not sure what an Orcas Island is, it is one of the San Juan islands in the North Puget Sound, not far from Canada – a fact that was driven home when we could see Canada from the “beach” that will come into play later.

Oh, it was nice. It was relaxing. There was a hot tub, there was a sauna (where I pushed my macho, heat and sweat resistance fantasies to their utmost), there was enough alcohol to bring down Luxembourg.

While there were a large number of happy, fun times this weekend with Mandy and Jason, I want to talk about the moment that could have landed me in whatever passes for an emergency room on an island in the winter.

We were done up. Sobriety was impaired in the same way that squirrels mowed down by a semi on the freeway are impaired. The walk down to the jumbled and massive rocks that made up our “beach” seemed like a good idea – I mean Jason had a headlamp. Jason scrambled down to the water’s edge and said, excitedly, that there was a way down, to stay low and go to the left. Again, Jason had a headlamp.

I neither stayed low nor went to the left, I stayed high and went to the right. While I was busy thinking this was not a good idea, my foot (expecting to come down on another slippery rock) came down inside a hole between slippery rocks. I went down like a Long Island prom queen.

I quickly checked things to make sure I was not broken, and I scrambled back up to solid ground in a way that I’m sure resembled Brody the cat scrambling away from something that has scared him. I did not realize until I was a good twenty yards away that my glasses had been thrown from my face. With Jason’s help – again, he had a headlamp – the glasses were found and we stumbled back up to the house, my sprained finger throbbing and plumping as if doused in venom lip gloss.

I have not been able to stop thinking about what could have happened: Broken leg, broken head, broken teeth, glass in hand at time of fall shattering in hand, getting knocked out and having to be dragged up the hill…

I would like to think I have learned my lesson about stupid, dangerous activities under the influence, but I doubt it.

More to follow…