Hm. Hard to hide from Tōnatiuh with pissant cloud cover like that.
Summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertime. …
Funny how it just kinda sneaks up on us every year. Maybe not.
One minute we’re enjoying a refreshing 65-degree spin on the old bikey bike; the next, Tōnatiuh has cranked up his celestial broiler and is basting us with our own sweat.
“Can you crank up the a/c? Some of us can’t peel down to nylon shorts and wife-beaters.”
The sun god called in sick for the last day of spring. I went out for a short trail run 8-ish and the cool temps and overcast skies made for a most enjoyable outing, if running — even at my casual pace — can ever be termed “enjoyable.”
But yesterday he was back to stoking the furnace and it looks like highs in the mid- to upper 90s for as far as the weatherperson’s instruments can see. Ninety-four yesterday, and b’gosh and b’golly it looks like more of the same today, only more so.
Homeless? Not hardly. I had the tent, the Toyota, and the house where both were usually parked.
“They had all the news from all around the world just crammed into four pages. Didn’t even have any funnies in there, you know? Every time you turned a page something just jumped right out at you. …”— John Prine, “Dear Abby”
Read enough news and something will definitely jump right out at you.
Sadly, we no longer have John Prine to write songs about it.
Nevertheless, there I was, sipping my morning coffee, slouching aimlessly from pillar to post on the Interwebs, just waiting to get jumped by something.
And suddenly, boogity boogity boogity, there it was.
The Colorado Sunhad a piece about the Moosejaw Business Accelerator, which in conjunction with Western Colorado University in Gunnison helps entrepreneurs with the theory and practice of launching outdoorsy businesses.
The story featured a fellow with an 18-pound, thousand-buck ruck that comes with most everything a larval backpacker needs; a duo working on a clothing line for “plus-sized” adventurers; and a bikepacker whose outfit makes “plant-based, gluten-free dehydrated meals for backpacking.”
They were all enthusiastic and effusive and by golly, good for them. I hope they’re all thundering successes.
And then I stumbled onto a New York Times story about how the end of pandemic-era federal funding for emergency housing is forcing Vermont to evict homeless people from subsidized motel rooms and into (wait for it) tents.
With waiting lists for shelter beds and transitional housing, the only option available to most of those forced from hotels this month was a free tent. Across the state, social service workers handed out camping equipment, a gesture that pained providers like [Jess Graff, director of Franklin Grand Isle Community Action, a nonprofit agency in St. Albans], who saw 28 households displaced from hotels in her area of northern Vermont on June 1.
“Even purchasing the tents is awful, because you’re in the store with a cart full of camping equipment, and people are saying, ‘Looks like a fun weekend!’” she said.
“A fun weekend.” Like, say, camping in a Brattleboro cemetery. Might see the odd plus-sized person out there trying to stay dry among the tombstones. But I bet s/he’s not sporting a thousand-buck ruck.
Some days I wonder whether we have the right foot on the wrong accelerator.
I was just scratching Miss Mia Sopaipilla behind the ears while watching a ladder-backed woodpecker tend to his knothole in the backyard maple and thinking how fortunate I am to have been blessed with zero offspring.
That I am aware of, anyway.
My mother laid a powerful curse on me early on. You know the one.
“I hope that someday you have a son and he’s just like you.”
Ouch. I knew I’d get dealt one of those, too, straight from the bottom of the Devil’s deck.
And by “just like you” Mom didn’t mean a smartass beer-addled dope-fiend college-dropout hippie layabout. No, she meant the exact opposite of whatever it was I had been hoping for, sprinkled with a hefty pinch of my own least attractive qualities, which were numerous.
For openers: A son? No, thank you, please. Smelly little dick-twiddlers who hide nose boogers under every horizontal surface when they’re not busy lighting fires in the crawl space.
Plus you know you’re gonna have to fight him one day, and if you pull your punches the best you can hope for is a draw. Then you have that to think about for the next few years as you try to lay down the law while he mumbles into his plate across the dinner table.
A daughter? Cuter, maybe, at first, but still a hard no. A daughter might not punch your dentures down your windpipe — she’ll be savvy enough to hit you where it doesn’t show — but she’ll have other ways to put you in the hurt locker, and I’ve seen a few of them.
Anyway, boy, girl, they, them, whatever. You feed and water them for a couple decades, try to teach them not to stick their tongues in an electrical outlet or have sex with the vacuum cleaner or just coax them out of the basement and into the sunlight, and one day they turn into Seventh-Day Opportunists or Realtors or born-again vegans or just hack your 401(k) for the down payment on a survivalist bunker outside Road of Bones, Idaho, from which they sell secondhand Chinese-made cargo pants to the Patriot Front.
Whoa. Did I say “you?” I meant “me.” My mom didn’t have anything against you. Though if she’d met you I’m sure she’d have come up with something.
You’re probably doing just fine with your kids. Probably. So happy Father’s Day, you poor, miserable bastards. Miss Mia sends her regards.
Ho hum. I see some deep-pockets blowhard strolled in and out of court again yesterday, without consequences, as per usual. Not even a mug shot.
Shit, I’ve done more time than this blabbering plastic sack of fast-food farts, a serial liar who cheats at golf and would sell his idiot children to the Saudis, if he could find one dumb and mean enough to buy them for sex toys and/or dog food.
And I didn’t have to lip off to the cops, DAs, or judges to get jugged, either.
No, that would’ve been one of my bros, the dude who told the graying Colfax beat cop with the rookie partner: “You can’t arrest us for walking out of a bar with a beer.”
Ho, ho. Wrong again.
This regrettable incident took place in the Glory Days, when my friends and I were basically ambulatory recruiting posters for the War On Drugs. We’d have let the feds put our faces on a “Know Your Enemy” flyer if they paid us in cocaine and Stoli.
None of us was wealthy. We had no well-connected allies. We had dedicated ourselves to scaling new heights of impairment and then tumbling down the other side into a crusty rental house that used to be part of a Glendale nursery. For plants. Not children.
And thus we learned how to talk to cops. Be polite. Rely upon the short, simple words you can still pronounce without drooling. Don’t let the nice flatfoot see the devils raging behind your blood-red eyeballs.
And never, under any circumstances, tell a cop, “You can’t arrest us for [insert your offense here].”
My friend forgot this cardinal rule — only for a moment — but that’s all it takes. Loose lips sink ships, especially when the crew is hammered. And so we all got a fun ride in the drunk wagon and a night to remember in the Denver calaboose, where we met some fascinating people.
One was a duster (crazed on PCP), and he was quickly awarded the entire drunk tank for his earsplitting arguments with people or Things who were not there. We more numerous but much less scary drunks got packed into two-man cells so we could enjoy the floor show from a safe distance.
Another was a glum-looking permed and pastel-leisure-suited gent who had gotten popped for soliciting a hooker who turned out to be a vice cop. He could see his apartment from our cell, but not his wife inside it. He was not looking forward to seeing her in his new digs.
We got sprung in the morning without charges. Go and sin no more, you silly little shits, they told us. But goddamn it, we did our time.
If only we’d been riot-inciting former presidents of the United States whose Florida resort’s crappers were overflowing with national secrets instead of addled stoners getting sideways with a Colfax cop.
We’d have been back in the Satire Lounge before closing time.
Mad Blog Media 