Gingerbread Man on 15/8/2018 at 01:16

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Here is a tale I haven't said, I think. Maybe someone already knows it, but not too many. Here we go!

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Shortly after ten in the morning I'm a mile or two west of the Farallones when a big China double-prangs me hard in the base of my left thumb -- the knuckle side, not the meat side. My left thumb is already burned and scarred from dozens of hundred-foot drops' worth of keeping a reel from overspooling, and in ten seconds the sharp stab of the prangs have given way to the excruciating feeling of having your hand slammed in a car door. There's a trick to fixing this sort of thing.

When you haul a rockcod from a clifftop 110 feet beneath the heaving Pacific to the top of the twelve foot swell, something happens to it. Three and a half atmospheres of pressure change in a few seconds. And the same thing happens to everything else in that situation: they damn near explode from the inside.

The trick to fixing the excruciating double-prang in the thumb is to find the China, slice its decompressed eye open (all bulgy and nearly as weird as it is, like the massive ballast sack protruding from its mouth), and smear the corneal fluid over the prang wounds. It's a near-instant and near-complete cure for the ridiculous pain of being... you know what? I should probably back up a bit.

The ocean was heaving and so were some of us. The morning swell was high and hard, and Jon plowed the Sea Wolf into a couple of troughs that shuddered the boat like a car crash. We weren't feeling well to start with, and after a bit of a couple's chuck off the stern Amanda felt awful enough to lie down for the last hour or so of the ride out of the Golden Gate. We'd already caught a few sand dabs for bait (or eating, who knows?) and had been steadily crashing our way west since then. Eight to twelve-foot swell, and not a soul in sight. The horizon was lumpy with heaving waves -- a tricky thing with which to contend when one is feeling poorly as Amanda and I were. The crab season had been suspended due to seriously elevated levels of domoic acid from a bit of an unseasonable Red Tide, and though I still believe that sacrificing a season of Dungeness for a winter's worth of El Nino rains is a good trade after four years of drought in the valley, I was a bit cheesed that we weren't crabbing as well as fishing that morning. But in the end we didn't care. Not like the dozens of bastards who cancelled, leaving the entire fleet save the Sea Wolf and the Huck Finn hanging. And neither of them were full even though every die-hard and deckhand had come along. Fairweather fishermen pummeling the wallets of Captains and their crews just because they won't literally get handed a half-dozen fresh crab each along with whatever rockcod and lingcod and eel and mackerel and whatever all kinds of fish live on the other side of the Golden Gate that they manage to catch. I caught a lingcod worth twenty Dungies boy, I'll tell you what.

Wait, I should back up a bit.

It was either the day before fishing or two days before fishing (one day after ducks on Grizzly Island) that I was woken up at 4:44 am by the reminder that I had given the cats the last tin of food the night before and that they had no food for the morning. Muttering something about why the fuck does a cat need to eat at quarter to five in the morning, I put my scowly hat on and stamped petulantly into the cold fog. “Where are you even going?” she called out. “7-11 has cat food,” I said and shut the gate behind me.

Ice on the windscreen. Second day in a row. A weird high pressure system had been squatting over the valley for a couple of days, and this was the second straight morning of frost. A bit disconcerting. I bought cat food at the 7-11, Singh tried to sell me my brand of smokes but I already had a pocket full of them. Just cat food, Singh. Have a great rest of your day.

Full disclosure: I am a complete and utter cunt in the mornings. I am churlish and petty and defensive and hypersensitive. I am snippy, unpleasant, quick to sarcasm, childish, and self-absorbed. My Personal Space is measured in Scoville units, it falls on the Richter Scale, and if you can see the top of my bald head over the curvature of the Earth you're probably too close. I fly down 3 am highways snarling at the fuckers in front of me with their red taillights getting larger and larger until I oh fuck YOU I HAVE TO GET PAST YOUR SLOW CAMRY ASS 75 mph and I know I know you don't have to tell me. I like to blame coffee, poor sleep, back pain, traffic -- but the plain and honest truth is that I'm pretty much an utter cunt until I've decided that I've woken up properly. Keeping it real, yo. Goddamned Bay Area douchebag motherFUCKERS COME TO THE VALLEY AND LEARN HOW TO DRIVE PROPERLY YOU ASSHOLES. Jesus FUCK have these BMW-driving stains on Gen X forgotten that their paint is more expensive than the ‘98 Tacoma they're trying to nudge off thnnggngnGNNGNGNNGNNGG FUCKING SHOOT THEM.

Hang on, I should probably back up a bit... Let me try to remember what we name days again.

Wednesday

2:45 in the morning and my eyes start to function, followed by my legs and arms. Brain kicks in autopilot and jams shirt and pants on arms and legs while kettle boils and mmm coffee. Time for a cup and half a smoke before loading weaponry and equipment and a dog into the Honda. An hour on the road, beating the commuter traffic, peeling off at Hwy 12, past Marina and Whatever and Something and then right down Grizzly Island. Highbeams, rabbits, ten or twelve miles of shrouded peat bog roads that weave between ranches and sloughs and which throw sudden pants-soiling curves at you. If you don't take that 15 mph sign seriously you're gonna jam the hood of your ride into eight feet of water over two feet of muck, and cows are gonna stare at you because you're an idiot.

There are abysmally few people in the Res line. There are more people in the Sweat line. Not unusual for a Wednesday in the early season on Grizzly Island, but it doesn't bode well already... Grizz is huge, and without a lot of gunners to move the birds around there are very few opportunities for anyone. So it goes. We're still trying to learn how to hunt with Aspen as well as teach her how to hunt with us. She knows what she's doing, but there's a rapport and an understanding that we don't yet... wait, that's gonna be a big part of Saturday.

Crescent 2 was where we were headed. It's a long slog with the gear, but at least the trail was hard-packed and pretty free of potholes and muck puddles. Even though I had to haul the decoys and whatnot a longer distance than usual, it was a whole lot easier than it usually is. Things had been slow at the checkstation, and we didn't have to wait long for shoot time. But by the time the first guns barked elsewhere in the marsh the wind had disappeared and the sun was bringing the mosquitoes out. Aspen behaved quite well despite her boredom, sitting on my lap (very uncomfortable) and pouring steam from the armholes in her neoprene camo vest. We packed it in after a few hours. Seemed like no one in the swamp got much action at all that morning. Same as the previous Sunday. And Saturday. In fact, the numbers at Grizz had only been decent on opening day, and that's because there were a lot of resident waterfowl who didn't check their calendars and were happily booting around the swamp when the steel started flying. Three weeks into the season the ducks per gun stats had dropped to nearly 0.5, which is insane considering how few people had been in each day. Although, that's one of the major problems with such a huge wildlife area: If there aren't enough guns to move the birds around, they just hang out where no one is and no one even sees them much less gets a shot at them.

When Grizzly Island is full of hunters (as it was on opening day) the birds are constantly on the move and everyone gets some action for the most part. But Crescent 2 was glass, the decoys sat like petrified toads on the dark bogwater, and I think we only saw a couple of ducks, too far to hail, booking it out of wherever they came from to wherever they were going. My junk was numb from having a Pudelpointer perched on me, but I was in a good mood. The sunrise will do that to me, that much I have noticed. Especially when it's as beautiful a sunrise as happens over Grizzly Island every single morning.

The rest of the day was wonderful, even though I had to fight my arms. I have to fight to make my arms work properly a lot these days, so that's nothing new. My doctor is a bit of a Wally, and the neurologists I've seen didn't find anything wrong with the nerve conductivity, but I know what's going on. I'm not a fool, and I know a bit about neurology. After peering at the Internet for several weeks, I know a LOT about peripheral neuropathy and the Intercostal Brachial Plexi. I had learned to nerve glide, I had discovered postures and exercises to relieve the pain and numbness, and deep in my brain I knew that as soon as the words “idiopathic neuropathy” were written down by anyone I could forget about getting symptomatic treatment beyond the things I had already learned. I still haven't replied to my doctor's question as to whether I'd like a referral to another specialist. I'm probably not going to. I'll let him know when I want to see someone. I always do.

Thursday

Sore and tired, I wake up to find myself explaining to Singh that I don't need any smokes today, just the two tins of cat food. I'm cold, and the noise in my head is starting to whine into life. I get home as fast as I can and go back to bed a thoroughly horrid cunt.
An hour or two later I drag my pale ass out of the warm bed and mutter my way to the coffee. Amanda's been talking to me for minutes, I can't really focus. Something about the dog, I'm too bleary to connect the dots. I have to go to the Doctor's Office in Sacramento and wait a ridiculous amount of time before I'm out of there and going to the shops. When I return home I have about 45 minutes to breathe and try to undestroy my back and arms before I'm back in the cockpit and bombing down I-5 to Stockton. Another hour or more on the road, I overshoot the exit because a truck was in the way and we got distracted by a helicopter towing a huge power tower top. We get back on track the back way, find Encino Ave, and I uncoil painfully from the driver's seat.

Amanda's dad is a big man with a bigger heart. Generous to the point of no return, brimming with stories both hilarious and terrifying from his years on this planet. Home alone while his wife attended to family business elsewhere in the state, he was obviously glad for some company that had fewer than four legs. Not that he doesn't love the four cats and the dog dearly, but I know that after a while you start to think in baby talk and have conversations with the cat. Jeff had graciously agreed to look after Aspen while we went fishing the next day, and he anticipated our arrival with beer and steaks and the Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood on the mind-bendingly immense television. The three of us spent the afternoon in wonderful conversation ranging from the banal to the intricacies of our own opinions and understandings of the world, and after dinner we said our goodnights and went to bed. The Sea Wolf wasn't going to leave the dock before 6 am, so we planned to leave around 4 in the morning, leaving the dog safe and happy in Jeff's large hands. He and Aspen like each other very much.

Friday

Amanda had been up most of the night with some kind of respiratory problem. Like asthma, she said. Couldn't breathe properly. A hard night for her. I kept waking up in the night because Aspen kept jamming me hard up against the wall next to the bed, stealing the covers, and then kicking me in the groin. Needless to say, the first part of the drive out to Emeryville was grim. We hit up an ATM for some cash, slipped through the highways just ahead of the traffic, and got to the boat around 5:30 in the morning. Of all the boats in the Emeryville Sportfishing fleet, only the Sea Wolf and the Huck Finn had managed to gather enough people to make it worth heading out. And neither of them were close to full, even though the deckhands and Captains from other boats had come along. No crabs, no “fishermen” -- even though the crab part of the trip literally involved the crew hauling some pots up and just basically handing everyone six Dungies each when we got back to harbor, it seemed as though the suspension of the crab season was somehow enough to make dozens of people cancel their charters. The Salmon Queen, the Seeker, the Sundance, the Superfish... lights out, engines off, crewless, passengerless. We headed out of the Golden Gate with only the Huck Finn in sight. And that's how it would stay.

The sea was rough. Not as rough as it could have been, that's for sure, but it was enough to make Amanda feel horrible. I went out to the stern to see how she was feeling, and we puked into the wake a couple of times before she decided to go and lie down in the cabin for a bit. When we arrived at our first fishing grounds off the Farallons, she hadn't fully recovered. “Go catch me some fish,” she murmured as she tried to summon a smile. I went out on deck and started catching fish for her. After about half an hour I had caught my limit and then some. She came out and caught the rest, because she's fucking TROOPER, yo.

Still a bit sore from getting pranged by the China and having my thumb all friction-ripped from keeping a 16 oz weight from overspooling my reel, I dropped a ball down a hundred or more feet and suddenly felt a huge strike on my line just as the weight hit the rocks. It took a lot of effort to reel in, and the fish kept taking more line even as I wound it back. I yelled for the gaff just as a large and presumably quite angry lingcod became visible. I kept its head down while Ryan gaffed it expertly and hauled the leviathan up over the rail. I could have put my face in its mouth. I was very pleased.

That lingcod was a jackpot winner by only a little bit, but there's no grey area when it comes to binaries. Mine was heavier, therefore the $75 was mine. I was more excited about the fish, to be honest. I don't often manage to catch lingcod (even though I can haul rockcod up like there was someone down there putting them on my line for me), and this was the first one I'd ever pulled up that was big enough to keep. Big enough in SPADES. I had told Ryan earlier that if he said the words “21 inches” to me on this particular day, I'd go over there and break his fucking ruler. Lings have to be 22” to keep, and the last time I'd been out on the Sea Wolf I'd tied into four lingcod between 19 and 21 inches. They all had to go back. It was frustrating. But now I had a keeper, and a monster at that. Our burlap sacks were full of rockcod, we'd both limited by now, and so I gave my arms and back a rest while Amanda continued to pull fish up so that even the crew would go home with meat. That's how we roll on the Pacific. That's how it's supposed to be done. I lit a cigarillo and squinted into the distance. Watched a trio of Orcas as we passed them. Scoter and seagulls and pelicans and Alcatraz. That ridiculous new bridge with its single-cable design just waiting to kill people.

It was 4:30 in the afternoon when we returned to the docks. It's about 35 miles from the Golden Gate to the Farallon Islands, and we had gone a few miles past them. A long ride to and from the grounds, to be sure. The swell had calmed some, and the way home had been the usual sun and fun banter and bullshit between those of us who hadn't decided to nap. It's always a great time when we go out with the Emeryville fleet. We bought copious amounts of ice, jammed twenty rockfish and a huge ling into our 100L Igloo cooler, and stared balefully into the future. We knew, we'd known since Jon called it a day and turned the Sea Wolf around, that the drive back to Stockton was going to be horrific. Friday afternoon Bay Area traffic. You know it's gonna be a shitfest when it takes you twenty minutes to get up the onramp to the highway. You know it's gonna be a shitfest when it takes you forty-five minutes to go twelve miles on a goddamned freeway. I can do that math: That's an average of 16 MPH. And I'm not sure we spent much of that time going faster than that. I invented many new invectives, and Amanda joined me in glorious, impotent road rage. By the time we got to Stockton her phone had run out of batteries, we'd both run out of reasons why everyone else was driving like orangutans.

I believe that living too close to the Bay makes you drive like a moron. They don't know how to zipper properly, they tailgate and then jam on their brakes, they wander into other lanes with the predictability of a drunk bowler. In the Valley we know how to drive (offer not valid in Fairfield and Vacaville) and we don't act like fools when the traffic is heavy. We don't try to merge our humungous and spotless Expeditions into equally spotless BMWs like confused children. I invariably end up wishing I had a paintball gun to fire at these assholes. Give them some nice lime green splatters on their idiot-driven cars. At least then people would be able to identify the jackasses.

Bay Area Traffic is the reason that your favorite television character caught AIDS and died. It's the reason your cat shit on the floor. It's responsible for the bubonic plague, Lance Armstrong's doping scandal, the sacking of Rome by Visigoths under Alaric in 410 AD, and the reason that you haven't won the lottery yet. It is all things foul and frustrating, wrapped in metal and creeping along at a soul-crushing single-digit speed while 65 MPH Speed Limit signs crawl mockingly past the spittle-flecked and fury-steamed windows of the Honda. Even the motorcycles, in this great state where lane splitting is actually legal, weave in and out of near-catastrophe and fuck things up even worse. Trucks can't get out of anyone's way, not that rental trucks like U-Hauls and Penskes ever do get out of the way, and the lanes fill with eighteen-wheelers desperately indicating right while douchebags in Priuses and Chargers scream past them on their monomaniacal quest to be three car lengths ahead of everyone else. Bay Area Traffic is the reason I hate San Francisco with a passion normally reserved for hate crimes and one-night stands with your celebrity crush.

It was probably around 7 o'clock when we finally reached Stockton. I'm sure Jeff had been a bit worried, especially since the last thing we told him before the phone died was that we'd probably be back around 5:30 or so. Of course, he knows the Bay Area Traffic intimately, and I'm equally sure he knew that we'd been jacked by a bunch of dickheads with expensive cars and cheap tactics. We stayed a few minutes, gave him a nice fish, collected our stuff. He sent us off with three pairs of thick woolly socks, a bag full of the leftover beer (Jeff doesn't drink), a really awesome surf rod and reel, a similarly awesome boat rod and reel, and a nice big fish net. Generous beyond comprehension, and I want to be more like him in so many ways.

But for now I had a fifty mile drive to do. Along another notoriously fucked up highway. My back was on fire, especially from where I'd been bracing myself against the pitching Sea Wolf. My arms were ruined from the fight with the ling and the white-knuckle rage-filled drive from the Bay to the Delta. Aspen was so happy to see us, Amanda was on the verge of collapse from exhaustion, and I just wanted a paintball gun to mount on the Civic. Jeff wished us a safe trip home, and we waved gratefully as we crept back out onto the asphalt and into the night.
We hit the Jack in the Box on the way home. Friday night in Davis is a nightmare of retarded pedestrians. Fuck fuck fuck I NEED A PAINTBALL GUN. It's a damned good thing I know not to throw garbage out the window at meandering freshmen in the roads. I'd have so many tickets they'd have to issue a warrant after fifteen minutes.

We dragged the 100 liters of fish and ice out of the car, left it in the front yard behind the fence. Fed the cats. Got the dog settled. Scarfed our Jack in the Box like it was the cure for everything that wasn't Good in the world, and crashed into bed with the grace of a cross-eyed hippo on a three-wheeled skateboard. Soft bed. Hard muscles. Eyes that screamed with the itchy memory of those fuck-off bright halogen LED whatever headlights they're putting on all these asshole tailgating cars lately. Hands scraped and cut and pranged and raw. Can still feel the boat. Can't keep eyes open. Won't keep eyes open. Brain collapses under the weight of cortisol. Eyes shut. Brain shut. Mouth open. Dark and drifting and suddenly gone.

Saturday

The alarm didn't wake me up. Amanda did. Gentle and lovely, she helped me piece my mind back together long enough to pull on my hunting jacket, make a coffee, and perch on my stool outside to have a smoke. Cold again, but not as cold. Not such an early morning this time. Pheasant opener today, a slower start. No shooting until 8 in the morning. No waders. No decoys. No hurry, no stress. Until the dog decided to chase other dogs and head towards every shotgun blast she heard. I got frustrated. Stressed. Angry. An utter cunt.
Amanda asked why I was so upset and when I listed the reasons they all seemed stupid and not worth the energy. She's smart like that. And patient with me. I felt better, and we spent a while slowly wandering through a fog so thick that the sun couldn't even burn it away until we were already leaving. Fifty-foot visibility, at the most. Learning how to hunt with the dog. Teaching the dog how to hunt with us. Teaching me how to pheasant hunt.

The mosquitoes started coming out, which brought the swallows. The fog was the reason we hadn't heard more than a half-dozen reports from the duck ponds and blinds. Bad day to try for duck, at least in the early morning. Might have been better by noon, I don't know. By noon I was sitting outside my house, ankle deep in fish gore, gutting rockcod while Amanda cleaned and portioned the massive ling before sealing it in vacuum bags. The new Game Saver works exceptionally well, and it's bigger than the old, cheaper one that burned itself out after last year. I cut all the prangs off the 19 remaining rockfish, gilled them all (that's where the wet work is: blood all over the place when you rip those gills out), and cut and gutted nearly half of them before I'd had enough.

“I don't want to gut fish any more today,” I announced as I opened up a beer. “I'll get some more ice and finish tomorrow.” My hands were cramped from the scissors and the gripping slippery fish and the cutting and the pulling and the scraping out of innards. My fingers were wrinkly and covered in scales, bits of gore, and fish blood. My back felt like someone had bitten my spine really hard. My eyes were sore.

The cat had pooed on the floor, someone had blown up Paris, and the car's trip meter -- which I had zeroed when we left for Stockton -- now stood at 430 miles and some change. Screw you guys, I'm going to bed.

Sunday

Amanda went duck hunting this morning. I did not. Aspen and I stayed in bed and listened to the rain until dawn. I made some coffee. We played ball in the front yard. It's nearly noon right now, and Deadeye will probably be back soon. She's so strong. I'm so old and stupid. And warm. And not sitting in a tulle patch up to my dick in cold bogwater. I hope she has a good morning. I hope I have to pluck waterfowl as well as finish gutting those fish today. I wish I was stronger, had more endurance, or coped with things with more grace than I do. I wish I was more like her. I'm working on it. I'm getting better at it. She's helping me, and I'm trying hard. I think I'll probably go see if I can shoot some turkeys tomorrow or Tuesday. I think we're going to double-dip on Wednesday and hunt duck at dawn and pheasant in the morning. I think I'm really happy. I think I'm really sore. I think the freezer is nearly half-full.

I think life is great. I am in love with my wife, my dog, and my planet. It's a good life if you don't weaken. And even if you do, it's not half bad.
Besides, I have a dozen fish left to gut.

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Deadeye came home with the glare of high winds and impossible shots in the reflection of her eyes. She told me tales of mallards cupping down, coots refusing to be shot, 15 MPH gusts raining skybuster steel on her decoys from the next blind over. Her new Girls With Guns rainshell was awesome in the unpredictable swamp drizzle, and I could tell that between 3 am and 11 am she had been very happy and having fun, even though what the hell did she take Blind 5 for it's so far away from the nearest road, like 3/4th of a mile of shitty overgrown and rutted path?

I bought more cat food. More beer. More wine. More paper towel. Taqueria Davis was closed because of course it was. It's Sunday and Sara and Tarcisio are family people. Catholics, Mexicans. I can't believe I even thought they'd be open on a Sunday. I went to Subway, bought a sandwich. I went to Little Caesar's, bought a pepperoni pizza.

Ket Mo Ree for dinner, at least for Amanda. I had a half of a pepperoni pizza to chow on -- I'm from Scarborough, we can eat a large pepperoni pizza for days if necessary. It may have been necessary a few times. Or maybe we just thought it was necessary. Either way, cheap pepperoni pizza is one of the surest ways to my heart.

And now I sit hunched with ass hurting, stiff with shoulder clenching, tired of finger-bending. I want arch support for my soul. There is no VA for the sort of war I fight. The next time you see me smile, remember how difficult it is for me to make a snarl look socially acceptable, understand that I don't actually want to exsanguinate you... I just look like that. Resting Bitch Face coupled with genuine pain produces the kind of scowling countenance that people like Jeff and I have. We're not angry, we're THINKING.

You fuckers.

Tocky on 15/8/2018 at 05:18

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Hell yeah. That's what I've been missing. A salty tale of facing nature aboard a ship named for a Jack London novel. I could see the ocean before my eyes and feel it's raging glory. No wait, that's a line from "Brandy". Well anyway I've never been out in high swells. If you are getting high swells in the gulf then it's red skies in the morning and you better dock. None of those ghastly looking lingcod (look like pilot fish on steroids) either just sea perch and red snapper which really doesn't look like a red snapper but more of an over sized gold fish. Catch them on squid. I don't know what a sand dab is but I bet you can wash that smell off faster than squid which is three days of hand scrubbing before cats stop following you. None of that dragging a line. Just over the side till it touches bottom then pull up a foot and wait and as long as you don't have flipper come by and take whatever you caught as you pull it in you get a fish. Maybe a tuna which is the steak of the sea. No meat better. I have no idea how they even turn it into that crap in cans. It's like some kind of bait and switch presto changeo evil sort of magic. And I never saw a fish explode because of the bladder puncturing poke the deck hands do and nobody hauls it up the side of a mountain to land it. Interesting stuff.

I've seen your rush hour traffic and you can have it. Never been down as far as your way but I've done the loop from Ventura down Topanga to LA and out the freeway to Vasquez rocks. A friend of mine even retired from being a city planner out there so you can hate him if you want but I don't know what else you can do with too many people trying to get everywhere at the same time. Hell, even Chicago has a better rush hour.

And hunting. I haven't hunted since I was a teen and then mostly dove which act as ducks do about opening day. I did plenty of it then of all sorts. My dad used to train pointers, mostly the short haired ones for quail and nothing like your dog which does indeed look like the Jim Henson puppet which only lasted a few shows as I recall. Somewhere there is a VHS with those few shows on it that I used to watch with my daughter at six? eight? and she is in her mid thirties now. Damn son, we made it to old. Did you ever think you would? I didn't. Life IS great though and I'll whip anyone's ass says different... or maybe buy them a beer and disagree loudly while table surfing. Right now I have to go to bed so I don't run folks off the road sleep driving tomorrow but it is good to have you back. AND STORIES. Jesus I couldn't get more than a handful with my thread and I told at least half my good ones.

Welcome back.

Medlar on 15/8/2018 at 16:24

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Jeez that was reality tv on steroids. I have driven in San Francisco recently, bloody ridiculous! Would love to go fishing with you, crabs or no crabs... you have a great life style a fad great enthusiasm for it, more power to you.

Again, great to see you back here.

Tocky on 16/8/2018 at 01:58

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That is one satisfied cat.

I have to figure out how to move a skeleton from below the camera's field of vision. The problem is they are top heavy when you have to move from below the pelvis. I have pvc pipes with a garrote string tight on each upper femur which will allow for a shaking of surprise once I pull the sheet off and then a turning to run off camera like I want. A short sequence but if the feet don't stay firm on the floor it topples too easy. If I use string from up top it becomes inoperable for one person (my wife). All it has to stay upright for is long enough to say "Dethy it's you?" and "Your naked! I can see your bone... s." Roller skates! They are heavy enough to counter balance and keep movement steady rooted. I wonder if mom still has mine.

You see, Dethy is my sometime sidekick on the horror show and I'm doing a version of the grade school joke "the ghost of the one black eye" because I have to introduce 13 Ghosts (the original which is a kiddy matinee) because it is the station owners favorite from childhood. This one time I'll do it but after this it's back to blood and guts. I have my principles after all.

jkcerda on 16/8/2018 at 14:36

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cats, because every house needs a box of shit in their homes.........