Dashing Not At All

We've a bottle brush tree cloaked in silly ornaments that range from a cast brass Eifel tower to a stapled paper pickle to a hastily sketched moose with mistletoe that I cranked out in 1981 when it would have made more sense to light the tree afire for extra heat 'cause I sure didn't have enough to pay for the regular stuff.

Heat, that would be. Not mistletoe. Neither moose.

Moose in fact is relatively affordable and apart from the fact that they tend to charge their herders and trample them to death on a regular basis, moose could be the other red meat.

So basking in the glow of this cobbled-together Christmas of bottle brush trees, light up deer and bewreathed sleds on the front porch I am counting the one blessing that I am most thankful for this year.

I ain't driving anywhere.

Bunny afficionados, this December 24, 25, 26 and I venture to say 27 I am going no where in a motor vehicle. My cottony ass is staying right here in Fungus County. I wish you the same but for those of you that are travelling, godspeed, safe journey and hurry home soon.

That in mind, I present my top five trips from hell.

5) An accumulation of several trips to Brookyn: Wherein a radiator hose blew out on Tonnelle Avenue somewhere near East Fuck, NJ and we abandoned the car to walk to the PATH station in Jersey City for fear of being late. Or in Holland Tunnel traffic the six week old car overheated in forty degree weather because the auto monkey who had serviced it last had disconnected a temperature sensor to get his simian paw around the oil filter. Or where, returning from a wedding reception somewhere in the Bronx, we get stuck in cross Bronx traffic at 12.30 am in ninety degree heat and the same vehicle that boiled over at the Holland starts having hot flashes so we drive to Newburgh just to get some air flowing before heading back south and home.

4) The tall ships have sailed up Narragannsett bay and everybody from Maine to West Virginia is on US 1 to catch an eyeful. In these pre-internet days I happily cruise down south for lunch and spend most of Sunday in a parking lot near Wal-Mart.

3) Last Thursday's drive home. Ok, so we had our first snow. Really just little more than a dusting but when on the way to work, the radio forecast says "really just little more than a dusting" I admonish myself for not immediately turning back for home, putting Kathy (the car, more on a future bunny) in the garage and switching out for the pickup truck. Nope, I'm going to watch the skies and once some flakes come down, I'll head home. Well, some flakes came down and I quickly found out how a 325 hp rear wheel drive performance car performs in snow. That is to say, not at all. Fortunately I was able to channel my inner John Wayne on one incline: Ya lissen to me Pilgrim! I don't care if I have to feather you out and run you to the redline, or if I dump you in first and feed you all the gas you want: You're gettin' up this hill.

2) Thanksgiving, late eighties. Wherein despite the inch an hour snowfall, we jumped into the car and slogged our way from north Jersey to somewhere in New England for Thanksgiving. Highlights included Jersey plowing one hundred yards out from their tollbooths and no more, staying in anybody's tracks across Connecticut for four hours and taking a windshield full of snow passing a plow uphill because 15 mph with twelve miles to go didn't cut it anymore. Hope the wipers can deal with this before we hit the ditch.

1) Taking Ruby home. I'd link this if I were ambitious but I'm not. You're going to have to find it yourselves. Long and the short of it we tranquilized a cat to take him on a 4 hour ride and between the temperature dropping twenty degrees, the cat coming off kitty downers early and the muffler falling off the car, let's just say that driving into the Atlantic was an attractive option at more than one moment of that journey.

Safe travels, all. Best wishes that you are all where you want to be, with whom you want to be and basking in the achievements of a very long year.

Merry Christmas.

Bunny on.

I.P. Freely

You've got to know where this is going, theme-wise. That we'll soon be in the scatalogical with gutter humor abounding.

So get off the bus now, 'cause we're heading to the downtown campus of U. Rhine and there ain't no restroom.

I'll dedicate this posting to the ride home tonight. About an hour and a half through moderate traffic and news radio. A mundane trip made notable by the Coca Cola I had finished just before leaving the office that made it known it was all done and would like to leave again. Now.

By the time now became NOW!!! I was in town and just close enough to home to chance it. It almost paid off, but gentle reader I confess I made it from the truck, leaving the door swinging open in the chill wind...to the side of the garage because there was no way in hell I was going to get through a deadbolt and door lock key combination with dry Dockers.

My property slopes away from the house and in the morning I'm going to have to see if the barn has washed away. Ok, at the very least the mulch pile is gone.

I'm not an advocate of public much of anything so I can tell you I'm pretty embarrassed by the whole thing.

Reminds me of my first visit to Disneyworld. I may have mentioned this in an earlier post but I'll be damned if I can find it. The one where I meet the girl and the old man decides the next morning to hoof off to the magic kingdom. Anyway, a straight shot from the Florida coast to Orlando is around two hours as I recall and as I recall too I had to pee about an hour into the thing. The old man was reluctant to stop since "we're almost there" and "I don't want to miss anything." Hint: Twenty some years later its all still there. You haven't missed a thing.

So "almost there" took another hour plus and by the time we pull into the parking lot to be guided into a space only to watch the next car park three seconds after us and the next three seconds after that I am full to bursting and if someone had gotten out of one of the cars and mentioned the word "waterfall" the Pavlovian reaction would have hit him like Polish government water cannons on Solidarity protestors.

The old man and mom went to buy tickets and I headed off to the rest room just by the edge of the parking lot. Apparently this sort of thing happens a lot.

I'm not sure how long I was in there but, reading newspaper accounts of the day I know that several boats in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride dislodged from their tracks and floated perilously close to the exhibits and four dolls in "It's a Small World" suffered irreversable water damage.

But I sure felt better.

Bunny on.

A Handful of the Half Baked

A few years ago I was a single fellow with a not too impressive career and a workplace four blocks from home. I did blog prodigously because how much time can you hang in traffic over four blocks?

"Yeah, got hung up crossing third. Somebody had thrown a shoelace and the left lane was blocked."

Add to that the less than impressive career which basically involved occupying an office and maintaining a 98.6 degree body temperature. Ah but for the good old days.

These days I've leveraged my experience and education to be one of the faster hamsters on a wheel going basically nowhere. Add to that an office that is essentially your briefcase so you work whereever you are. That means anywhere from forty minutes to four hours from home. Given that, blogging has taken somewhat of a back seat in that originality suffers when you're exhausted.

To wit: "I wonder if I'm fuckin' tired is funnier or somehow more ironic than simply I'm tired."

That ain't blogging, it's bitching.

You'll have to accept my latest offering, a couple of kernels of the unpopped contents of the brainpan.

Over at the second novel; Call Us the Knitting Circle, the boys are going to Kentucky to help a friend of Harry's collect back child support by pretending to be east coast wise guys. In a future bunny, Gustav Batman and Ehud Rabeen will fight crime as the unassuming third cello and first violin (respectively) of the Vienna City orchestra. Maybe an entirely concocted travel journal of Cog and Bunny go cross country in search of the perfect fried chicken. Hottest top toys for 2010 is in the offing once I figure out what the damn electronic devils are meant to do in the first place.

But admittedly, these are ideas whose crust though browning, are still basically unbaked goop at their core.

Just wanted to let you know I've not been abducted by the taliban and the Third Marine Corps are laughing wildly at demands for ransom.

This month, anyway.

Bunny on.