The Caustic Bunny

Radio Killed The Radio Star

2012-01-23T18:34:00.007-05:00

An inordinate amount of time was spent this past weekend resurrecting the car radio. The radio was brought back from its self induced coma a few years back in about ten minutes over a small glass of decent whiskey.

I must be sixfold more stupid today than I was those few years back.

The battery died then, and the radio has the feature of encoding itself into a secure, non-playing state whenever power is cut off at the source. Its a security feature, the theory being that if the radio were stolen, its power source would be cut off and it would be essentially useless in another vehicle or connected to a power source, resting attractively on a coffee table somewhere. It won't work again until you punch in the right code.

Great in theory but in practice, there are holes. For starters, who knew? I mean, when I fired the car up after having the battery disconnected, the radio gave me a funny numeric code and then said "Safe" on its display.

Yes, I felt safe at the time and presumably so did the radio, but I would have felt safe and entertained had it been playing soothing music as well.

So unless you hang a sign in the window warning potential crooks that you're going to need a code to re-set this thing, and they bother to read it, you're still going to come back to a busted window and a hole in the dash through which the wind can be called "Mariah."

Of course, the thief might return said purloined radio to you with a note:

"By golly, you got me. No code, you smart fellow you. Guess you win this round."

Fondly,

Peter R. Pertrapor

So I poked and prodded the thing but to no avail. Then once home whipped out the owner's manual to have thing tell me about the secret code. The code was of course printed on the back of the code card which I was advised to tuck in a safe place outside of the vehicle. I of course followed that advice, twelve years ago when I bought the car. Now, three houses, four wallets, sixteen dozen safe places later the owner's manual might as well read:

"The radio code is printed on the back of the radio card. Ensure that this card is not in the vehicle. Take it out of the vehicle, set it on fire and hide its ashes in bits across three non-contiguous states. Learn to hum or whistle."

The code was reprinted on a new vehicle checklist that was filled out before I took posession of the car. I had the list because it was the first thing I snatched from the dealer and stuffed into the nether recesses of the glove compartment, greedily wanting the bill of sale and keys instead. The checklist noted that a pre-delivery inspection had been performed and that the battery was properly charged, the doorlocks worked and the tires were correctly inflated. When I found it last weekend I noted that "brake rotors in round and balanced" wasn't checked so admittedly the first time I braked at speed, I should have expected the car to do a conga dance across three lanes.

Now having the checklist and the code, I went right back to the radio and punched the code in, dutifully transposing the first two digits in a fit of numeric dyslexia that from time to time grips me, resulting in awkward apologies to wrong numbers on the phone and stops at a massage parlor instead of the the optometrist I thought I punched into the GPS. Unfazed, the radio promptly shut me down and locked me out from re-entering the code again.

Neener neener neener.

This aloof behavior was not detailed in the owner's manual. Rather I found out on the web that after two errant attempts, one was obliged to wait an hour after which all would be re-set and you could try again without prior penalty.

Don't you wish marriages were like that?

Telling the story to a friend this morning, he commented that perhaps I should not disconnect the battery. Not practical, said I, as I need a power source for the weekend squirrel executions.

Truth be told, we disconnected the battery in order to re-set the engine computer. To get the "check engine" light to go off, we replaced manifold bypass hoses, installed a new PCV valve twice, replaced the OXS and finally put in a new manifold aspirator. But the thing kept faulting so we cut the battery, lit a few candles and chanted "forget, forget" over the transaxle for an hour.

Seems to have worked.

On leased vehicles with mileage caps, I might try it again. Or re-connect the poles backwards so the odometer reverses when you drive.

But seriously, when it finally occurred to me to key in the code such that the radio display matched the radio code I wondered how addle-brained I had become since I last swapped out the battery? Am I that dumber? Or can I attribute it to the season and the lack of visual and olfactory stimulus that comes with January? If everything's grey and smells vaguely of wet raincoats, is it a wonder that the difference between sleep and ten o'clock at the office is that the coffee has lumps?

Nah. Nice try. I'm stupider.

Bunny on.

Go Tell Him Nuts

2012-01-08T17:11:00.003-05:00

Harry had taken the precaution of swapping out the pedal clips on both bikes for standard pedals that anyone in running shoes, boots, flip flops or Turkish bath sandals could ride on.

Clips were specialized pedals that could only be used with shoes fitted with metal tabs on the bottom that clipped into the pedals and locked the shoes in to provide a longer power stroke for the rider. Here was the essential intersection between cycling and sexuality that had initially interested Harry.

The biggest drawback to the metal tabs, other than when you walked on a hard surface with them they gave the impression of a nascient tap dancer without the benefit of rhythm, was that they were generally fitted to sports shoes with the functionality of a negative heel seventies sandal. Perched high atop a bicycle, these shoes worked well so long as they did not encounter the level earth. However, once out of the saddle, they had the environmental ergonomic of an ice skate in a peat bog. So Harry swapped out the pedals for regular cut metal pedals with high points cut into then to grasp to the sole of an average shoe or cut deeply into the naked flesh of a rider if incorrectly engaged.

As he keyed up the pedal to mount the bike, the opposing pedal swung back and drew first blood off his shin like a rattlesnake on tequila. Jim was already mounted and pedalling feverishly up the first trail.

"This is a great bike!" Jim shouted back to Harry. It was a good bike to be sure, a Marin Palisades Trail front suspended bike, but not the fully suspended monster Harry was following up on. However, beauty being in the eye of the beholder, Harry quickly caught that while his current standard was the technically evolved Giant Attack bike, Jim had heretofore been riding an early nineties unsuspended Bianchi. Hence on the Marin, now able to bounce the front fork off rocks without rattling a few fillings loose, Jim might as well have been placed in full command of the Space Shuttle after forsaking an old Ford pickup. And indeed, he leaned into the bike and pushed uphill with force that left Harry checking his beard stubble for afterburner scorching.

"You might not think this possible, but right now I hate you even more." Harry said to Jim's outline on the ridge between violent inhalations of what little air he could get into his lungs.

The trail consisted of three elements: a steep, graveled uphill interspersed only with large rocks across the trail to prevent erosion, a level ride along the ridgeline that lasted all of thirteen seconds before, a steep plunge back down to lake level interspersed only with large rocks across the trail to prevent erosion off the mountain. Here was where Harry took issue with human intervention in geology: Clearly, erosion had been established as some sort of natural defense against mountains becoming too uppity. Erosion was a good thing. It kept high things in their place with the enforced humility of today's pristine peak is tomorrow's river slurry. But along had come man and artificially blocked this wonderful natural process. By laying stones across the path, man ensured that rain did not form conduits of mud and muck that pulled soil downhill and created ravines that ate away at the root growth of plants atop the rise. Man also created eight to eighteen inch rock obstacles that man assumed riders could jump with bikes. Man assumed falsely riders with oxygen rich blood that was not currently weeping off the latest pedal smack to the shin.

So Harry developed a routine of slowing, dismounting and hauling the bike over the rock obstacle. Here is where the non-clipping pedals came in handy because standard pedals allowed him to dismount without first forgetting he was clipped in, attempting to wrench his feet out in time but ultimately falling over sideways before he freed himself.

Jim was on the trail ahead of him somewhere and Harry could only hope he was making good time that that the re-introduction of wolves into this part of the state had been successful.

The thirteen second ride across the ridge, across relatively flat single track terrain with the ability to steer and still take in nature's providence took about thirteen seconds. By Harry's count, twelve thousand seconds too little to make an appreciable difference in this race which Harry had now dubbed "Adventures in torture." The trail turned abruptly left and bounced downhill over rocks, stumps and the same damned erosion retarders Harry had battled uphill. Now one would assume that downhill would be easier as you'd just have to jump off and over the things. And indeed that was the case if you were in your twenties and the idea of jump was not followed as it was in Harry's case with the idea of land.

And hard.

Here was where Harry realized that the secret of turning forty was the revelation of mortality. Nobody else really knew nor cared what happened when the bike landed, everybody else assumed a continuance of the forward motion of the thing. Indeed, probably only Harry was comparing long term disability actuarial tables on the way down to distract himself. So he slowed every time he got to an erosion barricade and went over it carefully to avoid driving the bike seat into his nether regions upon landing. He lost count of the landings but noted that he never did quite get the exact hang of it.

How did Jim get down here so fast without harming himself likewise? Probably not at all, but then it occurred to Harry that Jim was already raising two children and probably didn't care as much anyway.

The next leg of the race was to be on foot. A run and orienteering. Harry came out of the woods on his bike to find Jim sitting on the grass next to a small, dammed stream that provided the water from mountain runoff to the lake they had canoed on.

"Man that took you a long time!" Jim said. "Come on, we need to get maps over at that table and get going. We've got to catch up here."

Harry got off the bike and was staring at the dark water behind the dam. Cool and dark, it was alluring after the dusty downhill of the gonad-smasher express.

"Come on man!" Jim insisted. "Why are you staring at that?"

"So how deep and cold do you think it is just behind the dam?"

When Harry Met Folly

2012-01-03T18:59:00.005-05:00

There were clues from the parking lot to the gathering point of the Adventure Race Harry had let Jim talk him into. Small, subtle clues, but clues nonetheless that should have struck him with the force and audible resonance of a Zildjian square on the forehead.

Harry's pick up truck was one. A four year old compact that he had picked up after his full sized dented monster had lost its brakes one night last winter. That and the rust that was perforating the bed, the wheel wells and the cab kind of teamed up to tell Harry it was time to retire the beast. So now he tooled in son of beast, trading down to a compact with an asthmatic four cylinder that allayed his fears of ever losing his brakes again in that he would merely turn on the air conditioning to stop the thing dead. The little truck started to look out of place in a lot otherwise filled with four wheel drive, all terrain, land roving things that could probably throw out grappling hooks and lift themselves out of Hades by actuating a small switch in the cab. Plus the mountain bikes they all carried were hung off or strapped to carriers universely designed by Escher. Harry's two bikes had been gingerly thrown into the bed and the helmets strung up on a bungee cord.

Everybody getting out of the four wheel survivalistmobiles was about ten to fifteen years Harry's junior too. Jim was younger but only by four years, hardly the ringer material needed to even keep up with these kids. They looked to a one like they lived in single room apartments with their fashion model girlfriends, rode, lifted and ran all day stopping only by the mailbox to pick up the check that some sort of adventure racing admirers society sent them as a monthly stipend on which to live. Harry checked the last of his Blackberry messages from the office and got out to find Jim.

It wasn't hard. He had parked his Volvo near Harry in the "meek" section of the lot.

"Hey man, isn't it a beautiful day? I mean, for the second week in October, its heading up into the sixties today." Jim was always upbeat and enthusiastic mornings. It had to do with waking up to his wife whom he loved every day and leaving his children well off in his comfortable newly built home with a fresh cappucino, Harry was certain. Harry, on the other hand, always lightened his mood by quietly thinking up things that would get back at him. Letting the air out of his car tires, for example.

"It is, Jim. And to think that from my house I could be at the head of the Chesapeake in less than an hour, having a Bloody Mary at my favorite dockside bistro. But, here I am. Somewhere in a wood by a lake out of "Deliverance" and you've got that shit-eating smile on again."

"Its gonna be great," Jim ignored him as usual. He knew that if Harry wasn't unhappy about something, he just wasn't happy. It was amazing that he had been friends with the man as long as he had without a single incident of physical violence between them. "So I know I told you it was a canoe, run, bike thing, but Butch announced he had put in a few extras this morning."

Clearly, killing Butch on the spot wasn't going to be one of them, so Harry ventured: "What kind of extras?"

"There's a Frisbee toss, a portage, a treasure hunt."

"And when the fuck do we meet the Munchkins who will take us to the Emerald City?"

"Did you bring the second bike?"

Harry pointed to the truck bed. The lake caught his eye. It was beautiful, smooth and still with the morning mist coming off of it as the sun rose higher in the sky and the air began to warm. Framed by two trees, the water formed a mirror reflection of the opposite shore where maples had exploded into the height of their fall color. In a little while the air would fill with the excited shouts of the racers and the water would churn with their paddling. With a little luck, no one would notice him whacking Jim with the flat of his paddle and drowning him in sheer retribution.
But for now it was time to get the bikes. Harry had two mountain bikes and was lending Jim the older but still competent Marin. He kept the fully suspended Giant for himself since he was the more experienced biker. After all, Jim could outrun him, was probably a better canoeist and now that a Frisbee toss was in the offing Harry knew that there was one event they would have to brazenly cheat at in order to get through.

"Racers, assemble!" The call had to be Butch and they walked the bikes down to the starting point. They were shown, along with the rest of the runners/bikers/canoeists/masochistic sociopaths running this thing where to line up their bikes to grab once they had come out of the water.

Come out from on top of the water, Harry mentally corrected the organizer although even on a positive day like today he knew he was lying to himself.

"Ok, we've put a few fun extras into today's event." Butch roared into the portable microphone from his perch atop the abandoned school bus.

"Funny, I don't see the 'take the bra off of Jennifer Aniston' course." Harry said to Jim who was bouncing on the balls of his feet either to limber up his legs or piss Harry off.

"There's a quarter mile run to the Frisbee toss," Butch continued as if he had not heard Harry, which, being perched on top of a school bus roof, he of course hadn't. "Then you need to throw to your partner, and have him or her catch it in flight, five times each. Then you run to the canoes. Grab the first one you get to, put on a life jacket-Harry's heart sank a little-and put them in the lake. Two times around the lake, and for fun, you see the docks that jut into the lake? There and over there? You need to paddle up to them, get out of the canoe, lift the canoe over the docks and continue on the other side."

"Didn't we come up with ideas like the Panama canal to overcome this?" Harry asked Jim.

"Ok racers, line up for the starting gun!"

Indeed, Butch fired the pistol in the air and not at his temple as Harry had hoped. The race began with Harry and Jim keeping a comfortable sprint up until they got to an old dirt parking lot to take up positions opposite each other for the Frisbee toss. Jim threw first, straight at Harry who caught the disk in both hands.

"One down, four to go!" Harry called triumphantly.

"We each need to catch it five times." Jim called back.

"The waters are cold and deep!" Harry replied in what he hoped was his inside voice. He threw the disk and Jim turned abruptly left to chase the thing down the line of other racers, hoping to catch it twenty yards down line from where Harry had ostensibly aimed.

Jim threw back and Harry caught and immediately returned the throw. The racer two positions down from Jim, seeing the Frisbee careening directly towards his face, momentarily put down his own disk and caught the throw.

"Counts!" cried Harry.

Jim was breathing heavily from the sprints up and down the parking lot chasing Harry's throws. Harry could dial back a little running to the canoes and let Jim recover. They grabbed a boat, threw on life jackets and pulled it to the shore.

"You steer." Harry called to Jim and pulled the bow, now 160 pounds heavier since Jim had taken the command to take the back position as a sign to settle into the boat, into the water. Harry pulled until the thing floated free, jumped in and began to paddle. He remembered a story read to him in grade school. It was about early French explorers in Canada who went up the St. Lawrence river with their Indian guides. The Indians laughed at the sorry paddling skills of the French, who really just splashed a lot of water around until they acquired the skill of the Indians. Harry wished that he were competing against an all-Indian team who at this point would be in such throes of hysterics that they would be useless in any competition.

They paddled up to the first dock. Harry jumped out and began to lift the bow out of the water, almost neatly tipping Jim off the stern into the water.

"What are you waiting for? Get out an pick the boat up!" Harry shouted.

"I might get wet."

"We're in a lake. I'd say there's a pretty good chance of that."

In the first turn of the lake they watched as another team of two capsized their boat and went into the water.

"Ok, we may suck, but we're essentially dry." Harry said over his shoulder, hoping that Jim was paddling equally ferociously because it sure as hell didn't feel that way.

In the fourth turn of the lake, the last turn before the aimed straight for the shore to begin the biking leg, the turn where Jim was now soaked in the back of the boat, where an inch or so of water was sloshing back and forth in the canoe and where Harry's upper arms felt as if on the next stroke they would detach, skip out, paddle in hand, once or twice across the water's surface and then sink gently into the deep, at that turn in the lake they were passed by another boat which, from the soaked and dripping canoeists they recognized the team that had earlier capsized.

They pulled the boat ashore.

"Let's get onto something we're good at." Harry said. "If God had meant us to be on water, he would have made us float."

They got to the bikes.

"We do float." Jim said.

Harry strapped his helmet on. "Only after we drown."

Except This Time I Mean It

2011-12-31T17:22:00.002-05:00

I've never made New Year's resolutions and I don't intend to start.

Every December 31st I take the time to reflect, count up fingers, toes, appendages ensuring that nothing was hacked off in August that I'm just realizing now. I note that most of the scars are healing and congratulate myself for having come out of the other end of another year alive and relatively unscathed.

And so here we are, all present and accounted for and relatively unscathed. Tomorrow, we'll get up and start it all again hoping it will be better but pretty much resigned to it being the same and not worse. That's ok. The same and not worse is a good thing for those of us who, like me, worry about every damn thing that can, can't, won't or might really screw things up.

Let's review:

New Year's 1972: Stayed up until midnight, saw 1973 ushered in and was thankful that another year had passed without the Soviets nuking us into the stone age. Also the bully kid from down the block seemed to have lost interest in following me home mumbling "how about I punch you in the face?" under his breath.

New Year's 1977: With the parents out at a party, midnight came and I thought I'd celebrate like an adult. Have a drink. So I poured the better part of a fifth of Canadian Club into a water glass, lit a candle and raised a glass. Somewhere around May of 1978 I realized the holiday was over.

New Year's 1982: Still no Soviet apocalypse but my date woke up with a sinus infection and the couch we spent the night on was upholstered in 80 grit sandpaper. Let's forget this one too.

New Year's 1999: Watched the fireworks of Sydney harbor on TV and realized that all the lights had not gone out, the internet had not crashed and the Dell upstairs running Windows 98 was not going to pick up a hatchet and come looking for me.

New Year's 2005: The Russkie threat is long gone, there hasn't been an attack in four years. Ok, the marriage went into the crapper a few months ago but I'm on a bus to New York to run a midnight race with some significant arm candy. We'll wind up in our own respective homes come morning but for the moment let's pretend that ignoring the sub freezing Central Park temperatures are worth it. It's been a hard year.

New Year's 2009: Holy shit! Is the ride stopped yet???

New Year's 2011: Very little good has come from this year but not much disasterously bad has happened either. For a compulsive worrier, it's been like a stable low-level anxiety that's wound its way through the past 12 months. And yet, for all that's not blown up like a magnesium pile, I'm getting a little tired of reaching a milestone and saying "whew!" I miss some of the occasional risk-taking of my younger years. I miss being out on that ledge. I miss pitching all my forces into the fray and holding my breath. So let's stir things up a little. In less than a week, I'm going to hot up a cold war we've been fighting for the last four years. The details are unimportant but I'm tired of going along to get along. Enough said.

On other lines; Vladimir: Do you still have those SS-20's we all worried about? You know I stole the launch codes in '86. Care to try your luck?

Bunny on.

A Brush With Mediocrity

2011-12-19T18:08:00.003-05:00

People I'm acquainted with, from college roomate to good friend to colleague to person who's blog I read regularly, are getting their books published with a frequency as alarming as births nine months after a wide scale blackout.

So reach out and feel what true mediocrity is like, touch this blog and know that a lot of my page views come on drunken Saturday nights when the munchies make you Google "Cantonese" but, like I said, you're drunk.

Roomate just got ink on a book about teaching the best business practices through storytelling. Shockingly simple, yet effective in its concept. And just as "Marley and Me" spawned a generation of "Here's my cute, lovable but stupid dog who dies" books, this tome will spawn its collection of hangers-on.

In fact, I tried my hand at one.

See Dick.

See Jane.

See Dick and Jane meeting awkwardly in the copy room, making eye contact, going out to dinner, furtively pawing at each other and unleashing an otherwise uncontrollable lust.

See Dick and Jane sneaking off to an abandoned cube to go at it.

See Dick and Jane get fired.

Now, what did we all learn here?

Good friend, a couple of years back, compiled a guy's guide to guy movies. It didn't do terribly well and I wish him luck with his latest on raising chickens and compost on the fire escape or some such thing. I always thought the guy's guide to guy movies was kind of poorly targeted, though well executed.

'Cause after all, we all know what we like to watch and why. We don't need (and aren't motivated since the Highlander marathon is on AMC) to read about it. I thought that maybe a Gal's Guide to Guy movies would do a little better on Amazon.

Not so much a guide to the movies, but rather the fairer sex's guide to how to behave through these classics on the rare occasion that we get to pick the pay per view.

Goldfinger: Moneypenny's a fine woman. But until she starts showing cleavage you might as well forget it. Also, she wants a warm, substantative relationship. This movie is for guys, remember?

Alien: EVERYBODY knows you're better equipped to ward off evil aliens in your underwear. That's just the way it is.

2001; A Space Odyssey: Ok, he's the next incarnation of man. Get it? Now stop asking me all these questions! It's one a.m. for God's sake!

Colleague wrote about his dog a few years back. I guess having a depressing ending was one hell of a hook.

And now, Anna has compiled something called "The Chicktionary". Its over on her blog so check it out. I did and read some sample entries to Thumper who almost peed herself. I guess its funny but here's the thing; being an XY chromasomatic compilation the whole thing is predictably lost on me. There's an entry about the nickname for the monthly period. I would have sooner written something thusly:

Monthly period: Run. Hide. Go to the garage and sleep there until next Tuesday for the love of life. Just stay out of the house.

Like I said, pink in my world is the color that happens when you put a bass in a blender.

But seriously, check it out. Good luck with it Anna.

Oh yes, I've got a book too, I'm just looking for enough stones to not flinch when a hundred agents snort milk out their nose before saying "no." Surprisingly its not funny at all but a story of what happens when you follow desire too far and it becomes something else.

And if that doesn't sell, I'm working on a compilation of all the fart jokes my buddies and I told each other when we were jogging.

Bunny on.

The Forbidden Seven, and Then Some...

2011-12-12T18:54:00.007-05:00

From Yahoo Shopping today comes seven bad ideas for gifts this season which I've expanded so our Jewish friends can take full advantage of how not to fuck up eight nights in a row. Christian friends can also find favor in an expanded list, particularly if you're Catholic or LDS and have a lot of potential pitfall relatives on this year's list.

And if you're serving; Thank you. Find small comfort that you can always blame it on the post exchange only having it in XXL in green. But come on over if you don't like it, they've got an easy returns policy.

So here are some truly bad ideas.

Appliances-Nothing says "no sex until Easter" like a vacuum.

In a fit of practicality last year, Thumper asked for a pasta press attachment for our mixer and like a git, I bought it, forsaking the usual bauble that momentarily sends the bank balance creaking downwards like the Titanic in her death throes.

Not that it was a bad gift per se, but we've only managed to use it to wring out kitchen sponges so far.

Pets-Noun, not verb. You'll wind up giving a canary to a family of cat owners or a gerbil to a snake-fancier. Not to mention that lay away is awkward.

Gift Cards-The seemingly one size fits all innocuous gift card goes into the bad idea category when its to Ms. Alice's Erotic Delights or Yangs Special Chinese Massage Emporium. Just because it appeals to you.

Add to that, if the government picks it up, its probably a bad idea. So this year when your tax refund shows up as a redeemable gift card to the Kabul post exchange, you heard it here first. I'll take mine XXL, in green please.

Lingerie-Generally not a good idea for the office Secret Santa unless you think Ray, your boss, would look good in crimson crotchless.

Sweaters-Moaners and screamers. Always a superior choice.

Food Baskets-Peppery Ridge Farm summer sausage fondue and cheddar-marshmallow log packed in with jalapeno raspberry spread and a few crackers with the consistency of bleached sand dollars. Yeah, I get this one.

Jewelery You've Seen on a TV Commercial-Men! You know the truth! Any jewelery commercial where a guy gives a girl a sparkly something and she instantly melts only happens that once between those two people and can never be repeated. You simply cannot buy what's in the commercial. We are biologically doomed to trudge through every case in the store (including the confirmation crosses for some strange reason) at least three times until we find the thing we pray will:

i) not be a repeat of last year.

ii) not clash with everything else she has.

iii) not match anything in her wardrobe, so its off to the mall.

iv) not come close to anything you ever once gave to an ex girlfriend.

Complimentary memberships- Gym to a fat guy, zoo to a Peta-type, here are just too many assumptions in too small a place.

Tools-Nothing says "I'm going to be too tired for nooky until Easter" like a full set of plumber's wrenches. See "Appliances", above for hints.

Socks and Underwear-And here I'm solely focused on the parent. If you remotely assume that somehow you can pass off an ecomony pack of Fruit of the Loom as a seasonal offering...

You truly deserve to be boiled in your own pudding with a sprig of holly through your heart.

Bunny on.

An Adult Gift Guide For Boomers

2011-12-02T18:17:00.003-05:00

When we were young, Christmas started somewhere after December 7th and we had a pretty fast and intense run up to the morning of the 25th when we'd bounce out of bed at 4.30 and make noise that we hoped sounded like sunrise.

Then with our parents passed out on the couch we'd tear into what had been left for us under the tree. It was wonderful for the most part but like every grape has a seed and every Hershey's bar with almonds has Arthur McWhinnie mention the word "Rat Boogers" during your last bite, every sack full of presents has its potential "Gotcha!" demerits.

You could always tell the obvious ones. Soft, squishy packages were socks or underwear. Open last. But even the star of the show gifts came with two distinctive pitfalls:

-Batteries not included.

-Some assembly required.

The former had you running around the house, tossing every flashlight you could find for seven seconds of flashing laser robot action.

The latter was even more dangerous. Fathers fell into two categories here and your toys were put together accordingly.

The abjectly incompetent dad never knew what end of a screwdriver was right to use. As a result, your Marx three level garage usually just spread out on one dimension like a Wal-Mart parking lot. A lot of duct tape was involved too.

Then there was the over-achiever, the dad who had to customize everything. The toy tow truck not only has flashing lights, sirens, a working boom, independent front suspension, it also played Sinatra's "Come Fly with Me" and served beer.

Thankfully we're adults now and beyond that except for when you give yourself a home theater large screen plasma TV that needs hooked into cable, wired into the stereo and DVD system and programmed to pick up all the Tivo channels. Now you just hand the remote to the closest fourteen year old and tell them to call you when its ready.

In other words, we're screwed on both generational levels, never being able to do anything for ourselves.

So I'd suggest, for those of us that fall into this unfortunate generation, the following:

If you're going to gift this year, make it pass a two tiered test: Kids can't use it and the old man can't figure it out. Or vice versa.

Not really that complicated: Cars, power tools, liquor, small caliber firearms, R rated movies, sports accessories that involve rope, spikes, alpenstocks or hefty membership fees all fall into this category. There's a lot to choose from.

Send out a clear message in two generational directions: No you can't program "Angry Birds" as my company laptop homepage and yes, I could have done without the "properties of electricity" demonstration while you were setting up my toy trains.

Bunny on.

This Year Can We Just Cut to the Chase (A Gift Guide)

2011-12-02T17:53:00.002-05:00

Nobody but nobody seems to have a comprehensive top ten list of Christmas toys this year and there sure as hell aren't any breakouts the way we've seen in past years.

Even Elmo is getting long in the tooth. When he first came out, you tickled him. Then you sang with him. Then you danced with him. Then you went camping or took Elmo to Grandma's. Tellingly, Sell Me Shoes Elmo says this franchise is milking its last drops.

What are Fijits? They look like little purple cockroaches. I'm not even going there.

Leap Pad Explorer tablets load up sports games, fun learning games, interactive activities onto a personal video screen so the kids can walk up and down streets and hallways intently staring at a 3 x 4 hunk of plastic and squeezing buttons with the fury of the possessed. In other words, Blackberry/Iphone/Ipad/Droid users in training. Five bucks says that in two years New York and California will ban texting while riding bikes or skateboarding unless you're Leap Padding handsfree.

Justin Bieber Tour Bus and sound stage. Parents, if you even consider gifting your children this hellspawn of all toys, I will have you jailed for abuse.

Lego Ninjago Lightning Dragon Battle. Try as I might, I just don't get this one. Wouldn't the dragon immolate and consume you before you even got around to sorting all the bricks out by color?

Lalaloopsy Silly Hair dolls. Why not? Play with them, play with their silly hair. Take them to the LalaPalooza silly concert.

Let's Rock Elmo
I am T Pain Microphone
Air Swimmers R/C inflatable Clownfish and/or Shark.

If you enjoy, as I do, the ritual Friday night martini, these might not be the best ideas in gifts to have around.

Bunny on.

Thanksgiving May Come First, But the Bird Placed

2011-11-26T13:46:00.002-05:00

On Thanksgiving we had steaks in a red wine reduction with baked, stuffed potatoes and pan fried brussel sprouts.

It was brilliant and took either a little over an hour or 7/8 ths of a dirty martini to cook, depending on what yardstick you happened to be measuring with. Personally I'll lean towards the latter because if you have to go shaking a second before dinner's on the table you have a problem and better check the oven that your souffle isn't indeed formed of errant Cheerios. On the other hand if you can whip dinner into shape and still have half a glass left, you're eating take out. Admit it. Put the "King Vinnie, Prince of Chinese" cartons on the table and come clean.

This was the first Thanksgiving day since 2005 when the flu grounded me alone at home with grilled cheese sandwiches that I didn't stress in some way about the day's meal. But that is not to say we eschewed tradition nor did we ignore the feast. We just put it off one day to make room for an additional family member.

If food is like war, then the Thanksgiving day meal was sort of like landing in London in 1942. Yes, there's evidence of bombing but you're still at the pub with blackout shades drawn and a pint in hand. Combat can be taxing.

Friday on the other hand found the pub closed and your 101st ass in a Dakota over Normandy praying to Jesus for it to succeed.

In other words, Thanksgiving dinner was going to be prepared. Five dishes and a turkey to be cooked to perfection in just under three hours. Sorry, where was that jump into France assembling again?

The dirty secret about Thanksgiving is that the meal is a rank impossibility to pull of at any level of skill because the freaking American Turkey is well nigh the most impossible thing to cook that has ever inadvertently wandered into an oven. Over the years I have cooked birds that have roasted themselves to a dryness that would pucker the Sahara. Despite basting the little bastard in enough butter to sculpt a 1:1 replica of Mount Rushmore in. There have also been birds that simply refused to cook. That browned nicely outside but when poked with a meat thermometer you'd swear it stuck a wing in to hold the needle to about a hundred degrees for hours. Football games would be played, won or lost, families on the block would set out and return from post meal walks, the evening movie would start to run and this thing was still edging to 112 degrees if you blew your warm breath on it.

Not so this year though. This year we had an overachiever who was supposed to cook breast down for two hours and then be flipped to roast to a golden brown for another 45 minutes, yum yum.

Flip him at two hours and the meat will pull off the bone such that you'd better put on some reggae, get out the cayenne and announce "jerk turkey" in a hurry if the meal is going to look like anything other than a car accident involving fowl.

No dice, this critter was done and the 100 meter dash of vegetables and starch was on. Get it on a plate looking like something other than an amalgam of colors and textures was the challenge.

"HolycrapwillyoucovertheturkeywhileIfinishsteamingtheasparagusdrainthebaconsowecanwrapitnevermindthe smellofroastingfleshIneverfanciedthatpatchofskinanyway!!!"

Next year I'm doing the Chinese buffet thing. That, or grilled cheese sandwiches.

Bunny on.

Thanksgiving Comes First

2011-11-16T19:36:00.002-05:00

The first Advent, heralding four weeks until the Christmas day, this year happens on the 27th of November.

Tradition holds that one create an Advent wreath consisting of four candles and decorated in your choice and keep that as a centerpiece until on the fourth Advent, Christmas day, it be fully lit and incorporated into the festivities of the day.

Tellingly, the Advent, the moveable harbinger of Christmas, comes after Thanksgiving. This year and every year.

So...

Shouldn't Thanksgiving come first?

The Other Stuff Dreams Are Made Of

2011-11-16T18:59:00.005-05:00

Completely without the aid of halucinogens or any sort of psychotropic drugs I can attest to you there are times when I sit stupidly, looking out at the world with an expression so blank it says "wait until the ringing, after you hit me with the flat of the pan, has stopped", wondering truly if something I just remembered really happened.

Or if I dreamt it.

I'm oft times an insomniac. But there are other nights when I sleep, and dip my brain into the deepest of dreams that I actually remember and replay upon waking.

That's the fun part. I can mentally re-live dreams in images and feelings. The not so fun and quite frankly dumb part is when I insist on describing the damn things to my bed mate. When I was newly single and said mate was an old stuffed bear whom I hung onto because, quite frankly, his carousing was showing my social life up to be the pathetic joke it was, describing dreams was easy. Bear was not possessed of speech, so I would recount mentally the dream, adding a verbal;

"Ain't that something else?"

Bear would get it. And nod.

I've had a lot of dreams in the last few weeks. Some quite vivid at the time but I can't remember details just now. Over the years, I've had dreams that I do remember and can recount. If you're at all Freudian, you'll see certain distinct categories these fall into that pretty much pin me to the nutcase wall. That's why, when anyone degreed in the study of the human mind asks me about a dream, I usually tell them; "I dreamt about my dog."

Its safer that way.

I've had a lot of incapable dreams, or Sisyphisian dreams of futility. When I was a kid, I always wanted a snowmobile. I remember one dream where I got one and then had no gasoline for the damned thing. I filled the clear plastic fuel tank bladder with turpentine I finally found in the basement and hoped for the best. Then the alarm went off and I woke up to go off and fail yet another math test.

There was the one about being chased by horsemen until I finally found a primed but unloaded blunderbuss. I scrounged around and stuffed the thing full of rock, broken glass and whatever else I could find, rammed the lot down the barrel and fired.

Everything just dribbled out of the barrel and the horsemen continued to come on. Now I know this is some sort of indicator of sexual incapacity and I'd accept that saving for the fact that when I dreamt it I was of an age where the blunderbuss should have rightly cleared the entire field of enemies and then knocked off a few watching racoons, just for good measure.

I've had the actor's nightmare more times than I care to admit. A few weeks ago I strode onto the stage in a one man show and delivered my opening line perfectly only to forget everything thereafter. I've had versions of the actors nightmare which finds me without pants and/or the ability to find them. That's less of a nightmare for me than it is in mental pictures for you. I've been in public with nothing on my feet other than little girl's patent leather buckle shoes. Now that's not so horrible in that I'm a burly, rough-edged man wearing little girl's shoes but rather I don't have a matching frock to compliment my footwear.

And of course I've had the unrequited love dreams. The girl in class you can't manage the nerve to talk to asks you to dance and you spit Kool-Aid in her face. Or the young woman at the office who you want to have notice you finally does.

She did in my dream. Cheryl, the redhead I had been chasing for a while finally noticed me and wanted to talk. I would have, had I not been obligated to ride a bicycle in small circles interminably.

So much for that one.

What happens when you don't wake up from your dreams? Now there's a bunny for another day. But safe to assume, if that happens, you can always spot me:

I'm the guy who forgot his lines, riding a bike in circles, wearing patent leather shoes.

Bunny on.

Suddenly Last All Souls Day

2011-11-02T17:39:00.005-05:00

I guess I didn't realize it was Hallowe'en this year because last year was such a non-event.

So I had spent Sunday trimming and cubing a chuck roast. Chuck is a lesser cut of meat and needs a lot of preparation. There are numerous ways to ruin chuck and very likely my mother has dabbled in all of them.

Learn to distrust a culture who thinks soaking food in vinegar is somehow culinary.

My chuck is cubed, then delicately rubbed down in olive oil which dissolves a lot of the sinueous membranes that are characteristic to the cut. A healthy fresh grind of sea salt and cracked pepper add all the initial spices I need but I like the flavor infusion of fresh cut rosemary.

I use chuck as the base for stew, and stew is extended with meat stock or beer. This time, since I was making a smaller portion I was using meat stock which let me further infuse the chuck with a half or so cup of red wine. All that into a freezer bag and let it set up overnight to correctly marry the flavors.

Monday night was when it would go into a pot with cubed onions, potatoes, some carrots and celery and a touch of Tabasco (which I can't say enough good things about) to simmer for a few hours.

As I say, I can't say enough good things about Tabasco. I've toured Avery Island and if you can envision an entire processing plant smelling of Tabasco, well, you've found someplace special. Now of course, the good folks at McIlhenny aren't shy about calling it a hot sauce and as such if it finds a place other than your dish, well that's just an issue you have to deal with.

Like I did.

It found an ideal splash-back target in my eye.

My bad but frankly I'd rather take a piss after chopping up a few dozen habaneros.

Ok, so I've taken the chuck out of the red wine and oil infusion, dashed a little Tabasco in the pot-and other places-and was chopping vegetables when there was a knock at the door.

If you cook professionally or even as an amateur, you know your first line of offense is your knives. A good knife set kicks the shit out of every kitchen gadget you could knock off the rack at Williams-Sonoma. And I have a pretty good set. At the time I was possessed of a 12 inch chopping knife which I was careful to control as the Tabasco began to burn. I'd have likely set it down if there hadn't been a rap at the door. I normally hate interruptions and won't answer the phone, but we have elderly neighbors and it might have been them.

It wasn't.

It wasn't anyone, though I heard a squeal and the gate being thrown open.

Ok, so I was interrupted and hadn't had time to flush my eyes or wash my hands of the red wine and oil, or put down the knife. I just stumbled to the door as quickly as I could, flipped on the light and tried as best as I could to see who it was.

Sort of a letdown, really.

Last year, when I was ready for trick or treaters, I filled the anxious moments with catching up on chores.

It was going to get colder soon and we needed to stock up the wood stove. Trouble was, the chainsaw wouldn't start.

So I gave it my best shot. Working on the kitchen table in a warm house was better that back in an unheated garage. Lo and behold, I got the thing running and was just letting it warm up as I carried it up the hall to greet the first little goblin.

He didn't stick around for a Snickers. Go figure.

Bunny on.

Here's My New Ride

2011-10-14T18:05:00.003-05:00

I haven't seen Evan since the last century. He and Linda came down from Toronto in his Escort GT to see a local formal garden. That was Linda's gig; gardens, so we all dutifully piled into the Explorer and spent the day admiring orchids. Which is to say that the girls talked flora and fauna while we compared relative horsepower of what we were kicking around in.

Today its just he and I and a country road in my usual ride. I've upgraded since we last met; the Ford Probe in "write me up a ticket officer red" is now a subdued grey Nissan 370-Z. A little silly for the day to day use I employ it in. Traffic light to traffic light stop and go, its a wasteful application of too much power using too much fuel. Reminds me of the day I was following one of our company's senior officers up the main drag into town. With a four cylinder Mazda engine in a Ford chassis, I basically paced a Ferrari 308. It wasn't until he hit open road that he dropped a gear and the base roar of the Ferrari made me pull over, drop trou and consider my shriveled though fuel injected poor excuse for a member. A senior VP, I was never sure what he did until I watched him lean in the CEO's door to wish her a good morning. Aha, that was it, Senior VP in charge of friendly greetings.

So we still aren't in Ferrari class, but its a respectable car. Good enough to get a lowered window thumbs up from a fellow driver in a GTR last winter. We both stepped off into a green light together and the happy burble of all that torque most certainly pissed off a Prius pusher two cars back somewhere.

"Where we off to?" Evan asks as he fires up an unfiltered Camel, my old brand.

"Can't smoke in the car, man." I've quit since 1995 though I miss them dearly.

He puts his smoke out in the driveway and climbs in. I get in, buckle up and push the engine start.

"Nice sound." Three hundred and twenty five horses pulse through the stock exhaust. If you need a GlassPak, you're pushing too tiny an engine.

"North of here is my favorite road. State 82, then left off into horse country. Two lane smooth blacktop with a couple of straightaways and some 15 mph marked curves to test your downshift skills." And indeed, so it is. If you floor Kathleen (I name all my cars and this one is tagged for a former girlfriend. Like the original, the car is exotic, exciting and sexy but treat it just the slightest bit wrong and it will dump you in a ditch) she'll roar to the challenge but she's got oversteer to kill in corners.

Evan hasn't buckled up.

"What's the worst that could happen?"

"You've got a point."

Its a glorious day and a glorious ride and we all perform amazingly well. There isn't a single lane bridge to take Kathleen airborne the way I sent the Probe skyward last time we raced.

Afterwards, we come home to the front porch for a drink and a cigar. Evan used to send me blended Ontario tobacco every few months. In return, I'd package up a few cartons of Camels knowing that his hacking cough had me worried every time we talked on special occasions. My birthday, the fourth of July, Canada day would find us on the phone catching up and hoping we'd see each other in person soon.

"I've got a treat for you. A couple of Cubans I snuck in from Berlin."

"You know that we can get Cubans in Canada, no problem."

"Didn't think of that. Well, take them in the spirit they are offered."

"Much obliged."

"Geez, when'd we last talk? Oh six?"

"Oh five. I was pretty sick in '06"

"I remember. Well, not you being sick, but I remember the call from Linda that you had died."

There's an uncomfortable silence. I break it.

"You know, if I could have you back for a day, I think I'd even let you smoke in the car."

"Got a little secret for you. We'll ride again. Won't be for a while. But we'll ride again my friend."

In Case You're Counting...

2011-10-07T17:39:00.002-05:00

That last one was post number three hundred.

Six years, three hundred posts. Who knew I had that kind of staying power?

Thanks for reading.

Bunny on.

Opposing the Opposite

2011-10-07T17:08:00.003-05:00

Here it is October already and the shine is off the new school clothes and everybody's hunkered down in classes no doubt sexting nudie ex-girlfriend pictures off to the big old internet.

About the time I was of that age, back just before the Cretaceous era, I was sitting in a class on Moral Instruction (for it was thusly titled and I clearly picked up not a thing) when a schoolmate whispered that he had been playing down by the river and found...a condom!

"Heh heh heh." says I and dutifully that evening I snuck to the bookcase, drew out the dictionary and looked up what the hell a condom was.

Not that I was any measure of pure, just a little clueless. Concerning the opposite sex, that has followed me through life. On a spectrum of engagement there are on one end the red hot lovers and paramours, there's most of the rest of you, there's me and then, just off to my left there's probably the Pope.

So I got around to women carnally a little later in life. I did manage to very clearly avoid the pitfalls of teenage pregnancy which I've heard is closely tied to teenage fucking.

Parents have a problem with that. I can imagine why. Poor dad who has to look away when his daughter raises the back of her sweater to Mom to ask if there's an unsightly blemish (as I only have a stepdaughter, I generally drive to another county at moments such as these) now is expected to swallow whole some spotty faced underachiever wanting to get his little girl completely in the buff?

I'm thinking there's a series of challenges to that. Perhaps start with some questions on background, grades, ambitions and intent and then a modest physical display of commitment.

Shall we say, hole up in an airless box until you're 22?

But I've got the answer to young teen tomfoolery that can only lead to petting, groping, fucking and ultimately the sin of...dancing.

I say we marry them off.

Somewhere around twelve or thirteen when the first blush of "gosh he's cute" or "shucks, she's all soft and squeezy, not like you guys in football practice" we link them up, perform the rituals and get them good and married.

This way, the worry's off us, they get the full benefit of matrimony and everybody's set.

Until two years in, they divorce.

Then young he can come back home and brood in his room with sixty percent of everything he's ever had in life back in the little pink pony bedroom they used to share. Don't forget that most of his paper route tips have to auto deposit into her account. For fun, you can think about what you'd like to do but ultimately, since that bitch got the Schwinn and the X Box, I hope you like hanging on the phone with your guy friends reminiscing about when we could just pick up and have a one on one basketball game whenever we wanted.

Seventeen and divorced, he's not going to want to go talk to girls. Hey guys, how about we do some rock climbing, just us?

Sure, she'll have the bike and the video games but they're just daily reminders of the broken promise of love she'll carry for the rest of her life. He was charming, attentive, dapper but ultimately a cold self centered bastard who only wanted to come home to dinner every night and then climb into a bottle of chocolate milk. And they're all like that, just ask Tiffany down the street.

Friends will call suggesting a nice game of "playing house?" I've got a better idea; how about we start a food bank or a Sub S retailing art supplies on line like we always wanted to. Do you wanna read my play? Its almost finished.

Yep.

That'll cool 'em off.

Bunny on.

Here We Go Here We Go Here We Go

2011-09-22T17:54:00.002-05:00

My first impression of England was that it really wasn't England at all but rather South Carolina.

I was eleven, jet-lagged in my uncle's apartment in Putney looking out at a common garden with nondescript flowers blooming. The plane trip was a distant blur and this was just like being in a warm, wet part of the South other than my idiot cousin bouncing off the wall suggesting we play something like Hold Your Breath Until Treacle Comes Out Your Nose.

My uncle was in the diplomatic corps then, posted to London which is funny in that he is the most undiplomatic person I know of. Astonishingly, Great Britain did not declare war on Pittsburgh that year which just proves how restrained and civilized they are.

My second impression of England came thirty years later in the form of a dog sticking his nose in my crotch at Heathrow as I walked down a narrow corridor off the plane with the laughing goat girl who had kept me awake from her seat behind me for half the flight watching comedies and laughing, well, like a goat girl.

But that was all right. The dog I mean, not goat girl. This was Europe and despite it being pre-nine eleven security considerations were different here. People were getting off in Heathrow from all corners of the world trying to smuggle penises under their clothing. Pooch had a serious job to do.

I was there for a good friend's wedding. She was English, marrying an American and they agreed to have dual ceremonies in the States and back home. I had been to the U.S. ceremony where I was enlisted upon arrival to fix their car or the day would be otherwise shot since nobody felt like tying tin cans to a bicycle.

Here in England, once the formalities were over, she had promised to take me around to her haunts like her favorite pub, her parent's garden and out to a real football match.

I was excited, she was excited, England was excited and responded by pissing with rain for the next four days it was so happy. That was all right, the English cope and generally ward off the inclement weather with pints of ale, proportional to the general shittiness of the weather.

That year was the coldest, wettest April on record so I'm astounded I can piece enough together for a short story.

For the football, we hopped a tube ride to the north of London for a long walk to the stadium to watch her team, Tottenham Hotspur, play Wembley, Woolsley, Barrington, Thurbridge or Bird In Hand, I really can't remember.

As I say, it was cold and wet.

The Spurs, as they were known since alternate nicknames like the Tots, the Hams or the Hots didn't carry the same or for that matter, any cachet at all, were in the championship league. That was the second most exclusive league in English football, the highest being the premiere league. They had been premiere league but had not kept the points up for continued membership so they got into the "gold star anyway just for turning in your homework" league.

In the States, no such thing exists. You either win it all or go home a dog. Ok, there's the Pro Bowl; football's special olympics but its an exception.

We have the NFL and the AFC, the National and the American League (who play the same game with different rules) but those aren't ranked by performance. Mostly they are a reflection of our independent settling and development of our nation and our inability to organize anything sensible at all.

First thing I remember about the game was that the gates to the stadium were about half a human wide. That was to prevent rushing and stampeding which was fine but my only thought was if we have to get OUT of here in a hurry I'm not looking forward to being squeezed out like so much toothpaste.

Then I remember that the fans for the opposing team, let's call them Bird In Hand, were isolated into a second storey gallery with police posted at every sixth seat. Football's something else here.

Then of course there were the pitch level seats we had, the great game, the beer, the dash to the souvenir shop for a blue and gold Holstein Pils jersey. It was euphoria which settled just as quickly as the cold, wet bus we got onto for the ride to the tube for the ride to the hotel and ultimate collapse.

Caught the plane home the next day and a week later when the pick up soccer team I played on met, I had me a Tottenham Jersey to stand out it. Mostly along the lines of "who's the uncoordinated idiot in the blue shirt," but you take what you can get.

Go Spurs.

Bunny on.

The Promise

2011-09-22T17:37:00.002-05:00

Post race euphoria usually lasts a few days after the run. You're memory is now associating the sights and sounds of the race with the physical sensations of sitting in a recliner, so like a minor childbirth, the living hell of pain you ran through is forgotten by your sense memory and, sure another race sounds like a good idea.

You're like a dumb puppy, head hanging out the window of the car getting whomped by phone pole after phone pole and you pull inside, shake some more dander on the back seat then wonder why your not hanging out the window catching the breeze.

Whomp!

And so it was that I thought an 8.25 mile trail run in the springtime with the guys would be fun both for old time's sake and fun to do. After all, it was only 5 something more miles over hilly and river-snaked terrain, more than I had just barely completed over city streets with EMTs no more than a few feet away at any time.

So when one of the Circle suggested we sign up, I made the promise to and now I understand that I might have better promised to hold off the rebels while Ghadafi got on the plane. Both are stupid and both will result in a lot of physical suffering.

But I promised.

And a promise made is a promise kept. Its an iron vow that you only break when you're incapacitated as in dying or being held hostage by the North Koreans.

The run is around Easter. I don't want to look at a calendar 'cause I've got other things to dread just now. But stick with me. I'll be posting regular updates on how the training's going under the headline of Woodsy the Running Moron.

Bunny on.

Race Day

2011-09-15T16:53:00.003-05:00

Being a friend means more than just hoisting a beer and toasting good health to the guy or guys you've shared a few dirty jokes with. There are times when sacrifice is called for, laying down your prevailing interests for the good of others.

A friend in need is a friend indeed.

I'm just trying to figure out what need my friends at The Knitting Circle had for me to drag my ass out of bed at an hour one usually associates with returning vampires, only to slog through my leg of a relay race some three hours later. I could have met them at the hand off point after a nice sleep in, hot shower and one or two bloody marys. Believe me, you couldn't hinder my performance any more than a summer full of "I'll do double laps tomorrow" already did.

There were two choices: get up at 3.30 am and jump in the car to get there in time for the start, or stay with a friend and get up at 5 to make the 15 minute drive to the start.

I opted for the latter.

Big mistake unless having one beer and being shushed off to bed at nine thirty is your idea of what an adult male should normally expect his Saturday nights to consist of.

There I was in a nine year old's bed, some sort of fish tank aglow in my eyes and a floor full of Lego to circumnavigate at the risk of foot lacerations in case that one beer caught up with me.

I couldn't sleep.

I tried to let the fish soothe me but they made me have to pee. Not a good idea with the "Achtung Lego Minen" field all around me. I counted sheep. I counted tits. I counted all the times I had made just the right impression but that stopped at two.

Finally I jumped into Legoland and built a fissionable reactor just to get sleepy.

Got up at five, got out on time and got to the starting line, meeting up with the rest of the usual team and this year's substitute, the old flame. I didn't recognize her at that hour because when we were a number she was always gone by that hour. If she'd have worn an indented pillow on her head I'd have spotted her right away.

The national anthem was sung. If you can imagine the quietest place you've ever been, do so. Then imagine it quieter still.

When a uniformed police officer sings the anthem on September 11, 2011 you've got to assume hands are over hearts with intent and we're all in a silent space nobody is sharing.

The relay consists of five roughly equidistant legs that each member of the team covers while the rest of us pile into a car to chase to the next handoff point through city streets, poorly worded directions and infinite barricades. When the car owner is dropped off on the course to do his leg, we take advantage of his social profile and consider committing bank robberies while we've got his car.

As I said, I had the later, indeed, final leg of the race which was re-routed because of some recent flooding. In times of flood, the bottomlands are wet and the high ground stays dry. The only problem with high ground is that you have to go up a hill to get there and so it was that the flat, flooded, runnable bottomland was foresaken so that we could race up a damned hill!

At the crest of which we were promised "its all downhill from here."

This is Pennsylvania. We've known that for years.

Then it was over. The finish line was crossed. Congratulations on not dying en route were issued, chocolate milk was drunk with impunity and it was revealed that my car keys were missing.

'Scuse me, let me borrow the Subaru for a while and pay no attention to the bank alarm.

Bunny on.

A Propos of Absolutely Nothing

2011-08-18T17:42:00.002-05:00

According to Weather.com, we are in the immediate path of a severe thunderstorm right now. Either that, or we are going to be assaulted by traffic lights from the sky.

But the power just flickered and with our utility of record that can only mean one thing: It is raining just outside Gdansk.

The power has had the unnatural propensity to cut out at the most bizarre hours. One reasonably expects something to go wrong during strong summer storms, blizzards, the occasional glancing remnant of a hurricane or St. Bastille day. But we've kept the lights on during all of the aforementioned while on a clear, warm afternoon in July, the damn thing cuts out for eight hours!

I should be training right now. Running a circuit in the park to give good account of myself next month (in a couple of weeks.) Severe storm warning is tonight's excuse. Monday was grocery shopping, Tuesday a late appointment, yesterday the lawn needed to be cut. So I'll do the race pushing a Toro at a brisk pace. Dare to pass and I'll narrow the competitive field, so to speak.

Who, and I mean WHO leaves comments on news stories? Is there a great under-employed horde of web surfers out there with nothing better to do than to comment on everything from current national politics to the local blueberry pie eating contest? And are they all gramatically challenged? This is just symbollic of the denigration of our forums of expression. In days past, if I had to listen to the poorly constructed, ill informed, prejudicial grammatical diarrea of a complete boor, I could at least fall back on the cocktail party it was being presented at.

I was going to write a post in the style of a letter from God. What with the storm approaching and indeed here now, I thought I could slide in a couple of good ones about not assuming a storm signalling My anger. That in fact, if you listened to all I listen to in a day, you'd get this kind of manifestation of irritable bowel. But I was also going to slide in a couple of notes about not listening to anyone who claimed they knew God's intent or spoke God's word. That God really manifested Himself in other ways, like in a rainbow that a child is awed by, or a kitten, or in a sunset that inspires an old man to return to his ailing wife and comfort her last hours. Then, in a reflexive philosophical jerk, I realized that "God" was going to advise you not to listen to me.

I hate when I'm that deep. Thank goodness I don't comment on news posts.

Bunny on.

Running from the Nadir

2011-08-03T18:39:00.002-05:00

Got a little race I'm training for in a few weeks.

Just a couple of miles, not a big deal and something that, in my active running days, would qualify as a light workout and excuse for a lunchtime beer.

Unfortunately, these aren't my active running days and, while a stretch, I'm going to use the excuse of active lunchtime beer days as explanation of why the Special Olympians are going to kick my ass this year.

I trained for and ran this race last year. And that would be the last time I ran since oh, a few weeks ago when I realized I had signed up again this year. So I got out to the track just as the temperature crested the first level of the Inferno mark. Its always a challenge finding a comfortable pace through the obstacle course of Frisbee golfers who have collapsed from heat exhaustion and are being seen to by paramedics.

So training hasn't exactly been rigorous. I'm, when one regards progress in baby steps, still in the sleeping on my stomach, drooling and having to be changed every ninety minutes stage.

Add to that, the team I'm running on this year has had some minor personnel changes. Our former, and to be again, Captain is not running. He's enrolled in some kind of ultimate challenge the day before our meek, erectile dysfunction-themed race in which he has to run a thousand miles through burning fields and across mighty rivers, bike Death Valley in a heatwave, swim the English Channel during some U-Boat reenactments, be eaten by a wild animal and bring religion to the Borneo Islanders.

He won't be rested up enough to tackle the "Sorry, I had a hard day at the office, let's try again tomorrow night" marathon relay the next day.

So we found a replacement, of sorts. Oh, they'll be a fine runner but they're not the typical team member. That is to say, they are not a sarcastic middle aged married man who gets out with the boys to run, tell dirty jokes and speculate about the hot little number in copyediting.

They are the hot little number in copyediting.

They are also my former little hot number in copyediting. Not spouse, but pretty serious romantic interest whom I agreed to let on the team when every other potential team member was either unavailable or uninterested or still incarcerated or dead. And we debated the latter.

And now I have to run with a woman who's known me ten pounds lighter, five minutes faster, several shades less gray.

And even then, it didn't work.

Its a relay. We hand off. I have the last leg. If she has the next to last leg I can tell you right now what's going to happen:

She'll start her leg strong and full of hope. Somewhere near the end she'll suddenly get off the course and walk the rest of the way home. I'll wait at the handoff point, someone will give me a bill for dinner and I'll head off alone.

She'll likely call the next morning suggesting we try again.

Bunny on.

The Absolute Value of Colon

2011-07-09T09:43:00.005-05:00

July 23, 2611
Jayson Blair Pavilion
Seton Hall University
New South Orange, New New Jersey

I have been puzzling over the equation for the better part of ten months now. Still uncertain of its absolute mathematical function, it defines the absolute value, but what does that absolute value represent and what secrets of 2010 does it unlock?

:

The colon is a value, an absolute something but I don't know what that something is. I feel like a modern Archimedes, lolling in a virtual bath puzzling over the same problem until I see the water's rise. Like Archimedes too, I am waiting for that surreptitous squirt of pee from a fellow bather. The one that woke the master up with howls of "why is the water warmed up?" and "look, the water rises, someone can only be goldening up our bath!!!" It wasn't until the tub was freed from bathers that Archimedes noted the precipitous drop in water level which brought his to the realization that you could proof gold by noting the offset of water volume against its absolute density. Either that or you could pee all over it and tell its true composition by noting how many would still pick up and pocket the wet coins.

Yet : still eludes me. Digital records of 2010 put : into series of equations which I can describe but cannot solve.

The absolute value of colon.

:( :)

The value of P, subject to the absolute value of colon.

:P :)

The absolute value of colon, set equal to the value of P, or perhaps where the value of P is meant to be solved for subject to the absolute value.

:) =P

And the addition of a radical...

:) =P ;)

Who's value can only be wildly guessed at.

The whole thing runs in harrowing circles and I lay awake nights letting the equations taunt me from five hundred years ago. I want to be credited for my work, for my discovery. Much like my former professor Newt Isaakson who after an apple rolled off of his desk and hit his foot, rediscovered the physics of adhesion.

"Damn that apple hurt. We should tape it down to the desk."

On the other hand, I don't want to be caught running down a blind alley the way Eisenstein over at New Princeton did, decoding E=Mc2 only to have the whole thing blow up in his face. "Clearly this was just some sort of primitive fireworks they cooked up back in the 20th century. Let's leave it alone."

No, I'm going to find that absolute value of Colon, subject to P's equality or not, if I have to consume my career doing so.

<. //
<. o =
\\ on.

Now We Are Annoying

2011-06-30T17:53:00.007-05:00

When I was One,
This was all just good fun,
To amuse and regale you with Caustic the Bun.

When I was Two,
It was a little less new,
And we told silly stories as something to do.

When I was Three,
I was a little less free,
And sometimes O.D.'d on reality.

When I was Four,
Life had more tricks in store,
So getting to post took a little bit more.

When I was Five,
This was barely alive,
It wasn't on blogging that I managed to thrive.

Now we are Six,
Still caustic and wordy,
So I'll scribble and scratch without getting too dirty.

Bunny on.

Musings On Who's Really in Charge

2011-06-21T17:27:00.003-05:00

I came with two, she came with one. The new house had one left over from the previous owner.

Cats.

Just went through the evening ritual of loading up four food bowls, setting two down inside, quieting one little beastie outside with a helping and walking around the house like a moronic waiter with a bowl of stinking goodness looking to see if Miss Fussy Britches feels like a little repast.

We walk, talk, conceive abstract thoughts and contemplate our own mortality while they fill up boxes with shit and sleep on the average of twenty three hours a day. Yet once every month I dutifully load a pickup with cans of dead, wet fish so that I can fill the front end only later to scoop up the back end's recycling efforts.

Not that I'm a cat person per se. I love dogs and one of these days hope to take long walks with a shepherd I'll name Hero out of pure irony because clearly with my track record, my eventual dog will no doubt moisten himself at the sight of any passing gerbil.

But I digress. In the here and now and with my travel schedule I'll resign myself to a house o' cats whom I return to only to read their saucy messages urine-projected on the basement door.

Her cat is let out in the wee hours of every morning to roam. The neighborhood is quiet and safe and frankly the alternative is a one-sided game of Patty Cake featuring her paw and my nose. My two are enclosed in the kitchen-den area with access to the basement if they feel like sorting laundry. They never do, but we live in hope. Mooch is the wild card. Mooch (nee Oreo) is a little black and white stray who showed up in the back yard shortly after we moved in. Our neighbor let us know that she was an indoor cat who was shown the door by the previous owner when intellectually she began to show up her fourteen year old son in basic games of Husker Du. Mooch was just this side of starving so to gain her affection and trust, we began to leave bowls of food out for her. When she began to associate us with affection and food, we let her in the house where she jumped on the couch while inadventently a Jerry Lewis telethon was left on. It took months to get her trust back.

Mooch won't leave the bedroom from October to May and requests her services en suite. In the summer months she returns to the wilds of the rhododendron forest and only shows up for a meal or to drop off something she's kneaded and pawed to death and has died of comfort since she possesses neither claws nor teeth. Amazing we don't call her "Lucky."

Her cat, the one we let out every morning shows up for breakfast and announces that she's not seen food since she left Casablanca two months ago and the camel died somewhere near the Kazarine pass. Oh and she's certain that we're oblivious so she begins a repeating howl that makes us the favorite of the sleep-in crowd of the neighborhood and we scramble to stuff some sort of sustenance under her gaze before she wakes up the proverbial dead for we haven't enough folding chairs to accomodate them all.

My cat just pisses on the couch.

I swear I'm going to fit him with a catheter that runs back to his mouth.

So there you have it. While we wake at un-natural hours and spend the better part of our day at places we'd rather not be because we can't figure a reasonable ROI on a martini bar, then collapse for an hour in front of American Pickers trying to knock five bucks off of anatomically correct Barbie dolls, they await our return to see their every need attended to in lavish fashion.

Who's running this show?

Bunny on.

Vivaldi, Let's Stick with This One Movement, Shall We?

2011-06-02T18:38:00.004-05:00

The most perfect of all seasons, late spring moving into early summer, is upon us.

I like to talk about the weather. I am one of those that Mark Twain referred to when he said we all talk about it but none of us does anything about it.

I'd love to do something about it. I'd like to stop it right here, dead in its tracks. We'd be pretty much okay if things like this became the de jure status quo for perpetuity. Ok, a little boring after a while, maybe too reminiscent of "Pleasantville" but I'd settle for ideal days even at the expense of a family member winding up as a nude cubist piece on an ice cream parlor from time to time. As a matter of fact, I'd even volunteer my cousin as a model 'cause, let's face it, after one montage of him as the central sufferer in some sort of "Guernica" takeoff, the artist would surely and permanently revert to still lives with lemons.

It could rain from time to time, just to water the plants, but otherwise I'm ok with sun and moderate temperatures.

They say that spring is the season of hope. Hope springs eternal in the human breast. We can keep our breasts and get right to summer. Spring is the season of hope soaring to the heights of a sixty-something day only to be dashed on the rocks of yet another weekend of rain with temperatures clawing their way up to fifty two. Fall's beauty we can keep for a slide show. Two weeks of moderate temperatures with a kaleidoscope of dying deciduous trees surely always leads to the dregs and depths of sub-zero cold, snow, ice, sleet, slush and predictable February SAD crazies. What is it that February plods like a blind cripple and after a not-soon-enough spike of weather that you actually want to get out of bed for we are suddenly in June, the equinox two weeks away and if you're paying attention and are a glass-half-empty type you know we begin the slow downhill slog to daylight being something reserved for the movies (the 4.45 pm late show at that.)

Fall is merely the rallying of a dying soul. For a few moments, all looks well again and you've never seemed more beautiful and vibrant. Then you cough up a lungful of bloody phlegm and it's all over. To hell with that. My end will hopefully come in a warm bed and a comment about the wallpaper having to go. I'm no hero and I know it.

So here it is June, the opening of the summer season. We'll all bask in the glow, have picnics and barbeques and play beach volleyball for a few months until the first tapping of ice rain on the windowpanes comes and I'll really have something to bitch about again.

I just now didn't want to seem ungrateful.

Bunny on.

May 22nd

2011-05-22T17:47:00.003-05:00

So, seemingly, we're all still here.

Unless of course I live in Satan's corner and the neighbors are Belezebub's minions, I'm thinking I'd better plan to pay the mortgage in a few days.

Bunny on.

Work

2011-05-10T19:09:00.004-05:00

Here are a couple of guys, on Mother's Day, in the afternoon cutting apart a thirty something year old diesel locomotive.

I stopped the truck to take pictures of the machine. That they were there that day cutting the old machine apart was the proverbial pearl in the oyster.

And yet, as much as I focused on them, they paid me less than heed. These guys had a job to do, on a Sunday, and they weren't going to stop and break for some idiot with a camera.

So here is work. Pure and simple. Doing something that somebody, aside from you, feels has value and compensates you commensurately. It's simple, cut apart a machine for scrap and yet it isn't. These guys are being paid by the hour or the job. If the former, they probably get a bonus for finishing quickly. If the latter, then the less time they spend cutting, the more they make. They feel the same stress to perform as you or I feel "ensuring the customer's experience" or "managing the overall relationship." We all go home feeling we've either made a difference or need to try harder to hit that target.

I like work.

It's what defines us. Not wholly, for we are sons and daughters and mothers and fathers well before we are welders, cooks, engineers and managers.

But it does define us, and that's not a bad thing. Work gives us purpose, direction, discipline and reward. Its not easy, it sometimes sucks and its often heart-breaking.

But I suspect, that given the choice between the balance of time in a chaise lounge and an alternative, most of us would pick the hammer, blowtorch, second shift, keyboard, camera, shovel, tractor and soldier on. It defines the character.

Bunny on.

Hi, we're home!

2011-04-29T18:51:00.001-05:00

Times Square, 1963

2011-04-29T18:49:00.002-05:00

Bunny Salad Sandwich

2011-04-29T18:12:00.002-05:00

The end of a long week and the brain metaphorically is a TV remote with the cat sprawled across the channel buttons, cleaning itself.

Which is to say that snippets of mirth are in the occasional orbit of my consciousness but I can't quite hold onto them long enough, thematically, to weave them into a single post of the foolishness of the day.

So here's an Abbey Road side two of bunny; semi-coagulated glances at the passing hours.

The Royal Wedding: Nobody in the lunch crowd admits to having watched it, yet everybody had a commentary upon it. I didn't watch it. Sleep these days is in short supply and frankly more interesting than the day to day. Besides, I generally regard weddings as tragic things. Another two souls admitting that perhaps chaos theory is a poor lifestyle choice for them.

Apparently Elton John, Sir Elton John, was in attendance. Now there's a relaxation of protocol because it was my understanding that Westminster only admitted one queen at a time. Knights, those knighted by her majesty, carrying the titular; "Sir", used to be so recognized for deeds of courage and daring. The idea was the monarch had about them, proven warriors and defenders of the crown in case things ever got stinky again.

Were Elizabeth to be threatened today, well, between Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Elton, the brazen attacker would clearly be subdued by being dressed in clashing colors and sued for copyright infringement.

In other words, modern England is easy pickings. Oh, do watch out for the SAS. They still do it the old fashioned way.

Back home, Ben Bernanke's press conference managed to excite the markets with his creative use of puppets to illustrate complicated economic precepts.

Ok, what is it that gets drivers of Honda Elements inspired to pull out in front of me during rush hour? What Element are they referring to? Slowium???

Thumper's kid seems to regard me as a mis-shapen Care Bear who will benevolently put up with being poked, hugged, petted and covered in spring flower petals without the slightest thought of attack or retribution. Just wait until the college graduation party when the "mining for nose boogers" slide show comes out.

The first night I spent in New York City was in a hotel on Eighth Avenue, up in the fifties. I got in to town at four in the afternoon, walked about twenty blocks north from Penn Station, checked in and hung around the room until dinner. I ate in the hotel restaurant and forgot to tip the waitress. Then went back to my room to do what I had been doing all afternoon: Staring out the window, freaked out at being there.

In 1963 the old man had to drive to New York City to pick my mother and me up from taking a boat home from Europe. It was his first time in New York. He was braver than I was, he left the hotel and, camera in hand, nervously shot a few snaps of Times Square at night. Next day he hung around the dock all day and into the evening (the ship's arrival was delayed because of heavy weather.) I'm finding this all out now because I'm editing the slide collection. All I can hope is that all those years ago he didn't fuck up and not tip.

Bunny on.

Dear Mistah Disney...

2011-04-17T18:28:00.007-05:00

Boy did I like Toy Story III, but I'm worried that with Andy off in college, we'll never know what other adventures Woody and the guys get in to.

Sure, the little girl probably has an imagination but at some point you've got to confess to yourself that she's still just a little girl and the best that's going to happen is Toy Story IV: The Pretend Tea Party.

Woo hah.

So here are some ideas for sequels. Feel free to pick and choose, but remember I get a percentage of the gross, not the net.

Toy Story V: When two of three identical GI Joes get taken down by Cobra Commander, Woody gets picked to drop behind enemy lines to find the last Joe and bring him to safety. The last scene has Joe, now worn down, loose jointed and life-like hair pulled out, standing over Woody's grave asking if he was worth saving.

Toy Story VI: Rex has dinner with an old friend from the theater. The two discuss art, his friend's world travel, the interesting and unusual people he's met but Rex openly wonders if his friend has lost touch with the simpler things. Rex notes that its comforting waking up in the toy box, a cold cup of coffee on the table right there where he left it the night before. Rex treats himself to a cab ride home.

Toy Story VII: Andy's mom sends Woody to Andy's new home by Federal Express. When the plane crashes, Woody is the only survivor and lives on a desert island for two years. Woody eventually gives up the idea of making a raft and floats home because he's made of plastic. But Andy has long given up on him so Woody has to begin life anew.

Toy Story VIII: When Lotso, Mr. Potato Head, Rex and Woody go rafting before a new dam destroys the river forever, bad things happen with the locals.

I'll be waiting for your call.

Bunny on.

Been There, Done That

2011-04-03T17:46:00.010-05:00

Sometimes, history offers you the perspective of having been in the exact same place at two very distinctive times. This is one of them. Top shot was stealing the old man's Leitz for a shot while he was arguing with his nephew. Bottom shot was thirty eight years later while Thumper held the camera bag. There's a lot you could say about the juxtaposition and indeed, the pontificatory bullshit has been running through my mind all afternoon. Fortunately, I know what I think and its nothing new to me so I'll spare me from it. The more interesting realities I come up against daily are the reactions and opinions of those around me. Safe to say I'm getting to the point of my brief existance that I start to understand the wonder of having seen all I've seen. I'm older, to be sure, but not so old as to be planing pine for a soon to be constructed box. And not so old as to crab out moronic "when I was your age's" to the mildly bored youth who get close enough to be inflicted with stories. But by golly, a lot has changed and a lot of time has passed and how lucky am I to have seen it and recorded it and memorized it? Take a look around you. I'll bet you can say the same. Bunny on.

A Picture is Worth Three Words

2011-03-17T18:42:00.010-05:00

They being "WTF?"

As I approach middle-fartfullness it has fallen upon members of my family to consider me the archivist of our brief but mildly twisted span on this earth. After all, aren't I the one who, after dinner, bourbon in hand, can spin colorful yarns to the next generation of my generation-marked by singular dullness and outfits from the seventies that look like I'm heading to a luau in Edinborough-and the generation preceding me that causes current youth to wonder:

"Why is this man still breathing?"

But stories aside, somebody's gotten the grand idea to dump the old man's slide collection upon me. Shipped via UPS in two convenient, coffin-sized boxes and now its in my attic alongside a light table and legal pad for me to stuff into a familial dewey system that can only be conceived by someone in serious need of medication.

Case in point the herein displayed. A couple of posts ago, I wrote "Sundaes in the Car with George" which recounted my parent's foray into a state park to corrupt the wildlife. The kid thought it was a pretty funny tale but when photographic evidence surfaced she was agog in astonishment that we were all once this stupid yet had access to big cars.

When you're in a state park and you see wildlife in its natural environ, the correct reaction is to:

A-proceed slowly and let deer alone and untouched by the meddling hand of man.

B-squeeze off a brief snapshot, take only photos, leave only footprints and move on as above.

C-stuff a twelve point buck's head into a paper bag full of popcorn.

This was 1959 so "c" is the gimme. Notice also that the enormous vehicle is probably still idling. It's license plate is no doubt also the home phone number and no, the old man did not sell Mary Kay, that was just the color of the thing on the used car lot.

Of course, mother got into the action too. Can't let plaid capri pants go unnoticed.

Check out the fins on that monster (the car, not the deer and neither mother since I was still a few years away from being a Mardi Gras-inspired conception.)

If you're shocked and horrified, don't be. Take into account the year and remind yourself that you still think "Mad Men" is cool. It is. In fact, their first apartment could double as a set today which makes me think that we should all construct our domiciles in four stages and erect them on a turntable with a giant selector switch. With a flick of the wrist a giant axle would turn the next living room scenario into view and livability for a decade. We'd have fifties cool, sixties mod, seventies gaud, eighties traditional and we'd then dial back to the fifties. Think of it. One big purchase and then Raymour and Flanigan could retire fat, dumb and happy.

Given the weird drapes, wall to wall carpeting and sofa that is still in my house today, can you forgive them teaching deer poor nutritional habits? The deer probably eventually died of natural predation and not blocked arteries but just in case, and levelling the playing field, the old man, true to form, introduced bear to beef jerky.

As I continue my spastic waltz through the decades of Kodachrome...

Bunny on.

About Last Night

2011-02-17T14:20:00.001-05:00

On the positive side.

It's not insomnia.

I've finally cured my narcolepsy.

(yawn) Bunny on.

Half Time

2011-02-12T18:59:00.003-05:00

Winter's Half Time, the mid point between the first daytime shivers of October and the dirty poems associated with May Day would probably be now.

Mid-February. Wherein Punxatawney Phil actually failed to see his shadow this year and prognosticated an early spring and a reprieve from my cookpot where the fucker was going to wind up had he seen anything other than a warming trend.

If winter were a football game, the half time cheerleaders would be blue-lipped and shivering, aching to get back into the team bus. A hasty "rah-rah-rah" and off they would scramble because, as much as we celebrate being halfway home to a climate humans can function in without the constant urge to self-immolate, its still fucking winter and its still cold, distilling behavioral urges down to climbing into the core of the hot water heater until June.

My furnace continues to mock me.

It knows that at some point in late April, I will venture down to the basement, providing the spring melt has not set a river running through the lowest level of Paramour, and sever its red-plated umbilical cord of a main shut off switch, giggling insanely and mentally composing an epithet-laden letter of revenge to the local utility provider, suggesting they save up their fat 'cause summer rations are a'coming.

But that's all in the future and for now we take cold comfort at being half way home. Yes, the fleece outer layer when removed still sticks like velcro to the flannel shirt to the t-shirt. You remove the shell when in the kitchen, cooking, because you flail about like Kenny with a longknife otherwise.

Hail, hail, half time of winter and let us pronounce that our "wardrobe malfunction" is merely the inadvertant wrapping of scarf over mouth muffling our hurling of obscenities at the heavens while shuffling to the end of the drive to retrieve the paper in minus ten degrees.

Boy, did things scramble back into body cavities that day.

Bunny on.

Shall We Talk About the Weather?

2011-01-27T18:16:00.003-05:00

In a word, it's obscene.

The east coast snowstorm got us dead eye center. We had a night of heavy blowing snow and a slow warm up such that my garage doors at eleven am still had snow splattered across their face like a seasonal flaky sneeze.

It was heavy snow too and there was a lot of it. Like somebody had dumped all this stuff after first comingling it with so much lead shot.

Two weeks ago I was sitting in shorts and a t shirt ninety miles north of Cuba. We had found a little Cuban place for lunch that was little more than a walled off courtyard with the kitchen in a shack, the bar under a tin awning and gas fired heat lamps that they turned on when the temperature dipped below seventy.

It was a nice find. I look for little ethnic out of the way places like that. Its a testatment to never wanting to be like the old man in the gastronmic sense or any sense for that matter. As long as it came out of a McDonald's bag when things were informal or was served under a shockingly orange Howard Johnson's roof when you had to impress company, well that was just okey dokey with him.

I like a little more adventure in my food so I'll do things like my friend Ian does. He's on a quest to find the cheapest bottle of French wine that's still drinkable. He's down to 80p. I go looking for the shittiest dive that I can still get a reasonably good beer and a burger in without having to dip my toe in Maine.

The Cuban place looked just right and it was just right so two weeks ago I was having a real Bourdain moment, munching on spiced pork shoulder with pickles and a fresh Mojito. Tony's voice was resounding in my head, his quarter octave intonation mine for a few minutes.

"Cuban pork sandwiches and fresh Mojitos. The street traffic has changed from harried parents trying to steer their children away from the racier t shirt shops because they don't want to have "that" discussion yet to newly awoken twenty somethings who, having put last night's carnage and indulgence into the never again remember folder, are aching to test their liver's mettle for a second, or is it a fifth night?"

One week ago I was in Chicago.

It was cold.

Real cold.

So fucking cold that I was afraid to scratch my ear in that it might snap off.

We never drove a distance farther than the car's thermostat just opening and the first sliver of warmth kicking out onto the floorboards.

This week ain't too warm either but my ear's aren't brittle. What this week is however is a snowstorm that turned my morning world whiter than a klavern.

Tomorrow, what back muscles haven't hitched a Greyhound to Santa Fe are going to scream at me most of the day and into the weekend. And its only still January. This was the opening skirmish of the wider war that's still coming.

I wonder how much a pedicab driver's license costs?

Bunny on.

Bend Over and Smile

2011-01-16T16:36:00.004-05:00

There's a certain relief, no matter how small, you feel when you've passed through the airport metal detector bereft of shoes, belt, coats and jackets and sweater...that nobody's tried to smuggle a suppository bomb on board an aircraft.

Yes, I've been airborne again. Not so much that I throw my shoes into a gray plastic bin before retiring at night, but enough to remember what a pain in the ass flying is. That said I've developed enough coping techniques to minimize the pain of the process. Wear slip on shoes checking in. Don't walk around with a piggy bank's worth of change in your pockets. Carry one small bag that you can stuff up a gnome's ass. That ensures it will fit into any overhead of any partially-engined air buggy they put you on. Keep your id close and keep moving.

Real small stuff that about ninety percent of anyone at an airport does NOT pay attention to. I've gotten to the point of believing that every fifth airport worker should have the disposition, lung capacity and ability to unleash of Sam Kinison. They'd keep the goobs moving along so that the rest of us could get to the plane on time.

For example:

You're allowed one small carry on and one small purse or briefcase that can fit under your seat. That's one small carry on, NOT THE REFRIDGERATOR YOU'RE WHEELING DOWN THE JETWAY, and one small purse, NOT THAT COW'S STOMACH-SIZED DUFFEL BAG THAT'S HOLDING ABOUT TWELVE GALLONS OF MOISTURIZING CREAM THAT SMELLS LIKE IT CAME FROM AN EMBALMER'S SUPPLY CATALOG!!!

and

We'll be boarding the aircraft by zones. Zone one passengers may now board. I see THAT YOU HAVE LOST THE ABILITY TO COUNT, EVEN TO FIVE. NOW LET ME SEE A HAND! JUST ONE HAND AND UNLESS YOU HIGH FIVED A CIRCULAR SAW SOMETIME BACK YOU'RE GOING TO BE HARD PRESSED TO PROVE YOU CAN'T COUNT TO FIVE!!!

Oh and if you use the electronic kiosks to print your boarding pass out, please swipe your credit card or passport and if you don't have either WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING GETTING ON THIS PLANE IN THE FIRST PLACE??? THE BUS TO FUCKING MOBILE BOARDS DOWNTOWN AND YOU CAN PAY WITH WESTERN UNION CASH!!!

Clearly I was behind the "I've never been to an airport in my life family" this weekend who despite leaving an hour and a half slack between the time I got to the rental car lot and the time the plane took off just made me on time by a hair because we're going to miss our terminal stop off the rental car shuttle bus by taking pictures and we're going to check in most of Mongolia at the ticketing counter and we'll have to disassemble a cotton gin we've got in our carry on before we go through security.

Gee, I hope they're flying to Chicago mid-week.

Bunny on.

Dashing Not At All

2010-12-18T17:55:00.005-05:00

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

2010-12-07T18:51:00.004-05:00

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

2010-12-02T19:45:00.004-05:00

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.

Missing From My Camera Case

2010-11-13T17:21:00.002-05:00

Killing a few minutes before a client meeting last Friday, I'm over on Driving The Flies to see if there are any bon mots from Cog and there are. A camera apparently ridden hard and put away wet.

That got me to thinking about some exchanges Cog and I have had, one in particular where I complained of all the perfect pictures I passed on my morning commute or ride to the grocery store or what have you.

"Just throw a camera in the back seat." he advised but me being me never does and takes in life's beauty with appreciation and a whispered "goddam I should'a listened!"

Walking through the living room, I chanced across a perfect picture. Boris, the inside cat was sitting on the sill staring at Cindi, the outside cat. It was a mirror image. It was a good image. Not LOLCat material since clearly neither were dressed in evening formal or smoking cigars or seeming to be singing Bohemian Rhapsody but a good image nonetheless.
Well the camera was in the next room so I crept back, got it and back in the living room, taking heed not to linger with focus or aperture lest the cats catch wind of my conspiracy I fired away.

Somewhere between finding the shutter release with my finger and the thing tripping, Boris bent time and space and reverted to the other side of the sill forever ruining the shot.

So here it is: Two dumb cats at a window. About as poignant as a discarded candy wrapper.

Clearly, missing from my camera case is a staple gun.

Bunny on.

A September Moment

2010-11-13T17:17:00.001-05:00

Tomorrow May Never Come

2010-11-08T19:15:00.006-05:00

I had to have been the world's worst kid.

Not bad in the usual sense of digging up mother's rubber plant because the front line in the plastic soldier war had stalled and the order came out to make for the foxholes.

Not bad in the sense of saving up a few auto parts store rebate bucks to buy a legion of "STP" and "Crane" racing stickers to surreptitously stick to the old man's Chrysler Imperial when he wasn't looking.

Not bad in the sense of opening the storm windows in January, pouring water on the sill to let it freeze so that the plastic soldiers (who had held the line and advanced on enemy positions in the spider plant) could have a skating rink for a little r and r.

Not even bad in that I didn't get being a kid and, like most other things in life, didn't do it all that well. Although confessing to mother-who recently had filled in the rubber plant trenches to their pre-hostility state-at age four that I "just didn't feel that I belonged on this particular earth", didn't do a lot for my carefree innocence of youth repartee.

Generally, I was pretty good as a kid. I got it and got it done right. From leaving garden hoses flowing all night to blowing holes in screens with stripped bare extension cords to felling walnut saplings for the ribs of teepees, I did pretty well.

I was the worst kid in that I had the patience of a fruit fly. It was now or never. Instant gratification wasn't fast enough and being that way and being me ensured that everything I engaged in ultimately wound up taking more time than I was willing to give to it.

I was like a home improvement episode where kitchens get installed in what seems like minutes. I was a cooking show where everything gets put in a 350 degree oven and, oh look, here's a fully cooked example! What do you mean it isn't done yet? I can see it completed in my mind's eye to perfection. Why are you still on step 2A?

Plastic models were the worst. The curse of my youth, the bane of my after school-Batman's a re-run-do something quiet in your room life.

Were these things invented by the same guy who had just perfected the Chinese water torture? Hey, just read a book on Sisyphus, let me get back to writing assembly instructions for the Bell "Huey" UH-1.

Here's where reasonable but insidiously detailed anal-retentive, clearly designed to stretch patience to the breaking point and beyond, directions for assembly meet eleven year old.

1) Select a quiet, well lit spot. I'm an only child with an over-protective mother. That could be the septic tank in our house.

2) Inspect the contents of the package to ensure that no parts are missing. I can see both halves of the chopper, what else is there?

3) Cut, do not twist off plastic parts. Are you kidding me? It takes an extra hand motion to pick up the ridiculous safety scissors that eventually gnaw away at the sprue the way a toothless beaver would chew up pulp. Hell, I've got my hands on the rotors, just snap them bad boys off.

4) Be sure to sand (Sand??? Sanding is the slow erosion of material against an abrasive over time. Think I got time???? I'm eleven!!!) chrome parts clean before applying adhesive. Oh. Ok. No chrome on here. Marines don't chop their birds or pimp their rides.

5) Glue rotor shaft to rotor cap. Set aside to dry overnight. THAT'S IT!!! Tomorrow??? I gotta go to school tomorrow!!! Tomorrow may never come!!! Forget about it! The point of plastic adhesive it that it melts styrene plastic surfaces and then they bond. Truth be known, plastic adhesive melts the outer skin surface which then glues both halves together and to step 5A of the instructions. The only thing I'm setting aside overnight is me.

So inevitably the Bell "Huey" UH-1 wound up looking like a fine military machine that at the last minute had been left in a blast furnace just a few minutes too long and sailing it around the entrenced army of the rubber plant platoon was only so satisfying as the gunners couldn't look out the fogged with your glue-festooned fingerprint windshields.

And fortunately you grew up and realized that good things take time to which the same engineering sociopath who wrote the "set aside" instructions moved on to design microwaves, graphic user interfaces, rapid dry paints and finishes and snap-tite model kits just so you in your middle age could reflect on such things and state that "in my day, good things took time."

Somewhere in Wichita, an eleven year old has glued the left hand fuselage of a helicopter to step five and is flipping you off.

Bunny on.

Go Go Global Warming

2010-10-21T17:02:00.002-05:00

Admittedly, I'm ok with a late November hurricane that has us in water up to our nipples even though we're sixty miles from the coastline if it means that my January's don't dip below fifty degrees.

By God I'm a heat slut of the first order.

I'm the guy in Florida in August with the rental car air turned off and windows down.

Baked, not fried? Hell, why not both.

So today was the dark day I'd been avoiding for the last week. Today marks the end of life as we know it until some time in early May.

Today we turned the heat on.

I'd been hiding from the need to do it since the weekend. We had a glorious Saturday and Sunday, working and playing outside, all warm and sweaty in the sun. Everything was ok. And of course we came in with that healthy pre-carcinogenic glow to cook dinner, watch the sun go down, have a cocktail and...

...get chilly.

NO! We're not cold! Smile and think of England! Summer's still here, if only in spirit.

Ok, we're shivering. Inside but I'm not turning the heat on. Its only early October. Ok, early middle October, but you get the point.

Turning the heat on is an innocuous harbinger of a larger, darker evil.

Its like the first zit you get. Harmless enough at first but your days of playing in sandboxes and pulling girl's hair are over. The end of childhood is in sight. Similarly the first set of prescription reading glasses have the same effect. You're still young and virile but you have to whip these on your nose to read. Vitamin E for skin health is going to give way to BP meds and Viagra in the not too distant future. Your young adult years are done for, sonny.

Sure, today's a little chilly but if you move around, you'll warm up. Trouble is your day at home needs to be in front of a computer and on the phone so there's no opportunity to walk about, rake leaves, chuck wood, chase the cats out of the bomb shelter and so forth. Sedentary, you start to chill. Hopefully you stare out at the sky hoping for the cloud cover to break and the sun to come out but let's face it, unless you just recently built a 120 foot magnifying glass over the house, your ass is going to be cold.

So its down to the basement, dust off the ogre in the corner that in a few month's time is going to be gulping dollars you used to lay down on cervesas y limone on the back patio, flip the red switch from "Off and carefree" to "On your back like an insane monkey until spring" and let ol' farter fire up to take the chill off.

I'm comfortable, but decidedly unhappy. The beast of the basement is back. The high of the day barely matches my birth year. The shorts are in the back of the closet and the sweatshirts are front and center.

I'll let you know when I turn the old bastard off in spring. In the meantime, if anyone wants to fire off a sequential series of M-80's having the effect of tilting the 24 1/2 degree global incline to the sun more to our favor...

I promise, I won't call the cops or your mom.

Bunny on.

I Don't Get It

2010-10-20T20:55:00.003-05:00

Friend of mine was helping to set up a baby shower for his grand-daughter last weekend and was asked what the theme was?

Pardon me?

Theme?

It's a baby shower.

Way to go. You've succesfully incubated a live human being, expelled it from your womb in a respiratory and semi-ambulatory condition and nurtured it to the point where other caring adults can assemble to inspect, admire and generally watch it spew most of its formula across the living room wall in a random pattern you hopefully will be able to pass off as nouveau stucco.

Theme?

Yep. Every shower has to have a theme.

Were I a parent, I suppose I would choose the search for beauty and meaning in a post-apocalyptic world.

Ok, I give. You know I'd fall back on Pooh and Eyore: BFF.

Bunny on.

Play Faster Dammit! More Reefer!

2010-09-22T17:08:00.002-05:00

Up until then, I could cook, in that I could apply heat to foodstuff and create hot something or other from a can or more than likely, leftovers Mom had stuck in the fridge.

Patrick taught me the basics of how to truly cook, that is how to combine raw ingredients into something you could call lunch or dinner. The first time we put a meal together-it was pasta and red sauce-I remember the incredulity of having something in my mouth that did not resemble at all Mom's or my cooking to date. That is to say it did not have the texture, consistency and flavor of cardboard boiled in milk for eight hours.

We were both around 14, Patrick and I and were in with the girls like a bad organ transplant. With nothing else to do Saturday nights, we'd hang out, play cards, watch TV, muse about Virginia and Judy actually doing their hair and generally spend the time. One night the folks were out, we were hungry and instead of re-heating the posterboard latte, Patrick thought there was enough to put something more substantial together. So we did and I began to learn to cook.

In this, life is kind of like a whipsaw. Because for the all the hours my buddy and I put in in the kitchen in the lonely hearts club, it developed in us skills that in later years would ensure that any girl coming over for a light dinner would sit down at the counter with a glass of wine and be wowed at me in the kitchen. A path to other adventures paved with a little olive oil and fresh oregano.

Patrick's happily married and is raising a fine bumper crop of girls. He can speak to his own experiences.

All of which brings me back to marijuana.

If Patrick had come by that night with the express purpose of watching TV, playing cards and maybe putting something together food-wise, we'd all have been a lot better off. Instead he and I had plans to pass a joint around. Notice that we didn't have the common sense to get some grub set up for the inevitable munchies.

Instead of going outside into the tundra, I had discovered the updraft in the furnace exhaust pipe. The joint was lit, Patrick demurred at the last minute, so I greedily smoked the whole damn thing hugging the chimney like an ersatz-mutter.

Done.

Now to get stoned.

Funny.

Nothing's happening.

Heart's going a little fast.

Must be the excitement.

WTF?!?!?!!

WHY AM I STANDING ANKLE DEEP IN SNOW IN THE FRONT YARD WITH A MOUTH FULL OF MOUTHWASH???

GOT TO TAKE A SHOWER! CLEAN UP!

WHO ARE YOU?

CALL SOMEONE! I DON'T KNOW! CALL, NO WAIT, COPS USUALLY COME WITH AMBULANCES!

GOT TO TAKE A SHOWER!

About an hour later I stopped hyperventilating under streaming water. Got out, dried off, cleaned up the bathroom. Patrick noted that my eyes were about as red as whatever the simile for quite red was in 1977. He'd been calmly watching TV for about an hour while praying to Jesus that he'd never fall under the spell of this wicked weed.

So, Saturday night, you got anything going with Judy?

Nope.

You got something with Virginia?

Doubt it.

Guess we'll hang out.

Maybe cook something.

Yep.

Oh, this never happened, right?

Bunny on.

My First Joint

2010-09-04T17:24:00.002-05:00

Some first tokes expand consciousness. Some first hits mellow you out so you can become the person others turn to for understanding and compassion. Some initial forays into mind-altering substances cast the world in an entirely different light and one sees things that one never saw before. As you age, responsibility and common sense suggest that you put away the drugs of youth because as appropriate as they may have been for that time of your life, they are after all intoxicants, plain and simple.

However you retain in the archives of your experience the sights and sounds of your time with them.

I'll never forget how cold standing in knee deep snow in your gym shorts can be and how hard it is to explain Scope colored ice to your old man the next day.

I wish I could have passed a joint to the sweet blonde I adored all through high school over a roaring camp fire but that wasn't going to happen. A good runner up would have been a hit in the basement of a buddies' house with the wavy haired Irish girl obstaining ashamedly but that didn't quite pan out either.

Instead I bought a full joint of local grown Tibbet's Hill Thunderfuck in the boy's room, craftily hid in in my sneaker (no there's a place NO ONE would ever think of looking) and on a February Saturday night when Mom went over to the neighbor's for coffee and castigation of the new family next door, I invited my 2 year younger friend down for a pot party.

It was a perfect opportunity and it had been thrust upon me like the perfect storm of behaving badly. The joint had been stashed away in my room for the better part of two weeks and every night I connived how I might steal away to smoke it.

Mom was always home in the evenings because, let's face it, when its February in the frozen tundra, why the fuck go out for any reason other than to die in a snow drift?

Which I considered. Announcing I was "taking a walk" I planned to trudge out into Roberts' field (a couple of open acres of feed grass left in the middle of our small city as a reminder of either our rural past or the inability to feed a populace with a 2 month growing season) where nobody could see (or smell) my partaking of whoopie weed. I thought it was a good idea, the natural conclusion of a small search party coming across my frozen corpse and roach a few days later never having fully formed in my eager to be imbibed brain.

I was planning to "take a walk" Saturday night when Mom told me she was heading across the street you remember the phone number call if you forget where the pasta salad is.

Could I invite my friend down for company?

Sure.

Oh boy. Asian Opium dens, here I come!

Bunny on.

But Finals Were Just Last Month!

2010-09-04T16:50:00.002-05:00

Hitting the message playback button only to have a female voice identify you, her name and begin speaking in complete sentences, my stomach instantly contracted to the size of a walnut and ran to hide behind my liver.

There are awful, terrible, horrible phone calls you sometimes get in life and this was one of them. I had expected a truncated robo-voice urging me to sell my mortgage out like a herd of sheep in October or call right now to earn double the points of this amazing offer or participate this very instant in a town hall discussion taking place in Iowa.

Instead she asked for C. Autistic Bonet, introduced herself and said she had gone to high school with C. Autistic and was I he?

The fact that I was and she had found me (generic area code and all) on the first try made me re-think recent musings of giving up my day job to go back to being a spy.

Then I panicked. I don't know about you, but my high school generation was pre-prophylactic wrapped hand-holding. We took chances, sometimes foolish ones that nevertheless were really smokin' at the time, with our selves and other selves that you'd cut lawns for a month for to afford dinner money, con your way into a Saturday night with the car and after a warm glass or two of Charred O'Nay snuggle up to in the back of the car in a parking lot you'd scoped out with some buddies.

In other words, you did something that wasn't just youthful exuberance and coming of age, you got lucky in the back seat.

So for some woman to announce that she had gone to high school with me made me wonder if a one time back seat party was now out there somewhere debating a vasectomy, giving up on Rogaine and mortgaging his house for a second time. See, it was that long ago that I was in high school.

Now they're having a reunion, and I'm invited!

The woman (whom I don't remember, then or now) went on to announce that the-number so large it borders on obscene-year reunion of the old place is coming up in October.

Hoo-boy. I can't wait to see people I barely knew then and know even less now. Talk about all the good old times we never had and compare expanding waistlines and receding hairlines.

You can probably guess I'm not going. But to be honest, there's a reason I'm not going. I really don't know these people, we really didn't have a lot of good times together and I'm not going to make any shit up that we did. I went to 3 1/2 years of high school in a different town, state, hell, country than my graduating class. I showed up in January, looked forward to graduating in June then got held back a year because some administrator couldn't fathom how my old school considered eleventh grade the end of high school. Hint: We actually had a curricula that didn't involve study hall or self-esteem as legitimate periods. So after almost eleven years with kids I knew, grew up with, did actually have weird shit, life changing, remember forever experiences with I transferred and graduated with a class of strangers.

I won't be going back to reminsce eighteen months that happened -number so large it borders on obscene- years ago.

There was another reunion. It happened a few years ago and it was my actual high school class getting together after -a number that was just dirty- years.

I didn't make it. I was distracted. Life was kind of falling apart at the time and I wasn't going to recount that over white wine and cocktails.

Pity I didn't. Out of that maelstrom a few years ago came a few pretty good friendships and bonds that still hold today even though we don't see each other a whole lot and emails have dropped off. I still think of you all.

A lot.

In a year or two, our class will have graduated -a number so large it affronts God- years ago and I'm hoping there's a reunion. Count me in. Maybe I'll get my back seat boogie consequence to drive me up in the Porsche he can't afford.

Bunny on.

Neurotic Fiction

2010-08-14T17:29:00.006-05:00

(what to do when travel writing dies...)

Bermuda, 1989

Boris had met Elaine in Trimmingham's, he buying a soup to nuts wardrobe and tossing his sodden things into a Trimmingham's bag. Seems the concierge had been right about advising against a motorbike ride into Hamilton in front of the incoming storm after all.

Elaine was pale, petite and here on her own after her fiance had called it all off when he discovered her hammer toes. As long as she kept a pair of socks on under her sandals, Boris could tolerate the condition though he never tucked his chin lower than 85 degrees below the horizon.

Seducing her was easy, his taking her to most of the open conch museums on the island. In a fit of passion, he took her to the lanai, stripped her robe off and laid her onto the lounge chair. Pressing his weight onto and into her, she squealed with what Boris mistakenly thought was delight and soon was corrected in that the strapping of the lounge chair was pinching her pale ass in the Bermuda full moon.

Though called, the island constable on duty did not press charges, satisfying himself with an admonition to the couple and a hail of laughter in the sealed Police Ford Coronet.

Key West, 2000

Lauren let her new husband snooze the evening's liquor off in the Honeymoon Suite of what used to be the Flagler. She put her blue bikini on and a discreet wrap around the waist and walked out into the early night to the piers where you could lean over the side to watch the Tarpon swim lazily, looking for an evening meal.

Boris was there, waiting as he had promised once the Jonathan Winters retrospective was over on Showtime. The hotel had a great cable selection.

He too was watching the Tarpon weave their way in and around the piles that held the marina pier. Boris turned to Lauren and as she drifted into his arms, he received her and knocked the Southernmost Mudslide that he had balanced on the pier pile into the small of her back such that cream, Kalua and whatnot cascaded in small but passionate spurts down her discreet wrap and settling on her ankles and the tops of her feet. Sensing food, a Tarpon leapt up onto the decking which startled Boris such that he pushed Lauren away and into the water.

Toledo Spain, 2005

His flight was five hours late so he endured the scolding of his driver though he truly didn't have the first idea of what he was talking about. After a series of rushed meetings, facilities tours and a guerilla-like drive to his hotel in the front seat of a vehicle that was probably around since Franco had begun to die, Boris was dropped off in the San Juan de Reyes to be checked into a handicapped-accessible room and allowed his first shower in 32 hours. His feet dangling off the toilet scarce bothered him. He was only interested in soap and shaving and sleep.

But he was hungry, ravenous at six o'clock local time in a country where most mainstream restaurants don't open before 8.30 pm. He wandered the streets, shaven and showered but with a growl in the pit of his stomach that he was sure was frightening prostitutes. Not that he was looking but you never know...

He chanced upon a Brasserie that was open and serving beer and Tapas, racciones as many times and as much food as you cared to order and eat. Her name was Margarita and she was sweet but homely with glasses and a protruding chin. However, she proferred food and instantly Boris was in love.

He ate venison stew, asparagus wrapped in salty ham, olives and whatever else he felt he could pronounce and digest. When Margarita quietly said that she was leaving for the evening, he called for the cuenta por favor and asked Margarita if he could walk her home. He could.

She lived in a single apartment in the older section of the city by the Roman ruins. Strolling down the cobblestone incline he risked holding her hand. She accepted and squeezed his just a little too hard to be incidental. They smiled at each other through limited translation and Boris felt at peace for once.

The rumble began distantly and randomly but soon grew to an oncoming roar. In the middle of the cobblestone Boris suddenly realized that they were walking in a main thoroughfare. As the Volkswagen Jetta turned the corner by the El Greco museum, Boris had no choice but to loose his grip and launch Margarita into the stucco facade of the apartment opposing.

London, 2005

Boris and she had known each other through work although they were engaged in entirely different areas of the company. It was only happenstance that they found each other across the aisle of the same Cincinatti to London US Airways flight. They chatted over wine, brie and a flounder that wound Boris up in the digestive mile-high club somewhere over Greenland for the better part of the night.

He was on the fifth floor of the Durand, she on the third and they agreed to meet for dinner where she announced that it was her habit to abandon the rules while abroad and invite her first likely opportunity to her bed. Boris relished the thought of exploring her heretofore tweed and nylon-cloaked nether regions of opportunity. He stood, leaning against the portable butane space heater that warded off an early London June chill and accepted the cigarette from her, that which had been previously forbidden him. Lighting it, he leaned a trifle too heavily into the heater and as it fell off the open platform of the dining area the cigarette ignited the spilled butane.

Fortunately, Kate was a wonderful and caring sister in the burn ward afterwards.

I'm Not a Wet Baby

2010-08-13T16:15:00.004-05:00

And like anyone other than a wet baby, I don't like change.
Which is funny in that change seems to love me and follows me around like a hungry dog and I'm wearing Snausage aftershave.
This week, after studiously ignoring it, I changed my home email along with our home ISP.
That is to say, we changed the ISP about a week ago and they left me instructions on changing the email. Needless to say, something else to do that changes things, I slept, ate, watched TV, took out the trash and cut the lawn on it until I finally forced myself to go through the setup screens today.
Had to do it. The old email was shuttered. Changed ISP. See, its 2010 and I got the ridiculous notion in my head that for over a hundred bucks a month, I should be entitled to an ethernet cable that I could stick into a switch and power up more than one computer on.
Apparently, my ISP thought otherwise. I had contracted through Bigass, Inc., pretty much the only show in town at the time. Reluctantly of course, since I had once used Bigass, Inc. for cable only in a Previous Lifetime.
I hadn't started cable with Bigass, Inc. But they took over the local cable provider and the next thing you know, Pat Croce is all over the screen shilling his latest avoidable read "I Feel Terrific and You're Gonna Hear All About It Cause You Got No Choice."
Add t0 that they stuff silly little local interest stories in the middle of national news broadcasts so if you've only got fifteen minutes you're going to miss the updates on the California earthquake dropping LA into the Pacific because Elma Mipple from the Luvin' Kitty Kat Korner Klub is being interviewed.
Once I left my Previous Lifetime and moved into the Knob and Tube Palace, I was thrilled to find that Bigass didn't cover my area. There were two cable/ISP providers, Piddlydink and LocalPodunk. I went with Piddlydink and for about ninety bucks a month I got simple Outlook email, clear phone service and cable that plugged into the back of the TV and used the remote that came with the set.
What else did you need?
Then I had to go and change jobs.
Simple yet affordable Knob and Tube Palace was sold and we moved into humble Paramour that unfortunately was located in Unaffordable County. Walking to work was replaced with a drive and a security ID and a guard and a gate.
Piddlydink ISP went back to Bigass, Inc. and now my email featured Java-scripted stick figures dancing like she was stirring her children into a cooking kettle while the tag line announces that: "Obama Says Re-Mortgage Your Future!" and the weather in San Mateo, CA where Bigass Inc. ISP seems to think I live is always sunny and fine.
And instead of a router that plugs into a switch I got an option to pay another $6.95 per month to Bigass, Inc. for a second line. Plus the cable TV comes with a decoder box and its own remote so now we have enough button devices in the den to launch two space shuttles simultaneously.
Enough was enough and I went all Wet Baby on Bigass, Inc. and switched to Corporate Reset, Inc. as an ISP.
I'm now holding my breath for their particular foolishness but so far, so good. Yes I still have eighteen remotes and a branded home page but the remotes actually turn the TV on and not the blender and the home page only plugs their own products. I'd still rather have generic outlook but what ya gonna do? Only folks that write me at Causticbunny at Gmail.com are spam from women I once dated and the occasional Magazine Man or Cog wondering why the hell we haven't launched the 21st century version of George?
But I do have a wireless router which I wasn't expecting and that's the closest I'll come to kissing an installing technician named Bob.
So now I have a new personal email address and it took a while to name it. Tried to transfer my old email address which was my first unpublished novel @ Bigass.net but that domain was taken. Since I haven't named my second unpublished novel, much less written it, that was out of the question. Tried an older email address but it was gone too. Scratched my head and wondered what a big old stupid bunny was going to pick as an email address.

Apparently, that.

Bunny on.

Where's Bunny?

2010-07-17T08:22:00.000-05:00

Puddle

2010-07-17T08:19:00.000-05:00

Sunset and Moon

2010-07-17T08:17:00.000-05:00

The Rules

2010-07-01T21:12:00.004-05:00

Back in 1994, I met an amazing fellow who went on to become a good friend of mine. He was a learned man who read a lot, thought even more and sometimes committed these thoughts to paper. He sent me a hand written piece once that I thought was pretty inspiring so I set it to type and hung it on my office wall.
Later, I framed it and hung it on various offices, cubes, or walls of businesses that I owned. I called it "The Rules" and the rules were simple. If you ever wanted to know what made me tick; read. It was all there in black and white, everything I believed in.

The Rules

Develop a philosophical and ethical structure. Then live with it. Success without self-reflection is delusion.

Forty hours a week in a competitive environment will result in failure. Fifty hours, survival. Sixty hours, success. Additionally, strive to spend twenty hours in pursuit of interests in the arts and sciences. Leisure will eventually be regarded as laziness. Relaxation, while necessary, should only be indulged in infrequently and can be regarded as addictive.

If you are unwilling to pay the price of success, admit it to yourself. Envy of those who strive does not buttress what you are already not aspiring to.

Focus every moment of every day on process and process improvement. Small, incremental gains can add up enormously over a lifetime.

Make a list of reactive activities and reflect on them. Otherwise, how will you know if you're successful.

Do the same for proactive activities. Otherwise, how will you know if you're happy?

There is no holy grail. Learn to enjoy the quest.

If you are successful and your people are not, perhaps you have the wrong people.

Always give 100%, then give ten percent more. Your limits will keep expanding.

Money is also the root of all good.

The roads to gratification are many and often pleasant. The roads to success are hard and steep. But they do lead somewhere. Remember that the path of least resistance leads downhill.

If you are not willing to give the customer what they want, when they want it, you will fail.

If you are not selling on price, you'd better have something pretty special to offer.

The other most important relationship beyond the one with the customer is the one with the supplier. That means a fair price, prompt payment and regard for their business.

In life, you will get knocked on your ass. If you get up one more time than you get knocked down, you win.

Failing all else, try again. Try thinking ahead this time.

There are more ways than one to skin any old cat (every problem has a solution.)

The world is a sufficiently harsh place. Strive to be kind and gentle with people. But carefully cultivate the ability to stand your ground.

No matter how foul your mood, strive to project an appearance of good humor. You will not doubt still manage to piss someone off.

Above all else, resist the temptation to commit thoughts such as these to record. You will not doubt subject yourself to charges of foolishness and pedantry.

Thanks Bob. Bunny on.

Sundaes in the Car with George

2010-06-30T18:53:00.006-05:00

If you remember the movie "Christine" you know what the old man's first American car was. When he got over here from Europe the first thing he did was buy himself a red '58 Plymouth Fury with a white interior, white wall tires, steering, brakes and tailfins that could turn the Andrea Doria on a dime.
In other words, subdued, elegant.
In later years he sold that car to my mom's friend who had it painted pink in a pre-Mary K frenzy and I had one of my most famous carsick hurls onto a cop's shoes in the back seat of her.
But that's another Bunny for another day.
The old man was proud of his new ride and fanatical about its upkeep. After all, the best wheels he could afford in the old country was probably a converted Messerschmidt with the wings lopped off and the engine replaced with a bicycle tire pump.
This baby had straight six power and the old man knew how to use it.

On his first summer in country he decided to do as the natives do and go on a road trip. He fancied himself an outdoorsman having spent a better part of the war outdoors as people kept shelling houses he was in. Anyway, he could point to a picture of a deer or bear and declare that neither of these belonged in the living room so I guess he had his credentials there.
He and his friend packed up their respective wives in their respective cars and headed north to the state park. Now the old man had the Plymouth and his pal had a '57 Chevy Bel Air. Four people in two cars that had a combined carrying capacity of Uruguay. What the hell, they were still in the fifties.
The idea was to drive to and through the park to see what they could see. Maybe some wildlife. Maybe they'd stop to pet a bear. Or get it hooked on fried foods and get deer to like smoking cigarettes. They got part way there when the wife of the pal who had a touch of a weight problem like Charlie Manson isn't a people person decided she was hungry. Or maybe it was the Dairy Queen she spied just at the same time as her hubby rang a small bell on the dashboard. We'll never know.
They stopped, the boys both got cones so they could drive and gesture and Mom got the same thing the other gal got probably to assure her that more than one human being could consume a dish about as big as the spare tire; a banana split.
Now a banana split in 1958 was a grand thing. It was served on something like a meat platter, had three basketball scoops of strawberry, vanilla and chocolate ice cream, a split banana that these days gets towed behind a speedboat in the Bahamas, was covered in whipped cream, nuts, sprinkles, cherries, a few pats of butter, onion gravy and bacon bits and finally was floated in a great lake of hot fudge sauce.
While her companion probably was boiling off the extra on the manifold, Mom could only get down to one scoop of ice cream, a few cherries and Lake Michigan that had been Superior of hot fudge.
I can't finish, what should I do with the rest? She asked the old man.
Throw it out the window.
I mean, why the hell not? They were only in a state park. What was the worst that could happen; she'd bean a bear cub who'd just go crying to Mama anyway because he didn't understand the rank deliciousness he'd just been hit with.
Throw it out the window.
Of the speeding car.
Using a forearm motion.
Now this was not what she was instructed to do but it is what she ultimately did. She threw the meat platter out with a forearm heave and the thing left her hand to sail out over the hood of the car where it hovered for just a second until it picked up a new course aft. Not of course until it had bounced off the side pillar of the car and deposited the remaining fudge onto the white interior of the Plymouth such that the old man's car had a cowboy's Pinto motif. The dish then sailed onto the hood and subsequent windshield of the trailing car.
The old man and his bud stopped their vehicles the way you'd expect a jet to tailhook onto the Nimitz. Naturally they were both furious enough to have their first experience with raising children by acting like them. And of course they made the most logical first choice when you're in a state park, you find the first lake to wash the cars in. They backed the leaden beasts up to the edge of the water to wash them, Mom waded into the lake to rinse off, her friend accomodatingly waded in to raise the water level to a more convenient spot and tempers were soothed once the cars got clean, stuck up to their axles in soft sand, the women came out of the water with leeches and they never again did rough it anywhere farther than the parking lot of the A & W.

Bunny on.

And So It Ends

2010-06-29T19:11:00.002-05:00

Nah.
Not really.
I'm just fucking with you. There's more, there always is.
The day after tomorrow, July the first, will be the fifth anniversary of the first bunny.
I usually don't stick around that long.

So I read the July One Bun just about every year. It reminds me of where I was and I reflect on where I am.

Five years ago I had just gotten back from London. Was just about to set off on a new single life. Was wondering what the devil to do with "her."

Was watching fireflies off the back deck of a house in the country.

Lusting after a freshly turned 24 Natalie Portman.

July the first, a good friend would always call me from Canada, wish me a happy Fourth and I'd wish him a happy Canada Day. Five years ago was no different.

July the first always reminds me to buy a birthday card for a dear friend and put it on the kitchen table, ready to mail for arrival the 25th. Been doing that for 22 years. Ok, I do stick around from time to time.

This July the first, I'll write my fifth anniversary bunny. No idea about what but I'm sure some caustic glance at the world will yield material. I just need to pay attention.

Won't get any phone calls. Haven't for the last four years. Miss you my friend. Think of you often.

Won't be back from any trips. Still haven't figured "her" out. Know exactly what to do with her. Married her.

Given up on Natalie. I don't think she's ever read the blog. Betcha Diane Lane has and she's closer to my...um...age. Heck I'm almost just a little or kind of almost over one, ok, one and a half times Natalie's age.

The fireflies are back, the thirteen year old chases them around yelling "Buggy!!"

Pardon me if I didn't see that coming.

Hope you've enjoyed the ride thus far. I've enjoyed having you around. Now as Magazine Man, my original inspiration, would say:

"Ouch!!!!!"

Bunny on.

Apropos of Nothing

2010-06-12T15:54:00.005-05:00

If there was ever a blog about nothing, this is it. Held up to the show that was about nothing, former Seinfelder's desperate for something about nothing ought to be flocking to the site, beating on their screens and crying for more of less.

But I think that that was a fad that ended with the nineties.

Growing up, there was a kid in school named Glen Ward.

He was perfect. We hated him.

He really did have it all. No, not that his family was exceptionally wealthy or of unique standing (they were a good, upright group but Glen was hardly blood kin to some long deposed Czar of Uzbekistan) or anything material like that. But he had a couple of brothers who were just as accomplished as he was with his perfect teeth so it was kind of like having our own local Osmond family.

Glen just made it all look easy. Consistently good grades, nicely tossled hair, polite, well regarded, groomed, he was basically everything the rest of us ratbags with our frumpled jeans, poor attitudes, meandering academic records and greasy hair kinda really wanted to be secretly but couldn't so we rebelled against it.

He'd knock out straight A's, turn girls down to dance until his choice got around to asking him, looked good and clean cut and lorded none of it over anyone.

He drove us crazy. The blue-jeaned toughs, the ones who showed up in work boots to school, always sat in the back, broke pencils in their fingers and smelled vaguely of cow flop and motor oil would always give a running commentary first day of school as everybody came into home room.

Me.

"Faggot, we're going to kick your ass this year."

Patrick.

"Faggot, we're going to kick your ass this year."

Arthur.

"Faggot, we're going to kick your ass this year."

Michael, who came towing his latest girlfriend in.

"Switch hitter. We're going to steal your girl. Then we're going to kick your ass this year."

Glen.

Long pause.

"Gosh, he's dreamy."

I think we all got over our collective neuroses later in life when one of us found out that Glen had been conceived during a sexual encounter between his parents. That was a relief in that we now knew that he wasn't He and we weren't damned for eternity for that wedgie we gave him in second grade.

I've been reading Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and its one hell of a good book. The only problem is that in my mind's eye, the whole thing is taking place at a giant Ikea.

I see Blogger has a whole new set of templates, fonts, icons, backgrounds and such. I'll play around with them but I'm really looking for the blog that does its own writing.

That's not entirely true, some good ideas do hit me but its usually in the fast lane of the interstate in a rainstorm.

Here's to summer taking away another subject: bitching about the weather.

Bunny on.

That Time of the Month

2010-05-21T19:01:00.004-05:00

When I started this thing I promised myself at least one post a month and I've been pretty faithful, defying my natural state, thus far.

Ain't going to stray now, but I see that the last time I was here was April and here it is June coming up soon so I'd better give May its due beyond the first being opening day on beneath the stars copulation.

Not a good idea in the current climate because May is meteorologically behaving like a lot of first dates. Starts off pleasant enough, chatty and accomodating and a weekend or two rolls around where the temperature ascends, the sun shines and the last of winter shakes off your back. You get to feeling comfortable, layers of clothing come off and then the high for the day is forty five, you're under a blanket watching TV wondering where all that friendliness went off to. It's like the month tugged at the raised seam of her skirt, pulled it down to her ankles, straightened her pantyhose and stapled her hem to her shoes.

Tonight was a pleasant Friday evening though with enough warmth and longevity of day to mix up a four-barrel Martini, fire up a faux Cuban and wash the car. Couple of sips of the Martini, unreel the hose, back the car up, run over the hose flattening the nozzle such that from hence onwards any water pressure will shoot out the end in a display putting the Bellaggio to shame. I can hear former girlfriends lecturing me on the dangers of liquor and automotive hygiene mixing and all I can say is "yes, but in the morning I'll be sober and you'll still be ugly."

Nonetheless, you lay off the Martini until the car is washed and put into the garage and just to be certain, let's strap a few mattresses to her before we put her away just in case you hit the accelerator 'stead of the brake and imprint "Craftsman 2 1/2 hp direct drive 5/8" arbor" into the front end of the automotive thing you haven't actually paid for yet.

I play with wood from time to time, which is to say I build furniture for fun. Tried to build it for real once and realized that if I set my opportunity cost to -$1,000 per hour I could make money.

At any rate, last weekend I was planing some oak when the planer and the board collaborated to send a 7 inch splinter my way, impaling my hand. Ouch.

What can I say? I removed aforementioned splinter and sauntered into the kitchen to see Thumper (a retired EMT).

"Hi Honey, am I going to the emergency room?"

I didn't, everything's ok but my stigmata's acting up again. In the words of our Lord;

"Yeah, so it's Friday, I'm hanging around with a bunch of Latins and the darndest thing happens..."

Happy May. See you next month.

Bunny on.

Aisle Three for Submarine Rescue Gear

2010-04-24T16:31:00.002-05:00

The place smells like forty weight motor oil and fertilizer stored in a vulcanized rubber bladder. The carpet might have been green once. Inventory is no doubt stored on a diesel powered PC (upgrade from the wood-burning laptop they used to use) and you get the sense that if you had the know how, you could walk up and down the aisles, pick up parts and assemble a 747.

That would be my local hardware store. They're wedged between two big boxes, a blue one about eight miles up the road, an orange one a more menacing two miles away. Yet, they're still here, seemingly doing well. You got to love a place where pilferage control consists of putting the Easter lily plants on the front porch of the store at night.

The laws of economies of scale dictate that things are more expensive there. That's ok. In the end it all works out in that when you go in looking for a bulb for a router ($14.95 replacement cost) somebody behind the counter will sell you an automobile turn signal lamp for a pre-1970 Chevy with a bayonet base that fits the router as well. Total: $1.49 for two bulbs please.

I once walked in looking for a garden tool. I knew it existed, because I had seen one in a Vermeer painting.

They had it.

Typically, on a Saturday morning, somebody will walk in and ask for a 3/8" metric adaptable hex mounted flush cover offset gasket protected left wound quarter inch drive sub-assembly pre-stressed, torque-limited fastening bolster shortened to fit the aftermarket supplied bracket for my 1989 Ford F-150.

Typical reaction: Clerk walks down aisle four, about 2/3rd's of the way, reaches into a cardboard box on the top shelf and hands you exactly what you need.

You can do that at a big box, but my suspicion is they'd have to remove it from the building and most of the roof over Home and Garden would collapse.

Bunny on.

My Life Was Saved by Rock and Roll

2010-04-18T20:09:00.004-05:00

One evening I turned on a New York City station and had the wits scared out of me.

It was AM, an all news station that was going through the police blotter when an errant signal bounced off a cloud somewhere over Plattsburgh and was picked up by my vintage 1956 Telefunken just outside Montreal. Two robberies in Brooklyn, a rape in Queens, I'm cocooned under the covers waiting for another day of elementary school to dawn frozen and dead and thinking, all things considered I'm better off here than there. Listen to the radio a little while longer, then turn it off and head to bed. Try and tune it in the next night and all you got was static so you'd flip the dial over to the standard, the one Mom and Dad listened to, a few pop favorites mixed in with some numbers from the early sixties, an AM collection of music, news, talk that was all the car radio was ever set to so you knew the call letters and frequency.

When the old man waltzed in with a spanking new 1972 Grundig, the old wooden Telefunken wound up in my room. That was fine, I dug radio. Even when it was in the living room, I'd punch in the short wave key and dial up whatever the internal antenna could find. Nighttime was best when solar radiation didn't cut your signals to ribbons but when evening fell, I usually had to hoof off to bed. Putting the old set in my room was like giving a jet-junkie a crew pass to dead head. I'd turn off the lights, turn the set on, let the vacuum tubes glow and spin short wave around the world.

Of course when it came to listening to daily radio, I being all of twelve dutifully turned it back to 800 AM.

When I turned thirteen though, I spun the dial over to CKGM, home of Ralph Lockwood in the morning. They played the pop rock and roll that Mr. Gaviett put on the speakers in his bus in an effort to keep us quiet on the twenty minute ride to school. It usually worked which says a lot about the singularity of purpose of my generation. Either that or we were simple minded enough to be amused by simple things.

At night, the set would be tuned to CKGM but grooving to The Band alone wasn't as much fun as it was when you were seated right across the aisle from Shirley. So I spun the dial around a little, caught what else was out there on AM and turned in. Then Friday rolled around and I had a little more leeway around lights out. I did the unthinkable, I punched up FM.

FM was what the Grundig played every Sunday morning; European classics, news from the homeland, PanAm ads. It was what accompanied cold eggs and chives.

FM on a Friday night was a different animal, which is why I went for the station Mom and Dad listened to just to be safe. When they weren't blaring the latest Volkspolka, they played what was then called "Easy Listening" and what you hummed along too waiting for the "ding" of the next floor. That was ok for a couple of Fridays but something was missing. I spun it over to CHOM.

CHOM was a new, adult rock and roll FM station that probably got launched when somebody put his reefer down long enough to listen to Steely Dan. People who listened to CHOM smoked marijuana. If you had CHOM on, you smoked marijuana.

I turned CHOM on.

There were a couple of cool station promos that tried to emphasize that if you were listening, you were cool. I doubt very much if I could parlay this to Shirley even if she were sharing a seat with me. Which of course she never did. Then there was the rock and roll, the mid-seventies album rock; Foreigner and Styx, Steely Dan, Led Zeppelin, Stones, Foghat, Kansas: I usually went to bed when the Eagles came on.

There are always fulcrum points in life. Some are defined by great drama, some great tragedy, some great elation. In my life some fulcrums have had their point of inflection defined by what was on the radio and so it was when I was listening to CHOM, not smoking marijuana (that would come in a few years and go just as fast) but somebody fatefully put Lou Reed on the turntable. It was Walk on the Wild Side and it cracked my life wide open.

Candy came from the island.
Fat, plummy kid in a frozen Canadian suburb greets this positively, thinking some kind of tropical island is coming up.
In the back room, she was everybody's darling.
Ok, she's friendly.
But she never lost her head, even when she was giving head.
Gnnneiiiiigh!
She said hey babe, take a walk on the wild side, and the colored girls go:
This being the mid-seventies, that was still ok.

FM radio and Lou Reed, that night, cracked my reality open and away from elevator music, beige carpets and pop hits. I tried to tune in New York City again just to get the rough, raw, edge Lou was singing about. I jumped back on to CHOM to see what else was out there to turn my reality on edge and heard a young kid name Warren Zevon sing about an exciteable boy.

Sorry kids, I was lost. I was on my way out of there that would, within ten years find me living in the Village while you were still impressed that you could afford an apartment almost in Toronto.

And it really got down to a Lou Reed number.

Good thing they weren't playing ABBA.

Bunny on.

Their walls are made of cannon balls, their motto is...

2010-04-14T21:41:00.001-05:00

Do You Come Here Often?

2010-04-09T16:59:00.002-05:00

There was one day where it all came together. It all worked. Training, calculated response, it was all where it needed to be.

And it was funny too.

Two of us were mountain biking, the Scotsman and I. It was a Sunday morning in a city park outside of a large east coast concrete jungle. Now if you're conjuring up visions of slaloming twixt neatly spaced lindens, you'd better hit cranial delete. This was a city park only insofar as it was within the boundaries of the city proper. Beyond that, apart from emerging at its edge onto a four lane boulevard, it was as wild and as hilly and as overgrown as any path one might find in say, West Virginia. Save for it still had all its teeth.

Scotsman rode it every Sunday morning and I joined him from time to time. There were stretches that he excelled at, the harder ones, and there were flats that I hammered him on 'cause Bubba you don't play over 40 league mid-field without learning to go from zero to intercept really fast. Then there were the stretches we both sucked at. One's where we'd unclip and walk the bikes 'cause, well this was the over 40 league. Mortality was not just a good idea, it was the law. The Scotsman had a pat observation of these edge of cliff with shaky soil high off the ground clawing for a foothold paths: "They're rideable." he'd say. To which my pat response was: "Yes. On a planet bereft of gravity perhaps."

There was a long, wet, swampy stretch too. It was flat and crossed a little creek several times. It wound up in the back of an abandoned trailer park so we'd ride it to its end then double back over creek and through some of the soggy patches that threatened to suck down your tire if you weren't careful. That's when we saw her.

She was off the trail in some low foliage. She looked like hell, an old woman of eighty plus years, long yellow-grey hair let completely down, toussled over what looked like a summer dress that had seen more summers than she had. It was a late, late spring day and summer was making an introductory visit. The temperatures were in the high seventies and climbing into the eighties. She was soaked in sweat, smelled just awful and was jabbering away in a language that most of the other riders would describe as foreign and I knew to be Russian.

Training.

There were about five riders stopped on the trail, calling to her as she wandered through the brush, chattering constantly. When Scotsman and I showed up, the other riders turned to us and asked if we had a cell phone.

Yes I did. And it was very happily in the glove compartment. Cells are great in emergencies, but sometimes circumstances call for other tools.

Sorry, no cell.

All the riders called out to the old woman. "Hey! Are you ok?" "Come here please!" She would stop chattering for a moment, look at them quizzically and then go right back to the monologue she was having with herself.

I called out to her: "Ma'am, please come here." She stopped, looked at me and said something in Russian.

The only damn phrase I know in Russian is "Ya ni puni mai", I do not understand. It would have been as easy as falling off a log to look at her quizzically and then jump back on the bikes to finish a nice Sunday ride. But when in hell have I ever done the easy thing.

Ya ni puni mai.

"Russki!" she goes and the chatter is elevated in volume and frequency.

Ya ni puni mai. Parlez vous francais?

She looked at me like I was Alice's rabbit. "Nyet. Deutsch."

She spoke German. Strangely enough, so did I. So did the Scotsman. Off we went finding out who she was (no answer) and where she was from.

We got an address. The other riders immediately scrambled to find something to write it down with but if you don't got a cell phone, chances are you didn't bring pencil and paper either.

Did I mention it was wet and swampy? There's a stick, there's some mud. She's just said an address and a phone number. Write it down. You can try and memorize something until the cows come home, but if it doesn't have a personal relevance, chances are it'll be gone soon. On the other hand, if you see something physical; a tree, a path, an address and phone number scratched in the mud, you might just be able to retain a mental picture of the thing because it was relevant to a place you were at.

We got an address. We got a phone number. We got five people to hopefully get a mental picture of it.

Then she wandered off, so we followed. By now she was speaking exclusively German and the Scotsman and I had figured out that she was not in her right mind. And I don't mean that in a bad way, but there was some level of dimentia, Alzheimer's or otherwise, going on. When it was all over, Scotsman asked me why I started off in French. Simple: You've got an eighty-something Russian. Bark off a few phrases in German and see what period in history she might go back to and what kind of fright and flight responses you might get.

When you're dealing with dementia, you also don't want to get physical. Everything's got to be their idea. Hence, the Scotsman and I followed her rather than guided her, were as surprised and happy as she was once she'd found the trail again, and followed her, chatting all the while, until she got to the edge of the park. The aforementioned four lane boulevard that she promptly wandered on to.

Funny thing about people who wander off onto boulevards; traffic sees them as single, avoidable obstacles. Funny when you cast bicycles across the same lanes; traffic sees them as sharp-edged mechanical things that can do damage to the undercarriage of their vehicles. Oh and there's some old woman walking around the road too.

There was a community center on the boulevard and with gentle coaxing, we got her into the air-conditioned interior and got her some water and got her to sit down and got the police on the phone asap. When the cop showed up, we recited the address we had written in the mud. He knew it as a local assisted-care place, got her in the car, cranked the A/C to full and took her home.

Scotsman and I? There was a ride to finish. Suddenly a lot more limber than we had been in the previous 3/4 of an hour, we got our bikes, strapped on helmets and set off to finish the ride.

Scotsman would say silly things later, but just then he said the thing that made it all funny:

"Man, you'll do anything to get a girl's phone number."

Too right. Bunny on.

Pate is the New Loaf

2010-03-08T19:15:00.005-05:00

I'm thinking that the cats eat better than I do.

Because while I am chomping on all natural, heart healthy Veggie Chips, the four of them are tucking into "Classic Pate" which, by the tag line on the case of 32 I just bought, "Loaf" is now.

Yes, Loaf is now Classic Pate which of course means the cat will turn his or her nose at it somewhat less infrequently than he/her snubbed good ol' loaf. Because cats are all about class and attitude.

No.

Not really.

Cat owners, some of them anyway, are.

Cats are practical. They'll eat rodent gizzards if they need to survive. They don't hold any illusions of Classic Pate being any more than yesterday's Loaf and it doesn't portend Julia Child in the kitchen, fluffing tails and whipping up a little light Coquille Seulment Pour Chat.

Cat owners, some of them anyway, think that the fancier the label, the better little Pibbles, Bing -Bing, Mewkus or Monkey Butt will like the pureed whale snot that's being doled out of the tremendously expensive little can.

Of course I'm not like that. Cats eat what they eat and I couldn't care less although I found it encouraging that I could now serve Classic Pate to the little monsters and not have to dupe them into another evening of Loaf.

The Veggie Chips aren't bad either, but I need to remind Thumper that in fact, a potato is a veggie.

I could just as easily have a dog, because I like dogs as much as I like cats. But I'm more of a cat owner, which is to say I'm a little more sensitive. Can't stand leaving the house every morning with some dewey-eyed pooch wide-retina'd at you, wagging and drooling "DON'T GO!" The cat's "Yeah, see you when you get back, maybe." between hindquarters lick is a little more condusive to me getting into the car.

So it's cats for me for now. Four of them: Two that came from the knob and tube, one from Thumper's house, one that seems to have come with the new place.

Pate is the new loaf.

If only steak were the new Veggie chips.

Bunny on.

How's by you, Comrade?

2010-03-06T09:39:00.003-05:00

Hooray, hooray, the first of May! Outdoor fucking starts today!

There. If I've ever left an indelible impression, that's it and no other parade down Red Square will ever seem the same.

Forget diatribes about the old man's shorting out most of the east coast, putting up a Christmas tree, forget every airborne automotive stunt involving intentional acceleration. Memories are made up of vernal copulation.

May is still a ways away. But spring is right around the corner, despite Phil having prognosticated otherwise. Who can blame him? If I got dragged from a nice warm burrow with cable tv and an espresso bar every February and had my naked underbelly shown to the world of a thousand videocams and flashbulbs, I'd want revenge too. Can you blame an overfed rodent for pissing down a gloved hand and condemning them to another six weeks of morning galosh hunt?

Not only is spring close, daylight savings time is even closer. This is congress's fix for power savings, originally inspired by Ben Franklin's quest for candle savings. Didn't work then. Won't work now. See, Ben was in France and noted that if you turned clocks an hour later or earlier depending on the season, you could save candles for illumination on the way home since the sun would still be out. Worked over there because, well, it was France. Who the hell gets up at six in the morning besides prostitutes anyway? Kind of flopped in the colonies where we did actually get up at six and earlier because there was no Bastille to storm just before taking August off. Hadn't been built yet. Plus, we couldn't pronounce Versailles without alluding to chandlery.

So the extra sun we'll get scorched into our retinas on our evening commute home next week will be offset by-just as we were getting to the point of waking at dawn's first light-the pitch black cold morning we have to get up in again like January came around again just for the hell of it.

What will Congress think of next? Wait, don't encourage them. They might. I just carbon traded six briquettes for a Mickey Mantle rookie season card.

Bunny on.

Cat and Mouse

2010-02-17T21:53:00.002-05:00

In the sixties and seventies we were known as being a small family who got to alleviate their cabin fever every late winter with a trip to warmer climes.

Not to say that we were wealthy, we weren't. There was, in the way of offspring, only me, and I was ordered to order off the children's menu well after the age of six. Plus, being short for my age, which I still am, hoping that once fifty rolls around, I'll partake of that latent growth spurt, I was commanded to respond in the positive to "under six?" which of course meant a free extra body in the hotel room.

Also not to say that we were blessed with an abundance of leisure time. The old man was a workaholic. But he was an imported European workaholic. That meant he showed up on the continent with the requisite French-style take the month of August off vacation calendar. Not that he ever did. But he could have.

Which got us to the annual trek to Florida. On my mom's insistence, the old man would peel off two of the six weeks he was entitled to, we'd pack the car up and haul down to the sunshine state. Somewhere around 1964 we had found a small motel/efficiency that was clean, had low rates and allowed Mom to save a few dollars a day making breakfast in the room before we hit the beach. We'd have sandwiches at lunch, saving another buck or two and splurge at an all you can eat cafeteria in the evening.

If that sounds squalid, it wasn't. At least to a seven something year old who got dragged out of the Arctic circle (and school, provided I kept a page a day travel journal to pacify my teachers) every March to watch color TV in hotel rooms, swim in pools and scream hysterically when dragged into the ocean (that hasn't changed) by his confused folks. We thought he'd like the ocean.

Ah well.

Things changed. Money got tight and while the old man kept piling on vacation he also piled on a new boss who didn't appreciate time away. Finally the old man got a new assignment with a member of the family as boss and things eased up. He felt he should celebrate. Just like the old days, take the family to Florida for a few weeks. Soak up the sun.

That was all fine with me as I was now slogging through my last year of high school. But what I didn't realize was that, while my mom got it; a last family vacation before dimwit wandered off to college and we finally got the guest room we've deserved all these years, the old man thought we were going to re-live the past in all its glory. He hadn't quite wrapped his brain around my being eighteen.

Off we went. Two and a half days in the car to get to the hotel where I got my own room and got to follow the old man to the beach every morning. Then I'd lay on a towel, walk to the edge of the water a few times, swim in the pool and wind up at the bar before dinner. These were the eighties, I was eighteen if anybody's counting.

I'm sure Dad had a splendid time. We drove past the old motel we used to stay in. We ate at the buffet cafeteria (once) we used to eat in. He reminisced about all the things we used to do. Mom stayed quiet, I silently willed myself to get to the next day.

Not to be ungrateful, but my interests had changed somewhat. In Dad's worldview, I could still be placated with a toy car, bucket and shovel and beach. In my world, hand me a bucket of cold beers, shovel off and lend me the car.

After dinner, the folks would fire up the TV, I'd head off on a long walk until they were good and tired and then go to my room, allowing myself to lock the room to room door.

A couple of days into the last big family vacation, I took off on one of my late evening walks and started to circle the hotel we were staying at. I walked past a teen something talking to her mother, then circled back through the parking lot and ten minutes later passed the teen something still talking to her mother and then hit the beach and fifteen minutes later passed the teen something hanging out on the lanai alone and inquiring if I was going to say "hi" or something or keep passing.

Hi.

Her name was Katherine. She asked me to call her "Kitty" like all her friends did. She was from Chicago. She joined me walking.

I was enthralled. Kitty and I walked. We walked out to the beach, we talked, we went out for coffee and at last this last forced family vacation march looked like it had some promise. I had someone to hang with. Moreover, that someone was a girl!

Kitty and I exchanged room numbers and promised to get a hold of each other the next morning. Then we went home. I'm sure Kitty told her mom about the interesting but unusual fellow she had met the night before. I know I opened my mouth at breakfast just before the old man announced:

"We've never gone to Disneyworld, lets check out today and go."

It would have been impolite to spew pancake and melon in season, but I almost did.

Are you kidding me?

Disneyworld?

Did I tell you who I met last night? I'm not going to Disneyworld, I'm staying here in Kittyland. 'Cause God knows what magic kingdoms that will lead to.

No dice. Teen hormones shunted to the trunk, we struck out for Disneyworld. I got to tell Kitty and hoped against hope that we would return that evening but I knew I was deluding myself.
Not only that, but we took the only rest-stop-free highway in Florida. My over-riding memory of Disneyworld is pissing for five full minutes while the old man bought the economy pak of tickets.

Thanks Dad. We saw Disneyworld, Epcot, Land of tomorrow. I was kinda hoping for Kittyland, Tittieworld, Pussycountry, but THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN WRONG.

Kitty, I hope you're well. Console yourself. You ducked one hell of a bullet.

Bunny on.

Traffic Thoughts

2010-02-04T19:22:00.002-05:00

If your Toyota Echo or Corolla accelerates unintentionally, sit back and enjoy. I've driven one too many four-bangers that couldn't deliver intentional acceleration with gas pedal pushed to the back of the radiator.

Trying on the indigo-blue jeans Thumper bought me last night, I am still wearing a blue oxford button down and suddenly I am my first GI-Joe. If I held one hand in a steady open grasp and the other in a permanent thumb and index finger point, I'm sure I would frighten several people who were kids in the sixties.

Thumper also bought herself some undies, one size larger. She explained that this replaced the pairs that I keep washing and tossing into a dryer set to "inferno." These were pre-shrunk.

She did not appreciate my first guess at her "raison d'achat."

According to the weather forecast, the mid-Atlantic is either in for a winter storm this weekend, or Armageddon. I'm still trying to parse the report's tone.

New Yorkers.
Philadelphians.
Liverpudlians.
Orlandians.
Tampons?

If you're coursing around in a BMW just be aware that I already suspect you of something, somewhere.

Santas Fe?

Hong Kongolese? For that matter.

Out of the blue (the best things usually come from there) I got a writing assignment offer today. Of course I accepted and shot the editor off a snappy note saying so. Also using the wrong possessive therein. This now equates me to the writer's equivalent of an exciteable Chihuahua who pisses himself when petted.

Bunny on.

Sorry, there's a bit of Gore-Tex stuck in your teeth

2010-02-01T19:55:00.003-05:00

Just before the Amtrak train got to New London, the moon came over the horizon and I knew it was going to be one of those nights.

New London is usually where I hang out the right hand side window of the train, looking at the massive General Dynamics submarine pens. These are places where we build the sleek, swift and terribly beautiful machines that, if I were by accident of fate assigned to, would have their interiors completely licked clean of paint as claustrophobia took hold.

Thankfully, I'm too old and just not nautically inclined. Not only won't, but by the hand of Providence, can't go there any more.

The moon, on the other hand, was a different issue.

I knew I had been out of sorts all day, but I ascribed this to getting on a train north to go to see Mom. Not that seeing Mom was a bad thing in itself, it was just the ancillary issues of being treated like a twelve year old and constantly being asked if I was truly relaxed (it'll take two more bourbons, but yes) and why wasn't I hungry (get to that in a minute) that set a number of anatomical functions to overload in the station waiting for the hour-late regional. Now the moon set me straight and I realized that farting quietly during a jackhammer interlude only to have my good wife ask a radius of humans within twelve feet of the source of her voice if they too smelled methane had nothing to do with being stressed about going home.

It was the moon. The full moon that was going to rise and did rise above the frozen Connecticut shoreline that had had me on edge and itchier than I usually am in the dead of winter. Ok, so I exfolliate abnormally between December and March, an event that by end of January has me drawing my back across rough-edged walls in a manner that would put a rutting elk to shame. I thought it was just the humidity, or lack thereof, and then I thought that rutting elk, with onions and a little red wine, would taste just dandy about now. Barring that, I could tear the heart and liver out of the conductor.

Yep. Full moon. Freezing night. My "favorite" allignment of the planets, it was time to go hunting again.

I hate full moons in winter. They constantly remind me of the poor career choices of my youth. Rather than die once and join the undead I opted for the carnal pleasures of temporal existence and made my Faustian bargain to go hunting for fresh hot flesh once a month.

Boy, did I fuck up.

Rather than the creature of the night who has to be invited in, the one who Anne Rice romanticizes in a collection of best-selling novels and films, I'm the monster who bashes through your door uninvited and wholly without formal announcement.

Ladies and Gentlemen; Claude Raines.

Nope. Crash! Growl! Snarl! Screech! Munch munch munch.

I didn't really have a choice. I camped a lot as a kid so I guess this was inevitable. My parents were pretty strict, I didn't get the car a lot so driving down to the French market at midnight was pretty much off the books. I opted for the canopy of the stars in a sleeping bag and don't worry, they're more scared of us than we are of them.

Another useful life lesson on the ash heap. Thanks, Dad.

So here I am, on train 175 to Providence, sorry but I got to get off in Kingston. A bit of motion sickness, you understand. But in reality, while my old buddy Duncan is no doubt burning candles and brushing over the toussled hair of his newest URI RA (Duncan's over two hundred and sixty five years old, he really should stop robbing the cradle and date in his age group), eternally twenty four, I'm tromping through the woods, hoping the Merrill's hold out moisture and looking for some Pat's fan who's had one too many 'gansetts.

This sucks. I hate this. And I hate this time of year. Instead of building a blazing fire, mulling wine and slitting the wrists of the willing, I have to tear through layering to get to the juicy, fleshy parts. And don't I pay? Not only in Persian throw rugs ground down with muck and forest compost, but industrial-Prilosec stomach churning through whatever L.L. Bean has concocted to tame the elements this year.

No no no. No gentle seduction by candlelight for me. No soft sighs, punctuated by sharp inhalations as the carotid is punctured. Rather I've got the unholy screaming, flailing and yelling, dragging them into the woods behind a tree where I can tear their throat out without attracting the undue attention of the Alpha Nu Omega pledge homebound in his screaming-yellow Chevy Cobalt.

No novels devoted to my lost cause. One good song, but I don't want to move overseas, especially now with the Pound to Dollar exchange being as shitty as it is. Guess I'll have to slaughter, call Mom to tell her I'm an hour late and catch a cab to the train station I was supposed to meet her at at seven.

Right, and like I have eighty five bucks to spare. College kids are loaded. With what I pulled out of his wallet, I couldn't get an Awful Awful at the Creamery.

Rawhoo!

Bunny on.

Is That an Icicle or Are You Glad to See Me?

2010-01-06T19:11:00.003-05:00

Found myself in New York City this morning, for once quite by design rather than the happenstance of past years. And found myself there to be cold, quite cold, really fucking cold to the point of gulagian discomfort.

Last night I played some Lewis Black, ranting on about cold so from that perspective I am not going to apologize for the use of colorful invectives. Particularly against this fucking weather.

Mothers, put your children away, lest they Twitter that Mom's reading a blog that talks like they heard teacher when someone opened a door right into her new Corolla.

But to the cold: I laughed at Black's archetypical rant against the weather last night but somehow, although the words and vocal intonation played in my head this morning, it wasn't so funny after all.

FUCK ITS COLD!!

Somewhere around nine I was walking through Times Square waiting for a ball to drop. One would do although two would take some of the additional discomfort of walking out of the picture. I gave in around fiftieth street to barrel into a sporting goods store (they were open) and bought a N.E. Patriots wool cap.

Coupla' reasons. One, I'm a Pats fan. Two, I'm not a not a New York fan of any stripe but thats beside the point. The point being that the Giants are truly, like the Yankees, a team of the Devil. Anyone with the audacity to rob someone of a perfect season just to claim a silly little Super Bowl ring has to be in the employ of a certain B.L. Zebub.

The season was such big news that it even made NPR, not normally known for sports reporting outside of U Penn sculling. I remember Carl Kassel announcing an almost perfect season for the New England Pahtroyuts. Remember, this was NPR. Patriot is a foreign word.

Then the New York Devil-Worshipping Harbinger's of Hell win the Super Bowl.

I think that may have a lot to do with weather today.

At least to my Foxboro state of mind.

Bunny on.

Excuse Me a Moment, I Think the Cat's Lost It

2010-01-05T19:36:00.003-05:00

The cat (who I
adore) but not without unregarded eye
is kept close watch on at night.

Is nuts I fear.

Off her perch she
between the front door and the tree
is running like the mouth on a gossip.

She's gone insane.

Window to couch
again to same then tuck and crouch
to pounce upon the fleck of dust she just killed.

ADD's got nothing on her.

Fuss and worry
the last lost ornament the furry
macrame Santa from the pine she shimmied up last week.

Like Axemen on catnip.

Open the door for puss
but when her paw hits that first frozen step the wuss
makes a sound like "Gneeeiiigh!" and darts back for the rest of Shark Week.

Might be the weather.

No surprise its as cold
as a snowman's convention in an old
but functional freezer in the Antarctic in the middle of June.

And it ain't getting warmer.

Add to that the light
Of which there's none its been straight night
Sun's been scarcer than a lawyer's ethics since last Tuesday.

I've been a little edgy too.

Cooped up in the house
Chasing down a blue flannel mouse
While Mick and Keith, the squirrels, raid the feeder with abandon outside.

Talk about wasted potential.

If the weather doesn't break
And the sun don't come out to melt the top cake
Of ice of the thousand pound block that once was a well running car.

I'm gonna join her naked and furry running around the house.

Whew!

2009-12-31T21:31:00.002-05:00

It's New Year's Eve and I for one am staying up just to see 2009 put to bed once and for all.

Not that in retrospect it has really been a bad year here in bunnyland but the unpredictability of it all has been hell. We all seemed to be skating on the edge of a precipice, never really sure if we could hold our balance or if it would all tip into the void on the other side that we all knew was there but we all feared. That part of it, if nothing else, sucked. If you know me at all, you know that the unknown is one of my greatest fears.

I'm a planner and while plans change and go awry, this year passed has been the planner's worst nightmare in that nothing of precedence could be leaned upon and everything was cut at a moment's notice.

At the stroke of midnight, 2008, I was sitting outside a martini bar in Florida with my beloved, toasting in the new year. This year I'm at home and wishing for that bar, solely to be able to sit outside in reasonable climes. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy, healthy and well but at the same time cold. The vernal equinox can't get here soon enough.

In February of '09, I was in a bar in Minneapolis with a colleague watching the world around us melt down. Couple of bourbons in, I opined that those of us who could hold on to work until the end of the year might just make it. To what I had no idea, but survival from one day to the next was success back then. Come to think of it, it still is.

That same month the folks that pay our bills reckoned that our bills were too high for the times we were living in. A good friend worked hard to argue our case and re-negotiate more favorable rates but I had to cave in on my promise to my staff that "everyone stays employed this year" and somebody had to go.

Sometime in the winter of the year passed, another friend was let go from his position. He and I had worked together years ago, and I launched Caustic Bunny by his inspiration so it was pretty devastating when someone I considered to be at the top of his game was shown the door.

Springtime didn't come quickly enough but once it did I staggered out the front door to connect with the Knitting Circle for the first time in six months. Strange how fellows you used to see daily now show up once or twice a year and you don't care about a damn thing going on other than catching up, wishing everyone well and hoping you're in shape to catch up with them next year, this time.

Summertime was as usual, a delight in that the days were warm, long and happy. I worried about my friend's employment and my other friend's absence from blogging but raised a fair batch of tomatoes in the battle against stinging nettle.

August rolled around and I got on a plane for work and just got off one about ten days ago. Been that kind of six months. During which I found out why one friend had not blogged for months and that another had more than enough to talk about.

The former lost a mother. One day, I will lose mine, the last blood relative I have and I will grieve as she did. I don't know my friend well. I did not send condolences publicly but did think of her and wish her best privately.

The latter landed on his feet and I was never so happy to see where he wound up. Nice going, fellow. Bet it feels pretty good to be the master of the ship. None of this is to minimize the angst of relocating, pulling the family into a new city, working day and night to right a tilting ship but today, in the magazine aisle of my favorite grocer I picked up a copy of the January 2010 issue and, flipping through the pages, thought: Nice work. If anyone can do it, you can.

September found us in Europe, me visiting a dotty old aunt who I most likely won't ever see again. I wish I could have said the same for a dear uncle I lost last year but he passed and while we hadn't seen each other in over a decade, I still miss him.

With November came Thanksgiving and dinner consisted of roast beef sandwiches in a gas station. Not a bad thing, just a bit of poor planning and we more than made up for it by draining the bar of gin a few hours later.

And this Christmas, for the first time ever I got to spoil three generations. Believe me when I tell you that sometimes, Santa Claus is really a crotchety old rabbit with a cigar who happens to adore you.

Been a weird decade that started in a big modern house watching the computer hopefully not melt down and winding up in a more seasoned home watching the Ganges of the Basement. I'd fill in the details but all you really need to do is click on the archives at the right hand side of your screen. Don't worry, no one has ever read this before.

All of which brings us to now, an hour and a half from the next decade. We're still (as far as I know) employed, so there's a chance. There's still food in the fridge, beer in the cellar and a jaundiced view of the world so there's more bunnies out there.

Happy New Year all. Thanks for being part of the ride. Well done. Sympathies and thoughts. Hope you're all around 365 days from now to continue the adventure.

Bunny on.

Remember, You Can Always Return It

2009-12-27T18:01:00.006-05:00

Ok, so if you've been paying attention, Christmas has kinda come and gone. It was that turkey or ham flavored thing that whizzed past last weekend, no doubt while you were trying to shush Aunt Claire at charades.

Remember Aunt Claire? She's a little dotty, doesn't hear too well and the text editor in her brain needs a bit of defragging. Anyway, about two on Saturday, just after the twins have shown up, she mistakes "calling card" in the first "sounds like" round you're playing with the cousins so that the father in law doesn't prematurely begin to yell for dinner and Claire's certain that the word is cuningulus which of course she shouts repeatedly at the top of her leathery lungs.

Hope you had a good one and hope you got what you wanted. I really did mean to post my usual top ten hot Christmas toys about a week and a half ago. Its the one where I make fun of the real top ten Christmas toys and both of you readers wander the aisles of the local Mal-Wart looking for a Sir Pants A Lot action figure or a Fisher Price My L'il Shrinking Trust Fund.

Really I had. It was all laid out from the riffs on Zu Zu's Pets to a few pokes at Disney's Net Pal. But I was tempting the muses until the muses got tired of being tempted and struck back. As such, I was airline-bound and hotel-kept when usually at this time I would be surfing the web muttering things like "that would be a nice gift for me" and "I'd certainly appreciate that under the tree" and winking and nudging Thumper to no good effect.

So we'll miss a year and see you with the hot toys of 2010 which hopefully won't be fly-off-the-shelf items like "a job, finally, for my dad" and "end of the month without juggling too much." Instead, let's not tempt the muses, let's pop them in the tit and offer up the "Top Ten Hot Business Travel Gifts" of this year and years to come.

10) Self-extracting laptop: Because after taking off your shoes, belt, necktie, purse, rolling your socks into a clockwise ball if they're argyle, counter-clockwise if cotton, dumping the cellphone, blackberry, tape dispenser, antacids into trays and bowls, at least the laptop could pop out of its case on some sort of display shelf and not leave you with a shirtsleeve stuck in a zipper.

9) Pre-heated hotel room: Nothing like showing up in the Fargo Holiday Inn Express or Super Eight at ten thirty at night in January and have to stick a room key into a slot to activate power in the icebox before you jump into the sack only to slide off the sheets.

8) Likewise for rental cars: Why is it that the distance between meeting and restaurant in any climate favoring a space below freezing is exactly equal to the point the thermostat begins to open and release warmth into the cabin?

7) And while we're at the rental counter: Ok, so I've been too lazy to sign up for the "dash to your car" program that everybody offers but if we have to suffer in line, can we upgrade a few things? Namely, instead of offering upgrades at every page, can we please just get a few agents that announce "we're putting you in a cheap shitty car that you can return a quarter full, sound ok?" and suggest "you don't want all this tacked on insurance crap, now do you?" and can punch you out into your Hyundai Accident or KIA Killed In Action in seven minutes or less.

6) I don't give a crap about Flipper: So don't post his mug right next to the towels, trying to guilt me into drying off with a facecloth. Here's something really radical. If you insist on pulling down every cotton sheet to pamper yourself with you can pay a five dollar charge per item on top of your bill above and beyond one towel, one facecloth per person per room.

5) Charge this: The only in flight announcements I want to hear are "Please prepare for takeoff", "Kindly turn off your cellphones, Blackberrys, stop trying to pretend that the world will end if you don't get this one call. Sit back, relax and if you're texting by the time this announcement is over, one of the crew will legally punch you in the face", "We are preparing to land, please raise your seatbacks, return your traytops to their upright position and if you go for that text message one more time, a member of the crew will legally blacken your other eye." Do NOT interrupt my forty minutes of sleep from Chicago to Columbus with offers for your frequent flyer mile credit card with available cash transfers and low introductory interest rate offers or I WILL call the office from 35,000 feet.

4) You are limited to one carry-on piece, and one piece that can fit in the overhead. If your overhead piece won't fit there and you damn well know it won't, a member of the crew will allow your overhead luggage to ride in your seat and we'll stuff YOU up there for the duration. And don't expect in flight peanuts.

3) GPS that can read maps: Make decisions, that sort of thing. Not some disconnected, sexless robotic voices that remind me of ex-girlfriends that advise me to pull off on the ramp to my right then exit the left lane four hundred feet and six lanes of high speed traffic hence. Oh, and if you ever take me to an empty parking lot instead of the rental return counter at five thirty in the morning again, I'll back up over your happy ass in the crappy half full rental car with no insurance.

2) Wha-Fu? Can we find a Wi Fi operating system that doesn't dump its favorite settings and make you re-program back to epsedic every time you come across a new server?

1) I'm paying for this seat: After you've been strip searched for contraband jelly beans, snarfed down an Auntie Ann's Chili Express Sbarro Starbucks dashing to gate Q-365, boarded zone 16, can you at the very least occupy the doll-house-sized seat on the aisle you were assigned? That's not to say the plane was over-booked, that's to say the 235 pound donut sucker has gotten the middle seat next to you and is now spilling over into your seat cushion. You're very intimate with the left hand armrest. If you take up more space than should be allotted to a human being. That is to say if you flow over armrests and cascade into the seat cushions of others...

Pay for two seats. Don't like it? Take the bus. But if you routinely get sat alone at one side of a table for two, if you have a couch all to yourself, if your butt cheeks play dixie hanging over your bicycle seat and into your rear wheel spokes, well these are all nature's way, along with the flight crew slathering the door jambs with Crisco in hopes that they can push and pop you into the cabin like a happy little puss-filled zit and openly fret that you'll be able to get out the same way...of telling you you shouldn't have sucked down that second slice at the Duty Free. Now stay out of my seat. I've got forty minutes of sleep to Columbus and if they don't shill another credit card I might get there half awake.

Bunny on.

Catching Up with Some Child Stars

2009-12-10T18:59:00.003-05:00

Where are they now? CB caught up with some seasonal stars who hit it big as kids on the small screen! Folks you may not have thought about in years but who once warmed hearts all year long but especially in the magic month of December.

Pebbles Flintstone: Literally born on the set of the series that ran from 1960 to 1966, Pebbles just celebrated her 48th at home in Trexlertown, Pennsylvania. Remembered as the adorable redheaded baby in the original series, Pebbles re-launched her career in the late seventies with her child co-star and now domestic companion, Bam Bam. The two appeared in a rock band in the second, short-lived series and Pebbles and Bam Bam moved to Hollywood where she began working in advertising. Bam Bam kept pursuing acting but without Pebbles at his side, he found that he wasn't the draw he thought he could be. The couple eventually married, had twins but the marriage foundered shortly thereafter. Pebbles lent her name to a breakfast cereal who's royalties paid the bills. She struggled in her career, which wasn't helped when her now estranged husband agreed to star in a pornography film. A moderate success in the smut business, "Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam!" was unfairly associated with his ex-wife and cost her several promotions.
Pebbles, now single, dated several celebrities, Gene Simmons among them but never formed any lasting relationships. Her self-esteem slipped and she at one point binged on brontosaurus burgers. She ballooned to over 200 pounds before she decided to move back east. Settling in a suburb of Allentown, she adopted exercise, lost her excess weight and became a fitness spokesperson. Now a marketing executive for the Lehigh Valley Velodrome, she can be seen at major cycling events, has been considered as a spokesperson for Jenny Craig and is rumored to be in a relationship with Lance Armstrong.

Cindy Lou Who: When she was no more than two, she caught "Santy" taking away her Christmas tree. Cindy never pursued acting after the original "Grinch" but rather settled in Grand Couteau, Louisiana "as far from freaking frozen Mount Crumpet as I could get." A waitress at the renowned "Catahoula's" in Grand Couteau, Cindy earned a respectable if anonymous living. She once dated Gene Simmons but the relationship faltered in 1982. Cindy is a lifelong member of the NRA and in December 2007 was awakened by the breaking of a Christmas ball ornament on the floor of her small home.

Cindy Lou Who, who was no more than sixty two, crept to the living room to see what was new.

There she met (paroled felon Lewis) Grinch, dressed as Santy Claus, stuffing his sack of goodies up the chimney.

"Santy" she said, "Why? Why are you taking these things that I own? Things that I've worked for. For me alone?"
"Well, my child," the fake Santy Claus lied, "There's a setting on one side of a bracelet that's missing. A diamond or ruby or saphire would be stunning. So I'll put it into my sack and take it to my workshop at the North Pole. I'll fix it up there, and I'll bring it back here."

"Nice try ersatz Kris." Cindy replied "But while fooling me once, twice hurts my pride. I'm older and wiser and on to your game, so pardon me now if your lies come out lame."
"Its been a hard life and I've earned all I keep, so I'm not going to give in to some felon creep."
And with that being said, as Grinch stood by her heater, Lou Who drew out her nine millimeter.

When spring came along, a pine box was Grinch fitted, and later in May Ms. Lou Who was acquitted.

Lucy Van Pelt: Doctor Lucille Van Pelt retires next year after a successful career as a psychologist, self help author and celebrity therapist. In the early eighties she distanced herself from her brother Linus, lead vocalist of "The Blankets" and turned her attention to writing self help books. A degreed psychologist from Johns Hopkins, she turned away from private practice "I wasn't exactly getting rich, a nickle at a time" to write I Can Fix You For Five Cents. The book was a New York Times bestseller and solidified her position as a populist guru of mental wellness. She counseled Schroeder, then conductor of the New York Philharmonic but dropped him as a client when rumors of inappropriate contact surfaced. Other clients include Patty Halperin, the "Peppermint" woman whom she guided through a difficult coming out period in the early nineties. She was romantically linked to Gene Simmons in the mid-nineties.
Dr. Van Pelt established herself in 2001 with her book; Auuugh! What to do When Life Pulls the Football Out from Under You. That blockbuster earned her appearances on Larry King, Oprah, Doctor Phil, Regis and Kathie Lee, The Weather Channel and made Van Pelt a household name in self-help therapy. Dr. Van Pelt has not announced her retirement plans but is thought to be working on a memoir of her life and work, tentatively entitled "I Ought to Knock Your Block Off."

Bunny on.

Michigan J. Cat

2009-12-02T18:21:00.002-05:00

"You made tuna last night."

"How do you know it's tuna?"

"Can opener. Everything else has a pull top. Whitefish, turkey, stew, lamb, or at least the varying re-concentrations of something or others that get pressed into a can and labelled something you can relate to and think we like to eat. They all have pull tops. Except tuna. You have to open it with a can opener."

"You've been paying attention."

"Our relationship, until now, has had limited dynamics. Food, attention, that sort of thing."

"Litter box cleaning."

"Would it make you feel better if I flushed for you?"

"Forget it."

"Uh huh. Anyway, it's been restricted in our interactions. Limited to the simple things. Food, water. So a lot of things repeat. You start to sense patterns. Can openers, pull tabs. I'm sure you see it in your world."

"We call them ruts."

"Hey, you're talking dirty."

"Ok, boring then. But I get it. Patterns."

"Patterns. You look for them. See what they mean. Some mean danger, some mean something good. Some don't mean a thing. They just are."

"Boring."

"I guess. The way you and Colleen used to sit on the couch. You'd watch TV. She'd lean into you. You'd twirl her hair and stroke her neck. It didn't mean a thing. It wasn't dangerous and nobody was getting fed. So I guess that was boring."

Harry looked out the window above the kitchen sink for a moment. "Not boring." he said.

"So what's boring?"

"Not that. That meant that we were comfortable and happy. With each other. With the way things were. We felt safe."

"We sleep."

"So do we. Together."

"That wasn't sleeping. That was a lot of thrashing around. It meant danger to us."

"Before she left her old man, it meant danger to us too."

Boris yawned and let his jaw snap shut. That part of the conversation at least was ended. Before he started talking (the cat was talking, right?) that was a non-verbal signal of annoyance. Harry guessed it still was.

"Before I feed you, can I ask you something?"

"I'm getting hungry." Boris scowled for a moment. "Ok. Go ahead."

"You're talking."

"And you're awake. And you're sober. Satisfied?"

"No no. Not that. I know I'm in control of my senses. But you're talking. You're a cat. Let's leave the larynx aside for a moment. Your brain has the capacity of speech? Of thought?"

"And it's not the behemoth that your brain is? Is that where you're going?"

"It's not the size of a human brain."

"Size matters? Didn't you watch the news last night? Guy got stuck in a cave? That's a brain?"

"He's an adventurer."

"Every day is an adventure. Doesn't mean I stick my head in a fanblade. Remember what I said about spotting patterns? Some are dangerous. Look, let me explain it another way. Your computer; couple of years ago, you moved the big one out, now you're working on the little one?"

"The laptop. So?"

"So the first computers, Eniac I think it was. They were huge. Now they're small. But by all accounts they're better. Just because my brain is smaller, why should it not adhere to that trend?"

"How do you know about Eniac? Don't tell me you read Wikipedia when I'm not home."

"Oral tradition. We don't have a written history. It's all oral."

"So there was a cat at Eniac?"

"Geeks replacing vacuum tubes need friendship too."

Harry put the bowl down. Boris, who had been talking, had been talking as his face drew more and more into a scowl. Non verbal cue, Harry supposed. There was a knock at the door. Boris kept eating. His bowl was on the other side of the small counter that separated the kitchen from the dining room. As such, the kitchen door was in another room and not an immediate visual/aural stimulus. Harry supposed noise alone didn't bother the cat. It was when things started to compound that Boris usually ran away at various speeds. Harry looked over to the door where Jim was looking in and holding his hands up, palms out and fingers extended away from his body.

"What's up." Harry said, suddenly a little more adept at linking body gestures to the spoken thought. He motioned Jim in.

"What's up?" Jim asked.

"Morning. Not a lot. How you?"

"Not bad, hey Boris," the cat kept eating "Wondering if we're running Sunday?"

"Yeah. We are. Seven as usual? Doing twelve?"

"Yep. What're you doing?"

"Talking to the cat."

"Ok."

"He's answering."

"Ok."

"As in answering. Words. Thoughts. Complete sentences."

"You ok?"

"Fine. Boris?"

The cat kept eating, chasing a last flake of tuna around its bowl. He worried it up the steep side and then gravity pushed the morsel back towards his mouth where he caught it on his tongue and drew it in. He sniffed the bottom, then the sides of the bowl and satisfied that nothing was left, sat back on his haunches, licking his chops.

"Boris?" Harry asked again.

The cat angled his head and looked at Harry. Then he looked at Jim. Then back at Harry. He meowed. He got up and walked into the living room where he sniffed at the couch then jumped on to lay down. Harry smiled at Jim.

"See ya Sunday." Jim said, grabbed a banana from the fruit bowl on the butcher block island and walked out the door.

"Sunday." Harry said and said no more. He closed the door behind Jim. He took his own banana and walked into the dining room. He picked up the empty cat dish, walked back into the kitchen and put it in the sink. He filled it with water to soak. He cracked the stem of the banana and peeled the peel back a third of the way down the fruit. He took a bite and walked into the living room where he stood at the couch and looked at the cat. The cat looked at him. The cat said nothing. Harry said nothing, eating his banana. When he was done, he went back to the kitchen, threw the peel into the compost bucket, then walked back through the living room and up the stairs to the bathroom. He stopped for a moment halfway up the stairs and looked at Boris for a moment. Boris was looking out the living room window. Harry continued to the bathroom at the head of the stairs and just as he was closing the bathroom door the cat sang out:

"Hello my honey, hello my baby, hello my ragtime gal!"

Here It Comes Your 19th Nervous Breakdown

2009-11-18T21:42:00.005-05:00

The same Saturday morning ray of sunlight that warmed Harry's feet was heating Boris' entire body. He sat in the valley of the comforter, licking the length of his hind leg. The leg extended out at an angle to the cat's body. It reminded Harry of a ballet dancer's stretch. Up until the point that the dancer licked the length of his leg.

"Hi." Harry said, then held his breath. The cat kept licking. Harry exhaled slowly and stretched in relief, nudging Boris out of his comforter valley. The cat gave him a dirty look and then settled into an adjoining valley, still in full sun. Harry slid out of the left side of the bed. That had always been his side and even now, Colleen a memory of warmth on his right, he refused to stray or wander. He slept on the left, got into bed on the left, got out the same way. He walked to the bathroom to piss. Then he walked back to the bedroom to make the bed. He wasn't getting back in. The day had started, time for coffee and the morning paper and whatever else he could come up with to pass the time. He started straightening the sheets and comforter.

"Something wrong with my corner of heaven?" Boris asked.

Harry looked at the cat. He said nothing.

"Cat got your tongue?" Boris asked and then shook his head while expelling air out of his mouth and nose. It looked to Harry like he was sneezing other than Boris baring his fangs at mid-expellation. "Ok, so we haven't gotten laughing down to reaction you can comprehend." Boris said, looking at Harry with one eyebrow arched. Which was to say one top of eye collection of whiskers higher than the other eye.

"Fuck." Harry said.

"Can't. You had that taken care of. On top of which I am very much not interested in you. I'd say heterosexual but that's so...I don't know, sapio-centric? So why didn't I answer you when you addressed me this morning? Hmm. You'd have what? Sprung out of bed like a madman, launching me at the ceiling fan with aplomb? Dude, you've got to remember the six to one weight ration you've got."

Harry answered "Fuck."

"I see we're off to a good start. Tell you what. You go downstairs and get some coffee going. Clean out my bowl and serve 'breaky' like you usually do. I promise I'll just rattle along in something you can understand until you get settled. Then we can chat."

Harry looked at the cat. Boris yawned, then snapped his jaw shut. The cat looked at Harry and meowed loudly.

"Ok. Ok. I'll get you breaky." Harry said.

Is Fault Moose and Squirrel

2009-11-06T19:02:00.005-05:00

"What?" Harry swore he heard Boris say.
Then Boris got up, stretched, yawned-snapping his teeth shut the way he did when he was annoyed-and walked away. Harry stayed laying on the couch, not having moved other than hurriedly pushing the mute button on the remote on the off chance that Boris hadn't finished his thought. He didn't. That didn't happen. Boris was either in the kitchen-again-or had gone upstairs. Harry turned the sound back on and wondered which number glass of Maker's Mark he was on. But he wasn't counting. At least he had promised himself not to count tonight. It was Friday, the week was over and he had worked hard to get it all done, get to the end of it and leave the office with no regrets and a few tasks for Monday morning. Tonight was get comfortably numb night with little expected other than a face-plant into bed around midnight, not counting having taken its toll and advanced Harry's war on insomnia.
Boris' affront wouldn't help that but Harry wouldn't dwell on it. He'd ignore Boris until the morning came. Then he'd face him down and ask him what the big idea was.
Harry was sure Boris had a reason. He always did. Even on nights Boris went out. Nights that it was raining and cold and all Harry could think about was filling his glass against the chill, Boris would insist on heading out, always having a reason but never sharing it with Harry until he got home. Couple hours later Boris would check out what Harry was watching or look at the cover of the book he was reading or just toss a glance into whatever room Harry was in-except the bedroom-to check out Harry and if he was ok.
Harry was getting better as the days accumulated into weeks and the weeks into months. It had been a bunch of months, eleven whole and then some, since Colleeen had left-she had to but that only satisfied Harry's intellect, never his heart-and Harry had stopped running past her house at nights, he'd stopped running altogether.
It wasn't practical, Colleen staying in town. She could get work just as easy in whatever city she wound up in and she and Harry would be safe as long as they stayed away from each other. Sure, they were safe. But that was here and now and some day Paul's prison sentence would end or some parole board would believe his "model" put on and he'd be out and the danger would start again. Better this way with her gone and Harry not having a clue where. Paul could hit him all he wanted and he'd get all Harry knew which was nothing.
So she left. She was gone and Harry trading his running shoes in for a drinking glass which he'd drain a couple of times a night, every night, just to settle down and be able to sleep. Except Friday nights when he promised to lose count and he most often did. Those were the nights of reckless abandon that sometimes wound up with Harry dropping into bed around ten thirty and sometimes wound up with Harry talking to Colleen-even though she was long gone-out loud and no doubt annoying Boris to no end. There was the drunk bastard, chattering away to his long lost love like there was no tomorrow. If he had balls, he'd have run away with her. But something kept him in his comfort zone of manageable house, ok job, town he felt in place in and me hanging around most days.
Try going through what I went through was what probably ran across Boris' mind most Friday nights.
It started as a hard spot. Something that should not have been where it was, hanging around her kidney, 'round mid-back. It grew. She complained. If you touched it, ran your hand over it she'd yelp and positively screech if you gave it a squeeze. Harry talked to the Doc for a long time and they decided, once they knew what it was, to let it go, to let her go because there was no hope, there was only cutting and sutures and hanging around trying to heal while the stuff spread to another organ. So they let it be, let it take it's course which it did and she died within two months. That was eight months ago. Harry had had them both around the house for three months after Colleen left to keep him company and then she left too. She died and now it was him and Boris, a widower and an ex-something or other-Boyfriend? Paramour?-hanging out together for company.
Harry looked at his empty glass and wondered how many, really how many, he had had. Couldn't be that much. He spoke:
"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country."
He didn't slur any of the words.
"You're not that drunk." Boris called from the kitchen.
"K, thanks." Harry answered and it was then that he sat upright and snapped the tv off.
Boris was in the kitchen and Harry had to see him. Just had to. He righted the pillows he had been laying on and walked in to see Boris sprawled out on the floor. His front leg was under his head and his back legs were splayed. His tail twitched. There was marmalade fur in the corner of the small galley kitchen, Harry picked it up between two fingers and let it float into the sink. Boris was riotously red as Natasha had been black and white patched. If they had mated, Harry was anxious to see what kind of excitement of color the kittens would be. But Harry never got that chance and neither did Boris and neither did Natasha most of all.
"Did you just say something?" Harry asked.
Boris stared at him. He closed his eyes for a moment in that comfortable way that cats do when they relax or can't be bothered with you.
"Ok. Thanks." Harry said and put the glass in the sink next to Boris' wad of fur and the dinner dish. He looked back at Boris.
"You think you're alone here?" Boris asked. "You think you're the only one who's lonely, who's missing some deeper part of himself, who is wondering what's next?"
Harry just looked at him.
"The game is awful. Sox are down three and they're not going to come back tonight. C'mon Harry, its the mid-season Red Sox blues. You're tired. Go to bed."
Harry continued to watch Boris as he got up, walked past the dry food bowl, glance at it then continue to the middle of the dining room floor where he sat down and looked back at Harry.
"Fuck." was what Harry said. And nothing more.
"I miss Tash. You miss 'Leenie. We'll talk about it in the morning." He rose and walked into the living room, jumped up on the couch and got into a sleeping tuck.
It was probably ten minutes later. Harry couldn't be sure. He didn't much care but he turned the kitchen light off, checked that the back door was locked-it was-and walked up the steps to bed. He stopped three quarter ways up. He didn't turn. He just stopped, putting both feet on one step and breathing slowly. When he finally made his mind up to take the next step Boris called from the couch:
"One. You've been nursing that one glass all night. And you didn't finish. Just in case you were wondering."
"Talk in the morning." Harry said and went to bed.

Never to Glub or Glurk Again

2009-11-03T19:07:00.005-05:00

Bill the fish didn't make the day and now I'm pondering how elaborate a funeral he's to be given. Staring at me with those huge fish eyes, he doesn't look much different than he did in life other than he's completely motionless and his head is cocked at a somewhat awkward angle.

It was cocked that way a lot. The cats regarded Bill's home as a handy place to hydrate up with flavored water on the way to the nightly coaxial cable chew. It was kind of a symbiotic relationship, they'd slurp at his tasty fishbowl water, he'd lure them even deeper into the narrow-necked bowl hoping to get them cranially stuck and panicked with some sort of space-cat helmet now girdling their fuzzy necks. For once, they proved to have slightly larger brains than I usually give them credit for as, up until now, they still after several nights in the attic, outside, under the bathtub, in the garage, don't get the idea of doors that can only be operated with opposable thumbs.

But back to Bill. Burial at sea is out of the question in that one of my favorite bike paths passes by a sewage treatment plant. I say this only in that next April when I am sprinting past the thing that smells of a thousand farts, one particulary noxious whiff will no doubt be the remains of Bill and the last meal of bloodworms being digested in the thing that I was arrogant enough to flush him down to. Nope. Ain't gonna happen.

Digging him into the flower bed is more like it. I like the juxtaposition of burial of an aquatic on land for we are forever tossing our flotsam into their homes, fitting that they dump on ours. We bury at sea. Do you ever come across a fish buried on land? And I don't mean last night's Yellowfin which is primarily buried at stomach and if you follow it logically through it goes right back to burial at sea anyway. Nope, I'm going to ask Bill to push up some daisies for me.

The last time I buried a pet, it was my favorite cat; Crittur. She lasted a good 18 years but got a little Bill the Cattish, dotty and unkempt in the last few months. I remember her last morning, when she was weak and sprawled out on the living room floor, sprawling being the only physical act left that she could manage. I put her on a warm towel, brought her food and water, almost turned the TV on for her but knew it would wind up on the History Channel which she hated so thought the better of it. When I got home from work, indeed all that was left was a rigored corpse that kind of looked like a cardboard flat of a tabby.

She too wound up in the flowers as I remembered all the nights we used to play, "Catch me if you can" long before the popular movie of the same name. Crittur liked to go out in the evenings which was fine as long as she came back in before (my) bedtime. She mostly didn't so we had an evening ritual that consisted of me, a flashlight, a cat, and several scurries along the house foundation, behind the arbor vitae, up the rock garden to the flat spot on the dry stone wall she'd quizically stare at me from until I got within two feet of her. Then she'd drop off the back side, trot off into the woods beyond wondering why, after the eleven hundredth time, I didn't get it.

We played this game a couple of times a night over the course of a few hours and eventually Crit tired and wandered up to the back door and meowed to come in. Couple of nights, usually in the middle of summer she'd figure she was better off in the cool of the woods and I'd go to bed a little on edge. I always found her in the morning tuckered out herself. Seems that sleeping in the wild involves keeping one eye open, far from the slumberous abandon of the foot of the bed or sprawled alongside the kibble dish. She'd drag herself in, grab some chow and flop on the couch for the day to catch up on Z's while I went off to work pondering why if we are at the top of the food chain, the cat is watching Animal Planet re runs while I'm at a job I hate?

We had a rabies outbreak for a few years back then, which I why I got pretty insistent that Crittur haul her furry ass indoors at night. Racoons mostly got infected so you had to watch yourself around the trash and at the edge of the woods. I was out playing Catch Me if You Can with Crit one night when I thought she had given herself away by crashing through a small copse of trees and underbrush that separated my upper back yard from my lower one. I was ready to receive her in open arms when the biggest raccoon I've ever seen too close crashed past the last hosta. Shooing him did no good so I threw some two by four off cuts from a porch rebuild, a hammer or two and finally the contents of my recycle bin at him. Nonplussed, he gave me a dirty look and retreated into the brush. Crittur was of course right behind me watching and wondering what the great upright idiot was up to this time. I explained the yard o' trash to the neighbours the next morning, saying I was on a drunken angry bender. Seemed less embarassing than "a big raccoon scared me."

Good night Bill.

Bunny on.

Save Me the Eleven Grand

2009-10-14T18:40:00.004-05:00

Following is full disclosure of all items reviewed by the Caustic Bunny for commercial or other gain. In accordance with upcoming FTC regulations regarding endorsements in blogs herewith is presented full and complete disclosure of all items reviewed, endorsed or otherwise commented upon.

The Knitting Circle: Presented to this site in consideration of hundreds of miles run and hours of dirty jokes, deprecatory comments and sports wrap ups, The Knitting Circle does not financially, morally or even socially support this site. In fact, most of the members don't even remember the web link. Their reaction to this blog can be summed up in one of the Circle commenting that "reading the blog would be like looking in your underwear drawer."

The Old Man: Presented to this site in consideration of forty years of coexistance under what can be at best called spiteful detente. While The Old Man did financially support the site's creator for years, said creator did high tail it out of the house as soon as he could add up the sum of job+car+apartment. Truth be told, the Old Man had been dead four years before this site stumbled upon the idea of a literary dish best served cold.

Harry Moss: Presented to this site in consideration of twenty five years as a fictional character beginning as some ex-military action-adventure hero in the eighties to today's average joe with a closet full of anxieties spilling out on the bedroom floor. Nonetheless, still a pretty all around decent chap who wants to do the right thing even though he's pulled or wanders off the straight and narrow every now and again. Harry feels he is deeply owed for a particularly erotic chapter written and edited out on the advice of a good sister ("for five chapters he's barely unclipping her bra and now this??") but in truth had this site's creator never breathed life into Harry he never would have had that fleeting erotic interlude to begin with. As they say, 'tis better to have loved and lost than never to have imprinted your tatoo into the hotel bed sheets at all.

My referred to readers: Often as fictional as Harry, I'm sure you're out there somewhere. Hate to break this to you, but your fat envelopes of well-creased twenty dollar bills have failed to arrive for the 51st month in a row. Hence I owe you little but another post.

Thumper: Presented in consideration of if this doesn't work, I'm going hermit. While I owe Thumper untold fortunes, I am on an installment plan.

Assorted flotsam, jetsam, detrius and odds and ends: Hereto referred are presented in consideration of too many shitty days at the office and the occasional fishbowl martini that I should stop typing by. Anything anecdotally referenced or appearing as a supporting character or element to any of the above has contributed nothing financially to this site and as a matter of fact, if my time were money, they'd be on the hook for making me read their instruction manual.

The FTC and the greater current government they are an element of and hence represent: In consideration of not a damn thing since on the one hand they do not drive any readers, commerce or interested in Caustic Bunny franchisers my way but on the other are more than happy to extort eleven thousand dollars from me if a free soda "doesn't taste like so many turds floating in brackish water" the FTC can have a jolly old time finding me for "violations" akin to the traffic ticket on the 30th of the month. As to their larger sponsors, it is herewith declared that while no TARP, stimulus nor other funds were, are or will be accepted by this site, this site's creator will be ponying up way too fucking much for support of larger sponsor.

So I would suggest you all start disclosing pretty damn soon, whatever czar you are this week.

Bunny on, shot across the bow-wise.

Strange Beginnings

2009-10-06T18:31:00.003-05:00

Before Harry ever ran a step, with the Knitting Circle, up the street from the soused reveller he had just spilled beer on, away from his responsibilities at times, he played soccer.

Twice a week. In a pickup league that met noontimes one day and after work another to play either with publishing types for a friendly game or Jamaican and Indian engineers for an equally friendly game but a game where it was understood that the visiting publishing types were going to get shellacked by an NBA-like final score even though it was soccer.

That beautiful game that frequented goals like Harry went dancing. That is to say not a lot.

Harry began to play at noon because he had moved from his old job of selling printing to his new job of managing the magazine and a lot of the book's staff played. Harry felt it would bond him into the team, professionally and personally on the field.

So from a relatively sedentary lifestyle Harry jumped into chasing a ball up and down a pitch for ninety minutes mid day and realizing that airport to rental car counter steeplechase was not, in fact, any kind of a fitness program, long term or otherwise.

Selling print had consisted of on-the-road rallys alongside sitting in buyer's offices going "mmm, mmm" while they complained of high prices and asked for rate reductions. It also consisted of sitting in designer's offices going "mmm, mmm" while they complained of the press crew laying down an image that obliterated the thrust of the main image on the title page and where were the artists in these days of high speed production. Only later, in the (rental) car ride back to the airport did Harry articulate the "otherfucker! otherfucker!" conclusions to his daylong preambles.

Playing at noon also taught Harry that those years smoking were in fact, as he suspected when he quit to hack up God knows what for weeks, not at all a good idea as well as the fact that his quads needed to do more now than merely hold a napkin.

One night, post-game found Harry opening the last of his boxes of boxes of boxes of books to put in the last available bookcase in the new house he had moved into. The pain in his legs forced him to lie on his side and ladle the last of the volumes onto the shelf, all rather soup-like. Unable to kneel as one would normally, Harry was momentarily grateful for the lapse in his Catholicism.

Mike was the copy chief at the magazine Harry now managed and on the noon hours when Harry played, Mike ran on the cinder track that for a portion, circled the soccer pitch. You never could tell how many people could get away to play so games were always whatever half of any even number of people that showed up against the other half with the odd player switching sides after goals. It was confusing but so was the day job at times and at least here they were all outside. Harry tried to enlist Mike into the game from time to time as he ran by alone. You could always tell it was Mike, a loping gait with arms that didn't so much pump as they swung forward. A motion that made Harry think of Mike as he ran by of an attorney serving endless writs to the poor clerks of his poor opposition.

"Here's our request of the witness list." "Here's our motion to suppress." "Here's our recall of evidence." "Here's my subpoena of your phone number. I don't suppose you'd be free for dinner once this is all over?"

Mike was never that attorney but he was Mike.

"Play a few with us, Mike?" Harry shouted to Mike as he ran by.

"Morally object to a game that forbids use of my hands." Mike answered and continued, leaving Harry in agreement for that was his initial issue with dating.

In summertime, Mike ran the track alone or with Lou and Jack. In wintertime when the track had first washed half away in autumn rains and then frozen solid into semi-permanent tank traps, Mike and Lou and Jack ran on the streets. Harry, heading out for lunch would either chance upon them, they talking the last breaths of the football season and leaving tracks that doubled back upon their out and back route in the fresh snow, or just come across their tracks again turning one hundred eighty degrees for the run back to the main office.

Soccer kept up for a little over a year as a regular pick up game. Then Harry began to notice that the teams kept shrinking. From the eighteen that showed up to play nine on nine to the ten for five on five to six for three on three to Harry and Andrew kicking a ball back and forth for forty five minutes. Then it ended entirely as the twenty somethings who thought this was a great benefit at their first job moved on to their second job to claim signing bonuses and a semi-office for a great benefit. It ended. Soccer ended as spontaneously as it had begun which was fine except that it left Harry standing at the edge of the track looking at an empty field one day as Mike ran by.

"I saw Jim from IT running the streets." Mike said. "You could pick up with him if you're interested. In fact, the two of you could tag along with us. We're not fast."

Neither was Harry...

Got Out of the Tree for All the Wrong Reasons

2009-10-06T17:50:00.003-05:00

A short observation of the human animal would be thus:

There are days it seems we employ our-unique to the animal kingdom-ability to oppose thumbs to each and every finger of our hands for the sole purpose of shoving bananas up our ass.

Bunny on.

Streetlights

2009-09-26T09:02:00.000-05:00

Raisins and Coal

2009-09-26T09:00:00.000-05:00

No More Running for the Shelter

2009-09-16T18:33:00.005-05:00

Harry had flipped the alarm on, then off, then on again when he figured two red LED dots meant it was post meridian and the alarm was on, he had somehow confused himself just before falling asleep and switched the alarm off. Apparently convincing himself that one LED was enough, two were overkill and would piss the radio off.

He woke up at 3.58 am nonetheless, pissed that he didn't oversleep because he had had a pretty good list of excuses cooked up for missing the race. None of which the team would believe but none of which would incent then to jump in a car for the hour and a half ride to Harry's, like the hour and a half ride he was about to make to the starting line of the marathon relay.

The relay was a team affair; twenty six point two miles run in five unequal legs that the team had named after various past girlfriends. Tanya: Short sweet and over with far too soon. Kathy, long and hot but with irritating switchbacks and the dissatisfaction of having run it but still not being finished. Harry, due to his training regimen having consisted of being the last group to board an airplane and smuggling Cuban cigars into the country, took the shortest leg. Lisa: Fun but you could walk away when you were finished.

Jamie, the first leg, the one you could complete but never quite get over, started at seven in the morning and Gary, the team's captain insisted that the team meet up at six thirty for what was either going to be a pep rally or bitch session. Probably the latter for standing in a parking lot in shorts at sunrise, the day's satisfaction being having found a dark grotto to pee in. So Harry packed the truck up at quarter to five and found the race staging area and dark grotto first.

They were, or had been The Knitting Circle on any other day. Harry, Mike, Lou, Jim and Gary who all worked at or near the magazine that ate Harry's brain on a monthly basis, made the time to run a few miles at lunch three times a week, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Somebody at a sister publication had stared out the window once and cooked up the team name derisively, no doubt in lieu of getting their column in on time and correctly spelled. But Knitting Circle wasn't punchy enough for the race or they chose to preserve the anonymity of their clique or they were just embarrassed by the name, so they called themselves Mother's Little Helpers.

Partly the name came from Harry who was eroding the Stones' in his CD drive the first time they entered the relay. Partly too, it came from the race committee's rejection of their first maternally inspired team name. That didn't stop Mike from explaining the latter origins of the team name to the Vegi-Juice gal, leaving her open-mouthed and Mike without a free sample.

Part of the fun and adventure of the relay was the obscurity of the handoff points. As the race coursed through four towns, there was plenty of opportunity for tours of seedier neighborhoods of each and the organizers didn't skimp. They plotted streets you'd normally do fifteen miles over the limit on and planned handoffs in parking lots frequented by short skirted men and women just a few hours earlier than the runners. The other part of the fun was getting from one handoff point to the next, the roads at that hour being basically filled with early morning church-goers on the way to service, not understanding what a bunch of guys wearing underwear in a Volkswagen Jetta were doing honking at them for driving just under the limit. Truth be told, the guys had no idea where they were going and had Lou simultaneously driving, reading the race organizer's directions and checking them against the GPS on his iPhone. Not that it occurred to any of the four men in the car to actually pull over and ask for directions. No, they were going to find this thing.

The most fun of the thing though was the fact that they were all together again, The Knitting Circle. Once upon a time they had been an inter-office phone call or walk down the hallway apart. Once upon a time they had all given their best to a common cause and while their careers had merged into the slow lane, there was the satisfaction of a job well done for whomever might read their magazine and the camaraderie of five friends working together.

That was gone, the magazine sold and they had wound up everywhere from self employed to hamster on a corporate wheel to the backwaters of academia. This was one of only two times per year they would all see each other again. Hands were shaken, gifts exchanged, families caught up on and somewhere just before the starter's gun went off the patois of dirty jokes, sarcastic comments, caustic observations returned like it had never left and for a few hours on a Sunday morning as the clouds blew away and changed the day from a cool, comfortable race venue to a Pillsbury 10K bakeoff, it was as if nothing had ever changed.

Good race. Same time next year boys?

Bunny on.

My Dinner of Andre

2009-09-16T18:05:00.004-05:00

Along with shorter days, cooler nights and me gluing falling leaves back on to trees and shouting to nature that green warm light was just fine with me, who the fuck needs all these colors signalling our insane march towards winter, a sure sign of fall, post-Xanax of course is that Wednesday nights are quiet nights alone.

Thumper is out and won't be in until its time for a glass of grape juice no doubt left in the sun a little too long and I park myself in front of a blog that has tsk tsk'd me for three months, disapproving of photos passing as a post.

One of the wonderful things about Wednesday's is the absolute, and I mean absolute quiet of the evening. We're in a little corner of Swellsville next to two sweet older folks who roll out at five a.m. for part time jobs, their way of extending a firm middle finger at natural ageing, but roll up and call it a day sometime around seven, their way of compromising on their terms. Street noise is at an absolute minimum which is to say I'm bothered by the cat rolling over on her other side in the middle of the road.

Nights like tonight I can hear my inner voice and tonight it sounded a lot like Wallace Shawn. This of course frightened the shit out of me because I want to be heard a little more like a cigar smoking misanthrope who tells good dirty jokes than a frumpy writer who's happy with a crusty coffee cup that's still there in the morning. Not that there's anything wrong with wanting stability and consistency, i.e. waking up next to the remote, the cigar and the tumbler versus a dyed-blue, black-haired-naked female and where'd that freaking chicken come from??

It's just that cold coffee and a dirty tablecloth aims too low. Next thing you know you're playing gnomes and dinosaurs as opposed to say, the penultimate Puck.

Now I can't project anything than the rambling, scattered musings about the general absurdity of things into your brains. If the voice sounds like James Earl Jones, I can live with that and even adopt a mantra of "Baseball, Ray" for a few. But please chase Rex the Green Dinosaur and Stuart Best out of the cranial cavity if you please and at worst, supplant it with Thomas Haden Church.

Even if you have to go back to "Wings."

Bunny on.

Brandenburger Tor

2009-09-08T21:43:00.002-05:00

Unter Den Linden

2009-09-08T21:43:00.000-05:00

Mit Fahrradt.

Tex Mex

2009-09-08T21:41:00.000-05:00

Just under the Friedrichstrasse S bahn.

Go figure.

Scattered Across Labrador

2009-09-06T18:42:00.002-05:00

Short as they come tonight 'cause from my body clock's point of view it's approaching two a.m.

And my body clock is that which regulates and pretty much dictates that "man, I'm hungry for nachos right about now" or "Geez, could use a beer" and things fall into place pretty quickly or Mr. Body Clock begins to shut down vital functions.

More about flying across multiple time zones sometime later. Right now I am glad to be home with a good stiff drink and to be in a place where smoking is not vying to be an Olympic event.

Dammit, the only place in Europe where you don't wind up stinking of cigarettes is the airport. Most European airports are smoke free so Goddamit if you're going to go cold turkey in Berlin, London, Madrid or whereever the hell you may find yourself, head down to the local airport and don't come home until you've kicked the habit!

Otherwise, assume that once you've left the premises upon which your plane has come in on, you're going to stink like an ashtray. And that's not just me talking. I ran into a gent this morning, complaining that his clothes stunk like cigarettes. Won't tell you his name, but he plays in a band called "Daughtry" and of course I had no idea who he was other than a very nice guy who had a real good sense of his place in the universe.

He liked stinking of cigarettes less than I did. Cheers. Try hanging out in the Duty Free shop.

So we're home again, Thumper and I after a quick getaway. Once I get out from under jet lag (it's worse for me coming home) and the avalanche of work, I'll make sure to post something that might actually amuse or entertain.

'Till then, I still seem to be on a time zone more condusive to reindeer herding.

Bunny on.

Bunch of Bitchy Little Bunnies

2009-08-08T12:38:00.003-05:00

Business has taken me to some strange places. I once began to book Greyhound tickets to Toledo only to be admonished that my destination actually required a passport and a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish.

I had one and learned the other on the fly.

These days I'm mostly on trains in and out of New York City from time to time, each time more open-mouthed and goggle-eyed at the controlled pandemonium that that place is.

Pretty strange from a former inhabitant but I haven't forgotten that the constant fantasy I played out when I lived there was someday not living there.

Someday is here and I am grateful for my little corner of Swellsville, Fungus County.

Not that I dislike New York, I'm just happy to walk down a street where major drama isn't playing itself out with every third couple I pass. Geez, its exhausting keeping up with the fifty bucks she got from Benny the Sailor to get straight and the complete bitch to her coworkers when she doesn't even know how to add tax percentages up to being pretty sure we left it in the hotel safe but maybe I'd better call the 800 number.

Not to mention the detrius. You find, on the streets of Manhattan, stuff that were you to come across it in any other place in America, wouldn't make a lick of sense. Yet here all you need to do is look around and some sort of explanation takes form.

Playing cards down a subway grate? Three card monte hastily disposed of as a cop pulls up slowly. Guy with fourteen rolls of felt on a handcart? Fashion district. Mom, Dad, sister, brother, cousin, brother in matching tee shirts, flip flops and polarized sunglasses? DesMoines; welcome to Times Square. Everything else that's weird? Welcome to on going performance art.

Now and again though, I get thrown a curve. Well, a curve in an assignment I really wasn't expecting but, bunny being bunny, it conforms to "the way things tend to work out given your luck."

That is to say last February I was off to a place within earshot of the Canadian border where isolated thoughts snapped off frozen in your brain. I remember joking with a colleague as we jumped up and down, frantically trying to drive blood into the frozen extremity of our liver, that with my luck I'd probably wind up in Florida in August.

Ha.

Ha ha ha.

I just got my next gig.

Florida.

So hats on and hydrate, I'm off to 'gator country for a bit. Just bought a pair of melt-proof shoes off the 'net and tonight we're watching Ice Station Zebra. Over and over.

This of course all means one thing: If you live anywhere north of Fargo, look for me next January. Fidel, Raoul, set up the guest bed in July.

Humming "On the F*****g Road Again";

Bunny on.

A Bad Diet and No Exercise Killed the Radio Star

2009-07-20T18:40:00.005-05:00

Billy Joel was playing when I snapped on the car radio for the drive home which was fine except that I keep it tuned to the local college, alternative rock, shit nobody else listens to NPR station.

So naturally I thought one of two things, perhaps both simultaneously since it had been a long, synapse-disconnecting day:

1-Billy Joel is dead.

2-The radio has re-programmed itself to a station that plays songs it actually knows and can hum along with.

Not that there's anything wrong with the local alternative rock, shit nobody else listens to NPR station but there's a reason they play the music you won't here everywhere else.

Everywhere else has no interest in the latest release of Finger Sniffing Bolsheviks, or the Pretenders cover that Piss Nanny just came out with or the interpretation Glorious Band of the 17th of September has of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik done with bent saws and garbage can lids.

Every once in a while I'll flip back to commercial top forty radio that plays things that human beings on this planet listen to and have heard before. Then of course the ersatz shock jocks cut the song short to talk about their underwear or lure a caller into confessing an affair and I've snapped it back to NPR and Carl Kastle's lisp. Sometimes I have no choice and I'm riding in with Bonaduce cursing Shirley for not taking the little bastard over her knee more often. The local alternatives share a bandspace right next to an all-news service and the NPR talk station is wedged up against a classical outlet the way you were next to fat Aunt Tessie at Easter services. So unless you'd like your ears to go schizophrenic between the Decembrist's and hog futures or Cokie Roberts musing why the fuck there are different viewpoints in America interspersed with Chopin you should know the title to but were getting under Charlotte's sweater that particular day in Music Appreciation, you're back to Bonaduce's underwear and wondering if Shirley had had a man like you around, would he be president now?

Thankfully I've also got a CD player in the car and a copy of Teach Yourself Spanish which I'm employing for my linguistic betterment.

I'm all the way up to "Dos cervezas frigas por favore" and feel myself accomplished enough to head back to Madrid.

Bunny on, mi amigos!

Hot Dogs, Pretzels, Beer and an Apple for the Teacher

2009-07-09T18:47:00.005-05:00

Every early August when I was a kid, we'd, in the midst of our summers of doing absolutely jack-all other than being a kid, catch a glimpse of it.

A cold, wet, dark and ominous monster. Usually showed up in the paper, sometimes on TV, occasionally in a poorly printed sign taped to the inside of the stationers' store. Suddenly the escapist thrill of pooling six kid's Hot Wheels tracks together to tack down a REAL quarter mile down Church Street stopped like Twin Mill when it ran off the edge of the track right into and subsequently under Mr. Hamilton's LeSabre bias ply.

It was the beast that was the first "Back to School" advertising campaign.

The old man would catch it by the tail and lead it around the house. He made up a melody he chanted at the top of his lungs which is amazing since he seldom ever made up anything other than enough blame to go around. Ever the paradigm of fun, he'd chant "Back to School" with an enthusiasm he could only have developed while being beaten during Catechism classes. It drove me fucking insane and at first I'd cover my ears, so he shouted louder. Then I'd hide in my closet, so he'd find me. Then I went outside so he followed until the neighbors barbequeing next door gave him a look over cold beers that could only read "never come to a drinking establishment we frequent." He got that point and went back inside for a pilsner drunk solo.

Like I said, it was early August. He'd suggest at dinner that, in preparation for the blessed first week of September I should maybe crack my books now. Let's say, an hour of study every night in the first week of August, two hours a night the second week, three the third, four the fourth and so on. Like I said; ever the paradigm of fun. At first I looked at him funny and he'd go on to the disintegrating state of the world that was the nineteen seventies. Later in life when I developed the power of speech that was bleeped on commercial radio, I believe "are you out of your fucking mind?" was the response du jour. Ate a lot of August dinners in my room, I did.

Well, I'm his age now and its July. July. Ju-fucking-ly and we just read our first "Back to School" ad in the color circular and as much as I'd like to torture Generation echo boom x-y whatever the fuck they call themselves, I can't bring myself to break out into a few bars of "Most Wonderful Time of the Year." It's too early and you've got to wait at least until the first full week of August when even fourteen-somethings who have spent the post-solstice catching flies in their open mouths can palpably feel the fear of the oncoming school year.

Then, and only then, when they've come to the self realization that sensible shoes and scratchy cordouroys are just weeks away, do you pounce with a suggestion of an hour of study a night, then two hours and so forth.

Shit, if I sprung that idea now, in July, I'd suggest an hour of study a night, then two hours and sometime around October our twelve year old could go to college!

It was suggested that as ominous and foreboding as the back to school harbinger was for children, its even worse for the adults that teach them. Now I can accept this...up to a point. After all, yes, a lot of parents look at September as an opportunity to dump Pibbles and Bing-Bing into someone else's lap and let that someone swab their foreheads with damp cloths as they come out of the DT's of no more Cartoon Network at two with a big bag of Barbecue Lays. I get that. But only up to the point of when it was mentioned to me that in mid-July teachers are only seven weeks into vacation and have barely decompressed.

I reached back to my childhood for a familiar phrase to that: "Are you out of your fucking mind??"

Seven weeks into anything other than the day job and, excepting prison, I think I'd get up in the morning and piss myself with joy. Oh and it's only August and there's three weeks of Depends ahead of me? Give me a break you haven't decompressed. I'm decompressing getting into aircraft seating group Z, knowing I'm sitting next to a two hundred pound smoker from Tennessee who's going to hack up a lung in economy somewhere over the north Atlantic!

So who the hell knows how a "Back to School" ad is going to affect a teacher in early July if it pisses me off. Maybe they'll take it in stride as an example of our 24-7 lifestyle moving things ever faster. Maybe they'll understand that it's only a poor shit retailer trying to stir up any kind of excitement they can in the current Obamaconomy. Or maybe the ghost of my old man is stalking the upper hallways of their house yodeling at the top of his spectral lungs. In the case of the latter, they'd be welcome to come over and have a good stiff drink. I can exorcise that spirit.

Bunny on.

What a Difference Four Years Makes

2009-06-30T20:22:00.007-05:00

Four years ago tonight I did a really stupid thing and put the first "Bunny" out on the web.

Then I waited for the accolades to come in, the book offers to knock and the door and the world to turn bright and shiny once again.

Thanks for reading, both of you. But you know what really happened. I gathered an audience the size of my bevy of cousins, the book is written but there's a thing called "balls" between it and publication and the world, while it has gotten very much better since those days, still has its blemishes.

I wrote about fireflies in an open field. The field is sold and I live in town. Standing out on the back deck buck naked for the 'flies would be looked upon critically now. Just proves once again though, that bugs are generally smarter and less inhibited than we are.

I wrote about friends who told me I should write. I interacted with them daily. Now I troll through Facebook and Ass Journal to catch up with them.

What I didn't write about was the relationship that was barrelling into a wall and would soon be over. That was private and continues to be. It ended. A new one began and I'll mention Thumper but there it ends. What she and I have is ours. Sorry folks, but if you want details on intimacies, you're going to have to read "Family Circus."

What I also didn't write about was the perigee of my life as it seemed to be then. I'm not here to whine. That's not the point of the blog and you should read for entertainment not empathy. Things have improved, dramatically, since then but I have to confess: I miss that back deck that looked out on farmland and woods whereupon I once stood, scant of fabric and wondered if "Bunny On" were a dirty challenge.

I ended that first blog with "enjoy the ride." Thanks for riding, it's been an honor to have you along. Enjoy the next year, the next two, the next decade if you will, 'cause I've no intent of leaving unless of course NPR signs me up. But I doubt it. Who the hell do I know in Washington anyway?

Bunny on!

I F'd up on NPR

2009-06-30T20:05:00.004-05:00

Pretend you're me for a second and there's a challenge on the web to write as badly as "this" guy. This guy being the fellow who won the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest for bad opening sentences to a novel, as sponsored by the University of San Jose or someplace close to that.

Bulwer-Lytton are the duo who chanced upon "It was a dark and stormy night" as bad writing and the rest is history or a Peanuts cartoon depending on the depth of your cultural immersement. Me? I'm with Snoopy and the lost Van Gogh.

But NPR featured the winner of the contest and his first full winning sentence and I, singing to the tune of two lunchtime martinis, thought I could do just as well if not better.

And herein lies the distinction between talent and alcohol. See, the tenets of the contest call for you to write the worst first opening SENTENCE to a novel and while my entry garnered a pretty good collection of recommends, they all came from barflies such as myself who can't seem to distinguish SENTENCE from PARAGRAPH which is to say the first has words, the second PUNCTUATION. Alas, death by period. Something most of my high school girlfriends at first feared then prayed for.

So I entered NPR's little joust but really disqualified myself by entering a first paragraph rather than a first sentence. Publicly humiliated, I'm a little short on the shame quota, because whatever you fuck up in the national arena, you can always take back and mulligan in private.

So here it is. My NPR entry for worst writing, had I been paying attention.

Big Jake stopped his pickup and threw it into park like most folks would throw a bag of dirty clothes that came to represent their worst life memories into a corner of the basement, he opened the door and stuck his boot into the dust, raising a cloud that could have been his life's hopes and dreams, 'cause they settled just as quick as he pulled one last swig off of the tequila bottle which jiggled his contents like so many Jell-o desserts his Momma had made him; tighten your belt, boy, put "the negotiator" in its holster, breathe in deeply and walk as calm as you can to that waiting spaceship.

Shucks, I could have had a 34 second interview.

Bunny on.

Son of Facebook

2009-06-22T20:00:00.003-05:00

A sibling of mine and I were recently arguing the merits of Facebook and other social networking sites. Of course I was right, but being tolerant and generous I let her opine freely. I'm often, nay, usually right about such and most things but give others their due particularly in the case of my sister because she is after all several hundred miles distant from me but in times of closer proximity she's got a wicked backhand that can dislodge molars.

I don't get the point of Facebook. I've opened it up once or twice and am basically exposed to small snapshots of people I either don't know at all, don't care to know or know currently or knew once many years ago. The people I know currently I don't need photos of. That's what memory or face recognition is for. Tall blonde woman is Denise. Repeat several times over until its captured in your brainpan and you don't call out her her as "Ivan" at a ballgame. People I knew a long time ago, well that's just an exercise in facially catching up and noting that they've either "aged well" or "time's not been kind" or the pretty bastard is still a pretty bastard and thirty years later can probably walk off with my girlfriend all over again.

Don't think this is autobiographical.

Sis noted that Facebook was much more. It was a networking site that relied on brevity for users to catch up with each other in bits and spurts and not have to commit themselves to long letters or emails summarizing what's been happening with themselves since high school graduation or college or release from prison depending on your aspirations and such.

She noted that she had just caught up with a gal she knew once in college and found that they had had miraculously similar experiences that they shared in forty two characters or less. Either they found their life's calling at the same time in Calcutta working for the Sisters of Mercy and dedicated themselves to God's work on earth or they had the same rose tatoo on the inside of their thighs. I wasn't paying too close attention.

And I wasn't convinced. Admittedly, I don't get it. I can't sort out my Facebook from my Ass Journal from my Elbow Digest.

There is an idea for a networking site I can support though and it came to me the other morning. I'm tentatively calling it S.O.N. which of course is the Social Outcast Network. The structure is simple and you don't have to recommend, invite, tweet, toot, fart inconspicously or otherwise.

As a lone user of SON, you can link into popular groups through a url that allows you to "peer in the window." Groups such as professional organizations or collections of friends can "take pity" on your profile or "keep you at arm's length" or shun you altogether. You can keep up with others by "chattering" about what you're currently involved in or working on or otherwise doing and they can respond to you by "who cares" and "did somebody say something or am I hearing things?"

SON users can of course be connected to each other and can compare groups that they've been "ignored by" or "made fun of by." Connections between SON users would take the forms of "mumbles" or "mutterings."

With SON you could conceivably link up with hundreds of other SON users who would be at the periphery of real social networks not really knowing what to do next. One SON user could compare his or her sorry state to another SON user and note that he or she, as bad as things were, had at least not been kept out of "that" site. They'd feel better. Of course there would be other users who would be better of yet than they.

This would drive traffic immensely.

Not bad for an idea crafted in the cold, grey insomniatic dawn.

Or was that a hangover talking?

Bunny on.

Man's Second Greatest Thrill

2009-06-11T18:40:00.004-05:00

In a place bereft of gravity, I'm sure that I would enjoy flying without any kind of reservation whatsoever. Trouble is though, it's the law and that's one freaking long arm. Reaches up to thirty five thousand feet in my imagination and damn that's a long way down to a relatively hard place.

Earth wouldn't be too bad a place to land but they've covered it with rocks. The hard kind. They're everywhere. They seem to be multiplying too. I noticed that the last time I went mountain biking. Biking over treacherous terrain was fun and thrilling when my thirties seemed to stretch out ahead of me like the best advertising hook you can imagine. But now that my forties seem to be heading for the exits like they've downed a jumbo soda at a slasher film festival the idea of explaining traction to a bunch of kids that work for you ain't funny no more.

Red convertibles I've got a plausible story line for. Endo's on the single track, not so much.

Every now and again I get on a plane. Really, wings glued to aluminum sheathing so thin that were I olive loaf, the foil wrap would sport a note inviting salmonella to come on in, the water's fine. Screw some engines on, akin to holding a tug of war with Bible-paper rope and you get the idea that we're just fucking with physics in a bad way here.

But that's not the point. What seems to get me is that once down the jetway, sort of the long sharp needle that Mr. Plane cries about every time Nurse Airport pulls it out, every time we descend that ramp humanity seems to get automatic asshole enhancement features.

Nowhere was this more in evidence than when I just flew the red-eye home.

I used to think that the red-eye was a glamorous thing, never having taken one. High powered folks took the red-eye to save time. Jump on an all night plane, stretch out in total comfort and arrive refreshed. Oh, the flight attendants might sprinkle a little sand in your peepers and give you a peck on the cheek just to make it all believable but essentially you were just in your big jet engined bed in the sky.

Now I know better. Shove yourself into economy class where your chin is intimate with the breastbone of the passenger ahead of you. Fold yourself into the shape of a paper clip and get some turbulence-addled shuteye until all the cabin lights come on so they can offer you what's left of the orange juice.

Your feet are hugging your one legal-sized carry on, shoved under your seat because apparently the folks six rows down, the ones transporting their infant to the Utica colic festival think that carry on has the same amount of syllables and essentially means the same thing as "checked bags big enough to fill a city bus."

Of course, you've got a few hours. Took about six to get out here so if you take out the sudden jerks awake when you realize you've drooled the contents of Lake Mead on your shirt or rested your hand inappropriately on the lap of the knife salesman sitting next to you, you'll still get about four solid hours of rest. Too bad the prevailing winds will blow you home in less than three hours so by the time you land in the office bat-shit tired and ready to sign contracts that promise you washing the client's car into the second Palin administration you're only running on about an hour and even that gets interrupted for "Orange juice?"

And while the Colic Clan sprint merrily off to parking lot B, I'm dutifully at the carousel waiting for my bag which is no doubt being retrieved from Burundi.

There's another great adventure in travel out there somewhere. I just don't know where and if I find it I'm keeping it to myself for a while. In between fifty five, toll booths and construction sites, Amtrak hot dogs and TSA strip searches of yogurt, I want to keep the government from fucking up another experience. Add to that the happy colickers doing fifty two in the left lane, stretching across three seats or packing up everything but Jethro and Granny's rocker for the flight to L.A. and you start to understand that while God may have made beer to prove that he wants us to be happy, he made travel to warn us of the hot place that lies beyond selling your soul for a first class upgrade.

Best regards from fifteen miles above the limit, three gin and tonics in the club car and the personal tv screen and free socks in business class.

Oh, and if there's turbulence, toss two parts gin and a dash of vermouth in a shaker, I'll hold it for the duration.

Bunny on.

I'm With Stupid in Fill in the Place Here

2009-06-10T20:09:00.002-05:00

Every time I leave home for a few deserved days of not letting the rats win, I seem to forget to pack all my stupid saying silk-screened T-shirts. How about you?

I have a ritual: Check tickets at least twice, ensure that the light timers are plugged in and set to P.M. this time, toss distracting handfuls of kibble at the cats and smash all the "I got loaded in..." shot glasses on the floor.

Strangely enough, where ever I go I always manage to make sure that cheap cotton lays upon my back, an asinine bon mot I could not conceive on a bender graces my front and my highballs will be born in a crucible of "I got hammered in..."

Fill in your favorite destination.

That would be o.k. It's all part of the modern paradigm that includes "carry on" luggage the size of a Cadillac, layovers you have birthdays on and flights where I'd just as soon hold a flask of gin and vermouth and I'll get back to you about the olives once we're out of this kidney-wrenching turbulence.

But travel broadens the mind just as it tightens the sphincter to a point of being able to snap a wooden dowel if we suddenly drop another five hundred feet in a split second. Fortunately I'm back and safe and sound. All set to fly "Air Chair" for a few thousand miles and some postings about the latest effort to self-age ten years on a red-eye.

Bunny on.

Sure Ain't Fungus County

2009-06-10T20:03:00.001-05:00

Mountains with hills at their knees

2009-06-10T20:01:00.000-05:00

Where in the world is Bunny?

2009-06-10T20:00:00.000-05:00

Floor? This is the basement!

2009-06-04T16:03:00.003-05:00

August 25, 2008

Dear Rex:

Although I've always valued your opinion as my broker, I feel that you're leading me into too much of an equities-only position and wonder if pulling back into more diversified bonds and cash might not be wise.

I keep hearing about the home market values sliding although I must say that rising prices still seem to be the norm and "flipping," "trading up" and "buying the dream" are still quite popular in my parts. My neighbors closed yesterday and sold seventeen minutes later at a 60% profit.

Well, maybe you're right.

Bunny

Dear Bunny:

The average American home has appreciated 17,000% since 1985 and there's no end in sight. Sure, you hear about "tight credit" in the news but let me tell you that those reports are coming from somewhere else. I don't know where, but it ain't here. I've invested a large chunk of your portfolio into high yield mortgage backed securities. Looking forward to retiring at fifty?

Rex

September 20, 2008

Dear Rex:

Dunno. This "credit crunch" kind of worries me. I think we should pull out of the mortgage-backed securities 'cause mortgages are still too easy to get. I mean, come on, when I bought my first house I had to account for a dime I found in the street. This last place, I was on a "98.6 plan." Yep, they took my temperature and approved me for $300K. Trouble is, I don't want that much. I don't need to trade up. My friend Jim bought his dream home last June and for God's sakes, I don't begrudge him but the place is so big he hasn't seen his wife in a month. I remember that he has two kids but he's no longer sure. Where's the fun in that?

Ok, so Chrysler's undervalued by you. I guess you're right.

Bunny

Dear Caus'

You may have noticed that the market's been a little unsettled lately. No cause for worry and you know that in the long run, equities is your best value.

Rex

October 1, 2008

Hey Rex:

Calling the market a little unsettled is like calling Charlie Manson occasionally grumpy. Ok, so we agreed to stake out a long term position and ride out the short term bumps but what do you suggest for this short term sheer drop to nowhere. Can we get away from equities and commodity futures and maybe invest in apocalypse futures. I hear they're real hot right now.

CB

Dear Bunny:

Of course, Wall Street has always had its ups and downs. We know that and can advise you on how to chart the safest course in any storm.

Rex

November 15, 2008

Rexo:

The safest course in this storm may be praying to God almighty to pick me up off this ship. Ok, Lord, I'm sorry for hitting Shirley in fourth grade. I really didn't know how else to channel my pre-pubescent lust. And I apologize for mooning the neighbors the first time Patrick and I had three beers each. I thought you put the stuff on earth to prove that you loved us and wanted us to be happy? Oh, and taking your name in vain? Yeah, I've done a lot of that lately. Sorry.

Rex, I really think we need to talk about that GM buy.

Caustic Bunny

Dear Caustic Bunny:

Market uncertainty can be market opportunity if you know how to invest wisely in troubled times. Call me for an appointment.

Rex

February 12, 2009

Rexhole:

Could you possibly send me a diagram showing which parts of the English language you don't comprehend? Let's start simple: "A" is for apple which we shall shortly both be selling. Circuit City is "hot hot hot?" What the "fuck fuck fuck" are you talking about??? I'm waiting for the bailout that bails out the bailout.

Caustic Freaking Bunny

Dear Mr. Bunny:

It has been a difficult time in the markets. Equities have lost, on average, 46% of their value. Bonds, given current pressures on the credit markets, are not a safe haven by any means. Regular bank accounts and certificates of deposit are not paying significant yield by any means but for our more cautious investor they do remain attractive given their FDIC backing.

In short, we live in perilous times where from day to day we can only be thankful that we are working and have means to provide for our families. As your broker I would advise you that it is now as always prudent to put aside some of that income to provide for you and your loved ones in the future and, God forbid, on that rainy day. May I suggest that we you develop a monthly budget and stick to it. I'm always available to speak to for investment, secured and otherwise, opportunities.

Personally, I hope that you are sleeping better lately and don't dream about that "Rex" fellow any more.

Best wishes,

Bruce

ps. What is it you toss over your shoulder when you leave my office? Bunny on?

Single Me Out

2009-05-28T21:12:00.003-05:00

Thumper and I never did have what you'd call a conventional dating relationship and maybe because we met under the unusual circumstance of my just trying to avoid her.

Once we did get together we were both pretty busy so our dates took the form of passing glances at first and mind if we hang while I do something completely unrelated later. We'd have dinner and I'd hoof home early because I had to be in Washington the next morning at nine a.m. which I incidentally did even with a pitstop in Maryland explaining to the nice officer that yes, I was doing ninety.

That I was trying to avoid her had less to do with her and more to do with the stage show that went up in a different city every couple of weeks that was my classic first date. You meet someone, linger on a glance, tentatively say hi, maybe call them at home and then you'd go out. Out was usually dinner, you got a chance to talk and kind of get a first impression which either led to a second date or more often than not, didn't. Sometimes that was my fault where cheap magic tricks at the table would do embarrassing things with the bread plate. Sometimes it was her fault for ordering two of the most expensive thing on the menu, wrapping one up with most of the silverware and remarking that "my week's set."

Often it was both of us. I had been out of the dating thing for about twenty years. Things had changed. I wasn't ready for it. In my day you went out, talked, maybe pecked on the cheek or better on the front porch and watched the door close. How slow it closed or peeks out the window were indications of whether there was going to be a second date.

Now I was being fitted for the right size latex an hour into ordering drinks. Wasn't really ready for the zero to sixty in six seconds club, thanks all the same.

The stage show had just set up the Saturday night prior in town and while she was a lovely lass, it didn't portend well when she walked in said, "Hi, I'm..." and I responded "No, I don't think so."

So that didn't work. I went home and got on line 'cause, dirty little secret, that's where I was meeting people back then on a site who's tag line was more appropriate to a peep show. There was Thumper, dropped her an email and headed off to bed.

Next morning there was an answer and an invitation and the last damn thing I wanted to do was play a Sunday matinee. Didn't get back to her until Monday by which time the germs I had shared on the flight back from Phoenix had made themselves at home in my upper respiratory tract.

Like I said, when we first started dating we were both busy almost middle aged people. We had a life and part of her life was restoring some of the houses she owned. So I'd tag along, hammer in hand 'cause that was the only date I was getting with this girl. I think that the leitmotif of our early relationship was established at about one in the morning once when I, under a sink, wrench in hand, face full on dripping water proclaimed: "Couldn't I just fucking take you to dinner?"

The cold lasted only so long and she now had my cell phone number which she dialed and dragged me downtown to what would eventually become our favorite hangout on main street. The place we went when we were done running our place just up the street. We had drinks, then drove around town, then toured a rehab property she was working on then wound up at my place looking at some knob and tube palace renovations then realized it was about 3.30 am. Good first date. Peck on the cheek, phone numbers exchanged and I was going to have a hell of a time keeping up with the knitting circle at running intervals the next day.

But I figured, why not? I mean, where could all this possibly go to?

Bunny on.

Feel Free to Move About the Cabin

2009-05-22T19:58:00.006-05:00

In memory, it's always playing out in slow motion. We hit the ramp and go airborne, then drift lazily over the balance of the blacktop, coming down with a few sparks off the front anti-roll bar to drive merrily home.

The reality is and will remain a holy fuck moment when I realized that I lived in a state where the Amish are the technological vanguard and the roads department thinks its nostalgic and fun to keep archback single lane stone bridges in service even though we are barrelling towards the twenty first century faster than a drunk in a Mustang two blocks from home having to piss so bad he can taste it!

After he let me whip his Lotus around the cloverleafs of Toronto and then we got out on some prime flat straightaway north of the city where we hammered it and my thoughts came to me six seconds after I had passed them at the crossroads, I thought I'd be magnanimous and treat Evan to a half hour on the back twisties of the six tooth, trailer-dwelling swampland I was currently living in.

Yep, rural Pennsylvania where you can count to six on one hand and Nascar would be fun if'n you didn't have to add all them points up.

We took off in my current ride, a mid nineties Ford Probe who's salvation was that it was lightweight coupled to a four cylinder. If it hadn't been built about as sturdy as a Monogram Monte Carlo by a kid who would stick a fender on as a cheap excuse to huff some glue...

That is to say if it had been built out of, oh, steel instead of cardboard it would have an issue being run by that four banger I sacrificed rabbits upon to prey to the gods of torque just to offer up another few pound-feet.

I almost got the six it was offered with but that idea was kiboshed by my then wife or as I like to refer to her now; the Wicked Witch of...

Everywhere.

So I settled for the four and took Evan on a blitzkrieg-downshift tour of the single lane blacktop where everything was fine and why bother reading the signs that say "Single Lane Bridge Ahead?"

I was ok with the single lane. It was around eleven on a Sunday morning which meant that if the locals weren't still asleep they were in church looking around at who was sitting uncomfortably because THAT was who they had gone dating with the night before.

The single lane though did have to span the creek and it achieved this by arching not unlike a horny camel's back. And I'm not talking plain horny. I'm talking being in a stockade for seven months with four guy camels named Lance, then being ridden across desert only to wind up in a pen a few strands of wire away from Natalie who has just come in from the market after a good wash and rubdown. That camel horny.

Picture a road. Now look straight up. Now look directly in front of you. Now look down. Now you get the idea of the rise across this fucking bridge I happened to coach the Ford across at about sixty. This took a lot of dumping pure kerosene directly into the intake manifold hoping the shit would kick up something somewhere.

The reality was about 3/4 of a second of free flight at which time I did the only thing my irrational mind thought to do. Hit the brakes. See, I logically reasoned that idle wheels would create more drag and slow us faster than spinning wheels. That added to the drama of shreiking tires once we hit.

In memory we are up there, airborne, for a whole lot longer. Evan lights a cigarette. I pour coffee for us both. We talk about the boat outings of the past few years. Both of us perched on the bridge, scanning the water fifty feet out for the gray highlights that will bear Evan out about the outcropping of rock he KNOWS is around here somewhere. And of course he's right but he's right in that the hollow SKRUTCH against the hull proves him so. Oh well, step back and see that we're not taking on water.

SKRUTCH-SQUEAL is kind of the sound we make when we hit and like Evan and the rock outcropping I give him the "Yeah of course I knew this fucking one lane camelback stone bridge was here."

"Nice landing." Is all he says.

A couple of miles later he asks "How's your oil pressure?"

"Fine."

"Good, you didn't leave your pan back there."

Meant to do that. Really did. Meant to do that.

Bunny on.