Strike!

I was worming my way into a secret sealed off stairwell under my bathroom to check on a leaking drain.
While squeezing back through I found this thing. It's not a button. It's the same on each side. It is awesome.

Tortoise, turtle, I love them both, each in their own way.

Sunflower the tortoise is a real mensch, and a patron of the arts to boot.
He'd love it if you'd check out my project at  http://walletportrait.blogspot.com/2011/01/on-nose.html

Anyhow, I've always had good times with turtles/tortoises, I've gone out on a limb for them before, and it's touching that a tortoise would do the same for me.

As any faithful Thoughts and feelings follower knows, I once saved a turtle from Michael Jackson.
http://adamernestfarrington.blogspot.com/2010/10/set-my-blanket-free.html

Another time I was rowing my boat in city park, and freed a turtle who had swallowed a fish hook, and was tangled in a dead tree.

And there was the time I rowed up on a turtle who had wedged himself between 2 cypress knees.
His head was in the water, and his ass was in the air, he was obviously dead, as he'd been there so long he had grown green slime on the submerged part of his shell.

It was really sad.

I don't know why I even bothered to poke him with my paddle...
He sucked all his parts up into his shell!
So I saved him also.

I learned my lesson, and vowed never to give up on a turtle, without taking his pulse first.

One day I rowed all the way from lake Ponchartrain, up the canal, all the way to the pumping station, and discovered another stranded turtle on top of some pipes over the water.

I poked him, and he fell into my boat, broke open, I almost had to bail out, the stench was so bad.
I almost threw up, Then after that, I almost threw up. I flipped him overboard with my oar.
There was rancid turtle matter on the floor of the boat. I almost threw up.
I had to row to the shore and scrub out with water and weeds. Grosssssssssssssssssssssssss!!!

Damn right I'd do it again!
Anything for the turtles.

Broken bottles and rusty nails.

If you go to the shore, you could hurt your feet by stepping on broken bottles and rusty nails.

Broken bottles come from drunks and kids who can't resist breaking bottles.

People who's main contribution is a beach front obstacle course of curly green glass shards.

Every day drunks and kids, come out and bust up a new batch of bottles for the rest of us to pick our way through.

And since it's been happening forever, you wonder why the planet isn't a glass carpet by now.

And how is it that we can confidently stride out into the surf, barefoot.

Nature is always knocking stuff around, and pretty soon the glass rolls over and plants the sharp side in the ground, and then it gets busted into smaller and smaller pieces.

Thank you mother nature, someone's got to clean up after these drunks and kids.

But What's the deal with mother nature and rusty nails?

A person lays out the cash and sweat to build the best dock they can, and then mother nature thrashes it all over the shore in the next storm. All these rusty nails poking up through planks, and if they ever flip over, they just flip back again because of the nail. WTF? 

Luckily the drunks and kids burn up the naily wood in their camp fires. 

Drunks, kids, and mother nature working together in harmony.

Like me?

The other day I told Brother Love's neighbor that Love had been killed.
Then she told me what happened to the kids in the squat.
I think we both had thought the other already knew, but we hadn't.
It was kind of like boxing, the double knockout...

We each went on our way, a whole new headful of  death.

I'm not sure where the squat was, but it was near-bye and I'd heard of it before.

The thing is, I probably didn't know any of the 8 people who died in the squat fire.
But I might, I might be like, oh, yeah, that guy, I've seen him on the corner.
And I sure don't know to what extent the chain leads back to me, friends of friends...
Obviously things like this ripple.

There was this night I had my head out the window, jabbering with and throwing oranges to this banjo player and his 2 pals. We were not friends, but it was fun, and they could be burned up, or more likely, just elsewhere, or not, since I probably wouldn't recognize them if I saw them again.

Of course it's always proximity that determines how much impact a tragedy has.

Even if you don't know the victims, you ask yourself, were these people "like" me?
Which is kind of an offensive concept, even if it's pretty universal.

I asked myself if I'm stupid enough to light a fire indoors...
It didn't take long to tally up a list of equally stupid things I've done that good luck saved me from.

Would I choose that lifestyle?
I'd take that before anything that resembled 9-5.
It's pretty much how I was living my first week in New Orleans.

Like me?

Who isn't like me?

One, two, look at my watch.

Ron was loading the smoker with Chicken and stoking the fire with wood chips, while brother Love taught me "one two look at my watch".  It's a deceptively simple greeting.
"How does that go again?"
"One, two, look at my watch"
The one and two are accompanied by sort of, sideways high fives, not really a handshake...
So by the time I get my rhythm right, and I'm able to connect on the slaps, I've forgotten to look at my watch, which is hard to remember cause it doesn't even rhyme or make any sense.

But this kind of stuff can seem really important when you're eating barbecue under a huge faded rainbow mural, in the doorway of a derelict warehouse which was supposedly part of the scenery in "confederacy of dunces".
Pretty soon I'd mastered "one, two, look at my watch", and was fake checking the time like an old pro.

Speaking of old pros, Brother Love was a 50-something golf genius.
I don't know golf, and I'd never seen him play, but the way he and Ron were talking, I believe that Love could put a ball anywhere he wanted from absurd distances.

Brother Love had aspirations of joining the senior golf tour. He and Ron were always talking about it, and I said I'd make a demo video of him driving balls to the edge of the earth.

Brother Love lived in the warehouse, which is weird, because he was a smart talented guy who wasn't crazy or addicted, and he had a nice truck, if that's significant. It was a really leaky damp warehouse.
Anyway, the warehouse is going to be renovated, so he had to move out, and while he was staying temporarily at a friends house, he died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
I got the call from Ron over the holidays.

So I guess no golf video.
It's a little shocking.

The thing about city living, is the friends you make "by accident" people who you get to know, because they are around, more than they are the "type" of person you would get to know.
I'd seen Brother Love around, on and off while I'd been renovating the house across the street, but I'd only recently begun to get to know him, and I was a little disappointed that he was moving.

He was a really good guy. I'm lucky to have known him.

RIP

The dog cleaner.

When I was growing up, and someone dropped some food on the floor, instead of wiping it up, we'd get the "dog cleaner". Kind of like a vacuum  cleaner, except a dog cleaner laps up the mess, no fuss no muss.

I still use a dog cleaner.

I'm blowing my cover with this post. I don't think my wife knows how portable this dog cleaner is.
Sometimes when I spill food on the table or the stove, I pick up the dog cleaner point its nozzle in the right direction and start cleaning.

Like the Dyson Ball, A dog cleaner never loses suction.

HEAD TO HEAD!

I'm a comma comma comma comma comma chameleon

That's right, I'm a ,,,,,chameleon, because my wife's always criticizing me for using commas in the wrong place.

I always thought that you could put a comma any place that you wanted the reader to take a pause, especially in creative writing, but my wife swears it's not so.

Why can't the Americans teach their children how to write?
I feel like I'm married to Henrietta Higgins.
It's comma, and comma, that keep me in my place, not my wretched clothes and dirty face...

Just you wait Henrietta!

Cause I'm a comma chameleon. I put my commas where I want to, not where the tyranny of grammar dictates.

Like I said, I'm a ,,,,,chameleon.

But then I looked up the real words to the song, to see if they put commas between the list of karmas.
It turns out that sometimes they don't, and sometimes they do...
So I don't know if I'm a ,,,,,chameleon, or a ,,,,,,,,,,chameleon.
Sorry Henrietta, if you want lingual stability, there's always Latin.

Ahm jist sellin' me sculptchas ah am!