Day 940, No One In Sight

Paranoia

Part 11 of 30

I don’t actually have a gun -- no guns at all -- but I probably should have. Packing heat could very well come in handy. I can certainly imagine all the scenarios, like hiding away in a cave for 940 days and it'd be tough without a gun. If nothing else, you could shoot fruit from a tree and with it bring into your precious system the building blocks of nutrition. Anything that helps me stagger across the finish line of Day 941 would be good, probably, although at some point I could start wondering what the point is. Then it becomes dangerous.

But 941 days, that’s pretty long. 365 days in a year, and multiply it out, it’s something under 10 years. Definitely a long time to hold out, being as it is -- wow! --  something under 10 years. How time flies when you’re in the midst of a standoff whether with yourself or others, and whatever else may be out there.

I’ll tell you right now, I’ve thought of this before, because I’ve been in a cave: A cave is a great natural shelter, meaning, Other animals have noticed the same thing. And if I’m in a cave very long, it won’t be long till the animals and their families start showing up for the night. Meaning, a cave is a terrible place to live unless you have some way of securing it (1), and some way of (2) of stilling your conscience about the idea of displacing animals. I don’t think I could do it. I’ve camped before, then the paranoia of animals becomes too much.

I was talking with a guy a couple years ago -- homeless dude, but the county gave him a tent and let him stay at the state park without paying -- who totally turned me off to the idea of camping, roughing it in the wild. He told me about raccoons continually tearing through the sides of his tent, looking for food or whatever. He said they have razor-sharp teeth and claws like a bear. He was on his third free tent, which started to sound to me more like a way for the county to kill off the riff-raff and blame it on raccoons!

At that time I was living in a camper and I was paranoid enough about a camper. The wind rocks it. You hear rain like metal pellets. The furnace is hard to turn off. There’s no easy access points to it if you had to do emergency maintenance. Half your stuff’s outside, a easy mark for predators, including other people. But I considered myself lucky because another guy had an animal trailer he lived in. Which looked very cramped. He and I never spoke. I wasn't sure about him. Probably had seen a lot of stuff in his life.

Then there’s the mosquitoes, and ticks, and every godforsaken creature of the night, mostly raccoons clawing at that guy’s place. Which is actually only one step up from a cave -- because no creature of the wild has ever missed an entire cave. A cave wouldn't be good enough for me. They'd storm it and drive me out with fire.

Destroying February -- Fascist Rangers

February's slipping away, and there's so much left to do if I'm going to destroy it as a month. The worst thing I can think of is having February slip by unscathed. Then it'd be "Out of sight, out of mind," with nothing changed and nothing to change. There is literally no time to lose!

I'm checking my list, so many things to do, it's daunting. Get to the statehouse and lobby legislators, organize rallies, circulate petitions, then get crucial support for the new stump month to take February's place. The travel alone might do me in, not to mention the work! Whatever else I can say, the key thing is, It's all super important and must be dealt with -- pronto!

Damn it to hell, then! ... that it turned out to be such a beautiful day, more like spring than winter. And I foolishly put the list of tasks on the back burner, and went out -- again, so very foolish! -- and wasted the day, indulging myself. I had to think, Does February know its days are numbered? Is that why it's so nice? Who knows? But whatever it was, it really zapped me. I got in the car, which was already warm, and next thing you know, I was out at the lake enjoying the day.

I'll blame it on my new dog, Roughage. I've been wanting to take her to the lake and watch her in nature, running and acting like the springtime pup she is, full of joy and total abandon. So that's what we did, and it was a great time. The birds serenaded us with their happy spring-like songs; it was quite the time!

After she was a little tired out, we sat together in the car, the sun streaming in. I rolled up the windows because it was also fairly breezy. That was probably my big mistake, sitting there in the warmth, a sleeping dog stretched out on the passenger seat, trying to read my Kindle. I felt my head nodding, and tried to hold back but there was no resistance. Soon both of us were dozed off, and that's it...

I'd probably be asleep still, except I heard tapping at the window, which turned out to be a couple of park rangers -- wicked bastards -- asking if everything was OK. It seemed we were parked at the campground, and the main boss said, quite rudely, that that meant paying the camping fee and having the proper stickers and permits. And that he could run me in on a 402 or 511, this, that, and the other regulation I'd never heard of. The other guy said it's people like me ruining the campground for society. Well, of course that's just what I needed to hear! Having just woke up, I have to admit I wasn't as nice as I should've been -- I was downright surly -- and their mean snarling frankly didn't help the situation. If it hadn't been for the dog being so cute I'd probably be in jail right now.

Add to that the sudden awareness I had again of the list of things I should've been doing for destroying February, and it sunk me immediately into the worst mood. I got a headache, bang, just like that. And I left there resolved, that once I destroyed February, I'd also see to it that the entire state camping system gets its just desserts! As in "Bye, bye, fascist rangers!"

The day shot to hell, all I can do now is resolve and plan to get out tomorrow ... and get it done. Get out there and give 'em hell!

Pure Cussedness

I'm meditating today on pure cussedness, the living of life with jagged edges and weird angularities. God dammit! Sweet acidophilus! Pro shiatsu! Shitfire!

Ha ha, were ya expecting a few F bombs? I got em on board, and I probably won't but I could strafe the landscape with em. Most of my followers are women. But it's hard to picture a life of pure cussedness without em.

Whether cussing and cussedness are actually related, I don't know. Why don't you Google it, get the usual million hits, and shove it-- I mean, file it -- where the sun don't shine?! Am I really supposed to care? I'm cussed enough tonight not to.

Pure cussedness means never having to say you care. It's too busy kickassing its way through life and the day. Look at Popeye. He's got about 40 cans of spinach flattened under his shirt, so he's half metal. Anyone  hits him, his chest puffs out like a battleship and he wins again!

Have I ever had my moments of doubt on pure cussedness? Moments? More like decades. And what's it done for me, being Mr. Softy and very congeal? (Ha ha). Pro freaking shiatsu, nothing! I'd like to kick the sweet acidophilus of the guy that turned me off to it.

Grandpa had pure cussedness, and if it wasn't 100% pure it was dam close. He was known for about five things: 1) Hunting, fishing; 2) Digging the meat of the goodie out of hickory nuts all winter; 3) 4) I can't remember 3 and 4; and, 5) Cussing. No doubt he'd kick my sweet acidophilus if he ever heard me say acidophilus, and not the purer "ASS." And for the most part he didn't care, except, as I said it before, he would not drop an F bomb when women or girls were present. Us boys got that extra thrill, which is nice. I felt special as a guy.

Here's a true incident, as best as I can remember it. I'm not going to remember every word, of course -- it was sometime between 1965-1967, in there -- but I can summarize it close enough that you'll get the idea. (This ain't about my Grandpa, but he was at the campgrounds somewhere.) We were all at a campground, and my cousin was demonstrating through gestures and cussedness how he'd recently shot a bird that jumped up. F bombs galore, no adjectives and barely any nouns that weren't cussedness. One hell of a story.

Then there was this guy -- an adult -- who had a tent that was an ex-parachute, circular and very nice. Him and his wife got to be friends with us and our whole family. We even wrote to them for a few years. This guy saw us gesticulating and reliving some major event, the shooting of the bird, and came up the hill and asked us what we were talking about. It was funny, because since he was an adult, my cousin retold the whole story without a single cussedness, and it came out about the same, the bird jumping up and being shot down.

When we were separated from him -- he was back down close his parachute -- we were walking along and laughing and recalling vividly the difference between the two stories, celebrating both the cussedness and the quick replacement.

Oh boy, ha ha, that's one God dang memory, man ... I don't think I've posted that farking story before ... ha ha, one of the highlights of my kidhood. Pro shiatsu! Sweet acidophilus! Pure cussedness.

What makes the world go round? Cussedness. What makes the weary beaten pro wrestler, who can't even lift his arm, suddenly not only lift his arm but rigify it locked in place, to the dread of his abuser, now begging for mercy that will never come? Pure sweet cussedness. That's it.