Nature 3 1/2--Pat 2 1/2--5/22/06

Sigh. I should have known something would happen today. It’s muggy and should have been raining, but guilt drove me out for a bike ride early this morning (while it was still cool and when it looked like I had forty-five minutes or so between rain storms). I hadn’t been out but once in the last two months, so I should have known that something would be waiting for me.

And here I’m going to swear that I will never repeat an event in writing to everyone if it happens to me more than once. This is, admittedly, getting ridiculous. I wouldn’t believe that all this crap happens to me, if I were you, but I swear I am a weird magnet when I’m on my bike. On foot, not so much. But, because this stuff keeps happening, and I keep “sharing” with you guys all the time with basically the same story frame, I figured I should at least swear that I won’t repeat myself with the major story parts. At least that way you will know that something new and horrible has happened to me. Rest assured, though, this is, I think, the most uncomfortable story yet. So please read on.

I’ll skip the setting set-up, since you all know where I was and what I was doing by now.

At a little before 8:40 (only about 10 minutes into my ride), I decided I better have a bit of a stretch and use the public facilities there since my morning glass of water was obviously working its way through. I’ve always been told that stretching is vital when exercising, but I’ve never been much for it. Not surprisingly, I’m about as limber as a six-hour-dead soccer coach. Every once in awhile, though, my muscles demand that I give them a little attention, and this was one of those times. And I figured I should probably make the pit stop while I was there so I wouldn’t have to in another fifteen minutes (insert tragically small bladder jokes here, “friends”). The bathrooms at the park are actually not that bad. The floors are always wet for some probably-not-disgusting-but-I’ll-assume-it-is-anyway reason, but they have actual running water, which is more than I would have expected. Why I knew it was a little before 8:40 is important and I’ll get to it in a bit.

Anyway, I pulled my bike onto the sidewalk next to a picnic table close to the bigger of the two bathrooms. “Close” is a relative concept. I was still a good 20 yards or so away from the bathroom, but I needed the table to stretch my legs on. While my leg was propped up and I was doing awkward and poorly conceived looking but pleasant feeling leans from side to side and front and back, I took a moment to notice all of the people in the park. There were several regulars—oldies with their dogs and canes and chit chat—and a few new faces. One guy, I noticed, was sort of hovering around the bathroom area, looking distracted. He was pacing around the sidewalks, crossing the street and standing, inspecting the parking lot, and generally looking like he was waiting for someone. I continued with my stretching for a minute or so, and walked around, pushing on trees and doing more leaning from side to side to try and keep my legs from freezing up.

After finishing with that, I started walking, in a meandering, still trying to stretch my calves kind of way, to the bathroom. To an observant person, I might too have looked like I was distracted and trying to look "normal" or “casual.” I walked into the bathroom, stepped into the stall and did my business. I wrapped that up, figuratively speaking, and turned around to see the waiting guy standing at the door of the stall, looking at me. He looked . . . expectant. I’m not sure I can describe the look on my face. I’ve never been much for “emoting,” so probably I just looked mildly confused and maybe a little annoyed (I’m told I often look annoyed, I can’t imagine why).

“You here for the special?” he asked, perhaps trying to break the ice, as it were, with an awkward quip.

“Huh?” I responded. And he pointed to some writing on the wall.

“8:40—5/22,” it said.

“Oh,” I replied.

“Well, drop ‘em,” he suggested, looking down at my crotch.

At this point, of course, I became flustered. I am no slouch at coming up with witty retorts and should-have-saids, two hours after the fact, but I am horrible on the spot. I pretty much freeze up and my mouth and my brain refuse to cooperate properly—partly because my brain actually locks up and refuses to work while my mouth starts working independently. I suspect I might not be good in a crisis. At least not if conversation is involved.

“Oh,” I said again.

As I saw it, I had two choices. One, I could drop my pants and see where this course of action took me. Two, I could come up with some excuse about herpes and move on. Well, probably there were more choices, but these were the only two that were presenting themselves to me at the time.

The first option, while probably full of merit, didn’t seem like much of an option. Even if I swung that way, which I'm pretty sure I don't, this guy would not have been my type. I’m no trophy, but I am reasonably sure that I could do better than a 45-50 year old, overweight, bald, repressed-accountant-looking guy. Possibly not MUCH better, but SOME better. I could probably take one of those negative attributes and make it the positive version, at least. Get the fit, bald, accountant-looking or the overweight, bald, archaeologist-looking (hmm, I’m not sure what career-looking would be attractive on a guy, actually, I guess I lean towards the Indiana Jones archetype in my generalizations of male attraction).

“Well?” he encouraged.

“Oh,” I said. “No. I have . . .” I continued, looking down and making “don’t go there” hand gestures in front of my crotch. “. . . Problems,” I finished. And I left it at that, figuring, sometimes, less is more.

He gave me a doubtful look but didn’t move. It took me the last hour or so of thinking about it to figure out why he didn’t just get out of my way and let me leave, but I think I’ve got it. On the one hand, I hadn’t just said there was some misunderstanding, as there obviously was and I obviously should have explained to him. Which, to him, meant that I had known about the meeting time written on the wall, but just wasn’t interested in him, so I was making excuses to leave—specifically, to leave him.

Upon closer reflection, this was quite mean of me. Here’s this strange man offering possibly stranger men the love that dare not speak its name in a public restroom because he is probably not having much luck dating otherwise, and I basically shot him down with an excuse that is the back alley equivalent of “I need to wash my hair.” I was the type of guy who would show up for a lascivious, morning-time fling in a public restroom, but at the same time I was a fickle bitch who was too good for the person who was making the date. I suppose that’s some bad karma for me there.

Needless to say, I cut my bike ride short. I don’t think I could have faced him if I’d made another trip around. And I suppose that was for the best, because that would have added insult to injury. I have gone ahead and given both Nature and Pat ½ point in my ongoing struggle because, frankly, I don’t know who won out there. I figure Nature drove us together, in some weird sort of way (this is the second time I’ve been propositioned by a man in an unusual place; thankfully, Libby and I think Ben were there the first time at the McDonalds in Pratt—and I should probably mention that this is more times than I’ve been propositioned by strange women in public places by, I believe, two), so Nature gets a ½ point. And I resisted an obvious if somewhat disturbing temptation, so Pat gets ½ point too. There were no clear winners here, so that seems fair.

And, now, I think I might go finish up my bike ride. And I’m going to be using the bathroom before I leave.

Nature 3--Pat 1 1/2--8/12/05

Sorry this one is out of order. I noticed after posting the last one that my point total was off by 1/2 point, so I went back and tried to find the other story I was missing. It took me about an hour, but I finally found it, tucked away in one of my school files for some reason. Anyway, here it is.

This one will be brief, I promise. So I got home this evening from a walk with Cameron. Because we’re both not terribly motivated people, we’ve found it helps when we walk together. At least that way we can jaw on about pointless things like television shows and the students we’re teaching (yes, I called them pointless, prove otherwise), which makes the time go by more quickly.

I was walking up my driveway when I saw what I thought was a dog across the yard, near our creek (which, really, is a drainage creek that spends most of its time stagnating since it takes a good two inches of rain to get its water moving). The dog was standing there, looking innocent enough, so I paid it little attention and went into the house. We have about four neighbor dogs that get out and routinely wander through our yard, looking for tasty bunnies and squirrels, of which we have an abundance, to devour. Mostly they keep to themselves, so we leave them be, though there is an annoying beagle that comes into our yard and starts baying like Jesus Christ himself has returned to earth with the world’s largest dog whistle and two score of shock collars (which, if I’m remembering my catechism correctly, is exactly how he’s meant to return). This dog I would probably strangle if I ever had the chance, but he only comes in the middle of the night when we’re sound asleep and the rabid howling of a small dog can do the most psychological damage to us, and by the time we’re up and in the yard, he’s long gone since his job for the night is already done.

Figuring it was one of these dogs, I didn’t even bother to investigate further. Once inside, I found Libby in the office working on the computer and we started talking about something, probably how our days were or something else equally engaging since I don’t even remember the topic.

Then, quite out of nowhere, we heard a loud BANG.

“Um,” I managed.

“What the hell was that?” Libby asked. She was, of course, not wearing a shirt or bra because I demand that she is always topless when she’s home (for obvious health reasons). She got up and went into the bathroom to put a shirt on and I grabbed my freshly removed shoes and started lacing them back up.

We went outside to find two police cars pulled up to the side of the road by our yard. Outside the cars were two police officers, one of them holding some sort of assault rifle. And I’m not exaggerating here. It was an assault rifle of some sort. Granted, I don’t know enough about assault rifles to identify exact models on sight, but I know a regular rifle and a shotgun when I see them, and I have watched enough history channel and played enough video games to know that assault rifles, on the whole, do not look like either of these. Why on earth they NEEDED an assault rifle to shoot whatever it was that they shot was quite beyond me. Probably, they HAD the assault rifles somewhere back at base and were just waiting with baited breath for the day when they would get a call that would allow them to use them. And this, apparently, was one of those calls.

I surveyed the area and saw, in the exact spot where I’d seen the “dog” from earlier, a smallish heap of death curled up. It hadn’t been a dog at all, it had been a coyote.

Our neighbor Shelly came into our yard and said, “I saw him standing there earlier and he wasn’t moving at all. He looked like he was sick or something so I called the police.”

Very astute, I’m sure. Granted, it was a wild animal in our yard and I should have been more worried about it pouncing on one of us unawares and tearing out our jugulars, but I had grown up around coyotes and they really didn’t intimidate me very much. Sure they ate a few dozen of our cats in my lifetime, and we could always hear them off in the distance sounding like they wanted to rumble, but they invariably kept their distance and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a case of a person who didn’t deserve it being attacked by one. If it had been sick, obviously that might have changed things, but, since the only evidence against it was that it was “standing there” not moving, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about someone coming onto my lawn and killing the wildlife, especially when it’s probably just an excuse to use a big gun.

Anyway, about then Libby came out and said, “What’s going on?”

“Go inside and take your shirt back off,” I said, flexing my pectorals. “This is man business.” I flexed again for good measure.

To which she punched me in the gonads.

“Urgh,” I replied casually as I crumpled to the ground. “Coyote,” I then added, motioning to the heap on the ground with my head, since both of my hands were busy clasping my roughed up jumblies.

And then one of the officers picked the dead coyote up by the tail and dropped it into a trash bag. He tied the bag off, went over to his car, popped the trunk and dropped the bag inside. End of story. Both officers got back into their cars and they drove off. Never once did either of them say a word to any of us.

After that, we stood in our yard—Libby stood, I remained curled up on the ground—and talked with the neighbors for a few minutes. Kurt and Shelly, though we’ve lived by them for five years now, are still relative strangers to us. We’ve shared a few casual conversations and we wave to one another when we meet on the street, but that’s about it. This time we talked about a number of things—I’m unclear on most of the conversation because of the throbbing pain in my groinal area—but eventually it came to pass that they offered to give us an old soft-tub hot tub of theirs. It had been unused for two or three years but, apparently. it still worked. This sounded like great news for my aching junk especially.

And so, I’ve decided to award myself ½ point for the night’s adventure. Granted, I didn’t have anything DIRECTLY to do with the destruction of Nature, but it did happen on my property and I did receive a free hot tub out of the deal. If that doesn’t earn me a half a point, then I don’t know what will.

Nature 3 ½--Pat 2 (Social Mores 1—Nature 0)--1/25/06

So I was out riding my bike today. Yes, I know, this introductory device for opening my little stories is getting predictably tired, but how can I be blamed if interesting things only seem to happen to me when I’m on my bike? I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that my life has reached such a non-interesting point that getting out on my bike is about the only time that life can broadside me, but I think it goes beyond that. I am in the process of formulating a new hypothesis (my earlier hypothesis that I am invisible has, in fact, become a Law now as I have been nearly run over far too many times—and only when I do not have a clearly visible partner with me—for it to be a coincidence. So deal with that, physics!). This hypothesis involves me being a foci for unusual events as soon as I start to pedal my bike—that, somehow, a nexus of weird follows me around, wherever I go. But I’ll better develop that once I’ve had some time to observe it more closely, now that I know what I’m looking for.

Doubtless some of you are realizing that it is the end of January, and there should be no way I’d be out on a bike when it should be below freezing every day of the week this time of year. However, I have been out a half dozen times already this month. We had our ten days of winter in the middle of December, and that is apparently all we are having this year. This is, of course, no evidence of a “global warming” trend. I know this because very important people have told me (not personally, of course, what self-respecting very important person would talk to me personally?) that this is true, and very important people wouldn’t tell me such things if they weren’t true.

Before I advance this story any further, I should warn everyone that this story receives an R rating. Usually my stories rate PG-13 (Mild Language, Wordy Adult Themes), so I don’t have to give warnings. But today’s story, I think, deserves an R (Wordy Adult Themes, Clearly Sexual Situations, Implied Partial But Lower Body Nudity) rating, so go ahead and delete this if you’re feeling easily offended today.

For a little over two years now, I have been making regular trips to Athletic Park here in Newton. It isn’t so much that I want to be boring and painfully routine, it’s just that repeated near death experiences have forced me off all but the most remote city streets, and the drive around the park offers me the best chance to avoid traffic because it is one-way (though, even then I had a car—driven by a very inattentive young Republican, I’m sure—that swerved into the parking stalls just last week to avoid hitting me). As such, I have some pretty set routines that I follow when I’m biking. I know how long it takes to make a round (4ish minutes if the wind isn’t blowing), where the best place to stand up on my pedals to stretch my legs is (the north side because there are trees on both sides and the least amount of wind), and where I’m most likely to be killed (where the one-way curves through the spot where the two-way street ends and all drivers always assume they have the right-of-way). As such, I tend to pedal through my bike time on auto-pilot, letting habit guide me while my mind wanders on clearly more important things.

It was while my mind was thus preoccupied that I very nearly failed to notice what was going on in the blue, mid 90s Chevy Lumina that was pulled into one of the adjacent parking stalls on the north side of the park’s drive. In fact, on my first pass, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was seeing, as I only caught it out of the corner of my eye before I had passed out of clear visibility range. It could have been someone sleeping face down on a reclined passenger seat. But it could have been something, er, other as well.

So I sped up to make my pass around the park a little quicker. There was, after all, a chance that the person in the passenger seat had suffered some terrible trauma and I might need to save a life. And how would I feel if my leisurely pace around the park got someone killed? Pretty miserable, I was sure.

On my second pass, I discovered that, in fact, there was a young man lying face down in the passenger seat, which was fully reclined. What I hadn’t caught on the first pass was the young lady who was supinely positioned under him. They were diligently exploring the inside of each other’s faces (how’s that for a mood killing image? But it is, basically, accurate).

“Huh,” I thought to myself. “Ain’t that a thing.”

I was a little disappointed that there would be no life saving opportunities, but somewhat intrigued by the brazen way these two were completely indifferent to what was going on in the world around them. After passing them by, and quite unrelated to what was going on in the car behind me, I decided to speed up my cycling pace again. In the name of better cardiovascular activity, of course.

As I swung around the north bend again, I slowed down somewhat as I stood up on my pedals to stretch my legs. I know what you all are thinking: “Pervert!” But not so! It is mere coincidence that this was also the side of the park that the couple were doing their business on. I am, as I said before, a creature of habit when I’m on my bike and the north side is where I do my stretching. I clearly stated that before, which, I think everyone will agree, makes it indisputable fact.

As I stretched my legs and slowly crept past the car in a not-at-all creepy way, I took the time to notice a few more things about the situation. The most notable of which was the very distinct, well, motion of the gentleman in the car. At this point it became clear that something altogether reproductive might be going on in the car and that it was not just a simple make out session.

As I finished my stretch and picked up speed again, I started to ponder the ramifications of this scene.

First, it was obvious that I would have to write a story about this. This was due to the an interesting aspect of this situation—that this couple, despite generations of social breeding to the contrary, was doing something distinctly private in a distinctly not private environment. This, of course, piqued my scientific curiosity. How could thousands of years of social structuring be so easily disregarded by some people? How would the other people in the park respond? What kind of car were they in so that I could be accurate when I wrote this all out? All of these questions and more raced through my mind as I instinctively sped up well past my normal pace to get back around sooner for further now-scientific study. I needed to find out more about this couple. I wanted to find out what made them tick. What was motivating them? What was their story?

Of course, these questions were going to be impossible to answer without actually talking to the couple, and there was absolutely no chance of that happening. So I would have to learn everything I could through simple, and wholly impartial and scientific, observation.

And, so, I made several more laps around the park. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to decipher a logical reason for the couple’s blatantly exhibitionist behavior—at least I wasn’t able to come up with any publishable findings. But here is what else I noted of interest during my trips around the track. On my fourth round, the couple switched positions so they were both lying on their sides. On my sixth round they switched positions again and the woman was on top. This seemed noteworthy to me because, obviously, the depth of their depravity was such that simple public acts were not enough to do the trick, extra positions were also necessary. I also noticed that, quite against all reason, this couple never looked up from their business. And the park was actually quite busy. It was about noon and many people, especially older people, like to go to the park over the lunch hour. Most of them sit in their cars and do crossword puzzles or doze.

At this point it seems worth mentioning that Newton has an infestation of old people. No, that’s not the right word. Infestation suggests that, with enough chemicals and elbow grease, the problem could be exterminated. Newton has an epidemic, no, a plague of old people. They are simply everywhere—driving fifteen miles an hour under the speed limit, in the wrong lane, and being just generally old all the time. And the park is one of their favorite places to be old in when the weather is nice and their rheumatism or gyp or hemorrhoids or whatever isn’t acting up. And old people are, of course, notoriously unsupportive of naughtiness. So I was fully expecting to see some sort of scene involving irate old people and coitus interuptus-ed young people on one of my trips around.

(Now, of course, I’m expecting to hear from many people who are offended by my crude joke at the expense of old people in the last paragraph. I also expect someone to point out that, now that I’m over thirty, I am officially old myself. To this I simply say, “Get over yourselves, I’m just joking.”)

But by this point I had been riding, mostly at twice my normal speed, for about forty minutes. My legs were beginning to burn and I was afraid that, if I made more than another round or two, I would be forced to get off my bike and use it like a walker to get my sad, old self back to my house.

Those of you who exercise are doubtless laughing at my patheticness—forty minutes isn’t that long, after all. And those of you who are out of shape like me and have tried exercising again after being inactive for awhile are likely feeling my pain. And, then, the rest of you are either not interested in exercising (and, thus, couldn’t care less and are only reading this now because you don’t have the guts to skip ahead to the next paragraph) or not interested in anything that I’ve written so far (and I can say what I like about you because you’ve never been paying attention in the first place, loser jerk that you are). And, thus, I have become all things to all people at this point! Well, at least as far as my options go for how people might respond to my exercising capacities. Still, it’s quite a feeling of accomplishment for me.

Anyway, I hated to leave the story without closure, but I was finding myself with few other options. If they kept at it like the marathon love-makers that they must have been (and, of course, I still couldn’t prove there was anything, er, penetrative going on at this point, I could never actually see anything but suggestive movement), then I was going to collapse into a heap and, quite possibly, die before he, she or they finished.

I decided to push on for one more round, and boy am I glad I did. As I predicted earlier, someone must have been offended because, when I came around for my last round, I saw something that made me laugh inside (though I kept my composure as I passed by). Parked alongside the Lumina was a police cruiser. An officer had interrupted the couple. The gentleman was already dressed—he was wearing a pair of jeans so it didn’t take much. The girl was straightening her easy access skirt. And that was all the proof I needed that something entirely natural was going on in that car. They both looked awfully embarrassed and the cop seemed visibly uncomfortable as well. Which I suppose was also appropriate.

And, thus my scoring adjustment for this little encounter. I gave both Nature and myself ½ point. I figure I get the half point for getting to witness something that I shouldn’t have witnessed. I deserve some credit for sticking to my exercise routine until something worthwhile finally happened. Nature I gave the half point because, as is well known, the procreative drive is second only to human nature’s desire to create order from chaos so that institutions of order can create their own special brand of chaos. So Nature got a half point for drawing those two out of their home or homes in the first place.

Then I decided that it was time to track another competition entirely, since I saw the results myself. Social Mores got the point this time since some cantankerous old person had called up the cops to put a stop to what was basically harmless fun (sure it might be a bit inappropriate, but nobody could actually see anything but smooching).

Of course, I’m just hoping that my earlier hypothesis holds true and strange things like this keep happening to me when I take my bike out. If it does, maybe I won’t mind nearly killing myself for forty minutes a few times every week.

Always Wear a Helmet (No Nature v. Pat Points Awarded)--11/8/2205

I've decided to start this email installment of Pat v. Nature by turning my traditional parable style (and, yes, I think that's the style that these stories would best fall into as I learned a few weeks ago in the Children's Lit. class I'm teaching that parables aren't just for you religious types, so don't start harking for the church to declare anathema on me) on its ear by starting with my moral: Always wear a helmet, or Don't let your children enjoy too much science fiction.

It all began, as usual, with my bike ride this morning. The weather has been freakishly warm here so far this fall, so I've been trying my best to make the most of it and muster (which, in my effort to spell things correctly so that my dear family won't spend ALL of their time doing it for me, I learned is also the name for a group of peacocks) the initiative to get some exercise. Just to set the stage a little, let me explain the equipment that I was using because it will be important here in a minute for visual effect.

I own a mountain bike. There are, obviously, no mountains and barely any hills in this area, but mountain bikes are much cooler looking than street bikes. Street bikes, I've always thought, are for athletes or posers. Mountain bikes are also for posers (like me), but at least they (the bikes themselves) are also pretending to be something far cooler than they really are. They are the SUV of the bike world, being not quite equipped to handle what they are supposedly intended for (rough terrain biking--ask anyone who's hit a small pothole or railroad track while on a mountain bike and they will agree with me completely) while at the same time being less well-equipped to handle even normal biking tasks (they are built to, again, supposedly withstand shock, so they take that much more effort to propel their extra girth). Mountain bikes--at least the ones that I've seen, and I am in no way an expert--have a secondary set of handles that stick up at a forward forty degree angle from the ends of the standard handles. This little detail is also important later on. At any rate, I am sure I look very cool riding around on my bike, especially when I wear what I was wearing today.

Because I have a notoriously short attention span, I need entertainment even while exercising or I almost immediately lose interest. For the past two years, I've relied on my own brain and a short repertoire of seven memorized songs, which I always sing in a certain order to myself. Because I am also panting between each lyrical phrase, this set of seven songs usually takes me almost exactly as long to sing as I want to be exercising. Recently, however, I found a portable CD player designed for use during exercise. It came with a case complete with a Velcro strap that is too small to wrap around ANY body part for security--so I strap it to the bar on my bike--and a set of wrap around ear pieces, meaning they wrap around the back of the ear, holding the earphones in place. This is great because they still allow me to wear my helmet. I always wear my helmet because I am a naturally cautious person and because I am somewhat paranoid for the following reasons: A) Certain special interest groups or political parties are trying to kill me; 2) Nature is trying to kill me; and %) I am clumsy and fully expect to plummet head first into a ravine at the first possible opportunity. To top this all off, I was also wearing my sunglasses because my largely indoor lifestyle has made the harsh rays of the sun unacceptable to my sensitive eyes.

Again, I looked cool.

So there I was, singing along to my slow jamz (spell check suggests that I mean “logjams”), pedaling into gusts of up to 30 mph. Growing up, I vividly remember that I wore a dubiously named jean style called Husky. These were, since there is no need to pull punches, for the chubby kids. They had elastic waists to accommodate a “growing child.” And kids KNEW that these jeans were meant for fatties, which meant near constant teasing on the playground (“Hey, hey, hey! It’s Paaaaaat Albers!” they yelled. Give me a name that can’t help but be confused with the morbidly obese Bill Cosby cartoon character and put me in Husky jeans and you have a recipe for body image issues. Excuse me while I weep a few bitter tears and then get over myself).

Despite a few years in high school when I think I was borderline anorexic, I’ve managed to maintain my “husky” stature throughout my life. Usually this doesn’t affect me that greatly. I am well-built for moving heavy objects, which means that I usually get to be on the most unwieldy end of the washing machine when someone is moving (unless Jon is around and I can big brother him into doing the hard work for me, since he is also one of nature’s heavy lifters), but that’s about it, unless I’m riding my bike, and especially in a brisk wind. Then, being built like a mainsail has its drawbacks.

To compensate for my broadness, and because it is too uncomfortable to lean forward on a mountain bike to make myself moderately aerodynamic, I have adapted a tacking method of bike riding—moving subtly back and forth as I head into the wind, I am able to reduce the wind resistance slightly, thus wearing myself out almost exactly as much as I would if I pedaled straight into the wind thanks to the extra work that I’m creating. Not the most brilliant method, I’m sure, but it’s what I do.

It was while swerving to and fro this morning that I noticed all of the leaves on the ground. Thanks to the aforementioned freakish weather, Fall has been dragging on forever here. The upswing is that we’re getting some truly spectacular colors from leaves that usually turn brown and die, or die and turn brown, however that works. The, um, downswing is that the leaves may never stop falling this year and completely covering the terrain. And the road around the park this morning was littered with tree trash despite the relatively high winds. If I weren’t using all of my extra brain cells to remember things like the theme song to Small Wonder (“She’s fantastic, made of plastic, microchips here and there.”) and who sang “Lady in Red” (Chris de Burgh), I might be able to remember some specific tree names to better fill in my Setting information here. I’m sure there were plenty of cottonwood leaves—I know that one because we have a cottonwood tree next to our house whose roots have tapped, if not the fires, then surely the disposition of Hell. I’m sure there are some leaves from plywood trees and gnarlybarks or whatever out there too. Who knows. Well, lots of people probably, just not me.

As I meandered back and forth, I started to play a game, seeing if I could swing around as many leaves as I could. Eventually, I came to picture the image of myself doing this from a third person perspective, wearing my glasses, helmet and earphones. I was obviously a space pilot of some sort, careening through a dangerous asteroid field. All I was missing was a microphone to speak into, but I didn’t have any trouble imagining that was there too.

Of course then I grabbed onto the side handles, since they would make for ideal flight steering. I could even put my thumbs on top of the handles to make like I was firing some sort of weapon. From here I added sound effects—“whoosh”ing occasionally as I veered around a leaf and “pew, pew”ing as I blasted some unsuspecting ne’er do well who thought he (or she, space is a very equal opportunity employer, we’ve learned) was going to do me a grievous disservice.

I even began to create a character for myself. I haven’t come up with a name, but it will probably be a tough sounding, single syllable first name followed by a surprisingly sensitive sounding last name—like Spif Sparkle or Rock Kittenfluff. I volunteered for service because the galaxy was at war and every able-bodied person was expected to serve. I was one of the best pilots out there, but I had a real chip on my shoulder—possibly because my parents were forced to work in mines or I was an orphan or something like that—and had a real problem with authority. Pretty stereotypical, of course, but this was developed over the course of about twenty minutes worth of bike riding, so what can you do.

Then I came up on an entire squadron of enemy fighters. They were sitting, unawares, on the road ahead of me. This squadron of about a hundred blackbirds—and possibly a few other birds mixed in to fill specialized field tasks—was filling the road in front of me. I’ve actually come to think of blackbirds as traveling in squadrons instead of flocks over the past few years because, during the month or so they are migrating through our area, they constantly strafe and bombard everything around our house with their seedy ordinance. But I suspect that the squadrons in our area have also recruited a few specialist dive-bombers, perhaps barn swallows. I’ve seen swallows fly down and peck a passing cat just for the fun of it before, but I’ve never seen a blackbird swoop down and try to hit anything squarely. They are precision instruments in that respect, designed to do a delicate task that they perform without flaw (at least that I had seen, probably there were scores of brain damaged swallows out there who had tried, unsuccessfully, to hone their dive-bombing skills). And, today, something was definitely in a swooping mood in the group of birds that was in front of me.

As I dodged the last few leaves and entered into the clearing, I set my sites on the squadron ahead and opened fire. As I grew closer, they scattered, obviously afraid of my terrible, lasery wrath. Or so I thought. After they took off, most appeared to flutter away, allowing my mind to stop paying attention to them and shift its focus to the fact that I was still exercising and was starting to wear out, thus distracting me for a few moments. A few of them must have decided to circle back to watch for just such a distraction on my part, because a few moments later I felt a “thunk” on the top of my helmet. Startled, I looked around, wondering if someone had thrown a rock at me and saw the tale end of a bird darting back towards a small group that had lighted in a neighboring tree. With that, I pedaled my uneasy butt right out of there before a Hitchcockian moment could occur, and I never looked back.

After some consideration, I decided that neither side in Pat v. Nature deserved any points for this round. Granted, Nature did take an actual, physical stab at removing part of my scalp, but only after I had caught them resting on their laurels and destroyed no fewer than a dozen of them in my head. I decided to call it a draw, at least until a technology exists that will allow me to mount working laser cannons on the front of my bike. Then those suckers better watch out.

Strange May--5/2/2005

Hi all! As I'm sure most of you are aware, Strange Productions 27th annual May Day Pole Dancing Festival has drawn to a close. And oh how the poles were dancing . . .around . . .by many people! Every pole was freshly waxed before the event and it was worth it. You should have SEEN the way the dancers worked it!

OK, that's just too easy, but I had to make at least a few passing "pole" references. It was May Day, after all, the festival of fertility and crepe paper streamers wrapped around ground protrusions. But those types of jokes are in poor taste. Our Strange Productions Pole Dancing Festival has never been about the mythical, orgiastic gatherings by druids and witches and pixies and celts and krakens and suchlike (and, considering the staff at Strange Productions, it's best that the word "orgiastic" never works into ANY of our plans). For us the Festival has always been about good times, good friends and good dancing! Oh, and funny costumes (provided entirely by Kris and his extensive Renn. Faire wardrobe--thanks Kris!).

Now, onto the pictures. And I should apologize to anyone who was at the festival but wasn't included in the pictures. Shortly after the Festival ended, my digital camera fell unto the gaze of the mighty Medusa. Unfortunately, these were the only pictures I could salvage from the memory card, and they are OBVIOUSLY suffering from some sort of image distortions as well. Stupid Medusa.

Here's a picture of several of us prancing around the May Pole, having a gay old time! And I don't mean that as in gay gay, I mean happy gay. Though I'm sure there are plenty of gay gay undertones all over this picture. And who knows with some of you.

Here's Kris playing his instrument of choice, the Jew's Dulcimer. Unfortunately, Seamus, the fiddler filling in for Danny Boy, was a poor replacement and had a nasty tendency of scratching flat all the time. Poor Kris!

And here are our two May Queens, Pat and Cammi! Look at those fancy duds and fetching bosoms! Lovely! The voting for this year's Queen was so close that it ended up in a tie for the first time in Strange Productions history. As such, both winners will get to share the weekend getaway to the Appalachians. Be sure to take those outfits with you fellas, the folks up that way LOVE a little cultural diversity!

And here's Jon and Liz just prior to the lighting of the Strange Productions Burning Non-Gender Specific Human Being! What a blaze this cast! Who would have thought that a flaming, 90 foot tall papier-mâché hermaphrodite would be visible from space? But that's exactly what the good folks at NASA told us right before the Man came and hauled most of you away. Gotta stay quick on your feet, folks, that's what Pole Dancing is all about!

And, finally, here's a picture of our daintiest flower, Matt. Look how brave he looks even though death can only be a few heartbeats away. What a cruel prick Bacchus was to break Matt's neck like that. That's the last time we invite any gods to our shindigs! I don't care how highly recommended they are.

Well, that's it, people. I hope you fondly remember these good times as I always will, only with the aid of hypnotic suggestion.

Lessons Learned--5/30/05

(This is my first diversion from Nature trying to do me in. There are a few of these that made the email circuit. I will probably try to incorporate a few more of the ones that fell between the last of the duck stories and the next Pat v. Nature. Apparently I took about a year off from those emails. I bet nobody even noticed and, in fact, if asked, would say that I sent out "way too damn many of those stupid emails" during that time. Ha! You're wrong! But I did, in fact, fill email boxes with other stuff, so I should include those here so nobody forgets how amusing I can be.)

Today life was kind enough to teach me two more very important lessons while I was out for a walk. Well, one important lesson and one incredibly earth shattering revelation if one of my two hypotheses pans out.

The two hypotheses are as follows—I will get them out in the open and explain both of them in turn:

1) Republicans are trying to kill me.

Or

2) When I am driving my car, walking on or along roads, or riding my bike, I am invisible to 90% of the driving population. This only pertains to when I am in motion, not when I am stopped (at an intersection or light or turning or whatever).

Let me begin with #2 and I think you will all agree that my reasoning is sound, if not utterly flawless and inarguable.

First, let me make it crystal clear to everyone that I don’t claim to have any supernatural powers or anything like that (though, of course, I’m not ruling that out, but since I’m always alone when these things happen to me, I have no way of verifying that me and whatever means of transportation I’m using are ACTUALLY invisible, and I don’t want to sound “crazy,” so I will instead just disavow any chances for supernatural activity, just to play it safe). But, over more than a decade of city driving, I have learned to adopt a very attentive approach to dealing with other vehicles on the road. I have long surmised that people, for some inexplicable reason, just do not see me, and today’s events are helping me feel even more secure in the validity of my hypothesis.

Here are a few examples of changes that I have made to my driving over the years to compensate for this phenomenon. Let’s say that I am driving along the road and I come to an intersection. Crossing traffic has stop signs on either side, so I have the undisputed right of way. Time and many, many close calls have taught me to ALWAYS assume that the driver who is stopped at the stop sign will not wait for me to cross the intersection but will, instead, either drive right across the intersection in front of me or will turn into my lane of traffic, cutting me off outright. Now I always approach EVERY intersection as though I have at least a yield sign in front of me. During freeway driving, I have taken to driving in the middle lane as often as possible because this gives me a lane to swerve into when another car tries to simultaneously occupy the same place in my lane that I am existing in. Or, while driving down the street, if I see that a person is attempting a left turn from oncoming traffic ahead of me and there are no other cars around me, I invariably take my foot off the gas as I approach and hold my foot over the brake to allow me that extra second to slam and swerve.

These are just a few examples. Imagine how you would have to change your driving if you were driving down unlit streets in the middle of the night without your headlights on. This is how I try to drive whenever I am alone in my car. Well, it might not be THAT bad, but I do have to pay extra attention, and I know that this extra attention has prevented me from getting into over two dozen accidents over the years—and that seems like an extraordinarily high number of near misses to me--thus, I must be invisible.

Anyway, that was my pre-existing hypothesis and today it was nudged just a little closer to law while I was out for a walk. The weather was a bit balmy today, but the temperature was quite nice compared to what we’ve had here for the last week. So I decided to take advantage of it with an afternoon walk (I’m out of school for another week and a half and, though I’m sure I have “productive” things I could be doing, I’m trying my level best to be the laziest person I possibly can be during this break—so far it’s working gang-busters). Because I don’t like walking down the streets any more than I have to when I am alone (I’ve always had a sinking suspicion that my life was in jeopardy every time I did, but never linked it to my invisibility until today), I took the bike path down to athletic park and decided to walk a few laps around the park. This park, I’m sure you will all remember, is where I usually do my bike riding (again, so I can stay off the public streets as much as possible).

While on the bike path, everything was perfectly fine. Even the ducks where getting out of my way as I approached—though there was a bit of a tense moment when one of the neighborhood geese gave me the eye, but I stared him down and established my dominance (or at least he let me think that until a better opportunity arises). Once I got to the park, however, things started going pear shaped almost immediately.

All along the west and north sides of the park’s road, there are perpendicular parking stalls. All of the park’s playground equipment and the city swimming pool are along these sides of the road. People who use these facilities park here. In the center of the road that circles the park, there is a football field (and an amphitheatre, tennis courts, horse shoe pits, and a big, open stretch of grass for doing whatever people like to use big, open stretches of grass for). For the last seven or eight months, the city has been doing some work on the football field and its parking lot. So, now, besides the park-goers’ vehicles, there are usually numerous trucks belonging to city employees, contractors, and assorted hourly workers parked in the stalls along the road.

As I said before, when I walk, I try to avoid being on the road as much as possible—this is no different in the park. I try to stick to the sidewalks if I can. But today, thanks to the construction, large swathes of the sidewalk were blocked off and inaccessible. So I had to steer around them by walking along the side of the road. And when I say, “side of the road,” I mean it. If my legs had a suspension system, it would be shot from how often I bump into the curb. And when I see or hear cars coming, I try to jump onto the curb or a few feet into the grass to get out of the road (I’m sure you people are all thinking I’m some sort of crazy paranoid, but you’ll soon see why I act and think the way I do).

So, as I was straying very slightly into the left side of the road to go around the construction nets, I noticed that one of the contractor trucks was backing out of the stall--an electrician, though that has nothing to do with the story. He was about ten yards in front of me and on the opposite side of the road, so I stopped for a bit to let him pull out. He backed out of the stall, and kept backing clear to the opposite side of the road, where he snugged parallel with the left-side curb AND KEPT COMING BACK for no apparent reason. Of course, I hopped up onto the curb, tangling myself slightly in the orange construction netting and just getting me out of his way. When he stopped, I gave the back of the guy’s truck a smack, since it was less than a foot away from me. Either he didn’t notice the thump or he didn’t want to notice since he’d almost backed over me--and he sped away.

On his back bumper there was a Todd Tiahrt (R-KS) sticker and a Bush/Cheney ’04 sticker.

That was all well and good. I passed it off as just another prick driver who wasn’t paying attention and continued my walk.

Then, on the south side of the park road, where there are fewer parking stalls and before the sidewalk starts back up again, I was once again forced to walk on the side of the road. This half of the circular road around the park, for some reason known only to a stoned city planner somewhere, is one-way. And I was walking with the traffic—but still on the left hand side of the road where, presumably, I would be safe.

Unfortunately, we had a glut of rain this morning—only about an inch, I guess, but it came fast enough that puddles are still sitting along most of the roadsides. As I approached one of these puddles, I hopped up onto the curb and walked along the rather sizeable puddle of water (but not TOO sizable, it jutted out from the curb MAYBE two feet), and just as I reached the middle of it, I heard a car coming up behind me. I didn’t even look back, since I assumed I was well out of harm’s way. But the driver, subjected to way too many contrived sitcoms in his lifetime, swung over to my side of the road and hit the puddle with malicious intent, splashing me quite thoroughly.

He was driving a late 80s model Oldsmobile Cutlass with a Dole/Kemp sticker on his bumper.

Now, I’m willing to give that driver the benefit of the doubt and assume that he wasn’t trying to kill me, just prove that humanity, no matter how advanced, is still mostly populated with assholes. But, who knows? Maybe his beat up old piece of crap car just couldn’t clear the curb.

So I ask all of you, which of my two hypotheses is more plausible? The first driver clearly helps prove my theory that I’m invisible, while the second driver almost certainly saw me. As far as the Republicans trying to do away with me goes . . . I have never believed that the massive right-wing conspiracy has an illegally acquired database of all registered Democrats and that they actively try to do harm to or disrupt the lives of the people that they—the Republicans—disagree with. I want my Republican friends to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I think this is a load of hooey. And I strongly encourage them to pass this on to their other Republican friends at their next big $1000 a plate shindig.

Actually, now that I think about it a little more clearly, I wish to retract my earlier theory that Republicans are trying to kill me. In fact, I think I see now that, really, those fine, upstanding citizens were only trying to help me make a better, more attentive walker out of myself. Tough love and such like. I really respect them for their firm hand approach on this matter. Really. Totally. Good people. I certainly don’t wonder if some of them have heightened senses for slightly left-leaning view points—like a crazy pig can smell fear. That is preposterous.

So, definitely, I’m invisible when I’m moving on public roads. No doubt about it. Man, I’m crazy! Must be. Totally harmless, too.

(Crap, I gotta find a good way out of this story before I bury myself.)

Which brings me to the second life lesson that I learned—the not earth shattering revelation one (which was that I’m invisible and most certainly not being stalked by Republicans who wish me harm and/or humiliation, in case any of you were having problems following my not-entirely-clear story-telling style today). Exercise and Pat Albers don’t mix. Bad things always happen to me when I try to do the right thing. So, from now on, it’s all couch sitting and Freedom Fries eating for this one!

Responses

Alright. I'd like to say this is getting out of hand, but it has given me fresh emails to read every day for awhile now, so I consider this a worthwhile endeavor all the way around (especially since this is the first I've heard from many of you in quite awhile).

As I was sitting here trying to think up a response to all the emails I've received, I briefly considered apologizing to all of the people on this mailing list who fall into the Cursing-The-Cruel-Fates-For-Crossing-My-Path-With-The-Crazy-Ranting-Spammer category, and to those of you who, though you will fondly remember me and say kind words about me when I am gone, largely find me annoying and wish I would just get a real job that kept me off the computer for the majority of the rest of my life, but, then I decided that I would, instead, just curse the cruel fates along with some of you and ask those others of you to calmly bide your time and remember how gentle I am with cute, fluffy kittens and how, that one time, I pushed that bum out of the way and was hit by the bus instead. If you don't remember that story, but would like to remember me fondly for that brave act, give me some time and I'll come up with some way to introduce it to your memory of me in a way that casts a most favorable light.

Now, I feel I need to respond specifically to a few of the emails I've read over the past few days.

Ben--Killjoy. Logic is such a wonderful, mental tool, but it has no place in the fantasy world of my poor little brain (that reminds me, I heard a funny word on the radio this afternoon--gynecologic, though the simple addition of a dash makes it a far more interesting word, gyneco-logic, think about it, it entertained my brain for nearly ten minutes). OF COURSE the law of averages says that, if two people from a state predominantly populated with Republican supporters try to kill me in a single day, it is entirely probable that both of those drivers will have supported Republicans in the past--just because MOST of the people in this state have previously supported Republicans. It is also a well-known fact that most people who aren't "me" can't drive (I put quotes around that because it is the universal ME, applying always to whoever is speaking, who is always a fantastic driver). And, while I certainly respect the necessity for such logic in a crazy, world gone mad, I have but one simple word to say to you that fully sums up my feelings on the matter--BAH.

Caleigh--Believe me, there were no cell phones involved. Now, while I appreciate the fact that you were trying to branch out of the chosen topic of diatribe a bit, I'm afraid I can't just let this one idly slide by because, frankly, if I did, it would be casting my ability to remember certain details in a rather untrustworthy light (and where would I be if you people weren't believing that all of these emails were 100% true from start to finish?). Think about it. I am the type of person who, after nearly being run over by an Electrician's van, looks at the bumper stickers instead of doing the logical thing--either taking down the license plate number or remembering the van's number and committing the How's My Driving 1-800 number to memory for future tirades to the company's customer support line (whose employees I have the utmost respect and, I'm afraid, pity for--customer service is the devil's work and anyone who does it most surely has rested themselves a favorable place in the afterlife, while those who call customer support lines and treat those same employees like shit are, I can only hope, going to be spending a great deal of the afterlife on the wrong end of angry and rude phone conversations). Thus, it stands to reason, I would also notice whether or not the person was using a cell phone. That falls into the same story-telling vein, I think, as what bumper stickers they have prominently displayed, and, thus, is worthy of my silly little brain's notation.

Jesse--While I certainly like the idea of you and I running for office, I'm afraid that it is impossible. Not only are we both too young for at least the next two elections (35, isn't it? I can't remember. But certainly the majority of the population wouldn't vote for a couple of whippersnappers who were younger than 45 or so--that just stands to reason with the crotchety bunch of baby-boomers still coherent enough to be driven to the ballot boxes in November and vastly outnumbering all of us younger generations who are still far too apathetic to wake up early enough, if at all, to fill in a few ovals with a pencil), but there is actually a little known law that makes it technically and, apparently, constitutionally impossible as well. Back in 1919, one sly politician slid a rider into the Prohibition Amendment (number something-teen, if I'm not mistaken) that reads as follows: "Every 'minor' state in the Union shall be allowed only one (1) 'major party' Presidential nominee every 150 years." This was passed because, hey, nobody wanted to be "that guy who voted against that popular amendment" even if the amendment was, by in large, completely retarculous, so all kinds of crazy laws were passed along with it. Why do you think there even IS a Texas still? Anyway, since pretty much every state but Texas, Florida, California, New York, and, for some reason, Ohio are considered "minor" states, and since Bob Dole was kind enough to use up Kansas' one go in my lifetime, we're pretty much screwed for that idea. Unless, of course, we want to start a third party called the Sweet Ass Party. I don't imagine they'd view us as much of a threat, that's for sure, so we'd probably be safe as official candidates.

OK. I think that's all of the responses that need responses, as I recall. Glad I could help, or keep people's mailboxes full, or whatever.

Ice Storm (not the movie, thank god)--1/10/05

Greetings all! I hope this finds everyone well and good and (insert particular bit of small talk that interests you the most here). Last week we had one of the worst ice storms blow through that I can remember, and I felt it was my moral obligation to share our last week’s misery with you via wildly inaccurate and possibly long-winded narrative description.

It all started a week ago last Sunday—January 2^nd. The weather forecasters (who up until this point had been about as accurate as they usually are for us—batting around .400 for the 36 hour forecast) failed to predict not only that it would be drizzling around 7:00 that night, but also that it would be below freezing that whole evening. Thus, by the time I went to bed around 11:00, there was an icy slush starting to form on everything (the weather had been unseasonably warm up to that point, so the ground wasn’t anywhere near frozen—in fact, we still have some green grass in our yard). This worked out especially good for me as I was looking for an excuse, ANY excuse, really, to get out of going to my Inman class that next morning. I mentally prepared the phone call I would make at 7:00 the next morning letting them know that the roads were JUST bad enough that I wouldn’t be able to make it.

Which I did first thing Monday morning, even though the roads really weren’t THAT bad and I probably could have made it if I’d actually wanted to (yeah, go ahead, judge me. You know you’d do it too if you had that kind of control over when you do or don’t go to work). The rest of Monday went by without any addition to the ice on the ground, but the temperatures stayed low enough that nothing melted.

So, by the time the real freezing rain got going around 10:00 a.m., Tuesday, January 4^th, we already had something of a head start on the freezing and icing.

Here I should mention that, until this last week, I have spent my last few years with child-like hope in my heart every time the winter skies cloud up. I do, after all, have a job that will let stay home all day if the weather gets bad enough. Every cloudy sky held the hope of a day where I could crawl back into our nicely warmed, electric-blanketed bed and sleep until the next day. Granted, I no longer keep the stack of fresh “emergency” comic books to read while snuggled in bed that I always took care to have in grade school and high school, but, as I grow older, I’m finding sleep a perfect replacement for such material time-wasters. As such, I tend to love the prospects that winter holds. And, admittedly, even though I’ve had my fair share of winter after this last week, I find myself holding that same hope in the back of my head as the weather-person announces that yet another round of ice might be moving in tomorrow night (Tuesday, January 11^th).

Anyway, so it was with this sort of giddy anticipation that I watched as the sheets of ice slowly started to build on everything around our house Tuesday morning.

“This is great!” I thought. “No more class for a few days at least!”

So, with nothing on my immediate agenda, I curled up in front of my television and watched some Star Trek repeats on Spike TV. Only I didn’t so much curl up as I sat down in my chair with a small bowl of salted-in-the-shell peanuts. And I didn’t sit down with the intention of watching Star Trek, but found it while I was flipping through the dismal selection of early afternoon programming and decided it was better than silence and the cold, cruel voices that ring through my head whenever there is any lull in background noise. Only they’re not so much cold, cruel voices as a nearly complete silence broken only by the occasional soft thud as errant brain cells collide in a largely open field of play.

It turned out to be an O’Brien episode of Deep Space Nine, a rare pleasure indeed! So, of course, the power went out, just as I had broken into my third peanut. This happened at exactly 1:32 p.m. I know this because we have what I realize now is an unusually high number of battery operated clocks on the main floor of our house—five, one for each room on the floor (we make up for it by having zero on the second floor). This turned out to be great later in the week when watching the second hand slowly tick its way around its track became one of my favorite ways to pass the long, slow hours, and listening for the quarter hour chimes of the grandfather clock became something that I looked forward to with white noise deprived zeal as I tried to fall asleep every night.

After the power went out, I decided that it might be in my best interest to calmly and collectively assess my situation. I walked to the back window that looks out over our tree-filled back lot. It had been awhile since I’d checked to see how the ice was building, so I was mildly surprised to see that it was around a half inch thick on the branches of the trees.

“Huh,” I thought, because there wasn’t much more that could be thought on the subject.

If past power outages dictated, we’d have power before the afternoon was up and the house wouldn’t even have a chance to get properly chilled down.

I called Libby at work and let her know the situation. Wichita had only then started to see the first bits of freezing rain, but already things were starting to get ugly there too.

Here would be a good point for me to describe the typical Wichita driver. Every Wichita—and Kansas in general—driver will tell you that he or she is EXCELLENT in questionable conditions. I know this because I personally will tell you that I am an excellent driver in questionable conditions, and I know this to be a boldfaced lie. The truth is that, even though we see just about every kind of weather over the course of a calendar year, we don’t see MUCH of any of it. Thus, when it rains, drivers will tell you to your face that they normally drive like champs in bad weather right after they have side-swiped your car with twenty yards of steering/braking room to spare. And when that rain turns into snow or ice, forget about it. Odds are that 9 out of 10 drivers on the road at any given time are fleeing from or heading to an accident of some sort. So, even though I know I’m an excellent driver, I try my best to keep my car safely parked in our driveway whenever the weather turns bad.

And did I mention that I have a job that affords me that luxury? I’m sure I haven’t. I’m not one to gloat about those types of things (and everyone has to humor me on this bit because, really, what else do I have to gloat about?).

So, because Libby has a government job and it’s a well-known fact that when things turn south government employees are like rats on a sinking ship, she left work early and came home.

OK, that’s not fair. Government employees aren’t like rats at all. Not even the almost cute, domesticated rats that people keep as pets. They’re great people. All of them. But she did get to leave the rapidly deteriorating city that she worked for to come home and sit in the electricity-less house with me for the rest of that afternoon, so you come to your own conclusions.

And in that electricity-less house we sat for the rest of the day. As the last vestiges of heat slipped through our woefully inefficient windows, doors and walls, the two of use stood in our back room watching as tree branches fell with alarming frequency all over our property. It was so fascinating, in fact, that we stood there nearly all of the remaining hours of light that we had. We watched as huge tree bits fell on our nearly new shed (four separate times, actually) and as other trees all around our perimeter decided that our property was far superior to the property that the trees actually belonged to (for, while we have scads of trees around our place, we only have about a dozen or so that are actually on our property).

It was scary and awe-inspiring and devastating (and I’m sure I could get all kinds of poetic or at least spend a little time describing what it actually looked like, but I’ll leave those few thousand words to the pictures, this is already thousands of words long enough on its own) and it was all wrapped up into one rapidly chilling afternoon that turned into a very long night where every five or ten minutes the complete silence of our house would be broken by more trees falling, sometimes directly onto our house. And if you’ve never been woken out of a light slumber by the sound of a 1000 pound cottonwood branch crashing into your roof, I highly recommend it for the sheer adrenaline rush experience. After taking the time to get up, grab a flashlight, bundle up a little more and go outside to check what damage had been done a few dozen times, we slowly started to acclimate to the unknowable noises and drifted off into an uneasy sleep that ended up being one of the worst nights I’ve ever had. When we went to sleep that night, our house was still warm enough that our breath was only JUST starting to show up. By morning, the words we spoke actually froze in mid-air and dropped to the floor with an unceremonious thud. When I woke up that morning, my nostrils were completely filled with frozen snot and bits of my ears were flaking off to the touch. I had to use warm water to separate my butt cheeks. It was that cold.

Sadly, we don’t have a thermometer in our house. In fact, we only have one thermometer on our property, and it’s one that we bought last summer at the Ikea in Quebec and it’s outside under our back porch. It’s a nice looking thermometer. It’s roughly the size of a cinnamon roll. Not one of those poser rolls that they sell in tubes and you cook for a few minutes in a pie tin, one of those good-sized, Amish-style cinnamon rolls with the diameter of a tea saucer. It’s made of stainless steel and has a little temperature dial on the front. They came in a selection of three different options: thermometer, barometer and . . .something else, maybe kilometer or something that ends in –meter, I’m just sure. When we were looking them over, I noted (I think I said this to Libby, but I might have just been addressing my inner-child, as I often do with my observations that seem pointless enough not to share with the general public—and as you can see by the kind of crap I include in something like this, it would have to be MIGHTY pointless before I wouldn’t share it) that there were so few of the pedometers and barometers but so many of the thermometers. It turns out that there was a simple reason for this, the stupid thing only goes down to 30 degrees. Now, I’m not sure what genius was in charge of buying thermometers that only go down to 30 degrees in a country where the average winter temperature has to be measured in Kelvin just to keep people from getting depressed, but I hope he was fired, because even us suckers from Kansas who were stupid enough to buy one of the damn things found ourselves righteously disappointed by it.

The point is, we had no way of knowing how cold it was in our house. We don’t think it ever got much below freezing, because the snow we tracked in kept melting on the floors, but it was cold enough that water stopped evaporating on everything that got wet.

Hold on. I need to go turn up the heat. These memories are making the mental hypothermia set back in.

That’s better.

We eventually ran out of towels because every time we took a shower, the towel we used to dry ourselves became a frigid pile of damp uncomfortableness that never dried. Dishes that I hand washed three days before our electricity came on were still wet in spots when we finally got power back. I remember slipping on a puddle of nose drippings that I left within the first 24 hours of the outage. It sucked.

We were far luckier than many people, though. And I’ll take this moment to be serious. We have a gas water heater, so we were never without hot water to warm our hands or take a bath in. And our stove is gas so we were able to boil water for tea or cocoa or to fill nalgene bottles full of bowling water to warm the foot of our bed throughout the experience. And, after the first three miserable days, our friend Lecia loaned us two propane-powered catalytic heaters that we were able to use to warm our upstairs landing and our bedroom almost to the point where we couldn’t see our breath. Without those luxuries, I would have given up and started our house on fire for warmth. And, even then, after everything was said and done and we’d gotten our power back on and I reflected on how sorry I felt for myself and how miserable I had been for the past five days, I quickly realized that we had it REALLY easy, comparatively speaking, so I made sure to pop onto the internet as soon as the computer was running and donate some money to the Red Cross for the tsunami victims. Because, if it sucks to have bad weather in a civilized country where danger can usually be escaped by a quick jaunt down the street to a friend’s or even to Wal-Mart for a quick warm-up, imagine how hard it sucks having to deal with far more devastating conditions in a place where the only thing they know about Wal-Mart is that the company pays $.05 per day to sew shoes together.

But enough of that.

Some days passed like that. Five total, though I don’t really remember much specifically about those days. Libby, the lucky devil, was able to retreat to the sumptuous warmth of her fluorescently lighted cubicle. I, meanwhile, had to make like a refugee and travel from friend’s house to friend’s house, killing time until it got dark and cold enough that we wanted to be back in the house to make sure the pipes and our cats didn’t freeze. That Thursday night, our neighbor John came over and asked if we’d like to share the warmth of their fireplace for awhile.

To those of you who go out and meet your neighbors just as soon as you move into a new neighborhood, the fact that we had lived next door to John and Kim for three years but had done little more than make uncomfortable small talk over the fence in that time will seem strange, anti-social, and possibly one of the trappings of an insane mind. But we hadn’t, so label us however you want.

It turns out, though, that they are cool people. We went over there every night that weekend and, by the end of it, were enjoying their company enough that we split enough wine to make the whole, cold affair drift blissfully into the deep sleep of the hopelessly inebriated on Saturday night.

Saturday night, in fact, John and Kimberly got their power back. We would have gotten our power back too, if not for the accursed Elm tree in our front yard that severed our power line from the transformer on the corner (oh yeah, transformers exploding on a frosty, stormy night are also pretty neat to see—they flare up in many shades of green and orange). Elm trees, I’ve come to learn, are nature’s way of paying people back for making a muck of the planet over the past few millennia. They are about the most worthless tree on the face of the globe. They are tall enough to be dangerous and flimsy enough to guarantee that 75% of their total mass will collapse under the pressure of a hearty ice storm. But when we saw the electric guys working on the line in front of our house, our hearts were all aflutter. Well, mine was at least. Libby was butt-digging our little adventure. She was getting the chance to use bunches of camping materials that she had been stock-piling for god knows how many years—and she was getting to do it from the comfort of a real bed! The best of both worlds! Bah. I felt like a school-girl who was about to get her first real kiss. Or at least I assume that’s what I felt like. The best I could do from personal experience was a school boy who had just discovered boobs, but that somehow lacks charm and completely fails to create the right kind of romantic atmosphere for how I was feeling. Not that it was romantic, by any means (though we did drink a lot of wine that night, and it would be awfully cool to be able to tell a kid that he/she was conceived in the great ice storm of ’05—pronounce ought-five, of course, [though I have no idea how that’s spelled]), but it should probably have that same sort of romantic eagerness to it. A sort of longing for something that you’ve wanted so bad but were beginning to think would never happen. That kind of thing. You know. All of this could apply to the school boy discovery of boobies too, of course, but what can you do?

Anyway, now I don’t even really remember where I was in the story. Saturday. Power. Wine. Possible procreation. Sweet sweet boobies.

Right. Sunday.

Sunday came and with it came the hope of some warming up. Finally. Uncharacteristically warm it may have been the whole winter up to this point, but the first four days that we didn’t have power, it never once got above freezing—actually, it only got NEAR freezing once, the rest of the time it ranged from 1-20 degrees. We decided to make the most of it by getting all dressed up to start on the cleanup. John had come over for a few hours on Saturday to help us get some of the bigger stuff cut into moveable sizes, and on Sunday Lecia and Kris said they would come up and give us a hand cutting and moving some more of it.

So, while we procrastinated in our living room, hoping that it would get warm enough that we could venture outside and maybe open the windows to warm the house up a bit, the electric company trucks pulled in front of our house and within thirty minutes had our power up and running again. This was at around 10:30 a.m. I’m not sure of the exact time because I was dancing like a fairy princess all around the house and into the streets where I kept sweeping every passer-by into my intoxicating dance and before long we had an actual, impromptu, 40s musical-style production taking place on the streets of Newton. And then we cut branches for far too long and ended the day complaining how goddamn hot it was in our house even though the thermostat was only reading that it was in the upper 50s.

And that’s our story. Not quite as interesting as the one that happened in the movie Ice Storm—there certainly wasn’t any swinger parties and nobody got to see Christina Ricci naked that I know of, well, and nobody died—but it’s all I’ve got. I know there are other memorable things that I failed to work in, so I will list them here and you can just plug them into your memory wherever you see fit in this five day period:

• Making s’mores on our gas oven.

• Turning down numerous offers from fantastic friends and family to stay with them

because we’re just too stupid to get out of the cold.

• Worrying about our pathetic cats even though they were probably perfectly comfortable

the whole time. I mean, come on. They’re made of fat and fur, how much more built for

warmth could you possibly be?

• Discovering cold fusion and using it to power a rocket to launch a clown into space.

• Kicking up part of a tile in the kitchen because the glue had frozen underneath it.

• Running an extension cord from our neighbor’s house to power a space heater, flood

lamp and electric blanket for an evening.

• And, finally, learning, after years and years of hearing people talk about it but never

having real cause to learn its importance, the true value of dressing in layers.

I hope everyone has learned something important by all this. I know I haven’t.

Nature 3-Pat 1 (Duck Story the Third)--8/14/2004

I've had yet another skirmish in what is mounting into an epic battle between me and Newton's forces of nature, and I thought I would share it with all of you again.

Since I can never remember who I include on these mass mailings, I probably ought to briefly recap the events thus far.

The hostilities began early this spring when I was assaulted by a few of the half dozen amorous ducks in my yard. No actual blows were exchanged, but the INTENT for aggression was obvious. These ducks had blood in their eyes and eye peckings on their little duck brains. Understandably, I found this a little disturbing but dismissed it as hormone induced antagonism, possibly stemming from the frustration that an unsuccessful duck might feel when six male ducks are simultaneously trying to occupy one very small space inside a single female duck—obviously a few of them are going home unsatisfied and stymied and anyone who got close enough would undoubtedly receive the brunt of this frustration. Regardless of their actual motivation, I was willing to let it pass as a fluke event, hardly something to cause undue concern.

A month or so after this, however, the ducks escalated the hostilities and proved to me beyond a reasonable doubt (because I am obviously willing to embrace an illogical assumption over a reasonable doubt any day, just because life is always more interesting that way) that they were focusing their attention on me with the intention of “bringing me down,” as it were. I mean, they DID conspire to throw me from my bike into Sand Creek. I don’t think I am being too far-fetched in assuming that this was a deliberate act by an organized movement within the larger duck population.

Which brings us to today. After nearly three months of heat-induced reclusion in my house (and a general laziness and disinterest in getting out and riding my bike, or doing anything else that wasn’t absolutely necessary outside, for that matter), I decided last week that the weather was getting nice enough again that I should try to get out and ride my bike. It won’t last, of course, because fall only lasts three weeks in Kansas, so it will be around twelve degrees here by the middle of October, and then I will succumb to my natural instinct to huddle around the warm glow of my television set once again.

Now, as I’ve been out riding my bike these last few times, I think it’s safe to say that I have been a bit more wary and cautious than I previously had been. As any victim would, I now approach situations that directly reflect or bare resemblance to those in which I was assaulted. I mow my lawn with more attention to any fowl that might be nearby, and if they decide to get frisky in my yard, then I quietly leave them to their business. And when I ride my bike, I try to give possibly suicidal ducks (and since all ducks look and decidedly act suicidal, that means all of them) a wide berth. One inch of prevention is worth a mile of . . .whatever—I can’t remember the saying now, but I know it’s relevant. Some of you may laugh, but I see this as perfectly reasonable. The last thing I want is for another duck to send me sprawling into the Creek again—this time I might smash into one of the lethal protrusions along the path or, god forbid, be seen cascading over the edge by another human being.

So it is with more open-eyed awareness that I spend my time outside my house these days. But, today I learned that it would, in fact, take more than just awareness to protect me from Newton’s air terrorists. I’m afraid that I will have to take a page from our current foreign policy and bring the fight to my enemy’s front door, because obviously I am going to continue to suffer at their webbed feet as long as I remain passive in my war on airrorism (or maybe fowl airrorism would be more appropriate, I’m just coining these words on the fly, so I should probably give them slightly more thought at some point before I go MORE public with my plans—any suggestions for catchy propaganda phrases from any of you would be much appreciated and I promise to give you credit when I release my manifesto and airdrop the bomber hold full of fliers as I eventually intend to. I need to get the public on my side if I’m going to win this war, and I’m afraid that I’ve always shied away from spin and half-truths if I could avoid them, so if any of you PR or lawyer types out there who are used to lying can lend a hand, I’d appreciate it.).

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Here’s what happened.

I was once again riding my circles around Athletic Park here in town. And about forty minutes into my ride—which is about the time when I feel a bit like exploding on the inside, my arms start to go numb and my head starts to spin, which means it’s about time to begin my wobbly ride back to the house—I began what I planned to be my second to last lap. Around what I think of as the back side of the park—because it is the furthest from my house and would require the longest schlep home if I ever blew a tire or some other catastrophic event happened to my bike—I was peddling away, minding my own business. I have never seen the ducks anywhere near this spot, so I tend to let my guard down a little as I round this part of the road.

Correction! That’s the word. An inch of prevention is worth a mile of correction! Ha!

Anyway, I was heading south on the road towards the back of the park. There was a pretty stout wind today (if I had a blue screen available, I would trace out the line of the cold front that is slowly inching across the state for all of you to see, but I don’t, so I won’t), and I am not built for aerodynamics. In fact, my innate “huskiness” acts more like a sail than an engine when I ride my bike. Thus, when I’m heading into strong head winds—and especially when I’ve been out for awhile and I’m starting to pant and struggle—I tend to adopt the old nautical practice of tacking and waring to keep the wind as much on my side as possible, to keep my legs from failing as much as anything. To the untrained eye, this would look more like weaving and swirving than applied aerodynamics, but the untrained eye can try being a wide guy in a stiff wind sometime.

I also tend to hunker down a bit to let as much wind blow over the top of me as possible—also applied aerodynamics, if I am to believe all of the commercials I’ve seen with wind blowing over the top of luxury sedans (and I am, if nothing else, the luxury sedan of humans). So, as it were, I was mostly watching the ground slide by as I meandered from the middle of the road back over to the right hand side. And that is why I didn’t see the squirrel.

Squirrels hold second place on my List of Nature That I Wish to See Put in a Terminal Sleeper Hold. Over the last two years, they have become an infestation in our tree-filled yard and have made a nasty habit of eating EVERYTHING they possibly can, usually making a larger mess than one would think a smallish rodent possibly could. Sure they’re cute, but since they aren’t the kind of cute that you can put on your lap and pet, it’s a defense mechanism that just doesn’t work on me, I’m afraid.

Nonetheless, I don’t go out of my way to harm squirrels. I wouldn’t object to a largish occupation force of slightly disturbed adolescent boys with bee-bee guns coming in and liberating my yard, of course, but I don’t personally believe in soiling my hands with the blood of those who cross me and mine. I am a much bigger man than that. Possibly, and I’m just going out on a limb here and trying to divert attention from my physicalities, it is THIS bigness rather than my physical broadness that makes me a good wind block. I think this seems perfectly reasonable. Regardless of which bigness catches wind, I make it a rule to never go out of my way to harm anything. If nothing else, it’s bad karma and my life doesn’t need anymore of that.

So, had I seen the squirrel BEFORE it jumped from the curb on my right hand side and ran with suicidal accuracy straight for my front tire, I probably would have tacked (or wared, I’m not sure which it would be, I didn’t invest THAT much of my time on Jim Stein’s Nautical Terms web page. Actually, I might have only been doing one or the other all along. It’s not like there were illustrations on the web page to benefit those of us from land-locked locales who have no mental image of what ships actually DO on the water. Stupid, inconsiderate Aussies and their lots of ocean all around them!) to avoid him. But I didn’t see him, so I squashed him good. It turns out that, unlike ducks, who are large enough to survive, unharmed, a head on collision with me on my bike, squirrels lack the body mass to affect a “bouncing over and into the river” outcome and, instead, put forth a “recently flattened but still twitching” result.

I am not a squeamish person. I grew up on a farm that could have as many as four dozen cats running around at one time, and frequently they ended up run over, stepped on, carried off by coyotes, mangled by the dog or otherwise terminally molested by the fates that bend to no cat. I saw no less than six family dogs die of natural or unnatural causes. I’ve seen countless livestock—and bits of livestock after bloated, decayed explosions of gas—dead after lightning strikes, drownings, diseases and other acts of whatever natural force who hates to see cows live. And, speaking of livestock, I grew up EATING animals that I had personally raised by bottle feeding and who I had hand fed grain. Usually they had names. The one I most enjoyed eating was Larry. He was a 700 pound steer that I took to the 4-H fair. While at the fair, he tried to mount me. He tasted like victory. Growing up, being a slightly disturbed adolescent with a bee-bee gun, I killed many, many little animals. I killed slightly larger animals with a shotgun when I got old enough to do that. I have seen death. Which might account for all the bad karma I’m living down now.

But, for some reason, the sight of that twitching squirrel set me a little ill-at-ease. I didn’t stop, mind you, but I did look back as long as I could and then I quickly decided that I would be heading home instead of making another round—I wasn’t interested in being reminded of the negative repercussions of inattentiveness. So I pumped my little legs to get around the bend and began my trek back north, to our home.

It didn’t take long, however, for the guilt to subside, only to be replaced by a slight feeling of vindication. Nature had beaten me twice and I had had no opportunity for retaliation. Maybe I had successfully scored a point for the good guys!

It was this very option that I was considering as I pedaled casually back towards the house—along the path that runs adjacent to the Creek (I don’t feel comfortable calling it a “river” because I’ve seen what it is when the damn is released, and it barely ranks as a creek), where the ducks were quietly eating bread chunks that were being tossed to them by an oblivious Texan who appeared to think that what he was doing was a novel treat—he was smiling like a big dumb, well, Texan who just heard that gay rights, abortion and capital punishment laws had all been combined in the most horribly implausible but religious righteously satisfying way. I’m not sure what that would be, but you figure it out. The guy was smiling like a big, dumb oaf while he chucked large fistfuls of wadded up bread at the ducks, that’s all I know.

Had I noticed the ducks congregating along the path and not been entirely distracted by the Texan (and, yes, I KNOW it was a Texan because his car had Texas tags. Yes, yes, I know that’s not definitive proof, but what if he was wearing a ten-gallon hat and whistling Yellow Rose? If that would convince you, then he was doing exactly that), I would have chosen to take the road alongside the path, which would have put me far enough away from them (ducks, I believe, have poor far-sight because they never seem to notice that it’s ME coming until I get close to them. Either that or they have attention spans too short to process the information until it is directly upon them. This is obviously a part of the duck psyche that I will have to better familiarize myself with if I am to conquer them). But, because the front of my consciousness was distracted by the Texan and the back of my mind was still arrogantly considering my squashing of a hapless (and I have to say incredibly stupid squirrel, because how hard is it to avoid a BIKE in the first place, it’s not like I could have been going more than ten miles and hour and my wheel base is only two inches wide) squirrel, I wasn’t paying attention.

So one of the bastards took the opportunity to shit on me. On the side of my face, actually, as it flew over to land where the Texan was feeding them.

Now, some of you might still consider this just one more coincidence in a long string of coincidences that in no way proves that I am being purposely and deliberately targeted by one of nature’s most seemingly harmless animals. But consider this. The duck was flying north, with the wind. I too was heading north. He was obviously flying faster than I was riding, since he overtook me. Consider how very nearly IMPOSSIBLE it would be for a duck to actually shit on my face specifically; not my arms or legs, not my cycling helmet, not my back, MY FACE, a part of my body that was almost inaccessible. It simply HAD to be deliberate and, for that matter, very carefully aimed. There is almost no chance that it could happen on accident.

Possibly the ducks sought vengeance for their squirrel brother. Possibly their vendetta is their own and not a part of a larger conspiracy held by Newton Nature in general. Either way, they are most certainly out to get me.

And, so, it is with deep regret that I simply must declare war on them. And, in the spirit of war, I must destroy not only them but their supposed allies—namely, Newton Nature—whether I can prove they are actually allies or not is inconsequential. So watch the national news, because I’m sure this is going to get ugly and, when it does, everyone’s going to hear about it.