Max....This ones for you.

It is no big secret, if you have spent much time reading the dreck I spill out on the pages of this blog, my opinion of dogs is generally higher than that of the upright species to which we all belong. I've had this nagging worry lately. The kind of worry that hangs out in the darker recesses of the brain. The kind of worry that causes you to whistle as you walk past the graveyard late at night. That tiny yet creepy voice that whispers " If you run or look behind you, a thousand nightmares will spring from the earth and chase you down". So you continue to pretend to ignore the voice, the fear, as you nonchalantly stroll past. Still it's there. Always in your ear.

Most of you are familiar with Max the Yorkie, and no this isn't his obit. He is alive and kicking, actually he's sleeping, curled up against my leg on the footrest of my recliner. The same spot he has occupied since forever. But it's coming. Max is closing on 10 years. Teeth are starting to disappear, his step has slowed a bit. His muzzle is starting to gray. When that day comes, I'm not sure how much time will pass before I come to grips with it, find the words to write it down. It's coming. I can hear that little voice. So I just whistle a little louder and keep walking.

I was about a year out of the joint when I got Max. A Christmas gift from a girlfriend at the time. I saw him born. I'd keep him to the back of the litter when prospective new owners came to buy a pup. Max was the smallest of an already small litter of pups. That made him the most desirable. I suppose my attachment was so evident that the former girlfriend took pity on me and announced he was my Christmas gift. Best gift I've ever received. He outlasted that relationship by a good 8 years or better.

Max walked down 5 years of federal parole with me. He gave me a sense of responsibility. I knew he relied upon me, much like a child. As much as the years of criminal life, prison time, the constant looking over the shoulder wore me down, as much as those things kept my mind right, it was that sense of responsibility for Max that kept me out of trouble. That probably sounds crazy as hell to some of you. You would think doing right is something you just do. But we've already established that my mind, a criminal mind, doesn't necessarily work like the mind of your average square world type. So it is what it is.

We walked the streets of Midtown, skirting the winos, the beggars, and crackheads. We made the Christmas cover of The Pitch together. We have only been apart for one week his entire life. One day Max went MIA on me. I was frantic. Running up and down the streets yelling his name to no avail. Turns out he had walked in a closet door that was ajar. I found him napping away in the corner of the closet. When I opened the door of the closet the light spilled back in the far corner and he gave me a "what the fuck you waking me up for" look.  There were closer calls. A bout of near kidney failure brought on by a moron behind our house here in Independence who sprayed weed killer like it was glade air freshener. Fortunately for that particular douche bag, Max made  a full recovery, but it was touch and go for a couple of weeks.

We have a new life in a quiet Independence neighborhood. A girlfriend that has outlasted all 3 of my previous marriages combined and it gets better with each day. Life is good. Far removed from the a quarter century of lawlessness. A different world from the once gritty now hipster inundated streets of Midtown. Max has a fenced yard, two other dogs to run roughshod over. When the girlfriend is on a day off and I'm at work, he spends his days either tucked against her leg, or as the shadows begin to slip across the window he waits on the wide sill knowing I'll soon be pulling in the driveway. Every time I walk through the door he acts as if I've been gone an eternity, no matter if it's hours or minutes in actuality.

 Life is good. But I know it's coming, so I whistle a little louder, drowning out that tiny voice that warns  not to look behind me.

Lord of the Flies....Part 2...

Old Man Konkel, the sharp shooting, unfairly harassed , falsely labeled Nazi, didn't have to worry about shit like litigation or being arrested. The day he dropped down in that drainage creek like it was a trench outside of Paris during WW2, and lit up the fat slow kid with a BB gun, was way back in the early 1970's. The rules were different, nowadays it isn't even the same game. Some out of control kid comes running around a corner in the grocery store and headbutts you in the balls you'll be lucky to avoid molestation charges and a lawsuit. A teacher barks at some unruly student, that teacher might be unemployed the next day. When I was in elementary school, a permission slip from one of your parents was all that was required for the principal to bust your ass with a wooden paddle. Today you can't even make a kid sit in a corner for 5 minutes without facing the wrath of some over protective, under corrective parent.

 Last week 2 kids appeared on my block, brothers, a fat one and a thin one. Besides my girlfriends 13 year old daughter who lives with us, there are maybe 3 kids on our street, so when a couple of new ones turn up I tend to take notice. Let me clarify that last statement, when they turn up in my front yard I tend to notice. Last week wasn't the first time they decided to lounge in the middle of my yard, it was however the first time they showed up with crude yet pointy spears. The girlfriend and her daughter were away on vacation while I stayed home to tend to the dogs and work like a gubmint mule at my shitty contract job that doesn't allow for fancy shit like paid vacations.

I come home to find these two dirt magnets standing under the large Pin Oak in the center of my front yard. Now don't get me twisted, for all of my curmudgeonly grumbling, I'm not likely to get bent because a couple of kids happen to be in my yard. When they are armed with long makeshift spears, and when they are throwing said pointed sticks straight into the air overhead, totally ignorant of gravity, that's a whole different story. So I pull into the driveway, get out of the car and give em the fish eye, they don't miss a beat. They just ignored my presence and continue tossing their spears into the branches of the tree. The branches of a 40 foot pin oak are as thick as the under arm hair at a GLAAD convention. The spear hitting anything other than branches on the way up was pretty much nill. Returning to the ground was another story. Two thoughts go through my mind.
1. If I was them I'd cut and run.
2. Somebody is gonna put an eye out then sue the shit out of us because it happened in our yard.

The following transcript is a pretty accurate reflection of the conversation that followed.

Me...        "Hey, what are you guys doing"?
Fat Kid..."Trying to kill squirrels."
Me..        " How about you go kill em in your own yard"
Fat Kid..." You can't tell us what to do."
Me....      " How'd you like to limp home with that stick up your ass"?

That was pretty much the end of the conversation. The skinny kid, probably 10 or 11, and smarter by at least half, picked his bike up and scampered out of the yard. Fat boy, probably a year or so older, tried to stare me down. I figured I could take him.  I had at least 6 inches of reach and 50 pounds on him. Even with the spear and 40 years age difference, I figured if I got him to the ground I could knock him out before I got winded from the 30 years of Marlboro smoking. It was a Mexican standoff. The chubby little shit stared at me, I gave him my best prison yard mean mug, first one to blink loses. He blinked, I took two steps toward him, and he beat feet 2 doors up and ran inside. I heard him yelling "MOM" as he went through the door.

 Before some Mommy Blogger gets on here and reads me the riot act, of course I wouldn't ground and pound some fat 12 year old like we were having a MMA match. I would however take the water hose to him like it was Selma Alabama circa 1964. Just for the record the kid was white so no racism on the water hose comment. Besides, he looked like he hadn't seen a bath since the 3rd grade. After the admittedly insignificant and arguably petty on my part exchange, I half ass waited for the  pounding at my door that would mean either an outraged mother or the police. It never came.

There is a curse, usually your mother puts it on you when you are nearing Teen hood. It usually goes something like this," I hope you have a kid just like you when you grow up." I figure that curse extends to kids who aren't yours. I'm guessing all the fucked up shit you did as a kid will do a karmic boomerang on your ass at some point. Seems like just yesterday I was running through a creek bed. laughing my ass off while Old Man Konkel cussed us out in German for chucking rocks at him. Now the storm trooper boot is on the other foot. Instead of rocks, my tormentors come armed with spears. Instead of threatening them in German, I use a slight okie twang laced with prison slang. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Lord of the Flies ain't got shit on kids today..........

It may come as a surprise to some of you rubes, but I'm not real fond of kids, in general or otherwise. ( no Mike bad touch Jackson).  I don't hate kids, I'm not anti kid, I just don't have much use for them or any tolerance for their bullshit. Having been a horrible child myself, I know of what I speak when I say that 75 percent of children , especially the male of the species, should be locked in a room and only let out to attend school, perform no wage labor, or for medical emergencies. From the age of around 8 up to 17, there is nothing more repugnant to me than some mouthy punk ass ill mannered boy child. Having once been a card carrying reprobate from that age group, I speak from experience. As fucked up as I was as a child, and make no mistake, I was as fucked up as a soup sandwich, I still knew my limits. I didn't run my mouth at some grown ass man who might put a boot in my ass.  Kids today know all they need to do is call 911 or child protective services, and next thing you know you are standing before the bench for raising your voice at some little punk ass 11 year old.

Let me give you an example of how things have changed, then I'll get to the point of this Gran Torino rant. When I was around 12, running around with other delinquents, we took great pleasure in terrorizing the more eccentric adults in our neighborhood. One old guy in particular was a frequent target of our shenanigans. This guy had the misfortune of having a German sounding name, Konkel. Old Man Konkel. Not sure if Old Man was his given name, but that's what we called him. We also called him a Nazi, even though most of my friends had no idea what a Nazi was. Legend was Konkel was Hitlers go to guy, and he had lampshades made from human skin, ate soup from a human skull, the usual Nazi type shit.  Of course this was all imaginary made up shit based on the fact that Old Man Konkel had an accent, and was too old and slow to catch us and put a beat down on our worthless asses.

There was a storm creek that ran through our neighborhood. Dry as a bone normally, and it ran right behind the home of the neighborhood SS officer and skull soup slurping Nazi, Old Man Konkel. Myself and a few of the other ner do well shit heels, would catch Konkel out in his garden, pelt him with rocks, talk shit, then run like rats when he came toward us. It was big fun for a minute. In retrospect I realize that Old Man Konkel had the patience of Job. He put up with mad shit for about half of a summer. Then came that fateful day when he had had enough of our bullshit. The last time we fucked  with that old man, one of us got shot. The slow fat kid in our group. Craig Smith. He was shot. once in the back of  the neck, and at least once in his fat slow ass.

To this day I'm not sure how that old guy knew we were coming. At the time we chalked it up to some Nazi military training. Looking back my guess is we were just clumsy noisy little shits. Whatever the case, when we tossed that first rock, that old man moved like greased lightning, and grabbed a rifle out of his wheelbarrow. Turns out it was a BB gun, one of those co2 powered ones. At the time we had no way of knowing it was a BB gun. All we knew was that old man was faster than we gave him credit for, and it's hard to make a fast getaway in a drainage creek lined with jagged rocks. Nazi or not, the old man could shoot pretty fucking swell. He yelled some shit in German gibberish, dropped down in that creek bed, and lit the slow fat kids ass up.  At the time I thought he must be using a silencer, all I  heard was, pfffft, pfffft, pffft, followed by the screams of one fat ass Craig Smith.

We never fucked with that old man again. He didn't get in any trouble. No cops were called. No parents were outraged. Craig Smith found a new group of kids to waddle around with. I learned a lesson that day. Don't fuck with old people, especially old German dudes.

Fast forward to present day...........

 Since most people have the attention span of the common flea, I'm going to continue this post tomorrow  Wednesday.

Weiner blows career, refuses to withdraw.

*** A preemptive (No Homer, not that there's anything wrong with that) on this entire post, due to all the Weiner references.***

I figure it was a sign from God. His way of telling me to get off my ass and write something. I'm driving along I 35 yesterday, middle of bumfuck cow country, when I see the Oscar Meyer Weiner mobile in the south bound lanes. True story. I was flipping the radio between Limbaugh and NPR, no wonder I'm all fucked the fuck up, and the main story on both ends of the spectrum was the big Weiner mess. Rush was clowning on the guy pretty hard, while Terry Gross or some other NPR voice was assuring me that it was a small thing being blown out of proportion. Look, I could go on all day with these double entendres, but I don't want to be accused of milking this thing for all it's worth, or beating it to death.

Twitter. When are people going to figure out that Twitter is not Latin for      " Turn my life into a soup sandwich".  In the case of the Weiner he didn't intentionally post the photo of his beans and frank encased in plum smuggler drawers. His intent was to send his wood shot to some facebook college chica. None of that matters because one misplaced slip of the send button landed dude in deep shit. His career is over, probably his marriage too. It may take a few weeks or months, but you can bet your ass this thing isn't going to end well for Weiner.  It's only a matter of time before some fame whore comes out of the wood work exposing a sordid affair or some super freaky pictures.

With all of the attention this  Weiner thing is getting, it is a glaring example of just how twisted shit is in Washington. Unemployment is up. Obama is juggling 3 wars, don't try to convince me we aren't at war in Libya. The economy sucks balls. Impoverished urban areas across the country are war zones. The middle east has turned into one giant malevolent flash mob. And the top story is about some moron sending pics of his joint to facebook friends. Congratulations, we have become a perpetual 3 minute TMZ sound byte.