I'm gonna buck you up.

I used to hit up the bars with my buddies to a) drink away the stress of work, b) drink away the boredom of not working, c) meet and watch folks equally saturating themselves with temporary fixes, d) get fucked up, or e) a glorious combination of all of the above, resulting in a total black hole of anything good, kind, and right with the world. But as all fateful misadventure would have it, this gloriously habitual lack of sophistication in my life has introduced a fifth element in my infinite spiral downward: Big Buck Hunter.

For the unfortunate ignorant, Big Buck Hunter ("BBH" -- best said with a truncated lilt) is a simulation hunting game found at those peddlers of fine beverages that could only be described as having "character." To date, the current DC establishments worthy of such an electronic magnificence:


1) Pour House, Capitol Hill
Known for Thursday $1 beer night and phenomenal burgers; our most common haunt.
2) Kelly's Irish Times, Union Station
Never actually played BBH here; too drunk from kickball. Machine existence confirmed through photography of other calamities.
3) Rocket Bar, Chinatown
Blue glitter bartops; enough said.
4) Garret's, Georgetown
Apparently the place to go if you just broke up, if the jukebox is any indication; no better reason than to spend your night shooting things.

There is only one way to play BBH: loud, aggressively, largely wasted at the start but certainly so by the end, with constant smack talking to your opponent. Or onlookers, for that matter. Guzzle beer in between every round. (For 3-trek adventurers -- which is also the only way to play -- this entails sipping between all five rounds of each trek, plus the bonus round. Times three. Might want to have a second, or even third beer on hand before starting.) As a matter of fact, drink during rounds.

Nothing says commitment like holding a rapidly warming Miller bottle in between your yet-chipped teeth, waving a fluorescent green shotgun at digital deer while pumping a plastic trigger so frantically even the couple making out in the corner peel blearily away to wonder what the fuss is about. I just made round Buck Hunter, betches!

I miss my dog.

Yesterday I caught myself walking home, sloshing my way through the leaves caking onto the sidewalk, thinking about my dog, Karch. Well, he's not really my dog -- he's my big brother's -- but for three years I lived at home with no one but my mom, dad, and our dogs (the other is Heidi, Karch's mom), so I can't help but be a little more attached to the guy than usual. I found myself wondering if I were to throw a tennis ball into a pile of leaves, would Karch go and get it?

First of all, let me tell you a little about Karch. My dad and I bred Heidi back in the early spring of 1997. I was about 12 at the time; my dad convinced me to join him in this "business venture" to make a little Christmas cash, as he put it. We'd breed Heidi, keep one, and sell the others! I'm surprised my mom didn't divorce him right then, but then again, this is also the woman who stuck around after my dad bought a timeshare, a boat, and batting cages (that's right) ... all without telling her. Needless to say, our "business venture" went completely bust after Heidi had to go in for an emergency C-section half-way through delivery in a specialized clinic (our normal vet was closed due to power outage) because the third and final puppy (that would be Karch) was too big to do things the conventional way. Karch was stuck inside of Heidi for minutes without oxygen. The veterinarian pretty much guaranteed that Karch was brain-damaged, and when he did come finally rolling into the world, he wasn't breathing on his own. For the first 24 hours of his life, my mom, my brothers, me, and all the neighborhood kids took turns holding Karch and stroking his back. He would only breath if he had constant stimulation.

Which perhaps accounts for a lot of Karch's behaviorisms. He won't come and sit at your feet -- he sits on your feet. If your hand is draped down over the arm rest of the couch, he comes and pushes his nose and head into your hand. On occasion he'll walk by you on the loveseat as if to go outside, then without warning jump into your lap. God forbid there is a thunderstorm, because Karch has been known to squeeze himself inside of a pantry that had been bungee-corded closed to keep him out in the first place. Karch will work himself into such a frenzy when we kids come home for break, that his barks climb in octaves until he's literally screaming and wagging his nub of a tail so hard that his entire back half swings like a metronome in 6/8 time. And he loves to play ball. My eldest brother once through the ball so many times for Karch that the poor dog actually puked, then brought the ball back for more. His excitement for that yellow fuzzy ball is electric. I still laugh remembering the sound of him trying to bark and hold a tennis ball in his mouth at the same time. Sounds a little like someone trying to start up a rusted out Volkswagen van, with long-sounding vowels.

I was wondering about the leaves because Karch, having lived his whole life at our home in South Florida, has never seen a pile of leaves. I can imagine exactly how the scenario would go. The ball would disappear into the pile, and Karch would screech to a halt right at the edge. He'd sniff and smell around it, then look at me and bark just once -- like he does this when the ball rolls under the couch. It's as if he thinks he can't do it, but if you give him the go-ahead, then he must be able to do it. All it takes is "Get the ball, Karch!" and he dives right in -- in a pool, in the canal, in the newspaper bin ... I miss my dog.

Displaced Floridian

Everybody's talking at me.
I don't hear a word they're saying,
Only the echoes of my mind.
People stopping staring,
I can't see their faces,
Only the shadows of their eyes.

I'm going where the sun keeps shining
Thru' the pouring rain,
Going where the weather suits my clothes,
Backing off of the North East wind,
Sailing on summer breeze
And skipping over the ocean like a stone ...

I really do have the intention to write more regularly than my apparent pace. It's not like I don't have the time to sit down and hammer something out; I seem to suffer from a lack of imagination. For those very few friends of mine who might read this and have always been in the "You should write a book!" chorus -- I never have for the very same reason. Not a damn clue what to write about. And don't say all the crazy stuff I did in college, because police are involved and I would like to be in my family's will. Anyhoo, the road to hell, right?

Rewinding back to the point I intended (ahem) to make -- until my creative well springs forth a new life, I'm relying on other writing to at least get me started. Today is brought to you by Harry Nilsson's "Everybody's Talking At Me," found on the Forrest Gump soundtrack, and the letter S, for salt bagel, which I just ate. DON'T JUDGE.

Today the weather is just flat-out shitty. Not overcast, not rainy, not that radio euphemism "fall-like." Just shitty, which translates into a bleak combination of the previous three plus floating pockets of depression and high pressure system of go-jump-into-traffic. Really makes me love the Mid-Atlantic. Like I love getting my pinky toe caught on the corner of my coffee table, or the smell of my own burnt hair when it gets caught in the coil of my hair drier. Gems of life, I tell you.

There are days when I'd sit here and listlessly stare at the rain on the window contemplating my own mortality all Sylvia Plath style, but for some reason this song always puts me in a better mood. You really ought to listen to it to get where I'm going from this point on. (Or go buy what I'm selling, pick up what I'm laying down, or -- Kate W. -- go smell what I'm stepping in.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-_R-FDZ438 I mean, it's actually a fairly melancholy song. Do two sads equal a happy when music from the '70s is involved? Interesting theory. Must discuss later. But in any event, This Song = Happy KT.

Without going deep into it, because Lord knows I don't want my blog to be KT's ruminations on human existence and what is the soul, I think this song just strikes a heart chord of mine relating back to the old homestead. When you have lived and loved a place all your life, a little piece of it lodges itself so deeply into your being that, in a way, you never left.

This winter will be the first I have ever spent outside of Florida. (Yes, I have seen snow. No, I did not eat the yellow snow. I am a terrible skier, but I rock the ass-sliding down the side of a mountain because I am too wussy to ski a black diamond. DON'T JUDGE.) It's going to be pretty miserable I imagine. Today I needed three hands: one to hold the umbrella, one to hold the bottom part of my coat closed, and one to keep the umbrella from flipping inside-out. Hell, it's not even Thanksgiving and my knuckles already look like a lumberjack's and I tried wearing flip-flops again to work today; my toes de-thawed at approximately 10:45 am. Did you know rain makes wool really heavy and smelly? Huh.

I guess what this song reminds me of is that even when my bones are cold, I remember what it's like to be warm. People stop and stare, maybe at the silly Florida girl, but I wonder if they've ever smelled the rain on orange blossoms.

Overture

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity ...

This is by far one of my favorite poems -- for the language and the imagery, but also because it takes that unidentifiable feeling in the pit of a young twenty-something and gives it a face. L'entre deux guerres. A wholly new start. Imprecision of feeling. For us, there is only the trying.

I started this blog because I'm working a job that lobotomy patient could succeed at, and I'm desperately trying to preserve the few braincells I haven't already killed with this secretarial-induced coma and bourbon. I used to write often, and even occasionally well, so here's me grasping at the used-to-be. I began by including this poem because 1) it was largely my inspiration and 2) if you have never read T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, you are sub-human. Here. http://www.allspirit.co.uk/coker.html Go make yourself whole.