I Guess I Should Wear My Glasses

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As I teeter perilously close to the precipice of well….death…especially at my age,  I’m becoming keenly aware of all the things that happens to the body at the onslaught of serious aging.   At first, it creeps, slowly.  Then, past a certain age  (I noticed a change if you will, right around the age of of 47-ish), it comes at you all at once.  Speeding, racing…and at record time, too.

Hello Titanic, meet the iceberg.

At 51 years of age, I have and have had the requisite aches and pains for a while.  And I also pluck the occasional gray hair from my head and eyebrows and yes, other far more sinister places IF YOU MUST know, and these bastards are far kinkier than what’s remaining of my blond locks.   I’ve also  been lucky enough to keep  Crow’s Feet hidden in their epidermal nests.  Lucky?  Maybe, but not so much when you consider that I’m blind as a bat in terms of seeing things  at a distance.  I’m extremely near-sighted, though that too is waning.   My vision at this point in time can best be described as “fun house” like.   

Why not? 

I guess I deserve it because I’ve spent years telling everybody that how they saw me was fiction; that my short, squatty stature was just an illusion or some strange but vivid flashback they were having from tripping on acid while laughing and stumbling through a “House of Mirrors”  at one of those nasty traveling carnivals that usually find themselves in low rent strip mall parking lots.  The trashy, dirty kind where you get on a ride and your seatmate is day old vomit.

I have glasses and I need to wear them more often but well, vanity thy name is Laurie.   That means most days  I assume this ugly squint face–one that looks like I’m perpetually smelling a fart,  but have no fear;  the Houston streets will soon be safe once again.  You see, something happened that made me realize that I need to wear my specs all the damn time.

I had a few things to mail this afternoon, so I ferried me self to ye olde Post Office and stood in line like all the other drones and waited for my turn with one of the “NEXT!!!!” shouting,  rude and angry slaves to bureaucracy behind the counter.  The line moved slowly so that gave me a chance  to do something I rarely EVER do at a Post Office in Houston—I looked around.   And that’s often a gutsy move.    The Post Office is like the DMV in that it attracts a very motley crew.

Anyway, there was a very large, plate glass window on the right hand side of the lobby, near the office where you go to get queried and verbally poked–necessary things for obtaining a U.S. passport.

I looked through the window for a second or two, then squinted to narrow my myopia even more and damned if I didn’t see a bunch of men  standing under a tree and they all had long, whitish beards.

Odd, but I thought I recognized at least one of the guys.

I concentrated.  Of course!!  I figured it out!   It was  that crazy Pai Mei cat,  the bearded, but powerful and possibly ageless practitioner of the lethal Bak Mei style of king fu.   In Kill Bill, Volume 2,  Pai Mei

taught Black Mambo (played by the very white Uma Thurman) how to do all that karate stuff, like sucker punching her way out of an interred casket.

Could it be?  I was less than two miles away from one of Houston’s many Asian communities, but no!! Men, regardless of ethnic persuasion or culture, usually don’t run around Houston dressed like Maid Marian;  not even in Montrose, Houston’s equivalent to the West Village!!!

OK, I was able to eliminate the samurai.

Then,  I looked closer.  It was.. huh?  What the  fu—?

It was Amish men??????

But how could that be?  Houston isn’t home to any Amish that I know of and neither is Texas, for that matter.  Even so..irony or ironies..traffic was awfully, awfully slow as I snailed my way to the Post Office, but  that deduction was way too far-fetched.

I wiped my eyes, hoping to reset my focus.

Wait…..

My god!   Was it?  Could it be?   Yes, it was.  It was Dusty Hill and Billy Gibbons, the bearded front men from the storied rock group, ZZ Topp!!!!

It made sense.  Dusty and Bill are from Houston, after all.  But why would two aging rock stars hang around under a tree outside a Post Office?

Well, that rhetorical question allowed me to mark  ZZ off my mental list of possibilities.

But who or what in the hell was under that tree??

Hillbillies?

Can’t be.  Houston doesn’t have any hills.  Plus, we’ve got plenty of White Trash to fill that demographic.

By that time, I was getting frustrated beyond the pale.  I just HAD to know who these men were.  So, I asked the woman behind me to save my place in line.  She did and I walked over to the window and got a  much better look.  I touched the window; felt the cool pane of glass and realized that all this time, I’d been watching……

…..Spanish Moss, swaying gently in the breeze..

Damn, aging is a bitch, ya’ll!!!

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Mikey Writes Home From Camp

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Dear Mom and Dad,   
 
Our scoutmaster told us to write to you in case you saw the flood on TV and were worried.  Don’t worry.  We’re all  OK. Only one of our tents and two sleeping bags got washed away, but no one was in them.  Luckily, none of us got drowned because we were all up on the mountain looking for Chad when it happened.
 
Oh yes and please call Chad’s mother and tell her he is OK.  He just can’t write right now because of the cast.   And the leg is healing nicely, too.
 
But I got to ride in one of the search and rescue jeeps. It was neat. We never would have found him in the dark if it wasn’t for the lightning.   Nature is cool
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Scoutmaster Walt got mad at Chad for going on a hike alone without telling anyone. Chad said he did tell him, but it was during the fire so he probably didn’t hear him.
 
Did you know that if you put gas on a fire, the gas can will blow up? The wet wood didn’t burn, but one of the tents did. Also some of our clothes. John is going to look weird until his hair grows back.  That one burn on his shoulder will make a cool scar.  I’m laying odds it’ll look a lot like the shape of Idaho once it heals.

We’ll be home on Saturday if Scoutmaster Walt gets the car fixed.   It wasn’t his fault about the wreck. The brakes worked OK when we left.   Scoutmaster Walt said that a car that old you have to expect something to break down; that’s probably why he can’t get insurance.   He said he tried getting it, but was turned down by an insurance company he calls “Mutual of Mother Fuckers”.  Do you and dad use these same people?   They sound kinda mean. 

Anyway, we think it’s a neat car.  Scoutmaster Walt doesn’t care if we get it dirty, and if it’s hot, sometimes he lets us ride on the fenders. It gets pretty hot with 10 people in a car. He let us take turns riding in the trailer until the highway patrolman stopped and talked to us.
 
Scoutmaster Walt is a neat guy. Don’t worry, he is a good driver. In  fact, he’s teaching Geoff how to drive on the mountain roads where there isn’t any traffic. All we ever see up here is logging trucks.  We sometimes stop and talk to the drivers.  They’re called Teamsters.   I guess because they all play on one team, maybe?   They sure talk funny.  They have a language all their own— a lot like Grandpa.    And they have girlfriends with them and they’re part of a club I guess called ”hookers”.  Is that because they like to fish???
 
This morning, all of the guys were diving off the rocks and swimming out in the lake. Scoutmaster Walt wouldn’t let me because I can’t swim, and Chad was afraid he would sink because of his cast, so he let us take the canoe across the lake. It was great. You can still see some of the trees under the water from the flood.   We poked at a few really fat, funny smelling mannequins floating in the water.   Odd, they looked and were dressed just like those hookers!!   
 
Scoutmaster Walt isn’t crabby like some scoutmasters. He didn’t even get mad about the life jackets. He has to spend a lot of the time working on the car so we are trying not to cause him any trouble.
 
Guess what? We have all passed our first aid merit badges. When Dave dove in the lake and cut his arm, we got to see how a tourniquet works.  Wade and I threw u at the sight of all that blood, but Scoutmaster Walt said it probably was just food poisoning from the leftover chicken he found on that picnic table .  He said they sometimes got sick that way with food they ate in prison.
 
I’m so glad he got out and became our scoutmaster. He said he sure figured out how to get things done better while he was doing time in prison.
 
By the way, what’s a pedophile?
 
I have to go now. We’re going in to town to mail our letters, get food and buy bullets and condoms.   I’m thinking big water balloon fight, especially when Scoutmaster Walt says we’re going to have a big ”end of camp” party tonight and by this time tomorrow, I’ll know who my Daddy is.

I told him I already knew.   He just smiled at me and licked his lips.  Oh and one more thing:  can I get a merit badge for participating in something called “pederasty”?   Does that have anything to do with animal care?

Well, don’t worry about anything. We’re fine.   See you soon. 
 
Love from your son, 

Mikey
  
P. S.   How long has it been since I had a tetanus shot?  

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