A week of steady work on the acres sets a body straight. I settled by a crackling fire with halfwolf Sam and poured a dash of my favorite bourbon, Ol’ Piswidgit.
Sam’s a young fellow, but already much larger than many full-growns. For a whole bunch of reasons, I’m glad Sam is my friend. He’s awful big. I know wolves don’t hurt people. That’s silly.
Sometimes I sneak up on him and he takes it personal for days.
Heck, after 22 years in Ranger Recon I can pretty much sneak up on anything though there’s not a whole lot of sneakin’ up going on out here.
Took a long time to get used to dogs after the trouble they put me through. Seemed like growing up, dogs would hustle up from miles around to mess with me, like the big, lovable Labrador retriever that had me by my face and head, dragging me down to the river before my dad smashed it with a tire.
Later, I was trapped in a collapsed tunnel in North Vietnam, face-to-face with a Vietcong German Shepherd attack dog who wanted desperately to crawl three feet and kill me except he was trapped, like me.
He snarled and barked, barked and snarled of and on for hours until all he could manage was a nasty string of snarks.
Sam could easily leap onto the 8-foot, blood-red Spanish leather sofa and make short work of me…just rip my face completely off…his dog-breath the very last thing I smell.
That's’ why I like the guy. He likes me because I feed him.
Sam figures out things he can do to make me want to grub him. One big thing he does is he sits there looking like a half-breed devilton who is pondering why he hasn’t eaten me yet. Can be convincing.
Despite the langorous fire and the exhaustion of the day’s labor, Sam stared at me; smiled, panted, rose and nosed toward the kitchen, luring me single-pawedly into delectible skullduggery: Hot lentil-jalepeno-chicken sausage soup with sprouted, whole-grain buns smeared with Jersey hand-cranked butter and Pekmez, chive and dill-laced garlic goat cheese, charming Humboldt olives plated with salmon wedges, asparagus spears and sizzling, grilled portobellos flanked by a goblet of snappy but whelpishly energetic Santa Cruz organic Shiraz which faded into deep denoument as it was displaced cunningly by a wicked sidebar of Bavarian three-chocolate cake draped in ganache, bolstered unnecessarily with a steady but bucolic and somewhat lecherous Claret glassed slowly, as a hand-fed natural filet of beef (from an evening of roughhousing with Prudence) warmed in the fireplace.
Sam got dog log.
The self-designed, home-built, kitchen is the real heart of the ranchhouse, brimming with stuff I collected during decades of sailing most of the seven seas.
Oddly, debate remains whether I sailed all Seven Seas. The navigator on the voyage in question unfortunately took on a nasty tropical fever and later, in a fit of weakness, we presume, fell overboard with our charts, sextants, and the last of my absinthe.
Hard accounting for some people.
At any rate, the Mariner’s Society fell skeptical of my findings. Poof!..You know them, a bunch of cigar-chomping, armchair buggernauts content to spoil the game for everyone. Who cares what they think?
Anyway, those days are long gone. The moment’s always more important to me than the memory.
Shake it all up…what remains is story, one that hopefully reaches beyond the personal to the universal.
Doesn’t matter if it’s a 99-cent story about a one-dollar dog written by a guy with hands like banjos, long as it’s your story, and as such carries at least a taste of authenticity.
And it’s got to come from your place.
That place where you are.
Your self.
Your personal bioregion. Your vision of yourself. Your aura of personal responsibility: where you belong. Tenuous as it seems, your place is how you explain yourself…not to others, but to yourself.
Your place is how you define and redefine your continually evolving relationship to the world. It’s can be a major source of esteem, and, naturally, if there is much trouble in your life, you’ll find it’s source somewhere in your place.
Respecting your place is a necessary part of taking ownership. It’s a very good thing to take care of your place long before you tell others how they might do the same.
t was some righteous grub. Me and Sam finished every scrap. I belted on my .44 and snagged a snifter of cognac, put one of Tara Vinson’s early cd’s on and turned it up real loud. We stood out on the deck staring into a conspicuously fat, wet and shiveringly nasty completely full moon and counted our blessings.
As well as a good night to recount the struggle we as homenids and humans have gone through: dragging ourselves, usually kicking and screaming from the Iron Age to the Age of Irony. I think you know what I mean.
Sam quietly disappeared, I followed him down the stairs. I was worried about him. In his frenzy to protect me and his place, he would do nigh anything. Reckon I know the feeling.
My people call it fancy names, territorial imperative, or some such nonsense. With the dog, you can rest assured it is always, and unremittingly, about the food.
Soon, Sam was at my leg once more, and I never heard a thing. You know my ears were once well-tuned killing machines. I scratched him hard and pulled on his ear. I had to bite his ear one night to get him to pay attention. That’s where he likes to be pulled now.
I would have sat on the ground because I was bone-tired and probably over half drunk and definitely too overfed to walk. Dog won’t let me sit or lie down. He will never allow himself to be above me. Raises hell on a soft summer day.
Damn dog.
I went back up on the porch, railed back in the big wooden chair, took a pull off whatever I was drinking and stared at the fat, full moon. One thing was left on my mind at that point. Between me and that big full moon it was a secret torn open, except I had nobody to tell it to except Sam…and he don’t give a rat’s ass.
I dunno, it’s something like a prayer at this point. Maybe a prayer with teeth. I think about it all the time, and as I settled in for the night last night it was the last thing on my mind. Goes mlike this:
The nature of politics is not to liberate but to instill fear as a prime motivator for social change or political intervention..solving immediate problems for quick credit instead of bracing collectively for the vast global struggles ahead. And while we're at it, a major obstacle to the rational discussion of sustainability in our bioregion is the fear of a social movement capable of threatening the status quo. Anybody who talks about putting more power into the hands of ordinary citizens risks grave danger: from prison to torture to murder-it's little exaggeration to suggest more extreme methodologies could be construed by some to be threatening to the Homeland.
Heck if I know what was on Sam’s mind.
Sam’s a young fellow, but already much larger than many full-growns. For a whole bunch of reasons, I’m glad Sam is my friend. He’s awful big. I know wolves don’t hurt people. That’s silly.
Sometimes I sneak up on him and he takes it personal for days.
Heck, after 22 years in Ranger Recon I can pretty much sneak up on anything though there’s not a whole lot of sneakin’ up going on out here.
Took a long time to get used to dogs after the trouble they put me through. Seemed like growing up, dogs would hustle up from miles around to mess with me, like the big, lovable Labrador retriever that had me by my face and head, dragging me down to the river before my dad smashed it with a tire.
Later, I was trapped in a collapsed tunnel in North Vietnam, face-to-face with a Vietcong German Shepherd attack dog who wanted desperately to crawl three feet and kill me except he was trapped, like me.
He snarled and barked, barked and snarled of and on for hours until all he could manage was a nasty string of snarks.
Sam could easily leap onto the 8-foot, blood-red Spanish leather sofa and make short work of me…just rip my face completely off…his dog-breath the very last thing I smell.
That's’ why I like the guy. He likes me because I feed him.
Sam figures out things he can do to make me want to grub him. One big thing he does is he sits there looking like a half-breed devilton who is pondering why he hasn’t eaten me yet. Can be convincing.
Despite the langorous fire and the exhaustion of the day’s labor, Sam stared at me; smiled, panted, rose and nosed toward the kitchen, luring me single-pawedly into delectible skullduggery: Hot lentil-jalepeno-chicken sausage soup with sprouted, whole-grain buns smeared with Jersey hand-cranked butter and Pekmez, chive and dill-laced garlic goat cheese, charming Humboldt olives plated with salmon wedges, asparagus spears and sizzling, grilled portobellos flanked by a goblet of snappy but whelpishly energetic Santa Cruz organic Shiraz which faded into deep denoument as it was displaced cunningly by a wicked sidebar of Bavarian three-chocolate cake draped in ganache, bolstered unnecessarily with a steady but bucolic and somewhat lecherous Claret glassed slowly, as a hand-fed natural filet of beef (from an evening of roughhousing with Prudence) warmed in the fireplace.
Sam got dog log.
The self-designed, home-built, kitchen is the real heart of the ranchhouse, brimming with stuff I collected during decades of sailing most of the seven seas.
Oddly, debate remains whether I sailed all Seven Seas. The navigator on the voyage in question unfortunately took on a nasty tropical fever and later, in a fit of weakness, we presume, fell overboard with our charts, sextants, and the last of my absinthe.
Hard accounting for some people.
At any rate, the Mariner’s Society fell skeptical of my findings. Poof!..You know them, a bunch of cigar-chomping, armchair buggernauts content to spoil the game for everyone. Who cares what they think?
Anyway, those days are long gone. The moment’s always more important to me than the memory.
Shake it all up…what remains is story, one that hopefully reaches beyond the personal to the universal.
Doesn’t matter if it’s a 99-cent story about a one-dollar dog written by a guy with hands like banjos, long as it’s your story, and as such carries at least a taste of authenticity.
And it’s got to come from your place.
That place where you are.
Your self.
Your personal bioregion. Your vision of yourself. Your aura of personal responsibility: where you belong. Tenuous as it seems, your place is how you explain yourself…not to others, but to yourself.
Your place is how you define and redefine your continually evolving relationship to the world. It’s can be a major source of esteem, and, naturally, if there is much trouble in your life, you’ll find it’s source somewhere in your place.
Respecting your place is a necessary part of taking ownership. It’s a very good thing to take care of your place long before you tell others how they might do the same.
t was some righteous grub. Me and Sam finished every scrap. I belted on my .44 and snagged a snifter of cognac, put one of Tara Vinson’s early cd’s on and turned it up real loud. We stood out on the deck staring into a conspicuously fat, wet and shiveringly nasty completely full moon and counted our blessings.
As well as a good night to recount the struggle we as homenids and humans have gone through: dragging ourselves, usually kicking and screaming from the Iron Age to the Age of Irony. I think you know what I mean.
Sam quietly disappeared, I followed him down the stairs. I was worried about him. In his frenzy to protect me and his place, he would do nigh anything. Reckon I know the feeling.
My people call it fancy names, territorial imperative, or some such nonsense. With the dog, you can rest assured it is always, and unremittingly, about the food.
Soon, Sam was at my leg once more, and I never heard a thing. You know my ears were once well-tuned killing machines. I scratched him hard and pulled on his ear. I had to bite his ear one night to get him to pay attention. That’s where he likes to be pulled now.
I would have sat on the ground because I was bone-tired and probably over half drunk and definitely too overfed to walk. Dog won’t let me sit or lie down. He will never allow himself to be above me. Raises hell on a soft summer day.
Damn dog.
I went back up on the porch, railed back in the big wooden chair, took a pull off whatever I was drinking and stared at the fat, full moon. One thing was left on my mind at that point. Between me and that big full moon it was a secret torn open, except I had nobody to tell it to except Sam…and he don’t give a rat’s ass.
I dunno, it’s something like a prayer at this point. Maybe a prayer with teeth. I think about it all the time, and as I settled in for the night last night it was the last thing on my mind. Goes mlike this:
The nature of politics is not to liberate but to instill fear as a prime motivator for social change or political intervention..solving immediate problems for quick credit instead of bracing collectively for the vast global struggles ahead. And while we're at it, a major obstacle to the rational discussion of sustainability in our bioregion is the fear of a social movement capable of threatening the status quo. Anybody who talks about putting more power into the hands of ordinary citizens risks grave danger: from prison to torture to murder-it's little exaggeration to suggest more extreme methodologies could be construed by some to be threatening to the Homeland.
Heck if I know what was on Sam’s mind.
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