Just when you think you're alone...

I was alone. I'd been alone for several hours, sitting in my skivvies under the fan, as I worked on some editing for the office. I had the i-pod going, some hip-hop techno podcast, Cut Killer and DJ No Name. I was in my groove, working, grooving, and starting to feel a little hungry as the sun began its rapid descent.

Still blasting music, I take the sausages out of the fridge. I look for my usual pot, but it is dirty, and I am in editing mode, not domestic mode, so I seek another pot. Ah, the ones on the top shelf, where I keep the napkins. It's just above eye-level, nested in larger pots, so I get real close and go up on my toes. Hm, what... ARGH! I shout, and then I do a lot of swearing, my heart is racing, as a pair of beady eyes bulge out much the same as mine have done. A damned rat is in my pot, in my napkins, doing God knows what! I tap the pot with a large spoon. I see his tail dangling out. I push the button on the kettle, thinking to boil that sumbitch! But then I think, how cruel of me, he's only trying, or she's only trying to share the same ecosystem, and really, it didn't look like one of those nasty Rats of Nim.

So I decided against scalding the little shit, and I tap the pots until the creature runs this way, runs, that, it's a big fucker, too, and fast, and my main concern is getting it out of the house and not into the bedroom. My heart is pounding. It's go time, and I grab the broom... a little jab, a little feint, and then the thing is scurrying blue murder past the fridge and then gets caught at the door, as going too fast and the gap is really small. So there is more flurried, scurried paws, and pow, gone. In the space of one minute. I laugh my ass off remembering how it scared the shit out of me. I was so deep in my world of techno I didn't expect to find another living creature in my pots.

It turns out there was no rat shit, only some nibbled bits of plastic from a lid, and a nest of fluffed and plumped tissues. It was kind of cute, and then I thought, it's hotter than hell, and this bastard is using my napkins to make a bed in a metal pot? I'm looking for a rat psychologist later today.

Life is a bear, hop on and ride, if you dare

It was my birthday last Thursday, and no, it wasn't really the worst day, although time is creeping and making me thirsty for oblivion's waters which I'd drink till I burst, hey!

But oblivion's cause I must refuse, because it is life and its knocks that I choose, though it means one more madman out on the loose, so I'll take the booze, a cruise and stand right back up every time that I lose.

So it was forty I hit just last week, but my heart isn't in it and my eyes just won't peek,

though my body uses pain as its way to speak, I don't feel my age does it make me a freak?

Those who know me will say I'm a freak already, having tasted deep of life's nectars so heady,

sometimes safe, sometimes my life hangs by a thready, but who can decide, which of two evils is the more deadly?

I can and I'll tell you there's one thing I'm not, that's the guy who sits around in his life like it's some kind of pot, to piss in to swill in to die and his ashes to fill in.

To me life is something akin to a bear, a great heaving monster all covered in hair, it has teeth it has claws tucked away up in there but if I don't jump on his back I won't get anywhere. Others will sit and others will stare but I'm riding my bear the hell out of there.

Hot tub philosphy

Ahhh, yeah, the heat, the bubbles, a little music, the paradox of having a face frozen by the icy mist, having icicles in my hair, while my body is pummeled by 105 degree water jets, its me, the soupe du jour.

However, last night, after my routine of calisthenics and jogging on the treadmill while watching a movie, this time Diary of the Dead (zombies instill fear creating faster running), things were DIFFERENT. And I just now realized there is a parallel with life and the commitments we make that are just not good.

Before we commit to something, we give it X amount of thought, balance pros and cons, blah blah the usual, then we get involved. Last night there I was opening the hot tub, stuffing a cd in the player, all while in damp trunks and a blistering icy mist assailed me, and I was like, yehaa, I am Gundar of the Cave, I am primal, elemental, and presently I shall banish this cold draught with the pleasures of the hot tub. Nay, fate smote me again, for when my snow caked feet, and then the rest of me, chilled, but not shaken, splashed tubward I instantly found... the temperaturew was wrong.

What? I'm not boiling? I'm not going to be soup today? Not at 86 degrees. Ok, it was warm. But not what I had expected. Yet I stayed in for the full fifteen minutes. I listened to music, felt the jets, but I got colder and colder, and my hair and face froze.

If you get into something that you discover isn't working out, how long before you say enough's enough, and how could you be blamed? I knew the moment my feet hit the water that it was going to be a big let down. I had to have a scalding shower just to get back my skin's confidence in my ability to reason.

I say trust what your skin is telling you. Fuck all this give it time, all this being reasonable is shite. Are we on this earth to sit around like knobs just putting up with shit? Time and again when I have known in my gut that something wasn't right, it turns out I wasn't wrong, except I should have gotten out of it sooner. Just like that lukeskywalker water.

Tired of your gut screaming : Why didn't you listen to me?

My glob title

Mambo, bonjour, sac passe, yassas, in short... HI!
What is Wild Grass? It's me, and it's whatever you want it to be. Here's some rigging. I mean, riffing: wild grass is tough and hardy, and it can grow even on a stone, it just digs right in there and fights for its life. And because it is tough, when it catches fire, the strenght of its material creates a brilliant flame that provides warmth, a place to cook food, and it will burn you if you aren't careful with it.

I was watching Castaway as I was typing up some more of my novel. (I wrote it in bed, like Proust, in Dar es Salaam, under the fan, sweating, next to my sleeping queen, on a foam mattress- more on all of those eventually). The first time I watched it I had the same reaction: what a lucky bastard! However, the people in LOST at least had some company, but no junk mail! Fresh food! Crazy beards! Free balling! This time I found my miserable guts twisting in knots at a feeling of recognition I had when he returned to his home. In the film they really did a wonderful job depicting how you feel when you return to this land of many things, after having spent a long time purging yourself of the need for many things, for whatever reason, or as a simple result of where and how you were living. There is a social space around him, because people don't quite know how to take him. He's become objectified, as they have objectified themselves by their concerns over what, to him, are pointless facets of life. He looks at all the excess food, his former coworkers and their superficial worries (to them they are important, but to him he sees that he used to be like them, and realizes he no longer would worry or feel the need to have those things again), and he, too feels the distance.

This is perfectly illustrated when his old girlfriend's husband shows up. The man stands ten feet away, as if he's not human. And then, that man goes on to describe how the return of Tom Hanks' character has really upset things. Most people cannot bridge the gap that has somehow installed itself by his absence, and by the dizzying gulf that separates the ways they have been living. When you come back from somewhere after a long time, especially if you have been somewhere out of the ordinary, say a deserted island, you find you can't really come back. Partly its in you, partly its in the life of the world where you return to. It is a very lonely feeling to be in that place. How do you pick up the pieces of an old life? You can't. Unless people take you as you are, or try to bridge the gap (they must do it, because you bear the unfamiliar fruit of absence; and they must try, it can't be forced) and forget about the old you, then you can for sure, never return.

Now, faced with that situation, no real way to fit into old patterns, with a very special treasure back in that other place, what would you do?

By the way I got a new I phone, it has a snow scraper app.
It doesn't work very well.
(I don't have an I phone, I was trying to bridge something with comedy.)

Well, come to my glob. Wit and sarcasm await!