It's a Gas! Gas! Gas!

For the first year I had Chandler I fed him Iams® Dog Food. The only problem with the Iams® is that it caused Chandler to fart. He didn't just fart a little bit, and he didn't just fart odorless gas. He blasted out room filling clouds of methane that smelled as if they had come from the depths of hell. I knew that I had to do something because Chandler was threatening to leave us friendless. No person in their right mind would want to visit us and spend time in what smelled like Satan's asshole. So I switched Chandler to Purina® Dog Food. At first I gave him regular Purina®, but he didn't like it very much. I then tried Purina One®. Both dogs seemed to like the Purina One® and it mitigated the farting. Though after a while I noticed that once a week Chandler would not eat and would spend most of his morning walk munching on the neighbor's grass, which he would promptly barf up the minute we got home, in the living room, on the rug. I simply assumed he had a sensitive stomach. Unfortunately the longer Chandler ate the Purina One® the more often he would do the, eat grass, puke in the living room routine, until it got to the point where he went nearly four days without eating. So off to the veterinarian we went, where I was relieved of one hundred and eighty dollars and saw very little change in Chandler. Maybe it was what I was feeding him. So I then looked up dog foods, and their ratings on the internet. It turned out that Purina®  brands got very low ratings. I noticed that Iams®, the dog fart food, got nearly two stars more. Now I am not suggesting that Purina® is shit dog food, or that Iams® is any better. What I am saying, is that after switching back to Iams® Chandler's stomach problems went away. Yes he is farting a lot and yes they stink horribly sometimes. But at least my dog is eating the dog food, and isn't eating the grass and puking anymore. Besides, listening to Mark choke and gag on Chandler's ass fumes cracks me up. It's priceless.

Sweet Old Mia

One perk you have when renting an apartment from me, is that if you have a well behaved dog that gets along with my dogs, you will have a built in dog sitter. I've done that for all my tenants through the years at no extra charge. My current tenant has the sweetest, most easy going, fifteen year old mutt. Her name is Mia and Bette just loves that bitch, she follows her everywhere. Mia has spent many a day here in our house while her owner Jessica, travels or works late. Sometimes I invite her over when I simply feel like having Mia with us for the day. Mia loves me, my dogs, and our house. She has stayed overnight and sleeps on the floor right next to the bed. So what I cannot figure out, is why when I need to go into the front apartment, either to show it to a prospective buyer or to fix something, Mia turns into the snarling, snapping, spawn of Satan. I have tried everything. I've offered her treats, I've sent Bette in first before I go in, and I tried dangling her leash in front of her and promising her walkies. Miss Mia will have none of it, and nobody is going to come into her home while her mommy is gone. The first time our real estate agent showed our building, the prospective buyers had to stand outside the front door and look into the apartment while Mia threatened them with certain death should they step foot inside. To see the kitchen they had to walk all the way around the house and peek in through the back door. Yesterday we had another showing so I brought Mia over to our apartment. Everything went well. The prospective buyer and the real estate agents all thought Mia was so well behaved and such a good dog, until they went to look at the front apartment. Mia followed them over there and when the real estate agent opened the door Miss Mia stepped in. She went from a docile, feeble old dog who looked like she is on her last legs, to Cujo. I have to admit, she scared me. I don't know what the prospective buyer thought of it all, he left too fast for me to get a read on that.

Pink Underpants

Fifteen years ago, on March 27th my dad died. Two years ago I wrote a book. I had it professionally edited and tried to get it published, but nobody was interested. I was going through it again this week and the book does not read as good as I thought it did two years ago. So I guess the book publishers had a point. My book was inspired by many incidents in my childhood and teen years, but was not about me or my family. It was also inspired by stories Mark told me about his family moving to a nearly all white suburb when he was nine years old. Anyway, here is one small excerpt that was definitely inspired by my dad. It is based on something that happened on one of our family vacations. This incident is narrated by the fictional seventeen year old girl in my book, Maggie Ryan.

August, 1968, Chicago. 
Vacations with my dad were always an adventure in getting the most from the least. Some of my friends would come back to school in the fall, bragging about how their family had gone to Disneyland, New York, or even Europe. When somebody would ask me where we had gone, I would make up some fabulous story about our week at an exclusive resort. The truth was that every year we would stay in a cheap rented cottage, on some tiny muddy lake full of weeds and mosquitoes. The worst part about it was that every time we went on vacation something would go horribly wrong. Last year dad carefully loaded all of our luggage in a rented carrier that was strapped to the roof of the car. Unfortunately dad was not one to read instructions, and I remember looking at that carrier with dread.

“I’m not putting my things on top of the car.” I insisted.

“Why not?”

“I don’t think you put that carrier thing on top of the car correctly. It’s kind of off center, and that bottom thingy looks loose.”

“Thingy? See you don’t even know what you’re looking at, you don’t even know what it’s called.”

I don’t think dad knew what it was called either, but it was a convenient way for him to dismiss my misgivings.

“Now throw that suitcase up here, and then toss that duffel bag behind you on up to me.”

I obediently handed said objects up to dad, but not before I took my most valued possessions out of my suitcase.

Fifty miles outside of Chicago, on Interstate route 94, just east of Chesterton Indiana, a rattle developed. It seemed to be coming from the top of the car. Dad ignored it.

“I think something’s wrong with that thing on top of the car.” I opined.

Nothing, dad ignored his first born daughter.  After a few miles the rattle developed into a clatter.

“Now do you hear it?”

“That’s just the tarp I put over it flapping around up there. Don’t worry about it.” dad exclaimed, dismissing me as if I were just a girl who couldn’t possibly understand how things worked.

And then all the noise stopped.

“See, it stopped. I put that carrier on damn good. It’ll take anything.” Dad said proudly.

Except that my dad hadn’t put it on "damn good". Out of the rear window of the station wagon I could see all of our suitcases bouncing, and exploding along the interstate. The noise had stopped because the thing wasn’t there anymore. It had instead become a traffic hazard, causing the cars behind us to veer off into the median, and onto the shoulder. I screamed as I saw my pink suitcase hit the front of a semi and burst into a multi-colored cloud of socks, shorts, blouses, and to my horror, pink underpants.

“Jesus, don’t do that! Don’t ever scream into my ear while I’m driving.”

“The bags, the…everything... everything, it’s…” and again I screamed into my dad’s ear.

“Holy shit!” my dad exclaimed.

Finally, after dozens of cars, and trucks had pummeled our stuff, dad looked into the rear view mirror.

“Son of a bitch, goddamn, mother….” a string of profanities spewed from his mouth. As he pulled off onto the shoulder and stopped, the giant inner tube that we had tied on top of the suitcases came bouncing past us.

“I told you that thing wasn’t on there right.” I cried as I clutched my diary and toiletry bag, the two things I had retrieved from my suitcase before leaving.

©2013

Balls

I don't like heights. I wasn't always this way, my fingers didn't always go numb at the sight of a long drop, my testicles didn't always try to crawl back up into my belly when confronted by the possibility of plunging to my death. Back when I was a kid I used to climb on top of everything. My favorite was our garage. My sister Sue and I would climb up there and throw rocks into the neighbor's yard just because it was fun to see him get pissed off. I even used to jump off of that garage into the grass. I had no fear until one day it dawned on me that I could fall and get hurt badly. The problem was that this realization happened while I was on the roof of the garage. I couldn't get back down, I was too terrified to climb back down. Like good siblings, my brother and sister made fun of me while I cowered up there on the roof. My brother even memorialized it in this photo that he took. 

Forty six years ago two of my cousins and I took a road trip across the United States. We were all around nineteen years old and wanted to see California. Because there were three of us we intended to drive non-stop, over two thousand miles, switching off drivers while one of us slept in the back of the giant station wagon we were driving. Even at the age of nineteen all that driving took its toll. Somewhere around Flagstaff, Arizona we realized that we all needed rest, so we turned north and drove to Grand Canyon National Park. Our plan was to pull off the road that wound through the park and all stretch out in the car to get some sleep. Surprisingly, back in 1969 that was allowed by the park service. I'm not so sure they let you do that anymore. So in the pitch blackness of the high desert night, we found a nice little place to pull off the road. There were no lights anywhere. As soon as the car's headlights were extinguished complete darkness enveloped us. I remember waking up in the middle of the night thinking that I wanted to take a piss, but I decided not to get out of the car and go behind one of the bushes nearby. There were noises out there, animal noises, and I chose to tough it out until the dawn. When the first light of day broke, I broke for the bushes. I had to pee badly. To my surprise, immediately behind those bushes was a four thousand foot drop. I can feel my testicles clambering up inside me just thinking about it.

Mexican

Sunday evening Mark took me out for dinner. Nothing fancy, just the Mexican place that I've been going to for the last twenty five years. I used to like that place, but I think it's time for me to move on. I need change, a new Mexican restaurant. That's the problem, they haven't changed anything in the last twenty five years. Everything is the same. The same tables, the same chairs, the same bar, and I'll bet that in the kitchen they're using exactly the same equipment that they had back in 1990. I say that about the kitchen because as of lately the food has a certain flavor about it, as if it had been prepared on an old stove that has years of grease and charred meat fused to it. The food tastes like they cooked it yesterday and put it under a heat lamp until I came in. Meanwhile, out in the dining room they still have the same tables and booths that I first sat in back in 1990. When you touch them they aren't sticky so much as gummy from all the years of grease. Anyway that was Sunday. On Monday I paid for that Mexican dinner in the worst way possible. I paid with my guts and spent a lot of time in the bathroom. Every time I thought it was over, it wasn't. There is a tried and true method of measuring just how bad a case of food poisoning is, and that is on the little dispenser next to the toilet. I went through one and a half rolls of Scot Tissue, the ones with a thousand sheets per roll. So there is that, and then there is the jalapeño pepper, bunghole heat index. I'd put mine at around seven right now. That would be on a scale of one to ten, with one being no pain and ten being a glowing red, charcoal briquet.