You know how you’ll be cooking for friends or a party and maybe have a great idea in the middle of following a recipe. You decide it’s creative genius time and you go with it. You add some expensive ingredients and try a fancy turn on an old staple. But you fuck it up because it just wasn’t meant to work that way even though it sounded good a couple minutes ago.

You’re really attached to the idea though and you’ve already invested ingredients and time and dishes. You try to rescue it. You can’t yet admit you were wrong, toss it all, and just start over. You grab the whisk and corn starch and butter and salt and sugar and the spice rack and some bread crumbs and continue for far too long to ply this act of faith.

Dinner is done and it’s kind of pretty after all. Everyone oohs and ahhs as you serve. That stops as soon as the forks touch lips. Everyone eats it, though, and says it’s good. You know they’re lying to be polite. You’re eating it too. Everyone has excuses about already having eaten. That’s why not a plate is cleared and no one wants seconds. Not because it tastes like ass.

I just saw a Kelly Clarkson video. I finally get it.

War is terrorism.

Okay. Coffee is tea.

No one is free while anyone is oppressed.

Okay. No one is alive while anyone is dead.

No? Spurious? Yeah, I agree.

These are better: No one is happy when anyone is sad; no one is awake while anyone is sleeping; no one is outdoors while anyone is in prison.

What do you think about all day?

When I was 10 I spent most summer days in the woods directly across the street from my house in Metzger, Oregon. We would go and play in the abandoned tree house and Ash creek which had lots of frogs, crayfish, beavers, and even a colony of gold fish which seemed to do quite well.

I usually wore my favorite plaid, flannel shirt. I always took a stick to wave in front of me as I walked; otherwise it was a faceful of spider every five feet. Baby birds just hopping around, waiting to be picked up. The forgotten light gauge of an early railway from when the town’s future had still been city. Animals and artifacts in wait. Longing to be discovered.

My 10 year-old brain once pulled a monster crayfish from the deepest part of the creek with a stick while trying to fish out a soggy Nerf football. It was about 12 inches long and fat as a lobster. It disappeared with a single tail flip. As an adult the memory saddened me because I knew I’d made it up. Meaning I’d made up many other magical things I thought I remembered. There was no way crayfish got that big. My friend Sean recently saved half my childhood. He returned from a fly fishing trip at Mount St Helens—where no one had been for years on account of—to report a crayfish of identical stature.

One day I was blazing a new trail. The sun was stabbing through the trees in narrow spears. Suddenly I was surround by beautiful dancing motes of gold. The air alive with flashes in the narrow beams. I stopped, enchanted, to watch it. Then the pain started. The buzzing registering and decoded.

I ran. Passing my sister who was playing on the street. She tried to stop me to ask why I was screaming. She started crying. I didn’t stop running.

In a nice balance of fate one of my aunt Dotty’s ranch hands was staying with us. He knew what to do. He had flung me in the tub, got me in water with most of my clothes off quickly. Began killing the things. Though I don’t really remember a thing after running past my sister. I think his name was Tom. I owe him and anyone else who Knows What to Do.

Tallying later, it appeared 60-some yellow jackets had counted coup. It had been a warm day. One got up my shorts. Seeing little nests hanging from porches all the time I didn’t know they usually nest in the ground. I had stood right on it.

A week later I was feeling over it. Ready to get back on the Lewis and Clark trail. I put on my freshly laundered flannel shirt for a trip back to the woods. Buttoning it, I saw it was bangled with wasp heads. Their jaws clamped on for leverage to sting, the bodies came off in the wash but the heads remained like black-eyed, staring burrs. Telling me, “You thought it was over? Nothing’s over.”

I tore the shirt off. I don’t know if I screamed again. I couldn’t wear flannel or plaid or open my Time-Life books to any page with an illustration of a wasp for the rest of childhood.

I like insects better than you except for these bloodthirsty, rotten little motherfuckers. They can all burn in Hell.

They don’t complain about their disadvantages. They just get to it.

Geordi La Forge—the “blind” man who wears a sophisticated sensor array, plugged right into his brain, that allows him to see almost the entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation from infrared through ultraviolet and well into unspecified territories on either end—cannot “see” people lying, through walls, around corners by EM reflections on surfaces, radiation leaks, dangerous devices, distant heat sources, in the dark, traps, energy patterns from recent visitations, blood traces or any other hidden organic material which is easily visible under UV, or anything else that someone with very regular old, human, 20/20, visible light vision would also be able to see; except now and then when it is convenient to some plot contrivance.

#11.b: When all other sensor equipment is inoperable for some super science reason or another, his visor goes invariably and miraculously unaffected; except in this or that case when it is convenient to some plot contrivance.

Really shouldn’t have to explain.

Ashley is punished from above for his unapologetic atheism. Will he survive? Will the house damage exceed his savings? Is his long delayed repentance finally nigh?

Was the maple a sign to stop teasing Canadians for being commonwealth lackeys? Will he fall off the roof trying to play out the hand that the almighty God has dealt or will he be forgiven by a mysterious wandering carpenter who helps hammer out the dented gutter?

The Lord God knows the answers already, tune in to this week’s episode, “Treed!” to know His will!

This is my dog. Her name is Kalahari. Pretty, isn’t she? She’s smart too. And really athletic. She went over a 9' cyclone fence without even trying once just because she missed me. Some dogs can smile and when this dog does, she’s even prettier. Good natured, loves constant company, long walks on the beach, sports, picnics, jogging, wrestling…

Why am I writing about this?

I found out this afternoon that bestiality is legal in Washington. I’ve had this dog for almost three years. Think of all the wasted time.

Title taken from the querylogs. Someone was looking for him so I thought I’d help find him. Click on the images for photo descriptions.