Thinking About Nothing

I sometimes get impatient with the baby dog stopping to sniff gross stuff every 5 feet. My body doesn't start and stop on a dime so easy anymore and it's hard to hit my target heart rate at that pace. I usually give her the 1st mile to take her time so that she can check and leave scent messages for her canine friends(aka pee mail). I like walking in the sunshine which is a good thing considering where we live.

I never enjoyed working out. For what was a brief time in high school, I took weight training as an athlete. I played football but I wasn't a starter. I had too much of the sandlot player mentality rather than the disciplined approach preferred by the coaching staff.

That's a nice way of saying I was ignorant and unfocused. My mom wouldn't let me play Pop Warner (basically little league football) or ride a motorcycle and my dad was more of a baseball fan so I played little league baseball. I didn't come to appreciate the nuances of football beyond the "smear the queer with the ball mentality" until I started smoking weed. Then it all made sense. It's like a game of Stratego, outflanking the opponent and what not.

To Mom's chagrin, I saved up all my lawn mowing money one summer when I was about seven or eight, and bought my own 5hp, Tecumseh, pull start, centrifugal clutched, two wheeler from the JCPenney Auto Center (it became a Firestone in the 80's) at the Miracle City mall in good ol' Tittiesville or as I like to call it, Tight-ass-ville, Florida. It was my money so dad let me keep it over mom's protests.

That small experience taught me the value of working for what I wanted. Of course, I didn't have to keep a roof over my head at that age. Mom and dad bought their house for $12,500 cash, back in 1966. I think my brother got about $200,000, minus all the taxes, fees, bullshit and what not, for it when mom died. Funny how inflation works.

People are worth more on paper these days but they have the same shit basically as they have always had... a car, house and the TV. People still have to eat and like to go to the movies. Horse and buggy and the radio- no internet. Life is just much faster now. Before that, people were too busy with surviving, learning to read by candlelight if they even owned a book and dying before 40 years of age from something awful but preventable now.

We all have to die of or from something. Luckily for me, I have higher odds of passing in my sleep- I've done it once before, my mom laid down to take a nap and never woke up, same as her dad, a.k.a. my grandfather. The older you get, the more dead people you know until you're one of them.

In the meantime, I guess there's plenty of suffering to do as we approach our golden years. They're called golden years because life pisses on you a lot more as you age. Plan for this, plan for that- then shit happens that wasn't included in the plan. Some people call it "out of network costs."

It's just human nature to under appreciate things until they start to fade. I thought my eyes were bad in my 40s, 22 years haven't done me any favors in that regard. I play with my eyes closed most of the time, but when I do need to look at my guitar, I require much more lighting these days. And not cool purples, blues and reds but sickly yellow, baby puke green or plane ol' bright white.

Growing up in the 60s and 70s, we didn't wear seatbelts or think to bring earplugs when we were out shooting guns. We didn't bring earplugs to loud concerts. After the concert, everyone would go to the 24 hour Sambo's and talk real loud. Now, after 60+ years of blasting loud guns, guitars and cymbal crashes just inches from my ears, I have Tinnitus and some degree of hearing loss. That's how I knew I was dead; because my ears quit ringing. Wherever that was was pretty cool and there was no sensation of passing time...

The pot store, that's what the wife and I call the dispensary, is an improvement over waiting around for the dude and getting weed of unknown origin and species; and it was expensive. The other day, I purchased 7 grams or what would be known as a quarter (ounce) of totally decent Indica, with a Bic lighter and a stem (skinny glass bowl) for $32.50. The best part though; nobody is pinching my sack (when the dealer or a friend hooking you up takes a bud from your stash before giving you the bag). There is never anything good about a pinched sack.

The last alcohol I consumed was the year I had the congestive heart failure. On my birthday later that year, I found a lone Stella beer in the back of the fridge and that was it. The plan was to work until I dropped dead but I survived. The hospital forgave my bill so I figured I owed it to them to not show up in the same condition again.

One of the best things about that is I haven't had to apologize for things that I don't remember doing in a long time. The bummer is, no matter how much weed I do, I can't get to that point of blissful inebriation that alcohol delivers; the point where a person is staggering drunk and thinks it's a good idea to have another adult beverage. One more-ing it until I got my ass kicked by the old tree that was in front of the pink room at the Caribbean Club. The wife thought somebody had done that to me but I had witnesses that confirmed it was the tree. It hurt to sing for about a month and a half after that. Should've took that as a sign...

Mushrooms are fun and relieve anxiety but the people in charge don't want people to be that happy. Happy people tend to get along with each other and that's against the distraction method of ruling.

We are getting a real winter this year with prolonged outbreaks of chilly wind and falling iguanas; it's taxing my limited cold weather apparel. If it's only cold for a couple of days, I'm OK; when it warms up again I can do laundry and have warm clothes prepared for the next front.

Wearing layers sucks. Something is always twisting and crawling until it's pinching my balls, detaching hairs from the taint and/or crawling up my ass... God forbid if you get a case of diarrhea and the damn zipper hangs up on the layer underneath and you have to hold the puckering string and struggle at the same time, that's how accidents happen. When it's cold out though, for a second or two, that warm sensation feels nice.

Peace and Love!

Some people drink to socialize; I drink for the buzz. One toke over the line... Fun fact; the hops found in beer, and marijuana are related but not in a kissing cousins kind of way. I hate wearing jeans, I have no ass to hold them up.