Paint CHiPs
Smartest Man in the World
Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Location Location
Posts: 26796
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I got up at 9 AM this morning because, the house being for sale, there were a few showings scheduled for this afternoon and that means me and the dog have to make ourselves scarce for a few hours. The 9 AM thing sort of sucked, as I didn't fall asleep until like 7 AM. My teeth no longer hurt and I no longer have any painkillers, but that and the fact that I'm in no way gainfully occupied these days means that I no longer have any semblance of a schedule, and since not being able to catch more than a few hours of sleep here and there since last Friday due to pain/drugs, I have apparantly trained my body to only require three three hour naps a day but in the off time be absolutely incapable of doing anything but sit around like a sloth. Which is a lot more of a pain in the ass than it sounds like.
Anyway, also my mom/sis have been away most of this week, so the house was a shithole, so I had to sort of guerilla clean it after I woke up, which was a good way to wake up actually as it got the blood flowing. Got the place looking great by about 11, which is when I had to scoot.
Mugsy is the name of the family dog. He's never been the sharpest tool in the shed, and now that he's 13 or so he isn't very quick on the draw either, and is entirely deaf and mostly blind. He was gotten from an animal shelter when he was 3-4 years old already and had been pretty badly abused in the 3 years before he made it to the shelter, so he's always been a bit on the neurotic side, which has over the years progressed to being completely attached to my mom to the point where, when she leaves town, he gets devastatingly depressive until she gets back and when she does, gets so excited that he pisses himself. He's not very bright, he's a coward as far as dogs go, but he's the sweetest dog you'll ever meet, and perfect for when Hadley was a baby as he's a magnificently gentle animal.
So anyway, this week I've been doing nothing but watching old movies and baseball and taking my pain-med naps and rinsing with salt water and whatnot, and he's been lying in my mom's bed 24-7 being all depressed. So, we left so the house could be shown, and there isn't really any place you can go to with a dog for a few hours, so we went to this really beautiful wildlife reserve in the area (actually, a bird sanctuary, is what it's called). We've gone there before when the house is getting shown. It's oh I don't know 30 acres of woods or so with some trails cut through them, opening up into massive tracts of undeveloped land. Last week we ended up walking a mile or two and coming on some train tracks and I spent most of the afternoon following them for no particular reason, probably a good 2-3 miles. We even came upon a bonafide hobo camp near a railroad bridge (and near nothing else, it was pretty far out there) that looked like it had seen some use pretty recently. That was pretty neat.
This time though I was tired and he was depressed so I wasn't up for walking that far. This week also there was a really devastating flash storm that only lasted for maybe an hour but it was severe enough that it cut out the power all over and caused some significant property damage. It was one of those flash storms that you don't see coming until you look out the window and go "Jesus Christ!" as the rain is thrashing sideways and you can't see your own fence.
A curious side effect of that storm, however, was that it nearly literally became full blown autumn in the span of that hour. An hour before the storm and the leaves had been turning but not falling. An hour after, every goddamned leaf from here to New Hampshire was on the ground, at once, along with most branches.
So, we go the Bird Sanctuary this afternoon and it was really surreal. As I said we had gone last week and it was very pretty, your perfect New England forest. Today, however, the entire forest was ass-up. Trees had fallen over, all the leaves were on the ground, it was muddy, and there were branches EVERYWHERE. It was almost creepy in how much damage there was. And, it was gorgeous, in its way. I've seen storm damage before, but the forest was, as I said, just on the cusp of turning, and then BOOM the flash storm, so it looked like a giant just started walking through the forest with a huge leaf-blower, crashing through and blowing everything off the trees. In some places the leaves were well up to my knees.
Despite the fact that it was muddy we ventured in anyway. I let Mugsy off the leash and let him bound on ahead of me. He'd been depressed all week, and he's an old mutt, but as we walked through the downed forest he was bounding around like a puppy. Jumping through creeks, rolling through leaves, running up the trail a few dozen yards, sprinting back to me to make sure I was still following, and then galloping off again. I haven't seen him that excited and energetic in years. I guess, for a dog, the cavalcade of interesting and unique smells that must come with a forest being turned upside down must almost be like a narcotic. He didn't seem to know which way to sniff or to look at any given moment, it was so overwhelmingly active to him. He's a very emotional dog, usually for the worse, and normally a lazy, inside, inactive one to boot, but man was he psyched about the forests today. It was really good to see.
And the forest was as well. It was just devastatingly beautiful. It was all tore up, but not in a bad way, you know? It didn't look like it was fucked up or anything, just that Mother Nature had torn through and in her Loving Wrath had snapped the shit out of anything that was too weak to survive the winter, all at once. It vaguely reminded me of some of the forests in Virginia because of how most of the lush parts had been torn off, so I fondly remembered looking for aliens on Civil War sites for a bit. The path wasn't really a path anymore because of this, and where it was it was all muddy, so we ended up leaving it and just getting lost for a few hours before finally heading back.
Anyway, my plan was to drop the dog off in the backyard and then go catch a matinee at Railroad Square while the last showing took place, but by the time I dropped Mugsy off it was too late to see the show, so I ended up just taking some back roads through the country and having a nice drive. And, despite everything said prior, I was surprised to see that there were still leaves on a great many trees, and, whereas last week they were just starting to turn, now, they were at the very peak of color. I hadn't noticed this until I was well down some long stretch of two lane highway that I've never been on before, and I turned into a curve and came out on a stretch that was just exploding with all the colors of a stoplight. It was quite literally breath-taking. I was driving by farms and nosed around the bend and then just had to gasp. It wasn't the lukewarm shit-orange that you see everyday on the trees in your backyard. It was bright, alive, vibrant yellows, deep flushed reds, healthy greens. It was just spectacular. I had one of those moments that I get fairly frequently, put well by that one kid in American Pie, where the beauty of it was just so much that I felt like I was going to swell up and explode.
Anyway, I got blessedly lost and drove around for awhile, just taking it all in. There was one particular stretch, that first one around the bend, that I backtracked over a few times, and I'm sure to the guy on the tractor I must have looked lost, which I was. After awhile, I ended up back home. The people that had been looking at the house were just leaving. They told me I had a beautiful home (which isn't mine but I thanked them just the same), and said they hung out with my dog for awhile. The lady was quite taken with the old dog. "He stood next to my legs for awhile and leaned on me," she said. "Yeah," I told her. "He'll lean on just about whatever he can."
I ended up catching a later matinee, came back here, and have been fucking off online since then. I just brewed a pot of coffee to try to keep myself awake until a reasonable bedtime to hopefully get that in order again. I have a bunch of writing I need to do, and I'll get to it, but I'm not rushing myself for once.
Good day, in any event, and the livin' is easy. 
Sorry this isn't in poem form.
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10-15-2003 07:37 PM
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