DAY 55: Wednesday, December 2, 2009: You put water on salads, because you think they’re tiny gardens.

“IT’S GOING TO FIND ME.”  PART II:

This summer I ran into a Cumberland Farms down on Route 44, here in our quaint little hill town of four-thousand souls without its own police force or even a Main Street, and lo and behold, some nutcase is flipping out at the front counter, ranting and raving like a small worm is busy exiting the ear canal via his brain.

It really had something to do with his credit card, and he was coming unglued all over this very young woman, who looked like a high school student working to save for college. 

There was an older employee that I knew pretty well, and she was very calm, explaining how the cashier was new, and she had hit the wrong button, and now they had to get information so the guy could pay them.  They asked if he could just use the ATM, but he was starting to go a little nuts, and my adrenalin flooded the old system like springtime on the Mississippi,[1] which only happens if Janelle dresses like a witch.

Anyway, the guy suddenly runs around the counter and grabs for his card, then actually grabs at the youngster’s arm, as the cashier pulls away.

I was frozen for a moment there, thinking here we go again, I really can’t believe how it always happens in the general area of me — until he grabbed for her arm — and something really snapped.  I mean, we’re all a very jumpy lot now, since those maniacal scumbags took the planes with cheap little box cutters.  Americans are fucking READY bro; there’s more loaded guns tucked away in this land then single dollar bills.  Literally.  In true American fashion, we’re broke but heavily armed. 

I went around that counter faster than a cheetah on crack, screaming like that crazy British chef Ramsey my wife loves to watch on Hell’s Kitchen, and man the adrenalin was off the charts, like when you’re awareness level is crazy crystal clear, and any move that whiny shit made was going to bring holy rains of hell down upon his nasty ass face. 

And that is exactly when I slipped on a spilled slushy and went flying into the Raisinette display.

But the distraction was huge, and it kind of broke the overall tension so they could, uh, resolve their credit issue, after laughing for quite some time.  Oh, and they also mocked me like a small, trembling animal.[2] 

Now that’s all kind of funny and weird, but just to show you how often these things happen, a few weeks ago I went into a little country store up the street, and some guys were in there drinking beers and chatting away, talking to a tall young man chugging Twisted Tea, when things turned kind of ugly.

It turns out this young man had been a Marine in Iraq, and now he was telling the good ol’ boys how he had seventeen confirmed kills, with each date tattooed on one of his arms, along with his nickname, “The Reaper.”  

He had also been shot pretty bad, but they were starting to doubt all of this, so he challenged them by asking, “What?  You don’t believe me?”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence, and I visualized an approaching scene that would make Rambo’s counterattack on the police look warm and fuzzy, so I concentrated on keeping the store owner busy, ringing up my purchase to possibly avoid another weird encounter of the Dan kind. 

Of course that just never happens in real life, even when I make it safely home.

That night the dogs started going crazy, and when I let them out into the fenced yard, I heard this voice, asking, “Hey mister, could you help me out?”

The porch light illuminated a pale face floating above the front gate, and I could smell alcohol several feet away.  As I got closer, a pair of blood red eyes looked like they belonged to a killer zombie freak.

It was The Reaper, and there is no footnote here.  This is absolutely true.

“What’s up?” I asked, figuring he had come from a bonfire party down the street, at Wilson’s Pond.

When he asked if I would call a cab, I figured what the hell and gave him a lift, because fate was going to find me, and I was done hiding.  My life was coming to an end.  I had finally embraced the notion that major players in the universe were very busy toying with my simple little existence, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.  I realized that perhaps the real Grim Reaper had finally arrived as a burned-out killer marine, working overtime in a war zone, taking a long overdue stateside leave to see if some fool on the death list wouldn’t drive his drunk ass home, after a late night bonfire party. 

Plus, he only lived a few miles away, and out here in the hill country, cabs would cost a fortune.

So I gave The Reaper a lift, and listened very closely when he started talking about Iraq, eventually giving my two cents about life in general, and how I tried to keep a low profile these days, not mixing it up with local drunks in the store, or bringing attention to myself. 

I never mentioned how I had him beat in the “getting shot” department, or anything else about my violent past in the early eighties, because that would just invite bonding.  I’m thinking more like a hermit hillbilly these days, which is easy when you’re writing all the time, jaded by weird events until you become more furtive than mice on a ferret farm.  

The Reaper paid me for my troubles, shoving a twenty under my visor and refusing to take the bill back — so out of the blue came a very surprise ending.

Maybe things are looking up now.  Maybe I passed a kind of cosmic test, and even though it’s still dangerous to leave the house, cook in the kitchen, or generally be me, I totally digress, which I do anyway, losing track of wherever the hell I was heading, which was not toast at all, but my former jobs, and life in general, which is often like a job where you pay instead of the other way around, and sometimes lose more than it’s worth.  Much, much more.

Oh!  Oh!  Here’s a good one!  You know what Al Robillard said down there in Queens, New York, just before letting me go back around 1989?  He said, “I don’t know where the hell you go in your head, but it must be a great place.”

So I did get let go before!  I knew there was another time!  Whew!

And my daughter, back when she was around four, watching the short-term memory fish Dory in Finding Nemo, said to me, “She’s just like you, dad!  Just LIKE you!!!”

Gosh, what a great kid, sitting there for a time-out she doesn’t understand, for something she said so many years ago.  One other funny thing about first-grade kids; when the cookie jar appears light, they never see a DNA test coming.

I guess the past forms the present if you’re like me (god help you), so close your eyes again and play something soft and melodic, with a touch of Norwegian Death Metal, as we go even further back, to a time full of dung and marshmallows, transition and gunfire, a Boston radio station, and long walks on the beach, which I really hate because of all the blind dates holding each other’s hands.  Besides, the graphic sex, porno displays, and violence can come later.

HEY; STOP SKIMMING AHEAD!!!

 Oh yeah . . . it’s your read.  

-   -   -

 “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.  Now I have no bars on my BlackBerry.”

 The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost (possibly a discarded first draft)

I was not a good student attending high school in Massachusetts, where the full moon came out shortly after graduation, sprouting wooly fur up and down my arms and legs until they resembled arbor vitae bushes.  I was always prowling and howling at the moon. 

I kicked around Minnesota for a summer and partied hard, played hockey up in Maine for a winter and partied hard, tried Canada for awhile and was dutifully escorted out of Quebec City after a bloody barroom brawl, and all the time people kept describing strange and exotic realms called warmer climates. 

“Yeah right,” I said, with the reasoning ability of someone chasing rubber discs around frozen water surfaces.  “Maybe if the sun got a little closer.”

After Maine I was going to Mass Bay Community College just outside of Boston, and it was a dismal continuation of high school, where I had become the first student to ever get a grade “far below the alphabet”.

“It’s not even in the dictionary,” our principal explained at a rushed “graduation ceremony” in his office, caressing a large handgun.  “A tribe in the African Congo builds huge statues high up in the mountains overlooking their village, depicting the kind of student you represent.  They’re made from piles of wild pig shit, and when the rainy season arrives, it all slides downhill very slowly, toward their village.  It represents how you will eventually affect others in your life.”

“A real statue?” I asked, stupidly flattered. 

The gun was in my face.  “Get out,” he said.  “Get the hell out and never look back, or mention you ever went to this high school.”

“A big tall statue,” I said proudly, dazed by celebrity status in a warm climate.  “A real statue made of shit.”

So maybe I embellished a little, but it does remind me of a moment yesterday, when I was trying to convince my wife how we should import dung beetles to clean up after the dogs, out where thick grass keeps hiding little butt presents.

“You idiot,” she said, using her favorite description of me.  “Scarabaeoideas only goes after crap left by herbivores or omnivores, and our dogs eat too much meat.  The beetles don’t really clean up the crap, either.  They use it for affordable housing, nibbling here and there . . .blah blah blah and blah blah but blah blah and also blah blah, certain beetles for certain animals, like in Australia, they are doing what you suggest, however, blah, blah, blah  . . . prefer horse dung, blah blah blah . . . ”

My wife is a science freak, teaching college courses like “Remarkable Eggs of the Triassic Period”. 

Me?  I had shredded abs before beer found a home.  Plus my feet are size 15; a rare trait for the Irish.  Oh yeah, daddy brings the fire . . . so anyway, one night we accidentally discovered how lady bugs love marshmallows, which sounds kind of silly until aphids invade your whatever, and you decide to call in their worst enemy in the entire world (ladybugs, or what I lovingly refer to as “polka dotted mercenary assassins”).  You can keep a thousand ladybugs healthy and happy with a few lousy marshmallows, before releasing holy hell fire upon any aphids that come to munch your plants, or your favorite whatever.  Try doing that with the U.S. military.

Then it occurred to me how science is all about poop and marshmallows and that funny time in Jersey when I tried to brew my own beer in a little plastic chamber, and it expanded too much and exploded all over the kitchen, because of yeast or some other invasive species, and the dog lapped it up before I could, but you can really bond with a dog who giggles hysterically, and there’s a whole lotta science happening right there!

What does all this mean? 

Hell if I know.  wait . . . it all means that science isn’t really science at all, which is a word only surpassed by calculus in the scary department.  It’s real stuff happening all around us all the time, like exploding beer and giggling dogs.  It means I could simplify profound theorems and elaborate cupcake recipes by relating it to everyday things!  Once I was able to do that, I attended college and achieved a rare kind of academic status — having the University President threaten me with a gun!

So that’s a quick flashback review of where I’ve been, with silly exaggerations and so forth, but this is where things start to get really crazy, with no need for embellishment.  This is where things become scary in a factual way, and that is the craziest way of all.

I landed a career working with several unstable people, before creeping through the woods to float four-foot helium balloons for Environmental.  If there’s one sure thing I learned as a small and challenged child, it’s that soaring balloons were always a great place to start anything, like parties, parades, and books about wasted careers.  So let’s get this funny party started, then ease into the scary funny party parts.

Take the fast word challenge:  Scary funny party parts scary funny farty farts . . . ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Next Monday night:  “When a Balloon is a Cell Tower”.

[1] A river that starts in Minnesota and flows directly south a ways, than east, than south, then a little east, and maybe south.  Mississippi comes from an old Indian word meaning “cummerbund”.

[2] Honestly, I really did scream at the guy to “Calm down, you are way out of line!” and he snapped out of it and apologized, to basically beat a retreat.  They still had his card and called the police, who made him pay in the end, and I got four free any-size coffee cards out of the deal.  They also told me how they loved the video, which I refuse to see because I’m old and beaten and probably resemble Nick Nolte in The Hulk, screaming, “I am your father!”  Things are getting much better now, because years ago I would have actually flown into a Raisinette display, but that’s fine, because my philosophy these days is, “If the result ends peacefully, the journey is not important.”  That could also be a line uttered by Grasshopper, during episode 22 of Kung Fu, but once again, confusion is my middle name.