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Neighbor Man Starts the Fire

I promised you I'd tell you about an actual conversation with Neighbor Man. So here goes.

It's 12:35 AM. I've just put my mom to bed on the couch; she's down for a visit and, after we've all divied up a couple rounds of mint juleps (up!) and a bottle of Shiraz, it's time to hit the hay. I'm just saying good night when a flurry of Oregon-grade fireworks burst out of their boxes right out on the street. Wishing nothing else for Ma but a quiet sleep, I step out front to see a car stopped outside the house with two fountain fireworks spending themselves in front of it.

"Alright!" I scream at the car. "That's enough, move the FUCK ALONG!"

Only after stepping back inside and closing the front windows to guard my mom against further noise do I realize I saw Neighbor Man out there with a lit match. It was him, and not whoever was in the car, who was lighting fireworks in the street. Right in front, I further realize, of an oncoming car.

A twinge of remorse hits me as I head to my backyard to stay up with Ashley for another hour or two. Yelling at strangers who stop their cars to light fireworks in front of my house is one thing, but yelling at Neighbor Man is another. Feeling like an ass, I resolve to go over and apologize, and let him know he can do whatever he wants to.

I head over, Ashley behind me, to find him cowering behind his garage, looking upset.

"Hi!" I blurt. "I didn't know it was you doing those fireworks! I thought it was those assholes in that car! I don't mind you setting them off!"

He doesn't grasp the distinction: "I just got back from the bar and I had some fireworks so I thought I might set them off."

"GREAT! No problem! Do all you want! Rock on!" I say, retreating. As we walk back to our house we feel like a couple of silly old fuddy-duddies. When Neighbor Man's fire orgy fails to start back up, I decide to send him a final token of my goodwill: a moon rocket. These black little hulks are shaped like actual rockets and launch themselves quite purposefully up one hundred feet before executing a sleek Challenger-style self-destructo. Neighbor Man gets the hint and resumes his fiesta.

The rest of the night, Neighbor Man's words repeat and repeat in my ear: "I just got back from the bar and I had some fireworks so I thought I might set them off." "I just got back from the bar and I had some fireworks so I thought I might set them off." "I just got back from the bar and I had some fireworks so I thought I might set them off." "I just got back from the bar and I had some fireworks so I thought I might set them off." And I realize, finally, why he is so fascinating: he is me in an alternate universe. Haggard, bearded, building his beer bottles into pyramids and wearing his Hawaiian shirts open to the waist, coming home from a night of debauchery to fire his sparks into the night, in many ways Neighbor Man is who I'd be if I was still single and lived alone.

Although I think I'd mow the lawn a little more often.

Is FLOG™ melting?

I tells ya, too much free time spent in the languid Eugene heat is really cramping FLOG™'s style. I mean, I've hardly posted at all lately and the best I can come up with is telling you hardy readers about my dreams. My brain-damaged laptop can't take all the blame for this state of affairs. No, that ain't the problem. It's just that, here in the muggy July doldrums, FLOG™ is an under-stimulated and overheated denizen of an under-stimulated and overheated backwater half-horse town.

What I really need right now, with Ashley off at work, the dogs asleep, and a little Spaten Optimator coursing through my veins, is a dead body to go search for along the train tracks outside Cottage Grove. That would be about the only cure for the Southern Willamette Valley Summertime Blues. Hell, I might even come of age out there!

I had a brush with coming of age on Tuesday, actually, out hiking with the dogs in shimmering oak scrubland along the Coast Fork of the Willamette River. First there was the man in the woods, dressed only in a bright blue swimsuit and hiking boots, his cheeks, jowls and man-boobs sunken and drooping as though being left too long under the sun had softened him up. I'm not usually on edge about strangers in the woods, being 6'3" and 235 lbs. myself, but he angried up the dogs merely by his presence, and as we approached one another, I found him to be a full two inches taller and broader than me. But in the end all he wanted to know was if there was a place down the trail where he could re-cross the river, and I relaxed.

But, though I hadn't been forced to come of age yet, it got me to thinking . . . next time I'm out in these wildlands alone, I'll be sure and pack some kind of defense, for the hills round these parts positively teem with crazies and burnouts and it's best to be on guard.

A few steps down the trail, though, I had another brush with that old coming of age. The woods opened out into a riverside clearing, where a moody, charcoal-gray basalt fissure bound up three quarters of the river bed, forcing the whole Coast Fork down a chute 8 feet wide. Relaxing on the rocks, I stripped down to my Spongebobs and hopped in, steering myself feet-first down the chute. My dog Zuma followed me, having a couple hours earlier learned on his own how to negotiate rapids. (He's a sharp little fella.)

After a couple runs I pulled myself out onto the rocks, and realized I smelled a little rank. Briny or swampy or something. I looked back at the water and realized this wasn't the greatest navigable waterway in the world to hop into. Near the shore, long fingers of brown algae wagged ruefully in the current; the only fish visible were wary black darters that clung to the shadows. The whole stream was brown and teeming with melancholy plant matter and scum. I had just soaked myself in the combined agricultural effluent of Cottage Grove, Creswell, Goshen and all the soaked and swollen farmlands between.

And then I noticed the leeches. Tiny and wriggling, no longer then the breadth of your pinky nail, they squirmed on my skin, one end tapered, the other all mouth. They were everywhere on me. I hurriedly wiped, scraped and scratched every inch of body I could reach, dressed and hiked back to the car. On my way out I passed a sign that said

WARNING:
Deep water, leeches, and sometimes pollution.
Swim at your own risk.

And I grew up just a little.

Maybe next time I find a body!

Dream On

I've got to tell somebody 'bout this dream . . .

Most of the time my dreams are dense, spooky affairs involving endlessly shifting yet recurring settings and several varieties of impending doom (tsunamis, fires, floods, etc.). I'm sure any one of them could give a shrink enough psycho-fodder for years of interpretation.

The dream I had just before waking last night was not such a dream. It was entirely atypical, and therefore must be shared. Enjoy.

* * *

I was aboard a circular, inflatable raft on an open, shallow, tropical sea. I can't recall whether it was just me or whether Ashley was there with me (if she was there, she didn't have a lot of lines), but I know one thing. The Stones were there.

The Stones were, from what I could gather, gearing up for a big world tour. As usual. In pursuit of this tour, they had hired some three or four supporting musicians of varying repute. I think one of them had been the guitarist for some fairly well-known but certainly not Stones-calibre band from recent decades. They Might Be Giants or Simple Minds or some damned thing. All of these supporting hacks were preening starlets whose already overgrown egos were clearly stretched to breaking point by their newfound gig with the Stones. They were gossiping with each other endlessly about the cool things they had done, dropping names like a, uh, leaky phone book. (Except for Dave Grohl, who retained some class . . . more about him in a bit.)

(An aside about the supporting musicians: Due to the way my dreaming brain works, they manifested themselves as chunks of kindling that had been driven into the bed of the raft. During the unfolding events I am striving to describe, I occupied myself by pulling them out of their predicaments. Dreams being the way they are, this process in no way interfered with the conversation.)

Anyway, in the depths of their swaggering yak, these supporting musicians kept prefacing stories about their own exploits with "Don't get me wrong, I love the Stones, but . . ." After a spell of rocking aboard this raft with the Rolling Stones and these uppity chunks of kindling, I got fed up.

"Look, you punks," I told the hired guns. "Cut it out. These guys here are the Rolling-fucking-Stones -- the GREATEST BAND IN ROCK'N'ROLL! Y'all are a bunch of has-beens and never-beens." With that, I leaned back on the raft, quite smug in anticipation of the thanks I expected to hear from the Stones. But my smugness was short-lived.

"Did you ever stop to think," Mick Jagger inquired of me, "that after decades in rock'n'roll we are as tired of hearing about being the 'Rolling-fucking-Stones' as we are of small-time criticism and oneupsmanship?"

I was utterly staggered. Withered in my seat. "Uh, no, Mr. Jagger, Sir," I answered. I tried to explain to whatever Stones would listen how my sycophantry was somehow better than the supporting musicians' two-faced ego-pumping, but I got nowhere.

Just then, Charlie Watts, who had been absent (though I hadn't noticed), returned from a fight with a polar bear. He had won. I quickly forgot he was there.

After a spell, the hired musicians got back to bragging to each other. As part of this bragging, I heard them refer repeatedly to Dave Grohl (who was present) as "the greatest drummer in rock'n'roll!" And I began to wonder what Charlie Watts might think of this, were he alive.

Then I realized he was alive. And I further realized that, in addition to being alive, Charlie Watts was actually there on the raft. He had just beaten the crap out of a polar bear. Oh yeah!

Just then, the polar bears attacked. Only these polar bears looked more like the guy stuffed in the monkey suit in "Trading Places" than proper polar bears: wiry with black fur. Everyone on the raft began pelting them with rocks, and I scored some good hits myself. But the truth is we all looked to Charlie Watts to deliver us from danger.

So it was a shame when a moment later he had vanished, along with the rest of the Stones and their uppity hired guns, leaving me (and Ashley?) alone on the raft, overrun by gorilla-ass polar bears on a shallow tropical sea.

And then I woke up.

* * *

I could not make this dream up, and even if I had it wouldn't be worth telling. So tell me: what does it mean?

\Pardon me if I dont think this is amusing

So I finally got my laptop back from Gateway today, for the second time, and this time it appears they actually did the required repairs rather than simply blanking the hard drive.

And it's as good as new but for one endearing little defect, best demonstrated by my e-mail of two minutes ago to my good friends at Gateway e-Support:

Hello Gateway!

Ive just received my la\pto\p back from your re\pair facility. The hard drive now a\p\pears to be working alright, and Im quite ha\p\py about that, but as you may have noticed the keyboard is acting funny. I cant ty\pe quote marks, a\postro\phes, or question marks, and the letter \p and some other keyboard features are ty\ping wrong. For exam\ple,

'-zero comes out ]0
'-minus sign is '-
'-left bracket is /[
'-right \parenthesis is })
'-\plus sign, question mark, quote marks and right bracket dont work at all.

What can I do about this (question mark})

Thanks,
Daniel |P. Atkinson

I think I'll be sticking to Ashley's computer a wee bit longer.

Fun with new photos!

Since I can't scan the old photos I'd like to, lemme share some new crap!

All of this is from me and Ashley's trip to southeast Oregon in May.

For starters, look at this squirrel, and learn. Do not be like this squirrel. He is a fat, complacent rural American. He lives 200+ miles from the nearest interstate, spends all his time tending his lawn, and gets all of his water from government largesse. His life is an ecological disaster.

Aaaaaah, that's more like it. This bruiser makes his living off of ground squirrels, yet even in death, he seems to want to kill more. He gets an A+ for effort!

Here we are inside the Round Barn, built at the behest of cattle baron Pete French. That crazy bastard had three of these circular barns built just to keep his horses warm all winter. It might be worth noting that the French-Glenn Cattle Company at one time controlled an area larger than some damned eastern state, certainly, and Mr. French was murdered for being an asshole over a very small amount of land wth piss-poor water rights.

But man, could he build a barn!

Another pic from the Round Barn.

Zuma and Hamm's both demonstrating well the scale of a lava tube from the Diamond Craters flows, which occurred 'bout 25,000 years back.

Zuma, with Ashley, at a calmer moment on the trail of the (Donner und) Blitzen River.

(Close-up.) Just look at that dog. That is fucking ridiculous. That look pretty much sums up all I care to know about canines.

Fun with old photos?

Also coming soon is a nice little feature called "Never Look At Old Photos," which would be here now but for the inherent evil of Hewlett-Packard printer-fax-copier-scanner contraptions from Costco. Yes, add H-P to my shit list. Gateway & H-P : bomb the fuck out of them. Terrorist Commies!

UPDATE 2:50am I might add also that my digital camera can't get along with this computer, so I can't even post the pic of the funky-ass beetle I saw the other day. It would make sense to say that I want my laptop back (I'm presently on Ashley's obelisk), but since Gate-Fucking-Way wiped the disk drive clean, I'm not sure what it will take to get even the laptop back behaving the way I'd like. I hate computers exactly as much as I love them. The same equation applies to their creators. And for Michael Moore it's more like 70-30.

Encounters with the Neighbor Man

Our friend the Neighbor Man has been away awhile. After struggling to do a practice erection (stop that!) of his tent on his 3-foot-tall once-mowed front lawn, he went off campin' for 5 or 6 days over the July 4 weekend. It's just as well, since I was launching privatized-space-program-sized rockets out of the backyard all night.

Aye, but here's the rub: he left in a silver Audi with Oregon plates. He returned in a blue Ford Taurus with Washington plates. Explanation: not forthcoming!

Anyway, never mind Neighbor Man's mysterious mid-vacation car-swap. The fun stuff came last night, when we actually SPOKE to the man.

Coming Soon!

Poowatch ramblings

INTRO! -- I wrote all of this crap a few days ago, late one night on poo watch, but due to technical difficulties I couldn't publish it till now. Now I don't like it as much, but in my magnanimity it's all yours.

3:34 AM, July 8. -- I always thought being on a stakeout would be kind of cool. Hanging out, surveilling, waiting for your mark to make his move. Slow but somehow exciting.

Well, now I know why the guys on stakeouts in movies are always so pissed off. It's tedious, boring and frustrating.

Yeah, tonight I'm on stakeout. Every night for the past week this new puppy of ours has left a nice pile of Lincoln Logs right in the middle of the kitchen. This despite us leaving the back door wide open all night. Yesterday I caught him peeing there in broad daylight and scolded the bejesus out of him, yet last night he still laid down the poo. I've decided the only thing for it is to catch him in the act in the dead of night and escort hizass outside.

Now I'm in hour four of Poowatch and it is starting to drag. The mark hasn't even budged since 1 AM.

* * *

So let me tell you about my 4th of July. Unlike Blog's and Canard's, mine just didn't lend itself to the war imagery. I would write that off to Eugene's lackadaisicality but the truth is in years past I've had quite a few war-like ID's here. One year I and some rowdy compatriots treated our house like the embattled jungle fortress it was, firing bottle rockets off the roof from bamboo bazookas and cross-bowing sparkler-tipped bolts over Dari-Mart's bow. Another year, stoned out of my gourd on drugs I shouldn't disclose but that my parents have done anyway, I came as close to Apocalypse Now as five dumb guys can get in the woods along the Willamette River without anyone dying.

But this year it seemed somehow mellower. At least not warlike. But not without its epic moments -- I'd never heard or seen anybody initiate a water-balloon fight by playing the Star-Spangled Banner on electric guitar from a third-floor balcony before. So that was nice.

Yes, there was a water-balloon war. But, even with those green grenade-style balloons, it just doesn't conjure the war metaphors as readily as seeing the streets of DC lit up by explosives.

I did set off oodles of illegal fireworks. This year, though, I wasn't pointing them at anybody. I did hand a Roman candle to Olly while he was beyond recall, but I swear it was not an effort at anti-Redcoat sabotage.

I don't know. Somehow, for all the water balloons and explosions, this year just seemed rather quiet.

* * *

4:03 AM, July 8. -- The mark just came out of the closet, where he's been sleeping, and thought about hopping on the couch. I told him no; he glared and went back to the closet. (This Frenchie bastard's starting to remind me of a cat. Since when do dogs glare at you?) Still no poo. I'm fixing to quit.

* * *

Here's a promotion you wouldn't have thought of: Free meal if you're descended from Genghis Khan. Chang's Mongolian Grill should pick up on this.

* * *

4:22 AM, July 8. -- Ugh. Still nothing. I can hear those goddamned morning birds starting to chirp outside the window. Soon the newspaper will come and tell me 1/4 what I found out online two hours ago.

* * *

I used to stay up this late, or nearly so, every night. I was literally nocturnal for weeks at a time during some stretches of my undergraduate career. I'd pop Adderal's and boil the shit out of coffee right in a saucepan. But now it just ain't as easy. Or worth it. What the hell am I doing grinding my teeth and waiting for a dog to shit on the floor? I could be dreaming right now.

Still, this does take me back. To shivering on the student union balcony at dawn, my jaw and neck tight, my eyes bugged and bleary, chugging a warm microbrew and discussing whether we'd wrap the next OC issue by 10 AM. To seeing a dreary winter morning outside my window after a night of coffee and procrastination. To sitting on the Shafer stoop, exchanging poop jokes and clove cigarettes and waiting for the sky to stop dancing so we could sleep.

I always found my grandparents' stories entertaining in an antique sort of way. I'd like to think that mine will be more exciting -- I think I've done my best as a young hedonist -- but then again my grandkids will know about things I can't even imagine now. My Grandma Mayme was born in 1903, the same year the Wright Brothers debuted the age of aviation in Kitty Hawk. She died in 2002, scant months after airplanes had brought down the World Trade Center. Between the bookends of her birth and death, nearly every trapping and tool of the civilization I know was invented and improved. From that amazing century she gushed a fountain of racy and exciting stories. Yet they all seemed quaint to me. If I can consider her stories old-fashioned, what the hell will my grandchildren think of me?

Ah shoosh, I'm ramblin' again. Hey barkeep, ya got any more of that sarsaparilla?

* * *

4:35 AM, July 8. -- Oh crap, there goes that train whistle. Echoing all the way down to 43rd Ave, instantly planting "I'm on Fire" in my head. And there's the newspaper. Fuck it, the mark's not gonna poo. I'm gone.

UPDATE JULY 11. -- I gave up and woke the puppy up. I dragged him outside and stood there until he shat. Then I went to bed. Since then we have not had indoor poops. VICTORY!

Enjoy that sunshine!

If you've spent any more than a couple of months in Eugene, OR, you have at one time or another encountered Buddy Hazelton. He's the always-optimistic (and I'm assuming autistic) store clerk at Rite-Aid.

Buddy is simple in the head and friendly to the point of aggressiveness, and he always has some chirpy personalized chit-chat related to whatever it is you're purchasing. If it's plants for the garden, he says "Time to start planting, eh? Enjoy that sunshine!" If it's charcoal, you'll get "Good day for barbecuing! Enjoy that sunshine!" If you get hardware for a project he might offer a "Good luck! Enjoy that sunshine!"

You get the drift.

Well, I am proud to say that last week I finally had him speechless. Oh sure, he said "Good day my friend!" But beyond that, he was at a loss for words. I wasn't even advised to enjoy that sunshine.

And all it took to shut up ol' Buddy was a bottle of wine, a bag of dog treats, and a box of Trojans.

I'm back!

But not too auspiciously. Not much to say at this exact moment except that you should all make adoring noises at the sight of our new puppy, Pepper (aka Pepe). He's a French Brittany Pointer. I'm trying not to hold that breed name against him -- he's a good little feller -- although true to his nationality he did bring in a snail and eat it last night.