tattooed stranger

Posted on by May 9, 2013

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We live a little ways out in the country.

Usually, when someone makes it out this far, they have a reason for being here.

So, when a guy with tattoos all up and down his arms knocked at our door last night, it was pretty unusual.

“Hey…do you have any jumper cables?  Our car broke down…”

I told him I’d help him…and went to find our cables.

It was a red Tercel…pretty beat up, full of personal belongings…sitting across the road from our house.  There was a lady behind the wheel…and when we’d hooked up the cables, she turned the switch and the car started right up.

When we disconnected the cable, the car died.

” I think it’s probably your alternator”, I told them.

She asked me if I could drive them in to town if she gave me twenty dollars.  I told them that I’d help them if I could …but that I didn’t need the twenty.

We’ve had a string of breakins in our area within the past week….something new out here…and just that evening there’d been a triple homicide in our town…so it was probably bad timing for them to ask me for help…but I told them to hold on and I’d drive them.

I went into the house to tell my wife what was going on.  She was kind of freaked out…”We don’t even know these people…where are you going?  Who are these people?”.  I think that sometimes she is definitely the one with some common sense.

Anyway, to make a long story a little more bearable, it turned out that they wanted me to drive them down the watershed ( a bunch of miles of “two lane driving in the deep dark woods”…. of no streetlights and no houses ) to a town I’d never heard of…in the new darkness of a fading twilight.

Nahhhhhhh….I thought they wanted to go into Hendersonville.  Forget that weirdness.

I wonder if they’d asked me to bring a shovel and my sharpest ax on the trip if I would have been so unthinkingly helpful?

Hopefully my survival instinct is more finely honed than that.

Anyway, we went back out, hooked the jumper cables up again,  and let their car charge a little more… and I sent them on their way in the darkness.

It was all pretty darn sketchy, if you ask me.

But it got me thinking.  It got me thinking a little bit…in addition to my amazement that I was just going to let these strangers, with their pillowcases of God knows what, get in my car so I could drive them who knows where in the darkness….it got me thinking when they were driving down the road how much my “charity” was just a desperate attempt to get these guys outside my orbit again.

It was a real comfort to see their car disappearing in the distance.

Sure…I wanted them to be alright.  I’ve been stranded…broken down in some strange place…and the kindness of strangers made all the difference in how the situation played out.

But I also realized that most of my attempt to help these people was that I wanted these guys and their weird set of self propagated problems to just go away.

I don’t know how far down the road those two made it with that car…maybe I’ll pass them going to work…but last night, AWAY was far enough.

I was like a Good Samaritan yesterday evening…except in MY story, I’m the one who would be thinking, “Man…I am so sick of looking at you down in that ditch…let’s get you some help so I don’t have to think about you anymore.”

Not so noble when the truth comes out, is it?

image from here.

 

 

load o’ logs

Posted on by May 8, 2013

Reynolds-Bros-Mill-Logs-ca.-1920-P0204012-1024x609I called a guy who does tree work about getting a load of logs yesterday.

He’s going to bring it this morning…a tandem load of oak logs that I can cut up for firewood.

That is a lot of wood.

That is a lot of wood piled up in our front yard.

When you have a giant pile of logs piled up in the front yard, you really start feeling the urgency of the situation.  It is a necessity that you cut and split that wood efficiently.  It is important that you do all you can to remove it from the front yard…soon.

I have a giant load of logs coming this morning.

What have I gotten myself into?

It’s kind of like being a parent, though…in some ways, I guess.

Who’d want to be a parent if they could see the whole job layed out in front of them?  Who’d wade into that “giant pile of logs” if they really understood what it meant down the line?  You can’t cut up a tandem load of logs all at once…just like you can’t raise a child instantaneously.

What a shame it would be to miss any part of the journey if you were given the choice to hurry the process.

When I start cutting up this wood, I’m going to have to take it a log at a time.

It is really dangerous to try and practice two-fisted chain sawing.  I have two saws…and I guess that with some creative thinking I could probably come up with some sort of strange jig or something that would allow me to use two saws at once…but I think it would be a real liability to try and save time that way.

I could kill myself by being in too much of a hurry.

So, when I begin to “process” my giant pile of logs, I’m going to have to take it one log at a time… and when I begin cutting that one log up, I’m going to have to take it one cut at a time until I reach the end of that one log I started on.

And so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so……………

That’s the way it is with logs…you have a certain protocol when you have a big pile in your yard.  There is an order to the situation that must be obeyed.

My life with my family is like that, too….there is an order to it that, even though I don’t understand it…and even though I don’t always follow it…really needs to be followed.

If I saw the “giant pile of logs” clearly when any of my “main life events” happened, I’d be in a constant state of panic every time something changed.

I would be in a constant, never-ending, all the time…. state of panic.

I guess that like cutting through a log…working my way slowly from one end to the other….and then starting on the next log….I just need to take everything a day at a time.

And at some point, I hope I can say that “eating an elephant is like riding a bicycle….once you’ve done it you don’t forget”.

 

Image from here..

YouTube days

Posted on by August 21, 2013

“With a head as full of nothing as a head could be!”

That sounds like the perfect jingle for an amazing undeveloped product.

I wish I could think of something to pump out into the marketplace.

We’d all be RICH.

Joan Armatrading had a song years ago where she sang, “some days the bear will eat you…some days you eat the bear…”.

I don’t have any bears on my horizon…but there are mornings when a commitment to write a daily blog post feels like it might be just a little overwhelming.  What to do when you’ve exhausted enough good ideas to count on both hands and you still have get to write something?  What are you going to do to keep the quality as high as the quantity of posts you let float out into the webisphere?

You look to the only thing that might have any hope of inspiring you.

You look to YouTube.

Like this morning.  Right off the bat, I found this video of a pit bull having fun with a tree.

What could be more inspiring first thing in the morning for a mailman to see than a pit bull having fun with something…and never letting go?

I don’t know about you, but that image gets my blood going like no Venti regular brew ever could.  It gives me something to think about all day long.

Just yesterday, I delivered an intact package to a home high on the mountain.  When I pulled up to the residence, a GIANT APBT (that’s American Pit Bull Terrier for the folks not in the know) came around the corner from behind the house.

My heart skipped a beat…until I noticed that she had a pink heart name tag attached to her collar…

“Whew..”, I thought….”nobody’s going to put a pink heart on a mean dog’s collar!”

“That must be one nice pit bull, for sure…”

It turned out that after some talking, bone sharing (milk bones…I carry “store brand” milk bones with me), and generally just trying to instantaneously read the situation that the little pink heart was well deserved.

She was a giant wiggling, tail wagging ball of muscle and teeth…all sweetness and potential dread.

I left the package on one of the two porches (the one that didn’t have her food bowl and dog house on it)…told her not to chew it up…petted her one more time…and went on my way.

I guess that there’s always something happening in my life…sometimes I just don’t remember it until  a Russian dog trying to pull down a limb jogs my memory.

Sometimes I don’t remember it until something with really strong and persistent jaws drags it out of me.

Only metaphorically speaking, of course.

 

 

getting used to out of tune

Posted on by May 6, 2013

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When did good music from “my era” become classic rock?

When did I have a time that I could call “my era” develop?  How did that happen?

I was listening to some good music (ie classic rock) the other day….and I noticed that some of these guys really sang out of tune.

It might have been my own sense of hearing…maybe I was hearing discord where there wasn’t any conflict…but some of it sounded just a little off.

Some people say that familiarity breeds contempt.

Hearing these classic tunes made me wonder if it doesn’t allow us to cut folks some slack sometimes, also.

The way we hear it becomes such a long-standing tradition that we just accept it for what it is…a talented guy who made pretty good music in spite of probably being high as a kite when he made it.

( I don’t believe that being a heroin addict helped Charlie Parker play the sax any better…he was just a great saxophonist who needed a fix . I guess there might be some who’d think that the music was what it was because they were high.  It’s hard to say. )

We hear this music and think, maybe subconsciously, that “it’s just the way it is”.

After a while, we’re so caught up in it all that we don’t even notice how out of tune some of it is…and we just roll with it …enjoying the music.

Autotune can fix everything these days.  If you don’t mind sounding like a robot,  every note that comes out of our mouths can hit the mark all the time.

Perfection sure is weird and boring.

There was an “Everybody Loves Raymond” episode where Ray tries to introduce his father to music on CD.  His father freaks out…yells something like “that isn’t music!”  When they finally track down the old LPs that Ray had hoped to replace with CDs, the look of calm and comfort that crosses the old man’s face is priceless.  He liked the click and pop, the warmth of an LP…”now…that’s music”.

Some of the greatest music I have ever heard has been made sitting around a wood stove in somebody’s cabin.

If all the notes were in tune, I’d be surprised. Some of it might have been grimace worthy…it’s hard to remember that part of it all…but some of it was pretty great.  The parts where we all rose to the challenge of just hitting the notes…and it was in tune and the joyful noise was out in the air…that’s the part that I remember.

I don’t remember any of us thinking, “well…we can fix it in the mix…a little Autotune and that wrong note…that human element…will be history.”

What I remember is the triumph that came in-between the wrong notes.

What I relish is the thought that “Yes…we’re human and we get it wrong a lot of the time…but sometimes we get it so right.  Sometimes we get it so right that we look each other in the eyes and wonder just exactly where that moment came from.”

Inspiration… “inspirare”…”to breathe into”…we respond to the human side of our nature…we recognize the occasionally triumphant space between human failings.  We celebrate rising above the day in and day out “out of tuneness” of our lives.

That’s what classic rock is all about.

Really?

Now…I’ve heard the word inspiration means “with spirit”…”to breathe into”…maybe that’s why we look at each other in surprise when something outside of us guides us to be more than we thought we were capable of.  We are touched by the hand of God whether we believe or acknowledge it.

It’s a gift to be able to appreciate the getting up part of falling down.

It’s a gift to be able to enjoy the “out of tune” moments.

image from here..

 

 

it’s all about the terror

Posted on by May 5, 2013

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I don’t know how smart a chicken is.

If you watch them for a while, you have to come to the conclusion that a chicken is a pretty stupid animal.  They don’t seem to give much thought to anything except eating, drinking, and pooping.  They’re just not the smartest bird I’ve seen in my minor league bird watching lifetime.

But when you’re chasing a chicken around the yard, trying to get them back in their coop, they seem pretty crafty.  They zig, they zag, they evade.

A chicken can make you feel pretty unintelligent while you’re chasing them behind the picnic table.

Maybe a chicken is smarter than I think.  It would take something pretty brilliant to make me feel like I was a dullard….of that I’m sure.

We had some full-grown chickens before we got this batch of chicks.

Something was picking them off one by one in the night.  We came to the conclusion that it must have been an owl or a hawk…something big enough not to leave a trace of any chicken in its wake.

I don’t notice these chickens looking to the sky for the bigger bird that’s sure to kill them.  Maybe they do it when I’m not around…but to me, they seem unaware and unafraid.

We’ve had a number of break-ins lately in our area.  From what I hear, it’s some gang members from Greenville who’ve decided to migrate north and hit up the easy targets in NC.

I never worried about locking everything up before they started kicking in people’s doors.

The old cliché is “ignorance is bliss”….true statements that get used to death become cliches….but it sure is a lot easier to migrate through life expecting the best.  What’s the other cliché?  “Expect the best, prepare for the worst”?  I don’t know how you prepare for every random event.

I guess that’s what the insurance industry is built on.  Fear is an easy sell.

Thinking about these random break-ins got me wondering about how terror works.  It’s not just the event that leaves the real mark…it’s the lasting expectation of what might happen in the future.  We forget that the owl swooped down to kill….if it didn’t get us…but we remember that something bad could happen at any moment….even if we can’t predict or define what “bad” is.

Who would have thought that something benign like the Boston Marathon would be a target?  Runners have no politics while they’re running…it’s just the running.  It was effective terrorism because it made no sense. It changed our expectations of what might be possible.

That’s the thing about “effective terrorism”…it takes the “who would have thought” moment…and turns it into another opportunity to fear something that “could happen”.

I am going to miss those “who would have thought” moments when they’ve all disappeared.

After the Boston bombing, a lot of people shared this Fred Rogers quote.  I’ll close with this video because I really believe that in spite of all the fear and trepidation, there is a core of goodness in most people…we just have to figure out how to make it come out.

Norbit

Posted on by July 18, 2013

norbit_posterWhile I was getting my morning started…boiling some water for the french press, grinding the coffee, making a peanut butter sandwich for later, packing my banana, filling my water bottle…doing the same things I do every morning in the same way and at the same time, I thought, “this is kind of like a really boring and un-zenlike tea ceremony”.

My modern tea ceremony…complete with banana packing and sandwich preparation.

There are things that I think my wife would like me to keep hidden from the world.  There aren’t many…to live a life without secrets is a good thing…but discretion is vital sometimes.  Sometimes too much can be given away with the slip of a tongue…sometimes minor details tell more about a person’s character than we intended.

I like Norbit .

It’s as low-brow as it gets…the critics hated it…most people with any sense or refinement can’t stand it…it was pretty repulsive.

But I like Norbit.  I think it’s pretty funny.

I guess I should be embarrassed…should be talking about some movie with some class like Wings of Desire or Lawrence of Arabia…or some other such some such…but I like the low-brow stuff sometimes.

Like the country song sort of says…I like my movies just a little on the trashy side.

Maybe the most fun for me is seeing the reaction that other people have when I suggest it as a viewing choice.

“How about Norbit?”  is sure to produce a violent and sustained negative reaction.

For some perverse reason, that’s kind of entertaining for me.

I’m not a sadomasochist…I don’t like to cause any one around me any pain….I don’t get pleasure from other people’s discomfort.  I’m not like that.  That’s not how I roll.

But…it’s fun to see the grimace when I mention Norbit.

In case you hadn’t figured out from watching the trailer….Eddie Murphy plays the main character, Norbit…and he also plays Rasputia, his king sized…no, that may be the wrong way to say it…his queen sized love interest.

“You got a girlfriend, Norbit?  Well you do now.”

Things don’t roll easy for Norbit.  It’s a hard life living with Rasputia.  She is not a nice character.

Norbit is a funny movie.  I will say it again to cement the damage I’ve already done to my critical reputation…I like Norbit.

If I was on Oprah, I’d jump up on that couch and crow to the world, ” I LIKE NORBIT!!”

You would think that someone with his own private tea ceremony would have a more developed capacity for quality.   A mature man should be…mature…..”when I was a child, I…” and all that.  There should be evidence of growth and wisdom…not some weird backsliding like enjoying Norbit.

I don’t know if it’s some sort of covert Satanic plot, but this movie streams everywhere…Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, Crackle…it’s everywhere.

You can’t escape Norbit.  It’s like laying down next to the pods in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie….who knows who you’ll be after you waste some time watching this one.

I know it changed my life.

That’s a good thing…right?

.

driving and thinking…about Kesey

Posted on by May 3, 2013

What I think about when I drive around delivering the mail is so random that sometimes I can’t believe it.

Of course, the main topic of conversation inside my head is the accurate delivery of the mail.  That goes without saying. That is a given and needs no elaborate or further explanation.

But in the spaces in-between concentrating on something I do in the same way everyday, I think about a lot of things.

The other day I was thinking about trees…which led to logging…which led to this scene from an old Paul Newman movie…which led to Ken Kesey.

Ken Kesey wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest” in 1962…had great success with it…and then wrote the book that this movie was based on, “Sometimes a Great Notion”, in 1964.

Then, except for a couple collections of essays and a book of short stories and essays called Demon Box that he put out in 1986, he didn’t publish any other novels for almost 30 years after the first novel.

This second novel, “Sometimes a Great Notion”, was one I found in High School somewhere.  My barber had a rack of “strips”…books that had their covers removed so the bookseller could get a credit for the unsold copies by just sending back the covers.  The books are supposed to have been destroyed when the covers are ripped off…but for some reason my barber always had a rack full of these books.  From what I remember, I found my coverless copy there.

What a tremendous novel.  I have family in the Pacific Northwest, so the location might have had something to do with it, but I was pretty into this book when I first read it.

I think I could relate more to this book and its subject matter than the first book, which for the most part was set in a mental institution.

Salinger wrote some great novels and then retreated from the public.  He was a mystery…a recluse.

Kesey wrote some great novels and then seemed to be swallowed up by the counterculture.  He was out in the world, riding a psychedelic bus, doing the acid tests, living among the hippies (he did say that he was “too young to be a beatnik, too old to be a hippie”)…living in the moment…but…not publishing any novels.

Sometimes, I guess, a legend is cemented by what you don’t do as much as what you do. If you hit it hard with a powerful statement, and then don’t say anything else for years…you are remembered for your success.

You know, though…looking up YouTube videos of interviews with Kesey, I was struck by how many were about taking LSD or recollections of something that happened back in the 60’s, but I could not find anything about writing or creativity or art.  What the heck?

This guy is a great writer…but looking at these videos all I could think was that it was sort of a waste.  Maybe you become what people expect?  Maybe you play out the part that was given to you?  Maybe you just continue to ride that train that you bought a ticket for and then forgot how to get off?  I don’t know.

I used to think that it must be kind of cool to be a counterculture icon.

With a couple of years under my belt, it just starts to look like a wasted life.

If this video clip posts it’s a major spoiler.  It’s one of the most powerfully memorable scenes from a good movie made from a great book.

Ken Kesey had a lot more stories inside of him than “we got so high on a fancy school bus”.  Watching the video interviews made me wish he could have shared more of them in-between hits of acid.

 

where’s my tree?

Posted on by May 2, 2013

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” I’d like to see that tree you wrote about sometime.”

My wife was talking to me about a tree that I’d written a blog post about a couple of days earlier.

I’d made a big deal out of this one misshapen tree that I’d noticed in the forest.  I was sure I’d not only be able to find it again anytime I wanted to, but that someday it might even have some sort of marker or plaque commemorating what I had done…

“THE BLOG TREE”

That would have made all the sense in the world…that my words would someday spark a giant outpouring of nostalgia…”remember when he wrote about lego impotence?  Those were the days, huh?”  There would be plaques on most everything I had come in contact with or written about.

The reality of the situation was that when I went back to where I thought the tree was…I couldn’t find it.  It was a memorable tree but in all the new green, it just didn’t stand out like the first day I saw it.

That tree…the oddest of trees…just blended in with the other trees.  For the life of me, I couldn’t see it anymore.

We are the hub of our own universes.

Astronomers would be confused…”I thought we already settled that sun/earth issue….it’s the SUN that everything revolves around, remember?”

We are the center of it all…at least in some of our minds.

We are the tree that every other tree in the forest had the good or bad fortune to spring up around.

We can’t get over our selves.  Even if we work at practicing humility…and discount our own importance in the big picture….we can’t escape being us.

We can’t escape it…but we can’t understand it, either.  Try as we might, understanding ourselves is a tough nut to crack.

Not being able to find this one odd tree made me think about how people just don’t have the time to sustain an obsession with our differences or faults.  They are so busy being the hubs that to give up too much attention to someone elses problems takes too much energy.

They may notice some quirky (or major…it could be something earth shakingly major) difference…but they can’t get over themselves long enough to give it a second thought again and again and again.

Probably one of the major reasons we have to pay attention to other people is that it takes some of the heat off of trying to figure out our own problems.  We get to focus on something outside for a while ….and it feels good to leave the self obsession behind momentarily.

Not being able to find this WEIRDO TREE again was a big loss.  I thought that I’d always have it to point to as an example of nature gone wrong…always be able to compare the GOOD, NORMAL TREES to it.  It was bent and “growed back wrong”….why wouldn’t I remember it always? But, try as I may, I can’t see this tree anymore.

When someone else notices something about us that’s not flattering, in our minds it becomes a forever thing.  We obsess over it…water and nurture it until it becomes just another tree in the forest that “growed up wrong”.

The people that made the comment have probably moved on…unless they’re so desperate to escape their own pitiful version of “ME”  that they’ve set up a tent at the base of our trees so they can pick at us and forget themselves for a while.

They don’t have the interest in “outside things” to keep up the attack.

I’m glad I couldn’t find that tree again…it meant more hidden among the others than it ever meant standing out in the forest.

brawlin’ with the sherpas

Posted on by May 1, 2013

“They’re great people…these Nepalese guides”.  That’s the final quote in this short video…and something I kind of suspected to be true.

If I went into an area of the world and threw my weight around…spent my money and enjoyed the labors of the people who’d been there for years…had an attitude of “here I am…serve me…you work for me now, get to steppin’ “…if I had that sort of attitude, I suspect there might be problems at some point.

Wait a minute…it sounds kind of like my neighborhood…but that’s another story for another time.

These Sherpas seem to be pretty good folk on the whole.  I suspect they put up with a lot.  I think that in a lot of cases with these “western” climbers, the Sherpas are the real athletes of the bunch. They really are unsung heroes.

From what I can gather, the three European climbers, climbing unroped, interfered with preparation work that the Sherpas were doing above Camp 2.  Words were exchanged… and when the European climbers returned to Camp 2 they were met by an angry Sherpa mob.

I don’t know when we “westerners” decided that the world was OUR oyster…but it’s not something that started with Everest.  Wherever we go, our egos go with us…and the attitude that we have the right to enjoy someone else’s world on OUR terms goes with us, too.

Climbing can be a dangerous sport.  It takes a healthy sense of self to do what these climbers do.  You have to have a reasonably well-developed ego to survive.  But when we treat these Sherpas like guides at Disneyworld, there for the attainment of a goal that more and more often can be purchased if you have enough cash, something has gone pretty wrong.

I don’t know these climbers, but I wonder if they didn’t arrive at the mountain with an attitude…and I wonder, too, if they won’t leave with the same sort of attitude.  In their eyes, I bet the climbers see themselves as the real victims..”and then the Sherpas just WENT OFF…FOR NO REASON !! YEA, MAN….THAT’S WHAT I SAID…FOR NO REASON !!!”

You aren’t going to see the Sherpa side of the story, though.  They’re too busy fixing ropes at 22,000 feet so some guy from Chicago can pull himself up and live the dream of summiting Everest.  They don’t have time to complain to the news media that some Westerner picked a fight at high altitude.

The Sherpas have work to do.

 

 

freakin’ truck

Posted on by April 30, 2013

old truck broken

Any parent worth his or her salt is going to say that they’d do anything for their children.

“Why, I’d go to the ends of the earth, I’d jump into the fire, I’d give my heart if they needed a transplant…I’d do anything for my kids…”

When crotchety daddy gets a call from his little girl from a school that’s 20 minutes of moderate paced driving away….and she says, “Dad…the car won’t start again”…that theoretical devotion is put to the test.

Now, of course my going to help her was never in doubt.  I’d help her with anything that I could….fix whatever problem she asked me to, and probably try to fix some problems that she wished I would keep my nose out of…but, darn it, I was so relaxed at the end of my day.  I was so ready to just sit after driving around….sitting?…for most of my work day.

“Did you hit it with the hammer? Did you hit it in the place I showed you to hit it? Try hitting it again.”

“I tried that already”, she said.

“Try it again.”  I really didn’t want to drive down to the school to hit the old truck with a hammer myself.

I could hear her outside of the truck…tap, tap, tap.

“Still won’t start.”

I wanted to tell her to really whack it…it should make more of a pound, pound, whack sound than a tap, tap, tap sound…but what I said was…

“Hold on, I’m coming”

I felt like a cranky Liam Neeson in that movie where he goes to Paris to save his daughter with the specialized skills he’d gathered over a lifetime of espionage activities.

I was really going to lay into that truck with the hammer when I got there.

I have skills, too.

Actually, “tap,tap,tap” is the more appropriate way to handle the situation…it’s only a solenoid so the big whack is both impossible in a crowded engine compartment and unnecessary.  It’s just that it makes you feel like getting an even bigger hammer when the car won’t start.  It makes you feel like wailing on it…no matter how inappropriate.

My daughter was talking to her mother on the phone while I was making the drive to the school…she said that I’d probably tap it a couple of times when I got there and it would start, and sure enough…that’s what happened.  Thank goodness.  It would be a shame to call AAA…or even AA…and watch some guy look at it and then say that he needed to “tow it in for diagnostics”.

“Here’s the hammer,” I’d say.  “Try that first”.

You don’t see many really cranky heroes in the movies.

Most of the time, they’re chomping at the bit to wade into battle…”I’ll save you, Ma’am…don’t worry…I’ll save you.”  They don’t say, “hit it again…harder…try harder”.  They are steady and strong and everything a hero should be.

I’m cranky.

Most of the time I keep it under wraps…kind of “covert cranky”…but I can be a cranky little baby when I’m backed into a corner by a cheap Chinese aftermarket starter.

I wish my family didn’t already know that…but I doubt it’s a grand revelation to them to hear that Daddy can be a cranky guy sometimes.

But, you know, in my defense…I will jump into the fire for my family, I will drive to the ends of the earth, I will slay the dragon and fight the good fight.  If they ever need me, I will be there for them.

Every ounce of cranky, moaning and groaning, bitchy me will be there for them.

Yay for them….

“Isn’t there anyone else we can call first ?”

image from here