You Take Care Of Me, I'll Take Care Of You
Let's commemorate these three dogs, okay? They're the favorite buddies of some of my favorite people—and they've all passed away within (eerily?) months of each other.
Bruno, you bit me once and I was always kinda scared of you, but you were a hell of a guard dog to Melissa and, when happy, the gentlest of giants.
Jake, you drank from the toilet, you dug in the trash, and you could swim-fetch a tennis ball for four hours straight. You were a magnificent beast!
Benny, ah Benny! Wasn't it literally just yesterday that you were calmly allowing Lefty to bark in your face and then sunning yourself regally on the mini ramp?
Friendship with animals is, maybe, one of the purist, most joy-giving things in existence. Dogs, though—friendship with dogs in particular. (Not the same as friendship with cats! Which is also good, but, you know ... different.) (I have never called myself a "cat person" or "dog person" and in general believe those terms to suck.)
Anyway, dog tails wag with happiness and hope; their soft coats offer warmth and comfort. We feed them, we exercise them, we command them to sit and stay and come—and then we tell them they're good. In return, they LOVE us. Pow!
Sunshine Assessment
Let's assess. It hasn't rained in like, weeks? The days have been sunny in a windy, bone-chilly kinda way, and the nights—especially starry. This makes things like dry-pawed dog walks and skating out of doors all possible. More than possible—probable. But! I'm gonna say something weird right now: I miss the rain.
Here's where I'm at with this:
1) Sunny January days fill me with dread because of a sense (irrational?) that we're stealing sunny days from the tail end of spring. What if for every nice day we get now, there'll be a raw, gray one tacked onto June?! I'll be fragile by June. I'll need summer to start promptly.
2) Weather breaks! See, it’s oddly moving when a long stretch of weather—even if it’s not bothering you none—ceases quietly in the night, and you wake up at dawn to find a fresh situation outside your windowpane, kinda like an old friend you forgot you were missing.
3) We need the water. The gardens are parched. There's no snow on the mountain. The summer is due to be hot and dusty, with ominous red sunsets colored with wild-fire smoke. (Global warming is pretty skeeery, if/when considered seriously.)
Estacada park under golden rays of sun. Photo: Cutright
Saturday Smith grinds on the dry concrete. I like.
Favorites 1.20.14
Junot Diaz: Dominican-American writer, won the Pulitzer, etc. Juxtaposes hilarious cholo vernacular with vibrant beauty of language (utilizes "motherfucker" with wild abandon!). Start with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. You'll see—his shit just dances right off the page.
Lemon zest: Have you zested? Why wouldn't you? So much more lemony than lemon juice. Soups, salads, a bowl of plain yogurt—it makes everything brighter. In fact, any time someone throws away a lemon peel without first zesting it constitutes kitchen crime.
Hot tub/sauna before bed: Soak until your cheeks are crimson. Get out and cool off on the tile floor. Transfer to the sauna—stay there until stars start spinning in front of your eyes. Go home and shower. Sleep the sweet sleep of the dead.
The Heat: Not a chick flic—a buddy-cop movie, but with funny females at the front. You will LOL. (Melissa McCarthy—my new favorite actress?!)
Travel & Entertainment
As you may know, I have no personal problem with winter—but I'm kinda whatever about January. It's just a clean up month. I clean up my house. I clean up my mind. I keep my head down, hacking my way through the tall grass of life.
Part of the cleanup is getting my taxes in order. You self-employeders out there know the joys of adding up a year's worth of receipts all in one go—or you don't, because you use a less antiquated accounting system. Regardless! 2013 was a clusterfuck. "Entertainment" was off the hook, but "travel" was depressingly small. And the amount of paper I put towards non-fun things like utilities and insurance is a crime, but whatyagonnado.
Doing taxes is a kinda sweet way to remember moments from my year, though. The Deschutes River campsite receipt for the raddest (and what turned out to be only!) skate-camping trip of the summer. The 7Eleven receipt for two tall cans of Coors Light that were sipped outdoors under starlight with cute dog and cute boy. All the good meals I ate. All the coffee I drank. All the books I bought and consumed—breaking the spines and dog-earing the pages. The first time I tasted beer mixed with kombucha (a "raddler" they called it) on a sunny September eve in the East Bay with old friends. It's all good stuff. I'd pay money for all of it again!