Madam Calico on my front porch steps, in the afternoon, after work…

I’ve had a few head butts lately, and some body rubs, if I just sit there and don’t attempt to reach a hand out to her. I’ve been letting her dictate the level of proximity, rather than trying to get closer myself. I don’t think she’ll ever let me actually touch her. But she’s reached a point now where she’s willing to sit very close and occasionally slide up against me as she passes by. Up to this point its been rubbing up against every object on the porch, the chairs, the railings and the door when I open it, but never me.

Still won’t stay inside the house for very long. She’ll come in on cat curiosity and look around…she’s even wandered upstairs once. She investigates the furniture and anything new I’ve brought into the living room, like a bag of groceries for instance. But pretty quickly she gets a look on her face like Oh Dear God What Am I Doing???   And then she bolts. I’m trying to get her to understand that I will always open the door for her. But that lesson might never take. She’s afraid. That’s probably a good thing for a street cat to be in the city.

I was hanging out on the front steps smoking a cigar and saw something laying in the street that looked like a neighbor’s cat had been run over and I panicked and ran to it. It was just a black plastic bag of some sort. My aging geezer eyes decoded it wrong. And a fear I have now that never goes away probably added to the illusion. I’m never getting over it I suppose…

This is a part of me I know some folks may find disturbing, but so be it. I like to shoot guns. I have a few of my own. It’s not like I have an arsenal or anything, just a few handguns and rifles. It’s never been that big an interest with me that I spend tons of money on it, and it was more a thing when I was a younger man who couldn’t get enough of things that go bang. And that’s really the essence of it with me, and I suspect, with a bunch of us. It’s not about Dirty Harry fantasizing or anything like it. It’s about another elemental part of the human psyche. Fire.

Fire. I was the kid who turned off the lights in his bedroom, threw open the blinds and raptly watched every thunder and lightning storm that passed by. The louder and closer the bangs the better. It drove mom crazy. But I knew as so long as I watched from safely inside it was okay. I was that teenage boy at the quarter mile racetrack watching the fuelers blast down to the finish line in a glory of fire and smoke. Nighttime races were the best because you could see the fire coming out of their pipes as they idled at the starting line, and then leaping into the sky as they raced down track. I was the kid who smuggled in out of state firecrackers and set them gleefully off on the fourth while my friends kept an eye out for approaching adults. I was the one who built and carefully tended the camp fires at the end of a day’s backpacking, or in the fireplace of our winter break ski shack, then watched it raptly through the night.

But I’m a geek child, not a psycho. And the geek dives into their interest with an intensity of spirit that, yes I know, can be off putting to others. But sometimes that’s exactly what is called for, especially if what lights your fire, is fire. You learn the nature of the fires you wield, and how to keep yourself and the people around you safe. I don’t want anyone getting hurt. I don’t want to get hurt. It’s no fun if anyone gets hurt. Those people who, they say, go to races hoping to see a crash mystify and appall me. What I want to see is mastery of excessively powerful engines and Newtonian forces. I want to see them surfing the fire. Likewise, I am disgusted by nearly everything I hear nowadays from the so-called gun lobby. By now I suppose a lot of people who enjoy this sport are. We’re not all Ted Nugent.

I recently got a membership at a local pistol range. At 62 I qualified for the geezer level discount which cut the cost of a year’s unlimited range time neatly in half. “Unlimited” in this context could be a tad misleading; time at the range is limited by the cost of ammo, and for one of the large caliber handguns I have, a Smith and Wesson model 25-5 (chambered for the old 45 Long Colt, cartridge. As I said, I like big bangs), it’s Very expensive. A box of 50 rounds cost me 40 bucks the other day. Another box of 50 45 ACP rounds cost 25. It’s a much more widely used cartridge. The Long Colt dates back to the black powder days. It’s the cartridge of the famous Single Action Army Colt of the old west…the one you always saw in the movies. There was actually a nicer 44 Smith and Wesson top break gun sold back then but it’s the Colt that’s the classic western movie gun.

So I had my Model 25-5 and my Colt Officer’s Model at the range this morning. And I’m writing this blog post now for the benefit of everyone who thinks all you gotta do with a gun is point and shoot. No. Just…no. You have to practice.   Bunches.   And to my shame I hadn’t.   Well…not with mine.

Visiting my brother in California, he’s taken me a bunch to ranges he’s a member at, and I’ve shot his guns there and was very pleased with myself at how good my aim was with them. But those weren’t my own guns, and it lulled me into thinking I was still good with my own, even though I hadn’t practiced much with them lately. This morning I took the Smith and the Officer’s Model to the range. I hadn’t shot either one of them in years. A friend of mine used to take me to his pistol range as a guest and back then I shot it and my other guns a bunch. But he got into skeet and I take more pleasure in shooting handguns. So I didn’t follow him into that. And for a long time my guns just sat, and got the occasional cleaning, inspecting and oiling.

So I load the Smith and take aim at a bulls eye target and half my shots initially miss completely. Eventually I figure I’m low and to the left and make some adjustments. The Smith has adjustable sights and I thought they were sighted in for me. Maybe five years ago they were. Not now. Eventually I’m putting most of my shots in the black and I move the target back some. But my groups are all over the place and I’m not happy with myself.

Then comes the Officer’s model. Every friggin shot from my first clip misses the target completely. Mind you, I’m shooting at a target only 15 feet away. Eventually I figure out I’m shooting low and to the left with this gun too and I make adjustments and finally get my shots mostly in the black again and I move the target back some. But I’m even worse with this gun than the revolver.

So I pay my bill and leave the range and in the back of my mind I’m thinking about all the morons I seem to be reading about every day now who shoot themselves or shoot someone else and it’s obvious they think a gun is just another adult toy like a fast car or sex and it’s all so Easy…you just point and shoot…just like John Wayne! No. Just…no. Jim Wright, a writer I follow on Facebook, has wisely said there are no gun accidents. He’s right. Drunk driving isn’t an accident either. You get yourself or others hurt by not following the rules. And treating guns like fetishes in a culture war (I’m using the word in its religious sense) practically guarantees people aren’t going to pay attention to what the gun actually is and that’s how people get hurt.

But I hadn’t been paying as much attention as I thought either. So I had my lesson for the day. If I’m going to keep these things in the house, I need to practice with them regularly. As I said, it’s about fire. The fun is in the mastery of fire. If I’m not going to maintain a level of mastery I might as well sell them and be done with it. Otherwise they’re just dangerous weapons sitting there in the gun safe slowly becoming even more dangerous if their owner can’t even hit what he’s aiming at. I have an alarm system. I have a shotgun. I don’t need more than that for home defense.  

Madam Calico and me hanging out on the front porch.

It’s taken me five or six years to gain this level of trust out of her.

When a straight friend from back in the day calls to let you know an old episode of Black Sheep is on and a young Peter Frampton is in it, because he knows your taste in guys…

Came home to find a letter from the Maryland State Insurance Commissioner’s Office, telling me that they’d convinced State Farm to cancel my car insurance premium hike and refund the money Plus Interest.

I’m stunned. After I mailed off my form protesting the hike, back in October, I heard absolutely zilch back from them and figured it had just been conveniently lost in the bureaucratic shuffle. I would have expected at least a notice that the form and been received. But it was dead silence. Five months later they tell me I won.

Well this is good, but I hope State Farm doesn’t think it means I’m sticking with them. I was in the middle of exploring other options for car and home owner’s insurance when this letter came. There are lots of companies out there offering cheaper rates for the same coverage or better. And I am not at all happy that my local State Farm Agent dropped a clause into my home owner’s policy exempting damage from collapse. I have a flat roof and that is the one thing you absolutely need protection on if you have one of those.

While staying at the Walt Disney World parks I would make extensive use of my  annual pass. It basically gives you freedom to wander around the parks without worry about  when your tickets expire or which park you’re allowed into that day. So if I was staying at Boardwalk I’d start my morning with a walk down the path to Hollywood Studios…

…and make my way to The Writer’s Stop to get my morning coffee and a danish.  The Writer’s Stop is  a nice little coffee shop/bookstore tucked in a corner of Hollywood Studios, themed as a studio writer’s lounge/hangout.  And now it looks like they’re going to close it, another one of my favorite places in WDW, to make way for more Star Wars stuff.  I can’t really blame them. Star Wars is hot right now. It’ll bring the tourists in…and the money.

I’m probably not going back to Walt Disney World, largely because it’s not as much fun if I have to remember the fight I had with a certain someone every time I go back. But there is also this, and I discussed it the other day  with a co-worker who is also a big Disney fan: it’s feeling less and less every year like Walt Disney’s World, and more like Disney Corporation’s World.

I think when I started going back in 2008 I was just seeing the last fading light of Walt Disney’s influence on the parks. It was something special to me because I’m old enough to remember watching TV when Walt Disney was still alive and when I walked into Epcot that first time it all came back to me. But in the years since they’ve bought Star Wars and they’ve bought Marvel, and while those are all fun things they’re not necessarily Disney things. I don’t think that much matters to the boardroom anymore. Those of us who still remember Walt Disney are getting old.

It’s still the Rolls Royce of theme parks. The nearest competition can’t even come close. But I wasn’t a theme park kinda guy back in 2008…I only got talked into it by a certain someone, and then, to my surprise and delight, only dived in because I remembered Walt Disney. I don’t need to keep coming back anymore, if it can’t at least still be his theme park.

I’m feeling Wonderful. Aren’t breakup fights supposed to make you miserable? Well…we weren’t boyfriends, just, for a while, casual long distance friends, never to be anything more than that. But we had a past. I would have walked through fire for him. But not into the closet for him. That turned out to be the sticking point.

Yeah it hurts. But not badly at all, as it turns out. Mostly it feels like I have my life back, like it’s been reset back to before the time I found him again, and everything I had then and everything I felt then, I have back now. I’m not kidding…I’m feeling ten…twenty years younger. (grin) Now if I only looked it.

I came back home and the weather here in Charm City is feeling spring like and I’m really looking forward to summer. It’s stunning to realize I wasn’t before. It was just something that was out there. Now it feels like the open road beckoning. Like life always felt.

Back home just now after my excellent Disney World Adventure. I’m going around waking up the house now from its slumber. Water turned back on, hot water heater lit, Internet connectivity re-established, car unpacked…

Peace and quiet. You get it by making an authentic life for yourself, realizing that those moments of actual peace and quiet that come your way, like most things in life, the good and the bad, will come and go in their own good time.

So you deal with the drama as best you can, which you can because you have lived an authentic life, and you have learned how to cope, not how to act like you’re coping. And likewise you navigate the hardships, the pain, the disappointments. And you relish the good things, and all the joys life brings to you, large and small trivial and sublime. And you enjoy the peace and quiet when it comes, while it is there.

But if you go looking Specifically for peace and quiet you’re not making a life, you’re building a cocoon. And pretty soon the cocoon is a prison. And then…a coffin, from which only the dust that could have been a person emerges.

Word of advice…

Few things in life make pampering yourself more sensible than hostility from your high school crush. So my last vacation day I went to the Brown Derby to hang out with the other stars and have drinks and five star food and stuff…

I love this place. Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World is one of my favorite theme parks for the way part of it tries to be like the Hollywood of the 1930s/40s. I love the art deco main street, at the end of which is a reproduction of the last of the three Brown Derby incarnations. You walk in and you feel like you’re there. Well…except for all the other guests making it painfully obvious this isn’t 1930s Hollywood.

It took almost 45 years for my first high school crush and I to have our breakup fight. The advantage to waiting so long is at this age I can handle the emotional swings of it better, plus having some real life experience under your belt gives you better aim when you’re throwing shit back in someone’s face. So for this special occasion I went and ordered the Good Steak…

You’re looking there at the most expensive dinner I’ve ever had, or ever will have, because it’s not bloody likely I’m ever spending that kind of money again on dining out. (100+) But as it was a special occasion it was worth it. How does a steak dinner get so expensive? Simple. You add the 25 dollar Kobe beef option to the already expensive Brown Derby steak dinner.

It was Delicious! Everyone should have steak this good once in their lives. Well…if you eat meat anyway…

It was almost exactly when my server set this down in front of me my phone buzzed and I saw I got another lying harangue from das Submissive complaining about how unruly I am, (just for you hon!) and that we shouldn’t speak anymore because a closet needs peace and quiet. Time was I’d have canceled my vacation and gone back home in tears. This time I settled down to a nice steak dinner.

“Corpse food”…I think the vegetarians call it.   Yes.   Quite.

Reposting this one because it seems so appropriate somehow…

…not that I’m grieving, I’m beyond all that now. This is about das Submissive still working through all those stages of denial. He’ll be a while.

More fun to come when I get back to my drawing table!

Don’t want me to contact you in “any way shape or form” do you? Okay. Fine. (How do you contact someone with a shape?) I shall comply.

But…seriously…you should take that act on the road.

To Whomever German It May Concern…

Did you get pissed off last night because I spent all that time talking to that other guy? Really? No…Really??

You told me he was going on a road trip. Road trips are a big deal with me. I didn’t spend 60k for a car they say you can put 100 thousand miles on and it’s only just broken in because I wanted a status symbol. I Love Road Tripping!   But…you know that. That’s probably why you told me he was going on one.

He showed me his plan and I showed him the tons of road trip photos I have on my smartphone and my Facebook page and we talked road trip stuff and then he mentioned backpacking and I showed him that photo of me back when I was 30 with my pack on and we talked backpacking stuff.

Then he spent practically the rest of the night trying to find where you went because he knew we were friends (as opposed to acquaintances) and that I wanted to spend some time with you before it was time to go. And you’d bugged out.

You do that sort of thing. Like you suddenly get pissed off at me because of something I didn’t see coming and I would have avoided if I had seen it. And then it’s months before you talk to me again.

Love how you tease me every time we meet. You can launch yourself into a tea party tirade about how Obama has wreaked the economy with a perfectly straight face and if I didn’t know any better I’d swear you meant it. Of course, when I suggested with my own straight face that Trump was a good alternative the look on yours my dear German was priceless. Yes, I can tease back.

But teasing is only fun when there is a bedrock of honesty between friends and you don’t want me that close. For some reason. After I joked about Trump you said I was hard to read sometimes. No I’m not, and neither are you. And that’s really the problem all along isn’t it. We’re birds of a feather on the same wavelength every time we meet and you still can’t handle that. So you keep me at arm’s length. And then misjudgements happen.

Did you really get jealous? I swear…sometimes it’s like you forget I spent 33 years searching for you.   By now…don’t you know?

I just woke up from what was probably the most wonderful dream I’ve ever had. And no, I wasn’t having sex. Actually, since I hit 30 I’ve almost never had dream sex,

I was asked out on a date. That’s never happened to me in real life. Never. I’ve always had to be the one who asked. And usually I got the you’re a nice guy Bruce but it just wouldn’t work answer back.

I won’t go into the details, but me and the object of my affections were both teenagers in this dream, and he was someone I was madly crushing on (and still am…but I said I wouldn’t go into details…). What made the dream even more enchanting was some fairly old fashioned family members were watching all this go down and gave me a signal they approved of the nice boy asking me out, once they’d had a chance to size him up.

It was like a slice of life from a better world, a better life. I woke up feeling Wonderful.

I’m 62, going on 63 now. I’ve had my three strikes. I know it will never be. I think this must be how acceptance feels. I’m okay with the dream I just had. Better than okay. Some dreams don’t have to come true after all. They can just be dreams.

Put my bird feeders back up over the weekend. After I’d finished I noticed I seemed more awake, more aware of…everything…than I had in a long time.

I’d stopped feeding a couple winters ago (counting this one) because the mess was getting more annoying than I wanted to deal with. Birds are messy eaters and the shells get tossed every friggin’ where. Plus the additional cost of stocking up on big sacks of seed before winter set it was more one year that I wanted to bear.

But there was more to it, and even back then I knew it in that just-barely-aware space where you put things you flinch away from looking at too closely. Somehow I’d just lost interest. It’s weird, but looking back on it now I think I know why. The front yard was Claudia’s hangout and when she died, counter intuitively, I lost interest in the bird feeders.

I think it was the feeders were something I enjoyed looking out at.  Watching birds at the feeders is one of those little joys I’ve indulged ever since kidhood. I’d have them out on the apartment balconies everywhere mom and I lived. One of the big deals of having a house of my own was I could really indulge it if I had a nice yard and space to put up different kinds of feeders for different kinds of birds. Then it happened and afterward I didn’t much care about the front yard anymore. Or more specifically, looking out the front window.

It’s odd and interesting how emotions can seem to be about one thing when they’re really about something else. I had no noticeable aversion to looking out the front window at the front yard and the street. I did it often if only to check on the weather and my car from time to time. My house being an middle-group rowhouse doesn’t have side windows, so the front, which faces the south, is my main source of sunlight. So it always got its blinds opened first thing in the morning. Had there been  something making me actually flinch away from the window I’d have noticed it and walked it back to the source. But it was only disinterest in feeding the birds starting that winter. That little joy didn’t matter much anymore for some reason. So I took the feeders down. And without the feeders I never bothered looking out that window much, except to check on the weather, and the car. It’s been years since it happened  and  I still sometimes get flashbacks of glancing out that window and seeing Claudia thrashing on the street, and knowing in that instant  she’d been run over.

Last Friday while telecommuting I saw a chickadee hopping around on my Japanese maple looking for the feeders that used to be out there and I thought I should go dig out one of the small sunflower seed feeders. It was a chore because all the feeders were in a storage container under the backyard deck and the outside door to it was still blocked by the huge pile of snow I’d shovelled off the deck. I could get to it from the basement door but I just knew it would be covered in funnel spider condos which I just didn’t want to get near without a lot of de-spider spray. Plus it was blocked off with workshop items like the table saw and ironically, the storage cans where I keep the wild bird seed.

But I got into it anyway and cleared out the spider encampment (I swear this spring I’m hiring an exterminator to de-spider the space under my deck) and worked my way to the container with the bird feeders in it. I ended up taking most of the stuff in it out. As I began setting things back up in the front yard something apparently awakened inside. I found myself trekking to the Wild Birds Unlimited out in Cockeysville and buying some new feeders and mounting poles, and some fresh suet cakes for the woodpeckers. And when I’d finished I looked at my front yard  it seemed with fresh eyes, like as though for the past couple years I’d not really been seeing it right there in front of me.

Figured it might take me months to get my old customers back. They were all there by the end of that day.

Puritan Valentine’s Day Cards!  Oh yes…

A friend on Facebook says,  “For that special someone you’re willing to tolerate until one of you is dead.”