Ant Pompeii...

We may not have invented the idea, but in 1962 when we did this, it sure felt that way. David and I had a simultaneous epiphany when we realized that molten lead was exactly what we needed to make an ant tree.

There had been an immense red ant colony under a large grey slate that was part of the path leading from the back door of my house, out to the driveway. The colony was healthier than most due to regular feedings. When Mom took Dad to the train station for his ride into the city every morning, I lifted that slate and scraped the eggs I couldn’t eat for breakfast off of my plate. There was a depression under there where eggs and Kippered Herring fit perfectly, and enough ants to devour food quickly. After a while, I knew the colony must have a huge underground structure.

Although we had the idea of pouring something down that ant hole, we didn’t know what to use. Whatever it was had to flow quickly down to the very bottom and branch out into every chamber as it filled to the top. It also had to hold its structural integrity when we dug it up. We needed to be able to dig out that cavernous ant condo, complete with all rooms, cells, and yes…antechambers too.

Plaster wouldn’t hold together when we dug it up and cement would set too quickly. Both would just block the entrance. 

It was when we were over at David’s house, where antique guns rested in the living room corners, that the idea came to us. Black powder and lead for shot were in plentiful supply at his house. We frequently melted lead down in an iron ladle over the flame of his kitchen stove. We used molten lead for all kinds of stuff that most mothers would be horrified to know about.

On a day when we were alone in the house, we had taken David’s sisters door off of her bedroom and had it laid out flat on the kitchen table. With one side of the keyhole plugged by modeling clay, we poured lead into the other. Susan kept her door locked all the time, regardless of if she was there or not. Now she couldn’t even get a key in. We loved knowing it would make her crazy. But more importantly, we both realized that molten lead would be perfect to pour into that ant hill.
Molten lead could maintain its heat. It was heavy enough to flow all the way down to the bottom chambers before solidifying and strong enough to hold its shape when we dug it up.

The next day, we waited for my mother to go out for the afternoon and immediately started melting the lead. With the slate paver flipped over, we made about ten runs, back and forth to the stove and the anthill, pouring the led down into the hole in that red dirt. Once full, we let the metal cool and harden and then started in on the surrounding dirt with a garden hose. Turning the dirt into mud, digging with hands and arms, feeling the structure of the anthill under a puddle of muck, and slowly freeing the entire structure enough to pull it right out of the earth.

All that mud wallowing took about three hours and demanded that we sink our four synchronized arms down as far as possible with our faces turned sideways in the mud. Armpit deep. My right ear was plugged for two days.

But we got it out. It looked like a big, gloppy, sludge ball with a Christmas tree interior. We sat it to one side as we filled the hole back up with dry dirt and replaced the covering slate stepping stone. Mom would never know.

Hosing off our mud baby on the thick grass of the back yard was like digging out Tutankhamen’s tomb. We knew there is something special in there but had no idea just how special it was.

Turning the cast upside down so it rested on the top, a strong stream from the hose made short work of the mud and revealed a 2.5-foot structure that shone brightly in the sun. It was way more intricate than we could have imagined. Every room, chamber, connecting tunnel and shaft was perfectly captured in lead.

Although I wouldn’t recommend the molten lead method to permanently remove an ant colony, it sure was effective. All the ants were forever frozen at their stations, an ant Pompeii.

David and I were delighted. We built a wooden frame around our prize and hung it in the middle. We turned it into our ninth grade biology teacher as a joint project, for which we both got an A+.

It was so cool; I wish I still had that thing. Unfortunately, when we went into our teacher at the end of the year to reclaim our masterpiece, it had been destroyed. Our teacher blamed another teacher and a lack of storage space. The frame was gone and the whole lead anthill had been smashed down into a heavy ball.

Those bastards.

Oh well, you can buy one on Etsy these days anyway if you have an extra $250. and don’t mind having one made out of aluminum… but David and I thought of it first, and we made the best one ever...

The Dinner Guest

Bruce and I were two of the four bachelors who lived in a four story townhouse next to a large lake in a bedroom community of Washington, D.C. Each guy had their own floor and private balcony. Delightfully chaotic insanity hung ten atop a four-year tsunami of music, girls, beer and ganja, baked up in a bachelor paradise.

It was with that kind of mentality that Bruce and I decided it would be a good idea for us to go camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains, about an hour from our place. Although both of us were in our mid-twenties, we had zero camping experience between us, but we knew the Blue Ridge mountains were reputed to be quite tame. No big deal. Real mountains, like the Rockies, were a different story. After all, ours was to be little more than an overnight drink-a-thon out in the woods. At least that was the plan.

Bruce worked at USGS, The United States Geological Survey, giving him access to wonderful topographic maps many years before the internet provided such things with a few clicks of a mouse. So with the best maps available anywhere, we plotted out a route from a parking space in the woods, just off of the Blue Ridge Parkway, to what looked like a perfect clearing next to a stream only a few miles away…as the crow flies.

I bought a new backpack, tent, and sleeping bag. Bruce already had those things.

The night before we left, I made Chicken Cordon Bleu, carefully pounding breasts out flat while drinking wine, rolling them up to stuff into backpacks with the other supplies. We had gourmet cheeses, home-made trail mix, beer, and two one-gallon bottles of Gallo Hearty Burgundy. For some reason, my Grandfather’s passion for Burgundy had gotten me on a wine kick that summer. Oh, and I also rolled twenty joints for the road.

Early the next morning, maps and supplies packed efficiently into our backpacks, we took off for the Blue Ridge. We were well-prepared manly-men headed out on a beautiful, breezy morning, perfect for a short, refreshing hike to our designated campsite.

We started walking with the map in hand, disgusted with the little people who weren’t smart enough to get their hands on such maps and plot their course. Superior beings, savvy and resourceful…for at least ten minutes anyway. That’s when both of us realized that people hike on marked, cleared trails for a reason. Bruce and I had drawn a straight line on our map, with no consideration for steep hillsides, almost impenetrable valley undergrowth or impassible drop-offs. We hit them all. Two absolute idiots, blindly following a line on a map that made zero sense. Crawling up one steep incline, skinning hands and knees, then skidding almost out of control down the other side. Another rocket scientist move on my part: lugging two gallons of Gallo Hearty Burgundy in glass bottles and a 12 pack of beer. Every time exhaustion forced us to pause, we lightened the load of those bottles of Burgundy, by transferring wine from the bottle to our stomachs. Naturally we needed a smoke with that.

Had we taken the recommended trail, the hike would have been about a half hour walk. Instead, we fought through an up and down mess of tangled thorns and brush for more than three hours before we got to our campsite, bloodied, and stumbling.

But even as tired and hungry as we were, at least we were finally there. The ordeal was over. Quickly setting our two tents up, opening to opening, we started in on the beer while we shared a joint, delighted to not have to walk another step. The wine and smoke made hiking through that jungle hell twice as difficult as it should have been.

Sundown afforded us just enough light to carefully lay out the chicken, salad ingredients, several ripe avocados, a small plastic bottle of dressing, and a bunch of brownies I had made. Yes, that kind of brownies. I knew we would sleep well that night.

Bruce took all the other food, including eggs, a fat cylinder of Taylor's Pork Roll, coffee, and sticky buns for breakfast, and put them in a canvas bag along with 10 or 15 Tootsie Roll Pops for the hike back. Then he strung the bag up high in a tree where bears and varmints couldn’t get to any of it.

Done! Let’s party!

Both of us were only wearing shorts and shoes, letting the sweat from our hike dry off in the welcome breeze. Still passing the last of our joint, we heard a loud grunt immediately behind us.

There he was, a huge black bear, waddling in like he owned the place. Fearless. We stumbled backward and retreated about 30 feet as he casually strolled over to the chicken, salad, and two open beers, and started eating. He just sat back on his fat ass and went through one item after another, oblivious to us as we jumped and yelled from the sidelines.

He thought we were dinner cheerleaders.

Bruce and I assured each other that he was a semi-tame park bear, used to raiding campsites. We told ourselves that he would be easy to run off.

So we puffed ourselves up, got all manly, and approached him menacingly, yelling profanities about his mother, his family, and his obvious lack of character. I picked up a rock and threw it at him. No reaction as it fell short. I picked up another baseball-sized piece of granite, smooth from the stream-bed, and wound up with a pitcher’s stance, hitting that bear squarely between the eyes. That ought to do it!

He was instantly startled, forced to pay attention to us, probably hurting a bit, and mad as hell to have his dinner interrupted. He did that thing I had seen on the Davy Crockett show where the bear stands on his hind legs and growls with an open mouth just to show off his denture work. You know, right before he charges, pins you to the ground, and eats the scalp off the back of your head.

I thought he was way too fat to be able to run with any speed, but I was very wrong. Seven feet tall, 400 pounds, and he could run like Jesse Owens. Bruce and I levitated backward, turning toward the stream and flying across it on adrenaline fueled wings. We scrambled up onto a boulder on the other side of the water and the bear stopped on the camp side. He immediately lost interest in us. Turning back toward the camp, he knew there was a lot more picnicking to be done.

In our rush to exit the campsite, Bruce had managed to grab one of the gallon bottles of wine and I had a couple of joints in my pocket. So at least there was that. The later and darker it got though, the colder it became. We both started to shiver uncontrollably. Shirtless, exhausted, and now half freezing to death, we could see the bear in the flickering light of our Coleman lantern sitting next to our dinner as the he slowly ate everything we had sitting out. Our lantern mood lighting for his dining pleasure.

By 2AM, our wine was gone, teeth chattering, we decided that we had to risk a tip-toe back into camp with a plan to slip unobserved into our tents and the warmth of our sleeping bags we were both lusting for. If the bear saw what we were doing, he didn’t care. He had found the Tootsie Roll Pops and was delicately eating each one while making a neat little pile of the sticks and wrappers to one side. He knew his way around a Tootsie Roll Pop, all 15 or so.

I didn’t care anymore. The warmth of my sleeping bag was everything and I immediately fell into a coma sometime around 2:30.

In my dream, someone was trying to wake me up with a ripping sound. It was the back wall of my new tent, torn open with a huge black bear head coming through the new back door. He was looking for more food, his nose twitching like a pig’s snout, hovering over my knees. I yelled to Bruce as I shot out the front and ran. Bruce did too. Back to our rock on the other side of the stream. Cold, shivering.

The bear occupation lasted for another hour.

Then, without fanfare, he wandered off unceremoniously, just as the sun started to light the sky.

Cold and tired, Bruce and I went back into camp and quickly found shirts and jackets to slip into. Hungry as hell, we thought the big breakfast we had planned would be our life saver.

No such luck. The bear had climbed our tree, retrieved the bag from the bear-proof place we had strung it up, and eaten or destroyed everything in it. Eggs, Taylor ham, sticky buns, coffee…he was a non-discriminatory eater. The few things that he didn’t eat, he tasted. The avocados were dripping with bear slobber and puncture marks. Even our water was gone, stored in plastic canteens, the bear had punctured them. What water hadn’t drained out was frothy with bear saliva.

No food, no water, my new tent destroyed… there was nothing to do but leave.

So we packed everything up and put it all in what was left of the bear-proof bag. While we were packing, three adult deer wandered into our campsite. We just stood and looked at each other. It was as if they had heard there was food to be had and some incredibly stupid campers to take it from. I was incredulous that they were fearless, ten feet away, as my concerns grew that they were some undiscovered breed of killer deer.

We did not want to go back to our rock.

We got the hell out of there. Jogging down the well-marked path, back to our car.

Driving home, neither of us had any cash in those pre-credit card days, so we couldn’t even stop at the diner we had passed on the way in. Shit!

All of this was made worse in the weeks to follow when the one picture that Bruce took of our bear didn’t turn out. It seems Bruce had snapped a quick shot when we had gone back into camp to get some sleep. No one believed our bear story or how damn big that guy was. “Black bears don’t get very big.” They said. “They’re basically harmless.” They told us. Everyone thought brown bears were cuddly and friendly and that Bruce and I were pussy's. We were, but that wasn't the point.

It had been too dark for Bruce’s camera to capture the shot we needed to back up our story.

But Bruce’s USGS connection pulled through. Apparently they had a special lab that could work miracles with film and Bruce had a buddy with access.

I was home in our kitchen about a week later when Bruce came home from work smiling like the Cheshire Cat. “Guess what I’ve got?” he asked as he opened a large manila envelope.

That’s when Bruce pulled out a crystal clear 8X10 photograph of a huge black bear, standing upright and grinning with menacing delight at two fools who had served him a very memorable dinner.

Two fools who never, ever, went camping again.

Dad

My father had a massive heart attack when he was 64. He survived that wake-up call and, uncharacteristically, paid attention when the doctor told him to stop smoking, stop working and to take care of himself right now, or die. That kind of talk can get your attention, as it did for him. Dad quit his law practice in NYC, quit his three pack a day cigarette habit that turned the ends of his fingers brown, and moved away from New Jersey traffic to North Carolina coastline. For the next two years he learned how to fish the surf and walk a ten-mile loop between two prominent piers every day. Although he did ramp it up again after that and was the driving force behind incorporation of the town of Pine Knoll Shores, serving as mayor for two terms, he stayed healthy. When death came knocking again at age 89, he was ready to answer the door, and did.

We never hugged or said: “I love you.” A handshake was what fathers and sons did back in those days, and that was OK. But sometimes shared rituals speak to such things without being uncomfortably direct.They help us connect. For my Dad and me, it was limericks. We both looked forward to getting a letter in the mail with the immediately identifiable handwriting...

Dad wrote:

An amoeba from old Potawatomi,
Was beset with recurring dichotomy,
She split and she split,
And after a bit,
She observed: “There's a hell of a lot-o-me!”

I responded:

An old salt went fishing most days,
Catching fish in incredible ways,
The fish he was gleaning,
Were like ovens: self-cleaning!
And most days he caught just fillets!

Here’s the caption for this picture of him. He loved his dogs, much the way I love mine now. I even live in a different place near the ocean called "The Shores".

A lazy old man from The Shores,
Wraps his dog round his neck while he snores,
Sitting up on the couch,
With a dog-induced slouch,
He feigns sleep to avoid all his chores!

In this increasingly disjointed world, while I pretend to be an adult in charge, I miss my Dad's stable, reassuring, wise council. I know he's around me though as I can hear his voice quite clearly if I close my eyes. We speak as we did before. It has also become more frequent, now that I'm about the age he was in this picture, that when I open my eyes to look into my mirror, there he is.

If he's out there now, looking over my shoulder, I just want to say to him out loud so he hears me clearly: “I love you, Dad.”... but you already knew that.

hmh

Sell the Sizzle...

“CMT Awards 2017: Keith Urban wins big”

One of a very few non-Trump related headlines this morning. I guess Keith deserves it, apparently he’s been working for a long time. Of course pretending that Keith Urban is country is like believing that a McDonald's McRib Sandwich…is baby back ribs. But it’s not Keith’s fault. So called country music has little to do with country anymore, and too often, little to do with music.

These days, almost everything is about the packaging and spin. It’s better to look good than to be good.

In sales they talk about selling the “sizzle” not the steak. Our culture has embraced that. We want things that look good on the outside, regardless of whether they have any real substance or not. Keith Urban looks great.

We use artificial coffee creamer instead of cream, the Kardashians are millionaire celebrities because they know how to package themselves for the media, Donald Trump is the president. I know, Trump doesn’t look good at all, but his base perceived him to be a manly guy who would take charge and get things done. The fact that he’s shown himself to be an incompetent boob only matters to some.

It’s all about image.

Ultimately we all have to ask ourselves what we want, it’s our choice. Urban or Haggard? Baby backs or McRib? Cream or Coffeemate? An experienced, balanced leader…or an incompetent embarrassment?

If you'll put on some Haggard, I'll fire up the grill...

A Partridge in a Pear Tree...

Drug dealers and iPhone suppliers know their market. The weak addictions of their clients are their bread and butter. I always thought it happens to someone else, but then it snuck up on me too.

My own daughters got me hooked. “Dad, you have to get rid of that dinosaur of a flip phone. Here’s a new iPhone we got you. You can text us and Facetime whenever you want!” You’ll love it, they said. Devious as hell. Even though I was supposed to be grateful, I was skeptical, but they pushed me to give it one little try. I figured it couldn’t hurt. That’s how it starts. A toe in the water. It seems innocent enough, like when the big tobacco companies started supplying GI’s with free cigarettes during WWII. Such good guys to take care of the troops, we thought. They knew they were creating addicted clients for life. Just like Ruth & Hannah giving me that “free” phone. Those bitches.
.
Pretty soon you’re tying off and shooting up 24-7 iPhone.

It's been several years now. I don’t even try to break free anymore, no attempt to get clean. The addiction is too deep. My iPhone lies next to me in bed at night, coming between my wife and me and my little dog too. It rides along in my pocket when I walk the dogs and sits on a little shelf next to the commode when I shower or shave. Three years and that damn phone and I have never been more than a few feet apart the whole time.

This addiction has also come between my TV and myself, and the laptop too. It takes over everything, singing a Siren's song, taunting me to come get another fix, like a lab rat hitting a cocaine lever.

I know there’s fresh air and sunshine out there, I’ve seen it on my Weather Channel app. Pandora lulls me into complacency with my favorite tunes. YouTube runs video of Judge Judy screaming at people and calling them names when I’m on my elliptical machine. It’s important for me to see that stuff. 

Now my addiction is in a full blown raging mode and insists that I regularly check Facebook for status updates of people I haven’t seen since high school or perhaps never even met at all.

I bank online, paying my bills with that phone, daring myself to break free and actually drive to the bank just to see that it’s still there, but no, I convince myself that a dark corner, is all I need.

Why go to see a movie when movies come to me?

I can go anywhere and do anything without actually having to go anywhere or do anything, other than move my fingers ever so slightly.

There was a time, I think about it occasionally, when I lived an active life. Get this…I used to talk to people. I mean talk to them directly, with my voice, in front of each other, looking at them. Damn! That shit was cool!

Now the Apple Cartel has me hooked, dependent, enslaved, willing to do almost anything to feed the monster. Fortunately, I downloaded an app that walks me through exercises to calm me down when I get too upset about it.

I’ve got five ways to text, four to get news, three map apps, two built in cameras, and a Googled picture of a Partridge in a Pear tree.

And that’s all I need…

Don't Worry, It'll Be Alright...

An avalanche of condemnation spewed from the bank of overhead TVs at the gym this morning. “By far the worst move he’s made so far…” “Taking us backward into the stone age…” " a big middle finger to the environment..."

A few of our historically closest allies said that they spoke to Trump in private and tried to explain the Paris Climate Agreement to him in simple terms. “He didn’t seem to understand or care to know…” they said.

I was thinking: “Finally, something so stupid and indefensible that even his base will turn away from him!” Then I flipped over to FOX NEWS. They had on an “expert” from an obscure publication who pronounced Trump’s actions to be nothing less than “brilliant!”. She claimed that the whole accord was a scam, that climate change scientists make it all sound much worse than it is to help them secure more grant money to research it. She insisted that Trump is demonstrating true leadership in taking the lead against such deception.

So there you have it. He did everything possible to show how unqualified and unprepared he was for the job and we elected him anyway.

And he was right, he could shoot somebody on the street and his base wouldn't care.

On the other side, too many of us weren’t crazy about Hillary, even though she was the most experienced and prepared candidate for the presidency in history. But the strength we applaud in a man looks to us like “bitch” in a woman, and the right had been conducting an effective smear campaign against her for years. We thought: "Fuck it. I’m going to sit this one out. Maybe stay home and binge watch “Game of Thrones”. Hell, Trump can’t win anyway."

So yes, my peeps, WE elected this troll.

We all get the god, and the president, we deserve. So suck on that, you know?

Driving home, I listened to Jerry Brown put a positive spin on it all. He claims that the good news is that if Trump doesn’t get us all killed, he is forcing the majority of thinking people to wake up and get involved, to take our civic responsibility seriously. People realize they can no longer be lackadaisical, and that apathy is a luxury we can no longer afford.

I choose to believe that he’s right, well, left, and that good people who care about each other, and the Earth, will prevail.

For me, It can’t happen soon enough.

But what of death, he asked...

Gregg Allman was my age, 69. He looked fine in a fairly recent interview with Dan Rather and then BOOM! The big dirt nap. Not one, but two, count them, two of my college buddies, just crossed over the rainbow bridge in the last three weeks. They were both dogs back in school, for sure.

That’s my idea of heaven. Going where all my dogs have gone. They can vie for space on my lap when I get there. I doubt I’ll be so lucky, but hey, a guy can dream, right? I mean if Christians can get wood over the thought of “dem golden slippers to walk dem golden streets”, I can hope for a hairy tongue bath. What would I want metal shoes for or streets made of gold anyway. Gold would be totally devalued if it were actually the best building material available, cheaper than asphalt. I’m not sure the Christians have thought that one through, but they’re like that.

My atoms will go back to join others. Neither created nor destroyed, a continuum. The point of life is life itself. Life works hard to exist, everywhere. That’s the miracle. It’s a Zen thing, it just is. For many of us that’s not enough though. Ego demands a big story. We can’t just wink out one day and be gone. Tell it to Greg Allman.

Balance is key. Everything seeks balance. North, South, magnetic poles, hot & cold. Every cell in our bodies looks for homeostasis. It’s when we get out of balance that things go askew. So after living a full life, we look for that balance on the other side, after the curtain closes. That’s ego talking. We build monuments, pickle bodies and put them in sealed boxes. Great rulers take provisions, troops and earthly treasures, but they just become more atoms to add to the mix. We probably all have a few King Tut atoms spinning circles in inside of us. I’m starting to look a bit like him.

Life prevails. Our energy lives forever.

The immortality that we so desperately lust for is in that energy. It can also be seen in the turn of a phrase by a child or grandchild who has a bit of our DNA. The way they turn their head, how their laughter goes high and trickles off to a hiccough at the end. Mom used to do that.

I was riding in a car with my siblings recently. Sister Judy turned to speak to me from the front seat, and for a micro second, she was my Grandmother. It was in the way her eyes and mouth moved. Hi Grandma!

A friend who is 30 years younger than me, said that growing old must be a bitch. I don’t really have a problem with it and death doesn’t get a single line on my list of things to worry about. I often say that one of the beauties of growing old is that my “give a shit levels” bottom out. Been there, done that, everything from here on out is gravy.

I almost died two years ago, ambushed by blood clots that had hidden themselves in veins and arteries, attacking without warning in a coordinated effort to pull my plug. Lying in that ICU bed, it was very comforting to know that although Carla had just visited, she was still in the hospital somewhere doing her own patient care work. Daughter Hannah was asleep, curled up on the guest couch. She flew out to be with me when Ruth had to fly back home. A tag team passing in the air at 10,000 feet. Icing on my cake of life.

All of my girls were happy and healthy. I’ve had a great run. It’s all good. I don’t fear death. But then I’ve had the good fortune to live an exceptionally untroubled, happy life and right then I was drifting on a morphine cloud. All I had to do was press the call button in my right hand if I wanted more. I pressed it a lot.

So what’s the moral here? If your own celebration of life has been long and full, if your loved ones you’re leaving behind are strong and successful humans in this world, and if you are pumped way over the recommended tire pressure full of morphine drugs, death is nothing to fear, a dreamless sleep.

But if you don’t meet all those criteria and there’s no nice little package with a tidy bow, be scared as hell.

It may be your last… but have a great day!

You’re fucked.