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Over the course of 3 million years or so, rock, bone, flint, and obsidian have given way to titanium, ceramics, Damascus and high carbon stainless steels. Handles made with modern materials, Micarta, G10, carbon fiber, pair with a wide variety of lock-ups and openers. From neck knives to push, fixed blades to folders, I've been in love with knives since I was a kid. 

When my Grandparents went to Europe, I begged them to bring me back a switchblade from Italy. Those knives were poorly made from cheap materials, but unavailable in the States. Just by dint of the fact that it was a switch blade, I campaigned heavily. I guess they thought that I was a good kid and over the top about this knife thing, so they caved and brought me one. My parents did the same thing several years later. By the time I was in high school, I had a small collection. That ended one day when my older brother and I were wrestling at home. Kenny had one of my switchblades in his pocket. Our wrestling pushed the opener button and I got stabbed in my upper thigh. Mom found out and when I came home from school the next day, she was standing on the concrete floor of the open garage, methodically smashing each of my switchblades with a sledgehammer.

With time, I got over the trauma of having my favorite toys smashed but I never lost the pure lust I have for edged weapons.

Put your hand on top of the shelf closest to my front door if you want a fixed blade. Double daggers hang in their sheath next to the side doors. I keep a hand ax by the bedroom doors and two blades hang from the bedpost. There's a knife clipped to the underside of my car seat and one in it's carrier tucked under the seat of my bike. I always carry an assisted opener or an automatic with a very secure lock-up clipped to the inside of my belt.

These days the materials are so good, the blades made from amazing steels that didn't exist 50 years ago, they are like jewels to me. It wouldn't go well for a burglar breaking into my house That's exactly the kind of theft protection I rely on from a pair of stainless 38 Special revolvers and a nice 12-gauge pump shotgun.

I'm serious about that "WELCOME" sign over our front door, but be sure to only use that entrance...

hmh

Coroner

My new, part-time job is a freaking money machine!! All I have to do is bring the bodies in to my buddy, Ted, at the crematorium. Boom! $100 cash! And business is growing. I told my friend who runs the gym that if anyone drops from over exertion or whatever, just call me. Depending on their weight, maybe I’ll need a hand getting them into the trunk of my car, but other than that, it’s all good. He said “But what if they just fainted? We all just took a CPR class…” I pointed out that he doesn’t want to do CPR on some nasty fat guy, and he agreed. Let me handle it, I reassured him again. “But what if they’re still breathing?” I pointed out that after spending a day locked in the trunk of my car, parked for 8 hours in the blistering Florida sun at the parking lot of my day job, they most certainly are not breathing by the end of the day. In fact, you can’t get within 20 feet of my car on a day like today without knowing that something very dead is nearby. That trunk works like a crock pot, so now I keep a bunch of onions and celery in there so the drive over to the crematorium at night has me fantasizing about pot roast. Of course Ted can make a few extra bucks off any pacemakers, rings and dental gold, but I’m just a simple guy, $100 is plenty, I just bring them in. Some nights I get lucky and pick up two or three from under bridges and behind liquor stores. (Those people need extra onions, they’re pretty stinky to start with) The opportunities for extra income seem limitless. Monitor the ambulance dispatcher and get there first. No one questions you if you wear white and push a gurney. On nice days I take a ride through senior communities on a golf cart, looking for geezers snoozing on a park bench. A friendly tap on the head and no one questions why my cart-mate seems to be resting their head on my shoulder. “Oh, that’s sweet” they think. A quick ride to see Ted, and Boom! Another $100 cash! At this rate, I may even quit my day job

Express Breakfast Buffet

The Holiday Inn Express, as you might guess, has an “express start” breakfast bar in the lobby. Like their coffee machine, it’s complimentary, but unlike that Keurig in our room, it didn’t say anything nice to me one way or the other. But it was definitely calling my name. Although I’m a “foodie” and constantly plotting what I’ll cook or where we’ll go to eat (I’ve normally got plans a week out on an Excel spreadsheet.) I wanted what that bar had to offer. Bad. Lots of different kinds of coffee in pump thermoses, under-ripe bananas and oranges, “three minute pancakes” from the “never touched by human hands” special three-minute pancake maker. And there, center stage, shining like the big stone in a diamond ring, sat the hot bar. Cheap greasy pork sausages like the fingers of a fat man who had floated face down in a retention pond for a week or two, biscuits next to a tub of sausage gravy, made from those same perspiring fingers, sunning themselves too long under the heat lamps and frequently sneezed on by patrons who seem to hold it in until they lift the Plexiglas shield. The star of the show, a large deep-dish pan of scrambled eggs. Dehydrated, flaked, reconstituted, formed…that certainly had never met a chicken. The orange juice dispenser held juice made from concentrate made with a bad orange in there somewhere, or maybe the whole batch was turning on itself, effervescent. It’s not supposed to be fizzy, right?

Anyway, even though I should be embarrassed to admit that I love that stuff, very early in the morning with lots of black coffee, I’m not, and I do. It makes me feel like I’m at a realtor meeting but I don’t have to go to work afterward.

Reston Daze...

By 1976 when this picture was taken at The Reston Times, I had already graduated college with a BA in English, been divorced, and served four years in the Air Force.  Much to the dismay of my parents though, I still refused to grow up and get a “real job.” So I took a job as the circulation manager for the local newspaper because it was a five-minute bike ride from home. a bachelor pad where I lived with three other guys in a four story townhouse. Party central. Aside from planning the volume and distribution of our paper, I worked with kids. Mostly boys, ages 10 to 15. Dirty, sweaty, loud. Gangs of them, over 120. Paperboys. They would swarm in like locust after school let out to crowd around my desk dumping piles of crumpled bills and socks full of coins onto my desk. It was their job to collect from their customers and turn it all in to me. I would count it, roll the change, and head down to the bank across the plaza at Lake Anne center to make a lengthy deposit.

Five pm was “quiten time”, a quick bike ride back to the party palace.

One of our housemates was a banquet chef for Marriott Hotels in downtown D.C., spending his days serving large rooms of politicians and special interest groups. None of us knew Paul himself to eat anything other than malted milk balls though. He carried around one of those paper milk cartons of them, rolling them out into his left palm and making a loud popping sound as he threw them into his open mouth. He wasn’t around much, working long days. Before he left for work at 6am every morning, you could hear an intermittent hissing sound coming from the attached garage. Paul got his chef whites, whiter, by spray painting himself from the knees down. Quick drying white enamel covered the kitchen splashes from the day before. The floor of our garage looked like a lunar landscape, the outline of footprints all around the door to the house. Paul would come back home very late most nights, often carrying gourmet leftovers from one of his banquets. Of course in those days it seems like none of us ever went to bed before 3 or 4 am so when the doorbell rang furiously at 1am, it was no big deal. There stood Paul, a case of live lobsters dripping saltwater and seaweed under his right arm, a case of fresh Chinook Salmon under his left. He was hitting the doorbell with a paint hardened shoe.

We decided that a dinner party was in order and rallied our friends in the immediate area for a 3am feast. Bring your dogs. Paul prepared the food, fueled on malted milk balls and the joints that were in constant rotation. That was my job, rolling joints. We had too much of everything, 20 of us doing our best to eat one more piece of warm lobster or cold salmon. One more joint, another beer. Two dogs wore kerchiefs around their necks and sat up at the table with the rest of us, doing their part to finish off the lobster and salmon while The Eagles sang of the “warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air”.

I wanted it to last forever.

Little Bitch!

Running into the room like a five-year-old to the tree on Christmas morning...

“Oh! Wonderful! It's you! I thought I would never see you again! You're the one I love! (jumping), love, love, love! You are my favorite person in the world! (jumping urgently) Can I lick your face? Taste the back of your mouth? I love you more than anything! More than cat turds! I will love only you...forever!”

Chica is an excitable girl. Carla rescued her from a busy intersection the week I returned after a visit to South America. Chica seemed like a good name for the high spirited little bitch, all ten pounds of her

She ran back out of the room. Five minutes later, she shot back in.

“Oh! Wonderful! It's you! I thought I would never see you again! You're the one I love! (jumping), love, love, love! You are my favorite person in the world! (jumping urgently) Can I lick your face? Taste the back of your mouth? I love you more than anything! More than cat turds! I will love only you...forever!”

I heard the side door open. Carla was home from working the graveyard shift.

Chica flew at her...“Oh! Wonderful! It's you! I thought I would never see you again! You're the one I love! (jumping), love, love, love! You are my favorite person in the world! (jumping urgently) Can I lick your face? Taste the back of your mouth? I love you more than anything! More than cat turds! I will love only you...forever!”

It was the same deal when the plumber came to fix a shower drain later that afternoon. “Oh! Wonderful! It's you! I thought I would never see you again!..."

Like I said, she's a little bitch.

No Regrets

Whatever could have happened, did. That’s what brought us to this moment. If we could hop into a time machine and go back, redo even one tiny thing, it would open a tidal wave of change around us here in the present. Everything would be different. At least that’s what I believe. Whatever will happen in the future is written in stone. We can’t read it, but it will happen. So I don’t live with regret. Too many waste their time viewing regret as if it were a preventable death. That’s toxic.

Hopefully we learn from the things we come to see as mistakes, the dead end, the road we took on a path to trouble. It’s an opportunity for growth. That’s how we evolve as individuals. Our history is like a list of ingredients that make up our current recipe. But yesterday, when I showed a friend a picture of the scorpion I had found on the floor of the shower, he asked: “So did you give it a big 10 ½?” I said “No, I put it out on the lawn.” Looking at me like I was crazy, I added: “I don’t like to kill stuff.”

All afternoon I thought about a time when that wasn’t the case. A time when I was 12 years old, living out my summer vacations running free in my Grandfather’s woods with a .22 rifle attached to my side. I killed way too many small animals and birds for no reason other than because I could. I didn't yet understand that I had a responsibility to them. My friend David was staying with me one summer when we spotted a baby rabbit feeding on new growth at the side of the pond. David was saying that it was just a baby as I raised my rifle and put a bullet through its right eye.

I killed a goose in Mexico when I was 14. It came at me from behind, chasing me in the back fields of the Art Institute in San Miguel where my family spent several summers. The goose surprised me, scared me. Guess that’s just what geese do sometimes. I scooped up a large stick on the run and turned to face the attack, hitting the goose hard on top of its head. With a loud crack, the stick broke in half and the goose fell dead. Unlike that rabbit, I didn’t mean to kill it, but I did. That goose couldn't hurt me, I killed it because I was scared and stupid, and because I could. That's not a justifiable reason.

Two years ago I was standing in the hot summer sun in front of my house speaking with my neighbor about some common flowers between our properties. As we agreed on a plan to cull out the dead plants, a large beetle ran across the hot sidewalk between us, scurrying quickly for the cool of the grass on the other side. Without thinking, my neighbor lifted his foot to smash it into goo. Matching his speed, I said “no!” perhaps a bit too loud as I stepped over the insect to protect it from his shoe. The beetle made it to safety, oblivious to the giants standing above, deciding its fate. As far as my own fate, all I can do is the best I can do, I can let the beetle cross, unmolested, alive. If there is a power over me, hopefully it will return the favor.

Due to my memory of that rabbit I killed 54 years ago, that goose, all the insects I put into a cyanide jar and mounted on tiny pins in colorful balsa cigar boxes that I sat on the top shelf of my closet, I try to see beyond myself. It’s because of those little critters and one big goose that I’ll capture a spider in a glass and release it to the outside, or maybe a scorpion trapped in the shower that has as much right to live another day, perhaps more, than I do myself.

I do that, because the past is a memory, the future a hope. All I have is this moment.

I do that because I can. 

I never Left Your Side

Invite me to walk with you on a mountain path, 

Show me that pristine meadow with the bleached bones of a Red Fox,

Bushy tail still waving in the breeze. 

I'll be there with you.

Let’s do Yoga on the beach, inhaling deeply the first beams from a rising sun.

We'll leave only your footprints behind as we stroll along, close, like before.

Little has changed.

If you have a party or eat the foods we both love, save a place for me.

I'll be there. 

Let’s have an oyster shooter, mussels in broth, fresh baked crusty bread.

You know I'll be there.

But if you find yourself grieving, regardless of the reason, 

We'll grieve together, hand in hand, you can lean on me.

I never left your side.

Just because I no longer have an address in this world, never think that I am gone. 

I will live with you, through you, for all your days, 

Until that time when we walk the beach together once again,

Leaving only the footprint of the waves to mark our passing...

hmh