The Asphalt Jungle

It was the first spring after I’d moved into the little garage studio in older, rural West Petaluma. The neighborhood gardens were ablaze with color in the form of wisteria, lilac, daffodils, tulips, roses and innumerable wildflower species. Some of them had been purposefully planted and lovingly nurtured. Others just grew with abandon at nature’s whim. They adorned the yards of the beautiful Victorian houses like living jewelry and infused the air with a symphony of scents.

I had just taken a stroll through the neighborhood, gathering a bouquet of wildflowers (okay, and some not-so-wild flowers, but the neighbors had plenty and wouldn’t miss them). As I walked home down my old asphalt driveway, something caught my eye. In several places along the retaining wall that separated my driveway from the neighboring property the asphalt was starting to crack and buckle upward. Continental drift? Tectonic plate movement? I hardly thought so.

I stepped on a few of the cracks and tamped them back down with my foot. I promptly forgot about it, until a few days later when I noticed the asphalt was once again cracking and buckling…and that something had emerged…no, something was growing…from beneath it.

I looked more closely. I wasn’t hallucinating…a plant was growing up through the asphalt. THROUGH the asphalt. I found a dozen breaches where spiky little spears were pushing their way through the driveway.

WTF? What kind of weird-ass alien plant life form can grow through three inches of asphalt?

It looked just like the plants on the other side of the retaining wall – a stand of bamboo trees the neighbors had planted along the property line.

That’s what it was. Bamboo. Their bamboo was growing through my driveway.

Bamboo doesn’t propagate like most plants. Instead of dropping seeds, it sends out underground shoots. Said shoots eventually burst forth to form new plants. They grow at an amazing rate of speed. Turns out the spiky little bamboo shoots can grow through just about anything. Rocky soil. Clay. Asphalt.

Flesh.

I’m not kidding. The ancient Chinese used bamboo as a form of torture. Victims were suspended over or tied to a bed of bamboo shoots. The rapidly growing spikes tunneled right through their flesh, muscle and internal organs.

I saw an episode of the show “Mythbusters” that addressed this phenomenon. They had a human torso made of ballistics gel (a substance that approximated the density of human tissue) that they placed over a bamboo bed. Sure enough, in a matter of a few days the shoots had grown right through poor old Buster.

You may at first think this gruesome. But if bamboo can grow through flesh and asphalt, imagine the useful applications. Like planting a bed of bamboo underneath the furniture cushions in your living room. That oughta get your couch-potato boyfriend’s lazy ass off the sofa. Similar tactics might also encourage your neighbor to move that eyesore junker Oldsmobile off your side of the street. Use it to encourage the guest that won’t leave to get the hell out of your favorite recliner. Slip the stuff under a mattress and it’s pretty much guaranteed to get even the most un-motivated teenager out of bed before noon.

Bamboo cannot be conquered via normal plant warfare. You can’t just pull the shoots up like weeds, they are far too firmly rooted – hell, they’re still connected to the mothership. And they’re tough. I couldn’t break them with my best Tae Kwon Do side kick (I could hear the voice of my Tae Kwon Do instructor, Grandmaster Kang, in the back of my head, chiding me “You let bamboo beat you? Weakling! Go run fifty laps and then try again!”). Pruning shears? Bamboo will destroy them. And bamboo is unaffected by my very best ‘wither and die’ look, which normally kills all plant life within a 10-foot radius. The only way to rid my driveway of bamboolings was to employ weapons of mass destruction.

I’m sure my neighbors wondered what I was doing in my asbestos chainmail overalls brandishing a machete, flamethrower and spray-tanker of Roundup. It was the only way to knock the things down and keep them down. But I knew my efforts were temporary; only buying me time, only postponing the inevitable return of my spiky nemesis. Even as I was dispatching them to oblivion and tamping the asphalt down around their remains like a concrete casket I could hear them, in their best Austrian accent, as though reciting a line from a plant-version of an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie (The Germinator?) promising me “I’ll be back…”

Yeah? Well, I’ll be back too. I’m ready for you. When you burst through the asphalt next spring, I’ll be waiting.

So go ahead. Make my day.

Ineptitude

As a part-time employee in a tack store, I’m among the first to see the latest, greatest products for horse and rider. Some are practical – good-looking, great fitting riding breeches for under $100? Yay! Some are truly beneficial – i.e. saddle pads with changeable shims that fit a saddle comfortably to your horse’s unique conformation. Others are stupidly extravagant – such as the $600 riding helmet, subject of a previous blog. This week I discovered a product so absolutely ridiculous, in both price and function, that I felt compelled to tout its absurdity.

It’s a newfangled stirrup ‘system’ called “On-Tyte.” The stirrup contains a magnet. Your riding boot houses a reciprocal magnet. The magnetic attraction keeps the stirrup on your foot. It’s revolutionary! It’s a must-have! It’s three hundred dollars!

You have got to be f*cking kidding me.

Keeping your feet in the damned stirrups is Riding Lesson #1. Before you even learn to steer, you learn to keep your heels down and keep the stirrup on your foot. Your leg position is what keeps you anchored. It’s what keeps you balanced. It’s what keeps you on the damned horse. Any kid who’s had three lessons on a fat pony at summer camp can keep the stirrups on their feet. Have riders gotten so lazy that they require technology to do their most fundamental job for them?

This is not the riding industry’s first attempt to revolutionize stirrups to eliminate the annoyance of learning to ride properly. They’ve developed inventive inserts for the stirrup bed to better grip the bottom of your boot. They’ve angled the stirrup bed, and the stirrup itself, to ensure proper foot and leg position (nevermind all those pesky exercises your instructors put you through that are intended to accomplish the same thing). They’ve constructed the stirrup of lighter materials so that if your feet slip out the irons don’t bounce and pummel your horse’s sides – a cue most often interpreted by the horse as meaning “run, Dobbin, run!!” I can only hope you practiced the pulley rein exercise (to stop a runaway horse) more than you practiced keeping your feet in your stirrups. Or are you waiting for the riding industry to invent a way to stop your horse for you? Perhaps giant impact-absorbing sandbag blockades in every corner of the arena would do the trick.

I admit I’m keen on some of the stirrup improvements. My stirrups have joints that flex to absorb impact. When you’ve got enough years of wear and tear on your knee joints that just the thought of riding hurts, these stirrups are a godsend. I’m all for eliminating pain. But eliminating the effort of learning to ride properly? Um,…..no.

Don’t ever show up in one of my riding lessons with On-Tyte stirrups. I’ll make you go change them. If I’m feeling particularly evil, I’ll just take them off your saddle and make you ride without them. That permanently eliminates the problem of losing the stirrup and it doesn’t cost three hundred bucks.

If we’re going to make stirrups that make it unnecessary to ride well enough to keep your feet where they belong, let’s just rid ourselves of the need to do other things correctly. Let’s make Velcro reins and gloves, so your hands never slip out of place. We’ll call it Grip-Tyte. Let’s put magnets in the saddle and in your underwear so your sorry arse can sit the trot. We’ll call it Sit-Tyte. And let’s make feminine hygiene products that don’t shift while you ride. We’ll call them Up-Tyte.

I had ONE student that I would ever consider allowing using magnetic stirrups. She has a genetic condition that has affected the tendons in her lower legs. Even after many surgeries and much hard work, it is difficult for her to make one of her ankles flex to the point where she can reliably keep the stirrup on her foot.

Before she had the surgery that allowed her to maintain a traditional leg position, she rode without stirrups. Didn’t even put them on the saddle. She could walk, trot, canter and jump. All you non-impaired riders out there could learn a big fat lesson in determination and hard work from her.

But if I offered her the option of the On-Tyte stirrups, I know exactly what she’d say. She’d look down her nose at me and scoff “I can do it myself.”  And she can. And if she can, you can.

So instead of spending $300 on magnetic stirrups, you might want to consider investing it in some more riding lessons. In the meantime, I’m going to hope the riding industry realizes they are not helping anyone and unceremoniously dumps this product.

I’m also going to hope my gynecologist doesn’t get ahold of it.

 

 

It's About Time

I say I haven’t traveled much, but that’s not entirely true. Some twenty-odd years ago, I did quite a bit of traveling. But it wasn’t the traditional plane-train-automobile sort of thing. 

I time-traveled.

Of course, nobody knew this, because the beauty of time traveling is that you can be gone as long as you like and still get back before you left. With no scheduling issues to consider, it’s easy to, say, take a quick trip to the 1800s as a little break in the middle of a hectic work week.

My foray into time travel was completely happenstance. I thought I was walking in to a phone booth to make a call. It looked like a phone booth – one of the old “police box” style ones – from the outside, anyway. As soon as I’d walked through the doors into what appeared to be another dimension (and was, in fact), I realized that my phone card was not going to work here. It was too late; I happened to venture in just as the time machine was departing for parts (and times) unknown. My Partner in Time, an ageless fellow whom I knew only as The Doctor, was kind enough to invite me to tag along with him.

I figured, what the hell.

It was unfortunate that this particular time machine had a GPS that was slightly cattywampus. Sometimes you knew where you were going to end up….but you rarely knew when you were going to end up. As a result, even the best-laid plans tended to go dreadfully awry. Oh, the vacation in ancient Italy sounded like a good idea. Until the whole volcano thing. There was nothing in the Pompeii Travel brochure about that. And I’d checked the weather forecast; it said ‘partly cloudy with a chance of precipitation’ not ‘partly cloudy with a chance of being buried by volcanic ash.’

Speaking of travel brochures, there was a reason why hotel rooms were so cheap in Hawaii in December. In 1941.

I could have skipped that whole Roman Empire escapade. That Caligula fellow was just not right any way you looked at it. And if I’d known he had a thing for redheads (“a thing” meaning he thought they made the best sacrifices to the gods of fertility), I would have gone back to blonde. 

I wish I had countermanded the decision to take Genghis Khan for “a little ride around the 1200s.” Likewise the wearing of the Joan of Arc Halloween costume on that trip to the 1430s (saying I looked “hot” in it, by the way, my good Doctor, was not funny). 

We weren’t supposed to influence events, of course, just blend in and observe. That was the biggest challenge. It was difficult not to interfere when someone was about to do some colossally dumbass thing that you knew was going to end up in the history book chapter titled “Biggest Disasters of the Past 1,000 Years.”  

We learned about the not interfering part the hard way, when we decided to take the Wright Brothers on a little jaunt into the future to show them how their aeroplane thing turned out. Thanks to the cattywampus GPS we ended up in the middle of World War II. When Orville and Wilbur saw their flying machines being used as weapons of destruction, they promptly washed their hands of the whole project. We had to do major damage control (including showing them man walking on the moon and scaring the bejesus out of Neil Armstrong) to set them back on course. Talk about almost totally f’ing up history. 

We did end up helping things along sometimes. I dutifully sat for hours in an itchy getup and dark wig while DaVinci painted my portrait. And it was difficult to keep a straight face when my time travel partner was standing behind the artist making faces at me. I really never could completely wipe the smile off my face. 

Don’t engage me in a discussion of historical events, because I know things you don’t. Cleopatra was blonde. Napoleon wore women’s underwear. Edgar Allan Poe was afraid of spiders. Colonel Sanders was a vegetarian. And I know why the Mona Lisa is smiling. That whole conspiracy theory that the trip to the moon was faked? Bullshit. It happened. We spent a LOT of time erasing the hopscotch grid we’d drawn in the moondust. 

The opportunity to travel through time (albeit randomly) was priceless, and I remember my time-travel days fondly. I had to give them up when my (other) doctor told me it was bad for my blood pressure. I told him I didn’t think it was so much the time travel event as it was ending up in Pompeii in 79 AD or on the Titanic on April 14. Whatever the cause, my blood pressure is much lower now. My Accidental Death by Historic Disaster insurance premium is also much lower, and I don’t have to spend nearly as much money constantly updating my wardrobe. I really didn’t have thing to wear for the Crusades. 

You probably don’t believe any of this, and I daresay I can’t prove it. I don’t know where (or when) the Doctor is right now. Internet connectivity is spotty at best between time rifts, and he’s often out of touch. But once in awhile he gets a connection at an intergalactic Starbucks and I get a t-mail from him (kind of a time travel version of e-mail). Perhaps he’ll be able to read this blog and comment. Otherwise, it’s just my word against yours. 

Proof or no proof, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.