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.

Devil With the Green Dress On

It’s almost April. In a few more days I can breathe easier, stop looking behind me and jumping at my own shadow, stop having to appeal to the universe to give me the strength to get through what is always the most difficult time of year.

It’s not Lent. It’s not Fiscal Year End. It’s not the impending Tax Time.

No. It’s something far more formidable than life, death or taxes.

It’s Girl Scout Cookie Time.

Yes. That time of year when, as surely as the first flowers of spring, little sprites in the form of innocent-looking, uniformed girls emerge from their underworld lairs to tempt us to the dark side with bewitching boxes of tantalizing treats.

Don’t let the cherubic smiles and “fund raising” explanations fool you. Girl Scouts are evil. They lure us into their sinister sugar-traps with irresistible indulgences available only once-per-freaking-year. Then, once we are completely hooked and live for the day the damned green-frocked prepubescent devils knock on our door, they hit us with steady price increases knowing we are now addicts and will sell our souls for some Tagalongs or Samoas.

You can run, but you cannot hide. If they don’t doom you at your door, they’ll snag you at the supermarket. You’ll feel the pull when you approach the table, set up in front of the local Safeway, populated by adorable looking, identically dressed minions with whirling pinwheel eyes and robotic smiles. Resistance is futile. You’ll take one look at those boxes of Do-Si-Dos and money will fly out of your wallet of its own accord. Next thing you know you’ll be sitting on your living room floor surrounded by empty orange boxes and not even a dim memory as to what transpired. 

I surrendered my soul to the Green Demons many years ago. They are both friend and foe now; beings I look forward to seeing as the only source of satisfaction for my cookie cravings and fear because of the power they wield over me. I’m so deeply ensconced in their damned cookie cult that I now have my own personal Girl Scout Gremlin. She doesn’t even bother with the formality of coming to my door, she just phones me.

“I’ve got your Thin Mints,” she says in a voice reminiscent of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. “How many boxes do you want?” I’m certain that while she is saying this her head is turning all the way around. It doesn’t matter how many boxes I tell her I want. She brings twice that many and I shoot out dollar bills like a Pez dispenser.

You may be smirking. Or laughing. But you’re not immune. Don’t even waste time thinking you can avoid the Green Demons. If they don’t know where you live right now, don’t think they don’t have ways to get people to divulge your whereabouts. I don’t care if you’re in the witness protection program – I’ll sell you out in a heartbeat if it means getting discounted Daisy-Go-Rounds.

If you visit my house you’ll see the evidence of my addiction. Empty green boxes in the trash, partially consumed ones in the refrigerator and more in the freezer. You’ll wonder how I eat all those cookies and manage to stay so slim. And you’ll covet my cookies. But you won’t get any. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you’ve pulled me from a burning building. The cookies are mine.

Get your own.  

The Six Million Dollar Hat

As children, my friends and I galloped our ponies, Man-From-Snowy-River style, bareback and hatless, without a thought to our safety, and somehow managed to survive. Nowadays I’m a bit more cognizant of my mortality. So despite the fact that they are annoying and totally mess up my hair, I wear a helmet every time I ride. 

I’ve had my current hard hat for several years. While still perfectly functional, it’s kinda faded and beat up and…well….smelly. I should probably get a new one. But there’s something stopping me. It’s not an issue of time, or opportunity, or sentimental attachment. The issue is that the cost of a “good” riding helmet has broken the $600 mark.

$600.

Six.

Hundred.

DOLLARS.

For a HAT.

Like the plastic wind-up rice bowl with wheels, the concept of a $600 riding helmet begs the question, …..What The F*ck????

Okay – keeping your brains from exiting your skull is worth some sort of investment. I’ll give you that much. But ALL ‘approved’ riding helmets are constructed to the same safety/impact regulations to be certified as ‘approved.’  There is no argument you can make to convince me that a $600 ‘approved’ hat is going to keep my brains off the fencepost ANY more effectively than a $150 ‘approved’ hat. 

The $600 hats boast ‘cutting-edge technology’ construction and materials. They have ‘advanced features’ such as extra padding for comfort and ventilation to keep your head cool (not to be confused with keeping a cool head; no hat can guarantee that). Some brands even offer customized colors so that you can behat yourself in, say, navy and cerulean (um, for an even bigger price). 

I’m sorry. You’ll have to do better than that.

If I’m going to pay $600 for a helmet, it better come equipped with gadgetry to rival anything James Bond ever had. It better come complete with satellite radio, HBO and text messaging features. I want built-in audio reception and a channel directly to my trainer so, like Obi Wan Kenobi, he can be that voice in the back of my subconscious saying ‘use the Force, Luke,’ or, in my case, ‘slow down, Dumbass.’ Barring that, I’ll take a built-in On Course GPS, with programmable features and a little soothing voice that offers helpful information such as “Oxer in six strides. Apply leg now,” and “Pace has exceeded escape velocity. Triple Combination not advised.”  

Instead of some advanced composite plastic alloy, I’d like the hat made of something that is both microwaveable and dishwasher safe. I’d like a brim of sharpened, surgical grade steel so I can take the hat off, fling it and use it as a weapon, ala James Bond’s nemesis, Oddjob. Instead of spending all that money and technology making something that can absorb greater impact, how about eliminating the impact danger all together? Put airbags in the damned thing. And for that price, those vents in the top of the hat better be good for something more than airflow. I should be able to turn the hat upside down and, say, drain pasta or pan for gold. 

For all the amazing ‘advanced technology’ and design, these hats are still woefully deficient very basic areas. Why is the interior padding of EVERY hat not removable, washable and replaceable? That cushiony inner padding that they charge $200 extra for? After you wear the hat for a few weeks, it compresses. The result? Your $600 helmet no longer fits you. So you have to shore it up with something to MAKE it fit. Something that has its own adhesive that you can take off and toss after it gets sweaty and smelly. DON’T sell me a $600 hat and then tell me I also have to buy a box of ultra-thin maxi-pads to stick in it to keep it to keep the damned thing on my head. 

As if the price isn’t painful enough, the Bad Hatters add insult to injury by making the things butt-ugly. Whatever happened to the elegant black-velvet look? Modern hard hats look more like the exoskeletons of alien insects. Okay, some of them are kind of cool looking. But the majority of them are just a facemask attachment away from being something Darth Vader would wear. In what alternate universe is THAT a good look?

Seriously. If you’re going to have the balls to charge $600 and upwards for your ugly hats, you’d better get your act together and chock them full of features we can actually use. It better be something that would do Steve Austin (TV’s Six Million Dollar Man) proud. Until then, you won’t see me wearing one.

Addendum: Since writing this blog, I am happy to report that I am the proud owner of a brand new, state-of-the-art riding helmet. It's safety approved, kinda cool looking, and has a removable, washable and adjustable interior lining. It's comfortable. It's functional. It's goodlooking.  And it cost me $75.

Basket Case

I’m not much of a holiday person. I don’t decorate, don’t plan parties, don’t send cards, generally don’t observe. I’m happy to just have a day off and get to pillage the holiday sales at the mall. The rest of the whole holiday hoo-ha I can do without. 

But there are a few holidays I find fun.

I like Halloween. I like dressing up like some hungry, undead child-eating creature and scaring the bejesus out of the neighborhood kids. I like lying in wait for them to come home from trick or treating so I can jump out from behind a bush and grab their candy bags. Those screaming little voices and the patter of horrified feet running away down the pavement just warm my heart. Yes, Halloween is a great holiday.

The other holiday I like is Easter.

It’s not the sentiment behind the day. It’s not the vacation time from work. It’s not Easter egg hunts or picnics. It’s not getting together with family – crap, that’s the last thing I want to do on a holiday.

Nope.

It’s the chocolate.

Notice I didn’t say ‘candy.’

Chocolate.

You can keep your peeps and your jellybeans and your marshmallow rabbits. Just give me the chocolate.

Any chocolate. I don’t care if it’s shaped like a bunny, a chick, or an International Harvester. Don’t put a lot of time into selecting just the right work of chocolate art. The artistry of chocolate sculpture is lost on me; I am not going to stop to appreciate it before I rip Mr. Bunny’s ears off. 

And it better not be hollow. Don’t even TRY to slip one of those hollow chocolate travesties into my basket. There’s more chocolate than that in the center of a tootsie pop.

Hollow chocolate is a cop out; it’s for people who don’t really care enough to spend money on the good stuff, or for people who need a place to stash their contraband. I want solid chocolate. Solid dark chocolate. And make sure there’s no nuts in it – they just take up space where more chocolate could go. Yes, fill my basket with solid dark no-nut chocolate.

Then you’d better put said basket in plain view where I will see it immediately upon waking Easter morning. Hiding a person’s basket of solid dark no-nut chocolate is just plain mean. Trust me, you do not want tell me first thing in the morning that I must look for chocolate that you’ve hidden from me. I’m not going to look for it. I’m going to put you into a chokehold until you tell me where the hell it is.

Don’t bother cooking some extravagant Easter meal. I’ve got chocolate. I’m not going to waste perfectly good stomach capacity on ham or green bean casserole when I can fill it with solid dark no-nut chocolate. I’ll eat your meal when the chocolate is gone.

Finally, don’t even think about asking me to share any of my solid dark no-nut candy. There are two things I refuse to share: Men, and chocolate. The reasons for this should be evident. If you have to ask why, you are probably the kind of person who also thinks hollow chocolate with nuts in it is a good idea.

I might sound demanding, but really, I’m not high maintenance. It’s not that difficult to keep me happy. Don’t get hollow chocolate, don’t get nuts in it and don’t hide it. Do this and nobody gets hurt. It’s that damn simple.

Happy Easter.