Loot

First of all, I want to thank you all for the wonderful birthday thoughts and wishes. I truly mean that, and the kind words came from both commenters and non-commenters alike. You are truly the best. In addition to the kind words, I also received some gifts from folks, and those gifts are also deeply appreciated, because honestly, I love gifts / presents / prizes / winnings / loot / booty (oh yes, I LOVE booty) / swag / offerings / sacrifices / things I don’t have to buy for myself, and I love them because of the sentiment attached to each and every one. Thank you all, each and every one.

That being said, a couple of the gifts…stood out above the rest. Not saying that any of the gifts were bad – quite the contrary, they all were wonderful. But…well, I guess I should just show you. I have to say, Elle the Bad-Ass Pirate came through. She wins the First Annual Dark Damian Bad-Ass Birthday Gift Contest, or the FADDBABGC. Check out what the pirate got me:

Your eyes do not deceive you – this is, indeed, Season 1 of “Heroes”, live and in loving DVD, and encased securely in my brown hand. How excited am I? I. Love. This. Show. You’re talking about the guy who has actually gone online and read all the graphic novels related to the show, you know, the ones that fill in the gaps between the episodes. Yeah. I’m that guy. So when I saw this arrive, I about flipped my wig completely. But the main thrust of my excitement and bewilderment was the message on the “card”:

Um…do my eyes DECEIVE me? In case the wording is a bit too small to read, allow me to make it nice ‘n’ legible to you: “To Double D – I know this gift isn’t that personal but I know you will LOVE it. Word. You are my best friend. Forever and always. Kickin’ rocks…deuces! Love, The Elle.” Hoe. Lee. Shit. This unannounced stream of…of… NICE is utterly confusing me! Wow. I’ll take it. Thank you, Elle. But wait, there’s more! A couple of days later, this little nugget found its way to my desk:

Um…shiny foil packaging. A place called “Zazzle”. Obviously this was a bomb. After calling the police, the AFT, the Secret Service, the Fantastic Four, and my momma, I cautiously, tentatively opened the package, saying my prayers and hoping for some forgiveness for putting scotch tape on cats’ paws. And instead of getting all blowed up, this is what my eyes took in:

Wha….? At first, I was a bit confused. This sign language…I think she was trying to communicate with me! After thinking about it (and looking up websites for Sanskrit writings), I realized what she was saying. Do you know, dear reader? If not, the answer will be revealed at the end of the post.* I called Elle to thank her profusely for the gift, and she gushed (yes, gushed) and asked “Did you like the back?” The back? I didn’t even know there was anything written on the back at all! So I flipped that jive turkey over, and nearly fell out when I saw this there:

DOUBLE D!! That’s ME! My shirt, one of a limited set (I’ll ’splain in a minute), was PERSONALIZED!! I realize that I’m making a joke out of all this, but seriously, I was (and am) really touched by the gesture. Thank you, Elle.

I’m always surprised when people actually do things like this for me (yes, even when I outright ask for those very things in a blog post). Understand that I’m mostly joking when I demand trinkets and treats, so when I actually GET a copy of “Superbad” or a book from the Dune series, I’m genuinely thankful and happy. I appreciate you all. Even you, Jali.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Peace.

* Kickin’ Rocks. Deuces!

Explanation: L~ (“Kickin’”, with the L  being the leg and the tilde being the dynamic leg action); * (rocks); ^ (“Deuces”, two fingers pointed down in an inverted peace sign.)

You know you love it.

First Place, All Up In Your Face

Ahem.

As I look back at the times when I mention or talk about my eldest, the infamous 8th wonder (as in, sometimes I wonder what gets into his fool head) known as 8YO, it’s usually in a less-than-favorable light, or in ways that don’t always accentuate his best features. Now, in my defense, 8YO does shit that is so outlandish, so ridiculous, and so off the wall that I can’t help but to talk about him. But I realize that I need to be more fair and balanced in my reporting, lest my dear readers get the impression that my child is a half-tamed banshee/werewolf who we shave down twice a month for school purposes and have to feed with a slingshot. And that’s just not completely true, because there’s no way I’d have enough motivation or energy to shave him down that often. In all honesty, he’s a pretty good kid…very compassionate, smart as a whip, and funny as hell. I should emphasize some of those traits more, and I will.

As you may recall, 8YO had to do a science project for his 3rd grade class, something I found to be utterly ridiculous at that age. I mean honestly, that’s just too young and the projects themselves would just be too crappy to be interesting. And if you’d seen the list of projects they COULDN’T do, it would shock you to the core, because all those old and venerable projects you used to do (or not do, as I not-so-cleverly demonstrated)? Not allowed. So we pushed forward with the chemiluminescence project. I say “we” because really, a 3rd grader with ADHD and a natural aversion to work doesn’t have all the get up and go required to follow through with a complex set of instructions and directions that go into a science project. That “we” is real, baby.

The good thing is that the teachers know that parents have to be involved with the projects, since very few 3rd graders can go to the store, look for all the materials, curse loudly when they can’t find them, leave Wal-Mart and go to Office Depot, look for the materials again, find them at about 30% higher cost, curse loudly again, pay for them, go home, discover they forgot an item, curse loudly once more, return to Wal-Mart, get the 1 1/2″ black letters you forgot, go home and find out you needed 2″ letters, and then start making up curse words because you plum ran out of the old ones. It’s a lot to ask of a child, if you ask me. Naturally, since I was involved, the project didn’t kick off until damn-near when it was due, which was Wednesday. It’s me we’re talking about, folks. That’s how I roll. Fortunately, the experiment itself wasn’t complicated, and we (I mean, 8YO) was easily able to do it. All it involved was activating light sticks and exposing them to different temperature extremes, and recording the results. Our (his) hypothesis was that colder temperatures make the light sticks stop glowing, and that warmer temperatures make them glow brighter. Sounds easy, right? It is. It’s very easy, which is why we (he) picked it. The best part was that we (he) didn’t even have to include the light sticks as part of the display – all we (he) had to do was take some pictures and put THEM on the presentation board. OH – if I may take a quick ADD tangent for a second – kids today? They have it made. Nowadays when kids need to do their science projects, they use these pre-made, tri-panel presentation posters with nice cardboard backing. When I was in school, we had to go buy three pieces of cardboard, figure out a way to make it stand up (usually involving masking tape, several wooden rulers, and a pound of pure hope), and then use some superior penmanship to make it look less like something you slapped together at 11pm the night before. Today, the projects are all standardized, and use identical labels that you can (gasp) buy at the store. That’s bullshit, but in fairness, it made our (his) job easier. After taking the pictures, printing them out at a Kodak kiosk (say that 3 times fast), and staying up past midnight to get the whole thing typed and put together, this was the final result:

Don’t be pointing out shit like the fact that it’s kinda crooked. We couldn’t have it looking like it was done by an architectural firm. It’s for the THIRD GRADE, people! Despite that, when it came home on Friday in the hands of a broadly-smiling 8YO, it looked like this:

FIRST PLACE!! He got first place in the WHOLE THIRD GRADE!!!! I’m so proud of him. Don’t think that we overdid it, parentally – all the project displays had to look like this, with all the color-coding and neat section titles and whatnot. I hope that this success will show him the results of hard work, and spur him on to do bigger and better things. I just wish that I could use some of this effort retroactively on that aborted debacle of a science project I tried to fake in high school, but oh well. I’ll just revel in this minor little victory, and bask in the glow of reflected glory.

Until the next science project comes along. Ugh.

Peace.

EDIT: No Badger the Witness today, folks. Elle’s on the mend. Until later!

Eastward Bound, Chatper 3: The Ocean Run

Tuesday was another travel day. I swear, I was absolutely sick of seeing the inside of my Jeep Cherokee by then. Sick of it. Thanksgiving Day was going to be spent at my grandmother’s house in Sumter, near the center of the state, but I wanted to go to my mother’s house in Conway, which is down near the coast. I needed to see the ocean.

I took the ocean completely for granted when I lived in Conway. Myrtle Beach, mecca for golfers and sun-worshippers, was nothing more than a place where I found summer jobs when I was growing up. It held no mystery for me, no sense of joy or wonder, and nothing all that intriguing. The Beach was just a place to go find a job, hang out sometimes, and then leave before stupid people started shooting at you. I only knew the dark side of The Beach, and I wanted very little to do with any of it. In the summer, I only went there to go to work. In the winter, I never went at all. I openly cursed the droves of people creeping through my town, bumper to bumper, inchworming their way to the tourist traps and dirty ocean, making my 12 mile ride to work last over 2 hours, in some instances. The Beach meant nothing to me. It was just another place.

It’s funny sometimes how things you disregard become the very things you crave, the very things your soul begs for in a constant, whispering voice in your head. After I went to college, I very rarely returned to the ocean, and once I moved to Dallas, I never did. But in the weeks and months preceding my trip east, I realized that I had a growing urge to see the ocean. I didn’t know why…it never held any appeal to me before, and I really didn’t know why I wanted to go. But I did. We made plans to drive the extra distance and time to go down to my mother’s house so that we could go see the edge of the world.

We got into town after 8pm, and were immediately greeted by my mom and my sister, neither of whom I had seen in 2 years. Two years is too long. But life can get all up in your ass sometimes, and makes it difficult to get on the road or get on a plane, and turns months into years before you even realize it. My kids were little when they last saw their grandma, and now they damn-near ask to borrow my electric shaver. So when I stepped out of the Jeep and saw Mom and Sis standing there, hugs were the only language spoken. You know how some hugs are too long? These weren’t those. My sister, out of jail now, is living in Washington D.C. with some relatives and working a couple of jobs while trying to get her life back on track. Mom is steady, hanging in there after multiple small strokes, and still working and doing nearly everything she used to do. It was fuel for my psyche to see them both.

The next morning I wanted to do something I had never done before. I wanted to go see my father’s grave. For so long, all I could stand to feel about him was anger and resentment, and I refused to even think about him in any positive way whatsoever. But lately I’ve started really examining things, and me holding all that fury toward him does absolutely nothing except leave another stain on my life, to match the one he left. I decided to let that go. I still have my issues with him, but he wasn’t all bad. I enlisted my sister to take me to the cemetery, because he’s buried in an old family cemetery that isn’t easily accessible, and I hadn’t been there since his funeral, when I was a bit too preoccupied to check the directions. I bought some flowers, and we went. I wasn’t nervous or sad or anything…just ready. It had been long enough. But when we got there, the anger came back – not at my father, but at the rest of my paternal family who still lives in the area. My father is buried right beside my grandparents and my uncle. He doesn’t have a marker or a headstone because, quite frankly, there was no money for that at the time. I got left with a lot of past due bills and next to no insurance, and had to come out of pocket just to finance his funeral. And the anger issues prevented me from correcting that later on. I’m far from perfect. But the reason I got angry was because my grandmother, who died after my grandfather, didn’t have a marker or headstone either. Evidently my father and siblings tore through whatever insurance money there was, and so her grave also lies unmarked. The other reason I was pissed was because the gravesites looked like an overgrown swamp. No one had done anything to take care of them except my sister, who doesn’t even LIVE there anymore. My cousins, some of whom live no more than 5 miles away? Nothing. And that’s their grandparents too. It just pissed me off to no end, and I’m going to work to rectify both situations from here. I obviously can’t count on them.

After paying my respects, we packed our things up and headed toward the ocean. The first startling fact revealed itself immediately: the old amusement park, The Pavilion, was gone. Instead of this:

Or this:

I saw this:

Yeah. They closed it all down. All of it. I was so disappointed. But life goes on. We went on down to the beach, where we took off our shoes and socks. It being November and a balmy 75 degrees, it was too cold to actually consider swimming, but it was enough to just be there, at the ocean, looking out and seeing the rim of the world for as far as the eye could see.

Well, it was enough for most of us.

We instructed both kids to just get their feet wet since neither was wearing a swimsuit, seeing as how we weren’t going swimming. So, true to form, 8YO got his feet wet…

…as well as every other part of his body. Eventually he ended up like this:

That’s right. Shirt off, fully immersed in water that felt colder than Dick Cheney’s defibrillator. Seriously, I put one toe in the water and yelped like a puppy does when it discovers what a cat’s claws are for. I swear I saw penguins. But 8YO didn’t give a happy damn about the cold water. He played in the surf for a good 45 minutes, while we just stared at him. Even 4YO (soon to be 5YO, this Sunday) had enough sense to stay dry…

..mostly.

After soaking in the sunlight and playing in the sand and water, we packed up our things, bought 8YO some new clothes, and got back in the Jeep, headed to my grandmother’s house in Sumter. Another leg on on the journey. I’ll miss the ocean, but I won’t let so much time go by until I see it again. Maybe my desire to see the ocean helped me also handle going to my dad’s grave…maybe it was just the catalyst I needed to mend fences, and then climb over them. You never know.

More to come.

By the way, my birthday is on the 10th.

Just sayin’.

And there’s a link to an Amazon Wish List on my sidebar, over there on the right.

Just sayin’.

Peace.

Badger The Witness – Today at a new time!

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