Tips For Road Ragers

 Clever Cohorts and Miffed Motorists,

Daily, if we drive an automobile, we are forced to deal with all sorts of things on the newly Obamasized highways and roads of our nation. Many of  them can and will annoy us, while others drive us, literally, to distraction.  Manners are in short supply but nowhere is the supply shorter than on our roads.

People do not care about the other driver anymore. It is like a battlefield out there some days. In the film, It’s A Gift, starring W C Fields, we see roadhogs get their due when our tipsy hero buys a whole fleet of cars to follow him around and purposely crash into roadhogs.

Roadhogs are one of the worst problems. They cause a lot of the rage. Roadhogs come in all shapes and sizes, like the Harley-Davidson rider who feels he belongs in the passing lane while going 40 miles an hour, because he is a ‘biker’. No wonder we hate bikers so much. It brings back the Carlin line about how people used to ride bikes to piss off the squares and now it is the squares who ride the bikes.

When not slowing traffic down, they often feel the should ride on the center of the double-yellow lines, to show their ownership of the road, which they bought with the title to the cycle…probably because they could not afford a decent car. If you see one on the double-yellow, swerve towards them. You are really doing them a favor, since the increase in heart-rate and blood flow will keep them more alert and less prone to injury. Plus, the look of terror on their faces is always a gas, too. Bicycles are the same way. They really do need to make separate paths for bicycles, as these idiots in the shiny pants (which leads one to question their sensibility to ride a skateboard, much less a bicycle) are some of the rudest variety of roadhog…the self-righteous alternative transportation roadhog. A blare of the horn as you edge up behind them always gets a little jump out of them, if you do not have a squirtgun full of warm milk handy.

Tailgaters are maybe the worst of all, next to the cellphoners. Tailgaters show some of the more developed asshole tendencies. Often they will drive 45 mph in a 55 mph zone, and to be sure they slow down everybody else, they do this in the passing lane. Remember the passing lane? It used to be for passing. If you pass a tailgater on the inside lane and then shift over to the fast lane because you are in passing mode, they will often speed up just to tailgate you for passing them. They were in no hurry before you passed them but they took the move as a personal affront and feel like they must tailgate your car so you know they can go fast, too. Of course, we know the most common way to deal with this is to ‘brake check’ them, that is to hit your brakes hard so they almost hit the back of your car. Keep in mind that if they hit you from behind, it is always their fault, by law.

Sometimes such an action will rile up the offending party and they will continue the dangerous habit of riding your bumper.  If you have a car (which is really the only thing to drive if you do not haul heavy junk and are environmentally responsible), you may have windshield wipers that spray washer fluid over the roof of your car and onto the windshield of the car behind you. If so, a good thing to do is to lay on the sprayer a few times until you see the car behind you put on the windshield wipers. When they are distracted by that and cannot see clearly due to the wipers, hit your brakes then! It usually scares all hell out of them. Again, it may only rile them up, so we suggest keeping a few rolls of pennies or a cup of old rusty nuts and bolts in the console of your vehicle. These metal objects, when flipped over the top off your car, will bounce off the highway and, depending on what speed you are traveling, bounce up into the  grill of the car behind you or, if you are lucky, the windshield. Old golf balls from the shag bag are good for this, as well, as the large white orb has a scarier effect when flying toward you. The good thing about using pennies is that they are barely visible, should an officer look for evidence of projectile-influenced rage.

Sunday drivers have been an annoyance for nearly a century now. They are usually old and have no idea what is going on. If you rage at them, it does no good. They have to turn up the hearing aid just to hear you honk at them and that action alone slows them down by another 10 mph. If you have to drive on a Sunday, take valium.

Most offensive these days is the cellphone user. Most roadhogs and tailgaters are cross-addicted to the cell. This works in your favour because they are distracted. To them a brake check is especially terrifying. They really ought not to be on the phone and most states have laws against it. As much as we at CFYSA hate the law, we try to help the enforcers of the laws when it comes to these selfish, talkative bastards who think they are so important that if they do not phone to say where they are at the moment, the world will stop.

 If you see someone on a cell, lay on your horn. The person on the other end of the line will get an earful, as well. Better yet, here is a trick we learned by mistake a few weeks ago. Sitting at a red traffic light, we looked over and saw a driver yapping inanely on the cell, waiting for the light to change. We were not even with this car but our hood was about even with the driver’s window, perfect for a blare of the horn. We were in a two lane left turn exit from a shopping plaza that dumped onto a well-trafficked road. Reckoning to give the driver/cell-user a little blast of sound, we hit the horn. When we honked, the car abruptly pulled out, through the red light, into traffic.  Apparently, they were used to being honked at for sitting through green lights while yapping and thought they had done it again. Luckily, they did not get hit by another car but it certainly opened a whole new avenue of fun to us. Try it sometime and see for yourself! We encourage you!

There are many other ways to deal with the rogues of the road but we just wanted to throw out a few helphul hints for the novice ragers in the ethernet. Happy motoring!!!

What Is So Beat About Korea? The Dog Farm by David S. Wills…a review

Rabid Readers, Rabbit Feeders and Gentle Souls All,

Still, again, we find ourselves apologizing for our absence. Since we last wrote, we had a strange interlude with Ferd, which we did manage to get on a cassette tape and will to you shortly.

More exciting, upon celebrating the anniversary of the birth of our hero, the great Lenny Bruce, we discovered that a friend of ours is a mutual friend of Lenny’s only child, daughter Kitty Bruce. We were offered an introduction and Kitty is granting us an interview which will appear in the tenth issue of Beatdom, the religion issue. Lenny took a lot of swipes at religion and we are very fortunate that Kitty is so gracious to share her time with Beatdom. She will be in good company, of course.

Also, in Beatdom news, we made contact with Richie Ramone, fastest of the three Ramones drummers and writer of several Ramones hits, including Somebody Put Something In My Drink, a set standard at any later Ramones show. He has also agreed to talk with Beatdom about the Beat aspects of life on the road with the Ramones, among other things. It is interesting to note that the Ramones were the fastest-playing group in the original first wave of Punk. That makes Richie the fastest of the fast, and you can read him tell about it in Beatdom issue eleven.

So, it goes without saying that we have been busy (even though we just said it) and part of the bustle had to do with the release of the third book from the publishing house of the modern Beat, Beatdom Books.  Our third release is the ‘hot off the presses’ yet long-awaited tale of  a modern Beat suffering through an ‘on the road’ adventure, as given to us by Beatdom’s Fearless Leader and Editor-In-Chief, our partner, Mr. David S. Wills.

We are seeing more and more about Korea in the news these days, so as world-citizens, we offer this review of Mr. Wills’ tome:

What is so Beat about Korea?

 

  In his first novel, David S. Wills, creator of the literary journal Beatdom, takes us on a long, strange trip as he finds cultural astonishment in the depavity which surrounds him.

 

  His Korea, as presented in The Dog Farm (Beatdom Books, October 2011), offers the tattered tableau of a treacherous terrain where no mammals exist - except for on plates, to be consumed. Even the closest thing to a stray dog, behaviourally, are the vile and drunken denizens of Daegu.

 

  Spitting, cursing, staring, insulting his protagonist, Alexander, the whole of humanity in South Korea behaves badly, lashing out at our hero with fists, umbrellas and verbal assaults. Even worse, he introduces us to the vile smell of the kimchi, a gastricly gaseous foodstuff which pollutes the air of the country with the portentious stench that flavors sections of the novel. Kimchi, not only a food but a symbol of Korean superiority, holds the power to not only turn the stomach but causes a condition known as the kimchi rage…a violent mood-swinging behaviour, the ugly end of which usually targets Westerners, more commonly known as foreigners.

 

   Young Alexander arrives in this over-heated hell from his bleak hometown in Scotland, where he wiled away days drunk, stoned and on the dole. Korea, in his drunkenness, represented opportunity. White skin made him a faux-American, the first scratch at the surface of the racism prevailing in the strange, new land. While making him desirable as a teacher, since Korea is, of course ‘Number One!’, and the children of wealthy Koreans only get the best education possible, in their eyes – which is virtually no education, whatsoever, but as long as the teacher is ‘American’, all is well!

 

   Anybody with white skin can be American and earn a small fortune, with no formal education in teaching.

 

  Skin-tone may help with cashflow but in the drunken, dirty, dark streets of Daegu, it also incites violence and mockery, shame and shit-flinging. The racism works both ways. Alexander notes that he had no racism in his soul until being subjected to these anomalies.

We venture out of Daegu a few times, to the beach, the mountains, a glorious Buddhist temple, on an ill-fated escape to Japan and back.

 

  Along the way, we meet other characters, both the expats who form Alexander’s social circle, and the countrymen and women who dictate the rules of his existence at the dubious citadel of education, Charleston Academy. We meet the administrators, who are ugly, sleazy, greasy and dress cheesy. It is a nation of cheesy dressers. The master of the con is the oily Mr. Park, or ‘Parky’ as the expats know him. He implores Alexander to be good, not to drink like the others, not to sound Scottish and to make himself home in a squalid cell of an ‘apartment’…to stay there and not consort with those other ‘bad’ teachers who drink after work and see through the shell game of the academy.

 

   To return to our question, why is this Beat?

   It doesn’t get much more Beat than this. We have travel, sex, music, drugs, love, hate, exotic locales, odd new glimpses at human behaviour, danger, escape, corrupt society and crooked police hounding the hip. It’s the same old Beat but in a new country in a new decade. Alexander unwittingly morphs into the essence of Beat in this cruel petri dish of a country, where germs and humans cohabitate in unnatural transparency.

  Like those before him, he takes to the road as means of salvation and finds what one always finds on the road…more hard road to travel.

 

  If you have ever traveled to another country as an American during or after the second Bush presidency, you may have felt some of the prejudice and animosity described by Wills, but to a much-lesser degree. If you have ever considered travel to South Korea, outside of a safely-guided tour, you may want to read The Dog Farm first and perhaps consider visiting Japan, instead. If you have read all the Beat novels and are looking for something new, that is not a rip-off of Kerouac or Burroughs, but is a fresh, (relatively) new voice in the land of Beatdom, then this is the book for you.

 

  Available on www.amazon.com or www.beatdom.com or also on Kindle for those who like to read but do not like books.

 

For ‘Lit Undressed: Fashion In Literature’…My Favorite Bellbottoms

Gentle Readers and Friends of Flesh,

We have been tied up in many projects of late and the Fall peformance by the Lit Undressed group of Omaha, NE, looms large in our headlights. The Omaha Lit Fest, a wonderful event and one of the many cultural offerings to be found in the ‘NoDo’ (Northern Downtown) area of Omaha, is partly funded by the Nebraska Council for the Arts, as well as many other community-minded organizations. Omaha seems like a great place to live. The more we hear about it, the more we find to like.

The event takes place October 13-15 and rehearsals started this week. Here is a brief summary of the event, this go-round:

The focus of this year’s (downtown) Omaha lit fest is Silk & Sawdust, the heart and mechanics and literature. Authors will participate in panels, readings and discussions to lift the corner of the curtain on their methods and processes, and look at the literal tools of production—including book-making and design, and our curious nostalgia for the typewriter.

Included in this theme are fashions of famous literary characters—from the Tin Woodman’s heart of silk and sawdust in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, to Jay Gatsby’s pink rag of a suit in The Great Gatsby, to Jane Eyre’s grey and black gowns and Virginia Woolf’s explanation of fashion in Orlando, fashion plays a major role in many characters’ roles and sometimes the storyline.

When presented with ‘fashion’ as a subject, we immediately blogged about old shoes…a more recent blog which can be found by searching on this page. This time, we decided to write about…well, you can read the title….

My Favorite Bellbottoms

Getting my money’s worth out of the Nehru shirt I purchased was no easy feat. It could not be worn to catholic school because it would not work with a tie. Too nice to wear while out playing in the fields, there was no way my parents would let it see the inside of a church. If the flag of rebellious dress was to be foisted, the bellbottom jeans became the banner to wear.

There were many styles to choose from. Colored denim, red with black patch pockets, for example, were becoming passe’ as the low-riding, button fly, hip-hugger style with the slit pockets and wide flare took top wrung on the fashion ladder. I stuck with the zipping fly, being more practical than trendy. ‘Landlubbers’ was the brand of choice for the hip. Headshops and other counterculture stores sold them, while you could buy Wrangler, Lee and other popular brands, not near as cool, at Sears and other ‘straight’ stores.

Landlubber Jeans also advertised in Rolling Stone, so they had to be good. Dylan, Robert Plant, the Allman Brothers, the Rolling Stones…they all wore Landlubbers.

Eventually, the company expanded from jeans to corduroy offerings.

Worn correctly, they had to be long enough…preferrably, slightly too long. The ideal pair had the heels worn away at the back bottom seam from being tread under bare feet, platform shoes or a pair of Dingo boots with a metal ring on the side, as advertised in Rolling Stone!

Being well over six feet tall, I preferred Dingos and often enjoyed the sight of a friend caught in mud in the middle of a cornfield, trapped by thick sole and heels which had settled into plowed Earth as we stood in a circle and puffed. Enough said about The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys!

At first, bells were available in denim only, which presented a quandry in that denim jeans were ‘play clothes’. For school wear, we had the loud plaid pants with the wide cuffs which fell across the top of our platform shoes. Play clothes stuck around until replaced when worn out. School clothes needed to be new each year. This led many to cut straight-legged jeans up the inseam to the knee and insert a triangle of fabric to make the leg ‘flare’ into a ‘bell’. My mom was not going in for this. It was by skipping lunch and saving bus money by hitch-hiking to school that cash to get a store-bought pair became available.

At the headshop, stacked in neat piles between the vintage WWII gear, which was also en vogue, the slacks beaconed. The wide-wale corduroy, low-rise, slit-pocket with the little flowers, known as ‘Keith Richards pants’ due to a popular photo of him wearing them, proved the perfect ticket to trendiness. Not denim, the nuns could not say a word about them being jeans, just like they could not argue that the black ‘tails’ I kept hanging in my locker for daily wear was not a ‘jacket’. In retrospect, certainly I looked like an ass. This was done purposely to rile the ‘squares’ and the nuns, especially. They had dominated what we wore for all of grammar school and now, in high school, we could fight back. Brandishing the only tattoo on a student – a homemade starfish on my left hand – I had already trumped authority at 16 years of age. With hair to my shoulders, they didn’t even notice the earring. This was 1973.

The Nehru sold at a garage sale but those cords wore down to a frazzle. They attracted attention. Every non-polite epithet for ‘homosexual’ was hurled at me while hitch-hiking in such style…but when you are young, you like the attention! Now, everybody has tattoos and earrings. The starfish was surgically removed around 1990 and the earring came out long before. Both became too popular among the same group they used to annoy. Too old to wear three pairs of boxer shorts, and the tops of my jeans at mid-thigh to reveal them, soon I begin my 55th year…that may sound old to some but I would not be young again, if given the chance…I would miss growing up in the 1960s… things were much more fun.

Do Police Get Tested For Drugs and Steroids????

           Gentle Readers,

Forgive the fomatting, as the PC is still vexing us.  Speaking of vexations, many are disturbed by the presence of man-made monsters, one of the most famous of which is Frankenstein’s Monster.  Some people refer to the monster simply as ‘Frankenstein’.  There are a lot of these Franskenteins in the world, the most famous being the United States Government.  We create and enable them and then they rattle the chains, break loose from the stone walls of the government buildings and come create nightmares in our lives.

At one end of the scale we have Bracarat Obama, Disaster in Chief of These United States and on the lower, lower, lowest end of the scale are those we pay to protect ourselves and our property…the police.  Currently, the Obama administration is using these police as a tool of terror and fear as it employs them into the Neverending War we are involved in.  It used to be nice when wars ended. 

It also used to be nice when a police officer was a sign of safety, not a call for fear.  On Youtube, for instance, you have numerous instances of police beating innocent motorists because the civilians have the temerity to film the jackboot thugs in action.  These days, if you buy a gun or a camera, you need to buy both, not one or the other.  If you buy a gun, you need a camera to show the unjust way the police treat you when they try to take it away from you.  If you buy a camera, you need a gun to protect yourself from being beaten by officers wearing uniforms that you paid for.

We pay a lot in taxes, to the fed, to the stores but most disturbingly, to our local governments.  In our instance, we must pay several thousand to the school district, even though we have never spawned a child.  Why do we have to pay for the education of a bunch of little wankers when we had the good sense to ‘keep it in our pants’?  We pay for our trash to be collected and we just has an increase in our water and sewer bills.  So if you pay for the water, the schools, the trash and sewer – why do you have to fork over even more cash to have the township collect all the other checks we send?  We have to pay the police, of course.

Did you ever get pulled over for speeding or some other minor infraction of traffic codes and have some beast with ‘roid rage bark at you through the window, while flexing biceps which are unusually bulging with veins, like those veins in his neck as he screams at you for asking a question.  If you are like us, and have long hair and look like a liberal, it is even worse.

If noise comes from our yard, we are confronted by one of these monsters.  It has not happened for a long time.  If noise comes from another yard and we call the police, the chief tells us that they do not have equipment to measure decibels and so the ordinance is unenforcable.  So we are paying to have laws unenforced.  A judge told us to sue the township but the fear of harrassment stops us.  If a neighbor is persistent in destroying a section of our property and the cops are called in, the focus is not on the neighbor who is trying to build on my property…we get grief because the officer sees long hair and for some reason ‘roid ragers hate that.  Maybe because a lot of them go bald from using the stuff.

This is a bigger issue than our yard and long hair, however.  The drug war, which is the biggest waste of money ever to face a country which cannot balance a budget and even threatens to take Social Sevurity away from senior citizens. allow police to search homes, yards, automobiles, test your breath and your blood.  In all our years of paying taxes, we have never seen a breakdown which shows payments for drug tests on policia.  A lot of them are known to confiscate drugs and keep them for personal use and it is obvious that many of them use steroids in order to be bigger and stronger than the bad guys…they do not realise that the rage induced by the steroids makes them criminal in the cranium.

Office workers, Walmart workers, garbage truck workers, forklift operators…all of these people are subject to random drug testing…what about the police? The dangerous ones with the guns, pepper spray and lots of buddies to help beat on you.  If you pay a tax, you should demand that police be tested for drugs and, specifically, steroids.  Why would anybody be afraid to do this unless they were terrified of the thugs?

We know that not all police are bad.  Our own grandfather was a typical drunken, irish paddy precinct copper.  He used to beat his wife and kids and they did not even have steroids back then.  The thing is…just pay attention the next time you get pulled over or see somebody else in that unfortunate position.  See if the cop is red in the face.  See if the veins in his neck look ready to pop.  See if you can make him chase you by taking his photo.

They had cops like this in Nazi Germany and also in Russia, back when it was the Soviet Union.  Then, America was too good to allow such shit.  Not anymore.  This weekend, when you are on your way to a fun event and notice the ton of cops on the highway, earning overtime while getting high on confiscated pot, think about the fairness of them NOT being tested regularly.

Gas Shock Clocked, Writer’s Block Stopped

     Understanding Readers,

     We have not posted for a week or so. One of our last posts detailed problems with the pc and an outage at Verizon’s internet banks.  Yesterday, a Verizon worker came to my house after three days of me switching out old wires, phones, jacks, you-name-it, only to tell me that my phone line had been disconnected at the main office, for no reason.

     Falling off the face of the earth, with no phone or internet, was a very strange, lost feeling.  I felt disconnected and could not communicate with friends or go on the stock market or watch videos of fuzzy kittens.  Once used to it, the amount of work that had been put off for no particular reason became easy to tackle without the interference of the web.  I got a lot of interference from my cat, Inkie, but she is just a bug no matter what.

     Nonetheless, my trusty auto, which has been taking me from here to there since 2004, sucked up over $50 worth of gas the other day.  In seven years, it never took $50 worth.  This does not bode well for my idea of the crosscountry kittie caravan in the 30foot RV.  It makes me wonder how much more people will take. 

     Of course, as usual, there is always somebody to blame…now who would we blame if America was rich in oil and natural gas, yet the people living here are not able to afford to fill their cars, trucks and oil tanks at home?  Who would we blame if all the gas and oil we are allowed to consume has to be shipped from halfway across the world, while people who produce gas here could do it cheaper but are not allowed to because of hidden political agendas?  Who would we point to as the Anti-Christ?  If you said ‘Obama’ you could be right on all counts.

     My next door neighbor does not like Obama.  She is 82 years old and was a nurse for many years of her life, in facilities around Long Island, NY, where she is from.  She says she learned to read people’s faces and can tell when people lie about being in pain or caring about others or other facial ‘giveaways’.  She does not like the look on Obama’s puss and you have to admit, he is one of the MEANEST-looking presidents we ever had.  I can only remember back to Kennedy but nobody in that office ever gave the dirty looks that Obama can deal out to those who disagree with him. Sorta like this…

     So, it can be pretty obvious that he does not like people.  That would explain why he wants to screw his own country in a way that will take the rest of history to undo.  Five states now have gas above the $4 line and he can ride around on Air Force One and look down on us.  He could tell SecRATary of the Interior Salazar to stop the moritorium on american oil companies.  BP is drilling in Alaska, where a lot of people think our reserves are…guess what? They are BP’s reserves now…we are not allowed to drill but BP can because they are not American, yet they drill on our soil.  We are giving our resources to BP so they can resell them back to us at an elevated price.

     Why?

     Because we let him; because we elected him (not me), and because we do nothing about his actions now but to watch in awestruck horror as he dismantles the economy and ruins the lives of countless millions in the Gulf.

     Soon it will be April 20.  420.  We suggest that on that day, nobody take any substances which will muddle their thoughts.  We suggest that you get together, as planned…but instead of getting high, figure out how to use your votes to get this disaster off our backs and out of office.  Once that is done, you can get high…if you are lucky.

Better Call Henny Penny

     Frightened Friends,

     Is the sky falling?  Not really, it is just disappearing. Yesterday scientists reported that the ozone player has gotten even thinner than it was in November, when it was discovered that whales were getting sunburnt in the ocean because they had no SPF and the sun is too bright.  Gov. Cartman of New Jersey, who also is not too bright, said there is nothing to worry about.  He has no proof of global warming so he prefers to ignore it.  Here in Pennsylvania, Military Governor Tom Corbett has said that Cartman is his ‘role model’ so do not expect much for the survival of the species if  we are gonna depends on dolts like these.

     Besides being scorched from above, we have the Japanese directly dumping the ocean water that was contaminated in the cooling process back into the ocean, where it can travel all around the world and ride the jet streams and get in the tissue all of the fish which are not radioactive already.

      Besides both of those, we have new earthquakes in Japan today, which further unsettle our belief in a long life in a non-glowing body.

     The Japanese government announced that it was going to dump the contaminants back into the sea before they did it.  Naturally, there is no United Nations anymore, at least not the kind of United Nations that averts worldwide tragedy and keeps us safe.  The United Nations was really formed as a way to enforce Harry Anslinger’s morbid anti-marijuana laws worldwide and, aside from contributions to UNICEF (a CIA cover) they do nothing for us.

     All we want to warn you on is to give up the seafood.  It was badly polluted enough before these latest events and if you value your health, you do not eat it, particularly if you are prone to bad affects of radiation already, like if you are a cancer survivor like Your Humble Narrator.

     We have to get this world together or all you people with kids and grandkids are gonna carry pics of cinders around in your wallets, when your bloodline is boiled in their skins.

     Wake up Everybody, for the sake of Christ and yourselves and start paying attention to what you can do to make your legislators recognize the inherent dangers of us destroying the world from the outside in.

    You are not feeling it now…but wait until food and oil prices REALLY go up.  You have no idea about suffering unless you have done a lot of it.  Get prepared for a new experience.

Taking Dad To Ireland, Blood Across the Shannon and Kilts Are Not Irish

     Exhaulted Readers,

     As we stumble upon Saint Patrick’s Day, we thought that a few blogs about the old sod may prove appropriate.  To cut to the quick, let us make one thing clear.  If you see some big goon in a kilt at a bar or Irish function on Wednesday, it is surely an idiot who does not know the difference between Scotland and Ireland and probably bought the kilt as a convenient way to get into a fight.

     Avoid men with kilts, in general, in America, 364 days of the year.  They are allowed one day unless they are first-generation Scot.  Now, that we have annoyed that foolish segment of the population, allow us to continure with the actual story.

     As this is a personal (albiet ficticious since nothing on here is real) tale,  permit me to continue in the first person, I, to make it a bit easier.  The ‘I’ in question is full of bright ideas.  Many are fueled by booze and sentimentality, so the term ‘bright idea’ is a touch of the old sarcasm.  This time, this bright idea, came to pass beginning in late 1999,  the year my mom died.  It was a particularly grim holiday, either turkey day or xmas, and the old man and I sat at the table with the full meal and fixings.  It must have been turkey day, the first holiday without my mom around.

     He was getting teary and, in an effort to switch up the mood of the meal,  I suggested that we take a trip to Ireland the following year.  He was one of those types with the ‘honk if you’re irish’ license plate holder and was easy to deal with on holidays because you just needed a new book on Ireland, which he would never read anyway.  It was a chance to go to Ireland, which I had been thinking about anyway; it was also a way to show that life was not over and there were still things for him to do that he had not even dreamt of.

     As it turned, a golf buddy of his, Louie,  ran tours to the Emerald Isle for several years and we joined a trip he was putting together for the upcoming May.  It took all the planning off my hands, so that was just perfect…until we got there and it dawned on me that he went to sleep at 10pm every night and the sun didn’t even set until close to 11pm that time of year.

      I had never considered the implications of taking an 80-year-old man with a 70-year-old tobacco habit on a plane or how the altitude would affect his lungs.  We started off with a couple days at the Royal Dublin Hotel on O’Connell Street, with the statue of Parnell, the Great Patriot of the Irish Nation.  The old man took it easy, after the scare at the airport, where they put him in a chair and gave him oxygen for a bit.

     So, here I was in Ireland, the only young man in a group of senior citizens, the youngest of whom may have been in her mid-sixties.  At least nobody would try to hang around with me.

     It was great to be on the main street of the city, in walking distance of Trinity College, the famous old government buildings, the Book of Kells, the house where Bram Stoker labored over his novel, Dracula, which would sell many hoodies, hundreds of years after it was printed.

     There was a stain on the pillow, which I noticed the first morning and took to be a result of drooled-out tobacco juice, which stained a number of his clothing items.  There was another stain the next morning, as was discovered as bags were packed to leave Dublin and head down coast to the Munster area, where many of the first great kings of Ireland came from and where they fought many of their fiercest battles, defending their homeland from the inevitable pillaging which plagued the People for centuries.

     While in this corner of the Isle, we stayed in Clonmel (meaning honey meadow), near Tipperary.  The Hotel Minella was home for a few days, in the middle of the orchards where the apples for the wonderful Magner’s Irish Cider are grown.  The hotel was an extravagant affair.

                                             

    It lay along the River Suir, with the Comeragh Mountains looking behind.  Here, again, we spent a few days.  Dad had gotten a bit tired and so was I, so after a few drinks, we retired to the room on early-afternoon to get into an argument over the television.  I was watching the movie Butcher Boy, the disturbing tale with Sinead O’Connor as the Holy Virgin Mary.  While an excellent flick, it was beyond his sensibilities, so I tried for a short nap and went for a walk.

     The grounds were fantastic and, as stated, were surrounded by the orchards and farmland.  A dirt road ran sort of parallel to the river.  Apple trees and livestock ran along the gurgling waters of the Suir.  This was more like a creek than a river.  This was not the grand, majestic Shannon but it was lovely.

     Returning from my walk, a shower was in order and as I shaved before stepping into the tub, a few specks of blood near the mirror got my attention.  It was not a lot but it was in a small ‘spray pattern’.  I cannot even say that i knew it was blood at that point, looking back.  It totally surprised me.  A nice meal and an evening of drink, and at the light of dawn, the little dirt road beaconned.  Nobody was awake, not even the hotel staff, as I slipped out the door in my running shoes.

     I found some cows, feeding in a lot along the road, just a quarter mile from the hotel.  Having seen cows many times before, I am not sure what attracted me to them but I sidled up to the gate which held them in, to take a picture.  They all were chewing at the tall, green grass.  I got a shot or two of them chewing and thought it may be a good time to practice my ‘moo’, so one was brought up for the benefit of the bovine and it got their attention, as you can see in the photo.

                                                       

     Having made a good impression on the cows, the brisk walk continued and after a few hours, the hotel appeared in site again and it was just in time for a continental breakfast.  I stopped at the room to shower.  There was no blood on the wall, but here were bloodied paper towels in the trash.  It looked like he had been spitting up into them.  This was starting to get serious and we still had more than half of Ireland waiting for us.

     We will pick this up tomorrow, at the Hotel Minela.  Thanks for your patience.