catfish 34

 Actually I am trying to avoid getting into those long drawn out battles with Beagles.  Oh it's all good fun in the heat of battle, knocking down all of Beagles' points and making my own shining points.  Acting like I am just enlightening while I know that in the heat of battle I am likely to take a few cheap shots, and get a little nasty.

Like I said I feel like a knight in shining armor in the heat of battle, but afterwards I see that my armor is all muddy, and Beagles, also wearing dirty armor is still standing and not enlightened at all, and worse of all he is smiling as if he had won the battle.

But it's not like I am compromising my opinions.  Much as I like my ilk I think they are wrong on certain points.  PC is certainly one of them.  And I don't favor the idea of hate crimes.  If somebody kills another, they are already up for murder no matter why they did it, and arguing about whether the murder was racist is a messy affair. 

 When those black guys mugged me, they did it because I was white.  They probably were not that crazy about white people, but the reason they did it was because a white guy probably has more money and he likely has no friends in a black neighborhood.  So was it a hate crime or not?  I personally think not, but why go through that whole polarizing argument?

And I don't mind the death penalty all that much.  If the justice system wasn't so skewed against the poor, I might allow it.

I think my email program deletes emails after they reach some amount, not sure, never checked, don't care.  At one time I saved some emails that I thought were particularly well-written, but after awhile I noticed that I never looked at them again so I stopped doing that.  I do have a vast archive of notebooks and sketchbooks and odd documents.  I sometimes dive into them looking for something, but I try to avoid that because there goes the rest of the day.

The rabbit hole aspect is the most fascinating aspect of things like the secret of life, things that seem to hover just beyond reach.  But I know that Old Dog likes things that come to a conclusion, so I can see where it is not for him.

I'm curious about Groot.  Does he have leaves?  If so what condition are they in?  Can we get a photo.  If Groot doesn't make it I am prepared to name my most ambitious sunflower after him, just to keep his name and his brave struggle alive.

That Memorial Day visit was postponed maybe a week before it was to happen.  It turned out that Fred was still in the hospital getting his ticker synched after his surgery.  Yoick, surgery!  First I had heard of that.  Later I learned that they had taken out half his left lung.  Yoicks again!  But he and his wife were pretty nonchalant about that.  I guess at our age anything that doesn't kill you is not so bad. He is out of the hospital now so maybe we will reschedule it for later in the summer.  And the Fourth of July party in Champaign will be on again this year, so if nobody ends up in the hospital I will be going there.  First time out of Chicago since a year and many months.

 So there I am that night tossing and turning on the red couch, the shortest, the lumpiest, couch in the bunkhouse.  I could have been all stretched out on that glorious waterbed next to Gina all cozy with her nooked in the crook of my arm, those luscious breasts rising and falling with the motion of her sweet breaths, and maybe I would give her nipples a little tweak, a friendly good morning gesture, just as the morning sun was streaming in, and she’d be like a little annoyed at first, but I’d lean into her ear with some sweet talk, and she’d giggle a little, stretch a little, and wrap me in her sleepy arms, and then her hips would be against mine.

 But there was no waterbed, no Gina, just the red couch and outside the sound of Ron’s horn honking.  Shit, no time for a shower, no time to change clothes, just time to throw off the blanket and hop out into Ron’s car.

 “Phew,” Ron noted as I slid next to him, “You stink.”

 “Late night,” I explained.

 He chuckled, “That’s what I expected, when I saw you cozying up with Roberta.”

 “Roberta?”

 “Yeah, the skinny blonde, nice rack.”

 Nice rack, damn I hadn’t even noticed that, it happened so fast.

 “Romantic guy like you, I figured you’d go for the all night, after all what’s fifty bucks?  Reason I left, didn’t expect to find you at the bunkhouse this morning, just stopped by in case something went wrong.”

 Fifty bucks?  Damn I should have bargained, but then I never knew what was going on, not the sort of thing that I’d want to admit to Ron.  “So her name’s Roberta then?” I asked just to be saying something.

 “Hell I don’t know, that’s what she told me.”

 Told him?  I had this terrible image of Denise hauling him up the stairs, pulling down her skirt, pulling it up again, him counting out the money, licking his fingers maybe to make sure an extra ten didn’t go her way.

 “She’s got a kid you know,” I said kind of sudden, not sure why I said it.

 He laughed, “That’s what they all say.”

 “Well maybe she does.” I came back.

 “Maybe,  Anyway I’m just kind of wondering what happened, why you’re not still not up there in that motel pulling cheap beers out of her cheesy cooler, pouring them down her rack and lapping them up.”

 “We had a disagreement.” I said, sounded safe enough.

 “A disagreement,” he laughed again.  “You had a disagreement with Roberta, the most agreeable girl in the county?”

 “Well,” I answered but I didn’t want too get much beyond that.

 “It’s that Gina isn’t it?” and this seemed to come out of nowhere.

 “Gina, shit, we’re on the outs,” and I told him the whole apartment story.

 “So you passed up that waterbed, just because of her?”

 “Well you know, I was planning on getting her into it.”

 “And she’s the only one, you could figure on getting into it?”

 And you know, he had a point, a place like that I could have parties, even if the fucking fireplace wasn’t working.  I’d be on home ground.  Shouldn’t be to hard to cozy up to some babe, give her a little tour, end up in the boudoir, some sweet talk.  Oh yeah that would work.  “I ought to take it,” I told him.

 “Damn right you oughta.”

 “I’m gonna do it.  I’m gonna do it.  First thing I get back after work I’m gonna look up that realtor guy, and put down that deposit.”

 “Good for you little buddy, now you have your head screwed on right.”

 And we popped open a couple brews on that.  Usually we didn’t touch the cooler until after work, but it was sort of an occasion you know.

 After the clink and the long draws he went back to the previous subject.  “Still wondering though how you came to a disagreement with agreeable Roberta though.”

 “Oh it was, it was about the price.”

 “You tried to cut her down?  How low did you get her?”

 “No, not that way.  We were talking you know, and I said ninety.”

 “Ninety, ninety?  What were you, in love?”

 “No, no, the number just came up, and then you know, that’s what she wanted.”

 “You didn’t give her that, did you?”

 And I was about to say that she had a kid, but then I remembered we had already discussed that.  “She had a nice ass,” I said.

 “The world is full of nice asses,” he said.

 “Well sure, but some are better than others, if you think about a world of nice asses, then you have to admit that hers is right up there.”

 “Can’t say as I’ve noticed.”

 “Well, I did, it was, uh, superlative.”

 “Superlative?”

 Damn, where had that word come from?  Itch probably, I was talking like Itch.  “It was very nice.  I liked it a lot.”

 “Well why didn’t you spend the night with it then?  Shit, ninety bucks, you could have had it for half that easy?”

 Good question, shit.  Nowhere to go with this.  “She um, she said she had to get back to her kid.”

 He snorted.  “Real Romeo aintcha?”

 “Maybe,” the best I could come up with.  “Anyway where were you?  I came back to the bar and you were gone.”

 “Didn’t expect you to be back, had things to do.  How did you get back?”

 “Took a cab.”

 Cabdriver came all that way out to pick you up?  Usually they won’t do that.”

 “This guy did.”

 “Okay Little Buddy, if you say so,” he was pulling into the Big Job parking lot, “Let’s get to work.”

 Wasn’t a good day at work.  Hadn’t got much sleep, and that Gina thing, I’d put a lot of time and effort into that and I still expected it to work out okay somehow, but now both Ron and Itch knew about that Denise thing, it was worrisome.  Screwed up a couple reports, got away with it because the foreman was a friend of Ron’s, but still it wasn’t good.