Click images for desktop size: "African Night" Once when I was surfing an old pot bellied guy came up to me on the beach.
These type of guys I was figuring out if he was just hot for the hard bodies or what. All I remember is that he wore a straw hat with a little red feather in, madras shorts and sandals and socks . . . at Malibu Beach.
He started out asking me, "Son, where do you keep your gun?"
I was perplexed. Why would he think I carried a gun in my baggies. I thought maybe the turista' was thinking Hawaiian and was looking for my big wave stick.
After some bickering back and forth he wanted to know where I kept my gun to shoot the sharks while I was surfing . . .
Two weeks later my buddy Mark and I were up in Yosemite doing an easy 5-9 at Half Dome. "Nibbling at the toes of one of the giants," he liked to quote from someplace.
There are tourist paths there. We were about 25 feet up a wall when some guy comes by and starts yelling up at us. "Where's your gun?"
Mark was about 10 feet out on the rope. I always followed and Mark led. It got me an undeserved rep as a hotshot climber.
"Where's your gun?"
We mutually decided to ignore the guy because we had no idea what he was talking about. After he yelled again he started chucking rocks at us.
This is foolish on his part. He was not a fit guy and his rocks had to travel upward, up a rock face where all they would do is plummet back down.
We watched him nearly kill himself that way and finished the climb.
That evening we were back at Sunnyside Camp Ground and talked to some of the other climbers about this "Where's your gun" guy.
It seems a few of the crew had similar encounters. One of the old climbers explained that the tourist was looking for our mortar. A lot of people east of I-5 had it in their heads that the way you climbed a mountain was to shoot a rope and a grappling hook up the mountainside and then climb the rope.
"Where's your gun?"
That's what I was thinking of when they drained the blood out of me. My puppy got to be with me for that as a "hospital Dog" in training.
When they did the bone marrow test she had to wait with a nurse. She seemed okay.
Bone marrow tests are pretty bogus.
They hurt. It feels like they're driving a spike into you, a dull and rusty spike and then they wiggle it around a bit. Or at least that's the way it feels.
It will be next week when they get the results back.
I know what they're going to be. I've been down this path and I knew what was coming.
Now I've just got to ask myself, "Son. You've lived it large. You've lived it small and you've lived it in tears. You've felt them chemo's going through you and making your blood boil up something nasty. But now, son, you've got to ask yourself: You got the guts to do it again?"
That's assuming that they even want to try chemo again. They may not think that it's worth the time, the money or maybe they'll even think of me and decide something human for a change.

Click images for desktop size: by Chuck Jones Don't mistake this. I'm not giving up. I don't know how. Maturity is supposed to bring reason and a sense of calm and an ability to discern the fights you can't win. All it brought to me was a mulish streak that says the only fights worthwhile are the ones they tell you that you can never win.
I was pretty limp on the ride home. I held my puppy in my arms as she put her two little paws on the window jamb of the car and lolled her head out the window.
She's so scared of things still and she looks to me and then looks back out the window and she yawns and tries to understand what she's seeing, what's happening.
She looks to me to make sure I'm holding her well.
She doesn't ask me where's my gun.
I think; we'll do sit stay come tonight and get the metal taste out of my mouth and out of my brain. And tomorrow we'll go to work and I'll buy a new pair of jeans and a box of those cookies the puppy likes.
Because that's all there is that's worth doing.

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