So. I awakened this crisp Santa Fe morning with a slight tequila hangover—dry mouth, niggling headache, and breath noxious enough to gag the dogs.
“Wake up, shithead, and go gargle with mouthwash.”
It was the Squirt, it was 4:17 am, and she had tears in her eyes. As for me, I’d been asleep on my side with my right arm wrapped around my head to where I was breathing my hot, aged tequila breath in-and-out between my smelly armpit and a bunched-up down-comforter tunnel.
The adorable little bundle of piss and vinegar was dragging the covers off my body and touching her snotty nose to my exposed skin. “I said wake up, Mooner! What did you eat for dinner last night, marinated donkey ass?”
“Maybe I should get up and brush my teeth and take a bath as well, sweetie. The tequila breath in my mouth and the odor of flop sweat in my nostrils is somewhat disconcerting,” I told her. “Matter of fact, the two of you could use a bath as well. Wake the goat dog and meet me in the bathroom.”
Since we moved to Enchanted Land, I’ve not made the dogs bathe quite as often as when we lived in Sweatboxville. Austin’s heat and humidity would get their coats smelling like the vinyl seats in a McDonald’s booth about once each week. The cool, dry mountain air here to our new hometown has a different effect. It actually seems to help keep their coats smelling clean—same way as when you hang stuff outside on a clothesline, which reminds me that I want to put up a clothesline out back.
I’m thinking something artsy-fartsy in combination with my planned landscaping and perimeter wall paintings. My best-to-date idea is to paint a mural on the adobe wall that depicts the epic grandeur of the Sangre de Christo mountains, and then build the clothesline to look like telegraph poles and wires that serve to frame the mural. I’ve already got these great rocks that some previous owner brought to the house that would help provide depth to the installation.
I also bought a canvas bag full of those old timey wooden peg clothes pins—you know, the ones that look sort of like a glass milk bottle with legs? When I was a kid we painted faces and clothes on the little wooden pegs gave them as gifts to our womenfolk.
I wonder about using the word womenfolk. Is that another commonplace, useful and heartened word from our past that is now seen to be off-putting?
The bag was made to hold the brightly painted clothes pins—thirty-six of them before Yoda ate three. It has a thick wire hanger sewn into its top and the wire has a hook bent in the end to hang it on the line. There’s a way faded picture of a woman hanging laundry in the sun on one side, and a barely visible Coca-Cola logo on the other. When I saw it at the flea market, the guy said to me, he said, “That Coke logo makes it pretty collectible, sir.”
“Fuck Coca-Cola,” was my instant reply. “You can cut the patch of canvas off the back and keep your Coke logo. Then I’ll give you $7.50 for what’s left.”
Ended with the bag of wooden pins and the Coke logo for $16.00, and now I’m searching for an Acme clothesline reel—you know, those red metal drums that your grandmother had on her clothesline. Maybe your great-grandmother. Gram still has hers, still uses it, and those facts are likely why I always want my sheets, towels and underwear dried outside in the clean air.
When the three of us were in the shower enjoying the “Rain Forest Spring shower spray” of my fancy new shower head, I brought the subject into discussion. “What do you think about my clothesline idea, guys?”
The dogs looked at each other like I’d just asked them to go on a diet. Yoda raised his back leg and peed on the side of the shower stall in a spot where no water hit. “I guess that means you don’t especially like my idea.”
To reinforce my understanding that they were lukewarm on the installation, the Squirt squatted and yellowed the water at my feet. Which started me laughing. So, I peed on the wall where Yoda had and that started the dogs giggling. The Squirt made a joke about my Junior High School humor and I rinsed the pee off the wall with the shower head.
I really like that shower head. It mimics an afternoon shower in a rain forest with the sounds to go with the cascading water. It does have a downside as it encourages me to spend too much time in the shower and, therefore, makes me waste water.
OK, it doesn’t make me waste water, I simply waste water when I tarry too long in my new shower’s therapeutic sprays, and maybe my ADHD took too many showers in those last few paragraphs.
“Tell us about last night’s dinner while you scrub my back, Mooner. From the looks and smell of you when you got home, you had a ball. Spend some extra time on my sweet spot.”
For those of you wondering, Squirt’s sweet spot isn’t quite what you might think. It’s the top of her back where it meets the base of her tail. She says it’s too much effort to bend around to chew at the root of her tail when I’m more than willing to do the work for her.
I lathered the dogs’ washrag with ivory soap and then slathered the Squirt. Using their bath brush, I scratched and washed her coat. “It was quite an interesting night, guys. Linda is everything you thought and Mitch is a good mate for her. Turns out they are each, and both, deeper thinkers than we knew.”
I met Linda while purchasing building products for the remodel of La Casita Johnson de Santa Fe, and we hit it off in a friendly way. She’s frank and open in business and one of those people whose word you take with her first words spoken. That “look-you-in-the-eyes honesty” is an important character trait in business contacts and personal relationships both, and Linda has it. She and Mitch invited me to have dinner to meet Mitch and view the 1930′s casita they had remodeled.
“Dinner had been well thought-out and the conversation was great. The margaritas were good and strong, and my glass seemed to magically refill. I think I got a tad bit drunk.”
I applied the washrag to the goat dog and he whimpered with pleasure. “OK,” I admitted, “maybe I was a tad bit more than a tad bit drunk.”
I continued with the merits of the homemade salsa that I slathered on the perfectly-cooked beef flank tacos and the incredible dessert Linda and Mitch served as I rinsed the dogs. When finished, I placed my hands on the wall of the shower with my feet at shoulder’s width apart, and I stood with my the shower beating on my head and back. “Man, I need to stick to Carta Blanca beer, guys. I was having some wild tequila dreams before you woke me up.”
“Yes, we noticed. Tell us about the Ayahuasca, Mooner?” Squirt had a serious look on her face.
Huh? I didn’t remember anything about any Ayahuasca. “I didn’t say anything about that when I got home. I drank a gallon of water, peed and passed out.”
“You were talking in your sleep, asshole. ‘What was that guy’s name with the Ayahuasca?’ was what you kept saying,” she told me. “Sounded like this guy had an exotic disease that you had caught on one of your honeymoons.”
I often dream about the many hallucinogenic compounds in Nature’s bounty that I have ingested over my lifetime. I’ve tried to ingest them all in my personal research, and some more than others. “Oh, that. Ayahuasca is a South American mystic’s brew and native to the Amazon’s indigenous peoples. The only time I tried it was so long ago I can’t remember the name of the guy who had it. OK, or said he had it. I never did trust any potions from unknown sources back in the day. Didn’t stop me from ingesting them, but I was always leery of the promises made as to their efficacies. The guy who had it claimed it would ‘enlighten’ me and ‘change my life’.”
I can only remember that it looked like month-old V-8 Juice that had turned brown, and that my dosing didn’t produce any memorable enlightenments, and the only noticeable change I felt was in my queasy stomach. Then again, when you’ve been dosed with Gram’s potions all your life—starting at birth—enlightenments are no virgin territory when you hit your twenties.
If you’d like to read more about my first dosing of Gram’s magic mushroom potions, buy my silly fucking book by clicking over there ===}}}} on the blogie roller. Amazon has likely got them on sale for less than the cost of the paper pages inside the cover. OK, fuck it. Send me a proof of purchase and I’ll refund you a dollar. I only make about thirty-five cents on each sale, so take my offer seriously.
Which reminds me. How do you feel about tattoos on your skull? Would you date a woman with a tattoo of a snake eating an apple that covers the lady’s head beneath her hair? Would you have sex with her if the snake’s tail was inked down the crack of her ass?
Would you heartily debate these issues before dating and sexing her?
Manana, y’all.