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Is It Too Late To Be A Better Man? Depends

So. We three musketeers have just returned from four days over to Arizona, and while I must say the trip was a gigantic pain in the ass, the resultant outcomes are quite satisfying. The drive from Santa Fe includes passage through New Mexico and Arizona high deserts—long, flat plains with interesting geological features, yet not the first sprig of doggie grass—then a ride uphill to Flagstaff, then down a twisty mountain highway to Phoenix.
The Squirt—a cute little shit with a quite small puppy bladder—will squat to pee maybe thirty times in a given day, bathroom habits we share. Her for the small bladder, and me for my age, prostate cancer and those pesky visits with the Great Radiator. Sometimes, and I swear this is true, our visits to pee are coordinated like you hear that women’s’ periods can be. There was this one time back to the 1990’s when all the women residing at The Johnson Family Ranch seemed to fucking meld their periods into the same eight days over six consecutive months.
I’m certain that said melding was the root cause for a divorce. Number seven, should my irradiated memory be operating with some accuracy and functional alacrity.
We’d already stopped five times between Santa Fe and Gallup, NM, maybe once per thirty minutes. After the next half-hour’s driving, Squirt started squiggling in her harness and softly whimpering—usual early warning signs of her need to pee—and then she asked me to pull over.
Me, for my part in all this, well I have a crystal clear understanding of my adorable brown doggie’s bathroom habituals and spend considerable in their thoughts. Not pissing on rocks, won’t pee on concrete, hard pan, hot sand or anywhere near a fucking cactus. Nopers, our Squirtie girl requires a clear area containing at least one blade of grass in order to squat. Won’t pee in more than an inch of snow either. (See previous postings)
“Pull over, asshole, I’m about to pee my pants.”
Having anticipated this request, I answered her with, “OK, little lady, you just show me where.”
Long story short, after taking a small measure of fun from her discomforts, I pulled a puppy pee pad from its hidey hole in the trunk, a stash I’d secreted there, again in anticipation of this event. I unfolded and set the pad in the patch of barren sand she chose for this pee event, and the wind lifted the edge and sent it floating away. We chased it, Squirt caught it and then shook the shit from it like she’d caught a bunny rabbit and was preparating her mid-morn snack.
“For shitsakes, sweetie, why’d you do that?”
“What do you mean, dumbass, I’m a dog. Now hold this thing down or I’ll have the goat dog shit in the cooler.”
She’d do that. “You’d do that, wouldn’t you?”
I did my best to straighten the shredded paper-covered plastic pad and got on my knees in a best attempt to hold its tattered remains in the wind. Knees on two corners and hands on the others, I’m guessing I looked as though I were playing leap frog there to the side of the road. The small brown puppy surveyed the pad for a spot where enough absorbent paper was gathered to hold her water, positioned herself beneath the arch that was me, squatted and peed. She moved off the pad and then kicked sand onto the pad and into my face.
“Not funny, rat dog. Not funny at all.”
She looked over her shoulder, lips curled in a smile, and kicked another cup of sand my way. Me, ever thoughtful of time, economic and ecological efficiencies, brushed sand from my shorts, unzipped and relieved myself onto the pad. As I was zipping up, it dawned on me that perhaps I might have faced myself away from the traffic travelling on Interstate 40, a busy road. Then, I thought that could have peed without unzipping, an action that might have allowed maybe fifty cars to pass without an absolute understanding of what the gray ponytailed degenerate was doing twenty feet off the side of the highway.
ADD and its big brother, the dreaded ADHD, are amazing and intricate maladies. The same leaks in synapses that cause Shiny Object Syndrome can likewise create an environment whereat an otherwise thoughtful, sane man will pee in public to the entertainment, maybe horror, of a hundred passing cars. Focusing on a task with such intensity, honking horns pass through mental processes with no more thought than, “Horn sounds,” when that same honking horn is usually all it takes to derail a good session of sexing.
When we got to Phoenix at 5:26 PM local time, it was 98 degrees and the heat did that mirage thingie where the air waffles the light eerily. I’ve never understood that natural phenomenon. I remember spending countless hours chasing up and down our Ranch Road as a kid, trying to catch those shimmers in a butterfly net. Gram told me she’d reward me with a five dollar bill if I caught and brought her some. Mother told me it would be a fitting end to her tortures should I not pay attention to what was light traffic back then.
Which reminds me of my now dead sister. I’m finding myself thinking of her with unusually strong emotions—wanting time returned to enable me to give her a do-over. I keep having flashbacks of childhood when she and Mother battled, and rather than seeing a spoiled brat making her mother miserable, I see a third, unwanted child terrorized by the caregiver who had no love for her charge. If Mother’s dementia hadn’t already consumed her honest remembrances, I’d pack my bags for Texas to give her a giant chunk of my anger.
Dr. Sam I. Am-Johnson keeps telling me that it’s OK to be angry, but that I need to move on and forgive Mother. I’m not that big a man yet. I understand that there must have been things in my mother’s past that created the mentalities of her realities, that there are reasons for the selfishness and want/need to punish those around her.
It’s likely the same in my own case. I can’t blame all my idiocies on the ADD. Many of my bad decisions and hurtful actions have not been spawned from mental malady. And therein lies my rubs. I steadfastly hold myself accountable for my actions and more so as the years pass. I keep having these flashbacks of my life’s living and see things I did wrong. I’ve been convinced of the requirement to forgive myself before I can forgive others, but I’m yet to find purchase for that blanket of forgiveness in which I can wrap myself—cocoon and soothe and sheath my own damaged self.
It’s hard to share a blanket you don’t possess.
Anyway, the Squirt hated Phoenix, so that’s one crisis averted. “How can you expect us to spend our lives dancing the hot foot on bubbling pavement and concrete heated enough to fry eggs? What about Havana?”
Havana, indeed. Is it possible to endeavor to live a better life—work hard at it—and find the grace with which to forgive your own past transgressions? Will taking good care of my two puppy children make amends for not best fathering the human ones? Will cleaning dog shit from every imaginable surface make up for my inability to clean my father as he lay dying, his body slowly digesting itself and excreting seventy years of a good life into a Depends?
Am I a mess, or what? So, fuck Walmart!



This post first appeared on Mooner Johnson, please read the originial post: here

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Is It Too Late To Be A Better Man? Depends

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