Talkin' Shit About A Pretty Sunset

My boy Elliot was born November 16 at 4:27pm. He's 5 weeks premature so he's in the neonatal ICU for maybe over a week. He's got all kinds of tubes and catheters and crap running into him, but you can still see he's an outlaw, just by that little twinkle in his eye.



Already smiling and ready to man the winches or reel in a rockfish at a moments notice, perhaps.

Multiple choice quiz: a) this photo was taken at a Malaysian aquarium store and these are pets; b) this photo was taken at a Malaysian restaurant and these are dinner choices:

Took these photos from the top of the Jing Mao Tower. This is what I mean by shapeless motionless clouds blending to the sickly yellow pollution haze that's permanently hovering over the city:





The only thing I can imagine completing this skyline is a giant set of Mickey Mouse ears.

In Shanghai, my biz partner took me to a sushi place that I would have never been able to find if I hadn't been shown it. It was the quintessential unmarked place with two small red lanterns with Asian characters being the only thing indicating an awesome restaurant up the dirty black-carpet-covered stairs. Above, was some of the best sushi and sake I've ever had.

I took three pictures of the joint while sitting at the bar:

It's been raining every single afternoon here in Kuala Lumpur Malayasia and does not make for good picture-taking weather. But below is a photo I snapped of some of the world's tallest buildings taken with a nice light and foreground while trying to hold the Panasonic Lumix steady from a moving taxi cab that I liked:



God, I hate the words "Kuala Lumpur". Who the hell named a city that -- after lumping koalas?? I wish I wasn't here. Sure, I love seeing all my business partners but I should be home helping my wife with her pregnancy. Meanwhile, I'm schmoozing in Asia, waiting til Saturday ... taking decent photos of tall buildings.

The old cliché about swamp animals tasting like chicken couldn't be more wrong when it comes to Chinese turtle. The turtle leg soup was flavorless and the muddy broth stuck to my gums; the turtle neck salad was 70% bones; the turtle guts and onions tasted uninspired; and the turtle blood liquor was like a less sweet Jagermeister with tiny bits floating around in it.

I hate to seem like that fat weenie Andrew Zimmern on Travel Channel. Granted, I love to eat foods from all over the world, but I don't seek them out simply because they're strange, gross or exotic. I just like good-tasting food first and foremost. The reason I found myself eating the above monstrosity of a meal had nothing to do with shock TV though; I was eating all that turtle mess because the product I sell goes into turtle feed and I prefer more sales to less.

The Chinese believe all sorts of ancient bullshit about health -- sometimes referred to as Eastern "Medicine" by western hippies and yuppie fools. The Chinese still believe much of the "wisdom" derived from a period in time when nothing was known about human nutrition, disease or health -- before science, really. Simply because this knowledge has the cachet of being from a long long time ago, it has a vast following. Therefore, many Chinese think eating turtle will keep their sexual drive and energy up, and will make women's skin youthful.

The turtle farming region is in Hangzhou, an industrial city 110 miles southwest of Shanghai. If you've never been to China, you cannot imagine this level of pollution and industry. I've been to nearly every country in Asia and I'd never seen anything like this. Imagine that region on I-75 right before you get into Detroit or that section of northern New Jersey right before you get into Manhattan -- the sections where you pass a natureless field of industrial smokestacks and the car starts to stink up. Now imagine those smokestack regions stretching for miles and miles: that's the entire highway from Shanghai to Hangzhou, and for all I know, it could extend another 200 miles past Hangzhou.

A sickly yellow haze sits over this entire region. You can barely see the buildings only a half mile in the distance and you can't distinguish the separation between the motionless shapeless clouds and the polluted air-soup that envelops everything below. It was through this industrial endlessness where we stopped at the turtle farm for lunch and meetings.

"Turtle farm" makes it sounds more complicated than reality. We walked down a dirty highway and turned off down a gravel road that looked like I was entering the city dump, then past piles and piles of industrial trash before reaching this turtle-rearing facility. The farm is split into two sections -- outdoor and indoor. The outdoor ponds are massive acre-long concrete tanks holding muddy water and ugly-ass turtles whom nature cursed with heads that look like human penises with tiny pig noses stuck on the tip. The indoor ponds were in giant shacks made of corrugated metal roofs and thick black tarps. The hot stale air hit me as the door was opened, and I shined a flashlight into steamy darkness to see hundreds of tiny dickheads sticking out of the dirty water in concrete tanks.

The farmer reached into one of the writhing dark tanks, and pulled out this snapping beast whose neck stretched like some pornographic cock trying to bite us:



Here it is trying to attack us:



Luckily, I have a strong stomach. I have to in order to do business in China, but damn, after about a week of Chinese food I crave pizza and burgers like crazy.

In the last year I've done less reading than I'm happy with. Mostly, if a book doesn't grab me in the first chapter, I put it down. But damn, when a book catches my attention it changes my whole mood. That is now happening with a book called In Tidal Waters I found online written by some dead Brit named Francis Cooke who sailed the mouth of the Thames back in the 1890s.

Every chapter is a rambling witty story of sailing disasters on a number of small boats, written in a way that only an Englishman could tell. I could relate to a lot of it, seriously.

On his first sailboat outing, at the last minute he discovers that he's about to spend several nights aboard a 30-foot boat with nine friends -- NINE. They all end up in the cabin with a coal-burning stove without a chimney and are coughed out. Several of the crew say fuck it and sleep in a nearby inn. (Hello, 2005 on the Segel?). Here's Cooke's description of the first night:

"I then learnt that the interior of the yacht was even less inviting than the exterior had appeared in the uncertain light. The cabin, in the absence of a fore-bulkhead, was open right through and quite destitute of furniture or fittings. A bunk ran down either side forming seats, but the roof was so low that it was impossible to sit upright. As there were no cushions I could only conclude that her owners made a practice of sleeping upon what Dan Leno used to describe as 'pure wood.' Water dripped freely from the underside of the deck, and a cheap tin paraffin lamp with a smoky glass smelt abominably. Into this nauseating den the whole nine of us crowded."

And I love this description of trying to get some sleep onboard:

"I think I may say without any great departure from the truth that I never passed a more uncomfortable night in my life. Sitting huddled up in my overcoat with my chin almost on my knees, I was chilled to the marrow and soon began to feel that dry, prickly sensation all over my body which I have since learnt is peculiar to sleeping in small yachts in the winter. One by one my companions dropped off into a troubled sleep, and most of them snored abominably."

All the boats the authors sails are unseaworthy tubs that are constantly running aground, colliding with other boats, or sinking. For some reason, he always goes sailing in the worst part of the year -- winter. Twice in the book, he goes out sailing on Christmas day with a 12-pound turkey which he and his mate proceed to cook in a frying pan with some bacon. God knows how he did that. I'll have to try it.

All the descriptions of misery actually made me want to sail even more this winter. These guys were sailing back before we had quality portable heaters that don't suffocate you in confined spaces, depth sounders, and electric lights.

As my friend Jason said, people were made of "different stuff" back then.

You can download the entire book from this Canadian library. (It's definitely not on Amazon.com).

Yesterday I arrived in Austin Texas by airplane and witnessed an American soldier's flag-draped coffin being unloaded onto a hearse while his mother wept in the rain on the tarmac, her body so overcome with emotion that she was shaking -- heaving up and down.

This makes war come closer to me than before. From the plane, I could see this mother's eyes.

When we took off from Dallas we were told to wait to exit the plane so the military escort could depart first -- also that we'd have to wait for our luggage so the coffin could come off first. All this sounded pretty routine and the gravity didn't hit me at that moment.

We touched down in the rain and a big van pulled next to the plane followed by 15 motorcycles and a hearse with small US flags on the front windows.

Out came the family -- a group of 25 -- only with one umbrella. I suppose all of them were so overcome with emotion that no one remembered to bring more than one umbrella.

I unloaded my carry-on, and moved toward the exit, but stopped to watch the heavy sadness unfolding below me. I looked out the plane window and directly underneath me, they wheeled up a black conveyor and waited. The family was directed closer to the plane to the point where I was facing the grieving mother through the small airplane window only 40 feet down through the drizzle.

There was more waiting and I could feel the tension as the family held onto one another in mournful anticipation.

They just looked like any suburban family I've known -- a lot like mine. Just normal people waiting for a dead loved one.

Finally I could see the corner of the American-flag-draped coffin moving slowly out from directly underneath me into the rain. The coffin was wrapped in red, white and blue, and sitting on a shallow pine cart. The six military escorts came forward, each to carry the coffin to the hearse a few feet away.

I couldn't believe watching this crying mother so closely. Her image is burned into my memory. There's nothing like this -- to see it personally. More people should have to see this. No one should take going to war lightly.

I walked around inside several turkey houses yesterday for the first time.

Amongst these thousands of ugly animals, I kept thinking, 'what's all the fuss about this being inhumane?' It certainly is not. In fact, the grower has huge incentive to keep the birds in the best of health, otherwise the animal dies and is a loss for the company.

When talking to most people who live in and around cities, the feeling is that animal rearing facilities are horrible hell holes. This attitude is also in force in the book Omnivore's Dilemma which I read a year ago. In the entire book, it's just assumed that "industrial" animal-rearing facilities are cruel. I disagree.

First, broiler chickens and turkeys are not raised in cages. They are raised in open-floor housing that's nearly double the size of a football field -- huge. They do pack a massive number of birds in that space, as you can see in this picture, but as soon as you walk amongst the birds and they move out of the way, you can see that they have plenty of room to walk around. The only time these birds are in cages is the few minutes when they are put on the truck to the slaughterhouse where they are very quickly killed.

Most poultry raised in tight cages are for eggs, so, ironically, if you are an ovo-lacto vegetarian -- but not vegan -- your ethical choice is arguably worse than someone who eats meat but not eggs. How ironic. (BTW, I do not believe that keeping layer chickens in cages is cruel).

I also visited a house where they had just introduced 2-day-old turkey poults. These little guys have to be taught how to eat, drink and sometimes stand. I noticed that several of the baby birds had fallen over and I thought they were dying, but apparently these birds just aren't strong enough to stand on their own so it's the farmer's job to stand them back up by hand and get them tromping around again. It was sweet watching the farm manager give such care -- kind of like the time I was in the Philippines and the shrimp farmer actually gave little massages to the shrimp he thought were suffering from cramps.

I have yet to visit a slaughterhouse but I have seen video of how meat animals are killed. This also is entirely humane to any reasonable person.

People -- especially those in urban areas -- should feel fine about the meat they eat. Maybe most people are squeamish and delicate about this, but if they visited a poultry house, they would see that it's perfectly humane and as professionally-run as possible. If you're unsure how you feel, get over it or become a vegan; those are the only two legitimate choices.

The other weekend I realized I have two man caves -- one in my basement with a full bar, and a second in the garage when I set up a wooden table and plastic chairs as a smoking lounge next to the 50-year-old car.

Found myself there with my old friend Jason at 3:00am, smoking and waiting to perhaps catch late-night activities in the alley behind my house.

Jason and I had mixed rum-heavy Zombie Cocktails after everyone ate a bushel-load of crabs and left. Man, this is why I love having a home bar. At 3:00am while listening to sea chanteys on the stereo, Jason and I were grinding ice, squeezing lemons and limes, pushing pineapple through a strainer, measuring brown sugar and bitters, and pouring Bacardi 151 into a cocktail that was created by Don the Beachcomber back in 1934.

And then we took advantage of the fact that we were in Washington DC: while sitting in my garage smoking Marlboro Lights, we decided to pump up the bike tires and head down to the Mall and take a dark tour of the monuments. I tore up the garage for the pump, and we headed down.

We hit the Einstein Memorial, Vietnam, Lincoln, World War II, and Korean War Memorial.

Touring monuments in the daytime sober is not nearly as good as taking a leisurely bike ride in the cool summer evening with a good buzz rolling when no tourists are in sight. That's the kind of drunken moment that can get me all philosophical and nearly teary-eyed.

Sitting in Einstein's lap felt like I understood the Theory of Relativity -- looking up at the stars in the sky and down at the solar system inlay in the black marble. The glowing white stone of the World War II Memorial made me babble about my late grandfather who was in the Navy from '33 to '63 -- a subject that gets me. And the Korean War Memorial, man -- it's really worth seeing lit up at night.

Jase, in the lap of genius:



And looking for the Big Dipper in the inlays:



Lincoln at night:



The Gettysburg Address at 4:00am:



That eerie view of over-sized soldiers in Korea:

Most of the screaming about Obama's levels of deficit spending ($1.75 trillion in 2009) is because people cannot fathom the number one trillion. Oh my god!! A trillion!!??! BWAHAHHHH ....

But the debt needs to be be considered as a percentage of GDP. The red line is the US national debt as a percentage of GDP since 1940:



This is entirely manageable, especially considering how bad this recession is. Do people still not understand how unique this recession is? And Obama's level of debt is NOTHING compared to Japan:



Paul Krugman put it best:

"The projected debt/GDP ratio will be high by US historical standards, but within a range that a number of advanced countries have entered without catastrophe in the past."

Holy crap, is there a manlier vehicle on the planet earth? Check out the 1952 62-foot LARC Amphibious Landing Craft -- yours for only $245,000. Anyone wanna go in on it with me?

It's also hilarious that the contact person to buy the LARC is a guy named Bob Everhard.

Pictures:

I have a $500 bet with my gold-standard-espousing friend Matt that not one major industrial country will go to the gold standard. My time frame was originally in the next 10 years (or ever), but that's no fun for betting, so we've reduced it to 5 years, ending on April 13, 2013.

So for the past year, Matt has been sending me occasional links to articles like this one about Zimbabwe whenever there is any word uttered by a government about possibly backing a country's currency with gold.

Come on, Zimbabwe? Really? The country with 231 million percent inflation? Shit, if you were to propose backing Zimbabwe's currency with seashells, it would be more than reasonable.

The sonogram revealed a cigar-smoking handsome male that looks strikingly like me.

I've been thinking a lot about my life after Elliot is born in December.

Plenty of people live full happy lives without children, but if I were to go through the rest of my days without having raised a child, I will have missed an essential part of the life experience. (I speak for no one but myself on this).

I'm 35, and I will likely keep living longer than I have already lived. If we had decided not to have a child, what would lie ahead for 35+ more years? More drinking, traveling and hanging out with friends like we did in our 20s? Then, when the friends all have children, we're stuck with only drinking, traveling and surrounding ourselves with more and more material things until the day we die? Don't get me wrong, I love Katie so much that I start to miss her when she comes home even a little bit late, but I could not see myself at age 45 feeling I'm living a full life merely on career and traveling with just the two of us.

Thank god I'm gonna have a little dude to eat weird food with, teach to sail, light shit on fire, catch and cut up bloody fish, skateboard, teach guitar to, look for fossilized shark teeth, teach to drive a stick shift, and do 800 other things I would not have done otherwise. It's like life will begin anew in four months.

NOTE: I don't wanna hear from parents warning me of all the sleep loss and shitty diapers. What, do you think I can't handle being around other people's feces and losing sleep? Have you not noticed that for seven years I've been going on 4-day sailing trips with no fewer than four other dudes?? I am ready.

Music has qualities like smell does; both can take you back in time and for an instant you feel a calm out-of-body experience that can make history more real than anything you read in a book. Think about the time you inhaled a passerby's perfume that your ex-girlfriend used to wear 10 years ago, or that terrible Lords of Acid song you heard in the girls' dormitory back in college.

Listening to a well-sung sea chantey makes me feel warm and comfortable, as if I'm plying Chesapeake waters in a creaky wooden sailboat before stinkpots and fiberglass hulls existed -- the aural equivalent of drinking a good scotch on a snowy night in front of a fireplace while chatting with Herman Melville in the late 1800s. And few people did it quite as well as Johnny Collins who, I just found out, passed away last month. Here he is doing what he did best:



I bought this great shantyman's album a while ago and it gets lots of play every year during my annual sailing trip. I'm now at a stage in my life when music is not very important to me, but these old sailing songs always lift my mood and make me feel warm inside. In part, I thank Johnny Collins for that. God bless his soul.

I've never met a man who does not love pressure washers. My father-in-law is fascinated by them, telling me that he pressure-washed nearly everything he could see when he first bought one. And today I realized how addicting they are when I rented one from Home Depot for $56.

It's about the messiest job you can do. A gasoline-powered engine forces the water through the hose and jets out in a dangerous knife-like spray so you have to wear protective goggles or dirt nails your eyes at 50 miles-per hour. My entire body was covered in grime from the backyard, but mainly that was because I was not adverse to aiming the nozzle at nearly everything in my path -- leaves, weeds, and broken pieces of concrete. Outta my way! It was awesome.

Last Saturday the wife, dogs and I sailed to the Wye River. We'd caught crabs beforehand at the dock and put them in a cooler to eat later. After hours of sailing across the Bay, I reached in with tongs to pick them up to put in the pot of steaming water, and as you can see from the below video, blue crabs are REALLY aggressive and if they pinch you, you will bleed like a murder victim.



Most people only see crabs when they're dead and red and headed to your mouth but they don't realize what assholes they are when they're alive. My wife found that out the hard way when one pinched her finger and she bled for nearly an hour.

I couldn't resist re-posting this fishing report that I found on a Bay fishing message board:

"----POSTED: 7/03/2009 ... The most unreal day of rockfishing in my life-----

I have to prelude this by telling everyone that this year has been stellar when you talk about catching rockfish. Methods of catching them has varied depending on the locations but most importantly we know for a fact that the rockfish population in the Chesapeake is strong to say the least. Regardless of how many fish we have caught this year, what we experienced on Friday morning takes the cake.

After about a 25 minute boat ride, we got there and had the spot to ourselves. 7:30AM came and I just happened to turn around and scan the bay for signs of fish. Bingo. I saw a few birds working about a mile from our location. Immediately we all agreed to head over and scope out the situation.

What we saw as we got closer to the birds shocked us all and dropped jaws. I thought I had seen a few birds and I was right. What I couldn't see from the distance was a tremendous school of feeding rockfish just tearing up the surface. This school was gigantic and had to be every bit of a half a mile long. The best part was, no one else was around except us. Rockfish were going crazy churning up the water completely surrounding us. They were feeding on what I have always called silversides, little 3" thin semi-transparent baitfish that others may call spearing or bay anchovies.

We started casting surface plugs to them and was averaging 3 or 4 strikes per cast. A fish was guaranteed almost every cast. The most intriguing part about it was that these were not your typical summer schoolie rockfish. They were big and hungry. Almost every one was over 25 inches with some of them over 35. We had our over/under 28" limits for all four of us in 25 minutes.

This is when it really began to get interesting. Typically, when you find fish breaking like this it might last for 35 minutes, an hour if you are really lucky, and then they will disappear deep again. This is what separated this trip into a whole other category. The fish didn't feed for an hour. Not two hours. No these rockfish either really liked what they were eating or the fish gods were smiling over our boat this morning, because this same group of rock fed--nonstop--for get this--SIX HOURS. They were moving really fast and we constantly had to stay on the outboard to keep up with them. After it was all said and done with, we had followed this same school of fish for 23 miles. Totally unreal.

How many rockfish can you catch in six hours of nonstop bailing rock on every cast between four people? I have no idea. We lost count but had a serious conversation afterwards and felt comfortable saying that we easily caught somewhere between 200-300 rock, almost all of which were over 25 inches. None of us could lift our arms over our heads afterwards and I personally was bleeding from almost every appendage. My thumbs were so raw that I couldn't do anything but hold a cold beer for 24 hours to cool the burning.

After about an hour of catching them on topwater I got so freaking tired of dealing with the lovely combination of thrashing boated rockfish and big treble hooks that I had to switch to something with a single hook. I caught them on everything i threw at them, bucktails, spoons, swimbaits...but I settled on a 7" white bass assassin on a jighead as my bait of choice for the rest of the day. They would hit this bait SO HARD that it would take the rod out of your hands if you weren't paying attention. It was amazing seeing all the feeding fish around us. They were literally jumping completely out of the water all around us.

I've caught a lot of rockfish in my few years around, but I've never seen such a huge school of rock, all of such quality size, that fed for so long in one morning without ever disapearing 23 miles across the bay. It was totally unreal and I think may have been the best day I have ever had on the Chesapeake.

JF"

Every day around lunch time I watch my next-door neighbor stumble up to his door drunkenly after his all-night shift. And he is REALLY hammered every time. For example, today, he opened the screen door and started knocking into empty air. I suppose he thought the main door was closed so he just knocked into nothingness.

Today I was doing some painting outside when I heard him cursing and shouting at someone -- maybe to no one in particular. A sure sign that he was plastered. Then I noticed his cab.

The rear bumper was dangling off and dragging the ground and his side view mirror was smashed and dangling by a single wire. As I walked closer, I saw that the entire right side had dents all along it -- an obvious side swipe of another car or a guardrail.

I hope he doesn't kill someone. Maybe I should report him. To all DC residents: perhaps be safe and choose the Muslim cabbies. At least they're teetotalers.

I'm addicted to a show on Animal Planet called Whale Wars that chronicles the high-seas tomfoolery of a "captain" who values the lives of whales more than humans.

The show reveals this raw truth in every episode. In the season opener the captain decides to plow through expansive iceberg fields in pursuit of Japanese whalers even though the ship's hull is not built to withstand ice. He sends two 20-somethings into the hold, allegedly to patch an oncoming breach in the metal hull (like they could actually do anything to stop water of that kind!) The kids nervously watch as the steel creaks and flexes and the paint cracks on the inside from the massive ice chunks trying to send them to Davy Jones' Locker. The entire crew was in real danger of dying, simply because the captain wanted to get to some evil whaling ship so they could throw stink bombs at them -- really, stink bombs. Their main tactic is to throw stink bombs at whaling ships, and nearly die trying.

In last night's show, we again see what a heartless bastard Watson is when he finds that one of the crewmembers from the Japanese whaling ship has fallen overboard. That evening, Watson spots the whaling ships' spotlight looking for their dead shipmate. But no matter -- Watson decides it's time to send out their fleet of fast inflatables to harass them with the nautical equivalent of toilet-papering an enemy's house. Most of the crew is obviously uncomfortable being pissant nuisances while the whaling ship is searching for a dead person, but captain's orders are orders. They suit up and go.

The only reason Watson is able to accomplish such dangerous acts is because he has surrounded himself with the young and the stupid. Some of the young people onboard are genuinely smart but, I think, blinded by their idealism that they're actually saving whales. The stupidest person onboard is certainly Peter Brown, Watson's sycophantic First Mate. We witness his terrible leadership one time when it appears that the scout boat is lost at sea, and he has no idea what to do. One of the younger crew takes over to begin a search pattern and they find the lost boat. Last night Brown ignored satellite images of ice flows because he trusts his own instincts better than "computer screens"; he misses the break in the ice which could have brought them to safety. It's not until the more intelligent younger members of the crew come on watch to save the crew from being crushed by ice.

And all of this brings me to the question of why these people think they're saving the Earth by playing kids' games with massive ships and a big budget in the middle of the most dangerous oceans. Let's be honest with ourselves: in 2009, people support people like Paul Watson because whales are charismatic mega fauna, not because saving the few that are currently hunted is key to saving biodiversity. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad there's an international ban on whaling. Whales are beautiful animals and that's why they deserve protection. If whales were small and ugly, no one would give a fuck (or give less of a fuck). Japan kills 1,000 minke and fin whales per year and while there is disagreement, it's not a threat to the species. Even so, Japan should be stopped, but the main thing Watson's adventures do is make good TV. Even Greenpeace agrees with me.

UPDATE: I was wrong about Watson choosing to harass the whalers while they were looking for their dead crewmate. Watson radioed to the whaling ship that he would not harass them and would assist in the search for the dead man. However, the whaling ship radioed back and said they did not require cooperation from "environmental terrorists."

After a year and a half of trying, I finally put a baby in my lady. For all you in your thirties who're thinking about trying to get pregs, don't delay. It's not as easy as you think even for someone with an extrodinarily high sperm count such as myself [breathes on fingernails, brushes them on shirt]. As far as I know, pregnant women who're over 35 are considered high risk pregnancies.

I'm logging a mental list of all the things people say I am not going to be able to do after I have a kid. Then, I'm going to go through that list and check them off after I do them. I mean, come on, I can just bungie-cord the stroller to the mast and sail the seas like before. That's no issue as far as I'm concerned.

And I vow to talk on and on ad nauseam about babies and parenting around people who don't have kids. Childless people LOVE that.

One of the first people I looked up to and thought was a cool dude was my grandfather. As a kid I remember wishing I was more like him: bony hands, spots on his arms, always concerned about getting sunburned, loving fishing, taking me fishing, telling stories about being in the Navy -- the skinny red-headed guy who had fight in him down to the end (1997).

This may not sound becoming, but a year after his wife of 60 years died, he had some rough spots. The story goes that my mom found him alone in his Norfolk Virginia home with empty cans of Coors Light strewn about, passed out on the couch (he'd only been a moderate drinker). At the time, that was hard to hear, but now I think that was the best course of action for him to take. When his lady died, it was rough for the old man. Why not show some sympathy and say, hey, he at least deserved to get blotto one last time before the nursing home.

On the subject of getting old, you have to admit, one of the worst clichés in the universe is "Life is Short." God damn, it is NOT. I can prove it.

I am 35 years old and feel like I've been living for-fucking-ever. How many animals on the Earth can claim to have been around 35 years? It's amazing to think that I will likely continue to live for as long as I have already been living. You follow me here? My life is probably not even half over, if statistics are correct.

Here's another part: I've already got the old-guy habits and tastes down pat. Scotch? Like it. Classic cars? Got one. Old sailboats? Love 'em forever. Now all I need is golf, but I have no one to go with, despite having some of the best courses close by ... Derek?