Applegater., November 01, 2011, Page 14, Image 14

14 Winter 2011 Applegater
Tall Tales from the Editor
My bride Sioux, aka “Upper Man- big fir tree to my left, frantically barking
agement,” had gone to town to do our at unseen ghosts.
weekly grocery shopping. I was going
“How many times do I have to
to spend the day getting our vegetable tell you, McGee?” He looked at me as
garden and orchard in some sort of order. I admonished him. “I’m not a circus
That means pulling and killing any nasty springboard for your acrobatic tricks
weeds I might encounter.
when you try to catch real or imaginary
Our two-and-a-half-year-old bor- birds in our treetops. Geez, that tree is
der collie Barney McGee, aka “Monster ninety feet tall and, believe it or not, you
Boy,” was out in the yard with me. He can’t jump that high.”
was herding birds and squirrels from
I decided that it was time for a
tree to tree.
break. A cup or two of coffee and some
Utah, our senior border collie, lay aspirin for my back seemed in order.
on the gravel in our driveway. He was
As the coffee was brewing, McGee
bathing in the hot sun as he chased squir- convinced me to wrestle around with
rels and/or girls in his body-twitching him on the living room floor. The next
dream. I’m not sure why Utah prefers a thing I knew I was sprawled out again,
bed of gravel to, say, a softer grassy lawn. semiconscious with the most excruciat-
Maybe the heat from the sun-warmed ing pain in my head—pain worse than
gravel makes his arthritic back legs feel any migraine that I have ever been
better. Hmm.
blessed with.
I decided to lie down on the
Like a hammer driving a tenpenny
gravel in our driveway, too. No, it wasn’t nail to its head with one swing, our two
because I had been on a hard party heads collided during our wrestling
and found myself sprawled out like a match. McGee was licking my hand,
smashed pumpkin in the drive with the one that was trying to excavate my
gravel imbedded in
hearing aid that
my teeth. Not this McGee was licking my hand, the had been driven
time. No, this time one that was trying to excavate
from one side of
I wanted to see if my hearing aid that had been
my head to the
maybe it was more driven from one side of my head other.
comfortable than it to the other.
I staggered
looked. It was a sci-
into the kitchen,
entific experiment about which I might poured my cup of coffee and promptly
be able to write a paper and post it on burned my lip. I wondered if it was time
a website alongside all the other useless for something stronger than coffee but
drivel found on one’s computer.
noooooo, it wasn’t even 11 am yet. As
After a minute of sharp, jagged- if I cared.
edged gravel cutting into my back and
When Sioux got home, she asked,
rear, I gave the bed of gravel a comfort “Why are you in bed, honey? Are you
rating of zero.
sick?”
“How do you lay on this gravel for
“No, I just have multiple injuries.”
hours on end?” I asked Utah as I pushed
“From gardening?” she asked.
myself up off our meat-cleaver-hacking
“I wish. No, from our youngest
driveway. I had just about made it on boy,” I answered as McGee looked at us
my knees when I was hit in the back from the foot of the bed with his most
with the force of a flying karate kick that innocent eyes. “Refresh my memory,
knocked me flat on my stomach gasping honey. Didn’t I get a vasectomy decades
for breath. I felt as if a lineman for the ago so I wouldn’t have to deal with
Indianapolis Colts had just hit me in the wild, out-of-control children other than
backside—a hit that would be watched myself?”
over and over in instant replay while I
“That’s right, sweet love. That’s
was airborne catching the game-winning why we have dogs.”
pass in the end zone. (The same replay
I then told Sioux my story of the
also would show me dropping the ball, day. When she was leaving the room, I
over and over.)
asked, “Could you please turn out the
Once I was able to breathe again, light? I have a headache that feels like a
I slowly stood up and brushed off the herd of buffalo stampeding through my
debris—fir needles, broken fir cones, brain.”
twigs, sap with bits of gravel in it, dirt,
Headaches, headaches, headaches.
you name it. McGee was staring up the One can get them listening to national or
world events on the news, talk radio, dai-
ly conversations with friends or strangers.
Then there are the headaches provided
for the few people left who still read the
news in any depth or check sources to
actually verify information—especially
when it’s sent to you via e-mail. I can’t
believe the endless numbers of conspira-
cies, propaganda and outright lies that
continually circulate on the Internet.
Those can really get your head throbbing.
An ongoing super migraine was
caused when the mortgage market im-
ploded on itself. How is it that it’s all the
fault of the homeowner? The lending in-
stitutions okayed people who didn’t make
enough money to make payments and/
or never bothered to check facts on loan
applications. Why would they? They
made their money by selling bad paper
(loans) to unsuspecting investors. In the
end, after the stock market crashed, Wall
Street bankers still got their money (re-
member the “Bailout”?), while the rest
of the country went broke, causing more
people (through cutbacks in hours and
pay and job loss) to lose their homes.
What a headache I had recently
after reading a Forbes magazine article
in a doctor’s waiting room. The article
was titled “68 Most Powerful People
on Earth.” President Obama finished
in second place. What? An American
president who is not Number One? Do
you know who was Number One? Hu
Jintao. Who’s he, you might ask. He’s
the president of Communist Red China.
Oh yeah, did you know that China owns
around one trillion dollars in Wall Street
securities? Makes you wonder who really
owns Wall Street.
If you are one of the millions of
unemployed or terminally underem-
ployed, you might want to learn Chi-
nese—Mandarin dialect to be exact—for
it is China (among other countries) to
which we’ve outsourced our manufac-
turing and middle-management jobs. I
personally have a hard enough time with
the English language, so I’m staying here
to suffer through another headache.
How does your headache meter
read these days?
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Feed & Pet Supply
1750 Dowell Road
Grants Pass, OR 97527
Ph: 541-476-0402
Fax: 541-476-3622
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