At Every Occassion I'll Be Ready For The Funeral

My last post was missing one Bigfoot picture.

My brother said, "The funny thing about the Bigfoot Crossing is that there really is a guy in town that looks like the thing in the picture. We all want to change the sign to say 'Boozer Crossing.'" Because how could the guy that resembles Bigfoot NOT have a name like Boozer?

After I finished taking Bigfoot pictures I went back to the house to take a shower and dress for my aunt's funeral. My brother and I made it to the church exactly in time for the service, where a preacher pretty much just read her obituary. Then he invited everyone to stand up and tell memories of the deceased. It sounds like she was a very strong woman who loved to garden and widdle figures out of wood. I told the one story I had about her: After years and years of not seeing me, she looked me over as a man and said, "So you are Emmett Junior. You were the only one who could ever get away with stealing my french fries."

After the funeral we all went to a luncheon at the local fire station. The parents of a girl I knew in high school talked to me for a long time about whatever. Just because I knew their daughter in high school, I guess. Then I told my parents that it would be shame if I came all this way and stopped short of seeing the ocean by 30 miles. They were already thinking of heading out to the coast so we tried to peel off from the luncheon and go.

While we were outside in the parking lot I got this cool picture of my sister Erika half a second after she got nailed in the chest with a snowball by my sister Sarah. When we got in the van, Erika pointed out that Sarah's skin is getting lighter and lighter, "You're turning white," she said.



There is a tradition of mourning in our tribe. When a bad thing happens you go to a creek or river and "wash up" and then you cut off some hair and burn it in the fire. Then you sit out of dances and ceremonies for a year. After that, the mourning has past and you move on with life.

Before we headed for the ocean my family wanted to stop at the river to wash up. Those snow storms that came through last week really hit the area hard and knocked down trees and created landslides that took out roads. Phones and electricity were out for days. When I was there, large trees laid in the ditches along the highways. We were supposed to spread my aunt's ashes in a field on top of a mountian but the roads were too bad to do it that day. When we tried to go to a campground to wash the road was blocked by fallen trees. I said, "You see, if I lived here I would definitely have a chainsaw and take it with me everywhere I went. When I came across a fallen tree like this, I'd just pull it out and WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR! Then I'd yell at the kids. GET OUT THERE AND LOAD UP THAT WOOD!"

I even mentioned it to my step-mother, "It's strange that in Utah you have to fight hard to keep every blade of grass alive but here, if you don't constantly fight it off, the forest will swallow you up."

We went to a creek where it feeds into the river just below the house where my dad was raised and we washed up. It was funny, it really did feel good to splash the cold water over my face and rub it up and down my arms; Even in comparison to wading in the river that morning.

We were in the car driving and Erika asked Sarah, "Will you speak to me in Hupa? I try to speak in Hupa every day."

Sarah said, "I can't. I can't remember anything."

Erika said, "Just say anything. Anything that comes to mind."

Sarah said, "Nothing is coming to mind."

I suggested, "The rivers will run red with blood..."

Sarah said, "I can't say that!"

Despite that I barely know a word of the language, I said, "You don't know RIVER? You don't know RED? Gee, Sarah, you really are getting whiter and whiter everyday."

Erika thought for a moment, then asked, "What is the Hupa word for DIARREAH? It translates from IT RUNS THROUGH ME."

We couldn't figure it out just then. But we went to my favorite beach in Trinidad. Here I am:



When we ran out on the beach, I picked up a giant piece of kelp and starting swinging it around like a jump rope. I yelled, "Somebody jump in!"

Erika ran over and started jumping. She jumped over it ONE TIME before it came around again and thwacked her in the shin. I think it kind of bummed us out. She wanted a do-over but, before we could, a bunch of copycat losers started swinging there own kelp around and we didn't want any further part in it.

Then we ate dinner at a restaurant on the dock. We made a quick visit to my cousin and her son (I tuned his guitar and played him some Chili Pepper songs) and then decided to call it a night. When we stopped for gas I saw an old friend from high school (Shane M.). He was excited to see me. He was there with a bunch of high school kids (as a teacher's aid/couselor). He said, "We're having a great time. We went to a basketball game and then we went to a really funny movie (Wildhogs) and you were one of the funniest guys I knew in high school."

He said it just like that. It made me laugh. I said, "I think everyone thought you were funnier than I was." And then, just as quickly, he said, "I heard two days ago that our old classmate, Leon V., just died of a drug overdose on the reservation." (I'm sorry for saying that bluntly for anyone who reads this and may have known Leon; that is how I was told, too.) It put a damper on the conversation. I told him that I would be coming through again pretty soon and that I would probably bump into him. He said he would like that.

Even though I had to wake up at 4 am to get to my plane, when we got back to my parents house, I stayed up past midnight watching Sienfeld reruns with my little sisters. Because how often do I get a chance to do that? I'd do it again. It was a full day.

A day at the farm

Olivia: "Daddy, why do people build bridges?"

Me: "Why did the chicken cross the road? It's the same thing."

Olivia: "That's a funny joke."

Me: "Yup. And full of chicken wisdom."

I'm coming up only to show you wrong

We got to the reservation late Friday night and my brother and I went to the house of my deceased aunt to sleep. It's a nice house but it feels strange because the house is full of odds and ends that I haven't seen for about 25 years, like a suitcase-sized portable television that we took on a ski trip to Lake Tahoe when I was in kindergarten. I think my dad must have dropped off all of his stuff at my aunt's house when my parents got divorced so long ago. I fell asleep on the couch watching Cosby Show reruns with my brother.

I had mentioned to my father that I would like to wake up early and walk down to the river. He said that sounded like a good idea but when I showed up in the morning they said he had already been running on his treadmill and was in the shower. So I made Erika walk me down to the river so I could skip some rocks and wade around in the fast moving water.

My brother said he wanted to drive over to Salyer (which is the area where my mother grew up on her father's hillside) to get a different shirt to wear to the funeral. I told him I would like to go with him, just to take in the scenery. When we got to Willow Creek, where I attended elementary school, we looked around for my Uncle Philip (my mother's uncle) because he's always hanging around town and he's a funny guy. We saw his car but couldn't find him.

Then my brother asked me where I would like to be dropped off. I didn't want to be dropped off anywhere but he insisted. I will try not to betray my brother too much here, but if you knew all of the details of my brother's relationship with girls then you would know that, in comparison, Shakespeare didn't know the meaning of the word Drama. To give you a taste, there was the drug-dealing tweaker who broke his neck and he is currently involved in a custody battle for his son with a mean lesbian. He doesn't want the lesbian messing with him so he doesn't tell anyone the exact locations of where he keeps his stuff or sleeps on any given night. Not even me, his only brother. So I told him to drop me off where the rivers meet at the foot of the mountain where my mother was raised. It's the spot where the Indian city was destroyed and a lumber mill was erected. I walked around and took some pictures and he told me he'd be back to pick me up in a few minutes.

I also figured I would pay some homage to Bigfoot being as Willow Creek thinks of itself as the biggest Bigfoot capitol this side of Seskatchewan. I seriously took all of these pictures within a five minute period and they are just the tip of the iceberg.

(This first one is of the South Fork River pouring into the Trinity River which later pours into the Klamath River. They are all in a great hurry to get to the ocean.)


When you live in a place like this, it just becomes normal: There is a river and there is a river and there is all the bigfoot stuff. It makes sense at the time.



This one is known as the "Bigbird Bigfoot" he looks like he has feathers.



This one was carved by the tweaker-girlz father. When he wasn't cutting his own CD of folk music or farming illegal substances, he liked to fire up a chainsaw and make art. When I buy a chainsaw I will definitely make some sculptures.




Man oh man, is it taking me a long time to tell you about one day's worth of stuff. More later.

I'm coming up only to hold you under

I was going to describe my trip to California as "As fun as a funeral can be" but no sooner had I thought it than I knew that it was far from true. For instance, my friend Gordon constantly talks about how he wants his funeral to be a romping good time with door prizes, a potluck and a giveaway of all of his stuff. But the bottom line is: I had a good time.

The trip started with a snowy and salty drive to Utah's airport. I wanted to bring sandals but refused to put more than one pair of shoes in my bag and I already had dress shoes in there. I didn't want trouble with airport security thinking I was a complete loon by showing up in Tevas while snow came down from the sky. So the sandals stayed home and Security only stole my hair gel.

I probably still looked suspicious because I had worked until 4 am and was at the airport around 8 am. My wife had run outside to our old shed to find a bag as I threw my clothes together at the very last moment. At the airport I tried to organize the loose straps on the bag and, when I did, spiders fell out and crawled away. So there I was, a zombie man with cobwebs and spiders streaming off of my backpack.

I make the best first impressions in the world.

The plane ride to Vegas was fast and pleasant and I read quite a few pages of "Cadillac Desert" which Gordon loaned me well over a year ago. A guy stood next to me in line for my second flight and I had to hide my face to keep from busting out laughing. He was on his cell phone saying stuff like, "I will NOT travel with those people. I like them. But I will not travel with them. They go on vacation. They eat at MCDONALDS! They stay... at the TRAVELODGE! I will not travel with them. Let me tell you about that guy, okay? He's worth $9 million but goes to the DMV to bilk some guy out of $20. Gimme a break. No. You're not driving to Truckee. Because. It's snowing in Truckee. You don't drive in the SNOW..."

He just kept going and going and I had to pretend like I was sneezing so he wouldn't know I was laughing at him. But the middle-aged lady in front of me had a catface tattoo right on the nape of her neck. A catface with hypnotic green eyes, nose, whiskers, mouth... but no face shape outline. When she moved the catface seemed to come alive. It put me in a trance with its stare.

On the ride from Vegas to Sacramento I tried to read but started dozing off. Instead, I just closed the book and kept to myself. The lady sitting next to me had spent the beginning of the trip reading crappy Hollywood rags but she saw the book I was reading and started to ask me about it. I told her it was about the issue water shortage in the western United States. She was impressed and asked if it was a new book. I told her, I think it was written in the mid-80's but is more relevant today than ever. She asked if I was reading it for school and when I told her I was just a nerd she laughed and slapped my arm. Then she talked to me about a great many issues we face in the world today, even in China, and told me it made her happy that people from the younger generation were concerned about them, too. I wondered why a lady like this had been reading Hollywood gossip all morning.

After we had spent sufficient time getting to know each other, she took the plunge and asked me for a favor: "Every year, my husband and I do a WEIRD Christmas card and we were wondering if you could come to baggage claim and take a picture with us when we get to Sacramento?"

Huh?

Have you ever been to the Sacramento airport? In the baggage claim area they have towers of luggage from the floor to the ceiling, and these people wanted me to take a picture of them pretending to climb the luggage towers for next year's Christmas card. I told them that my brother was driving over to Stanford to pick up my little sister, Erika, and then they were coming to get me. I had my bag with me and we would probably leave as quick as we could exit the building.

But then it turns out my brother was 2 hours late picking me up. So I went to baggage claim and saw them choosing the best angle for a picture. They saw me approach and their faces lit up. "HE'S HERE!" They shouted. The base of the towers are like dumpsters and one of them said, "Samson." That is the tower they wanted to climb because it was the name of the man's grandfather who had been a strongman for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Since I had time to kill, I took a ton of pictures for them. When they left they offered to take me down to Sanoma with them. I told them, maybe another time.

I wasn't upset about waiting but I was hungry. It was about 5pm and I hadn't really eaten anything all day. I was trying hard to avoid eating airport food. To be on the safe side, I decided to walk to Terminal B to make sure by brother wasn't looking for me on any of the loser airlines. During the walk I took this picture, because wouldn't every garage be significantly awesomer if it just had, like... bird thingies on it?



When I walked back to Terminal A, I finally cracked and tried to buy a crappy pizza. The young girl at the counter was from somewhere near Russia. I asked her, "What do you have to drink?" She just pointed at a cooler at the end of the counter, "Coke, Sprite, Juice." I walked down and grabbed a bottle. Then I asked, "Can I get a pepperoni pizza?" No response. I asked again, "Can I get a pepperoni pizza?" Still nothing. So I walked down to the pizza display and rummaged through the boxes. Most of them were empty decorations, so I grabbed the plastic looking pizza and put on the counter in front of the girl. She didn't like that. She said, "This is example only. I will make you a new one." I said, "Thanks."

I watched her make my pizza, spread the cheese, deal out the pepperoni, put it in the toaster oven. When she pulled it out, it fell facedown off her spatula and everything fell off of the dough. She did it all over again. It was really gross and expensive pizza but I'm glad she didn't charge me for two.

A few minutes after I finished the food, my sister Erika ran in to get me. There are two other girls from the reservation who go to Stanford with her and my brother was giving them a ride home, too.

I asked the first girl what she was studying. She said, "Linguistics." I asked, "What kind of a job do you want to get with that degree?" She said, she didn't know. I said, "So you just love words, do you? Do you use the word 'cacti' or do you just say 'cactuses' because it's easier? We were at Home Depot the other day and I wanted to tell my kids not to hurt themselves on the cacti but I was tempted to say cactuses but I couldn't because it seemed dishonest."

She said something like, "I don't really talk much about cactus so I don't really care." I said, "If it's your major, I think you should care." But later on when she wasn't looking, I looked through her stuff and found her school notebook. It was just notes from her classes, but in the margins along the edge I found something she had written:

Clover wets her paw
a short tongue pink and flicking
stroking over her lop ears
nestled down in a field
hidden she lists
Kak Kak calls the Jackdaw
A seed inside a billowy green forest
tangled and sprawling
all beneath a twirling sun
with skirts blazing
her finest yellow fur

Bunny poetry! No wonder she was so secretive!

Okay, okay. I made up the whole bit about stealing her notebook and her love of bunny poetry but that's what she gets for not fessing up. On the other hand, I don't have any evidence to suggest she DOESN'T love poems about rabbits. I guess it's just as likely that her interest in linguistics is tied to a desire to preserve the language of her ancestors but, again, it's all speculation.

I asked the second friend in the car what her major was and she said, "Feminine Studies."

And because I love making a first impression that is sure to charm the pants off of 18 year old college girls, I said, "Oh. So you want to grow up to be a man-hater." And suddenly, a bunch of eyes popped out and jaws dropped. Erika told me later that people had called the girl a "man-hater" in high school and she had not enjoyed it. I told Erika that I didn't know enough about the girl to make a personal attack on her and that I hoped she realized that I was just goofing around to kill time on a long car ride. But just to put a toxic cherry atop the cake, when we dropped the girl off at her house I reminded her to "hate the game, not the playa'."

I'll tell you more about the trip later.

We Play Out Our Last Scene

The other night we ate dinner at my inlaw's house. They had rented the movie "Akeelah and the Bee" so we watched it.

This was my summary of the movie: "This is exactly like The Matrix except it has Spelling instead of Kung Fu."

To which my mother-in-law responded: "If someone had only described it to me that way earlier I wouldn't have waited for it on DVD to watch it."

My wife's summary of the movie: "Hey, look! It's Booger. That's Booger. Remember Booger? It's Booger."

And upon seeing the physical condition of Lawrence Fishburn and Angela Bassett we decided a good alternate title for the movie would be "Buff and Buffer." My mother-in-law liked "Buffy and Buff and Buffer." My wife didn't say anything but she was probably thinking "Buffy and Buff and Buffer and Booger."

I don't know if we are fun to watch movies with or annoying.

4 I'd Pidgin

The other night at work, that movie-going 18-year-old named Jaren showed me a picture on his cell phone. It was a picture of the dashboard of his car.

He said, "Check out the mileage."

The mileage was 1337. I said, "You've had that car about two months, that's pretty low."

He said, "Yeah, but it says Leet."

I asked, "What does?"

He said, "The mileage says 'leet' in Leet. 1337. I thought it was funny."

I asked, "What is Leet?"

He said, "It's just a language you use on the internet. Like when you use numbers to spell words."

I said, "Like when you spell HELLO or BOOBLESS on a calculator?"

He said, "Kind of, but not really."

I said, "SHOULD I know what Leet is?"

He said, "Probably not. I think it just means I spend too much time playing online video games."

It's tough to keep on the edge, even if you just want to be a nerd. Besides, World of Warcraft can suck it. A true nerd would never say that.

You So Crazy

When I watched the Superbowl I noticed there were a lot of commercials for "Coke" featuring an artistic silouette of a classic Coca-Cola bottle. I mostly noticed the commercial they did honoring Black History Month with a chronology of what Coke bottles looked like during key moments in Black History. (I notice they don't try to glorify the cheap plastic bottles they use nowadays)

What the makers of Coke did not know was that the day before the Superbowl, my kids and I watched the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy." The entire premise of the film is that an African bushman, who is completely unfimiliar with Western Culture, ends up in possession of a Coke bottle which his tribe finds useful at first but then starts all kinds of bad feelings within his family and very soon they start referring to the Coke bottle as "The Evil Thing." First he thanks the gods for the gift but asks them to take it back as it causes so much trouble for his family. When they don't take it away he begins a quest to walk to the end of the earth and throw the bottle off.

During that commercial with a chronology of Black History and Coke, I absolutely expected to see "1980: The Evil Thing Must Be Thrown From The Earth." So it was funny that during the entire commercial I watched that stylized bottle and just sat there thinking, "It's the Evil Thing." How did the publicists at Coke let that whole thing slip through? A movie about how your product is evil? Print it!

I know some people think "The Gods Must Be Crazy" is disrespectful towards Africans but I disagree and I think anything that brings world attention to the problems in Africa is good. I especially liked the summary of Western Living: How we make our world so UN-natural and complicated that our children must be condemned to 18 years of sitting in school just to learn how to survive in our society.

Another set of commercials that stands out to me are the UPS Whiteboard commercials. The very idea makes me laugh but mostly it makes me feel like I'm at work without being paid for it.

Have you ever wanted to be a part of or just plain missed being in a crappy, crappy business meeting? UPS has the solution. Let's forget for a moment that at EVERY business meeting in the history of the world, there has been someone, if not several people, who would rather stick their tongues in a meat grinder than sit through the final minutes of some windbag in a suit farting visible gas out of his mouth. Blah, blah, blah. What is up with your TPS reports, man? Didn't you get the memo?

And UPS isn't giving you the Power Point razzle dazzle as is customary these days. UPS is kicking it old school, with some know-it-all dude in front of a whiteboard like he is some kind of magician. Whoa! He erased a truck and drew a plane without breaking the rythme of his blah, blah, blah! Amazing!

He's going on and on about abstract things like efficiency and reliability and taking the weight off my shoulders so all I have to do is sit back and wait for my stuff to be delivered. When is going to get to the part about why this box my mother sent me is all smashed up like an accordian and has a big footprint on it?

Magic is in the airwaves.

I had to comb my worries and fix my thoughts

Yes, when life gets busy the blog suffers. That is the way of things.

I actually wrote a really long post last week but my wife vetoed a part of the story and I never quite finished it and it was just deemed unpresentable. It had all sorts of stuff about Kathy Ireland and furniture and some porn star and self esteem building (all completely unrelated) but I couldn't get it together and you should know better than to question me when I say it doesn't work. Sorry.

This isn't an excuse, it is more of an explanation. Cow Country tales and the other crap I do shall continue in the near future. I've been working a lot, had some home stress living with my sister, the bank messed up our checks which messed up some of our bills, I'm working on a short story about a girl who runs away to the Grand Canyon, I'm trying to help Ethan enter a story contest put on by The Reading Rainbow TV show with a tale about a Tyrannosaurus Rex who really enjoys playing with all of his friends but then eats them all without thinking about it (Of course the story would be about a dinosaur and I said "it should probably be about the dinosaur and his friends" and Ethan said "but I want him to eat the dinosaurs" and the story was born. I like the dark humor.). At someone's request, I'm also designing a card game for girls. Nerdy girls.

My father's aunt died last week. She is pretty much the matriarch of his side of the family so I'm going to California this weekend for the services. It's annoying. I don't know if I've mentioned it on my blog before but I feel like once you've lived by the ocean and then moved away, you start to live where a part of you is always asking, "So when will I see the ocean again?" Because you WILL see it again and the worst thought in the world is that maybe you won't. But my last trip and my next trip to the ocean are both going to be tied to the deaths of the elders in my family. It's a bummer that death seems to be the call that brings me back. I don't like the trend.

And at work, I think I have been shining too brightly. I hold a work philosophy of not sucking and not shining too brightly (because that just gets you "special" tasks for which you will not be paid extra), but all last week I was being tossed from special task to special task every day. I need to start dropping furniture off the shelves or something to lower their opinion of me before trouble really sets in.

When you have to ask for a weekend off to go to a memorial, you are reminded that it is a crap job. In the 8 months that I have worked there, I have NEVER asked for a Saturday off. And now, due to a death, I ask for one and the boss basically tells me it's my problem. Tells me he won't do anything for me but wants me to hang out and listen to him complain about his job just the same, and then an hour later he comes and asks me if I'd like ANOTHER special task and cruises off before I can say, "I'd love one". So I had to go wheeling and dealing with my coworkers and work out some trades where I get a nice weekend off and the suckers who traded me get the shaft. Luckily, the mofos like me.

I also have some passes to Snowbird I probably won't have time to use. If you would like a free pass to the Snowbird Mountain Ski Resort please send me an email (100 words or less) on why I should give you one and maybe you'll win.

Anyway, I thought this might give you an idea of why I haven't been posting much lately.

Getting out of your chair with style

My daughter: "Whoa, dad! I just did a really cool trick!"

Me: "Is it called 'falling'?"

My daughter: "Uh-huh. I fell really cool."

Clearing his throat and smiling with his hands on the bathroom sink

I gave my kids a bath today. Usually my wife does it. I was about to put them in the tub but I noticed crud building up on the sides. My wife usually cleans the bathroom, too. Don't get me wrong, I vacuum and run some dishes or a load of laundry (usually every week)and I do manly stuff like take out the garbage and shovel snow. Did I mention I built a shed?

Anyway, I wouldn't appreciate being tossed in a grimy tub if I was a kid so I tried to find some cleaning stuff to give it a scrub. All I could find was a bristly brush and some bleachy all-purpose spray. It did an okay job but I wasn't completely satisfied so I also repeated the process with some dish soap. How do you get the non-slip stuff clean without totally scrubbing it off?

I was thinking it was strange that people need to clean bathtubs at all. I know dirty people use the tub to hose off but it is constantly being flushed with soap and water. And what are feet aside from nature's scouring pads? How does it get dirty?

I haven't done any research or experimentation but these are my guesses:

1. Soap has its own crud-factor.
2. Leftover bath water has none of the qualities of "soap and water."

I just thought a tub should be easier to clean. But speaking of hygiene:

I have been lucky in life to be someone who has never had issues with Body Odor. Even when I do something strenuous and make a lot of sweat, I usually don't stink. But a few years back I started working long hours a physical job and I started to notice some BO (You still have to get your nose pretty close to smell it). The strange thing about this BO is that it seems to strike in only one armpit. I have a hard time understanding this so I decided to take a closer look.

Upon taking cheese scrapings from both of my armpits and careful observation under a microscope I found some interesting cultures of bacterium. The bacteria in my left (or stinky) armpit seemed to sustain themselves in shabby, disorganized groupings around burning garbage cans. The bacteria in my right (or mountain-fresh) armpit seemed to organize themselves in aesthetically pleasing groups with well-tended gardens and swimming pools.

In conclusion, I would like to advance NativeMinnow's theory that "poor people stink" and suggest that "poor people have poor bacteria and rich people have rich bacteria."

18 and Life To Go

My wife's aunt was having a birthday get-together tonight. We went and ate some dessert. I asked one of her daughters what she bought her mother as a gift. She said, "We gave her that pink skirt that she's wearing right now."

I had to leave because of a prior engagement. When we headed for the door the aunt came to hug us goodbye. I said, "Sorry we didn't bring you a gift."

She said, "Oh, please don't. I don't want you to buy me a gift."

I said, "Well, we did buy you a gift. It's a pink skirt exactly like the one you're wearing so now we have to return it."

She said, "Really?"

I said, "No. That was a joke."

She said, "Oh. Hahahahahahaha. That was funny."

I said, "Yes. Actually, that joke is my gift to you."

She said, "It was really funny."

I said, "Yeah. That's what I get everyone."

Have you ever tried re-gifting a lame joke, suckers? You can't.

I had a prior engagement because, the other night at work, this 18 year old kid came to me with the specific purpose of asking if I would like to come with him and his friends to see a movie this weekend.

When you are 30 there is a small part of you that thinks, "I can't see a movie with you. YOU'RE 18! I have a wife and kids." But this kid has the same schedule as me and managed to suggest seeing a movie at an opportune time in my week. So I ignored the voice that said I was too old to have play-dates like these and I just said, "Sure." How often does anyone invite me to do anything?

I told my wife about it and she laughed and thought it was a silly idea. I told her I planned on going and she thought I was crazy. "18 year olds, Emmett! Don't you remember what it's like to hang out with 18 year olds?" I do, my little sister is 18 and I hung out at Sundance with her. It was fun. Besides, this would put me right in my element to be loud and obnoxious, the way I am.

It was also funny because when the kid asked me to go, he approached me about an hour later and said, "I should probably tell you that one of my friends is kind of an asshole. He's into Heavy Metal and chains and shit."

I laughed and said, "I don't care. There is no shortage of assholes in my life. They're usually at least entertaining."

I met them at the theater. The kid had gone on and on about how excited he was to see the movie "The Pathfinder" and he told me that is what we would be seeing at precisely 9:20 this evening. When we got to the ticket booth we found out that movie isn't even in theaters yet. So we got tickets for "Hannible Rising" instead.

We had to wait an extra 40 minutes for that movie to start so we talked about Heavy Metal. Isn't Megadeth so totally awesome. I told them I thought Megadeth was awesome when I was in high school but that I have since moved on. Wait, wait, wait. "You USED to listen to Megadeth but you DON'T anymore?" It was obvious something was wrong with me.

Megadeth is pretty good... they just bring back cheesy memories.

When the movie started, the guys whipped out a bunch of bags of sunflower seeds and told me they had a tradition of spitting as many shells on the floor as they could by the time the movie ended. And they liked to throw seeds on eachother from the top row of the theater when their friends were walking down the ramp to the exit. Overall, not too annoying. And hey, free seeds.

The movie was pretty good but not as good as Silence of the Lambs. They did a good job of giving the movie a similar feeling though. I wasn't dissappointed.

Tomorrow we're all going out for Slurpees.

Cow Country Addendum

I've been meaning to clarify a couple of things in regard to my most previous "Cow Country" entry.

I probably should have given more details about the drive back to the school with the cop. How he told us about all the crazy guns he'd shot. How I asked him if he had ever shot anyone (he hadn't). And what the worst part of his job was. He said, "The worst part of my job is that I have to do paperwork on EVERYTHING I do... and that's why I'm so pissed off at you guys right now."

When the principal asked us why we didn't get along with the other kids and I said "because we don't wear Wranglers" his initial response was to remove his shoe, place it on his desk and say, "Does that look like a shit kicker to you?"

I realize I made a crucial error in not naming the principal as he is such a key player in these stories. He once grew a beard and everyone called him Grizzly Adams and I considered using that name, but Grizzly Adams was a character wrongly accused and fighting to prove his innocence, which is completely out of character for the principal. So I've decided a more apt name would be Principal It-Rubs-The-Lotion-On-Its-Skin.

To usher this character more appropriately into the story, here is his theme music (if you have not already seen the film Silence of the Lambs or do not wish to see imagery from that film, you probably don't want to watch this:

A Big Big Love

I know I'm getting behind on the blogging again. It's because I'm distracted during the day reading exciting articles about the importance of sharpening your lawnmower blade, the thickness of your lawn thatch and compost piles. The snow is gone and I'm looking forward to getting outside. The kids have already been riding their bikes.

I keep thinking I will write at night but, lately, the moment the sun is below the horizon and I stop moving I go right into a coma.

I figured while it is still sort of Valentines Day I will talk about how much my daughter cracks me up. I know my words cannot do her actions or inflections justice but here they come anyway.

First, she is 3 years old and obsessed with teenagers. It is still very important to her that she becomes a teenager WITH BIG FEET. The cool thing about teenagers is that they can do anything. She tells me more everyday. Dad, I think teenagers can eat in the living room. Teenagers can use a knife. Teenagers can get a real tattoo. Things like that.

My daughter and her 4-year-old cousin also play a game based on the lives of my younger teenaged sisters: "Okay, I'm Erika and you be Sarah..."

Sometimes I like to rattle her cage a little and tell her things like, "Teenagers stink. When you become a teenager that's when your body starts to stink and you have to wear deodorant."

When I say that, her eyes get wide and she gasps as if I just told her Santa Claus eats raw pony meat for dinner every night.

My daughter has talked to me about a serious bedtime issue before in regard to my goodnight hugs. Apparently, I have not complied so tonight she went over my head and spoke to my wife about it, "Mommy, can you ask daddy not to hug me so hard? Lastnight he crushed my leg into a triangle again." ("Okay, Livvy." "Thank you, Mommy.")

I'm not exactly sure what she means when she says I crush her leg "into a triangle" but she has mentioned it more than once. But the truth is... I don't think I can hug her any softer than I do.

I will hug her and love her and name her George.

You're the one and the everyone, got a list of the things that you've done

I don't really want to but I feel like it would be omissive not to mention the shootings at Trolley Square last night, here is Salt Lake City.

I was at work when the shooting took place. The CNN coverage hasn't been that great, they only seem to throw the highlights at you as fast as possible. The local coverage has been better, they have people at the crime scene, people at the hospitals, and even people at the home of the shooter.

The witness stories are moving; some unsettling and some heroic. It would be hard to imagine yourself as one witness who saw a wounded person hiding in a car, bleeding from the head with an ear-wound that "looked like meatloaf." Or, of course, the off-duty police officer who shot the killer, who heard gunshots and left his family during dinner feeling a million times more frustrated than the average person who has to rush to work at a moments notice on his day off. Or even to be someone just hiding in a closet. Listening to it all. The last two times my little sister has come to Salt Lake to visit, we ate at Trolley Square.

It is hard to hear about the 16 year old boy who has just been moved from a "critical" to "serious" medical condition. And worse that when he comes out of it, he will need to deal with the shooting death of his father. But, if it was me, that is the way I would want it as opposed to the father living and son dying, but still a tragedy any way you slice it.

I liked hearing about how the shooter blasted two people in the parking lot before he entered the building and one of them got up with a chest full of buckshot and ran for help, "Call 911, There's a maniac!"

There is no justification for acting this way. This kid obviously didn't know his enemy but still felt like he had to lash out somehow. They said the 18-year-old killer lived with his family. His parents were Bosnian immigrants. Bosnia is part of that region of Europe that seems to redraw borders and rename places every couple of years, when governments aren't busy running genocidal campaigns or crumbling to civil war. What ever happened to those "Yugo" cars? If the boy was 18 then he was born right about the time the wars of a crumbling Yugoslavia were starting to flare up.

Obviously I don't know what kind of affect that would have on a kid but I imagine he had some idea of what was going on in the land of his family before him and it probably doesn't make you feel good. And then I imagine a kid of foreign descent in one of our dehumanizing schools and all of their wonderful cliques. His neighbor's said they believed he attended West High School. My wife actually taught a class of "bad" kids at that school a few years back. It's even possible that the killer is a former student of hers. And it wouldn't be the first time we saw her kids on the News.

But you can't completely blame school, because even 12 years out of high school, that kind of social environment still seems to exist everywhere I go. When I am working or when I'm in the lunch room, like people seem to cling to like people and exclude everyone else. There is one guy at work named Isaac. He is a skinny brown guy with super-googly eyes and coke-bottle glasses. He tries to act like a gangsta. He acts like he's comin' straight outta Compton but he's really from Idaho Falls, Idaho.

The Instant-Winner-In-Waiting asked me, "If you walked into a room and saw him lying on the floor looking at the ceiling... wouldn't you swear he was having a seizure or something?"

And that Captain-of-the-football-team guy just calls him Lazik, instead of Isaac. It's to do with they eyes.

And that big Shaq-tongon dude yelled at him one night, "Hey Nerd! Are picking up this cart or what?" He didn't know Isaac's name so he had to improvise.

If you don't start on the right foot in life, it seems to stick with you forever. I have always been cool and popular so I don't really know how it feels but I imagine it's a lifelong source of anguish being uncool and unpopular. So this is all typical speculation as to why a kid would do something like this but it is easy to imagine some outsider kid wanting to get back at the world just like those kids that shot up Columbine.

And those kids pose another problem. Because the Columbine kids got caught stealing computer equipment and forced into a psychiatric care program as punishment. They successfully complete that program and it is said that their day of killing is their retaliation for the punishment they received. Their plan had actually been bigger: to blow up the cafeteria, shoot stragglers and then get out on the city streets and shoot more people. They even had an outline of a plan to hijack a plane.

Overall, I think people care. We just aren't good at it. Today there was also a telephone threat of a school shooting down in Utah County. I'm guessing that when one creep pokes his head out, a bunch of others try to keep the crap rolling.

But this is a rare thing in Utah and not likely to happen again anytime soon. This is not my favorite place and these are not my favorite people, but it is still a good place and they are still good people.

I think people will go through a week or so of being scared to go outside, but we are probably much more likely of dying in a car accident or from carbon monoxide than being shot up while we're buying fancy smelling soap. Again, you can't let it scare you. Live your life.

My Funny Valentine

After years of living together, to the best of my abilities, here is a list of my wife's favorite things in their correct order:

1--- Candy
2--- Kids
Somewhere between 3 and 100--- Me

She has expressed serious concern regarding our marraige because, even though I like candy, I may not like candy ENOUGH for an amicable future together. When there is no chocolate in the house, she informs me of the "problem" with all of the urgency of the kitchen being on fire. If I don't respond by running to the car, sliding over the hood, and burning rubber out of the driveway to get to the store to obtain chocolate, she looks at me with disappointed stoicism and says, "You are not taking care of me."

Instead of telling you another self-incriminating story, I will just say that I KNOW BETTER than not to have flowers for her on Valentine's Day.

The other day, my wife gave me two candy "conversation hearts" that she chose just for me. They said, "HEY YOU" and "GET REAL." I would have preferred something at least as friendly as "EMAIL ME" or a vague "IM SURE."

She likes to make homemade Valentine cards and sugar cookies. She cried more than once because her sugar cookies did not taste as good as usual. I told her the kids just enjoy making the cookies. They don't taste as good but they are fine and I saved them all from the garbage by telling her I would eat them. I ate four that night (they are big).

She doesn't know what kind of a gift to give me for Hallmark's special day. I told her it would make my life a lot easier if she could develop a sex addiction. She'll probably get me a CD though.

The other day she wanted to buy little decorations to use on cards and to put on our windows. She said, "I want to go to the dollar store. Is it alright if I go to the dollar store?"

I said, "Yeah. Just don't spend more than a dollar."

When she came home she walked through the door looking as sad as I've ever seen her. There is no downer like striking out at the dollar store.

After reading this blog--I feel like I deserve to know what keeps you going?

I always try to answer these serious questions. I think you are going to love it.

First, you will need to try a lot harder than that to hurt my word-spitting pride. The entire reason I wrote that post is because it makes me laugh when people try to come up with all these intricate connections that still point to the same things we already know.

Second, here are fast, easy, lame answers to your questions:

1. Only Oprah can tell us.
2. It's the Pandora's Box thing again; open the lid, out comes disease and hatred but also, Hope, flitting like a Lady Bug. Those Greeks knew everything.
3. I'm a miserable wretch.

When my little sister came to Utah for the film festival we were talking about the Indian reservation. I told her I would like to live there someday but not if I had to struggle to make ends meet. I told her I only want to live there again if I feel like I have some ability to make things better.

And really, I think of things that way wherever I am living. The improvements are just on a small scale. When we bought our first house we fixed a lot of things. The neighbors had lived there for decades and they told us all the time how they had never seen the house look so good. The house had either been empty or filled with strange people, fences were knocked down, cars were lit on fire. Then we came and people liked us. They liked seeing our awesome kids in the yard and the flowers we planted. I think we brought life to our block. Now we are gone, the house sits empty and those trashy kids that moved in next door are probably roadkill.

You have to look for a point in what I just said, but here is the real point:

It's the same message that Ethan wrote on his Magnadoodle a year ago: My Life is Myn. I don't know your beliefs. Perhaps you think you will be boning virgin after virgin in heaven but I don't have clear expectations on what is behind death's door. I am not waiting to live again in a different dimension. I am not putting off the things I want to do any longer than I must.

Somehow, I've been given life. It may be my only one. Just because things suck doesn't mean I'm going to bail out. Make the assholes leave. If you live your life and it all ends up shit, then it all ends up shit. You tried and it was worth a shot. But if you are too scared to stick it out or if you spend your whole life paralyzed with fear that you will never be a very good cog then that means that THEY won and you forfeited the only thing you had that was worth anything.

Pep talk is over. I've been awake all night.

The CIA and the IRS tell us where to shop and how to dress

This is my post on conspiracies. But there is no mind-blowing silver bullet in conspiracy theories because all of the worst conspiracies are right in plain sight and are no big deal to indifferent, regular people who just want to get along.

There is plenty of food in the world, yet people starve. Even in America, people who don't want to still freeze and starve to death every year. It makes no sense but who has time to worry about any stomach but their own?

It is hard to make a living, even when you do things right. There was an old man at my desk job who had a PhD and had been a professor at the West Minster school here in Salt Lake. He is a cool guy. He is fun to talk to and he has a lot of cool stories about doing brain experimentation on chickens. But he hated his co-workers in Academia. He said those professors were the most childish people he had ever met. So he quit and worked at the desk job and part-time at a bookstore. A substantial number of people at the desk job had degrees so it didn't make me feel too far behind in life when I was there.

It just seems that even when you have the credentials, it is still unlikely you will land a job you like with people you admire, respect or even find tolerable. I applied for a job recently and, according to job description, I was very qualified for several aspects of the work and it didn't really pay that much. But the company shows promise so I tried for it. The first interviewer seemed to love me. The second guy didn't show much emotion but I figured he was just quiet. I was honest and I think I gave good answers but I didn't try to fluff myself up. I didn't try to knock his socks off. And that is my best guess as to why they told me they didn't want me. Job hunting tip to myself: Every question should be answered with "Whatever you tell me to do is the RIGHT thing to do. Whatever you want me to think is the RIGHT thing to think. I AM THE COG. I AM A VERY GOOD COG." We are indentured servents, free to choose the man who holds the whip.

My wife was laughing because she checks the "want ads" for me. She chose a yellow highlighter to mark good prospects but found that nearly half the ads are highlighted in yellow by the printer. So she grabbed a red pen to circle the jobs instead and then noticed that "circled in red" is another feature you can purchase when you place your ad. How is THAT for a conspiracy? An orange highlighter is the way to go for marking stuff in the paper.

And the first page of job listings is half filled with ads for lame colleges and technical schools. It is funny logic, "I need money NOW so I'll look for a job... OR since I have no money I can go nuts getting loans, stressing out about classes and then HOPE that I will get some sort of degree or certificate that makes me special enough that I can make more money than fools in call centers by responding to this crap-college ad in the "help wanted" pages.

Call centers are funny. Their ads say this to me: LIKE TO TALK ON THE PHONE? or ARE YOU PASSIONATE ABOUT MUSIC? How would like to spend the majority of your day getting yelled at by strangers about musical equipment you will never be able to afford (on our wages)? I love that. Sign me up.

College is the land of empty promises. Insurance is highway robbery. Healthcare is for the rich. Drugs are the answer, or so the television tells me. I don't use drugs but I think I would be more accepting of life if I did. Meaning, I would think of myself as a loser and would then expect to be treated as such.

America has been the bitch of the energy companies for almost 100 years. Oil, cars and highways. Public transportation systems are for socialists. We put the greediest, most self-serving people in our greatest offices and accept that "if it isn't this money-grubbing bastard it will just be a different one." That is also the go-getter attitude that leads to SUCCESS for the common man in this country. Yay. Our leaders cut the path to the riches. Sometimes they share it with their friends. We are just their groupies. We are just supposed to love them for it. Patriotism.

We all seem to accept that if we already have a bad system in place then we can't possibly change it. We also except that even though companies are slowly poisoning people, we can't make them stop because then they wouldn't continue to get rich and that would hurt the feelings of their CEOs. And those guys are known to write big checks to politicians. I like my friend Gordon's idea that, should the death penalty be kept legal (it's awesome when whether you live or die depends on how good a lawyer you can afford), white-collar crime should be punishable by death. See you in Hell, Enron.

The law is still the law. Survival of the fittest. There aren't any REAL secrets, just details. Life is bad enough around the world that decent people feel guilty for not suffering MORE than they already are as poo rains down from the sky.

Don't worry about me, I assume you are dumb but I still like you and I hope you will think the same of me.

Stone Throwing

It seems like I heard about a "moral" debate regarding a "breakthrough" HPV vaccine about a year ago and I thought it was so ridiculous that I figured the debate had been eradicated. But Texas is ontrack to have all school-aged girls vaccinated and now the debate is turning into a superbug.

The question seems to be: By vaccinating school-aged girls against genital warts (an STD) that commonly lead to cervical cancer are we telling them it is okay to have sex?

It's pretty much the same question as this: By vaccinating people against Polio are we telling them that it is okay to go to the park and eat dog turds (because that's a good way to get Polio if you haven't been vaccinated)?

And even further: When car manufacturers decide to build cars with a backseat, is that a thumbs up to premarital sex?

If you have a vaccine that can save lives, give it to people. To even debate the issue is to suggest that some small part of you believes that girls that have sex deserve to have terminal cancer. I know of a conservative, church-going-lady who was married in the mormon temple and a virgin on her wedding night who had HPV. Is that God's way of testing her or punishing her for some other short coming, just like He is doing with all of those other people who are in dying hospitals?

If You Don't Get It Then Neither Do I

Standing in line at the grocery store-

Eleanor: "Emmett. Look behind us. Sluts. That girl's boobs are going to fall out of her shirt. Their clothes don't fit them right. They're cheap sluts."

Me: "I guess that's what happens when you buy your sexy clothes at Walmart. Don't be too hard on them though. Someday cheap sluts might save our marraige."


I know what you're thinking: Valentine's Day must be awfully close for there to be THIS MUCH romance in the air. If I could find a way to put the noises my wife wails out when I say things like that into print it would add a whole new dimension to my blog.

Girlie Music

My wife likes us to give gifts on Valentines Day. I usually just get her a CD or something. She likes most of my music but when it comes time for her to pick a CD it's usually something disappointing like The Bangles or Cyndi Lauper. Maybe next time I will get her Bananarama but I was thinking of something like these people for now. Any better ideas?

Chronicles of Cow Country High VII

Beanpolio was my neighbor to one side of my house and on the other side lived a younger kid named Rogi. Rogi’s big regret in life is that he is white and he played too many video games but he was a cool kid. Besides, if you got paid pennies per hour to play Super Techmo Bowl then my friends and I would still have been millionaires several times over.

Anyhow, we started serious work on our fort-of-doors before the school year ended and we enlisted our group of young protégés to assist us and share in the benefits of fort ownership. They were my younger brother Joel, Rogi, Geppetto’s younger brother Lil Lindbergh (who would later run off a gang of my classmates who were bent on putting his head in the toilet by cracking Eddie Munster in the nose with his mathbook and spilling his blood. Awesome!) and Sven (when his parents permitted him to leave the house). Beanpolio liked their help but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t light a pack of Black Cats or Lady Fingers and toss the firecrackers onto the younger kids as they slaved away for us.

Aside from the company, the best thing about these new friends was that Minnow and Beanpolio both had their driver’s licenses and they both seemed to drive to school a lot. Cars cover the 40 miles much faster than a school bus and you get to act stupid, like saying you hold a special record because you stuck your head out of the window and ate a muffin while driving 70 miles per hour. Sometimes Minnow would drive his family’s truck to school. It was a big truck that could crack a deer’s spine without flinching and the passenger-side door would randomly fly open even when you were driving. But the day that Minnow passed a big semi-truck on some windy mountain switchbacks and the wheels started to slip on the wet asphalt, that was the day that Beanpolio became emotionally scarred and I think that was the moment he started to insist on driving everywhere himself (insisting on gas money from us before we could offer and even when we knew his mother gave him gas money to cover the trips).

School was still hell but friends gave the day an uplifting “bird in the window of your prison cell” kind of feeling. We all liked to goof around and each of us was told to either “grow up” or “act our age” by the hour, rather than the day. But every 15 and 16 year old is stupid and it’s only made worse when you make a conscious effort NOT TO BE stupid and then fail. It’s bad for the self-esteem. It’s best just to have fun with it.

In the days before we realized how to get free sodas from the Coke machine, we would do stupid stuff like perform very amateur “a cappella” singing and pass a hat around for donations. Usually, we just got a hat full of “Shut up!” from the student body. I believe we had been told shut up by just about everyone one afternoon and were just riding out the final minutes before lunch ended. I told my friends, “Check this out.” And then I yelled, “HEY YOU, IN THE WRANGLERS!” At which point, nearly everyone present in the commons area (99% of them wearing Wrangler Jeans) turned to look at me. My friends and I found this to be hilarious. I mean, HILARIOUS.

And while we were laughing some girls approached us and got on our case. It got to the point where they were LOUDLY saying, “You don’t like us and we don’t like you either! This is our school and if you don’t like it you can leave!” And all the other clowns cheered and backed them up. We mumbled to ourselves for a moment. Maybe we should leave. Either Minnow or Beanpolio knew that Lucy was driving home early that day to go to a dentist appointment and they scrambled off to see if she could possibly give us a ride if we were to take the rest of the day off from school. It turns out that she could, so we made a big scene, “Fine. We are happy to leave. If we ever see this school again it will be too soon!” Something to that affect. And we left.

But Beanpolio chickened out at the last second. He said he wouldn’t come with us because he didn’t want to get into trouble. I’m sure we called him a wuss before Minnow, Geppetto and I hit the highway to start the walk home.

We were just about to the Chevron station where the highway began when we saw a kid called The-bear-of-little-brain. Geppetto said, “Hey Bear-of-little-brain! My sister Rose Red says that you’ve been hitting her on the bus again. You’d better stop before I have to kill you.”

The Bear said, “Huh?” And Geppetto repeated his statement. The Bear said, “ Yeah. Okay, Geppetto.” And then he moved past us toward the school. Then he looked back over his shoulder and said, “Hey, Geppetto. Fuck you.”

I’ve never been able to stand empty threats or promises, so I spun around on my heel and made like a field goal kicker attempting a 50 yarder and brought my foot up square under the seat of The Bear’s pants. My foot struck right at his tailbone and I wouldn’t be surprised if his feet lifted off the ground for a moment. The Bear-of-little-brain scowled at me and mumbled, “That hurt.” And then he hobbled back to class. I yelled after him, “Leave her alone.”

When we first got to the highway we were worried about being seen so we crouched down and moved through the sagebrush for a few miles instead. Soon, we decided that was annoying and we just started walking along the road. But not a few minutes later, a member of our local Bishopric was driving by and spotted the county’s Most-Outstanding-Male and Geppetto who he knew from Sunday services.

He just stopped and asked us how things were going and then he left. He wasn’t curious at all as to why we were on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere during school hours. So we kept on walking.

On Utah’s X96 Radio From Hell show, I’ve heard Kerry talk about “street porn.” He basically says that when you see a magazine sitting on the side of the road, the odds are excellent that it is a pornographic magazine and throughout his life he has referred to this stuff as “street porn.” While we were walking along the highway out of Manila we found such stuff. It was a magazine called “Black Booty.” You might be surprised to learn that the magazine did not feature black people nor their respective booties. This was a magazine full of melon-breasted women of all races who had boy pieces down below that resembled uncooked foot-long bratwursts. Those brats were huge but couldn’t stand on their own.

The magazine left us baffled. I can’t say that it makes you feel inadequate as a man to see a woman slinging around a floppy piece of breakfast meat. It still leaves me baffled to this day. I wonder about the person who produces those magazines. I imagine something like this:

“Dude, what are you going to do with all that money you inherited?”
“I don’t know. What do you think I should do with it?”
“I don’t know. What are you passionate about in life?”
“Well. If I had to choose ONE thing… ONE THING that’s never left the back of my mind that I’ve always meant to come back to later in life… it would have to be chicks with wangs.”
“Oooh. That’s good.”
“Yeah. The problem is, it’s tough to find girls like that.”
“Well then that’s what you need to do. Find those girls and bring them to the masses.”
“Yes, you’re right. I’ll find them and put them in a magazine. But what can I call it? I can’t just call the magazine Chicks with Wangs.”
“That’s no good. How about Black, because black is mysterious and intriguing. And then Booty, because people like booty. Black Booty.”
“Man, you’re a genius. How would you like to be Vice President of my magazine?”
“Sweet.”

And who is the target audience for this magazine? I imagine the target reader probably has a bumper sticker on their car that says something like, “Pre-op tranny and loving it!”

There are many things you can’t learn in school.

After we discovered the distracting magazine we only went another mile or so. We sat down on a pile of shale rock and waited for Lucifer to pick us up in her car. We also found that there were thousands of seashell fossils embedded in those rocks where we waited.

It wasn’t too much longer before Lucy picked us up. We started up the switchbacks before the most famous view of Flaming Gorge known to tourists and we only got a couple of miles before a county Sheriff’s truck was flashing its lights behind us.

Lucy summoned up the tears before the cop even made it to her window. Without provocation she started to plead, “Please! I didn’t do anything.”

The cop strolled up and said, “Relax. I’m not here for you. I’m here for the guys in the back of your car. Let’s go guys.”

We reluctantly got out and took our seats in the police truck. Let this be a lesson to all criminals who think they are clever like Butch Cassidy. It is not a good idea to hide out in the Flaming Gorge area. There are tons of cops with absolutely nothing better to do than hunt down truant students. They do drug busts and counterfeit money busts and things of that nature all the time. Flaming Gorge is not a good place to lay low when you are on the run.

But I am never one to waste an opportunity, so I started talking to the cop. I asked him how fast he let people drive over the speed limit before he pulled them over and I asked him about the crazy guns he gets to shoot as a cop. He liked talking about that. When we were almost back to Manila, I asked, “Would you be willing to let us stop at the gas station to get a drink before you take us to the school?”

He asked, “How far did you guys walk?”

I said, “To Sheepcreek.”

He said, “That’s pretty far. Okay.”

And he stopped at the gas station and let us buy some drinks. While we were buying drinks with the cop watching over us, we bumped into Beanpolio’s father. His father is a nice guy and he was excited to see us. It’s funny how no matter what situation you are in, when someone asks you how you are doing, the answer is always, “Fine.” Suddenly, we were all glad that Beanpolio hadn’t come with us, because then his father would have had more questions.

When the cop took us to the school he stayed with us in the principal’s office until we were done talking. I know that office well. There is a cricket paddle on the shelf that says, “Board of Education.” There was a hand grenade with a #1 tag attached to the pin and the plaque says, “Complaint department. Take a number.” And there was a little plaque with a spinner arrow on it and spaces that said, “Yes, no and Pass the Buck.” That one was on the principal’s desk and I’m willing to bet that he really used it.

The principal asked us, “What’s wrong. Why did you guys leave?”
We said, “We don’t seem to get along with the kids here. They told us to leave and we were happy to go.”
The principal said, “Why do you think you don’t get along?”
I said, “I guess it’s because we don’t wear Wranglers.”
The Principal said, “I don’t wear Wranglers and everyone likes me.”
(So literal)
I said, “They don’t LIKE you. You’re the principal. It’s different.”

Being as this was the first offense and that he had an audience (the cop), he let us off without even calling our parents. He told us to try harder to get along.

I tried and tried but I never got it right.

Chronicles of Cow Country High VI

Since the cold and snow were letting up, we started playing basketball after school on the humble little court in Dutch John. One night there were new kids on the court. They had just moved in to town. It was Minnow and the Epitome-of-Sweetness. And because I am awesome at first impressions, I believe that was the night my brother and I got into a scuffle on the basketball court. For some reason we occasionally get into fights when we play sports. It’s mostly my brother’s fault but I think it was my fault that night.

Minnow has told me the story again and again: his father announced to the family that they were all moving to Cow Country on April 1. He thought it was a joke. And when all of their stuff was packed in a truck and he had a new room in a new house and he saw the glorified trailer park lacking paved roads where he would attend school, he thought the joke had gone too far.

Minnow’s first sister was so sweet because she looked like a little pioneer girl in their family photos and she idolized Ty Detmer for his prowess on the football field at Brigham Young University where one of her other brothers was in school. But sweetness is wasted on me. I am much better at annoying-older-brother, so we called her sloth because she wouldn’t run when we played basketball and if you confronted her about it she would disrupt the game by pointing to a mystery bump on the calf of her leg and claim that it was cancerous.

Minnow inadvertently and begrudgingly took Cow Country by storm. Geppetto had an older sister named Cordelia and Cordelia was the uncontested and reigning leader in Grade Point Average at Cow Country High. To be honest, there was nobody at the school who cared to give her a challenge. But Minnow moved in and his GPA was the better. Fair-haired Minnow was 6’3”, went to church, had the highest GPA in town and was awarded the schools “Outstanding Male” certificate within weeks of his arrival.

This is probably one of those seldom times that a discouraging word was heard on the range and it was heard most loudly from Minnow. The award was given as a flattering gesture but it was more of a symbol as to how pathetic and desperate the school really was and, as the new smartest guy around, Minnow knew it.

In California, my biology teacher would blow up Sodium Metal in water and let us dissect things, but in Cow Country the science teacher looked and sounded just like Vizzini (“Inconceivable!” From the Princess Bride). He was very smart but not a great teacher. The only hands-on work that he did was to photo-copy worksheets. He would also expect the kids to respect him and quiet themselves independently at the minute class was supposed to begin. When the rowdy teens inconceivably were not quiet by their will alone, Vizzini would stand at the front of the class with his face turning red. When steam started piping out of his ears he would leave the classroom and pout to himself in the hallway until he felt the kids were ready to behave. Expecting kids to show a boring teacher such respect is good in theory but didn’t work out so well in practice.

The class was organized with tables that could seat two students each. For reasons that should be obvious by now, I was alone at one of the tables. On Minnow’s first day of school he showed up late for science class and he took the seat next to me.

He made me laugh because everyday he penned out homage to his disdain for Cow Country in his notebook: “I Hate Manila.” And then the next day: “I STILL Hate Manila.” And he decorated the words with hard, thick strokes of ink.

And when he arrived, things seemed to come together. At the very least, Minnow and I had a fish-out-of-water bond working. And Minnow went to church with Geppetto and they became fast friends. And as soon as we looked like we had our eastside pack together, Beanpolio didn’t want to be left out. In a very short time the four of us formed a close group. Things seemed to take on an “Us and Them” atmosphere. We didn’t necessarily dislike everyone else, we just didn’t seem to mix that well and were most comfortable with each other.

And with this newfound strength, confidence and support, there was bound to be trouble.

80's Movie Quote Trivia

I'm bored. If you are reading this then you must be bored, too. So here are some lines from mainstream 80's movies. I tried to keep away from easy lines that would be plastered all over the internet, which actually makes it tough to make a good quiz. I took out, "Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?" and stuff like that. But see if you can get these:

1. Even in the future nothing works.

2. 8 am tomorrow I'm a senior. I've got one year to make it all work and that's what I'm going to do. Make it work.

3. I got some naked pictures of your mom taking a bath. You want to buy em? Real cheap.

4. The bones tell me... nothing.

5. I spilled beer all over that car when it smashed into me. Who's gonna pay my cleaning bill?

6. Otisburg. Otisburg? OTISBURG?!?!

7. If this were to get out it would seriously ruin my reputation as a dude.

Broke The Mountain's Back

My friends have offered up their feelings on the movie "Brokeback Mountain" and now I will, too.

Here are the thoughts that stood out in my mind while watching the movie:

1. Heath Ledger is earning my respect as an actor. He does a great job of seeming like a different person in nearly every movie; compare Brokeback to The Brothers Grimm to all those other teeny bopper movies.

2. Yes, I have an appreciation for acoustic guitar and vivid trips to the mountains.

3. I am not gay. I'm not gonna tell you who or how to love but that doesn't mean I'm gonna celebrate watching some dude take a tour through another dude's chocolate factory. Especially in this movie; You get the feeling that both of the characters had something of a lost childhood but I still expected Ennis to coldcock Jack when first their lips met. And I expected it for awhile after that, too.

4. Uugghh, more kissing? I am REALLY not gay.

5. The characters in the story are likable but I get a little disappointed and lose sympathy for them simply because they are never true to themselves. Ennis is true to a cowboying lifestyle that leaves him impoverished and lonely. He learned long ago the hatred and violence towards gays by the people with whom he chooses to associate. Why not leave those people behind to pursue your true joy in life?

Both characters remain faithful to the end that Greco-Roman wrestling and spooning up in the mountains are the first and second best reasons for living. Yet they both marry girls and have kids. Nobody is honest to eachother. Jack travels to Mexico on occassion to get his fix of man-meat from male prostitutes and Jack's parents tell Ennis that he even made plans once to move to the mountains with some other dude.

So Jack wanted the mountains with a nice guy. Ennis wanted the mountains with Jack but would never allow it to be a permanent thing due to lessons from his youth. I felt really bad for Ennis' wife. Jack's wife obviously wasn't too concerned. They ended up sad and I feel that it was because they weren't willing to work for what they really wanted in life.

As I am writing all of this "Cow Country High" stuff I hope that people can get the sense that I feel like I was part of a special time and place that I would continue forever if I could (not counting the school crap). In that respect, it is easy for me to get drawn into the dream of the gay movie cowboys and just be glad that my heaven isn't nearly so complicated as theirs. It's funny because over the years I thought of the "Cow Country High" stories as a tale of friendship but the more I think ahead of things to come, it seems to be more about freaky guys and their endless desire to nail teenage girls.

Maybe when I put all the stories together in a dimestore novel, I will give it a tagline like: In a world where dudes are ferociously battling to bang teenage girls, a few guys and girls were lavished with magnificence by a remarkable place and supportive friends and neighbors. Gimme a break, I don't have time to think of something clever.

It would have been awesome if this movie had come out when I was attending "Cow Country High" but it probably would have been more trouble than I could handle as I would have no restraint in using the film to annoy straight cowboys.

Overall, it's a pretty good movie but I felt like I needed a counterbalance to the gay stuff. Want to make out, Sugar Beat?

The Power of Love Deliver You There

After a particularly hard night of dealing with kids who won't sleep.

Eleanor: "I can't take it anymore."

Me: "Hey. I love you."

Eleanor: "No you don't."

Me: "Yes, I do. All of us do. We love you to death. Didn't I tell you that everything I love turns to dust?"

Chronicles of Cow Country High V

In March, the sun was moving closer and there was only snow in most places. Bare patches of earth were beginning to show, even among the juniper trees. Beanpolio introduced me to a veritable goldmine for industrious teens, such as we were: The dump. It was a landfill, so you couldn’t count on seeing the same stuff on each visit. You had to grab things fast, lest they be buried tomorrow.

They had one hole for garbage and another hole for scrap wood and things like that, which made it easier for us. There was also a Forest Service dumping ground where they put things out of the way, like the floating outhouses they had used on the lake in years before but later decided were a bad idea.

But what Beanpolio really wanted to show me were two stacks of doors sitting next to the hole full of garbage. Regular house doors; front doors, bedroom doors, closet doors. I guess there were between 50 and 100 doors in those stacks. He told me he had designs on building a fort using these doors. I said, “Cool.” And we grabbed a bunch of doors and tossed them over a chain link fence and carried them to a spot he’d picked out already. He had moved some doors there previously as well. It is hard to pick a good spot for a fort in that area because the places that don’t have juniper trees turn into washes during rainstorms. But Beanpolio had picked a good spot that wouldn’t flood. We could envision the fort even as the doors were flat on the ground or leaning on trees around us.

Then it was back to the brimstone school with the creepy crawls and the living dead. My story for English class was coming along nicely. I was doing my part. Beanpolio was a year ahead of me in school and most of my classes were with the rest of the sophomores. My favorite class was woodshop because I got to make things. I did most of it by myself or it was just me and the teacher. I made a nightstand that is in my daughter’s room right now. The metal shop was basically in the same area as the wood shop, so sometimes the cowboys would overflow into where I was working but most the time they stayed in their space, welding “headache racks” for their trucks.

I wasn’t making friends in my class. The nicest guy there was still a cowboy through and through and he worried me a little. Nothing bad, but when we played basketball in Gym and I was guarding him as he tried to drive the lane, he spat, “Get out of the way. I play football, dammit!” Remember, the school had no football team. I think he was trying to sound tough and give me a reason to fear him. I thought he sounded like he was about to cry. There was no sense in reaching out to a guy like that. Leave him be.

The Green River is a world-class destination for fly fishing and occasionally movie stars fly in just to drop their scuds in the rushing water. But if you go into any gas station or lodge in the Flaming Gorge area and you see an autographed photo of a movie star hanging on the wall, the odds are, it will be a photo of Loni Anderson.

Would you believe that THE Loni Anderson is connected to Cow Country High? It’s true. Her sister was the Home Economics teacher at the school. Her nephew was in my class. My first impulse was to call him Eyebrow Monster for this story, but let’s call the nephew Eddie Munster instead. Eddie Munster was the son of the Forest Ranger. They say Eddie Munster dated one of the twins from a Double Mint gum commercial. Eddie Munster worked summers at the local yacht club. Do you know what that made him? Hot. Shit.

I think Eddie Munster had seen the world outside of Cow Country and he knew cowboy wasn’t cool everywhere. So Eddie Munster was only cowboy some of the time. Other times he was Utah Cool, meaning denim shorts and a braided belt. Eddie Munster wasn’t braggadocious about how he had things happening in a far out kind of way but he did walk around with a strange grin locked on his face like it was only a matter of time before you found out how great he was and then, oh yes, the fawning would begin. He could wait.

I think these things gave Eddie Munster a boost in self-confidence. He wasn’t shy to talk and he talked loudly like he was going to say something funny, but I can’t remember anything he ever said as funny. I remember he took the dry erase markers and was making a show of sniffing them at his desk. The principal rolled his eyes at the wolf-boy of destiny and went on with class. I think that’s about as funny as he gets.

I tried to make jokes with him during class for a couple of days but he made no response, except one day he got up and moved to a different desk. Like I said, my material was no good with this crowd. Too bad I didn’t have a famous aunt or a need to be a prick, maybe we’d have something in common.

Eddie Munster came up to me in the locker room one day and said, “Emmett. My dick is purple.” I looked at him and waited. I was certain there must be more to the story. He said, “MY DICK. IS PURPLE.” I waited.

Then he calmed down and said, “We were talking about how you laugh at everything. I was just testing you.” What was the difference between passing and failing, I wondered. Nothing, as far as I could tell.

There was no luck for friends on the drab side of the lake. When the bus took me back to the sublime side of the lake I started walking home. I was walking next to Geppetto who was a year behind me in school. We said hello. I was staring at an outcropping of red rocks on a nearby ridge. I asked him, “Have you ever been up to those rocks up there?” He said, “No.” I said, “They look cool. We should hike up there sometime.” Geppetto said, “Yeah.” I said, “Do you want to go right now?” Geppetto said, “Sure.”

We didn’t even go home first. We just pointed ourselves up the mountain and went. It was a few miles up the hill and Geppetto told me how all of his family lived down around Vernal. His grandpa had a recycling plant and would pay him to strip copper wire. He planned on living around here forever.

I liked Geppetto. I guess getting to know someone is just not worth the risk for some people. With others, you can just point up a mountain and say, “Want to climb it?”

My Laugh

This isn't meant to be entertaining. It's just a getting-to-know-me reference post and I think it will probably come up a bit in the future.

It's about my laugh.

I have this laugh. I've had it all my life. It has a life of its own. It doesn't need me at all. I don't even think about it. I don't even notice it. It's just been there. My whole life. Like my shadow.

It's kind of an Elmer Fudd, Beavis and Butthead thing. My wife laughs at me and calls it "Your nervous giggle." I don't think that "nervous giggle" is a good way to describe it.

But like I said. I don't even notice it. I don't realize that I do it. I'm not about to try and change it. But when I hear myself on tape or video or whatever, I hear it. That's when I notice it. And I think, "Man... that's kind of annoying. That guy laughs way too much. Why does he do that?"

Simple. It's just been that way his whole life. His laugh is like his shadow.

Other people who laugh way too much always tell me they love my laugh. And everyone else is just polite enough not to say anything. But I've thought it too. "Man... that's kind of annoying." But I'm not about to try and change it now.

When I was in that car accident last summer, after I was soaked in Dr. Pepper and waited 3 hours to fill out an accident report, closet-gay Brad and his pseudo-girlfriend and the pseudo-girlfriends family drove me to my car.

Brad told me later that when I got out of the car, the 13 year old little sister said, "Finally. He's gone. Every time that guy says something, he laughs." Man. That guy is kind of annoying.

Don't worry. It will grow on you.

Portraits of General Apathy and Major Boredom

I need to strike first, so here.

I finished my shower and came out of the bathroom, partially clothed.

Eleanor: "Wow. You really do look like Superman."

Me: "You mean my body?"

Eleanor: "No. Just your hair. I'm going to call Emilee and tell her she did a good job on your haircut."

And I tell you that in defense of this conversation we also had:

Eleanor: "I'm trying to laugh like that one surfer fish on Spongebob. Nahh Ahh Ahh. Nah Ah."

Me: "That's not very good. It kind of sounds like a goofy witch or someone doing a bad impression of a neighing horse."

Eleanor: "You try it."

Me: "I think I can do it, better than you anyway, but my throat is sore."

Eleanor: "You're rude. And don't say you can do it better than me if you won't do it."

Me: "I know I can do it better than you. I just don't think you have the pipes for it. Just like I can't sing like Mariah Carey."

Eleanor: "Do it!"

Me: "No. I'll have to do it loud and the kids will wake up."

Eleanor: "You're mean. You tell me I sound like a dumb witch or an ugly horse. See, I'm going to start my own blog just to counter your blog and tell everybody all the mean things you say to me."

Me: "Are you going to call it Swims-with-fins?"

Eleanor: "It would be Swims-without-fins, dummy."

Me: "I thought Swims-WITH-fins would be the opposite. Maybe, Doesn't-swim-with-fins. Anyway, can we just end this conversation now?

Eleanor: "Ooooh. You're a mean, mean man."

Me: "If I was as mean as you say I am then I would have told you to shut up 15 minutes ago."

And just so the world knows: She used to threaten to break my fingers when I did the "Whatever" W-sign at her with my hands.

Tricks to Being Alone and How I Put Too Much Stock In Cartoons

Are you familiar with those days when you just kind of hang around the house and by the end of the day you just start to feel bummed out?

I think it has to do with our desire as people to make progress in our lives. If we hang out for a day and don't make any kind of progress on a personal level then things start to seem wrong. I think this explains why we use shopping as therapy in America. Because if we buy something cool, though perhaps completely unnecessary, then it makes sense to us that our lives will be substantially better once we have that thing.

To avoid any guilt, one day I thought, "maybe I will go out and get my wife something nice." Just so long as I'm buying something. One second later I reminded myself that we don't have any money for me to go buy her something nice, but while I was thinking about money I sat down and paid some bills. And somehow, paying the bills made me feel better. Not like I was getting ahead in life but that I was at least taking care of my responsibilities, which is something I know a lot of people have difficulty doing.

I told my wife about my thoughts and that I was surprised that paying bills made me feel better. Here is what she said:

Eleanor: "I think you get bummed out because you are high maintenance."

Me: "WHHAAAaaaaa...?"

Eleanor: "You are high maintenance. Listen. Most people are happy sitting on their butts watching TV all day. All it takes for me to be happy is for my husband and kids to be nice to me."

Me: "Goodluck with that one."

Eleanor: "But you... you expect life to be awesome. You expect everything you do to be a cool experience, like snowboarding or biking or travelling. You expect more out of life than most people and when you can't have it you get bummed out."

Me: "Television sucks. I can't sit inside all day. And I have this crazy idea that life should be enjoyable. I'm an idiot."

It's good to pinpoint the problem. So, in short, I think people need to be patient with themselves. Baby step through work. Baby step through bankruptcy. Baby step to the timely passing of your wealthy relatives. And then you are set. If you can't wait that long, I hear drug dealing puts you right on the fast track... but if you choose this route DO NOT GO TO PRISON. I hear bad things about that place. And don't piss off the drug cartels, I hear that is an unpleasant experience as well.

The very best thing is if you can develop an attitude towards work like Spongebob. He loves his life and everyday is pretty much the best day ever. I often think that but then I compare my life to that of the yellow one without spicules. Squarepants owns his own home. Flat out owns it, before he even has his boating license. All of his family is in town and his two best friends live right next door. He has easy access to the Jellyfishing Fields and Goo Lagoon. He can setup a bubble blowing stand in seconds and even produce a living bubble friend if the other guys aren't available. He has no problem living on fastfood wages.

If I didn't have to worry about a home mortgage, I could easily live on the money I made as a dishwasher/busboy/prepcook as a teenager. If I could get out of town by taking a hop, skip and a jump down the street then I would rarely complain about living where I live. And friends? Who has time for those. Most of them can't even be bothered to check in on your blog every once in a while.

Yes, Spongebob has got the life. He should never feel sorry for himself ever again. If it was really feasible to live at the bottom of the ocean with a fishbowl on your head I think we would all be there.

Some Real Conversation For Your Ass

The thing about posting bits and pieces from conversations I have with people (usually my wife) is that I only imagine they are entertaining to me and my blabbing partner. I can easily see them from an objective perspective as, you know.... pointless.

But I will ask the readers. Do you like or dislike these?

Shopping before Christmas---

Me: "Are you really going to make me go into this store just so you can buy MORE wrapping paper?"

Eleanor: "EVERY husband has to do stuff like this ALL the time."

Me: "But do you ever wonder where bad husbands come from?"

What's in a name---

Eleanor: "You never brought me the fingernail-polish-remover like I asked you to."

Me: "I looked for it. I couldn't find it. Don't you think that fingernail-polish-remover is a funny name?"

Eleanor: "No."

Me: "You don't think it's funny that the stuff doesn't get it's own name. It has to be named after something else with the word REMOVER added to the end? It's kind of like when people call you Emmett's-Wife or Ethan's-Mom."

Eleanor: "Yeah, they take away your identity. Every time I go to the school EVERYONE ALWAYS calls me Ethan's-Mom."

Me: "See. When you go to the school you aren't Eleanor anymore. You're fingernail-polish-remover."

Eleanor: "Okay. I guess it's kind of funny."

And if anyone wants to argue that "Hey, that stuff is called acetone." Then I argue that the only people who know that are science geeks and people who are desparate for reading material when they are sitting in the bathroom working out a three-day cheese-plug.

The Answer to the Question Nobody Asked

I spent most of the weekend with my younger brother and half-sister at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City. The festival is a strange mix of experiences for me.

First, I was excited to be with my siblings and I always think of movies as impersonal events. Like if you take a date to a movie, you may as well just be watching a movie by yourself at home. You can't talk, you can't get to know each other. So I was a little resentful of the movies for dominating the time I could spend with family, but at the same time: They flew in from California for the festival. So I can't be that mad.

And it is possible that the movies saved my little sister from having her ear completely gnawed off by me. I can be loud. I can be obnoxious. I can take things too far. When I say things that may be overheard like:

"We'll just hang out here with the smokers... even though they aren't supposed to be smoking within 25 feet of the entrance to the building. AM I RIGHT OR AM I RIGHT, PEOPLE?"

or when people are shuffling into the theater seats a row behind us and I stop talking mid-sentence to whirl around and hiss the word

"SeatKICKERRR!"

at somone, and then my sister started laughing a hearty laugh... I want to believe that it was because she finds me wildly entertaining and not because laughing is just her way of dealing with an embarrassing situation. I ask that my sister please let me believe that, even if it isn't true.

My sister is in the "Film Society" at her respective university and she had a house with twentysome of her fellow students in the mountain town. There were two students in particular who seemed to be the designated Bosshogs who yapped and yapped about making everyone stand in line for tickets but never seemed to get anything accomplished aside from making everyone wait around and listen to their annoying boardroom-type banter. We were supposed to give some girls a ride into Salt Lake to their hotel and we felt obligated to listen to everyone gab for almost half an hour with no final decisions when my little sister just told them, "Well, we're going now." And then she walked away slowly with a sidelong glance as if to say, "going, going, gone." It was the right move.

When we got to the car, I said, "That one guy talked so funny. He's from the Future Micro-managers of America or something." I also added later, "He probably talks that way about everything, too, like taking out the garbage."

My brother said, "I've talked to him twice now and BOTH TIMES he used the word 'GOTTEN.' Is that even a word? It doesn't sound right."

And my sister lost her faith in the Future Micromanagers of America when it turned out that I kept buying my tickets right at the door when the movies started for less than what she was paying for tickets bought by her fellow students sleeping on sidewalks in freezing weather. After that she didn't have anything to do with her film society and made it into all the movies she wanted to see anyway.

The festival is a fun atmosphere as long as you don't gag on all the people flaunting money and trying to look important. It seems like most of the films are out to shock people. I commented that I would like to see ONE film that doesn't have a gun in it and everyone seemed to be doubtful that I would achieve that goal. Maybe the party got started on the wrong foot when the first movie I saw was called "Weapons" and the opening scene of the movie has Nick Cannon's brains getting Wild n' Out with the aid of a shotgun. That movie was well-made but still amounts to just hanging out with a bunch of dumb teenagers.

We watched a mexican movie called "Night Buffalo" and though I seemed to understand most of what they were saying, even without the subtitles, it still left me completely lost.

When we came out of the theater I said, "That movie was surprisingly boring considering how many naked people were in it." And I asked my sister, "Why didn't I understand it? Who was that guy with the longer hair?"

She said, "That was a flashback. It was the main character."

I said, "Oh crap. I thought the whole thing was in chronological order."

It was one of the most confusing movies I've ever seen. But even if I knew that most of the scenes were flashbacks I am still convinced that the ending was stupid.

I didn't see any stars while I was there. My sister got into Steve Buscemi's movie and he told everyone the backstory to the remake he made. My sister also knew the director of a movie called "Four Sheets to the Wind." He is a native american from Oklahoma and the movie is basically about an Indian who discovers that there is life off of the rez.

Before the showing of the film, we went to a luncheon being held by all of the people who made the movie. The director was there and all and we sat at a table with a bunch of people who are part of the film festival.

A lady who said she was a film-maker and "programmer" for Sundance started talking to my sister. My sister just told her she was there with her film society and that she had met the director of this movie and then my sister got up to buy us tickets to the showing of Four Sheets that started immediately after the luncheon. The Festival ladies turned to my brother and I and wanted to know what business we had there.

I said, "That girl is our little sister and we're just here to make sure nobody messes with her." And I tried to say it in a way that implied these little ladies had better watch out. I told them that I lived in Utah and that my brother was living on the rez. They asked where the reservation was in California and I asked them if they had heard about the 2002 fishkill in the Klamath River, as that is one of the more notable news stories of the rural area in recent years. They said no but they wanted to know all about it. I directed them to my brother as he has worked for the tribal fisheries department for years and years now.

My sister returned from unknowingly buying tickets to some after-party later in the week that none of us will be able to attend, and she was surprised to find us talking about the river and salmon. I started to apologize to my sister for being weird and she said, "No, I'm glad you are talking about this... I just don't understand how this conversation got going in the few seconds it took me to go buy tickets."

It turns out that the film-maker/programmer is from Oakland (which is near my sister's school) and is making a movie "about water." The lady told my brother she would like to talk to him more about the whole fishkill story because of his fish knowledge, but it was my sister who was there to make connections so we had to bump her into the spotlight. I told them that my sister was the leader of her tribal youth group and student body president and that she had won a major environmental award over a river project. My sister told me to hush and gave the lady her business card (18 with business cards!) and told her she could send her a good DVD about the whole thing.

My sister was a little disappointed that during her entire time at the film festival, she had only given out that one card. I told her it sounded like that might be the one that counts though.

There was another lady at our table who said she was in charge of all of the shortfilm submissions for the whole festival. My brother and sister didn't realize who she was but I told them, "I think she's just the lady who picks up the mail. Otherwise I would have laid on the charm." Instead of trying to impress her, I told her about my role in that "vampire western" movie I worked on. About how I played an Indian guide who is killed by vampire only to rise again as a vampire and be killed again. And I told her with a straight face that it was a shame that the film was never finished because "it was really groundbreaking stuff." The lady had no response.

Then I missed the "Four Sheets to the Wind" movie because there was no place to park the car and the movie would have been half over by the time I parked and rode a shuttle back to the Raquet Club. So I let my brother and sister watch the movie and I played Mario Kart in my car until the movie was over.

So I embarrass my sister but I do it for her own good. And I'm trying to help her. If I expect her to come back I think I will probably have to make my own awesome film for the festival and then I can be her connection. I am going to get to work on it right away.

I like the movie-makers probably more than I like the movies themselves. It's interesting how it all comes together. And the lesson my sister should learn from this experience is the same lesson we should all learn: It doesn't matter what knowledge you have, it matters what you will do with that knowledge. Think about it.