Slackjaw's Forum

It was a low mournful howl that woke me up. Not all that loud, just mournful in a hungry lonesome way that lost hungry dogs have when they’re lost and hungry. I haven’t been sleeping all that well lately anyway, what with Swearing Man and the boys both having colds. But it did wake me right up out of a dream in which I was trying to find a train station. I found him over at the Adler’s place rooting though the garbage cans, just as rail thin and mangy as any dog you’ve ever seen. The Adler’s live in Arizona during the winter months and they had yet to come back to Tacoma and open things up. So needless to say this pup wasn’t finding much to eat. He came right up to me when he saw me. Most stray dogs are a little skittish at first, but not this one. I don’t know if it was the hunger or the cold or if he was just to damn tired to put up any resistance, but the moment he saw me he came right up with his tail between his legs and wouldn’t leave me alone. He followed me back up the road to...

There was a Russian sub in the Thea Foss waterway. It wasn’t a commissioned sub or anything. It was built in 1973 and a Canadian entrepreneur had recently salvaged it from the scrap heap. He had had the brilliant idea to fix up the insides with some cans of paint, decorate the state cabins and galley and charge people an entrance fee. Now for a few crisp tourist dollars, one can take a tour of the submarine and see firsthand how 70 men could live in a little Russian metal tube no larger than an elementary school bus. It’s also testament to Russian use of old technology as there is nothing at all modern in this little trap and if I had been told it was built 50 years ago I would not have been surprised. My understanding is that this pissed off the Russians who had thought it was to be used as scrap metal and not as a tourist trap but by that time there wasn’t really anything that they could do about it. In some roundabout way we are friends of friends of the port commissioner in Tacoma....

It was a nice slow quiet week this week. No car bombs or drunken fistfights going on down the road. No police chases thought our park, no new car stereos tested at two in the morning. No parties down at the sandbar or by the quarry. Sometimes that kind of quiet is all about peace and tranquility, and sometimes the quiet is in a weird light like the sky before a thunderstorm. Last night Swearing Man was back. He only seems to come by in the summer months. I don’t know if this is because he doesn’t have a good raincoat or if he has use of a car from November to April or what. But when the nights get warmer Swearing Man takes walks down our road. “GOD DAMM YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!” “You fucking motherfuckers!” He screams at the top of his lungs. “You fucking bastard cocksuckers! You fucking bitches can go FUCK yourselves!” He yells as he walks off down the street. This is almost always between one and three in the morning, when usually nothing short of a bottle-rocket breaking your kitchen...

Well this week marks the one-year anniversary of my web site. I’ve written 31 forums in 365 days. I’ve re-done the site two or three times, writing close to 13,000 words and unknown amounts of html code to get to where I am today. I’m averaging around 300 hits per month which considering I have neither naked pictures, nor a particularly funny writing style, seems pretty good to me. This week the site reached the 3000 hit mark. I’m trying to remember what caused me to start this web page in the first place. I think I was reading a story about blogging and I thought I would look into it. At any rate, I’ve longs since dropped the blog part of my web page as I found it too lightweight and fleeting than the style I was interested in creating. Besides I need spell check otherwise I get cranky and use small words. I can honestly say that I haven’t written this much since high school, being that I chose a fine liberal arts education where large amounts of writing weren’t a prerequisite to grad...

Today starts my birthday week. Since my birthday is on a Friday this week, I thought I would wait until Monday of the week proceeding before I would start it. This would avoid the post birthday letdown occurring over the weekend: a common occurrence when planning for a whole week celebration of the date of my birth. Narcissistic? Undoubtedly. But it’s only once a year and I don’t think one week of narcissism out of a possible 52 is all that bad. I don’t harbor any beliefs that I deserve it more than other people who only celebrate one day out of the year, but as Clint Eastwood said to Gene Hackman in “The Unforgiven” right before he shot him, “Deservings got nothing to do with it.” My goals this year include there being less of me at next years birthday week. I simply must get my lazy fat ass under control. To write more music and spend more time recording. To kiss my Sweetie more often, whether she wants me to or not. To play with the boys more often. To eat better tasting food. To re...