Slackjaw's Forum

Yeah, it’s been a while. I needed a little time off to recharge the batteries as I usually do this time of year. This site always slows down about now anyway, perhaps because of the sunshine, or the fact that due to summer vacation, there are more children underfoot, or that people prefer being outside or watching reruns on TV or just getting away from the great world wide web to clean their senses and wash their souls clean. Besides, I haven’t had much I’ve felt like sharing these past few weeks anyway. Sweetie and I have been dealing with a lot of death and dying, struggling to catch our breath in the sea of stress we are currently finding ourselves in. Somehow it feels like to write about it, trivializes it to some degree, and to ignore it makes the events of the past few weeks seem like a dream or untrue. And so what I wind up doing is a lot of writing and not much posting. Before I realize what’s happened, a whole month has passed without an update to the site and so here I s...

I volunteered for Field Day at the older boy’s school today. The 1st and 2nd graders at his school take over Wrights Park for a few hours in the afternoon near the end of the year and play games at the various gaming stations. Jack’s mom, Carra, and I were in charge of the fire bucket brigade game, where there is a full bucket at one end of a line of kids and an empty bucket at the other end and the kids pass the bucket hand-to-hand down the line. In the beginning when we first got there Mrs. Haney took us though each of the stations explaining how the games went and the rules at that particular stop. There was the water balloon toss, the tug-of-war, the shoe toss, the obstacle course, the frog toss, and our station. We were allowed to pick our own station and of so of course, I picked the one where I knew the kids would get the most wet, I also picked the one where I didn’t actually have to walk too, since that was the last station we all ended up at. By the end of the afternoon,...

I got nothing today. I knew this day was coming, because it started a few weeks back and I feel like I’ve been petering out ever since. I should be spending the hour mocking the Chevy Suburban driver who was about to have a fit that I had parked to close to his back bumper when he saw me getting Ike’s wheel chair out of the back of the 402. I should be filling this up with statement like “When you drive one of the biggest cars out there, a car so big that it seats 9 comfortably, don’t come crying to me when you don’t feel like there’s enough of a space cushion surrounding your car. “And then I’d probably use the word “Asshole” a number of times, wrapping it up in a way that you’d know my middle finger is showing. Or if not that, then I should be telling you about the Suitcase Project that I taking part in. Local artist Lynn Dinino is putting together a public art project in which more than 50 local artists (and here I use the term loosely, because I count myself among them) have...