Month: June 2015

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Platonic Canine

Postaday for June 10th: A Dog Named Bob. You have 20 minutes to write a post that includes the words mailbox, bluejay, plate, syrup, and ink. And one more detail… the story must include a dog named Bob

Bob’s kinda shaky these days, but he still tries. I open the blinds in the morning and he opens one eye against the light. Then I unlock the door and he gets up. It takes him a while, but he manages it, and I hold the door for him the whole time. Once I didn’t– I was in a hurry to get the mail, and when I came back, he was back in his spot like nothing happened. And when I filled his bowl, he didn’t move. And when I opened the door later, he didn’t move. Finally I had to resort to giving him a few burnt pancakes with too much syrup, and he gave me a lick on my hand. His way of forgiving me. Ever since then, I hold the door until he makes it out.

He’s shaky but he still surprises me. We went out one morning to see of the circulars had arrived, and a bluejay swooped down to give me some hassle. Arthritis, blind in one eye, muzzle gone to white, but Bob let out a woof and was in the air, swatting that asshole down like it was nothing. “What the hell, Bob! You ain’t no cat!” He just sort of panted the way dogs do with their tongues to show you a grin.

A walk out to get the mail in morning, Bob watering the one tree in the yard, leaves a deposit in a spot right next to the trashcan so it’s easy for me to dispose of. A walk in the evening to water the same tree, no deposit this time, just me and Bob looking at those mountains way off yonder. Was a day when that was all we could see. Now we see it over the top of houses, that new neighborhood they built in the valley.

Then it’s me and the circulars, looking for deals. I eat my apple slices and let Bob lick the plate. I watch some baseball, take a nap, Bob takes a nap, the TV takes a nap. Naps are good. Get up and wash the ink of my fingers. Maybe have a bowl of soup. What else are me and Bob going to do all day?

I wish I could hand you a twist to this story, like my wife died or I got some serial killer buried in my back yard, or I won the lottery but there’s no amount of money that can make Bob young again. Sorry about that. Just a little snapshot of an old man and his old dog, the easy chair I spend most of my day in, the worn spot on the rug where Bob spends his.

Either you love dogs or you don’t. If you don’t, you can stop reading now. If you do love dogs, think they’re pretty much the best, let me ask you this question: when you picture old Bob, what kinda dog do you see?

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Ronald Bog

Ronald-Bog

Maybe instead of “Photography 101” I should take a blogging course called “Abusing Adobe Lightroom 101.”

My “problem” was that I went out to take pictures of this lake and none were very compelling. So I did what I could for this one. Maybe overdid it. Oh well. I’m wracked with terrible allergies as a result of tromping through cut grass to get this shot, so, let’s blame it all on that!

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Avast, Ye Lazy Do-Gooder

Postaday for June 9th: On the Edge. We all have things we need to do to keep an even keel — blogging, exercising, reading, cooking. What’s yours?

Put me on a three master out in the middle of the Atlantic at half-past two in the morning, lightning on the horizon and fifty-foot swells smashing cargo in the hold left and right, and you’ll find me up in the crows’ nest, lashed to the rail and cursing God with every pitch and kick. That wing beneath water belong to no angel, and if she leans out too far she’ll swallow up the next gust, send a shiver up the timber and snap your sheets. Sails turned into sarcophagi but I won’t budge from spot until the mizzen breaks in two and Davy Jone’s lighting candles for another dark party.

Keeping an even keel is one thing. But usually it’s out of whack before I even know it. I’m no prophylactor, me, but then I’m blessed with a mellow life and have little need for balms and calming teas. I get up, walk into my office, do some work, so some writing, play some games, more work, more writing. Maybe I’ll go for a run. Maybe I’ll watch a cheesy horror movie on the Netflix. I’ll have an apple for a snack, a turkey sandwich for my lunch, and when my wife comes home, help her make something nutritious. I go to sleep and I don’t dream about anything.

I dread shipwrecks, but I’m never more productive than when crisis is on the rise and I’m forced to be at my best. Combine that with my otherwise laid-back life and you can see why I don’t need to keep my keel even. I like to walk around and take pictures of flowers while listening to podcasts. I like to browse Reddit or play Hearthstone and do Ken-Ken puzzles while I’m waiting for my opponent to take his turn. I’ve been known, now and again, to sit in a shady spot on a hot day and drink beer and eat potato chips and read really excellent novels. These aren’t palliatives; these are life goals.

My wife’s keel keeper is terrible TV. My brother’s is online slot machines. My dad does woodworking, my mom has her crochet. One guy I know rides his bike everywhere. Another gal I know posts political rants on Facebook. And then there’s marijuana, something I can’t do, even thought it’s legal, because my wife’s a Fed and it’s not legal for her. Are any of these world beaters? Do any of this smack of something deep and utterly human?

Neither do my past-times. Keeping an even keel, then, is just succumbing to an urge for peace. That’s well and good— but sometimes I wonder what irony there is in craving peace too much, too hard. Like running hard to go get more oxygen. Shouting at someone for silence. You see my point. We’re all of us vibrating dots in a petri dish, some of us swimming straighter than the others, are keels nice and even, but even the biggest dish is just so big and there’s always an edge to strike and bounce off of. Maybe the wigglers got it right— they never go anywhere, and never hit a thing.

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Street Veins

aurora-2

If nothing else this course has gotten me to take photos I might not have otherwise taken.

Aurora (Hwy 99) at North 130th, from the pedestrian overpass.

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Carlsbad Flower, Drops (Photo of the Day)

drops on orange flower

My contribution to the Postaday Weekly Challenge: Vivid. I originally posted this on my blog on April 13th, but then I got an email today that the photo had won an “award” from Viewbug. Call me cynical, but I’m sure the “award” was more or less arbitrary and just a way to get me to come back to the site. And I will, once I overcome laziness. Nevertheless, I do like this one, and feel I was able to capture what I intended. I’ve always had a thing for water drops.

Taken at The Flower Fields in Carlsbad, CA.

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And The View Was Of a Concrete Wall

Postaday for June 8th: Blogger in a Strange Land. What’s the strangest place from which you’ve posted to your blog? When was the last time you were out and about, and suddenly thought, “I need to write about this!”?

Well I’m a wimp. I never blog from anywhere except home sweet home. Not that I am opposed to on-the-go blogging. I just don’t have my act together when I’m out and about. I suppose I could blog with my phone, but… I’m a tactile writer, I take energy and inspiration from the clickety-clack of the keyboard. Sliding my thumbs over a tiny screen, squinting with myopia the whole time, doesn’t inspire.

The closest I’ve ever come to “exotic blogging” would be the time I was in Puerto Rico in the middle of a DBTC effort on 750words.com. DBTC stands for “Don’t Break the Chain” and was inspired by advice Jerry Seinfeld offered on being productive (basically, you pick a daily task, and mark a calendar everytime you complete it. Soon you have a row of Xs, and that should motivate to keep going, so that you don’t break the chain.” 750words.com is a website where you are encouraged to write— you guess it— 750 words, a kind of daily writing warm-up. The website gives you a badge for consecutive days, and I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.

So there I was everyday in our hotel room just outside of Old and New San Juan, desperate for a wifi signal, tapping away on a small portable keyboard that was bluetoothed to my Ipad. I wasn’t blogging back then, just writing, and not anything readable, either. Yes, if it occured to me, I wrote about what we did on the trip. But I’m not one for travel-logging, usually. So moistly I just typed whatever.

I should, though. I should get into off-site blogging. Goodness knows I’ve explored the necessities. I’ve got the aforementioned portable keyboard, and another foldable keyboard, and a few tablets, and that Ipad, and another iPad Mini, and a Chromebook, as well as my work-laptop. Heck, I’m in line to upgrade my phone to one of those bigger Samsung Note behemoths, which is basically a tablet unto itself. There’s no reason not to exoto-blog!

Except, of course, that I don’t take inspiration from being elsewhere. I’m an insular writer, and I work from home, so I don’t need to be out and about, don’t need to decide if I should sacrifice blog time to get things done.

Maybe I should try anyway. On Tuesdays I got to a bar to drink beer with friends. Maybe once I get that giganto-phone I can start going an hour early and see what happens. Hey, whatever I come up with can;t be more than this sad entry! (My apologies for that, by the way).

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Home is Where The Beer Is

…and a book and a place to sit and enjoy them.

I was just going to take a picture of my house, but my wife said “That’s too easy. You should take a picture of a lawn chair with a beer and a book.” Which reminded of this photo I posted on Instagram a few years ago.

I was planning on getting all fancy with my DSLR and Lightroom- but sometimes the simple pictures are the best.

A photo posted by Jason Edwards (@bukkhead) on

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Welcome to Bukkhead

Hello! My name is Jason, also known as Bukkhead. (I wish, back then, someone had told me that my chosen web-name would follow me around for the rest of my days. I maybe would have chosen something less awkward.)

Ah, but whatayagonnado. I’ve had my website since as far back as 1995, and have “blogged” on and off since then. Mostly just personal stuff. For a long time, entries formed nothing more interesting than a daily diary. “Today I ate fish. I was not very good. Then I read the paper.” Etc. BORING!

Lately, though, I’ve been trying to get into a blogging “community.” I’m never going to be a world-famous blogger with a million anonymous followers. So why not be a locally-respected writer with a few dozen blogging friends? That’s my goal.

I’ve been at it daily for a few months now- did the Writing 101 thing in April, and loved it, and have been trying to keep up the Postaday prompts as well. This is good practice for me— my first love is fiction writing and getting into a daily habit will help me get past those slump moments when my fingers hover over the keyboard but refuse to move.

So that’s blogger me. If you read my stuff, sometimes I’ll just do a rote wrecking-ball treatment of the prompt. Sometimes I’ll write fiction. Sometimes I’ll let Dale respond if I can’t think of anything personal I want to share. (Dale’s a guy I made up. He likes breaking the fourth wall.)

The real life me is early forties, married, could stand to lose a few pounds, loves running, photography, and surf guitar. That’s just a slice, but I don’t want to bog you down with detritus.

Looking forward to reading your posts, fellow 101ers. 🙂

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The Nose Knows (Dale)

Postaday for June 7th: Super Sensitive. If you were forced to give up one sense, but gain super-sensitivity in another, which senses would you choose?

How do ya mean, forced? What are you gonna do, hold a gun to me head and holler “Awright, lose the sense of smell, jerk-face, or you’ll be sleepin’ wit da fishes. Don’t worry, you’ll get better eyesight outta da deal.” Or perhaps I’m to go under the knife. “Observe, Dr. Malicious, as I sever Dale’s optic nerves and reattach them to his sense of taste. And voila! The next superior sommelier is created! Muahhaahhaaa!” Gimme a break.

Actually, thinkin’ about it, I suppose it would be awright to go blind if I got an uptick in the other senses. Like that Daredevil kid. Of course, firstly, he’s in his twenties, and on the other hand, he’s a comic book hero. But I’d sign up for that. I been around my fair share of decades, and I’ve seen plenty. Blind me if it’ll make my hearin’ better.

I’m guessing most folks won’t want to lose their sense of sight. But what is there to look at? With hearing, you still got your bands from the 70s (before music went stupid), you still got your baseball games on the radio. What else do ya need?

But Dale, you’re sayin’, this is your first post about not hittin’ the strip clubs when your wife is outta town. You’d give that up if you went blind. Well, thanks, ya jerk, for bringin’ up strippers when I wasn’t going to. And lemme tell ya, I can still go. Might be harder to get there, but I’d still know the bartender, and you don’t need eyes to enjoy properly made martini.

You don’t need ears, either, so I don’t know if I’d pick enhanced hearing if I was going to lose my eyesight. My wife makes a mean meatloaf. And I’m sayin’ mean in the sense that it calls you names to your face while you’re eating it and then maybe tries to break your car windows when you’re done. So I don’t know if having a better sense of taste would be such a good thing for me either. Who knows, maybe there’s some kinda wonderful spice down there underneath all the char. My luck it would be Turmeric. We went to Goa a few years ago on some kind of vacation and she brought back a gallon of the stuff.

And I’m not so sure what having an improved sense of touch would get me. Maybe I’m at the Dancing Bare and Carla comes by for her tip and I reach in and I can tell just by feeling if I’m grabbin’ a Washington out of my wallet or a Jackson. I mean I know Carla’s got the kid and she’s working on her Associates but I give her a twenty just once and I look like a creep tryin’ to buy somethin’. Then again, I figure blind guys got special dividers for their bills so who needs touch?

I guess I’ll go with smell, then. Yep, gouge out my eyes, and make my snout a thing of beauty. Dogs live by, all the animals do, and they been around a lot longer than we have. I told you Loretta makes a mean meatloaf but up my olfactory and now I’m picking out the perfume she puts on when we go to church but wears off by Sunday’s chicken roast. I’m smellin’ the shampoo in her hair, the metals in her lipstick, the sweat on her upper lip because I don’t care what temperature it is, putting on the AC in April just feels wrong. Global warming, am I right?

That’d be good for a laugh, anyway. I like hearin the old girl laugh. She come walztin by and I’d smell soap and I’d say something like, “Wash your hands again, Lo? You gettin’ all OCD on me, woman?” And it’s cause she’s visiting the ladies more often now but she couldn’t admit that and I’m blind so I can’t see her blush but maybe I can smell it.

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World’s Ending? You Want Fries with That?

Postaday for June 6th: Eat, Drink, and Be Merry… …for tomorrow we die. The world is ending tomorrow! Tell us about your last dinner — the food, your dining companions, the setting, the conversation.

The world is ending and all I had was some left over pork roast and quinoa with mushrooms? Are you freakin’ kidding me? Life as we know it puffed out without so much as a whimper, and my last meal was leftovers night, an Adele’s sausage on a potato bun with mustard ketchup relish? If I had know the earth was doomed to explode in a fiery ball at the hands of an evil alien race bent on dominating the galaxy, I would have washed it down with something better than a glass of filtered water followed by a Tollhouse pan cookie.

Although, if I’m being honest here, that cookie was pretty good.

Listen to me very carefully. If you get wind of a secret government project to create a mag-lev driven blackhole reverse polarity inducer, a fool-hardy attempt to leash the power of unlimited energy, please tell me ASAP. I am serious. We all know that the Fenning equation for mag-lev is seriously flawed, and the resulting transductive breakdown will set off a chain reaction, flipping the quark state of every atom within three hundred nanometers and annihilating covalent bonds. I need to know so I can have as many last meals as possible. Last night was leftovers. The night before? Three Jamison and gingers and a slice of pizza and a pulled pork sandwich. I was at a party.

You know as well as I do that there’s a statistical probability that Snorg the Uberdragon awakens on planet Maxifraxx, and when he does, he will fly with space wings of gossamer blacklight straight towards planet Earth, the home of his metafather Tris. They will fight, for there can be only one Uberdragon lest the worshipers of Grennel throw off their yokes and revolt. The red-hot lava breath that Snorg and Tris spit at one another as they beat their thousand-mile long wings will rip our planet to shreds. So if you see Snorg in your backyard telescope, tell me. I don’t want my last meal to have been what I had three nights ago, a cranberry and walnut salad with a vinaigrette dressing that was, in my opinion, a bit heavy on the balsamic.

Four nights ago I had fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and baked beans. That’s not a bad last meal. If you happen to know that plate tectonics under the Pacific ocean are grinding together and resonating a feedback surge that just happens by sheer coincidence to be at the same time as an upswell over the Mariana trench thanks to a phase-state-change from the heat of decayed phytoplankton, and an atmosphere-sucking tsunami is on its way to wipe out the entire Western United States seaboard, plugging up the release tubes in five major volcanic systems, causing Rainier to explode and spew a trillion metric tons of ash into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun for a thousand years, then, sure, fried chicken with all the fixings would make a fine last meal.

Just in case, though, right now, I’m heading over to a local Mexican chained called Azteca. If the Old Gods are coming back to devour the earth and we’re to burn in the hellish pit of their stomachs for a millenia, I’m going out with a Macho Burrito and a margarita as big as my head.