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Rules of the Game

Sundays we played volleyball.

Looking back it feels like we played the game for years, in the bright sun, under the gray sky, on still and humid September Sundays. We played. But it couldn’t have been years, could it? People came and went, the energy surged and waned. We paired off and disappeared, sometimes forever. But everything was forever then. How could there be an ending to those holy days, those brown and beautiful bodies, those perfect visions?

I can still feel the sting of the ball, its heft as I dug it out just before it hit the grass. I can see it spin up again, two more chances. We could fly in those days, before we found out about the things that are not possible. You have to keep it in the air. It can never touch the ground, but you can’t just grab it and stop it. You could save it that way, of course, but it’s not allowed. The rules of the game. What makes perfect sense, you can’t do that. You must serve, dig, volley, set, fake and spike, defying gravity, the rules of the game countermanding the laws of physics, of life, of the natural order.

We were out of college, all of us big boys and girls, starting our real lives, looking for our places in life, the ways we would make good, change the world, build the future. We were artists, con men, housewives and whores, makers, buyers and sellers door to door. We were learning the rules, making the rules, breaking the rules. Twenty or thirty of us, this is the way we partied, every week. Hard-fought games in the sun, Mexican beer in the coolers, whiskey, wine, music and drugs under cover of night.

I met you there on that field, and we played that game for all it was worth. After a while I told you that you had a nice set, and you cast your lovely dark eyes down, but you knew exactly what I meant. Then we played a different game, a game that didn’t have such easy rules, or maybe there were no rules at all – I never knew for sure.

I thought I was so smart. I thought I could play you, and you let me think it was true, while you volleyed and set me up, in the game where you made the rules. I thought I was winning you, but I was losing myself.

What a prize I was, brown and lean and smart and hard. What an ass I was, young and thoughtless and cruel. I guess you got what you were after, although I know I didn’t give you what you wanted. I guess I took what I needed from you, and I thought it was love. For a moment I held your heart in my hands, and you gave me indulgence and forgave me my sins.

Now I can’t find you anywhere, and I am certain that I never will. I catch glimpses in dreams, and I cannot speak. But I have learned the rules of the game, and now is when I need to confess to you, and now is when I need one last absolution.

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Get Thee Below Me

Well, OK. It’s never too late to learn.

Boy, that last post sank like a stone, didn’t it? Let’s bury it a little further right now. It was just stream of consciousness, in a way. I bit my tongue, I wrote about biting my tongue, I bit my tongue because I was eating too fast, food was in my mouth because of the eating, and yeah, it made kind of a nasty picture, but believe me, the reality was much worse for me than the description was for you.

Somehow it just turned into that kinky kissing thing which, coming right after the ghastly image of half-masticated food – and come on, some of you were also thinking about blood, too, weren’t you? – well, I can see now that it was just too much. Since I am a sophisticated man of the world, you’re probably thinking “How could he have committed such a faux pas?” I could say that I love you all, and I was overwhelmed by the desire to plant a smooch on you. In fact, that’s really my only defense, weak as it is. So that’s what I’ll say.

Sue me.

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Just Gimme A Kiss… Like This.

I bit my tongue at lunch today.

And I mean I got the back part of it caught between the molars, back there where the jaw has the most possible leverage, in the area I usually use for crushing diamonds, and chomped down on it good and hard. I was eating at my desk, like a pig. Worse than a pig, actually. I was eating fast, stuffing food in faster than I could swallow, getting it on my face, on my desk, on the floor, everywhere. Luckily I was alone in my office. I was doing something on the computer and answering the phone, and I just got that big ol’ piece of tongue-meat caught in my teeth and before I could stop pigging I had bitten it so hard that I almost cried. I had to stop all activity for about a minute. This is not a pretty picture, folks, me sitting there trying not to weep or drool, my mouth filled with half-masticated salad, unable to close it.

I was able to finish my lunch, because I am a pig, but much more slowly, and within the hour the pain started to spread downward so it felt like a sore throat (it still does, eight hours later). For several hours the pain radiated as far south as my sternum. Just a moment earlier I had been pain-free and lovin’ life. Now I was crippled in the mouthal area. Like a toothache, it was all I could think of, and I know it will be with me at least all through tomorrow, when I have meetings.

I didn’t want to bite my tongue.

I wanted to bite your tongue.

I wanted to put my hand on your shoulder and begin slowly to draw you toward me. Trying in vain to look you in the eyes, I’d be seeing only your mouth. When your face came close to mine, I’d brush my lips on yours, just a whisper of a brush, then I’d use my lips – only my lips – to gently push yours apart. I’d slip my hand around to the back of your neck, the better to hold you still, and I’d use my tongue to tickle just the very corner of your kissy mouth, that edge where the top and bottom lips dissolve into one another, first the left side, then the right, then back, two times, maybe three, my tongue starting to stroke your luscious lips with each pass across them.

I wanted to make love to your wanton mouth with mine, softly bite and tug that pouty smile right off your face, taste that space just behind those lips, run my eager tongue along your teeth, meet your own soft and sexual tongue in the wet darkness there. I wanted to devour you, be inside you and all around you, starting with your beautiful, hungry, lascivious mouth, the only part of all your gorgeous parts I can think of tonight.

And all I want from you, all I will need tonight, all I ask, is your hot breath, your pliant lips, your open mouth, your searching tongue and your dirty desire.

Can you give me that?

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A Lump in My Throat

Ma, send me money now, I’m gonna make it somehow…

I convinced myself at an early age that I had no artistic ability. I don’t remember doing this, but somehow it must have happened, because there exists no evidence of me ever trying anything creative as a child. I didn’t fingerpaint on the walls or go out in outlandish costumes on Halloween. I choked in the sixth-grade Christmas pageant. I was Joseph, and I screwed up my lines.

Maybe it was an incident in first grade that closed the book on my creative efforts. We were “working with clay” one day. The teacher handed out lumps of brown clay. Everybody got a lump, and we all messed around with our lumps for a while. The teacher was going around the room, making sure everybody had a lump, and, it seemed to me, making sure that we were all comfortable and enjoying ourselves with our lumps of clay. After a tough hour of “See Dick run” I was ready for a little R&R, even though reading came naturally to me.

So I was bashing my lump of clay around on my desk, or maybe we were sitting at a table, I can’t recall, rolling it into a ball, flattening it, shaping it into a cube, when the teacher finally got everyone settled and went back to the front of the classroom and made the announcement that she wanted each of us to make an animal with our clay.

I was stricken with horror. An animal? I couldn’t make an animal. How do you make an animal? I had no clue. I stared at my pancake of clay in front of me on the desk, trying to think what to do first, my stomach in a knot and my heart sinking fast. I tried to complain about the assignment, tried to explain that this was just too difficult, that there was no way, but the teacher smiled in that bitchy, patronizing way they have and told me to get to it, of course you can make an animal. Just go ahead and make one, any animal will be fine, we’re not here to judge.

Perfect. She couldn’t see the panic I was feeling, and she was going to force me to perform for her. This is probably why to this day I look for tall, dominant women to tie me up and – wait, that’s another story.

Anyway, I made a snake.

While the rest of the class was shaping legs and ears and tails and antlers, the little bastards, I took my clay and rolled it into a thin tube about a foot long. I tapered it a little at the back end, but I doubt if I had the herpetological expertise to make a hood, the characteristic mark of the cobra, or even a mouth. So I probably didn’t. This is all a little blurry to me, as I am just recovering this memory now after all these years.

I had found a loophole. Legally, a snake was an animal. She didn’t say “mammal,” or “any animal except a snake.” She had said “…any animal will be fine.” So I had her, and I was off the hook.

Of course you know what happened. The snake didn’t fly. I remember clearly when it was my turn to show what I had made, I held it up and said “I made a snake.” Even though I knew I was in compliance with the letter of the assignment, I had a lump in my throat, because I knew the snake wasn’t going to cut it. And it didn’t.

Her smile turned into a sneer, then a small, derisive snicker escaped as she told me that a snake wasn’t good enough. Oh, she didn’t use those words, of course, but her meaning was clear enough: “You are a rotten kid. You have tried to slide by on this assignment, using a technicality. And you are not getting away with it!” In sympathy, the rest of the class laughed uproariously at me and my snake. My face burned, my vision blurred, my heart palpitated. If we could have found a hole, we would have crawled into it, me and the snake.

She forced me to make something else, and I think I made a cow, taking care to make the worst cow ever sculpted, to prove to her that I had no aptitude for this, that I was right and she was wrong, and she should never have tried to make a sculptor out of me. As soon as she saw it and half-heartedly approved, I destroyed it violently. And I never tried to make anything out of clay again.

In fact, for many years my nickname was Snake, because I always tried to slide by on technicalities, hoping some strong woman would take me in hand and – no, no. Other story. I remained The Snake until I played in a softball league with a guy named Ed who weighed about 130 pounds but whose amazing sinuous swing was good for a home run about every third time he batted. He actually wanted to be called The Snake, and by that time I was glad to shed that skin, so to speak.

I carried the trauma of that horrible first-grade play-time humiliation into adulthood, although it was effectively repressed and I seemed normal. Until one night on the living room floor at the home of some friends with young children. We were playing with some of the thousands of toys that kids seem to accumulate these days, when somebody brought out a couple of cans of Play-Doh.

And handed me a lump.

The memory of that horrible first-grade embarrassment came flooding back. The kids were making animals. Handily shaping their lumps into whatever the hell they chose. And I made the decision that I had to stand up and fight my demon, or it would torment me forever. I determined that I was going to make an animal, or die trying.

Here is what I made:
There’s a bigger version up at the top of this post, for those of you who are stunned by the artistry and want a closer look, and who missed it while you were up there the first time. I made it completely from scratch, without a picture or a model to work from. I just closed my eyes and saw elephant. Don’t tell me you didn’t know it was an elephant. That would make you no better than the kids in my first grade class, who laughed at me and my snake.

Since I made this elephant my self-esteem has been sky high, and women frequently tie me up and have their way with me. Yes, I have learned an important lesson. And that lesson is this: Play-Doh smells real good, but it tastes like shit.

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Foot Bone Connected to the Head Bone

No one can make me happy about working at my crummy job.

For the past few months, due to mismanagement and bad planning, my job has been a brutal nightmare. If I were not already highly skilled and efficient at what I do, I would surely have fallen apart. But the fact that I can make up for failures elsewhere in The Corporation doesn’t mean I want to, or that I enjoy it, or that I should have to. I have complained about this all I dare in previous posts, so some who are reading this now are aware of my attitude. I’m a little grumpy.

Now, things are more or less back to normal and I don’t have to use my super powers to get the work done, and this annoys me, too. Mind you, I don’t take credit for this turn of events – it was just a happy accident. The various managers, supervisors, vice presidents and directors forgot to screw things up this month.

I refuse to act busy, so I find myself going around looking for things to do. At the Post Office or on a Teamster job, this might get me killed, but at my job they already think I’m a crazy misfit, so they barely notice.

I ran out of things to do by mid-afternoon, so I checked my email a thousand times, redesigned a form I want to start using, read a bunch of blogs and commented on a few, and then I just sat in my office for a while, sort of becoming one with the furniture. I tried to make my mind a blank, and it seemed to be working. But I looked in there and the thought that I found was this: I wonder if I can touch the top of my head with my big toe.

Think about it: The lowly foot getting to meet the head, home of the brain. They probably haven’t seen each other since I was a very little baby, made of some kind of highly flexible rubber. The only communication they’ve had for all these years would be the brain sending down orders to walk, or run, or stop. One-way orders, no discussion, no compromise, no warning. The only way the foot would have had any input is if it sent pain signals, or if it simply broke. If I could touch my head with my foot it would be like a chauffeur getting a sit-down with the CEO. Who knows what good might come of it?

Remembering my psychocybernetics, though, I thought it would be the better part of valor to simply imagine vividly that I was touching the top of my head with my foot. Because as you know, the mind cannot distinguish between a real event and one vividly imagined, and besides, I didn’t want to be carried out by my colleagues and driven to a hospital.

So I looked at my foot, gauged the distance and the bending that would be involved, and it only took a few seconds for me to say “Damn! I could actually do this.”

Of course, that was just a theory, and it had to be tested. So I closed my office door, took off my shoes and got down on the floor, and yes, it turns out that I can touch the top of my head with my big toe. Not only that, but I can do it with either foot. OK, I admit I had to grab my ankle and drag my foot up there, and I can’t put both feet up there at the same time, but what do you want? I’m putting it on my resume.

Sadly, the foot-brain conference did not take place. The foot got one look at the hideous haircut I got the other day, and went back to the garage, laughing.

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Promised Land, Chapter 1

…continued from here. The story starts here.

The third bus dropped him off in the city of Venice.

He’d been riding and changing buses for nearly three hours, inching his way across the endless city toward Jake’s place at the beach. He was surprised to discover that he wasn’t the only person in Los Angeles who didn’t know where the hell he was. Even the people who lived here didn’t know anything. He’d given the first driver Jake’s address, and the guy had glanced at him for a split second, then turned back to his driving.

“Where is that?” Friendly, but stupid.

“I don’t know. I was hoping you’d tell me.” No sense pissing him off so soon. “Venice?”

That was the magic word. The bus rumbled twenty or thirty blocks while the guy hashed out a plan, talking to himself the whole time, working through the possibilities. Eventually he came up with an itinerary, involving a couple of transfers. It was barely comprehensible, but it worked.

By the time the kid got off at Pacific Avenue it was early afternoon and the sky had turned a bright, hazy gray, fading to brown at the horizon, when you could see it. It was hot, but there was no visible sun. There was a taste in the air that the kid had never known before, since he had never been less than a thousand miles from the sea, and now he was just two blocks from it. The bus lumbered away, and he stood there and looked after it.

A seagull wheeled far overhead. A siren howled in the distance. But for that there was no sound and no movement on the street. The Pacific Ocean lurked unseen just on the other side of some buildings to his left, and the lack of anything beyond it made him feel as if he were standing at the end of the world. The corner he was on featured two broken down apartment buildings, an empty lot and a corner grocery. He went into the little shop to buy cigarettes and a Coke and to ask about the address he was looking for. The guy at the counter was 40, completely bald and muscled like Marciano. His chest rippled under his shirt when he pushed the change across the counter. He shrugged at the address. “It’s down Pacific.” The kid borrowed an opener for the Coke, drained most of the bottle, then set out to find Jake.

It was a neighborhood of flaky stucco apartments, four and eight to a building, jammed side by side and all of them touching the sidewalk. The street curved gently to the right and disappeared a few blocks ahead. Parked cars lined both sides. As he rounded the curve, things started to happen.

An ambulance overtook him from behind and raced past. Two boys on bicycles followed, and behind that a police black-and-white went by, too fast for the narrow, curving street. Rounding the curve himself, he saw the official vehicles parked all over the street. Ambulance, couple of squad cars, paramedics, fire truck. Uniforms all over the place. As always, the cops had drawn a small crowd, and now they were engaged in crowd control. They were standing in various heroic poses around the scene, refusing to speak to the curious neighbors. The kid had been looking at addresses, and now he saw that he must be very near his destination.

The cops seemed to be guarding one of the apartment buildings, and they seemed to be too late. The windows on the ground floor were smashed, glass and pieces of the frames blown outward and strewn on the sidewalk. The front door was hanging by one hinge. The kid couldn’t see the address on the building, and then he had gone as far as he could without knocking down one of the cops.

Through the broken doorway came the ambulance attendants rolling a stretcher, it’s occupant under a sheet and showing only a bloody face. As they rushed past the dangling door it twisted off it’s remaining hinge and fell face up on the sidewalk, revealing the four tin numbers tacked there. It was Jake’s address. As the stretcher went by, the bloody face looked up at the kid.

“Hey Alvin,” it said. “When did you hit town?” Then Jake was gone, stuffed into the waiting ambulance.

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Holding the Phone

Paper towels, huh? What would we do without them?

If I had been a pioneer I would have stolen a bunch of land from whoever was there ahead of me, and I would have tamed that land, and planted it, or mined it, or raised cattle. Whatever the hell I was doing outside, the little woman would have to be in the kitchen, cooking for me and the men. And when she spilled something she’d have to clean it up with a rag, which would then have to be washed. Until it was washed, it would sit around and stink, or perhaps get moldy. Jeez, what a mess!

But not if you have paper towels. If you have a lot of big, sturdy paper towels, you can wipe up any mess you make, and then just throw them away! Spill some beans on the wood-fired cookstove? No problem. OK, I think we’re all on the same page now. Let’s move on.

I went to Supercuts this morning, a chain of haircutting shops where English is a second language. You never know when you tell them how to cut your hair if they get it or not. “Take a half-inch off” might mean “leave a half-inch on.” They always act like they know what you’re saying, but I don’t understand anything they say, so why should I expect them to understand me? And let me just tell you right now that I have nothing but the highest regard for those who have immigrated to the U.S. from other places and are making their way in this strange land, getting jobs, buying houses, learning a new culture. Greatest respect. But now I am sporting perhaps the worst haircut of my life. It could be the worst one in Los Angeles, although – and I can’t verify this – I might be very hip in Cambodia. I don’t know how such a small amount of hair can be made to stick out so forcefully in all directions.

But I am not proud. I took my weird haircut like a man and went on to the rest of my errands. The main one was I had to exchange a telephone that I bought at Radio Shack. Since I bought it at Radio Shack, I saved all the packaging and the receipt, because I figured I might have to take it back.

This was not a cell phone, but a regular wireless home phone. It has big buttons, though, and a volume control, stuff that’s hard to find. I took the phone in to the store, where two pleasant-looking young people were standing behind the counter. This is what I told them:

“I bought this phone four days ago, and it seems to have a problem. I charged it for 12 hours, and it went completely dead in less than an hour. I charged it for another 12 hours, and it lasted a bit longer, but I have never gottten even four hours of use out of a charge. So I think it’s defective, and I’d like to exchange it for another one just like it.”

To my surprise, both clerks agreed, and one of them went into the stockroom to get me a new phone, while the other one started to ring up the transaction. Alas, the price of the phone had gone up in the few days since I had made my purchase. This was a serious issue for the Radio Shack Kids. They huddled over the register for a few minutes discussing this impossible customer service conundrum: How can we charge this guy an extra 20 bucks now that we’ve agreed that his phone is defective?

They had to call tech support. I’m not kidding. They had to make three phone calls and wait on hold for five minutes each time. One of the calls was because they had forgotten to ask something on the previous call. But I was patient. I was in the right and God was on my side, it was a beautiful day and I wasn’t going to ruin it by pulling out a weapon and demanding justice.

It turns out the issue was that the phone had gone up twenty dollars, but there was a twenty-dollar mail-in rebate on it. If they changed the price for me, the computer would still have printed out my rebate form, thus I might get away with something. Rule Number One in modern corporate sales: Never let the customer get away with anything. The solution, no doubt provided by the president of the company was this: Change the price for the man, and keep the rebate slip. The clerk who finally did this for me and handed me my new phone actually tried to convince me that he had wanted to do it that way from the start.

Why then, did he have to talk on the phone for twenty minutes while I stood there cooling my heels? Then it hit me: The hidden cameras in the store were taking pictures of my grotesque haircut, and it was being emailed to all the stores so the schmoes who had to work on Sunday could have a laugh.

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Promised Land, Prologue

The kid hit town on the Super Chief from Kansas City, mid-morning in L.A.

Union Station, maybe he’d get back there some day, look around. Some kind of museum, nothing like it back home. He’d never ride the train again, though. Fucking snooty porters. A buck for a pillow. He’d rolled up his heavy coat and slept on that. Never wear that fucking thing again, either. Not in the promised land.

First day of summer in Los Angeles, and you could hardly see the end of the block, fucking air was so thick. It burned, too. Old timers would tell him You shoulda been here in fifty-seven, fifty-eight. Air was so bad it’d chip your teeth. Fuck them. This was bad enough. He could barely open his eyes. It felt like he was in a burning house. He walked out the front, past the cab stand, dropped his duffel bag and guitar case and hung the coat on a parking meter. Dug through the pockets for the phone number he had written down, found it, and went looking for a pay phone, leaving the coat behind. Who needed it here? He’d get something nice in L.A., something with some eyeball, who needs the farmer suit?

First things first, though. Call Jake. Jake had been out here for a year, knew the ropes, said he had a gig for the kid, make some real money for a change. Hah. Money for a change. Tired of working for change, those dives in K.C. Fucking drunks didn’t know their butts from page eight, comes to good music. Night after night in those dives, he couldn’t play bad enough to bother anybody. He tried, too, at first a wrong note in an old standard, then whole wrong chords. Nobody noticed, fucking drunks puttin’ their cheap hustles on each other, telling him tone it down, man, people are tryin’ ta talk.

Fuck you, he thought. People are tryin’ to play music. No more of that shit out here. They had good clubs here on the coast, famous places, clean places, where people came to listen. Places like Shelley’s, and The Lighthouse, and up north The Hungry i. He was already thinking the coast, trying it on, rolling it around in his mind. I’m on the coast.

He found a phone booth, went in and dialed, his eyes burning and watering. Five rings, six. He fished a Lucky out of his shirt pocket, lit it with the old Zippo. Eight rings. He hadn’t told Jake he was coming, and now he started to regret it. He thought he’d surprise his big brother. Hey, man, I’m here! Maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea. Ten rings. He hung up the phone. He was sweating now, and the muggy brown air felt good when he opened the door of the booth.

Jake lived in Venice. The kid still had the postcard, a couple of broads in skimpy bikinis, Greetings From Venice Beach, California! Fucking Venice, like that place in Italy. Nothing was real out here. Those broads looked real, though. The address on Pacific Avenue. It’s not much, Jake had said, but I’m never home anyway. Never home. Probably should have picked up on that, he thought now. He dropped the cigarette on the curb, put the sun at his back, and started walking.

In no time he was lost. The streets wouldn’t let him keep the sun at his back, and soon the sun was straight overhead anyway. Good thing he’d dumped the coat. He rubbed his eyes for the hundredth time with his sweaty hands, and cursed the heat and the filthy air. A city bus lurched toward him, spewing black smoke. He had fifty bucks or so left in his pocket, lucky those porters had let him keep that much, a half pack of Lucky Strikes, his eyes and his feet burned and he had no idea where the hell he was. The bus door opened and the driver looked out at him, bored. The kid looked up and down the street, but there was no one coming to his rescue. He stepped aboard, heading for the promised land.

Continued here.

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Lesbian Love Slaves Who Like It Both Ways!

That ought to bring in a little traffic.

I know what you’re thinking: Both ways? Doesn’t he know there are more than two ways? I thought Larry Jones was a man of the world. How is it possible that he thinks that both ways would cover it?

OK, you got me. I was planning to write about just two ways tonight, in lascivious detail, until you were drooling on the edge of your seat, begging for more. Then I was going to give you more! Sure, I know about those other ways. I may even have tried a few of them. Or at least in a psychocybernetics kind of way, I might have imagined them so vividly that I now believe I actually did them.

Did you know the brain has a hard time telling the difference between things that really happened to you and things that you have vividly imagined? Makes sense, when you think about it. The arms and legs, and, uh, other parts are out there taking care of business, walking, sky-diving, getting in fights, getting laid, shooting baskets, and what does the brain know? It has to believe what it’s being told about what’s going on “out there.” If you tell it (by vividly imagining it) that you are shooting a thousand jump shots a day, and you’re hitting most them, your brain will eventually start to think “Damn, I’m getting good at this! I’ll bet I could join a team and be the star player!” The brain would start to “remember” hitting all those shots, exactly as it remembers real stuff that happened, like going to the bathroom a thousand times a day (if you do that, although I don’t recommend it).

Sometimes I wonder how much of my past really happened, and how much I just made up and told myself the story so many times that my brain is totally convinced. Like, was I really on Apollo 13? Did I ever perform at The Apollo? I don’t know anymore.

One thing I’m sure of is that the babe I saw at the grocery store tonight was looking at me. I know because I was looking at her, and I didn’t want her to feel uncomfortable at me checking her out, so whenever she caught me I pretended I was just looking at something else that happened to be right over her shoulder, like the boxes of soup. Did you know that soup comes in boxes now?

Anyway after a while I realized that she was catching me way too many times for it to be a coincidence. Then I started to feel all cocky and cool: Hey, she’s checking me out. So, as we’re pushing our carts up and down the aisles and we keep being in the same department at the same time, I got bolder and let her catch me red-handed, as it were, a couple of times, and I gave her my shy smile. It had to be another crazy coincidence that she headed straight for the checkout counter right after that.

But now I’m wondering if I really have lesbian love slaves, how many ways I’ve given it to them, if they like it, and what’s on for tomorrow. Hey! Wipe that drool off the edge of your seat.

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Not In My Back Yard

My back yard, in fact my entire neighborhood, is alive with springtime.

Trees which have been bare for months are undergoing their annual rebirth, sprouting the sweetest bright green leaves. Feral tomcats are feeling amorous and serenading the domestic females up and down the block. The asphalt skateboarders are out in force, methodically practicing the same tricks over and over, pressing daylight hours to the very limit and daring passing motorists to run them down. These surly boys were just toddlers last fall, weren’t they?

Now that Daylight Time has gone into effect, I hear the many nesting birds outside my bedroom window, chattering excitedly while I am trying to stretch my all-too-short nights’ sleep a few more minutes. This morning I heard a couple of starlings going at it over location, location, location.

She: There’s a cat in this yard. I just don’t feel good about building here.

He: I’m telling you, honey, I’ve checked it out, and the lady across the alley throws birdseed out every day. We’ll build the nest in a tree. No cat can catch us, and we’ll have free food. What could be better?

She: That’s what you said last year about the eaves of that Mexican restaurant. Free tortilla chips, you said! But you didn’t think about the busboy with the BB gun, did you? I still have a pellet in my butt!

He: Nag, nag, nag. I’m the one who has to go get the twigs and the grass and the gum wrappers to bulid this thing, while you just sit here and complain.

She: Complain?! That’s a good one, Mister I-don’t-want-to-sit-on-those-eggs! I ask one little favor and you act like you can’t be bothered.

He: You have no idea how hard it is to find worms in this town. You’d think grass seed would be good enough for you, and the occasional crust of bread, but no, not for The Princess. I fry my feathers flying all over the place looking for extra special treats for you, and all I want when I come back to the nest is a little appreciation —

She: — Appreciate THIS, Mr. Big Shot! YOU stay here all day guarding the eggs and watching for that damned cat, and I’ll cruise around town, wasting time with my NO-GOOD FRIENDS!

He: You leave my friends out of this.

She: I’d like to. If you spent half the time here taking care of things as you do out on the telephone wire by the pool hall — get away from me!

He: Aw, c’mon, baby. You want me to “take care of things,” don’t you?

She: Mmmm, yeah, Big Boy…

So goes the circle of life in the trees. But a more alarming conversation seems to be getting underway in the back yard – that between Molly the Cat and a couple of mockingbirds who may be moving in.

Last spring, mockingbirds built a nest somewhere in our vicinity – we never found the damned thing – and proceeded to claim as their own the entire region in the name of the Mockingbird King and all of Mockingbirdland. They perched on various trees, on wires, on rooftops and weathervanes, and every time they saw Molly the Cat they attacked.

At first, the attacks were verbal. Scurrilous they were, but as I told Molly the Cat, words will never hurt you. Upon spotting the cat, one of the birds would fly down from God knows where to the nearest perch that was out of reach and issue the first warning, a one-syllable epithet that sounded an awful lot like the word “SHIT!” all the while giving M the C the old mockingbird stinkeye. “SHIT!” they would shout, followed by a low-pitched, scary call reminiscent of an angry old man saying “crap,” but drawing it out real long for effect: “Craaaaaaaaap. Cra-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-p!”

The verbal attacks went on for several weeks. Molly the Cat started to develop a nervous tick, and she would never go outside without standing in the doorway for a minute or so, staring out in fear.

I did some pissed-off bird research, and I discovered that mockingbirds are known not only as beautiful singers, but they have an uncanny ability to learn the songs of other birds, that they seem to have an abiding love for music, often staying up late, drinking and singing as many as fifty songs that they have learned, just for the pure joy of learning. And drinking and singing, I assume.

But, ominously, I also learned that mockingbirds are highly territorial, and will go up against almost any animal who ventures near the area they have claimed as their own.

Sure enough, one day I walked out the back door with M. (she had gotten so she wouldn’t go outside without an escort), and I heard a sharp “SHIT!” from the garage roof. Then from next door the other mockingbird came swooping in, while the first one said “Craaaaaaaaap” in that threatening way. While I was distracted by that, the second bird came buzzing down at me, flapping and squawking and missing me by about an arm’s length. Then they both went up to a nearby overhead wire and glared down at us, cursing “SHIT!” and “Cra-a-a-a-a-a-a-p….” Molly the Cat bolted for some bushes, and got buzzed by both birds before she made it to shelter.

This went on for SIX WEEKS, while the mockingbabies were incubated, then hatched, then weaned, making the back yard pretty miserable for me, and totally uninhabitable for Molly the Cat. I don’t mind saying that I was getting pretty exasperated. I went back to my internet research, to see if there was some humane way I could get rid of these little bullies, and that’s when I discovered to my horror that mockingbirds will sometimes raise TWO BROODS IN A ROW in the same location in one season. Sometimes.

OK, you know what happened, right? Right. A second brood. More squacking, cursing, swooping and pecking. Six more weeks, effectively ruining the whole summer before they finally left, sometime in September, although they didn’t say goodbye, so I don’t remember exactly.

Who the fuck do these mockingbirds think they are, anyway? We were here first. We are PAYING for this land, these trees, this house, the very garbage they eat. It got to the point where they would spot Molly the Cat when she was just looking out the window, and yell “SHIT!” at her. She was in counseling until January.

And now it looks like they are back. They must have liked it last year. Maybe I was too gentle. Maybe I was a sucker. Yeah, that’s it. I was a chump. Well, this year – No more Mr. Nice Guy! If they yell “SHIT!” at me…

Who am I kidding? I couldn’t even find their nest last year, and even if I could, I’m probably too soft to take any irrevocable action.

Besides, those little bastrds are badass. SHIT!

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