%$#@ Yeah!
Heavens to Betsy! This one is for me and all my potty mouthed friends.
Click image to see larger size:
Pearls Before Swine comic strip from October 31, 2011
Category: cursing
Hit the Road, Jack
What better way to celebrate the long drive home from L.A. than with my favorite story about the ubiquitous Grapvine. The Grapvine is what they call the bit of road leading through Tejon Pass in the Tehachapi Mountains in Southern California. After miles and miles of bleak, hazy and bland I-5, the Grapevine is sort of a welcome breakup to the drive.
It also, in my opinion, serves as the gateway to Southern California. Everything changes once you come off that mountain pass and drop down into the outskirts of L.A.
This bit of road is the stuff of legend and lore. Many a car has met its match on the Grapvine as the climb from sea level to at times as high as 4000 ft proves to be too much.
And with that, I’ll turn it over to a great New Mexican, the cowboy poet and dear friend of my best friend’s family, Baxter Black.
I read this story aloud to The Good Man as we made the summit….being on the very same road made it that much more hilarious.
Enjoy.
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The Grapevine
By Baxter Black
Equisearch columnist Baxter Black ponders the futility of tryin’ to impress the ladies while driving a Chevy Nova.
How better to impress his new lady friend, thought Rob, than to take her to his friend’s rancho for an afternoon branding and BBQ.
She would be pleased to see that he had many friends who drove pickups with chrome grill guards, tinted windows and coordinated paint jobs. He admitted to himself that his own outfit was less ostentatious. His ’64 model two horse trailer had been repaired so many times that it looked like a well drillin’ rig! The ’76 pickup was using 2 quarts of oil to tank of gas and his horse was . . . well, ol’ Yella looked right at home.
Rob was eager as a piddlin’ puppy when he picked up Delilah and headed north outta the Loa Angeles area. He was anxious to make a decent impression but one large obstacle lay in the pit of his stomach like a pea in the Princess’ mattress . . . THE GRAPEVINE! It was a monster of a hill dreaded by truckers and people who still drove a Chevy Nova.
The engine was screamin’ and smokin’ like a burnin’ pile of creosote posts when they finally leveled out at the summit of the Grapevine. Rob had sweated through his shirt but he sighted with relief as he gave Delilah a comforting look. She smiled back uneasily. Then the motor blew! A big dent appeared in the hood and it sounded like someone had dropped a Caterpillar track into the fan!
They coasted silently into a service station at the bottom of the grade. He assured his sweetheart there was “no problema”. He had lots of friends nearby. Her reaction was one of forced optimism.
By dark he’d borrowed a pickup from Hank and they both agreed returning back home was the best option. He loaded Yella, hooked up the trailer and back over the Grapevine they flew! Halfway down Rob managed to slip his arm behind Delilah’s neck.. Soon she was lulled into discussing’ her dreams of home and family. She snuggled closer as he watched a tire bounce by him on the driver’s side. No headlights shown in his rearview but he couldn’t help but notice the huge rooster tail of sparks spraying up from beneath his trailer! He could see her astonishment in the flickering light.
Rob wheeled the screeching rig to the shoulder. Together they unwired the trailer doors and Yella stepped out, unhurt. Rob tied him to the highway fence and unhooked the trailer. Rob’s facial tic had returned.
Seemingly in control, he jumped in the pickup and headed south for the nearest phone to borrow a trailer. He returned to the scene to find Yella grazing in the median with semi’s whizzing by on both sides and his date shivering over the still warm axle, forgotten. She, herself, was smoldering. She spoke not a word and Rob conceded to himself that it was gonna be hard to regain her confidence.
In the space of 12 hours and 50 miles he had left his pickup, his trailer, his horse and his girl scattered from one end of the Grapevine to the other.
Next day he towed the pickup to the shop. He left his trailer to be impounded by the State Police. His horse made it home safe but Delilah changed her phone number, wrote him out of her will and has not been heard of since!
For more from this cowboy poet, visit BaxterBlack.com.
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iPhone photo of The Grapevine, copyright 2008, Karen Fayeth
Story reprint found on Equisearch.com.
Possessive Punctuation
On Monday of this week, I set out to write a post, but seriously lacked for any good ideas.
I seem to be going through the Mohave Desert of good ideas lately, and it’s killing me. I think I abused The Muse mightily back in June when I did four different entries for the county fair, and she’s pouting now. Seriously pouting.
So I decided to rely on my tried and true Muse busting trick of going to the random word website, laying down the rule that I must use the first word that shows, and then just writing.
The word I got was: apostrophe
Well. It’s Wednesday and I still got nothing to write about the word apostrophe. I’ve been Googling the word trying to come up with good ideas, but nothing really sparks my interest.
I mean, c’mon: “apostrophe…from the Greek apostrophos (prosoidia) (the accent of) turning away”
Um. Ok.
And then the grammar pages discussing how the apostrophe is either used to denote a missing letter, as in can’t, or to denote a possessive, i.e. Karen’s blog.
And a dissertation on how the apostrophe and the single quote are two TOTALLY different things (even though they look exactly alike).
Yawn.
I mean really, random word generator? Apostrophe? If you had to give me a punctuation word, why not something with flair, like Ampersand? Or as mudane as Comma, but at least I could wax on for a thousand words about my own personal, overuse, of, the, comma.
But nooooooo. You had to drop apostrophe on my already massively blocked self.
Damn you aposotrophe for making my already stifled Muse even stiflier!
Tis simply a writer’s dilemma. (<--Huh? Huh? Did you see what I did there?)
Cartoon from What The Duck.
Tis the Season
On this rainy, cold, dark Tuesday morning, my alarm went off extra early as I have meetings with London today, and that eight hours time difference is making me blue.
There I lay in my dark room, pondering my life and what it might take to get me up and out of the bed. The Good Man slept quietly next to me.
I froze in place when I heard outside my window a low moaning sound. It was a little otherworldly. It started very quiet and then grew in volume.
Well. I’m a child of New Mexico. You know what I thought, right?
I’m not even kidding. I started *freaking out*. La Llorona here? In California? Did she follow me here? Does she live here now too?
My heart began racing as I remembered all the nights as a child I lay awake in my bed listening for La Llorona, straining my ears to hear, swearing I’d be ready to fight off her ethereal form and survive her grisly plans.
I clenched up, my stomach hurt, I bent to listen as the wailing increased in intensity. That bitch wasn’t going to get either me or The Good Man. Hell no!
And then the wailing became very loud, following by a hiss and a loud “RRRROOOWWWR!”
Oh wait, it’s just two cats fighting.
Sure. Ok. Right. I knew that all along. I’m a grown up. I’m a good kid. I’m in control of this stuff.
Relief washed over me. I joked to the now awake Good Man “what a sound to wake up to, huh?” and chuckled like my body wasn’t raging with adrenaline.
I got up to face my work day, pack my lunch, have some breakfast and shook my head at myself.
In my defense, a chilly, damp, dark October day….that’s La Llorona season. I’m just sayin’…..
: shudder :
Image found at Soda Head.
Misty Water Colored Memories. Of the Way We Were. Orale.
In the wake of my most recent (and fabulous) visit to my home state of New Mexico, I find I’m getting my old crone on.
New Mexico has both grown and grown up over the last twenty years. I suppose change is inevitable.
But sometimes I still lament the way it used to be.
So here’s a top of my mind list of how New Mexico used to be. This just happens to be what I’m thinking about on my first day back in California on a stormy Bay Area day.
Grumpy McGrumperson’s List of “That was my New Mexico”
- It rained in summer. It snowed in winter. The Rio Grande bulged with water in July. Farmers irrigated their land. Sure, it was still a desert, but water didn’t cost $300 a cubic meter. Cotton plants grew tall. Pecans grew large. It worked. Now New Mexico is in the midst of a terrifying descent into serious drought and a mismanaged water conservancy.
- If you went to the Balloon Fiesta, there was never, not for one moment, a thought that you’d just sit there and watch. You were expected to pitch in, even if you were a small child. “Safety” and “insurance” didn’t ever come into mind. We just helped, because getting those hot air balloons off the ground was what we did in Albuquerque.
- Breakfast burritos at the Balloon Fiesta were cheap, incredibly delicious, and you bought them out of a battered ice chest and didn’t think twice about it. Same with tamales at Christmas.
- Pinto beans were made with pork. No one ever wondered about or protested this fact. Ever.
- If you ate a Biscochito, you didn’t question if it was made from lard. OF COURSE it was made with lard. And no one thought that was weird, bad or worried that it would make them fat. Anything but lard was unfathomable.
- Luminarias used a real candle. None of this electric hogwash.
- If it said Hatch green chile, you knew it was actually from Hatch. It seemed strange to even question.
- When you looked into a bucket of ice at a bar, and pulled out a bottle, it was beer. Just beer. None of these foofy malt-based sugared up drinks. Just beer. And decent beer. What’s with the light, light, oh so lite you can breathe it like air. Just drink a damn beer! Or don’t. (this comes straight from the events of this weekend. I grabbed what I thought was a beer. It wasn’t. *sigh*)
- While on a two lane highway, when someone passed the other direction, you gave ’em a wave. Be it whole hand, the pointer finger, two finger Boy Scout style or whatever acknowledgement you like, you did it. And the other driver waved and smiled back. (in some places this still happens, but I got an awful lot of unreturned waves this weekend.)
- We didn’t call a tortilla a wrap. It was a tortilla. They weren’t made of spinich or tomato, and if mom made ’em from scratch they were thick and oh so very good.
There’s more, I think, but that’s enough of what’s bothering me today.
I suppose time marches on whether I march in step or not. New Mexico can’t stay the same forever and neither can I.
Must be the dark clouds I have, both mentally and meteorologically, that’s got me all stirred up.
Wish I could find a way to send you some of this wet weather, my Fair New Mexico.
