Fleas Flee, Please

Not too long ago, I had a dog named Daisy. Or Dixie. Something like that. You see, I’ve never really connected with her. Because see, she’s never allowed me to. She’s so scared of men that she wouldn’t come to me. Every time I would approach her, she would make a rather large puddle of this dark yellow liquid. I’m not sure what all that is about. But I couldn’t have a relationship with this dog like most people have with their dogs. You know, like petting it and saying, “Come here, Butch!” and have him actually come see you. So I’ve never connected with her, and thus – I don’t really remember her name.

Regardlessly, she brought some of her friends in a few weeks ago. And now they’ve taken over. Fleas. I hate them. I hate them worse than I hate golf. Thousands of them. You couldn’t walk through the grass to the back door without having them hop onto your legs and start biting. The little cocksuckers.

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Let’s talk about spiders.

Spiders are great little creatures. Millions of people like spiders quite a bit. I like spiders. I’ve had a large huntsman’s spider in the corner of my bathroom for several years now. I don’t know what she eats – it’s not like there’s a lot of bugs in the bathroom! No, but seriously, they’re good for the environment, they help prevent global warming, and they’re a great alternative fuel source if you grind them into a fine powder and mix them with Tang® and shrew urine. I cannot back up any of these claims, however.

But that leads me to my real point: spider silk. Now that shit is bad ass. It’s so bad ass, in fact, that they’ve made movies about it. Have you maybe heard of a little movie called Spiderman? It’s about a boy who finds a bunch of spider silk and starts dressing up as a spider so he will have a reason to use it. Spider silk is seriously strong though. Its tensile strength is stronger than steel, and it’s extremely lightweight. You know I’ve read somewhere that if you were to take a line of silk long enough to wrap around the entire earth (which is like 70 or 90 miles) it would weigh less than sixteen ounces. Sixteen ounces! In other words, a little more than a pound.

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My fly troubles are over.

You know what Venus Flytraps do? They catch mothereffing flies, that’s what! These things kick ass. If you’ve never seen one in action, I suggest you run up to your local hardware store or retnec repus tram law and pick one up. My girlfriend walked by a whole aisle of them yesterday and said, “Ooh ooh, kick ass! Check this out, Space!” Yes, she calls me Space.

So to make a short story long, we came home with a Venus Mothereffing Flytrap. And it does what the container advertised: it traps some mothereffing flies.

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Eradicate the Crickets

You know what’s worse than lying there, not being able to fall asleep – when you should damn well be tired enough? Lying there, not being able to sleep – when you should damn well be tired enough – but you can’t because of a stupid effing cricket. Clearly it’s in the laundry room, which backs up to our master bedroom. But every time I open the door to look for his little ass, he shuts up.

So you end up sitting there in the dark, flashlight in hand, waiting for him to speak up. Sitting on the cold tile floor, waiting like a ninja. Or, ooh-ooh a Green Beret! And he never chirps again. I know he must be under the dryer, but I don’t even want to go into how much of an anathema that is. There’s no room in my laundry room to move the dryer unless I disconnect the washer and move it out first. So I have to live with the chirping?

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Where are the good cats?

This last Monday I took my folks to the airport for their trip to Hawaii. Yeah, I’ve heard it from just about everyone now: “Tell your parents they suck, dude.” Why, because they were smart enough to fly south for the winter? If only a week, at least… Anyway, I loaded them up with memory for their camera and Cheez-Its for their flight and sent them on their way.

That meant I was driving my mother’s Porsche for the last couple of days, because I was too lazy to make the trip back out to their house to pick up my trusty old Wrangler. It’s amazing how lazy one can get about things like that when he is driving a sports car. Either way, I took the wife and kid out to Red Lobster last night for a feast of seafood (OMG those lobster tails and crab legs holy god they were awesome…) and then made the trip out to Silent Hill to swap out the cars. I gassed up the Porsche (I tend to put my foot in it a little too often and turn what should be a one-gallon trip into a five-gallon adventure) and parked it neatly between the lines in the garage. After my wife hopped out and moved all the shit out of the way.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 3

Volume Three: Lisa, the Notorious Cereal Thief

Lisa, my sister, likes cereal. I actually used to call her Cereal Killa. No I didn’t. I just made that up. But I should have. Being that she lived right around the corner from me, she would skate up to my house (literally, rollerblades) and visit me in the mornings. However, I knew she wasn’t really there to see me. She was there to eat my Honey Smacks. Can’t say I blame her. That was some good ass cereal. I should place a hyphen there between good and ass. I’m not sure I’m fond of the thought of ‘ass cereal’. I digress.

So she would skate up and eat a couple of bowls of cereal just about every day. And I was finally like, “Why the hell don’t you just buy your own, then you wouldn’t have to skate a quarter mile uphill in your pajamas every day?” And she was like, “Then I wouldn’t get to see you.” Uh huh. At least the quarter mile home was downhill. Well, one day I was feeling particularly generous, so while at the store, I bought two boxes of Honey Smacks. And when she came up the next morning, I gave her one of the boxes. “Here, take this home and you can eat it whenever you want!” So she did take it home. After she had a couple of bowls at my house.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 1

Volume One: Weiland, the Racist Dog

My first story is about Weiland, the racist (and possibly homosexual, as Captain made mention to in my last column) pit bull I had when I lived in the Dredge House. When I first moved in, Blake came over one day with Easy E, his 80-pound pit and said he knew a guy who was getting rid of a brindle pit. Was I interested? Well yeah! Who doesn’t want a tough dog?

So we went to collect him. He was chained to a tree in this guy’s front yard and I actually walked up and took his chain off, put a lead on him and walked him back to my truck. The dog immediately took to me. He was beautiful too. I named him Weiland after the lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots, because they were very relevant in my life at the time.

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The Lonely Life of a Battered Dog

My dog Daisy is quite possibly the sweetest dog ever to have lived. I mean besides your dog, okay? For reals. She’s totally sweet and submissive, and – well, I’m out of adjectives. She’s a damn dog. But yeah, she’s sweet!

Sweet DaisyAnyway, we rescued her. And – as you guessed – the previous owner was abusive. Why is that so often the case? She has no visible scarring or anything superficial. It’s all mental. Her psyche is just totalled. Like a subaru left on a train track. We’ve had her for a couple of months now and I’ve not raised my hand to her once. Even though she tries my patience like a Rubik’s Revenge. And it’s not because she’s bad. She’s not. In fact, just the opposite. But she’s got driven into her head so deeply the thought that I’m going to beat her, that she won’t even come to me.

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The Great Dove Hunt of 2007

My Pop and I packed up and headed out early Friday morning, the last day of August, heading west. We followed my buddy Stout and his brother David out to the deer lease for opening day of dove season. Wait, that should be capitalized. Opening Day of Dove Season.

So we got out there Friday night and got everything unpacked and settled in at the lake house. We then sat out on the patio and tossed washers for about two hours while drinking beers like we were in a contest. The point of all this was to do as little as possible. To get away for a weekend out into the country – to do as little as possible… To disconnect. To unwind. It was so nice to be able to become one with nature. And the birds. The boids.

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The Amazing Squirrel Incident

Gah, what a weird night. I left my Pop’s house the other night just before dark, and as I was crossing the railroad tracks, I saw a car parked in the gravel by the road with two women standing outside of it. One was on a cell phone, and they looked distressed. I made the ‘ok’ motion with my hand and the one not attached to the phone shrugged and pointed down to the ditch. She didn’t wave me on, so I pulled in to check up on them.

I get out and say, “Can I help you ladies?” The other hung up and turned to me. “There’s a squirrel laying over there in the grass. I think he’s injured real bad.” Oh. I see. Good thing I pulled over for you. Sigh.

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