Duck Season, Rabbit Season

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Have you ever felt shot?

I mean, have you ever taken a shotgun blast to your lower right spine, right at the belt-line, directly under the love handle. It comes out of nowhere. You just wake up and you can't move a muscle. You try to rise and it hits you like a stab wound. You're fucked and you know it. It's like watching your arm fall off and saying, "Oh shit, that's gone."

Oh shit, my back is gone. I threw it out. No doubt walking all over god's green Earth in the rain for hours looking for that fucking Dentist. I must have strained my back because even though it's weak, its stronger than my stomach muscles. Like everyone keeps telling me, my core muscles are out of shape. Really, I've built a considerable gut that needs to be shaved down. That's the problem. I'm too front heavy and it's making my back muscles strain harder to keep me standing erect.

I should be walking all bent over forward, dragged down by my increasing belt size. Still I fight against gravity and I'll win. I know I will, as soon as the weather changes. I want to do my walks again. It cleared my mind. It gave me an extreme clarity that I could use to make decisions from a distance. Damn near made me clairvoyant. I need my long walks also, to look at the New York women go by. Ha ha. I'm not joking. It's the best spectators sport ever known to man.

So getting in shape is indeed very much on the horizon. I will at that, and there is no one that can change that fact. I want to do well with myself this year. There's something about 2011 that has the feel of death to it. Maybe it's because my father is gravely ill, which hangs over my head daily, but I think I wear it's mantle pretty well. Many people would be all depressed and slowed down. Morbid and grim all the time, but I think I'm learning a good lesson from my father, which I can only describe as a stiff upper lip.

I spent some days with him and he only talked about his death once. For five minutes. The rest of our conversations revolved around the trivial. And still, all around us were reminders that he was going to die. Friends coming over to wish him well and to ask how he's doing ("Hell, I'm dying," he would laugh at them). A visiting nurse service dropping by with medications and wanting to monitor his vitals. Paperwork out the ying-yang from his military records, to birth certificates and the so forth to hand to the appropriate people. And through it all, he dealt with it as if dealing with selling a car.

Shit, I would be terrified. I hate the thought of a slow death, and this is slow. I never wanted to go slowly. My father is hoping that the final stroke will happen when he falls asleep. He hopes he'll just close his eyes one evening and slip away. I don't think so. He has the luck of my life. Or maybe I have the luck of his life. The short end of the stick at all times. If there is a fifty-fifty chance for me, trust me, I'll draw the short end every time. Knowing this, what I do when I have a fifty-fifty chance is pick, then stop and pick the other. This way I duck my first inclination that will be the short end. But that doesn't work either. It's like life switches it around at the last minute to catch me anyway.

In any event, I'm hoping my father gets the end he hopes for, but if it was me, I would prepare myself for the worst. That's another reason why I want to be there before he goes to hold his hand and give him moral support. It's times like that that you want someone there that loves you, and I do love my old man.

But all of this has nothing to do with my back. My back, which is once again in the way of my life, adding to my further suffering, as I had said before.  Life loves to see me in pain, because I have been the spawn of the Devil and I'm doomed to Hell. Whatever. However I offended mother nature, I'm having my ass handed to me, largely because I stop fighting constantly and take breaks that are way too long and too deep to be appreciated or tolerated.

So, like I said, there is something about 2011 that makes me want to get up and kick some ass, and I'm just watching the days click by. Soon, very soon, the bell will ring and the gates will open and I'll burst out, hauling ass down the track. I'm ready.

Shit, my winter vacation is over. It's time to get back on the stick.

Peace,

Hobobob