God's Country

Lexington, Virginia

There were cows roaming around in a pasture behind the gas station/Subway where we stopped for lunch. The tourists, ourselves included in that wretched word, were amazed, and stopped, and stared, and some of us even pointed. The cows, however, seemed rather nonchalant about the whole thing. After all, this is all these cows know. We know what we know, Virginians know what Virginians know, and cows basically don't know shit.

At least, not as far as I know.

People in this part of Virginia wear cowboy hats, and they don't seem to think there's anything out of the ordinary about that. That's probably because, here, it isn't. Rather like cows wandering around behind the Hess Station off of 81 South.

These aren't just regular, run-of-the-mill cowboy hats either-- these are rather a bit outlandishly-proportioned, (at least by Pennsylvania yankee standards), and they are generally favored by men into or approaching their seventies. I spied one crustified gentleman wearing a Stetson that was the size of a basset hound, and he was tooling around in a gray Buick Century. Tale away the hat, and he would have looked like my maternal grandfather.

So far, I like it here. It's a bit absurd at times, but, mostly, it's quaint, and I've always been one who's a bit of a sucker for quaint. Sure, I may be blogging away on my Blackberry, but I'm doing so from our room in a bed and breakfast with no television, and the curtains are lacey and there's a lovely, honey-hued damask wing-back chair in the corner.

And I like that.

They sing about God a little too much on the public radio station for my taste, but, then again, I don't have to live here, so it really isn't my place to say, is it? This place is for the cows and the Stetsons and the folks who still love to talk about Stonewall Jackson, affectionately, and it's certainly nice to visit.

I can see the Appalachians from our bedroom window, and that's better than anything that would be on TV at 8:30 on a Saturday night anyway.

Except "Cops," of course.

The Elephant in the Shorehouse

At around 5:00am yesterday morning, I awoke to the uncommon sounds of our elder statesman dog, Finley, making distressed panting noises, pacing about the floor, and generally behaving in a skittish, anxious manner.

I also, coincidentally, awoke to the uncommon odor of shit which, according to David Mamet, all train compartments smell of (vaguely). Our bedroom is not supposed to smell like shit because Molly, the puppy who is currently terrorizing the very marrow out of our bones, is crated during the night, and anyone who’s ever owned a puppy will tell you that dogs will not shit in a confined space, because they know two things, instinctively:

1.) That they are not in a train compartment

and

2.) That shitting inside a small confined space is gross, because, then, you have to lie down in it.

We had been feeding our dogs the bottom-of-the-barrel dog food for a while, and noticed that their fecal output was boulder-like. After I opined about this on my blog (because I am so uber-powerful, I can get you to read posts about dog shit), a couple of my well-intentioned readers suggested cracking open ye olde wallete and pouring some decent coinage into a higher quality of dog food.

My wife and I did this. One of the bags even said, “Venison.” Folks, I’ve only eaten venison once—my fucking dogs ate it twice a day, every day for three weeks.

The results (sorry) have been mixed (sorry). Molly’s shit seems to have normalized in quantity and quality. Finley’s, well, not so much. I’ve been Finley’s master (?) since 2003, and if there’s anyone who knows anything about his ass-leavings, it is I. Finley always, always, always pees before he poops (am I really writing this?) always always always. After consuming this allegedly higher quality food, the moment we hit the grass, he’s squatting to let out some serious Number Twosies. On a quaint walk around the block, he will shit four times. It’s a good thing I’m going to the gym, or I’d never be able to lift the poop bag, with all its requisite nuggetage.

Sometimes, I’m a tad pressed for time and I don’t have time to allow Finley his four squats in a given walk. Like yesterday, for example. So, against what I know was his better judgment and preference, he laid it all out on our bedroom floor in the middle of the night. Of course, as I swung out of bed, slowly realizing what had happened, I stepped in it, because I am the guy into whose eye birds shit, and I am the kind of guy who steps into his own dog’s shit, after he says, “Oh my God, Finley just shat all over the place.”

At least, at 5:00am, I still have the presence of mind to talk like a fag.

All that said, we have secured a dog-sitter for this weekend, because we are going away. On a vacation.

Sort of.

Actually, not really.

I can’t remember if I’ve written about this or not. If I have, sue me. And, while we’re in court together hiding behind our lawyers, bite me. Actually, bite my lawyer—that’s what I’m paying that asshole for, isn’t it? Anyway, a while back, my parents were at a silent auction—the one social event they attend in a given calendar year. The grand, mega-prize was one full week at a fully-furnished beach house in Brigantine. Nobody was bidding on it, so, to grease the wheels, my father put his name, oh, and $2,000 down.

He won.

Now, in a normal, pleasant, happy world, a week at a shore house would be, you know, something nice. The Gilbertian, topsy-turvy twist in this particular world of Apronism is that nobody, and I mean nobody in my family wants anything to do with it. In fact, up until a couple weeks ago, my father was ardently trying to sell the week at the shore to, well, anybody. Nobody wanted it because, apparently, it is cursed-- with our blood. This auction was won in January, and nobody in my family would speak about the details until, oh, last month. It was such a taboo subject that we were actually directed not to discuss it when coming to my parents’ house for dinner.

So we didn’t.

Nobody even knew which fucking week it was until the beginning of July. This, kids, is how we roll.

Anyway, my wife really wants to go. I was dicked out of a week’s worth of vacation at my current job (it will end August 27, and I am not permitted to take any days off until the termination of my job—after which, I can have all the days off I want— woot!) and my wife has lots of time off, but may be changing jobs, so that’s all up in the air. A weekend in Brigantine, with my parents and, potentially, both of my sisters and my sister’s husband and their baby, and now quite possibly my deadbeat uncle, alcoholic aunt and their college-aged twin daughters could be in the offing.

In the words of Gandhi: this does not tickle my wickle.

Regardless of its wickle-tickling properties, I have had to resort to asking a coworker to dog-sit for us. She recently acquired a puppy (which she had potty-trained in a week. Yes, a week. Can you smell the jealousy-pie cooling on the window?) and was, therefore, in my mind, ultra-qualified to take care of our canines. I asked her if she would do this for us on Monday, and she told me she would think about it. She walked up to me at work yesterday morning and stood in front of me without saying anything.

“Oh my God,” I said, “this is where you’re going to reject me, isn’t it?”

She smiled and said, “No, no, no—I’ll do it.”

I was flabbergasted. Stunned. Slackjawed. I actually almost cried.

“I just wish… we were actually going someplace where we were going to enjoy ourselves,” was all I could think of to say. She gave me a comforting rub on the shoulder and said,

“I know. Just try to have a good time.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You, too.”

Motel You Something

Yes, we're in the Poconos.

No, we're not staying in one of those places with a champagne glass-shaped hot-tub/semen receptacle.

We came here to ski: even if it kills me. And today, after making a wrong turn, I thought it might. At the very least, I took a spill that I was sure had broken both my thumbs. And yetm here I am, blogging on a smartphone- thumbing my merry way into your hearts- God love you and your easily thumbed-through hearts...

So, obviously, my thumbs are okay.

While I'm not usually in the habit of making petty excuses for my varying and colorful ineptitudes, maybe I would have skiied better had I not been utterly sleep-deprived and operating my skis under more of a haze than the average inebriated, blonde-haired, snow-chapped Telemark d-bag, scuttling haphazardly in a fog of Natty Ice and a puffy, goose-down onesie.

The reason for the dearth of sleep experienced by Mr. & Mrs. Apron? Why, the peeps in the room next door.

Apparently, the cheaper motels in the Poconos rent rooms to hoards of donkeys. I was not aware of this little-known business practice, or I might have gone more upscale, you know, like one of those places with the rotating champagne glass jacuzzi and the vibrating toilet. From 9:30pm until at least 2:30am, the mothercunts next door brayed incessantly, at one point drunkenly playing either charades or Pictionary, when I finally acquiesced to my wife's begging me to call the front desk. If anything, this made the donkeys angrier. And louder.

I pictured their room-- hay and feces and donkey hair everywhere. Poor Conchita won'tt like refreshing those towels.

In the morning, I did something I hardly ever do: complain. I know, I do it on the blog all the time, but that's very different. I don't walk up to randomly french-kissing lesbian couples and pull down my pants in real life either. The long and short of it is that the woman at the front desk was very apologetic and moved us to a different room without hesitation.

We'll see if the skiing improves.

A Skiier's Prayer

Editor's Note\Apology:

My wife and I are on a vacation-lite in the Poconos for a few days. For webnotainment and blogging endeavors, I have only my smartphone on which to lean, and type. And the fucking keys are the size of a cricket's nipples. As such, you will observe that My Masonic Apron's blog entries for the next few days, while not as annoyingly brief as tweetledeetdeets, will be regrettably truncated.

**************
I'm going skiing tomorrow.

I know-- you're like, "B.F.D., loser. I pour lighter fluid all over myself, have some neckless guy named Bra shoot me with a Vietnam War surplus flamethrower and then jump out of a helicopter while strapped to nothing but a bag of broken glass and Oral Robert's corpse."

And I hear you. Really. I do.

But my family's idea of excitement was going to the King of Prussia mall or taking the Buick through the car wash. I never went skiing until a few years back when I let Mrs. apron pop my ski bunny cherry.

And I fell down a lot.

I still fall down, but not as much as I used to. I even go on some moderate-level slopes and I don't spontaneously start crying on the way down anymore. Now I sing Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs at the top of my lungs as I somewhat erratically cut through the obstacles in my way-- namely red-faced, drunken assoles in North Face jackets and giggling girls with jangly fleece jester hats.

So, wherever you are today, send up a quick prayer for me. And, if you're taking to the slopes somewhere in the Pennsylvania mountains and you happen to inexplicably hear "I am the Monarch of the Sea" sung out lustily behind you-- get the fuck out of the way.

No Good Deed

This afternoon, my red PT Cruiser will resemble Santa's fucking sleigh.

It will be crammed full of winter coats, six of mine, three of my wife's, and will be driven to the local Burlington Coat Factory to be donated to clothe the homeless and the needy this winter.

Before your pupils get all dilated and dewy in a veritable occular orgasm of affection for me based on this tremendous act of goodwill I am doing for the betterment of mankind, um, restrain yourself.

As is, I suspect, the case with most acts of do-goodery, this holiday-time mitzvah is not entirely altruistic. I was, shall we say, heavily prompted by circumstance.

For several days, my wife and I were vacationing in Providence with my in-laws. While we were there, it was difficult for me to not feel suffocated, or at least overwhelmed by, well, crap.

My mother-in-law, an ardent anti-cussiest, eschews all four-letter words except for "crap." It is, in point-of-fact, one of her favorite and most oft utilized nouns. For some reason, crap is acceptable for her to say, without restraint, but, when my wife's ear-bud fell out of her ear and she uttered a reflexive "shit!" in her mother's presence, her mother cleared her throat loudly and announced that, "Four letter words hurt mommie's ears."

It is a funny little coincidence that "crap" is my mother-in-law's favorite cuss, because her house is full of crap. The refrigerator is crammed tighter than the fiction shelf at your local public library. Drawers overflow with random, non-sensical items such as newspaper clippings and hair-covered dog toys, lipstick containers and expired JoAnn Fabric circulars. There are lots of batteries in the freezer. The basement is, well, frightening. When at the RISD museum, my wife noticed familiar-looking silverware on display there, and she recognized it as silverware that her mother sometimes used when there were a lot of people over for dinner at their house. Sure enough, as her mother dug through a wardrobe that lives, inexplicably, in the dining room, she found dozens and dozens of pieces of this apparently museum-quality silverware. It needs to be polished for a week or two but it should clean up nicely.

For what reason, though, remains to be seen. A complete set is worth approximately $6,000. But she won't ever sell it and I fear that, in thirty or forty years, it will wind up in our house.

There are also approximately 328 coats in that house, though only two people live there full-time. There are coat hooks on the wall all along the basement stairs and there are approximately four coats on each hook. You hang your coat up and it falls down.

This situation is, naturally, distressing.

What is more distressing is that my wife and sister-in-law and I went out antiquing, (to buy my mother-in-law a display case for her newly-unearthed museum-quality silverware) I saw a U.S. Navy pea-coat hanging up in one of the antique vendor's booths. I've never wanted a pea-coat before, but I was magnetically drawn to it. I don't know why. I took it off the hanger and I tried it on. It was $28.00 and dusty. The sleeves fit perfectly. But, when I buttoned it, I almost asphyxiated myself. It was much too tight. Apparently, 17-year-old skeletons enlisted in the Navy back in the 1940s. So, it was not meant to be. But the fact that I seriously considered buying this coat at all disturbed me greatly.

I knew that I had roughly nine or ten coats at home-- why did I want this one, too? Well, it's old for one thing, and I like that. Maybe I had never wanted pea-coats before because the only ones I had really ever seen up close were the gay, cheap-looking ones for sale at GAP for $88.00. I like old things. I went to the upper-level of the antiques mall and proceeded to inspect several pocket-watches, one of which I actually considered purchasing until I realized that it was thoroughly broken.

I have at least three pocket watches. How many pocket watches does a man in the waning days of 2009 require for life? One? None?

What the fuck is wrong with me? Six or seven typewriters. 10-ish desk telephones (the vast majority of which currently reside in our garage). Am I a hoarder? I don't think so-- but am I a collector and an accumulator? Yes, I am. Do I take pleasure from purchasing things? I do. Can antiquing get dangerous for me? It can. Do I usually let it? No-- I often go antiquing and leave with nothing, and that's good.

Yesterday, I didn't leave with nothing. I bought a gift for my mother-in-law's friend. She loves and collects ice-tongs. Hey-- a pot for every lid, right? I found a pendant watch that was a set of ice-tongs clasping onto a watch, shaped like an ice-cube. The ice-cube was made of clear lucite, so you can see the watch face inside. I wound it up and it ticked, so I reasoned that it was worth the $24.00 (and I got a 10% discount because I'm so sexy). Besides, I rationalized further, it wasn't something for me, it wasn't a lot of money to make someone else happy, and where the fuck was she ever going to find something like this?

And it was much cheaper than the set of vintage 1909 ice-tongs I also saw in the store for $395.00.

And so, because of my semi-disturbing weekend at my in-laws and the antique mall, I'm going to donate a bunch of coats to the homeless. What a guy, right? As a reward for my generosity, Burlington Coat Factory will offer me 10% off a new coat from their store.

But I think I'll pass.

Going Buh-Byes in the Car

In just under 20 minutes, I hope to have successfully bundled my wife, my dog, and several tons of bags, clothing, toiletries and other assorted items (including my 1930s style Boater hat and some light vacation reading about explorers perishing during their ill-fated quest for the Northwest Passage) into my wife's Revolution Orange Metallic Honda Fit for our trek up north.

They tell you to never post on Facebook or a blog that you're going away on vacation, but I have reasonable amounts of faith that a contingent of my female, Canadian readers aren't going to break into my house and steal my collection of antique typewriters while we're away.

Speaking of "while we're away" you might be wondering, "Well, what the fuck?! What about us?!!!"

Well, dah-links, I had the best intentions of banging out a week's worth of blogs today while I was at work and setting them to auto-display at 8:23am each day we're away, but I could only manage one, which will go up tomorrow at the aforementioned time. If something very blogworthy happens, perhaps I'll risk arthritis of the thumbs and post a quick entry from my Treo, but I doubt it. Blogging from a five-year-old handheld device is exhausting. You practically go blind while doing it and, two hours later, you've written the equivalent of 3/4ths of an 8.5x11 sheet of paper.

Not very rewarding for blogger or blogeee.

Before I depart, I should just like to point out that I received a friend request via PoliceLink, a social networking site for police officers and law enforcement advocates/afficianados like myself. The subject header of the email read,

"Jim Bigguns wants to be your friend."

Am I a lucky sonofabitch or what?

Travel Plans

My wife's funny.

We're trying to decide where to go on vacation this summer.

"We should go on one last big trip before we have a baby," she says. That sounds reasonable enough.

"Great," I reply. Where?"

"Oh, I don't know. Somewhere on a plane."

"Ah."

My wife loves to try and get me to do things I hate doing-- like recycling. And flying. She's not particularly dying to travel somewhere intercontinentally, but she wants to fly somewhere with me-- to get me out of my comfort zone. She feels this is good for me, the way that fathers feel that football is good for their pale, gawky, awkward sons. This sometimes covert, sometimes overt prodding is very similar to her insistence that I hold other peoples' children. I know part of the reason she wants me to do it is so that I get comfortable doing it, so that I'll hold our own child when we have one, and part of the reason she does it is so she can get that warm, gushy, schmoopy feeling a woman can only get when she sees her husband cradling a child, thus proving that he's not a total immature, knuckle-dragging, incompetent, retarded asshole. Every woman wants not to think that about her husband, and, even if it's true, no man really looks like that when he's holding a child, unless he's holding it upside-down, or over a balcony railing (no offense to the recently deceased).

We were originally planning on returning to Maine, like we had done last summer, only we would venture a little farther North than we did last year, to explore more of the state. I have recently been reading "Northwest Passage," an extremely poorly-written (lots of misuse of the contraction "it's" which is just unforgivable in a published work) biography of Stan Rogers, and then the idea hit me.

"Hey! Why don't we go to Maine for a little bit and then, you know, just keep going-- up to Halifax or Nova Scotia. We can go to a different country-- without flying!"

At first, my wife saw this for what it was: a totally transparent cop-out by an errant, insipid coward, but, the more I talked the idea up, the more it began to grow on her. Her parents had been up that way for a wedding recently and had nice things to say about the area. Bob, our friend who is building a master closet for us had been there with his wife and son and loved it.

"You know, instead of doing the drive, which friends of mine have done and they say it's lovely, but long, you can catch the auto ferry from Portland."

My wife's ears perked up at this. Here was an opportunity to go where I wanted to go, but to make me do another thing I don't like: travel by water.

Several years ago, we took the auto ferry from Plattsburgh, New York to Vermont and there are a couple pictures of me clutching onto the railing for dear life with a wince on my face that gives the impression some unseen bully had just smeared fresh blueberries all over my pants and called me a "faggot" but I was told I still had to smile for the picture. I think I ended up negotiating with my wife that, if I made it for the first half of the trip (probably around six minutes) that I could sit in the car for the remainder of the watery voyage.

I am very well aware that I am going to die one day, probably of a respiratory-related ailment, and though I'd like to put that off for as long as possible through constant calls to my doctor and a steady diet of maintenance inhalers, I am also pretty fanatical about avoiding dangerous situations that may hasten my demise. These situations include, but are in no way limited to:

Flying.

Taking the train.

Going out on a boat.

Flying.

Mowing the lawn.

Repairing the roof.

Walking during a thunderstorm.

Driving during a thunderstorm.

Flying during a thunderstorm.

Shoveling snow.

Getting into altercations or arguments with unknown entitites.

Parking near a BRINKS armored car.

Visiting an ATM after 7pm.

Eating the contents of any can with a visible dent.

Consuming food products past the expiration date.

Consuming medication past the expiration date.

Using public lavatories.

So I try to minimalize my chances of early demise by avoiding as many of those, and other, activities as I can, and yet, I still do lots of them-- though I'm pretty diligent about the dented can rule. You can easily spot me in the supermarket: I'm the guy obsessively fondling every goddamn can in the aisle like I'm a blind fetishist or something. But I'm really not at all crazy about flying, especially if there's no pressing reason to other than to get me to do it more (and of course, statistically, the more frequently you do it, the greater are your chances of dying while doing it-- so there) especially right before we're about to start trying to conceive. It'll make for an absolutely awful local news interview with my mom or sisters after we die over the Atlantic:

"And they were just about to start trying to have a baby.... *Boo hoo hoo!*"

Jesus-- fucking awful-- is that what I want the community to hear about me and my wife? During our honeymoon flight from Jakarta to Bali, the plane started going up and down like a fucking Yo-Yo, and that was all I could think about-- the inevitable, terrible interview sob-story that the vultures would just eat up:

"And *sniff sniff* they were on their honeymoon!"

Awful. Just fucking awful.

No thank you. I'll take that goddamn auto ferry, though. When's the last time one of those went down?

No, seriously-- will someone wikipedia that shit for me? I'm too scared to do it myself.