Monday, September 24, 2007

Why I hate Nature

Lake of the Ozarks
Hillbilly land of Mecca
shared bathhouses, sick!

I hate Nature

I have grown up in the city my whole life. I have never felt that need to get away, to go pretend I am homeless, to flirt with lime disease, dysentery, Ebola, crabs, whatever else you catch just walking around out there that my party regularly died from on Oregon Trail. Apparently I am alone in that feeling, and my wife informed me that I had promised my boys I would go camping with them the last weekend before fall came into full effect ya'll... I do not remember promising this at all, but figured since I had a couple of portable game systems and was in pretty decent shape (that shape being "egg") I would be alright, build a campfire and roast some marshmallows, watch as forest animals walked by in a nice neat single file and displayed themselves for inspection and punches in the face and/ or boots to the anus, the temperature nice and cool the whole time, how could things possibly go wrong?

So Thursday, while going up for a rebound, I fall wrong and something pops or cracks in my heel. Being a bona fide Manly Man, I completely ignore it, or try to as much as I can since I have to hobble. Friday morning comes, and 30 minutes before he says he is going to show up my wife's dad shows up to get me. I hobble in to get dressed, and we leave for our trip. The whole way down there, it is freezing cold, and he insists on having both the windows open and the air conditioner on at fill blast. Since by weight I was the smallest or next to smallest person in the car by at least 50 pounds, I deal with it. The whole time her dad is blabbing on about how hard we are going to work and all this and I am thinking he is just talking to the other passengers since I can't fucking walk right on level ground, much less the uneven butthole fillet that is the ground at the camp site. Apparently he is talking mostly to me.

We get to the camp, and it is a mess. There are scrub pine trees, tall grass, all kinds of little bushes everywhere around where our fire pit should be. My wife's dad, D from here on, gets out a cool machete and starts warming up or whatever and I start thinking about playing Madden or something. He then hands me a sickle. "Try to keep up, we need to clear this all out," and with that he starts hacking these little pine treelets down. O-o-okay. I am annoyed now because it had turned from freezing cold to scorching hot with no pause in between even for station identification. I go at the brush with a vengeance, clearing out all around the fire pit, cutting those stupid pine tree things down with one masterful stroke, all manly sweat and spittle flowing with my +4 warrior woodsman skills in full effect, my manboobs jiggling not unlike Jello as I cleared the area. Well I twisted my ankle. Numerous times. The yells turned to muffled whimpers, the +4 warrior woodsman skill turned to a +6 bard elf without healing skills, and I assumed I was done for the weekend. Wrong again.

After an excellent night of watching numerous insects feast on both my food and me, and a great night in the tent that was 2 feet too short to lay down in and had just enough rocks under it to keep me awake all night, I moseyed over to the car parked on the gravel road some 100 feet away, in pitch darkness, thus further assuring the many twists and turns to my ankle would be amplified. I awoke at the buttcrack of dawn, not from a good nights sleep but because something was pissing on me, and though it turned out to simply be dew it was still enough to annoy me and make me hate nature that much more.

After another breakfast a la insect, I am told we are going on a hike. D looks at me and says I do not have to go since I am infirm, which pisses me off so I say of course I am going. We set out down the damn creekbed which has dried up, and if COMPLETELY FUCKING FULL or smooth round rocks, all precariously balanced on one another, all the better for me to step on them. The "short hike" turns out to be a 2 mile fight for survival, the forest animals playing the Imperial Death March from Star Wars in the background. EVERY fucking rock I step on slips and makes my ankle pop just a little more in a different place.

More on this tomorrow, but I leave you with a question. We had a shared bath house for showers and shitting. I go in there to drop a few brown ducats, and notice shit on the walls and back of the toilet, though the seat was perfectly clean. How the hell do you get shit all over the walls and ceiling of a toilet stall? And why would you bother just wiping off the rim and leaving the rest of it to crust and solidify? I could SMELL the incest that had gone on in that place, and I wore swimming trunks and flip flops in the shower, and threw the trunks away on the way out. Gross!

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