#four years... even more recently with richard literally being ON MY FUCKING WALL IN FRONT OF ME god im dead
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realized why all this time i've been so vividly disturbed by rufus' relationship with dimitri and why i've spent four years wondering why i can't place what the reason is
only for hopes to make that vividness reach maximum capacity like no i definitely expected everything they're saying rufus did to dimitri but why did i see all of it coming like why is this literally everything i feel like i already knew
only to realize today that it's bc this whole time i associated rufus to cedric
evil blond uncle tries to murder soft hearted and kind blond prince
i realize this whole time my mind was just looking at rufus and cedric interchangeably like -points- it's the same person
but i also realize even in my mind it's just bc i never let richard tales of graces i love you go and so rufus was on my red alert list from the moment dimitri declared he didn't get along with him
unfortunately for cedric he passed the threshold of a quick death bc dimitri was still sane when he killed rufus in hopes and wasn't the one who did in houses
sucks for him i guess (it's not that i don't have sympathy, it's that i blatantly appreciated and enjoyed it and that's what u get for attempted murder on richard, i mean.)
#DCB Comments#fr i've been sitting here for FOUR YEARS being like why the fuck do i have weeo weeos going off in my brain with rufus#why am i so sure i have seen this before. then suddenly my brain becomes one with asbel's and i'm like. RICHARD.#lowkey wonder if dimitri's entire concept is just a coincidence to how eerily almost identical it is to richard's#the black clothing (and armor in mitri's case) eventually turned into a lighter color after the fucked up phase of their lives#the kind and soft hearted blond prince the very specific feuding with a murderous uncle#soft hearted prince having a period of going utterly batshit and then regretting it and fighting so hard to atone and being loved for it#even if it wasn't actually their fault in the first place (trauma voices etc/possession)#to a lesser extent the eyes with the eye patch versus the change in eye color from lambda........#intsys? do u have anything u would like to confess to??? why am i looking at richard fire emblem???#AND WHY DID IT TAKE ME FOUR FUCKING YEARS TO REALIZE I WAS LOOKING AT THE SAME STORY ALL OVER AGAIN#four years... even more recently with richard literally being ON MY FUCKING WALL IN FRONT OF ME god im dead
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Wicked and Secret Somethings
Characters: Kilo, Victor, Sierra, Echo, Juliett, Hotel, Papa, Richards
Word Count: 2,194
Trigger Warning: Slight Swearing.
Summary: Since my brain hates me and refuses to let me work on actual plot or sketch comics it decided on writing some ViKi. Sierra Company is sent on a mission to find out all they can about a state senator. Suspicion of the man has risen is recent months. Which means it’s mostly up to Vic & Ki to do what they do best. Click that read more if you wanna…
It was the middle of the day; that time when most regular people would be either at work or going on their lunch break. But, since they never kept schedules that normal people did, this time of day meant that they were hard at work. It was the perfect time for them to do their jobs after all since it guaranteed that next to no one would actually be in their homes. Under normal circumstances what they were doing would be considered unlawful breaking and entering. Fully complete with a couple charges of illegal surveillance of an individual, computer hacking, and possibly a few stealing charges. But since the home owner left the keys to his front door in a fake rock they only entered the man’s home unannounced.
There was no doubt about the hacking and illegal surveillance.
Despite being part of a government organization they did quite a lot of illegal things. Things that they ended up getting away with, time and time again, because they worked for the government. Most people would rot in jail for the rest of their lives if they did even half of the things they did on a regular basis. Not to mention that the two of them alone obtained national security information that they would be probably be executed if they were average citizens.
One of the few advantages of being a spy.
Another was getting to see how regular people spend their lives doing and what they spend their hard earned money on. Not that they didn’t spend money or do things with their lives it was just what they did was never really a choice they made. So the times where they got to really see inside someone else’s life was rather fun for them.
Kilo and Victor were currently doing that in Senator Jacob Keller’s estate.
They had quite a lot of intel on Keller but nothing which was substantial. A descendant from oil money, he was the only living heir to his great-great-grandfather’s fortune so the money, and the large scale South Carolina estate, went only to him. Keller’s love with politics and his natural-born way with people made him the perfect candidate for state senator. Winning each time he ran Keller became the youngest and most re-elected senator in South Carolina’s history.
But they were looking into Keller because intel suggested that he was up to something illegal on the side.
Who hasn’t done something illegal at least once in their life?, Kilo said when the team received this assignment. The comment promptly got her a stern look from both Sierra and their handler Richards. Juliett chuckled under her breath and both Echo and Hotel pretended they didn’t hear. Papa nodded in agreement. Victor, more than used to comments like that from Kilo, just rolled his eyes.
That was a couple days before. Now, while the others did their respective assignments, both Kilo and Victor were hard at work in Keller’s home.
Kilo started off in the library while Victor went to the study. The study was a rather large study for a man who lived alone but then again Keller inherited the estate. Even though the estate had a library the study had one wall that was an entire bookshelf. A large, black oak, desk sat directly across from the bookshelf and two small black leather bucket chairs sat in front of the desk. One wall had two small black end tables each with its own lamp and chair. The lampshades and chair cushions were both a deep, dark, blood-red. The look of the study was completed by the carpet which was the same exact shade of red as the cushions and lampshades.
Victor sat at a large black oak desk in the study with his laptop. It was open right next to the target’s sad excuse for a laptop. Like most people, who think they’re being original when they aren’t, Jacob Keller owned a Macbook Pro. Not a single thing adorned the laptop’s sliver shell that would reveal it was owned by anyone. The Macbook looked as clean and new as it probably did when Keller took it out of the box.
Victor personally owned two laptops.
A black Lenovo Thinkpad E570 which had a Kevlar-lined exterior, strictly on the off-chance anyone shot at him while he worked, that he used for hacking. Victor had affectionately taking to calling it The Beast. And an Alienware that he used for gaming along with everything else which was adorned with multiple stickers. The Beast was currently hooked up to the Macbook so that Victor could hack into it without getting his fingerprints all over it.
He rubbed his hands together gleefully and silently chuckled; finally figuring out the laptop’s password.
The answer stared him out at him from the lone photo on the target’s desk. It was a brown, oak wood, frame with a rectangular photo of Bengal cat. Underneath the photo, in black, were the words: You were more than a pet you were a loving soul I will never forget. RIP Mr. Whiskers.
What kind of person sets the name of their dead cat as their laptop password?
He shook his head annoyed and disappointed in himself for not trying it sooner. It was right in front of his face the entire time, after all. And if he learned anything at all from years of this it was that most people left clues to things just lying about in plain sight.
Better question is what kind of idiot leaves their laptop at home in the first place? Especially a man such as yourself, Mr. Jacob Keller, with your high political status. You’re bound to have a lot of secrets hidden here and you just leave it for little old me. Must be my lucky day.
With the password cracked Victor went to work on looking through the laptop’s files while simultaneously hacking into the target’s online banking account to take a look at his bank statements. Then he was going to work on the man’s multiple email accounts. After that he was going to surf through all of Keller’s social media.
Man, I wish I could see his face when I blow him out of the water.
Victor always loved his job, but, there were a lot of days where Kilo hated hers.
So much of it was very boring and tedious like what she was doing right now; planting bugs. Kilo had a lot of work ahead of her because the house, if you could really call it that since it was so large, had about ten rooms. But that didn’t include the four full-scale bathrooms and the massive library so the room count was actually fifteen. Kilo was currently hard at work bugging the house’s massive library with everything in her surveillance arsenal. And wondering why someone like Jacob Keller would even need to home this large; or anyone for that matter.
Well, she was working, as hard as she could with a double-decker cheeseburger in one hand.
Ki!
They were only a couple rooms away from each other they but still talked through comms. Old habits die hard and older ones die even harder. The sound of Victor’s yell through the comm. link startles Kilo making her jump and drop her cheeseburger.
She makes a small choking noise as the burger hits the wood floor. When her eyes shift to the small camera in her other hand she makes another noise.
“Dammit, Vic! I thought we always agreed no yelling.” she yells as she moves her bangs back from where they fell onto her face. “You made me drop my burger and now there’s cheese all over this camera! If this dries before I can get it all out then this fuck-up is on you.”
Victor rolls his eyes and lets out an annoyed sigh.
Ki, what do I always tell you?
This time Kilo sighs annoyed. “Never eat and work. I know, I know! But you know that I need my brain food and that I would be eating. “So this…” she gestures to the mess on the floor before her, “is your fault.”
You know I can’t see whatever you’re doing, right?
Kilo stares sadly at the mess that covers a good amount of the cherry wood floor. Sighing sadly she bends down and begins to clean the mess. Reaching into the grease-covered bag from the burger joint she palms a bunch of napkins.
“I didn’t even get to take a single bite! I only have my triple chocolate shake left and what the hell am I supposed to do with that? Besides, no matter how great our tech is supposed to be, no camera on Earth can survive this. If this thing is broken, and I wasted all my time, I will literally kill you.”
No, you won’t. You love me too much.
Kilo could practically hear his smirk through the comm. link and it makes her even more pissed off. She finishes picking up the last bit of the burger from the floor and starts to work on getting all the cheese off the parts of the camera. Sharp cheddar would definitely ruin the inner workings of any camera.
“Well, I hope you’re happy, Vic! A perfectly good burger wasted for nothing.”
Ki? I think I found something.
“More important than finding it in you to give your best friend the well-deserved apology she needs right now?”
I’m serious here, okay? This is big. Very big.
“I’m not playing. You owe me another burger, Vic. No. Make that two since I never got to eat this one.” Kilo says, ignoring him, as she walks over to the massive bookshelf. She moves a vase to plant the, now clean and fully functioning, camera in her hand. What lies behind the vase makes her mouth drop open in shock.
She doesn’t say anything to Victor about what she saw and instead keeps looking around the library.
Kilo, I’m telling you this is crazy. No, it’s scandalous. It’s like breaking the internet kind of scandalous!
Blocking Victor out as he talks about how insane whatever information he found is Kilo mentally totals the amount of items she came across. Things that have no place in this man’s home unless Kilo herself put them there, but, she did not. The amount of them is also something that catches Kilo off guard.
This can’t be happening, she says to herself.
Just to make sure that she’s not dreaming or anything she goes through the rest of the house. There’s a couple in the first floor bathroom. The dining room had three hiding in the chandelier alone. And three more were placed randomly about the room. About five or six were hiding all over the master bedroom on the second floor.
His bank statements are all over the place, and, Ki? I just finished fishing through Keller’s four separate email accounts. I’m telling you, this guy’s emails are enough to send him away for a long, long, time. Oh, I wonder what his text messages look like.
Kilo groans slightly and triple taps her comm. link, making it emit a beeping that speeds up as she gets closer to the person she’s online with, so she can find Victor.
She finds Victor sitting at the large black oak desk in the target’s study.
The blue-eyed blonde sits leaning back in the black leather office chair. His hands lay intertwined behind his head. Grinning from ear to ear Victor is obviously more than pleased with his handiwork. His face lights up even more when he sees her in the doorway. Before Kilo even enters the room he begins to tell her everything he found.
“The whole place is bugged!” she yells cutting Victor off before he could finish telling her whatever big news he started to share.
His jaw drops and his eyes go wide; “Holy shit.”
“I know,” she says with a nod. “And I’m talking the whole nine yards, here, Vic. Mics, cameras, hidden motion sensors; all of it. I found over 20 in the library alone.”
“You know what this means, Ki?”
Kilo nods again and sits in one of the black leather bucket chairs on the other side of the oak desk. It was the last thing they ever thought possible, but, it had to be true. This never happened to them before and she doesn’t know what to do. Kilo sighs and thinks for a few minutes but she comes up with nothing.
She looks to Victor but he doesn’t have any answers.
So, Kilo does the only thing that she can in this situation. Tapping her ear comm. she calls Sierra. She bites her bottom lip hoping that their leader answers as quickly as possible. No, scratch that, she just wants Sierra to answer no matter how long it takes. Kilo doesn’t want to take this information to the team’s handler. She can’t. Luckily Sierra does.
This better not be another call saying you’re hungry. I’m not taking time to buy you food, Kilo.
“Somebody out there is on to our guy.”
#here's a thing#the forgotten#story snippet#sierra company#agent kilo#agent victor#agent sierra#agent juliett#agent hotel#agent papa#agent echo#viki#might be a part two in the future#since this has a cliff-hanger ending#total bullshit title there
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5-6/8/19 Watching True Detective Episode Eight Finale
5/8/19
16.53
I can’t work on anything else so i’m writing this up now to salvage this afternoon. Not up for cops and pseudo-philosophy.
One night the summer we all started taking pills, we were at my dad’s house after a party, i can’t remember where my dad was, but Adam said something about how with the Picasso and Kandinsky prints on the wall, it was like a pseudo-intellectual’s house, and because i didn’t know properly what pseudo meant or had such low opinion of my family and i, i took it as a compliment, that at least we were grasping to look like something more than we were. I hate this memory. Why couldn’t i defend myself. I would defend it now. Adam’s family had a fucking New Yorker cover print framed on their wall.
16.58
Hays’ jeans are too tight; his dialogue with Hoyt is a Previously On with the eery music. It hasn’t started raining outside yet.
16.59
This mf Hoyt literally dragged Hays from his house to walk through the Ozarks swigging bourbon and sobbing about the myth of the ideal family. I hate this show. Masculine posturing bullshit, but like a parody of the machismo that people mock online. As previously mentioned, i’m not one to shy away from the Big Opinion. This season more trash than season 2.
17.07
Damn dude sometimes you gotta burn your suit at 3 in the morning, give him a break.
17.18
I had to get the torch out myself the other night. One of the giant snails disappeared. Best friend and i looked high and
17.36
Sorry, the last entry wasn’t even worth finishing, and i had to go to the toilet to scroll the 40 pictures i took of passages from books over the past year. Some of them i couldn't even remember what they were, too much Tao Lin from before i read Richard Yates and saw how problematic he was; a lot of Liveblog, maybe my fav book ever.
17.38
What i look like, a snapshot:
the cheap sports direct adidas striped sliders with nike tube socks (white)
Black chino shorts (dirty, the only proper pair of shorts i own)
T-shirt of the keith haring statue of liberty print (too hack to wear in NYC; Eve’s mum got me it)
Hair “half-up” like Eve’s
Monobrow stubble at the top of my nose that i haven’t excised in a couple of days
Beard just about too long
jaw clenched
stomach gross
My legs are so bulbous, like why was i born with such ridiculous protruding legs. Not muscly, hefty. Very gross. Gross.
17.43
All i’ll eat tonight is a peanut butter and banana sandwich and an apple. Sorry, i have to try again with other Personal Projects. I don’t want to watch this show. i can’t watch this show right now. I’m no insider but there is maybe six per cent of a chance that HBO run it back for a fourth.
***
6/8/19
20.25
Emmy said she wouldn’t be impressed if i were to get in to a fight. I laid out a whole hypothetical where someone gets thrown out the bar where we work and is needling me the whole time. I take off outside after him and we get in to it, but it’s outside work premises. Asked her A) if she thought i was meek, B) would she understand if i threw fists in that instance and C) would i get fired. She wouldn’t be impressed and thought it was the bigger thing to do to let it slide. Also the police would get involved which would effect the work thing.
Pete’s been in fights. People are always getting in fights in the past. I’ve never seen anyone i know who’s been in a fight when they were actually fighting. The fights in True Detective are all in the past. Emmy said she doesn’t think i’m meek.
20.28
Mr Scotland (Peter Mullan) also does a show set in the Ozarks and what i think is that his southern accent was so bad that it had to be edited in post production. During his dialogue, the camera cuts to a reaction shot from his equally sociopathic wife or the Arrested Development guy, which is wildly disrespectful to a man who was trying to play an abusive maniacal southern drug kingpin instead of the usual abusive maniacal alcoholic Scottish criminal. This is what happens when someone tries to branch out and why so many people are scared of failure. Anyway, we’re not here to talk about rival crime shows set in the Ozarks. We’ve got a child sex ring to uncover and Dorff heat to savour.
20.30
Would be nice to have the honesty in a relationship where you can tell one another you should probably give up on a central arterial line of your life and move elsewhere. Emmy and i tell one another something like ‘you should quit’ all the time but neither of us really believe the other when they say they will. I don’t believe her when she says I love you during sex. It feels like a placeholder for real-life emotions or intensity that she’s still waiting to feel.
20.32
Quality of office lighting: strip lights, squares placed amongst the cardboard tiles, headache grain, staticky, unnervingly silent, revealing, bags under eyes, shadowy somehow, depersonalising, unaltering.
Quality of school lights from Euphoria: suplhate glare, neon, alienating and spooky but in a fun way?, fireworks! makes you say ‘it’s like a club in here,’ glitchy, Fireworks!, transformative.
20.36
Roland in the afterglow of starting a mass bar brawl then getting emotional over a mongrel, sipping straight Jack. Damn, to have memories like that. Roland didn’t have a gf telling him it wouldn’t be impressive or cool getting into brawls.
20.38
Like how they announce Man of the Match before the Match is even over (seems presumptive), i’ll be announcing my top crushes from this season VERY shortly.
20.39
Yup, not long to go until my number one crush from this True Detective Season is announced, as well as numbers two, three and probably four and five. It’s been markedly less horny than previous seasons, so we’re including different iterations of the same characters. It’s dry out here in the 80s.
22.02
There are noises in our living room, not like threatening banging or whatever, but people. There are friends in our living room. Not that we’re here to talk about popular 90s NBC sitcoms.
23.35
Everyone is here in our flat again tonight these snails have made us so popular.
Lucy put Mr Rightside on her arm.
Mil cast Bad Medicine to the TV and Jane suggested Van Halen.
Damon put on Carlyle Williams and Mil decided he couldn't apply for a Montreal visa until he found out what Sarah wanted.
Best friend and Jane cast Cold in my Veins. Mil got sad and started rallying for the TV to be turned off.
Best friend and Jane cast a Big Train sketch where Chairman Mao is dying and then the flatlining heart monitor turns into the opening riff of Virginia Plain and Chairman Mao recovers to sing.
Best friend cast the shooting stars where Vic and Bob do Virginia Plain and we listed the most recent instances we could remember of celebrity blackface.
I text Emmy if she wanted to work together tomorrow instead of taking the mushroom pills.
I feigned interest in a story about a kayak Jane told because i think she’s cool and want her to like me.
Lucy and Damon were lame when they left. Lameon lol.
Best friend turned off the tv and he and Jane went for a tab. Mil talked about Sarah.
Jane said she could get acid for Lucy but not this weekend and left.
Steve came in to ask if he could shut the door and I left to watch this episode.
00.07
This one-eyed mf talking like it’s Wuthering Heights and he’s [whoever the Irish housekeeper is who does most of the first half’s narration]. Recalling some vague terrible accident that blighted a rich-ass family, that should have zero impact on his one-eyed ass.
00.10
His story is very Woman in Black. Would love a Pizzolato reading list from this season. Friend of the blog Nick Pizzolato, please send me your reading list and influences.
00.12
It’s always too late. No matter what we do. Damn. That’s some extremely defeatist shit. Old people, you think they all feel this way. A cop out. These detective shows, i want meaning from them. Structure. Some kind of organisation that i can understand and trace, not this.
00.21
Roland and Hays hanging out, staying over at one another’s house. Can’t wait to be old, hanging out just me and the boys. Like how homes have a similar vibe to halls, just at the point on the back end of your life, symmetrical to the front. Just playing old Final Fantasies, absolutely on pills. Distracted during family visits because i have more gaming to do and a year left at most. Sounds reassuring. The long term doesn’t matter, so you do only the things that produce instant gratification.
00.32
Googled “what’s the word for when one thing is the same on one side as it is on the other’ lol then i cried at this stupid show. Mahershala Ali transcends this dumbass show and it’s writing and is doing something complex and satisfying and sad. Pulling together what he can of this jumble that sometimes makes sense and most of the time is not worthy of us trying to make sense of it.
00.42
Ok, here it is. True Detective season three Crush List:
5. Me all the days i wrote this and didn’t throw up whatever i’d just eaten. Very proud and horny for u, my boy
4. 1990 Roland with the rockabilly blazer
3. Hays in the tight acid wash jeans
2. Amelia’s dulcet monotone transcends being annoying around the middle of the season and turns alluring, like i need to hear it for thirty per cent each episode. It’s pretentious but in a way that makes you wish you were pretentious
1a. Hays burning his clothes in the dead of night. Mysterious. Jacked. Sweating as hell. Haunted.
1b. Everyone who checked out during the front end of this season - intelligence is a quality that personally makes me very horny and they displayed plenty of it by forseeing that this season would be a less exciting mess than last. Would love for them to contact me to just like hang out and watch a different show, if they want.
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This Is How Horror Movies Start
As you grow up there are many milestones, signs, ages and moments that claim you are “a man.” There’s the fake ones like being bar mitzvah’d or losing your virginity or just turning eighteen. There are the assumed ones like getting a job, getting married, buying a house or having a kid. There are the personal ones, like the fact that I was recently able to root for the New York Rangers in a playoff game. As a kid I was an Islanders fan. The Rangers made me angry. The Rangers made me cry. The Rangers made me slap a kid in the face when I was twelve because he rubbed it in a little too much after a devastating loss. So the fact that I could stand up with 23,000 Rangers fans and legitimately cheer for them was to me, a true sign of growth and maturity, because my twelve year-old self would never be able to fathom how that could ever happen. But does that make me “a man”? Doubtful. Maybe the only way to really know if you are a man is to measure yourself against others. To be put in the same environment and see how you do. Maybe the real sign of manhood are the tests, tests of will, tests of courage and tests of sanity.
A few years ago there was a test that presented itself and put my manhood on the line. "Daddy, I want to catch a fish." This came from my son Charlie, an ocean-life obsessed five year-old at the time. He really wanted this more than anything and there was only one man that could help him reach this goal, and he was two thousand miles away.
My wife grew up in Montana, a state whose name I don't think I even uttered until I was twenty-five. I am amazed when I go there at how she could have come from such a place. It is beautiful no doubt, but from my perspective it's a different country. It is so far from our current reality, as she's been in New York for over twenty years. There were moments when I was more at home in India (Jewtown specifically...look it up). My wife always says that she felt like an alien growing up there and I totally understand. That's what New York is for. It's a planet filled with all of these aliens who have found a home away from their hometown. A place where they don't stand out but they actually blend in. I am very comfortable in my own hometown and can fake it in most places, but in Montana, you may as well just get me a seat between Richard Branson and Justin Bieber and send me to Mars.
I went on my first trip to Montana in 2002, essentially, to meet the FAMILY. Her dad has two brothers and five sisters, who have an average of two kids each. Her mom has four brothers and one sister, also averaging two kids each, so the math is extraordinary as far as cousins go. Luckily only about a third of her family lives in Montana. The other three thousand live in the slightly more familiar planet of Minnesota. In preparing for the trip I had to work with flash cards. "So Rick is married to Jean and their kids are Kayla and Keith"? "Cody...Kayla and Cody...Keith is my uncle that lives in Minnesota." And it would go like that for days up until the big family dinner where I would look at Rick, shake his hand and say "hey Kevin".
If they were to create someone that is the polar opposite of me then my father-in-law, Tom, would be the perfect choice. Let's look at the scoreboard. He lives in Kalispell, Montana, shadowed by Glacier Park, where bears are a nuisance. I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, shadowed by Prospect Park, where strollers are a nuisance. He retired at 62 after 35 years working on the railroad (seriously, he drove cargo trains up and down the Pacific Northwest). I'm a fucking ad guy with no hopes of retirement. When a relative wants a house, they buy a plot of land, call my father-in law and his brothers and they drive hundreds of miles to help build it, from scratch. Where once there was nothing, now there was a house. Like a family of David Copperfields. After we bought our house, completely renovated, my in-laws flew out and built a shed in our backyard over a rainy weekend. They were rubbing it in my nose, literally in my own backyard. When my relatives buy a house I might send them a lovely waffle iron. My father in-law's "pets" are packhorses, horses that he uses to disappear into the woods for two weeks so they can carry a recently shot moose on their backs. I have a Labradoodle, who sometimes wears a raincoat on her back. His favorite hobby is hunting, but he uses a bow to keep it fair. I like playing basketball, but I stay on the outside to avoid aggressive elbowing. So my insecurities of where I stand on the manhood acceptance scale are at a heightened state before I even board the plane for Montana.
If there were one place that really boils the culture shock down into an image it's my in-laws' basement. It is overwhelmed by the presence of stuffed animals, just staring at you from all angles. And I’m not talking inanimate stuffed animals like Nemo, Snoopy and Buzz Lightyear, but animals that were once very animate and now are stuffed. Two things really stood out in that basement. First, these were not stuffed birds or squirrels. There were cougars, moose and elk with antlers that looked like giant witch fingers. The second thing that hit me was that these were all animals he had actually bagged. I think the moment I saw that room my penis went to the nearest computer, got online, booked the first flight back to New York (I think he prefers Orbitz when in a rush), packed up his little rucksack, hopped to the front door, realized he forgot something and approached me, yanked my pants down and grabbed my balls, dropping them in the bag. He continued to the door, turned back toward me, gave me one last look with his eye and said, "And you've been telling people you're a man all these years. Well I can't support this charade anymore." That was followed by a dramatic door slam.
As I looked at all of the animals covering the walls, no matter how anti-gun, anti-hunting, anti-NRA, anti-anything an upper west side raised Jew would be anti, I could feel nothing but respect. My wife had told me stories of how one elk would feed them for the winter. They would get it butchered into steaks, burgers, chops, chili and sausage and put it in a freezer. It's probably the right way to live, although I don't know if I could give up going to specialty stores and getting the meat in one place, the bread in another and the veggies from the green market fresh on a daily basis. Now that's my kind of hunting ("oh I hope Union Market has the Alaskan wild-caught Salmon, or US farmed, never foreign farmed, yeah I hope they have that.")
Tom and I did find common ground in sports, specifically baseball and a love for the Minnesota Vikings. So there was always easy conversation if there were any awkward moments of silence in my future. Like if we were going after some elk or a bear we could talk, I should say whisper, about the Yankees overspending, the Vikings' offensive line play and their draft class that year.
My son was fixated on fish from a very early age and he would always talk about wanting to go fishing. I have no experience fishing, at times going to great lengths to avoid it, but he and his sister, Lucy, are the only two people on the planet that could make me go and actually be excited about it. Charlie had to catch a fish. We had tried and tried, on lakes, rivers, ponds, even in Prospect Park, with no luck, although we did catch some "stick fish." But Grandpa Tom was going to make it happen. An old friend of his had a house with a stream about forty-five minutes away, deep in the woods. Now when I say woods, we are talking about the woods of Montana. This is like the Yankee Stadium of woods. This is the kind of woods where your chances of survival take a noticeable tick down, and I've brought my five year-old son into this. Two thoughts begin to battle in my mind.
1. This is what being a father is all about.
2. This is how horror movies start.
As a parent you are constantly playing a game of "Final Destination". The name of the game is in reference to a series of movies in the 2000's where Gen-Xers were killed seemingly by accident, although darker forces were at work. Electric wires would loosely squirm around and land in a puddle as the football player steps in it. A trailer becomes detached and slams into the young fashionista's car. A flying metal pole impales the over-the-top snobby girl that seduced the hot English teacher (ok I've never seen these movies but I imagine I'm not too far off). It was basically a Hollywood version of a safety manual. The way the parent version of the movie works is you scan a room, playground, restaurant or situation and determine what are the simple to outrageous ways my kids could get hurt, maimed or killed. There are minimal risks ("just move that table before you jump off the couch"), moderate risks ("you can only climb up to the middle rail if you're going to lean over the boat") and unacceptable risks ("don't put the drape cord around your neck"). The unacceptable one is always met with rejection, a lot of "but whys" and at times pure defiance, resulting in grabbing, pulling, redecorating or outright banishment. There are certain times when this game is heightened, usually because of two things - when confronted with the unknown, and when others leave you alone to deal with that confrontation. And when this one two punch works in tandem, it could expose you as a complete and utter wimp. My punches came in the woods of Montana.
We are bumping along in the truck with my wife's seven year-old nephew towards what could be the highlight of my young son's life and the worst nightmare of mine. As we approached Paul's house, Tom, with complete sincerity and sternness, says "Jon, I should let you know there are bears out here, so keep an eye on the kids when we’re outside." My head jerks up, hoping he was joking, but he did not break character. So I eked out an "Ok" that, let's just say, lacked the confidence that one might be looking for from a parent. So the game was afoot and Death had made its presence felt. The images begin. Let's call it "a horrible mind," as it starts racing to all of the things that I read, saw or heard about bears and how to avoid them or, worst case scenario, defend yourself against them. The major points that I remembered were "be still and hope they don't approach you but never...never run. And if mauling is about to happen....fight like hell." So I am ready to give myself up for my son, already preparing for the mauling, hoping the bear starts high and ends it quickly. I activated my spidey sense, constantly scanning the area. If we were in New York I would be completely aware of my surroundings. I would know where the best pizza place is within three blocks or where the nearest New York Sports Club is in case I had a bathroom emergency. I could even break down suspicious characters and know if I needed to cross the street at any moment. But here, it was just complete, helpless paranoia.
We arrived at Paul’s, immediately unloaded our gear (that's right I said gear) and headed out to the stream. We are all business at this point. And speaking of business I had to be on a conference call with a client about twenty-minutes into our angling. Although I was in one of the most peaceful and beautiful parts of the country, I was feeling more stress at this moment then I've felt being stuck on the Southern State Parkway on a Friday in August trying to catch a 6:30 ferry to Fire Island, probably the most stressful feeling a New Yorker can have. This is not what "A River Runs Through It" was trying to convey. We walked down to the stream, which was teeming with fish...excuse me, brook trout. They were basically falling out of a rock and grass tunnel into the fast moving water, like splashing kids going down a water slide, three and four at a time. This was gonna work. Tom started to bait Charlie's hook and threw the bait to me for mine. This is one of those moments that we all know well. It's the "pretend you know what you're doing so you don't look like an ass even though you don't know what you're doing" moment. If my penis were still around I'd imagine he would look up at me, maybe his Shar Pei like wrinkles would contort to look like folded arms, and say something to the effect of "whatcha got?"
I am an animal lover but I will eat the crap out of pretty much anything, except veal as I'm still shaken by the photo of what "milk fed" really means. But I'm rarely confronted with murder. Okay, it was a worm, but I was ending its life by sticking a sharp hook into its head, or whatever they call it. Once I realized that my son was staring at me, there was no turning back. "Daddy, are you going to kill that worm?" Then I remembered, the worm doesn't die, it wriggles and taunts. The fish does the killing. That's the whole point. I was exonerated. "Well, actually Charz, the worm is alive, the fish does the killing. The worm needs to entice it.” Look at me. I took this awkward, uncomfortable moment and turned it into a lesson. This is how you grow, as a parent, and as a man. As I glowed with pride, Charlie looked at me, blinked a couple of times and said, "so you're just torturing it?"
While I was playing Mengele, completely mangling this poor worm, Tom had already caught two fish, Charlie immediately running over and reminding him that this was catch and release, needing visual evidence that they were thrown back. Eventually it was time for Charlie to get his fish. The plan was for Tom to actually catch it on the hook and quickly pass the rod to Charlie. I had to hold onto Charlie so the quarter pound fish didn't pull my twig of a son into the "crick." Tom felt a bite, gave me the signal and it was like clockwork. Charlie grabbed the rod, pulling and fighting the fish. I helped him reel it in and there it was, flopping around. Everyone celebrated Charlie's first fish. But within 30 seconds, Charlie realized something. "Grandpa, now I want to catch my own fish." The boy is no dummy. He knew what we did and this was not him catching a fish. We threw the imposter first fish into the shallow water and headed for the back-up plan, the stocked pond.
As they moved our operation to the pond, I hopped on my conference call. So here I am in a clearing in the woods of Montana, always on the look out for bears while also trying to capture Charlie's ultimate moment, yet I need to discuss the end messaging for our commercial for Fruit2day, a unique fruit juice experience; real fruit juice blended with real fruit bits, that's right bits, don't say chunks, because that would be gross.
Paul created a funnel from the creek to a pond, basically the bottom pool of the water park, where the kids pop up, slightly discombobulated, before they say they want to do it again. But there was no way out of this water park. The fish just accumulated there. Easy pickings. I finished up the call and raced down to the pond. We threw our lines out and the biting began immediately, everyone was pulling up fish, and then Charlie got a bite of his own. Tom helped Charlie stabilize and they reeled it in slowly, the fish fighting, Charlie battling (okay he was just holding the rod but he felt the fish) and then they pulled it in. He was thrilled, but not so thrilled that he forgot the golden rule. So after two minutes of glory, we threw our prize back in the pond, to live another day and tell his side of the story.
Having accomplished our goal it was time to head back to Paul's house and have some celebratory ice cream. We walked up the slight hill, the boys chasing frogs as Paul began boasting about an elk he just had stuffed (taxidermied?). He had to show Tom, and Tom was excited to see it, as if they were ten and Paul told him he just got a Mickey Mantle rookie card. So we got to the house and entered through the basement, which was filled to the gills with stuff, man stuff; oily rags, fishing reels detached from their rods like dug up skulls, hunting magazines and half finished projects everywhere. It was similar to the lair of Jaime Gumb, the killer in The Silence of the Lambs, only with better light and a more stable, civilized, less pre-op transexual, psycho killer vibe. My penis would look around, take a deep breath and say to me "now this is what I'm talking about. Get your notebook out young lady because you're going to school." They could do an entire Final Destination chapter in this room. Final Destination 9: Paul's Basement. Or if they decided to do an Off-Broadway version this would be the set. It would be tough to find a square inch of that room that wasn't wrought with danger of one shape or another. A wrench hanging off the edge of a counter, a knife left on a coffee table like it was a forgotten piece of toast, canisters of poisons, powders, cleaning fluids...just a death trap. So this prompted a reaction of protection for my son. The first step was corralling, basically keeping at least one hand on my child at all times. That could mean holding his hand, to an arm around his shoulder or, in this case, the two-shoulder-I'm-driving-and-you're-on-autopilot-mode.
As I controlled Charlie through the maze of death, the kids got their ice cream and we sat at the counter, thumbing through Fishgutting Illustrated, when Paul invited Tom upstairs to look at the elk head. As they headed up, Paul remembered something, stopped on the third stair and casually turned to me as if he were going to say something like, "Oh Jon, the paper towels are under the sink" or “help yourself to the lemonade in the fridge". But he didn't say those things. What Paul said, in a throwaway manner, was "Oh Jon, keep the kids away from the guns...they're all loaded." I watched as they continued up the stairs and squeaked out an even more lackluster "Ok." I now had a much bigger problem than the bears. Death was not only present but it was now in the same room, and potentially in many places of the room. Instantly my mind Googled and downloaded the thousands of stories I had heard about kids shooting themselves, their siblings, their friends, their parents and their cousins with guns found lying around the house. Paul had no idea who he was dealing with. Maybe he thought I was the type of man who can grab a gun, disassemble it, reassemble it blindfolded, click the barrel open and dump the ammo out in seconds flat. These are the men he's used to and that's the norm to him. But not this guy. It would be like me saying to Paul if he wanted to get from my house to Madison Square Garden - "Oh, just take the F to the A or C. No problem." Maybe Tom should've given Paul a little shake of the head or a whisper, ”He's not really a man”. But alas there was no help coming. This was the test. It was me against Montana. So I had to break down what he said, "they're all loaded." All as in more than one but as many as....a hundred and fifty seven? Couldn't he have said "they're both loaded" and at least looked in the direction of the three-foot pile of newspapers or the chainsaw leaning against the rocking chair? Just some numerical or geographical clue. My eyes scanned the room, and I could hear the Steve Austin vision SFX kick in di-di-di-di-di-di, but I couldn't find one, much less all, of the loaded guns. So after my five-second moment of scouting, I did what any man would do when confronted with a life or death situation, I avoided it head on. "Boys, let's eat our ice cream outside” (so we don't drip on all of Paul's loaded guns). I escorted them outside, still looking back into the room, as if the loaded guns were sneaking up on us, plopped the boys down in some chairs and got back to scouting for bears.
Looking out onto the vast, wide open, death ridden space I felt good, comfortable, confident, almost at home. Charlie caught a fish, I sold through a tagline ("a new way to eat fruit") and avoided a horrific front page news story ("penis-less New Yorker watches as five-year-old son shoots seven-year-old cousin with one of all of Paul's loaded guns"). I imagined something coming over the hill. It probably was nothing but in my mind it was my dick returning to me, balls in tow, preparing for a tearjerker of an ending. Loving me for who I am, as a father and as a man. This was not a horror movie anymore. This was a romance. And if it were a bear charging over that hill it should do the running because I was ready to fight like hell.
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