'The Headless Pisser' ~or~ 'The Day My Lid Blew Off'

("The Headless Pisser"...aka Jeff)

(Where my hat took the plunge...)

(Me & Glenn)

(River/Tour boats, River Street, and the gold dome of City Hall)

(Some tug boats...)

It had been rather low-key around here, but this past Sunday we actually communed more with the outside world. Glenn's brother, Jeff, had been threatening to take us for a ride on his boat for a couple three weeks or so. This past Sunday we finally rode the river, and I must say that it was a really nice time. Jeff gave us a call in the early part of the afternoon asking us if we wanted to hit the boat later that afternoon. I had been feeling a might wonky over the past day or so (lack of sleep, mainly) and had started settling into spending the day at home, but I didn't want to say 'no'. As I said, it had been something we had been trying to coordinate for a few weeks. After engaging in some light personal prep (which included beer gathering), we headed down to the dock by the Sea Ray dealership (Jeff works there) to meet up. In addition to Glenn, Jeff, and myself, we also had one of Jeff's sons Clay, Clay's girlfriend Kim, and Jeff's nephew Cameron (whom I'm told was named after Ferris Buellers' best friend). We set out with Clay behind the wheel on what was to be a nice trip.

Clay, being a bit of a speed demon, was fast out of the gate. The sun was bright and the wind from the boats' momentum was high. Made it a little difficult to snap some pics of the passing scenery (got quite a few blurry photos out of it), but it felt really good. Spent the entire trip sitting in the rear of the boat, which was really nice. Still got to see everything we passed. Jeff's boat isn't small, so it was very comfortable for the six of us. One of the first places of note we passed, was the Bonaventure Cemetary. That is by far a favorite place of mine here, so I wanted to try and add to my photos of the place by getting something from the water. As mentioned prior, we were moving along at quite a clip, so I only had time to snap a quick one or two. Can't really see a lot from the river, and the photos didn't pick up much besides. (Was a little bummed, but its not like I can't venture over to the cemetary itself any time I wish.) A little ways after that we passed Fort Jackson. (There are several forts here in Savannah.) I happened to be looking at the opposite side of the river as we were passing, and Glenn didn't chime in until we had whizzed well past the place. (I would be able to snap a quick one as we whizzed past later on the way home, but it was really too dark and it came out a bit blurry...drat...) Then it happened. Something I was trying very hard to avoid. We weren't long past McKinley when I saw a shot of the sun coming through the clouds that I wanted to try and capture. I shifted forward so that the shot would clear the roof of the boat, and I felt something get whisked out from under me. I'd been sitting on my hat to keep it safe. I turned to see it go flipping through the air and splash into the boats' wake. Glenn quickly called out to Clay who slowed things down and turned the boat around. I'm happy to say that my hat was located and pulled from what could have been it's watery grave. I wouldn't have given two craps, but it was a hat a friend gave me...has his bands name on it. Plus, it was a really nice ball cap. After that, it was back on course at top velocity.

We saw several factories and such along the way. A concrete factory, electrical plant, coal mill, and the intensely foul smelling paper plant. Saw tug boats, paddle boats, couple of freight ships, shrimping boats...the river was having a busy day. But then I'm sure it usually does. It was cool. We eventually back tracked a hair and docked at River Street to grab some grub. Hit one of the establishments I remember from my days in college, "Spanky's". Chicken fingers and beer. Then it was back to the boat for the trek home.

Ya know, when Clay was hauling ass down the river when the sun was up...didn't bother me that much. When it got a bit darker...there were a few times that weren't entirely white knuckle time, but...let's just say that I'm glad that Glenn and Jeff were onboard. They both grew up driving boats, they both have Captain's licenses, and Jeff spent a number of years in the Coast guard. Glad they were there to point certain 'shallowness' issues to him. Things that might be as plain as a person's nose during the day, but that became a bit more difficult to eyeball at night. Aside from that, once the sun went down it became very peaceful and relaxing out there. Saw a pelican or two, and even a couple of dolphins breaking the surface. Things slowed down a bit as we neared the docks...there was a sighting of the mysterious "headless pisser" (hehe...Glenn's the culprit who snapped that one...brothers...)...our outting was drawing to a close.

Mosquitos. Sand gnats. Whichever they were, they were in full force when we got to the docks. Really thick. Interestingly enough, I don't think I really got bitten much, but the sensation of clouds of small bugs swarming you is really annoying. Thankfully they disipated once we were by the truck, and we were off home.

Hopefully there will be another boating trip in the future that will be a bit more conduscive to photo ops.

(It's raining quite steadily at the moment...gotta love the rain.)

The Bonaventure

Yesterday, Glenn and I had talked about going to the Bonaventure today. We've been going to bed at the crack of dawn and sleeping till after noon lately, so don't know why I thought that would work. I ended up getting up at 1:00pm (jumpin' jehosaphat) and told him that I didn't see us making it after all (sigh). I hadn't had my coffee yet, so how could we possibly make it before the place closed? I regrouped and decided the procrastination had to end. I needed to get out and do something for corn sake. So once I got my act together, we headed out before 3:00 - the Bonaventure closed at 5:00, so we would have plenty of time. 15 minute drive and boom! we were there.

Since moving to Savannah at the end of November, '08, I've wanted to pay a visit to the Bonaventure Cemetary. Plans had been tentatively made, and passed over (I'm bad about procrastinating...). Today we finally made it there. I've known about it for some time. Known that it was a historical site; saw footage of it in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" (known as 'the movie' here in Savannah). I've always had a "thing" about cemetaries...the older the better...and was not disappointed by this one.

It is so peaceful, moody, and old. A chunk of land covered with history. 300+ years old, it's covered by headstones, statues, and mausoleums. For me one thing that really added to the places impact were the massive and gnarled oak trees covered with spanish moss. (From what I understand, those trees are over 250 years old and part of the historical register.) Definitely appealed to my gothic side. I had Glenn's digital camera with me as I wanted to get some good photos. However, the sun wasn't cooperating with me. It was mid-afternoon and the sun was extremely bright and wouldn't stay out of my eyes. I just threw caution to the wind and snapped 20 or so pictures anyway. I must say that after downloading them to the computer and blowing them up, they didn't turn out half bad. If I can suss it out, I'll post some to the blog here.

The Bonaventure was a great time. Interesting to say that about a cemetary, but hey! I call 'em as I see 'em. After we walked around there for a bit, we headed out. Went to 'Tubby's Tank House', sat on the front porch, and had a cold one. Today was a good day.

Ah, The Rain...

(Taken from the screendoor on the porch...it was coming down pretty hard...

didn't want to get wet.)

__________________________________________

"Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the rain." (author unknown)

"The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain." (Longfellow)

"There will be a rain dance Friday night, weather permitting." (George Carlin)

"I'm singing in the rain, just singing in the rain. What a wonderful feeling, I'm happy again." (Arthur Freed)

"I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?" (Douglas Adams)

"Don't threaten me with love baby. Let's just go walkin' in the rain." (Billie Holiday)

________________________________________________________________________

It started raining today. Over the weekend, the weather 'people' kept saying that it would. Low and behold, they went against tradition and were right for a change. I've never put much stock in weather reports (and their reporters) cause most of the time they never seem to get it right. Glad they did this time. I was in need of a good rainstorm. One with heavy rainfall and thunder. Glad to say I haven't been disappointed.

I'm feeling rather mellow, as I usually do when there's rain about. I find it very motivating in many ways. May actually get a little writing done this evening. (But don't go looking for Ripley's phone number yet...the evening is still a bit young.)

Hippity Freakin' Hop...

I used to get into the whole Easter deal when I was a kid, as most do. I guess. Mainly it was an excuse to eat chocolate until I passed out in a sugar coma. Of course, there was an extreme mania that preceded the coma state. I'm sure my mom would have loved to stuff me in the closet for a few hours until the hyperactivity stopped, but it probably wouldn't have helped. I would have found a way out...bwahahahaha! Think the egg decorating was more up my alley. I've always been a bit creative. Any excuse to draw or paint. I did get better at not cracking the egg shells as I got older. Even with hard boiled eggs, that can be a problem with young'ns.

I was thinking today that I've never really looked into "why eggs on Easter", or for that matter, "why a rabbit"? I'm sure at some point in the early years of school, we might have gone over it. Don't remember if we did. Decided to do some internet searching, so I paid a visit to Wikipedia. For the most part you can find some usefull stuff on there, but some of the stuff I've read has been suspect. Thought everyone knew that anyone can write stuff for that site? At least since Colbert dropped the bombshell on his show. Read what they had to offer, feel I know why now, and it was close to what I had predicted anyway. To put it in simple terms, eggs and the rabbit signify rebirth. If you want a much broader explanation here are the links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_bunny

Moving right along...

Here at the condo on Bull River Bluff, life is pretty much status quo. I took a trip up to the Kroger (our local grocery monger) for provisions. Got some cow for dinner. Cow's good. Would have replenished the stores of beerage, but Georgia law is "no sell-ie the beer-ie on Sundays". Now if someone can explain this next bit to me, please do. You can't go into the store (grocery, convenience, or otherwise) and purchase beer to take HOME and drink, BUT you can go to bars and drink your fill (or more) until midnight at which time you might drive home while intoxicated? How does that make sense? I don't get it. I've been told that the Georgia state governor said that the law was in place to "make people schedule their time better". Think that guys' bulb flickers more than most. Anyway, even though I'm glad to be out of Los Angeles, I did get acclimated to certain things. Like being able to buy booze any time, any day. 24/7. Oh well, I'm not a booze hound or anything. I just don't happen to find that law to have been created in a logical way. Par for the course, I suppose.

The agenda for tonight includes cow for dinner, followed by a trip up to "The Islander" for a few beers and a few games o' pool. No bunnies or chocolate eggs involved. Ain't that the spirit...?

Happy Easter.

No, really. I mean it...

TV & The Paranormal / pt. 1

There is a show on network television that I can't quite freely admit that I watch. I mean, I do admit that I watch it, but my admission is always accompanied by a requisite eyeroll. The show is...cough, cough..."The Ghost Whisperer". After a few Fridays of B-ball preempting it, a new episode was aired last night. It's one of those shows that seemed 'OK' when I first started watching it. Actually, I can't quite remember WHY I started watching it, but...well, anyway, as it progressed it did start getting a bit darker. Which I liked. I had gotten tired of watching what felt like "Touched by a Ghost", and was about to ditch it from my roster until it did start venturing into darker territory. Things do still get wrapped up in a tidy little bow pretty frequently, but there are some people who get theirs in the end. Well, close enough. There was one particular storyline of a funeral home director running out of money who (to thwart losing his business to others) starts tossing "clients" in the local lake to keep profits coming in. He didn't get the usual bow, but he didn't get the tear-jerky, puppies and kittens send off that most do. I'm sticking with it because I've now put in a lengthy time commitment on the thing, and want to see what happens with the main storyline they're airing currently. I'll try and give a Reader's Digest overview. Here goes...

Melinda (Jennifer Love Hewitt) is married to her paramedic husband, Jim. One night Jim gets shot at a friends cabin by a 'green' cop who sees a shadow of a man with a gun through one of the cabin windows, and shoots haphazardly hitting Jim and not the guy who actually had the gun. (Melinda is there and sees the whole thing.) So Jim is in the hospital in bad shape. Melinda falls asleep in a chair at his bedside only to awaken to his ghost, as Jim has died. Jim refuses to leave Melinda, who can "see dead people". She is grieving in a major way and tells him to go, but he still refuses. THEN...one day there is an accident in the town square. A guy on a motorcycle is hit and killed, resusitation isn't working. Dead as a doornail. Jim sees a chance to return to Melinda, so he jumps inside the guys body. NOW...the guy does come back but his identity is that of Sam, the motorcycle guy. Melinda is crushed because she knows her husband is in there, but this new guy/body doesn't know who she is. However, he does feel an unexplainable familiarity with her. They become friends, and she rents out her 'unfinished' garage apartment to him. The story arc follows Sam going in search of who he is/was. At one point he finds an old girlfriend he was going to ask to marry him before the accident - that doesn't come to fruition. Sam is starting to feel a strong attraction to Melinda. He does ask her out, but there are a lot of unexplainable things about her (i.e. when she disappears to help the living who are haunted by the deceased). Melinda tries to explain a few things to him gradually (albeit not very successfully...or well), but Sam doesn't really believe in the paranormal. THEN she gets involved with a 'case' very similar to hers. A dead guy has entered the body of another guy who died. Melinda helps that guy, and the 'dead' guy who took over the body of the newly dead guy re-enters the world. The one dead guy becomes the other dead guy. BUT in the course of helping that guy, Melinda gets trapped in a sewer area that is filling up with water and is in danger of drowning. Eli, a psych prof at the local school who has the ability to hear the dead speak (an ability he acquired when he died and came back), gets the help of Sam after a ghost tells him where Melinda is and that she needs saving. Sam decides to just accept things for whatever they are worth and do what he can to save Melinda. While swimming through a flooded corridor that leads to where she is, Sam gets caught up on some pipes and starts to drown. A life starts to flash before his eyes, but it's Jims' life not his. It's at that moment that Jim comes back, replacing Sam. SO...now Jim is back, but in someone elses body. All of the friends he had in his other 'life' don't know who this Sam guy is, and Jim is faced with having to readjust to a new face/body and whatever else from Sams' life comes down the pike. Hmmmm...I just reread that...why do I watch this show again?

I think the next several episodes will either make or break the series for me. Will I continue to watch? It really depends on how they handle this major storyline. They have a real opportunity to make it interesting with 'as yet' undiscovered tidbits from Sams' life. My guess is that it'll just be tied up with another precious little bow. Hope I'm wrong.

It's A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

TODAY

73 Degrees & Sunny

Visibility: 9 miles

Wind: S 10 mph

Gusts: 20 mph

Humidity: 60%

TONIGHT

Scattered Thunderstorms

Today marks my first 'official' Blog entry. I realize that Blogs are many things to different people. A creative outlet, a means to communicate the goings on in daily life, to express ones thoughts... All I gotsta say is that I will be experiencing an adjustment period. Writing just for the sake of 'writing' is something I haven't been too good at in the past. Most of the writing I've approached in a regular fashion have been plays/scripts, books, and the like.

It's been a really nice day today. Decided to venture outside and snap a picture that might illustrate just how nice it is. The above shot is from several feet up the river bank behind the abode here. A much nicer arrangement than my last digs. Having moved to Savannah at the end of November, 2008, from West Hollywood, CA, the change has been quite dramatic. Extremely welcome, too. I'm from Atlanta originally, so after spending just shy of 20 years in the Los Angeles area, I'm quite happy to have landed back on Planet Earth. That's the best way I can describe it. Life in L.A. will skew ones' sense of reality as to life everywhere else to the extreme. Too many people, too expensive...just too much of...everything, really. There isn't a daily/nightly barrage of helicopters buzzing overhead, so I no longer feel like I live in downtown Beirut. The din of cars (the noise of screeching breaks, engines revving as they speed by well above the speed limit, and voices raised in the throes of "Road Rage"), the wailing of sirens (a police station 1/4 mile to the west, and a fire station 1/4 to the east), noise from neighbors (loud parties of every conceivable type, dogs barking continually and in abject loneliness while their owners are away at the salt mines), and the yearly Gay Pride Festival (drag queens, and pumping dance/disco beats starting at 8:30 in the a.m. on a Sunday - they lined up for the procession on my street). Yeah, it was a hoot for awhile, but the 'charm' wore off awhile ago. Savannah is the flip-side. The differences are dramatic and many. The fact that I can walk out the screen door of the porch to take a picture of the pseudo-bucolic back area is just really nice. Trees, spanish moss, reeds, and a couple times a day the tide comes in changing the river from a mudflat to a...well, a river. I will most likely revisit the spot I took the above picture of when the tide does come in to illustrate the point. A phrase with the words "waiting" and "bated breath" comes to mind.

I had always vowed that...

...I would never venture into the world of the Blog. Many reasons would instantly spring to mind. "Too much of a time commitment." "I couldn't possibly sit down and write something (which I would then re-read, edit, judge to be either too trite or insipid-*similarities will follow later in this entry) that I would most likely delete because I'm my own worst critic, thus wasting my time and never posting a bloody thing." "Why write out verbose diatribes that friends will most likely endure the reading of out of a sense of camaraderie?" The list could (and does) go on, blah blah woof woof. Let me say that there is a greater purpose to this Blog's creation. A purpose that, I hope, comes to grand fruition.

I'm experiencing a writing block. That's the chief reason, pure and simple. I have a few projects that I have been wanting to work on. Really. I've just reached the end of the proverbial tether in terms of my frustration level. *Writing, re-reading, editing, deleting. In that order. Then a friend's Blog came to mind, and it occurred to me that starting one of my own might help me break through my wall. It has apparently worked for others, why not me? So here I am. The grand purpose of this Blog: to help cure my current bout of Writer's Block.

Starting a Blog had seemed fairly simple in theory, but I hit yet another snag. What the hell should I name the thing? I would like to say a virtual plethora of ideas spilled out of my grey cells, but...well...the going was slow. I did create a blog that I quickly eighty-sixed under the moniker "D'ya want fries with that?" (Even now I look at that title and it makes my upper lip curl like I've smelled something extremely bad.) A few others ran through my head and quickly exited. Nothing was 'working'. Then it hit me. Something that seemed appropriate. Something that seemed to make sense for what I was going to use it for. At least to me...anyway...

When the super computer Deep Thought was created to hash out the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, it came up with 42. Took it 7 1/2 million years, but it fulfilled it's mission. It gave its answer. But what was the ultimate question? Ahhhhh...for that Deep Thought had no answer, BUT if another even better aparatus were built to supply that... Thus the Earth was created. The grand experiment. (There are a lot of other nuances and events to the story that you'll have to read Douglas Adams' work to learn cause I'm not going to relate them here.)

I realize that to those who are unfamiliar, this title is a bit on the esoteric side. To those 'initiates' who read this, I think you'll get why I thought this to be an appropriate title for a Blog.

And, yes...I know where my towel is.