Among my friends two very sharp cookies despise the internet with almost evangelical vigor.

"It'll take your eye out."

They've said the equivalent at different times, ready to duke it out with any techno-hipster over how shittily technology's empty promises of flying cars has left us all tethered to computers and crackberries, our dead weight grounded, gleeful paying $39.95/month for streaming videos of some imbecil fame seeker jerking off a chicken.

"Unrest.  All this connectedness leads to unrest, you wait and see."  BillyBob the mountain bio-geneticist tells me then asks,  "How many people do you think have been divorced as a result of Facebook?"

"Several, that's how many."  He's the guy who never answers his voicemail, only turns on his computer to model complex molecules and track cell geneologies, and most days keeps his phone turned off entirely while in pursuit of dangerous white water in which to paddle.

My other pal, TommyLee, a wildly successful 420 entrepreneur, wears covert disdain quietly, but firmly like a corset around his wallet.

"GPS tracking through the internet and all your whatever-the-fucking-G service you people use to keep from being bored with your own thoughts for more than 30 seconds will keep a man (or woman) from being a safe, reliable customer."

His brand of network marketing is still illegal in most states and his pragmatic, albeit somewhat paranoid view of customers and um, business partners, has caused him to adopt technologically strict (dis)qualifications regulating with whom he will trade.

"Lead the man right here, that's what the internet'll do.  The devil can't come into your house unless you invite him."

I was going to make this about that time Gerald Ford's administration wanted to tap me for service as a pilot for Airforce One.  But that story didn't end so nicely when they discovered I was only ten.

Then there's the infamous and problematic photographic insinuation that there was something going on between my sister and me.  Totally unfounded though it was, the story gained momentum simply because my mustache dictated it be so.

But this really needs to be about me hounding  you for money to donate to the NC Children's Hospital.  Money raised helps provide equipment and services to battle all manner of horrible things visited upon childrens' health. 

C'mon.  You know you wanna help out.  Make a donation and copy me with a link to your confirmation and I'll send you illicit photographs of my moustache personalized for your pleasure.  No, really.  I'll take pictures of my mustache in compromising positions that will guarantee you the price of admission.  No donations are too small to help out.




3 weeks growth -  1 week to go.  Totally PG shot of my mustache, which to my chagrin, wishes to be called Butch.

Smoke - barely anything you can see, no more than what breath from a kitten on a cold, dry winter's day would look like if you got down close enough to see the wee puffs escape its mouth.  There's smoke, honest, and there was a fire, and now there's just smoke again.   At some point you have to trust me on this, trust that I know what the fuck I'm talking about standing here with a box of matches missing a couple, showing two (or is it three - they overlap?) scrapes from yellow-stained phosphorous tips.  Trust that kerosene does not explode the way gas does, that it is practically diesel and is stubborn to light.

There's also black crust for as far as you can see, all firm the way sugar gets after you've cooked it in a heavy pot slow enough to caramelize and then let cool; crust covering curves and ripples that used to glow verdant with life, that used to smell good - even better than butter and sugar cooked bubbly on the stove.  Earth heaved from heat sounds remniscent of snow crusted with sleet and rain when I step on it, but oh-so-far from anything like snow.  With that critchy-crunchy sound my feet make walking heel-to-toe, searching for survivors -- I could close my eyes and think, it is snow!

Bamboo stakes stand at angles; a rat wire lattice holds a few butterbeans in its grip.  I think about spiders and flies looking at them.  They taste good, blackened.  Not great, but good.  I eat them all and trample the stakes flat, spelling my name inside a heart stomped into the char, an unhappy valentine.  I note how he used peat moss layered with old, watered down newsprint, creating a phylo stratification designed to hold water and heat and explained the crust.  Clever.  A tip - something I'd copy next spring when time comes to plant my own garden. 

I wish it was dark right now, like pitched black, moonless dark.  I'm thinking there would be spotty embers and hellish glow beneath me if it were only night time.

It was a reaction, a quick kick to the guts of my neighbor after he aimed his floodlight one time too many at my bedroom window.  He gardened, you see.  He is a gardener, and one day, after he moves, he'll probably lay out a garden similar to the one behind his house where I'm standing now, where I'm thinking about peeing, considering the charred lillies and why it is he had to aim that goddamned light right at my house, my bedroom, my head.

My kerosene, my matches, my word.

Look at his hands.  I'm four inches taller and weigh a good sixty pounds more, can easily move his weight and mine in any number of ways, but even in his 80's, the sight of his powerful paws still humbles me.

I was six when it first occurred to me that he had monstrous hands with thickened callouses, seemingly impervious to heat, sharp pointy things -- anything, yet able to hold us without breaking our bones.  I remember watching his hands as he would pick me up, wondering when it would happen, when they'd clamp shut and I would simply be squished into, I don't know, oblivion?  But his touch was gentle, and that was miraculous.

When he taught us how to pitch - something for which he is still known, a skill many old timers get misty over - it was damn near impossible to emulate his knuckle- and screwball grips.  He could throw a fast knuckleball that hung oddly and dropped from the sky at the oddest times, all because his hand engulfed the ball even when knuckling.  And the screwball, sweet jeebus...how easy it was for him to pitch balls that broke opposite, confounding left-handed batters just as easily as anyone else throws to righties. 

Once, when I was sixteen, watching him solder intricate transistors inside the cramped space of an old radio's carcass he'd salvaged, the dexterity and finesse with which he controlled those catcher's mitt-sized grabbers dropped my jaw to my chest.  It was like watching an elephant perform bypass surgery on a mouse.

"Hand me that flux, there, will ya' Nat."  He didn't look up so much as gesture with his eyebrows -- great Breshnev-ian tufts capable of direction and much more.

"Well..."  He was waiting.  I gawked and fumbled with the small, greasy container, dropping it over the edge of his workbench.  He anticipated what was about to happen, had already started switching the hot soldering iron to his left hand, and deftly caught the falling tin a few inches before it hit the sawdust and pistachio shell-covered floor of his shop.

He grinned.  I grinned, and when I looked to his hands, the soldering iron was already back in his right, the flux was open, and he was dabbing his lead and tin solder coil into it with his left the way a cat takes its first tentative sips of a fresh bowl of water.

Minutes later we listened to a Phillies' game, acrid smoke from his work still in the air.

My mother's father was a liar.  Not in the villainous sense, not like a criminal or fiend, but a teller of falsehoods just the same.  I wish I'd met him.   

He told my grandmother he was eighteen when he really was fifteen.  She needed to hear he was eighteen as she had just turned nineteen and, having fallen in love with him the week she graduated from college with her teaching certificate, pressure to marry and longing in her heart didn't want to hear any business about him being a fifteen year old boy.

Grandpa was hardly a boy.  He'd been shaving a full beard since he was eleven, having from the age of nine been supporting his family, hauling sacks of grain and tending to livestock when he should've been studying engineering or playing stickball.  He died in his thirties hoying hundred pound bags onto a loading dock somewhere in town.  Bacon and eggs and scrapple and souse caught up with him, felling him over the last satchel of feed he'd stacked, peaceful, as if just resting a bit before wrestling another to the pile.

Grandma was left alone to raise my mother and aunt and uncle.  She was less than five feet tall and the source of mine and my siblings' varicosities.  I'm told she was saintly, yet I hate her for my inherited predispositions towards failed venous valves. 

Once, after my parents had married and fired up the baby factory, Mom asked Dad to go check on her mother the morning after a massive snow.  His approach brought him to the side yard's rickety gate where he couldn't help but see a rich crimson trail of blood and footprints leading from the outhouse to the flower room door.  The carnage started out as a few drips, describing a straight line and quickly grew into a bloody, drunken paisley that widened as the mayhem closed in on the house.  He'd butchered hundreds of animals and that's what he started to think had happened to Nanna. 

I can just see him dropping whatever he was carrying -- a loaf of steaming hot bread, perhaps a tray of cinnamon buns --running his great athletic strides to her rescue the way I'd seen him respond to other family crises.  God, how swift a man my father once was!

He opened the door to find Grandma on a rug she and our mother had woven the previous fall.  Blood pooled on the linoleum, wicking into the woolen hem, leading in a thick stringer trail to her calf which floated like a blue-white ham on the puddle beneath it.

"Oh, Herbert."  She moaned and fell unconscious.

Dad quickly washed her leg, where he guessed the source of all the blood; a tear in her hose revealed the tiniest gash in the meaty part of her calf,  A great deal of her life had drained from a ruptured varicose knot torn open by a neighbor's dog who, excited to see Mrs. Glace outside in the snow, had jumped up on her when she exited the outhouse.  A single claw from it's happy puppy paw ripped her open on the softest, most vulnerable part of her body.  She'd had to drag herself the last ten feet to the door, thrashing her weakening legs in the fresh fallen snow.  I never met her, either.