The Way to a Man's Hands...

I am obsessed with Law & Order. I have been for the better part of my life, way back in the Paul Sorvino days, and well before anyone called Chris Noth “Big.” While the cheese factor of Ice T’s tough guy lines in SVU will always have a special place in my heart, my absolute favorite episodes are in the original series of the franchise, back in the Briscoe/Curtis or Briscoe/Green detective years. Maybe my love of the series boils down to my love of Lenny Briscoe. I have seen the episode where he relapses and Clare gets killed in the car accident dozens of times, but I still cry when he gets out of the car and realizes…

Briscoe was the epitome of the old school detective. He could take the Ice T line and make it believable. Find a socialite’s body in a cooler? Here comes Lenny with something like, “I thought they only liked their martinis on ice.”

There is something about that type of old school guy that appeals to me. Always has, whether it was Han Solo or Magnum P.I., I liked that take charge kind of guy and even more so, the type of guy who wasn’t afraid to get dirty.

My dad worked at a grain elevator and I remember him coming home covered in dust. And even though he wore a facemask to protect his lungs, I remember my childhood fascination at the weird dusty snot rockets he could blow. And I knew my dad was the coolest guy in the universe.

It’s safe to say I was never going to be with a guy who stamped loan papers for a living.

So I really had a chuckle when one of my friends on The Book posted a question as to why women find the blue collar working man attractive. Of course, the bait of “His paycheck” was thrown out, both seriously and in jest.

Man Friend qualifies as one of those blue collar guys since he’s a carpenter. He’s a workerman with the tools and the giant truck. I don’t date freeloaders anymore, so I appreciate the fact that he gets a paycheck, but the paycheck isn’t what I find attractive. I like his workerman hands. They’re all roughed up and calloused, full of little nicks and scars from years saws and drills, telling the stories of all the things he’s made along the way. Holding his hand is like holding a book filled with tables and dressers and cabinets.

I suppose everyone’s hands tell a story like that. I remember how soft the pads on Joey’s paws were the first night she came to live with us. I laugh when I think of her hop stepping the first time she felt snow. The miles have toughened her up. It might sound dorky, but I do hold their paws sometimes when we’re cuddled up on the couch. It doesn’t seem so dorky ‘cuz they let me.

The Cat and Ham's Key...

I just finished reading “Cloud Atlas,” which is an amazing piece of writing, if anyone is looking for a good read. I cannot stop talking about it. As a writer, I have moments in which I am reading something and get this twinge of jealousy because it’s so damned good. Sometimes it’s just a sentence or a paragraph, but there are entire scenes and characters that keep me writing just for the sake of trying to get at something partially as amazing.

Now, I don’t want to ruin it for any of you with specifics, but the big theme of the novel is how lives intertwine and affect each other throughout time, in the past, present, and future. It’s this big, creative philosophical puzzle that really makes you think. It’s a gift with a big, fat bow on it for an introspective chick like me.

So last Tuesday, with about 200 pages to go, I decided to leash up the bitches and go for a run. Time to digest a story like that is really important and a run is the perfect space for me to muddle around in it.

We cruised down 18th Street and hopped on the bike trails behind the zoo. A loop around O’Gorman High School and the hills of Kiwanis Avenue give us a nice five miler.

And just as we had, so many times before, we broke off the trail at 41st Street, in front of O’Gorman, so we could break back to the north.

But, like never before, a beautiful cat lay dead next to the sidewalk. My gut reaction was to make sure the bitches didn’t get interested. Wrestling away squirrel carcasses is one thing; disrupting the lifeless body of someone’s family member is another story.

It was a very pretty cat, dark gray with those tigery stripes and a touch of white on his paws. He seemed peaceful enough, postured in a slight stretch. Since 41st is a busy street, how he met his maker was probably not a case for the Hardy Boys. I just hope the little one didn’t suffer.

I called Animal Control when we got home so he would be picked up. I’m sure someone was looking for him.

And I really didn’t think about him again, until last night, after I finished the book and jumped on The Book.

Facebook really is a wily bastard. For all the bullshit, nonsense, politics, and well, hate, that is often spewed there, now and then there is a reminder of the promise of social media. The promise of actually connecting people and making us see the connections throughout our lives.

I know you’re thinking that I found the cat’s parents.

This is my life we’re talking about, not an ABC Family Movie of the week, kids.

I caught a status update by my buddy Sambourine Man, who prefers the moniker Ham Surly. His story, below in italics, is used with permission. I would like to state, for the record, that I do not condone his blind consumerism. I would also like to state that, other than that, he rules. Hard.


Today while delivering tasty beverages for Coca-Cola, my co-worker gave me a soda machine key off of his key ring, so that we could go to different machines at the same time, thus saving time. Upon unlocking the soda machine, I tossed the key into my sweatshirt pouch, for quick storage until I could return the key to my co-workers key ring. The machines were filled, and we were on our way.

As the weather gets colder, one must start wearing warmer clothing items. The way I ween into winter mode is through added layers, until I need to just put a dedicated winter coat on. This morning I wore two sweatshirts, staying fairly slim and agile, but adding extra thickness and warmth for the chilly morning.

The next stop was O'Gorman high school, and I was already heating up from my double sweatshirt strategy. I make the decision to remove my innermost sweatshirt layer, (one non-zipper hoodie is an awkward task in its own to remove, two takes some prerequisite courses in physics and biology) and then proceed to hop out of the truck and be on my way with work.

Spoiler: this is where the key fell out.

There are different keys for different soda machines. Each key is universal in a sense, but only to the machines that have a lock specifically set for it. On my route, I have 3 or 4 different keys for the numerous machines I service. The situation with losing a key is that you can't just get a replacement key and continue on. Someone could find that key and go on a Coke banaza, so all of the locks in the machines designated to that key must be changed. That is a lot of machines and a lot of money, all put on the person who lost the key. Me.

Roughly two hours after removing my innermost sweatshirt and dropping the key, we arrived at the next soda machine that required that keys pattern to unlock it. My co-worker asked for the key and I assume I looked like Sponge-Bob and Patrick doing the slap dance in 'The Spongebob Squarepants Movie' (http://youtu.be/j5mb3Uoz3hQ). I couldn't find it but remembered putting it in the pouch pocket of my sweatshirt, possibly the worst pocket to leave it in.

The rest of the day I had to record all the machines we were unable to fill because we were unable to unlock them. Machine by machine I slid into a deeper somber state, imagining all the hours I had worked turning into all the dollars I had earned, that would soon disappear because of a misplaced, quarter-sized hunk of metal.

At the end of the day I was allowed to take a work truck around to retrace my steps in hopes of finding the key, which turned out a lot easier than a hostile attitude would first perceive. Any time I get hit with a ticket, fine, or lose money I imagine all the cool things that could have been purchased with that same sum of money. All the currency possibilities, dead and depressing.

Rolling up to O'Gorman I could see something shining from a distance, a light of hope. I parked where we had hours before and hopped out to where that first small step for Sam-kind was this morning, and there it was. The key, literally "chilling" on the cold ground, presumably untouched, ultimately unclaimed, now retrieved. I hated the day until that moment, but now I gotta say, today was a good day.

Back to the thinking of all that money that was about to be lost because of a key. The key was found and back in our possession, thus leaving my funds snug in my bank account. But now that things are back to normal, is it too soon to forget "all the cool things that could have been purchased"?

Luck was indirectly on my side today, and now it's time to buy something.


Crazy luck, right? Maybe. Good Catholic kids? Perhaps, although I have plenty of evidence to the contrary, some even living under this roof!

You see, an introspective like myself, high on the philosophical novel has to draw a deeper conclusion here. And since it all happened within a 48 hour time frame, I have to believe that there was some sort of karmic energy at work. I think my little kitty friend took some suffering away from the world right here, on that campus, so there was enough good floating around for no one to mess with Ham’s key.

I don’t always understand the balance of the universe and I don’t often see it, but I know it’s there. That I believe.

I don’t know what Ham bought. I might suggest that he buy a bag of cat food and donate it to the Humane Society.

Pawsitively trying...

I once mused, “Are ugly people attracted to politics or do politics make people ugly?” There was a variance of responses, usually depending on how invested one was in the process. Some people took me literally and struggled to point out a lawmaker who they found physically attractive. That was incredibly amusing, as the number of women who found John Thune good looking mystified me. He reminds me of Skelator. And I have no desire to visit Greyskull.

But what I was really getting at was the seemingly ever-present dirtiness of politics. The negativity that offends/sways/turns off the masses for whatever reason. Maybe negativity is all that some of us understand anymore... I don’t want to believe that, but it does make sense to me.

I thought people got into public service to affect change in the world. I thought. Or at least I thought maybe some of them did. Some were after power and money, I’m sure. Some are just the uber competitive type and playing with trillions of dollars and people’s lives has to have mad appeal.

But the striking thing to me, the thing that I’ve only really started to notice since the advent of social media networking, is how the negativity has saturated down to nearly every voter.

A friend made an innocuous post earlier simply asking if anyone could articulate why she should vote for Romney. She clearly stated that everyone she had previously talked to said they were voting for him because they didn’t want to vote for President Obama. She also asked that no one attack her.

Easy enough. I wanted to get on board because I really wanted to see how the average Mid-western Republican would respond. So I took the feminist route and said I couldn’t give a reason to vote for a ticket that didn’t believe in equal pay or my right to autonomy over my body.

Of course, someone had to jump on and remind me that Romney thinks it’s okay to get an abortion if I were pregnant via rape. I didn’t even try to debate that Ryan’s weird personhood ideas would outlaw some types of birth control, so autonomy is more that choice. But I digress…

The whole mess turned into an Obama hating shitfest. Remember the original question? Sigh. I said to check out some non-partisan sites and BBC News. She’s a smart girl. She’ll figure it out.

But they kept going. Someone even posted a link to website entirely devoted to why Obama should not be elected. Holy fucking balls. I get it. I voted against Bush in ’04. I didn’t vote for Kerry.

Maybe it was the poor grammar. Maybe it was the complete lack of structure in the arguments, as there was nothing articulate or factual in the statements. Maybe I’m still upset about Opie “Sons of Anarchy.” I just don’t get the haters on the President. Sure, I thought Bush was an idiot, a dry drunk, a puppet. But I don’t think I ever hated him the way people seem to hate Obama.

I’m sure there are plenty of ways to opine the whys of it. Racism. Definitely. His cool demeanor. Maybe. Calling him a Marxist, Socialist, insert whatever ist you think it’s the most un-American. But his story is so American. I don’t know. I know for whom I’m voting, so I guess that’s something.

The bitches are definitely Obama voters. I mean, I’m pretty sure Alli is a lesbian and I can see her being involved in equal rights. Both the bitches enjoy the outdoors and were offended by the Republicans laughing about climate change at their convention. I just wish the kibble vote had more pull on the national stage.