Our backyard lies in the shade in winter. Snow is still two feet deep back there. The slow melt of day freezes into a hockey rink every night. Icicles the size of Darth Vader’s light saber flow off the eaves of the house like crystal daggers. Some are 5 feet long. Fifteen feet of steps leading to the cold ground are coated in 4-inches of polished ice.

Rudy, our Jack Russell, has had to become the Bodie Miller of dogs just to make it down. It takes practice and talent to navigate the frozen treachery, even on four legs. Rudy has mastered 4/5ths of it.

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We all have to be something. Aries, Tarus, Winnebago. I am a Sagittarius. I have never put even a remote amount of faith into such things. I’ve always figured our fortune was guided or blunted by our own actions, not the stars. In the last year, however, I have started regularly reading my horoscope in the local paper. (more…)

 On a recent trip to the Deep South to take care of some unpleasant business, I began to notice a few incidences of the famous Southern accent evolving into something akin to a foreign language. Not everyone speaks it, but here and there, a few people have swallowed a mouthful of slurry verbiage.

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When I was growing up, we weren’t exactly wealthy, to say the least. For entertainment during the holidays, my family (and sometimes friends) would brew up a Thermos of strong coffee, pile into the old Bel Air, fog up the windows, and ride around Montgomery, Alabama looking at Christmas lights and decorations in the nicer neighborhoods and a Normandale, a legendary shopping center (at the time) and the absolute coolest place during Christmas. Gas was cheap so this was the next best thing to free entertainment besides perusing the Sears Christmas  “Wish Book” catalog – which many poor Southerners called (along with the Bible) the “good book.”

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I heard part of this story and witnessed the other part of it. The year was 1974.

Down on Highway 29 headed south out of Andalusia, Alabama towards Florala and the Florida line, a single, tall evergreen tree leaned achingly toward the road. It had been bent over a little to the east by the winds of a hurricane years earlier – probably Camille.

The old man who lived in the house behind it decided to string up a few lights that Christmas. His plan included aluminum pie plates as well. His wife was gone, either dead or just unexplained gone. She left him with quite a collection of shiny plates.

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Rudy loves to eat a big meal, ride around in the car, listen to seasonal music and look at Christmas lights. The sparkling strings hypnotize him into a holidaze. Last night we took him for a little ride through the neighborhood. He sat wide-eyed in the backseat, front leg propped against the armrest, leaning on the door with his snout pressed hard against the glass, fogging the window in a blur of dog snot.

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Blogs are usually short, pithy, quickly-read, Seth Godin-ish snippets of 400 words or less. If the blog goes longer than that, experts advise you to break up your verbiage with subheads or lists. The things I mostly write here would often be considered short stories instead of blogs. And while most of these stories are longer than proper blogs, there is a sneaky component to my stories. I’ll use the last one as an example. It was titled Police Scanners, Y’all. In examining this blog, I managed to include several words that improve search engine optimization significantly. 

I will get some argument here, but I have noticed a severe proclivity for usage of police scanners among Southern men. I’m sure that’s just because I have seen a lot of police scanners in my travels through the South. The little receivers are like a Wii or an Xbox for certain people. A six pack + a Lazy-Boy + a police scanner means hours of endless entertainment for many Southerners. I have seen a man flip ESPN to an SEC game, turn down the sound, crack a can of PBR, and turn up his scanner for an evening of perfection. If barbecue can work its way into the lineup, a man could pass out from brain-squeezing joy.

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Recently, we had the opportunity to shoot in Wilmington, North Carolina. Michael Jordan is from Wilmington. They shoot movies and TV shows there. It is a friendly town, filled with college kids from UNC Wilmington and Cape Fear Community College. The Cape Fear River winds through downtown and between swamps and under bridges like it has no where to go and is in no hurry to get there. From Front Street to the docks on Water Street, over cobblestones and narrow alleys nudged by palm fronds and eclectic shops, film crews run cables past restaurants, bars and businesses. Like them, we came to shoot. Unlike us, the Marines came to celebrate the 234th anniversary of the Corps. Then another visitor showed up. Like us and the Marines, tropical storm Ida stayed for six days and nights and worked as hard as any of us.

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I have never had a green thumb; just the opposite. If I plant it, it will die, water and fertilize be damned. There was a time, however, when I could grow a nice stand of grass (not the kind people smoke) by disturbing the ground enough to toss some seeds out and get them to dip root and hang on.

As a teenager, we convinced a yard full of St. Augustine to set up shop. St. Aug (as one old-timer called it) is squishy like carpet with a four-inch pad. It is tough, green and a man can change his oil on it without much worry of it turning surly on him. Salt water doesn’t affect it. It loves heat, sun, rednecks and hurricanes. Planting it involves yanking up a few strands and putting them in bare spots. St. Augustine is also no respecter of persons, loving mansions to mobile homes.

That was the Gulf Coast. This is Virginia. Different story altogether. As the summer turns to fall, I am suffering from the blue grass blues.

For years, I treated my lawn like a hot date – feeding it, pampering it, whispering sweet nothings into its delicate blades. I hate to imagine how much money I have spent on our yard just trying to encourage grass that won’t embarrass me. No matter how hard I tried, we never won Yard Of The Month. Then this summer, our good grass ran off into both neighbor’s yards and a splotchy rash of crabgrass took over.

I tried like hell to stop it. I pulled it up as fast as I saw a clump making an infectious island. It simply outran me and had its way with my lawn. Soon, crabgrass was the only kind of grass we had.

Crabgrass – it is hard for me to type the word without cursing – is immune to almost everything except lightning. The urine of a female dog will usually kill a hand-sized puddle of fescue. Not Crabgrass. This scourge thinks dog pee is a Mojito and can thrive on a rock in a drought that will kill a pine tree. In a week it will spread like jock itch during two-a-days. My defense could not contain its offense. Crabgrass had me 58-0 at the half.

We finally soaked it in Roundup (the suburban equivalent to Vietam’s Agent Orange). This evening, when I got home from work, I walked through the carnage, now just a landscape of stubbly mud. At least I don’t have to mow it anymore.

I joked about paving it and painting it green with a mop. Then I read on the Internet that crabgrass is the only thing that will grow in the dessert – on asphalt.

After staring at the bog for an hour, it hit me how to beat the stuff: I will plant crabgrass and nurture it and after months of hard work, it will die.

Since before 2000 BC, the ugly practice of cockfighting has attracted humans with a taste for gambling and blood. On July 26th, however, Shelton, Connecticut police seized 150 canaries, $8,000 and charged 19 people with bird-fighting.

I have always thought canaries to be the most docile of fowl. They sing. They chirp. Tweedy Bird was a canary. The little yellow birds saved miners lives below the surface detecting dangerous gases. Scientists use them for things we don’t want to know about. But fighting? That is like laying bets on the odds of one firefly electrocuting another. (more…)