When Animals Attack

I am a friend to the animals. Sort of a St. Francis of the 'burbs. I'll swerve to avoid hitting a squirrel. I'm on a first name basis with all the feral cats and dogs of the neighborhood. OK, so first name basis means Kittycat or Poochie, depending on species, but it proves that I'm interested in their feelings.

Some of my favorite times have been spent in a boat, fishing and checking out river creatures or biking early in the morning on the trail digging the deer and turkeys as the morning chill starts to evaporate.

But do I get any love back from the animal kingdom? No, I do not.

Last weekend my girlfriend and I went to the North Georgia Zoo. It was pretty cool. We hit the Atlanta Aquarium earlier thanks to free passes, so it was a day of animal fun. We bought a bucket of food and started feeding animals. I made friends with an emu, a bird you might recognize from crossword puzzle clues.

The goats and sheep were all over us, due to our magical bucket. Here's one of the few photos I shot, mostly because my fingers were covered with goat spit.

As I was distributing handouts to another group of pushy farm animals, a llama wandered over. I started to say something deep like, "Check it out, a llama," when it looked at me with its stupid llama eyes and spit all over me.

If you've never been spit on by a llama, imagine being dunked in lawn clippings that smell like the inside of an animal's stomach. Add some grit, some liquid, and a little more stink, and you've got the idea.

It was all over my face, my hair, my shirt, inside my mouth, basically everything above the waist. I dropped my glasses on the ground while spitting and coughing. Apparently I was ready to just leave them, saying, "I'll just get some new ones." I'm surprised I didn't just leave my shirt on the ground as well, but my reluctance to display my doughy physique won out.

I spent the rest of the day smelling like the stage of a 1977 Sex Pistols show, and learning a valuable lesson about animals that pretend to be your friend.

I still speak to the stray cats in my neighborhood, but I am a bit more wary and not as cheerful. Will I still swerve to avoid a squirrel? I'm not 100% sure anymore. Some might say that blaming all of animalkind for the actions of one asshole llama is a terrible example of racism, but I'll bet those people have never been covered in llama spit.

Mighty Big Shoes to Fill

I went Bigfoot crazy a few weeks ago. It started when I caught an interview with an author plugging his latest book on NPR about the legendary creature (his shocking conclusion: Bigfoot probably doesn't exist, the 'bigfoot community' is sort of nuts). That sounded pretty cool. Then, within a week, two or three people mentioned Bigfoot or sent me a Sasquatch-related link.

Realizing this was a plate of shrimp moment like the movie Repo Man told us all about, I was powerless to fight fate so I loaded up my Netflix queue with whatever Bigfoot movies they had, checked out the NPR guy's book from work, and would have listened to Bigfoot music, if I could figure out what that was. I have a hunch he would listen to Fu Manchu.

Bigfoot was everywhere when I was a kid. Exploitation filmmakers cranked out films about him, he was on TV, he even had his own line of shoes, which I remember pitching a fit for in Buster Brown. I do not recall if my shitiness was rewarded.

I do, however, remember lots of time spent in the woods looking for the beast. This was back in the late '70s/early '80s when parents didn't really care what their kids did, just as long as they did it somewhere else, or at least did it quietly.

And man, did I love hanging out in the woods. My friends and I used our Bigfoot hunts as an excuse to follow trails for what seemed like miles and to freak each other out with outrageous lies as we got deeper and deeper into the woods. You could also fairly regularly find piles of waterlogged and moldy Penthouse and Playboy magazines out there which was an added bonus and safer than running into Bigfoot.*

There are adults who still do the same thing, although they are completely serious, which is funny, because even as kids we knew we were wasting our time. If you have cable you might have seen those ghost hunters who walk through haunted houses in green light challenging ghosts to fights. I'm serious. Half the running time is guys in Ed Hardy shirts yelling stuff like, "'SUP GHOST?! WHY DON'T YOU SHOW YOURSELF? YOU LIKE SCARING LITTLE KIDS AND WOMEN? WHY DON'T YOU MATERIALIZE RIGHT NOW, GHOST?"

The ghosts never show up.

As with many things I loved as a kid or teenager, Bigfoot tracking is probably the next ridiculous thing to hit the mainstream. Next time you're out on a relaxing walk in the woods looking for old dirty magazines, don't be surprised if you interrupt a camera crew shouting "C'MON, BIGFOOT! WHY YOU GOTTA HIDE, BRA?! I'M RIGHT HERE IN YOUR WOODS, DUDE!"








*Do you remember the thrill of spotting the back cover of a magazine somewhere as a kid, seeing a cigarette ad, getting excited thinking you had found some forest porn only to realize it was just a Newsweek or something? If I could bottle that euphoria and exhilaration I'd put 5 Hour Energy out of business.

The Sting

I decided to take Thursday off. I had some errands to run and hadn't been able to get out on the trail in a long time, and besides, I just needed a little time off. Hey, get off my back, it was a long week. Jeez, what are you, my boss?

Say, you don't suppose my boss is reading this and realizes that I didn't have extra deadly swine flu Thursday, do you?

So I must have had my mouth open when I was riding down the trail. I've been perfecting my mouthbreather Halloween costume. All of a sudden I feel a bug fly into my mouth.

"Hey," I think to myself. "That was a really big bug." The thing is all tangled up in my mouth between my lower lip and teeth and I'm trying to spit it out while trying not to veer off the road. I'm also noticing my lip feels like I got slapped, but I figure that was just the impact.

The bug doesn't want to leave my inviting mouth. After a couple spits I finally get him out of there, but not before I start feeling sort of funny. "Must have been where he hit me," I'm thinking. "I mean, right there in the inner lip, of course that's gonna sting for a while."

So I've got about 6-7 miles to go and I can feel my lip swelling up. Again, I'm thinking that it's just the impact, since we were both going pretty fast and that's a sort of sensitve area.

By the time I get off the trail my lower lip has swollen to Popeye proportions. I get home and call the doctor for an appointment and sound like a stroke victim over the phone. Never one to let a gross medical condition go to waste (maybe I can squeeze some sympathy out of it, or at least post gross pictures of it on the internet) I try to take some photos of my swollen lip but nothing comes out.

Of course by the time the doctor can finally see me most of the swelling has gone down and he can't find any stinger or anything in me. He writes me a prescription for some steroid pills and sends me out into the world, wondering why I came into his office with such a made-up story. Later on I notice that doc's steroids haven't made my arms any bigger either so I'm thinking of just buying them from that dude that hangs out at the gym from now on.

So my relaxing no work day ended up full of bee venom and doctor tedium. To make matters worse, there was a retirement party that day so I missed deviled eggs. I have learned my lesson and will never play hooky again.

Down, Down to Bradentown

Went down to Bradenton for a late Christmas. It was pretty cool. I got a GPS system, which anyone who has ever driven with me or asked me for directions will be eternally grateful for.

We were only there for a few days, but I found I slipped quite easily into the world of retirement. Waking up early, perhaps taking a nap at 2 or 3. And yeah, might as well pull the car up at 7 PM. I ain't going anywhere at night anyway. Whoa, is it 10:00 already? No wonder I'm so sleepy. What am I, Hugh Hefner staying up til the crack of dawn?

When I wasn't busy sleeping or being brought along on Bataan Death Marches through the gazillion antique/fabric/thrift stores the area has to offer, I found this cool little nature trail/park.

The trail was in an area that I explored quite a bit when I lived in Bradenton. See, there was this crazy guy who lived out in the woods there named Crazy Nathan. There was a game in high school to see how far you could drive down his scary driveway in the deep, dark woods before he ran out of his house shooting at you.

Nathan was a source of endless fascination to a group of my friends. Why did he live out there? What did he do? Was his house all Texas Chain Saw Massacre looking on the inside?

We were fairly obsessed with the guy. We made up Team Nate stickers that we'd paste all over town, which were mistaken for a satanic cult. We spent time in the woods trying to find a back way to his house so we could...well, I don't really know. Spy on him, I guess. The woods had a sprawling network of trails, so you could spend a whole day out there walking around freaking yourself out, wondering what would happen if Nate or his murderous family caught you out there.

So when I found out that the scary-ass Nate Woods had been turned into a nature trail, I was all over that stuff.

The trail is actually to the south of Nate Woods, an area which wasn't as scary, but it was still pretty strange to be walking these once-impenetrable trails that are now paved and full of families and old people walking dogs.

This is sort of what the old trails looked like


Hernando DeSoto landed somewhere around here, looking for gold and Indians to torture.


This is a horseshoe crab, the most useless and ugly animal ever created.


Mangroves are awesome. Whenever I get a whiff of brackish salt water and see mangroves, two memories come rushing up.
A) I'm going fishing or
B) I'll bet somebody stashed some old Penthouse magazines around here somewhere.


Banyan trees are awesome, too. You know they're saying, "We are going to eat you."


So yeah, the trail was pretty awesome. I got there late so I didn't get to explore the whole thing, and it didn't really replicate the fear and terror I once felt in those woods since I wasn't constantly looking over my shoulder to see if a rampaging lunatic was after me, but maybe that's OK.