HOORAY! Daddy’s here! I was feeling much better by Friday night when I went to pick him up from the airport. I’d actually had a pretty decent day on Friday up until I heard DJ AM died. That was a big shock, and it was hard news to hear. I was really angry for awhile. I was angry to have lost him to the disease of addiction. I know how hard he fought against it. I guess addiction is like any potentially fatal disease — no matter how hard you fight it, sometimes you lose.
My father is the kind of person who arrives in a city and then wants to spend the rest of the time driving to everything in the distant vicinity of that city. So today we drove three hours each way to and from Ocean Shores, Washington, which is this tiny Pacific Ocean beach community on the southwest corner of Washington. We took Leo, of course.
On the way there, we drove through Aberdeen, where Kurt Cobain grew up. The city sign said “Welcome to Aberdeen: Come as You Are.” The town itself is small and kind of sad, the main roads lined with ship-shod houses with faded paint and overgrown lawns. For a kid, there’s nothing to do there but find trouble. It gave me new insight into Cobain’s life.
Ocean Shores is beautiful, but it’s small and there’s not a whole lot to do. As a result, it seems like everyone flies kites. There were like 30 kites in the sky. Very cool.
The beach was gorgeous, and they did horseback rides up and down the beach. Unfortunately, none of the horseback tours were leaving at a time convenient for us, but this did not prevent Leo from grabbing a huge piece of horse shit in his mouth and running around the beach with it as my father chased him and we all yelled at him to drop the horse poop. Now, Leo knows not to eat poop, but, as my dad pointed out, horse poop probably doesn’t smell or taste like cat or dog poop. It’s probably much more grassy, and Leo didn’t realize that it was poop. We spent awhile talking about this. We also have pictures of Leo running around with the horse poop, but they’re on my dad’s camera so I don’t have them yet.
Today was supposed to be my berry-picking day, but we didn’t pass any berry farms on the drive out there. So on the drive back we just pulled over into a blackberry patch and started picking. Picking blackberries in a naturally occurring blackberry patch is much different than doing so on a farm. The blackberries fight back. I was severely injured by the thorns. OK, not severely, but it seemed severe at the time. But we got enough blackberries to make pie tonight, so that was fantastic.
As we were leaving the blackberry patch I saw a snail that looked like a poop. I know, I know. It’s a slug. It still looks like a poop.
We drove home (3 hours!) and made our pies and watched Valkyrie and I made a Holocaust joke on Twitter and so far I’ve only had one person lodge a complaint. Not bad for a day’s work.
Oh and then there was a giant party on my apartment’s rooftop deck. Everyone’s revolting because the stupid new management at the complex (The Neptune) fired the only guy there who actually helps us, so it was a Fuck the Neptune party. They had a DJ and everything. After Daddy went to bed, I went up there and hung out with my neighbors. Our complex is across the street from a big Marriott, and every now and then we get a delightful guest over there. Tonight there was a fat old man masturbating on a chair facing the window. You can kind of see him in this pic:
And then he noticed us watching and went ahead and stood in the window while masturbating. He dimmed the lights, though, so I couldn’t get a good picture.
And then we all took turns wearing the decorations as a wig:
And then the cops came and everyone went home. Except for the really drunk people who are still in the courtyard being extremely loud. I’m sure the cops will come for them eventually.
I’m off to bed because Daddy wants to leave for Vancouver, Canada (sigh) by 9 am tomorrow. I expect that dream will be shattered in about, oh, 7 hours.
