SmokeSound

 The nice thing about (once) needing a big pickup is that everything is stout.  The springs don't spring:  they honestly transmit every rough place directly to the car seats.  Good gas mileage is not a matter of concern:  it is impossible.  Tight turns are no problem, at all:  they cannot be done.  U-turns require driving out to the edge of town and looking for a fallow field.   And the tires are formidable:  ply after ply of something resembling military armor.  I assume that is why I have had two flat tires in about a week's time.  Both flats happened in our driveway. The first was the result of a break in the sidewall of a front tire.  Since I wanted to return the tire to Costco, where I had bought it, I proposed to remove the flat myself.  The Drivers Manual said the jack was under the rear seat, and so it was.  The jack cylinder was about the size of a can of beer, and the handle had thirteen or twelves extension pieces, so that once the jack was in place at the onl

A genuine horse, in Roosevelt State park Sometimes I feel like a dolt let loose in the real world. All my life, I have loved the sight of horses running.  It has seemed to me that if there were a god, he would have allowed the evolution of a magnificent beast, more interested in a good, grassy meadow than in seeing a rabbit or a goat as a meal.  Oh, my god, how beautiful is a horse running just for the sheer wonderful hell of it! Once I had an uncle whose life and language was more pretense than performance, who came to an end in Bend, Oregon--I think it was--in a road accident.  He is the uncle who thought to teach me to play chess, not because I had talent for it, but because I did not.  The last game of chess we ever played, after much pretending, was the game I finally won:  the first game I had ever won. He lived a short walk away, in a Western Washington that was more trees than civilization, which later struck me as a kind of transplanted Appalachian outpost, with dea

Imagine for one, brief, shining moment that a wiener could think.  (Not Anthony, of course, but all other wieners.  Hot dogs.   That sort of wiener.)  And while we are at it, imagine that a wiener were happy to end up as part of a hotdog. I am trying to think positively about how a sentient wiener might come to a happy end, given its options, short of photocopying itself into posterity. I am driven to this meditation on the sensibilities of weenies by a recent picnic luncheon.  I say, luncheon", although I never eat "luncheon".  Sometimes I do eat lunch.  The Wienermeister--we might call him--asked what I wanted, and I, thinking about dark mustard and onions and sauerkraut, said I would like a brat. The Wienermeister pointed out that he had pickle-infused brats, and cheese brats, and ballpark franks, and even kosher hot dogs for Sol Rabinowicz, who is Jewish, you know. I looked at the pack of alien hot dogs and wondered what is was like to be Bernie Sanders in