|
The Onion's Defense Mechanism 2
This is continued from last week.
I was at the docks because, I find, every once in a while in a man's life a man gets a craving to be beside the sea, and there are only two places he's going to be able to do that: at the beach and at the docks.
So it's a 50/50 chance he'll be at one of the other if he gets a craving to visit the sea. If you go down to the beach and look around and don't find him, you might want to try the docks. If, eventually, you find him at the zoo or out washing his car, well, he might not be craving to be beside the sea.
As I was. Craving.
So I had left my tidy little hamlet of Charlton, Massachusetts, nestled at the bottom of the state in between a bunch of gentle hills and a healthy quarter day walk or so from the Massachusetts/Rhode Island/Connecticut border. And I set out for the coast. Well. Nantucket, actually.
Which is coast to the extreme, as it's an island, and has a whole lot of coast to go with it.
So I travelled to New Bedford one fine morning, hoping to find passage to Nantucket, so I could get out where I had an abundance of sea to look at. That and the film festival was on, so I figured I might be able to catch Clint Eastwood or somebody like that.
New Bedford, I found, possessed rather a different... 'vibe' than Charlton. So I left New Bedford, and caught a lift with some guy and his three dogs in a Honda Accord down to Hyannis, where I could catch the ferry to Nantucket.
I don't know if you've ever tried to ride in the car with one dog, let alone three.
Now, you New Yorkers may be thinking, "What the hell's so bad about traveling with the dog? We take M---sy out to the Hamptons all the time and never have the slightest problem.
Well, that's all fine and good, south of a certain geographical latitude, beyond which dogs inexplicably shrink to miniature proportions and can do nothing more harmful to you in confined spaces than yip loud enough to pop your eardrums.
In New England, dogs are, well, dogs. Or horses. Small horses. With claws, which are arguably worse than anything a horse has, shoed or not. A horse's hoof will whack into your chest and possibly leave a dent and a couple of cracked ribs, but a dog, or three, in a confined space, like a car, will thump into your chest and then scratch away in a panic because it can't get it's claws out of the threads of your sweater, until finally your sweater gives up with a small sigh like the last of air leaving a balloon. Which leaves your wounds open to the air, and the other dogs, coming over to investigate what got R***y into such a tizzy.
Not to mention where their hind legs get to as they hop from one side of the car to the other. Now, in a Honda Accord this isn't actually a distance they would need to hop, as simply turning would do in most cases. But the dog(s) hop, things in between be damned. This is when I almost died. Me, the guy giving me a ride, and the three dogs.
Going from 75/80 miles per hour down to 25 isn't the brightest of ideas, especially on I-195 east, towards the Cape.
But we made it eventually. And that whole trip is probably what got me thinking about tough dogs' lives and things along those lines.
Thinking these sort of things, I walked from the mall, where I'd been dropped off, and I think the dogs were mildly despondent at seeing me go, and left immediately for the docks, to get my first taste of the sea.
And this is when I saw the advertisement, and the whole sordid adventure started. Or kept right on going.
I caught the ferry out that afternoon for Nantucket.
To be continued...
disclaimer:
So we ran into troubles with that upgrade of our servers last week, and didn't actually get around to it. We may do it this week, we may not. Who can tell? Who cares?
Probably not you. We're actually having a hard time caring about it.
The only guy that really cares about it is our systems administrator, shoved back in the little closet we keep all our servers in, stressed out and hopped up on just a bit too much coffee, and probably a danger to himself and others at this stage.
We've told him it's okay, don't worry about it, it's all okay, no harm done, but he's bunkered down with a Nerf(tm) gun and a lot of printouts, so we pretty much leave him alone these days to sort out what he needs to sort out and everyone'll be happy in the end, we suppose.
As you may have noticed, there's another series going on above, we hope you like this one as much as you liked the previous. Well, at least as much as you liked it judging from the feedback mails we got.
And yes, thank you to many for enquiring after the health of our spam filters. They seem to work. Ish.
See you next week.
|
Yer Weekly Horoscopes.