Emeril’s Table 10 in Las Vegas is not the typical restaurant Irene and I would eat in. We are far too frugal for that, but this one time it seemed like a good idea. We hadn’t eaten at all, lunch time was long past, and we had played indoor pickleball in the morning at the Dula Center, walked the whole of the bizarre and camp-ily covered Fremont Street several times watching the characters with too much money suck up perfumed oxygen while getting their heads  massaged with unsanitary-looking battery-operated mutli-pronged stimulators and the other characters with no money at all discussing if a trashed then scrounged plastic bottle had a redemption value, looked for – with no success at all – a multi-way penny slot-machine ready to pay for our trip, had coffee at the dirtiest Starbucks we’ve ever seen this side of Bejing and generally needed nourishment and some positive reinforcement.  This indirectly led us to Table 10.

The experience itself was worth the $50 lunch tab, I suppose. It wasn’t so much the food itself – described quickly the food was ordinary; Calamari as an appetizer and Mahi-Mahi sandwiches with cole-slaw. But, and I suppose this is Emeril’s genius – BAM! – it was all a bit different and (dare I say it?) better than its less-pricey competitors. The Mahi-Mahi in particular was (at the time at least) the best I’ve ever eaten…a small sandwich on a home-made roll but with a thick and perfectly-done tender fish steak nestled gently in a pineapple-tomato relish that somehow worked very well. Plus, like I said, going in we were starving and coming out we weren’t so you chalk up the experience to being an experience and thus allow yourself the extravagant mid-day meal. Plus – and, hey, my “I hate people” attitude aside, I am a people-person in some ways, or at least I’m a waiter-person, and I LIKED Julio, who probably didn’t take any more special care of us than anyone else, at least his patter with them seemed identical to his patter to us, but he made good eye contact and shared his own personal views of the dishes and he wouldn’t have steered us wrong, right? So it was all good….

Until, two hours later, in our motor-home, Spyro walked, K.C. the Kit scratched, me laying down for just a moment to “rest my eyes”….my stomach began doing an old and remarkably familiar dance that I thought I had left behind when I stopped drinking 25 years ago, and one thing led to another, which led to a brief bout with the porcelain pony….I will spare you details here….

…and this in turn led to a relatively short-lived series of fairly profound (for me) thoughts, of which I share a small selection here.

1.  Is the experience of eating good food made less by the experience of throwing it up afterward?

2.  We all know, and I don’t need to belabor, how food is processed and what eventually happens to it. So perhaps we should short-cut the whole process and only eat minimum amounts of food and only as fuel? Perhaps the whole thing of “enjoying” the food we eat is an artificial creation, an emotional overlay that we add to a process that isn’t worthy of the effort anyway, given that it all comes out in the end (so to speak)?

3.   Does Emeril, in this case, owe me anything? Like my money back, an apology, a signed copy of his most recent cookbook? Or did he already give me what I paid for, and what I did with it was (somehow) my decision?

Obviously this type of mental masturbation does nobody any good. But, from the perspective of the range of alternatives presented to one when on their knees in the very tight confines of a motor-home water-closet, it’s better to think about those things than what is right in front of your face, as it were.

Or, in my usual fashion, did I miss the whole Zen-point…again?

Of course no essay that describes Las Vegas is complete without having some reflection on reality, as basically Las Vegas turns reality upside-down. Nothing is as it seems here. This includes, interestingly, The Shrine of the Most Holy Redeemer, which is, by my reckoning at least, is perhaps both the most upscale and least real Catholic Church I’ve ever seen. Located just off the strip, within an easy chip-toss, appropriately, of the Mirage, with a pastor who delivered a sermon in which he sang parts of Handel’s Messiah and who discussed his interview on Fox News the night before (where undoubtedly he gave his opinion on the economy and on China’s role in environmental affairs), nothing in this church looked like a Catholic Church is supposed to look.

What does this mean, you ask? Well, it’s easier to answer by asking a few questions of my own. What other Catholic Church has two deacons whose job it is to follow along behind the priest when he is shaking holy water over the congregation with mops to immediately dry the marble floors?  What other Catholic Church has vocational candles that are actually electrified and turn on and off with individual switches instead of actually burning? What Christian church of any denomination has a “Last Supper” scene cast in bronze at a scale of about six times life? There are many other examples but you get the drift.

But I am probably making something out of nothing. At the same time I seem to be criticizing, I have to say, to be fair, that the angel-voiced priest spent as much time talking about the upcoming food drive and the church’s mission in assisting folks who are HIV-Positive as he did singing. And the people in this decidedly upper-class building were as friendly as any I’ve seen anywhere, including Sister Pat, the semi-retired nun sitting in the row in front of us who shared that she had lived many years in San Francisco and for many years before that in Redwood City, which is next to San Carlos, CA., which is where, South of San Francisco, that Irene and I lived for many years.

So what conclusions can I draw from this, after all? Only the same one that I’ve come to realize plays so big in so many parts of my life. I don’t know much and what I do know is subject to change ‘cuz I’m probably wrong about that, too.

First, Gart began by asking me why there weren’t going to be open courts available during certain times today. “Now that we’ve got 12 courts (up from 8), we should always have some open courts available!”  Ralph chimed in with something equally inane and the two monologues went on unchecked for a few minutes, me not able to get a word in edgewise.

Finally I stopped them and told them the truth as it exists in my world-view. The truth doesn’t matter to this story but is as follows:  it can get complicated but we have designated times for open play and during our busy periods at least four courts allocated to that, four reserved courts set aside for those who want to reserve them, and during periods where we are doing both reservations and open play we restrict the round-robins (organized play based on skill level) to no more than four courts. Thus, worst-case scenario, we would have four courts available to virtually any purpose known to man, excepting of course those who may wish to land small planes in liu of flying them into IRS buildings or some such. This can occasionally be superseded by club-sanctioned events, e.g. that very day (to Gart’s question) when we had Sarah’s annual Woman’s Mixed-Level Social scheduled (using eight courts), leaving us only four for the Men’s C Round-Robin and, for two hours, none for open or reserved play, and I was explaining all abut THAT when Ralph leaned over to Gart and asked “Are you getting any kind of an answer out of all this BS?”.

This, of course, torqued me mightily. Here I had actually given credence, if just for a moment, to the idea that they might actually WANT an answer and all they were doing was baiting me…again…and worst of all I bit. I should know better, but my intemperate response was that I was no longer talking to Ralph and was only talking to Gart, and that any further communication from Ralph to me would need to be routed through Gart, and we went on that way for a few minutes, much to their amusement and my continued irritation, until my butt hurt too much to continue and I got up and gimped off.

I don’t know why I waste my time on those two.

That said, pickleball appears for me to be an even longer journey. When we arrived at St. George, Utah a few days ago for the warm-up week before the pickleball tournament within the Huntsman World Senior Games (aka Senior Olympics) I was totally jazzed and looking forward to showing everybody how good I’d become since last year, which you know right away was a major no-no. It wasn’t so much that “they” showed me different but more that my anxiety to show somebody something made my doing virtually anything correctly somewhere between difficult and impossible. It was only after we (Irene and I) had lost our first four or six games that I settled down and began to hit one shot at a time…at which point my game slowly re-appeared from wherever it had been off hiding.

This was all very disheartening until I was, today, playing against and later watching a few of the “big boys”, no names mentioned, who had come in from various parts of the country and arrived at the courts for their first outing of the season today. I was now playing adequately, as was partner Steve, and although we got beat fairly handily by the big boys it wasn’t as handy as it had been last year, and by golly they were missing a few shots that they would most always have made, simple down-the-line forhands for instance, or hitting lobs into the net, or serving long, or dinking shots six feet on the wrong side of the in-line, or whatever…just like Steve and I. And they were obviously pissed about it, too…just like we have been. But, over the course of watching them play for about two hours, they very quickly were regaining form and were suddently were hitting the shots they had missed just those few minutes before, and looking, once again, like the top-flight players they are.

What’s the point? I could make many points out of this simplistic set of observations but what this certainly has to bring home is that pickleball is not a 50-year sport for me, while it may be a 20-year sport for some of the so-called big-boys, and that, for me, I will have to simply give myself some time, each year, to get back into the game…head and body, assuming I’m allowed to keep playing for awhile. But all that said, I am a better player than I was at this time last year. And, even when I don’t show it, I know it’s in there and can be re-discovered, while last year it wasn’t yet there at all. And, God willing, there may be other improvements still available to me, and perhaps I will discover them….one step at a time, one step at a time, one step at a time.

I have to say, though, that at the end of the day I am often glad I am still an RVer. We, too, have the same backyards as these guys, the same sunsets, the same access to superior Missoula services. And if our neighbors get pesty or that red-tailed hawk is too noisy eating his magpie dinner, we can change our backyard by the next day. I’d like to see Steve (the bigger-than-yours guy) try that trick.

Getting complacent about things isn’t acceptable when one is searching for truth, any truth. For instance, a good friend, albeit a bit misguided, told me recently that it doesn’t matter what economists I quoted to reinforce the obvious truth that Obama’s economic polices are working and are rapidly bringing us back from the economic slide-to-suicide begun with Reganomics and carried blithfully forward even into “W”’s ignorance-as-a-virtue day, he could quote a different, more conservative economist that thinks the big O’s policies are akin to devil worshop.

He may be right, of course, but can we both we equally right? It doesn’t mean that these opposite points of view can co-exist, does it? It seems there has to be ONE truth in there somewhere, especially when the two points of view are fundamentally so different.

One risk is that we, as Americans, seem to be inculcated in believing that ALL viewpoints are healthy, that there is NO absolute truth, that everything should be considered a respectful shade of gray, that things that are labeled theories are therefore still devoid of fact and are unproven (while the scientific meaning of theory has nothing to do whatsoever with whether anything is based on fact or PROVEN or not, it’s just more ignorance making it’s way into the maintstream). This is wrong, and it brings me around to the real point I’m making here, which is really about a definition of pimping that I think is really beneficial for society at large.

Ignoring the classic or even Wikepedian definitions of pimping, that the word has mostly to do with the act of soliciting women into prostitution, either on the street or in a brothel, and managing them for profit, an activity that may have social good in it somewhere but I wouldn’t know about that, having only been in a brothel once in my life and that time only to see if Al Kalgren and Frank Marino could really trade trout for sex, a classic entreprenurial endeavor if I had ever seen one set up and something I wanted to see play out, although as it turned out it didn’t. Pimping as I’m using it doesn’t even have to do with adding a third or fourth TV set to your recently renovated 1987 Cadillac Hearse, although I applaud the activity generally.

No, the definition of pimping I’m refering to here has to do with the activity of trolling things by people in the hopes of stirring them up, knocking the complacent pins from under their tired feet and making them think differently about something, ANYTHING. I believe in pimping in this sense because I believe there ARE absolute truths out there…not ALL points of view are created equal, we do NOT have to give equal weight to all silliness, and we would be far better off as individuals and by extension as a society if we DO THE MATH (a nifty colloquialism I’m using here as a metaphor for “Do The Work”…whether math is involved in the research or not).

I love pimping people out of complacency and into the light, and once they finally get moving I love it when people do the work. That’s why when 0ur financial advisor, Kevin Hatch, calls and we discuss our portfolio for two hours and I question him about everything I inevitably take his recommendations almost without question across the board because he has DONE THE WORK. It’s when Jack and Diana Reynolds call and say, hey, there is a start-up that we want you to invest it, we say “where’s the checkbook?”, because they(and their own advisors) have DONE THE WORK. It’s why, when I go back and read Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and understand from that how he came up with the remarkably fully-featured philosophy of evolution that tends to explain our world’s existence better than the thousands of years of sacrificing virgins (assuming that’s what they really were), or the reading of chicken entrails, or the placement of the pillars at Stonehenge by (assumably) the Druids or somebody like them, ever did…it isn’t because his shit is newer, it’s belycause Darwin, bless his soul, DID THE WORK.

However, and admittedly, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t somebody out there on the other side of the equation that isn’t doing an equal and opposite amount of work, is there? No, I suppose it doesn’t…..

Out here in RV-land many of the folks I run into are either (a) very settled in their beliefs and generally are fundamentally true to a Christian God (and generally don’t want to hear about any different possibilities), or are (b) not searching at all and don’t think even about a god, much less God. In between these two points there are people who are sure of themsleves in many different religions, including, in our brief wanderings, commited aetheists (stretching the definition of religion) as well as Jews, Muslims, Amish, and Muslims, plus some real hell-fire Baptists and other interesting Christians. All interesting folks and I keep waiting for lightening to strike and to tell me something that will save my own soul. So far it hasn’t, although occasionally it seems that Somebody IS trying to tell me something, and as example let me share with you an experience I had at a gas station in Wisconsin just a couple of days ago.

The older fellah that stepped gingerly out of a newish green pickup truck, other than being bigger than most guys and a little more crippled up, walking with aid of a cane, seemed pretty ordinary, dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans like most folks in this cool wooded area, but his truck carried a neatly-printed sign saying “Lay Catholic Apostle for Christ” , or some such. I asked him what that meant, if he was, for instance, an ordained Deacon in the church, a position that’s always interested me for its level of commitment and one that I had explored, briefly, for myself.

“Nope,” he said. “I’m strictly a lay apostle. But I’ve been out here doin’ this for 25 years!”. Doing what, I asked? “Preachin’ to the sinners,” he said with a smile. “I’ve got 1.68 million miles on my cars doin’ this!” Man, I said, that is a LOT of miles! Where do you go? “I go where the sinnin’ is,” he replied. “Wherever the tough ones are! Here,” he said, “let me give you a present!”

I nodded amiably…thinking I would get another brochure or something, followed by a request for a donation, of course. Instead, he handed me two professionally-published books and two accompanying CDs. “One for you, one for a friend!” he smiled, clapping me on the back as he turned to go into the gas station to pay for his purchase.

Well, I thought, here it is at last…the meaning of life, coming to me unexpectedly, as I somehow knew it would, in this most banal of all places, a Wisconsin gas station….Paul being struck down from his horse by God on his way to war…that kind of unexpected visitation, albeit a trifle less dramatic. Nice….the meaning of life, in a book and a CD.  I placed a $20 bill on his seat while he was still inside, tossed the stuff into our car and took off.

I wish I could tell you that they did contain the meaning of life. I mean, entitled as they are “God Speaks, Will You Listen?”, clearly they were directed exactly towards my search…how could they be wrong?

Well, the publishing is certainly the high point of their existence. The content is trivial…simple readings with no explanations done by a fellah whos ounds like he might be still in his teens, a monotone recantation of the same things I’ve read for myself in the New Testament, not that there’s anything wrong with the readings, there isn’t, but it doesn’t go any further, doesn’t tell me a thing, just sorta pissed me off that it doesn’t INFORM me or inspire my belief or anything at all.

Well, I can take hope in the fact that, although it appears I’m still looking in the wrong places, the places I’m looking are beginning to appear to be more like the right places. And, maybe like Paul, I will be struck with belief at some point. Or, maybe like Jimmy Buffet says, it’ll just turn out that the Hokey-Pokey really IS all it’s all about, after all. In any event, it’s nice being out here, and I can still look around…we’re in Minnesota now…and it’s still all green and lovely and all, and while it doesn’t NECESSARILY prove the existence of a god, it doesn’t say there isn’t one, either. And it’s a nice place to hang out, this world, isn’t it?

Yes, I know what she means, hard to miss her meaning accompanied as it were by hand-gestures signifying, if not mountains, then at least large mounds. But seeing big steaming piles of moose evidence is not the same as seeing a moose. When I was last in Alaska I had been out running (outside of Anchorage if I remember correctly) and was on a dirt road pretty far outside the city limits, doing a run of maybe ten miles. I was more or less at the end of the run as dictated by my stop watch and was thinking about turning. I decided “just a bit further”, went up and over a rise, and came within five feet of running broadside into a cow moose, thankfully without calf (or otherwise I might not be here talking about the story), and she simply looked at me disdainfully, put her nose back into the underbrush and continued filling her belly. I back-pedaled as fast as I could, reversing nearly in mid-stride as I did so, perhaps looking more like Michael Jackson doing a moon-walk than the middle-aged jogger I was, and beat my time out by ten minutes getting back.

Wisconsin, our current stop, doesn’t have the same claim to fame as the town in Michigan (in fact we’re told you’d need to go to Canada from here to see a moose) but it, too, has its attractions. For instance, Woodruff, the place right around the bend from the Hiawatha RV Park where we are staying, claims to have the World’s Biggest Penny. This was a strange enough fame-claim to inspire Irene and I to go looking for it. Turns out it is simply a painting of a big penny, although all the banners in town proclaim “world’s largest penny” and why they think that seeing a PAINTING of a big penny is the same as seeing a big ‘ol COPPER penny is beyond me, any more than I understood, in Michigan, how seeing the evidence of a moose can be considered the same as a moose or how you can have the U.S. Moose Capital without having a visible moose.  Heck, I don’t know…I just go where we are pointed half the time, looking for something to write home to mother about, or in the advent of her not being available, I gladly settle for you, especially in that your expectations are so low, knowing us as you do.

That may be all the word on Wisconsin I have to share at the moment. We have not fished here at all, alth0ugh the small-mouth bass water nearby looks invitingly rocky albeit a bit low. Also we have NOT eaten a Pastie (Pass-tee), the famous meat pot pie. We have not eaten any fried cheese curds, nor have we attended any of the many Friday all-you-can-eat fish fries sponsored by everyone from Elk’s Lodges to boy scout trouts, generally, it seems, followed by blackout bingo. St. Germaine, down the street from us about ten miles, also has a Monday flea market of some size and fame, which we missed coming in, and a very large farmer’s market on Wednesdays, which interests us Local-vores quite a bit although we will miss that as well on the flip-side as we drivers say, leaving at oh-dark-thirty tomorrow morning as we are to visit good friends Tom and Jean in Minnesota, where I intend to beat Tom’s butt in pickleball….once again, and this time with the expectation he will bawl like the baby he is.

In the meantime, I need to get us ready, so I’d better get on it. I have a drawer face that’s pulled off, a toilet seat that’s loose, a sewer tank that needs to be flushed, etc. etc. It’s hard to roll when pieces are falling off here and there, personally and otherwise, but a screwdriver can take care of the coach. Actually, overall it’s tough out here but it’d be tougher anywhere else in these perilous times and we are making the best of it. No sense your feeling sorry for us, if you were.

Shaq's Shoe!

…and OH my gosh….how I DO run on. But do you get that EVERYTHING is here? Between the Archives and the Smithsonian there’s a beautiful park containing dozens of exquisite statues and a chlorinated pool where you can take your shoes off to soak your feet, and so many people were doing it, it felt like we were in Lourdes except instead of prayers I heard people talking about what they had seen and everybody was talking about something different.

"Where Do We Go Next?"

One poor little rich girl near me, a teenie-bopper wannabe all of maybe 14 but wearing a grand’s worth of casual elegance, was grilling her daddy mercelessly about what’s this, what’s that. This kid knew nothing, she didn’t know that Gerald Ford had been Nixon’s eventual choice for and served as VP, she didn’t know who Nixon was, for heaven’s sake, but her curiosity had been awakened by somethng that wasn’t on an Ipod, something that couldn’t be captured by Tweeting, something that was over and above texting….she was waking up to her own country – and her father, bless his heart, was doing his undereducated, overmoneyed best to explain his way out of a trap of his own creation. And no matter how poor a job he was doing, and frankly it was pretty piss-poor, he was giving it that old Mississippi State try, and both he and his daughter wouldn’t forget THIS day very soon, and neither would anybody else in their family, and for the most part neither would any of the other dozens of families we saw, heard and watched during the long, tiring day, and neither will Irene and I, truth be known, and tomorrow we get to get up even earlier and go do even more of this, bless us both for being such lucky ducks.

Anyway those of us who are crotchety older full-timers, and here I do refer to you or at least the people we prefer to hang with (”hang with” being a younger person’s phrase typically but among geezers still appropriate while taking on a whole new and admittedly unfortunate connotation) dislike KOAs because they are loud and always have some organized activity going on that we wouldn’t participate in if it meant the return to health of our 401Ks. OK, that last is an exaggeration; if it meant money we WOULD participate, but it never does and so we don’t. Speaking of money, KOAs are also amazingly expensive and we always feel that we aren’t getting value as we don’t participate, this becoming something of a Catch-22 for those few of us who are driven by logic, but excluding Irene the rest of us aren’t so we only recognize overt high prices, coupled with the fact that they, more than almost any other campground chain, will raise their prices tremendously during peak seasons, and since those seasons define as “That period of time when Irene and AJ are nearby”, we always wind up paying more for what we perceive as less….and having just come from the Tiffin factory and several dog hospitals, where, disregarding the fact that in both cases we were getting something we wanted out of it,  people lined up starting at dawn to get what’s left of our money…yes, disregarding this, or perhaps in spite of it or because of it we have none to spare.

This lengthy preamble, of course, only forcasts the obvious….that I’m writing these golden sentences from the comfort of our coach parked reasonably comfortably inside…wait for it….the Lexington, VA., KOA. Why? Because it’s the only place in town that’s worth a damn, the profanity becoming obviously appropriate in just a moment if you’d please wait. I swear you have the patience of a ferret.

Anyway, the last two days we’ve been driving, driving, driving…up at dawn, animals fed, animals walked, throw ‘em into the coach, roll up the sewer hose, unhook power, hook up toad, check for road kill, toss into coach for later Zone-favorable meal (mostly just kidding), head out, rawhide (stirring music and lowing cattle in background)… up from Alabama through Georgia, down the road across South Carolina, up through North Carolina, across a tiny piece of Tennessee and into Virginia, it’s all good, nice roads, blue mountains, lush meadows everywhere, nice stuff, but it’s a long way and we switch Sirius channels endlessly, going from PBS to Bloomberg to CNN to FOX and back again. Way too much time, way too much talk, too much nonsense passing for news….too many issues by far, and certainly too few solutions. It’s clear that the forces of darkness are fast approaching and I doubt that even Obama will be able to turn the tide. It’s a bad day in Black Rock when the best I can look forward to is that I won’t be here long enough to worry about it, a bad day made worse by Irene’s struggle, as we drive, to find suitable campgrounds where we can overnight and also hopefully go see something in the few daylight hours she allows me.

Generally, when it comes to approaches for considering this particular problem of where to overnight, I prefer worry. Worry is easy; it’s something of a way of life for me. In fact it’s always been so for me, and as much as I’d like to believe that somehow time will magically change this, a condition like this that’s successfully fought off the miracles of multiple talk therapies, anti-anxiety diets, lung-busting exercise regimenes, mucho Internet research, a library of books, an almost-infinite number of most-prescription drugs and near-endless whining, well, it probably won’t. But as I worry I’m reminded of the paranoid’s lament…”Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t trying to get me!”. Likewise, just because I’m certifiably neurotic doesn’t mean there isn’t anything I should worry about. Today alone I found the following worthy topics for extreme worry while driving:

1.  In the far-right lane,  how far to the right can I drive our big rig without hitting traffic signs or getting the back four wheels stuck in a rut or a ditch…either of which circumstances would most certainly result in the coach  flipping onto its back like a huge, multi-colored turtle?

2.  If I do flip the coach over, will my insurance pay? They’ve been wonderful to deal with thus far for stuff like answering questions, but I’ve never put in a claim. Insurance companies, I’ve heard, don’t like claims, seeing them as anti-profit.

3.   If the insurance company doesn’t pay, I won’t be able to repair the coach. Will I then have to give up RVing? Where would we live? What would we live IN? Living in a cardboard box has always idled along beneath my seeming placid exterior, probably because it’s so close to my old fav., living on a park bench, covered with newspapers. A worrier’s aside; if we DID go for the cardboard box option, where would we find a box big enough for ourselves and our dogs?

Granted, the things I’m worry about here, while possibilities, are basically mental masturbation and not likely to come to pass, and as such eventually I would probably let them go. And when Irene announced that, like it or not, we were staying at a KOA outside Lexington and I could just shut my yap because she didn’t want to hear about it, I did as she requested but changed the focus of my worry instantly. After all, based on many experiences, I now had something more real to worry about. And my worry suddenly had more focus. It wasn’t whether or not we would be inundated with kids, it would be which group of kids…the mewling, pewling, toddlers or the skateboarders who would do jumps through our yard, nearly taking out poor Jake in the process? It wouldn’t be whether or not we would be subjected to unworldy amounts of noise at all hours, it would be where would it come from, and what, if anything, could we do about it? I’ve been known, at KOAs, to go visiting the neighbors in the early-morning hours when the drunks were in full throat. I’ve also been known to take Rocky the Girl-Dog with me, back in the day when her very appearance garnered respect…rest her good-natured soul, she never intended a minute’s harm to anyone but there were at least two groups that quieted instantly when she showed up. What would I do now? Could Jake put the fear into anybody? Could Spyro? Well, perhaps Spyro…now that his teeth are cleaned they gleam in a most ferocious way, so if anybody alive can be intimidated by a Cocker Spanial they certainly could be by Spyro if the light was just right.

Reality is always an slap in my worried face, presenting me as it does with totally unanticipated outcomes. In this case it was Karaoke. If I ever go to hell, which if it exists is probably a likely outcome given my sins, I will at least be joining my friends, as the Irish expression goes, and more to the point I’ll be used to the experience as karoake at the KOA will have showed me the way. Nobody in the camp could sing. None of them could carry a tune, even with the tune and the published words apparently trying to carry them. And, being directly downhill and under the swimming pool and stage areas, we were bombarded by the noise as if we were in the flight path of cargo jets. And, of course, the summertime hours had just gone into effect, meaning that the quiet times were diminished and didn’t start until 11 PM, which doesn’t sound late but when you are as old as I am it might as well be dawn, especially when you factor in that I must lay awake for at least an hour or two settling my mistakes of the day before the books are balanced and I can go to my restless sleep. Probably in an ideal world I would go to bed about 8 and get to sleep by 10 or so…in this case, starting after the noise finally backed down a bit meant that it was probably 2 AM or so when sleep finally arrived. When you are looking at traversing 50 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway later today, a beautiful route unfortunately characterized by turns wrapping endlessly around each other, one leading into the next, it is good to have your wits about you, and, unfortunately for the motorcyclists and bicyclists and joggers and hikers who will be in the road up there, today I won’t and most of THEM will be lucky if they get through it alive.

Well, it could be worse for them. They could be sentenced to the KOA. And me? I’m gonna go find some coffee.