Assorted animals

If you want to end your own team's winning streak, send David Price to the mound, by golly! You know the expression "such and such makes me want to throw up?" I don't understand that. Why would you wish to throw up? Unless that would get some poison out of you and it's the only way? David Price is poison for the Red Sox. Vomit him up, move on. I hate watching this guy.

I made my op-ed debut with the New York Daily News today, on the subject of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Happy with that. Happened fast. Sent it yesterday morning, we went back and forth through the day, and less than twenty-hours after first sending, there it is in the newspaper with the ninth highest circulation in the country. Good process, as they say. Prior to last September, I had never done an op-ed. Since then: this one, The New York Times, USA Today, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and one in The Wall Street Journal coming any day now.

Again today I ran three miles, walked three, climbed the Monument five times. People inside the Monument who literally have bottles of soda sticking out of their pockets, love to tell you that you have to slow down, you can't run, it's harder than you think, you'll be lucky to get to the top taking your time, etc. etc. These can be people you've already passed four times, because you are a mighty beast of the Monument! Do you think the world has always been the projection festival that it is right now? We are not all the same. Just because you are sucking wind on step #11, does not mean that we all must suck the wind on step #11.

I have noticed a very disturbing trend lately: people doing awful things to animals, filming this, sharing it to social media. People have always done awful things to animals, I'm sure, but there seems to be an increased concentration of these incidents lately. I'm not talking nationally even. Just right around here. A couple weeks back, two idiot-rubes put a snapping turtle--a beautiful, fascinating animal that is a favorite of mine--in the back of their truck, and then one of them, this breasty dude--you know exactly the kind of build I mean--kicked it to death. What the hell has to be wrong with you as an adult to do that? The turtle is going about his or her life, and you basically torture that creature until it's dead? Then there was this chihuahua that someone left in a box to die of heat stroke. Someone else found the box with the dog in it. The dog was unconscious, with foam around its mouth, but there was a faint heartbeat, so this person tried to rush the poor creature to the vet, but it died on the way there. Now I'm reading a story about a couple jackasses who found a goat and forced the goat to inhale their pot smoke. The goat looks like it's going to hurl.

I want to go up to Millbrook Pond in Rockport on a weekend soon. The MBTA has a flat $10 riding pass over the summer. Normally, it's over $20 round trip to Rockport and back. Millbrook Pond, a favorite Rockport spot of mine--though I love them all so much--was recently dredged, cleaned up. It was a lengthy process. The animals were relocated. It was a lot of work. Anyway, I saw reports of snapping turtles near the dam, and it sounds like they're around there often. It's been a long time since I saw a snapping turtle in the wild, so I'm going to do that. When I do my crazy walks across three or four North Shore towns, out in the sticks, I'll often encounter other kinds of turtles--plus snakes--on the roads. I pick them up so they don't get hit by cars and carry them a ways into the woods, trying to deposit them in a sunlit spot, because that's what they're on the road for, to soak up some rays. These are turtles you can handle easily. Snappers you have to be careful. Their necks are super good at extending, and they can extend backwards, plus their feet are pretty well-clawed. You can basically kill them by breaking their spines if you lift them by the tail, so you never want to do that. When I was a kid there was a brook about a mile behind our house, out in the forest, and during the early summer I I would wade about, exploring, and there would be baby snappers. Those you could pick up in the palm of your hand.

Mookie Betts just had the baseball at-bat of the season. Fouled off many pitches, a double digit at-bat, then launched a grand slam, which came on the pitcher's 46th pitch of the inning. Weird inning. A force out at second on a potential double play was overturned because the second baseman came off the bag. That never mattered in the past--neighborhood play. But everything is right on the button now. Sent a baseball pitch to an op-ed editor at The New York Times tonight.

And since we are talking animals, here are the Animals, before they were famous, at their home club in Newcastle, in 1963. They didn't play like this later. This is them tearing it up like wild men. Hilton Valentine is shredding on guitar.