November 2018 – Here…this is you.

This is Sherman. Sherman is dumb as a bag of hammers but he’s very sweet. Because he’s such a lovable cuddle bear, people refuse to believe he has a ridiculous prey drive. (RIP all of the lizards.)

The other night, he and his sister, Lulu went outside at about 0300 for whatever dog reasons and I immediately heard them losing their damned minds. I ran to the backyard to prevent my neighbors from hating me and saw a coyote right on the other side of the view fence.

My house backs up to a wash with tons of cacti, trees, and rabbits. Coyotes and javelinas hunt back there all the time. Most nights, they go about their business quietly and my dogs sleep through it. But nooo…

Sherman was barking like an absolute lunatic and I grabbed his collar right as he tried to lunge at the fence. This coyote lunged at the fence at the exact same time. There is plenty of space between the wrought iron bars for noses. Sweet fancy Moses, my Sherman was less than two feet from fighting with a wild animal through the fence and still barking in kill mode.

I marched him inside, blocked the dog door, and went back to bed. My dogs jumped on the bed and crashed like nothing unusual had happened. I, on the other hand, lay there with my heart pounding in my chest like I had just run a 5K in my flip-flops. Sherman didn’t even thank me for saving his life.

I was at my mom’s house one day in late 2004, probably to mooch some food and complain about my life. She handed me a photo she had printed from the internet and said, “Here…this is you.” I looked down at a black and white image of two steam locomotives that had crashed head-on. The coal boxes were sticking up in the air and several men were standing around with their hands on their hips gaping at the mess around them. And then we both laughed.

She wasn’t wrong. I was a train wreck and I stayed that way for a few more years. On that day, I was 29 and had been divorced nearly 3 years. I was in a light bulb (off and on) relationship with an alcoholic who was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder. My anxiety was off the Richter scale and I wasn’t handling things well. I had moved back home to Kansas and was living in my grandmother’s rental house in a terrible neighborhood. I hated my job and myself for moving back to my hometown and basically failing at life.

14 years later, we still laugh about that photo and that moment. Now my mom tells me I should write a book because there are some things which could only happen to me. Once again, she’s not wrong. Writing a book about about my experiences seems a bit extreme but I have reached a distance sufficient for me to see them through a very humorous lens. It’s on the list.

Month: November 2018

Stone Cold Killa

Here…this is you.

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