Holy crap I miss my office. Usually while at work I can pretend that I am researching something important and knock out a few paragraphs in no time. With all the kid wrangling and in-law Olympics going on this holiday week, I find myself two days late and a column short. Right about now, the only thing I am thankful for is the fact that I get to go back to work on Monday. It’s too early in my career at the WVSR to pull these kinds of shenanigans, but at this point, I have little choice – you’re getting a hodgepodge. Sorry - it shouldn’t happen again for at least a couple of weeks.

I’ve been married to my lovely wife for just about four years now. Everything is going pretty well. We seem to have each other figured out and are on the road to developing the “routine” that all long-hitched couples enjoy. At this rate, we will be wearing Depends, going on bus tours to Nashville and complaining about everything and everyone in no time. Like every relationship, there are a few problems. Lucky for you, I’m not going to bore you with details about the toilet seat and the fact that whenever I can’t find something, it’s likely been thrown away by the aforementioned lovely wife.

I will, however, share the details with you about her parent’s house and the flatulence that comes with it. The fact is, just being inside her parent’s residence gives me enough gas to get to West Virginia…and back. I used to think that it was a side-effect of the nervousness caused by my desire to impress them enough that they didn’t have to worry about me reducing their intelligent and attractive daughter into my personal crack-whore. After a couple of years, I had developed enough of a rapport with her parents that I knew their crack-whore concerns had long subsided. They still think I am a dick – but the necessary lines have been drawn and they know that I love their daughter. Enough of that sap.

The point is that we are now long married and I haven’t any reason to fear them, and yet I still get cramped up like a bloated donkey every time I set foot into their home. It begins even before I eat her mother’s cooking or drink the water or anything. I have tried all manner of medication available for this affliction, to no avail. There is abso-fucking-lutely no explanation at all for the phenomenon. I’m sure they think I am sneaking a smoke or something when I quietly slink out the back door (being especially careful not to let my feet spread too far apart for fear of dropping a bomb in the kitchen of my children’s grandmother). In reality, I have reached the point that if I don’t at least briefly release some of the stored vapor; I will explode all over my mother-in-law’s famous macaroni salad. It boggles the mind.

In other news, I was barely able to avoid being on the news a couple of days ago.

Some guy went out and bagged himself a couple of deer. He then proceeded to hang them from a tree on his property. The next step is to split them open from throat to tail and bleed them out for a day or so. It’s all pretty standard.

Other people become involved when the man decides to hang the deer in his front yard…a block south of an elementary school. I become involved when a slew of soccer moms trying to walk their children to school in the morning happen across said deer and call the city in a fit of ignorant rage and disgust. The news becomes involved when I tell ignorant, raging and disgusted soccer moms that neither the man, nor the deer, is doing anything illegal.

In short, if I end up on the news, shit has gone wrong. So I go to the guy’s house and talk to a giant, jolly man who was holding a butcher knife and covered in blood. I tell him he’s not doing anything illegal, and asked if he could please move the deer to the back yard. He laughed and said that where he comes from, people would make fun of him if he didn’t have a couple of deer hanging in the yard this time of year.

He said that he was about to take them down anyway and thanked me for stopping by, laughing at my dumb-ass job throughout our visit. The deer came down before the cameras got there and I wasn’t on the news.

I wonder how Buck would have handled the situation…What would Buck do?

Sorry again for the hodgepodge. Talk to you next week.

Love, JRM

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