Dan and a bunch of folks camp every year at Hither Hills. I always have an excuse. Dean's girlfriend says her family used to camp all the time. When she was really young, a watersnake slithered into their area. Her dad was also young, and didn't know what to do, so decided he had to protect his family and kill the snake, by pinning it with a forked stick and chopping off its head. But he was also a hippie, which somehow meant that he also had to skin the snake. Except the snake was pregnant, and skinning it exposed a gut full of babies. Her dad released the babies into the water.
My dad once mistook an escaped gerbil for a rat. He wasn't wearing his glasses, and we did have rat problems (old house, messy neighbor), and so as it ran across his foot while he sat on the john naked, he just thought, damn, that's a rat. He killed it with a cane my mom had been using after a back injury, then had to buy a replacement when he looked in my brother's gerbil cage and saw two where there had been three. But the pet store gave him a female instead of a male, so soon there were a dozen where there had been two -- hilarious, because before some kid left them with us for what he thought was the weekend (his family didn't tell him they were moving away forever), there were approximately zero.
I also met a guy from India last night. Good guy. Lives in Jersey, commutes into NYC. He grew up wealthy, so when he first came to America, he wanted to experience the menial work he'd never had to do. Someone convinced him Oklahoma was just like Mumbai. He went there and for three months worked in a convenience mart next to a strip club. He laid on a thicker Indian accent than his real one when giving the strippers free cigarettes (“Just for you, lovely”), and says this actually worked. It makes me want to go to Mumbai.
Even Thomas admitted that Thai/Vietnamese coffee & vodka is delicious.
