That was what popped into my head as I was driving home-I was wondering how that was going with your book! Glad to hear your progress-
The weight loss thing is kind of fun, since I am not really working at it, it is new meds and just not moving around as much. I guess it is muscle mass going away, but...I do enjoy fitting into clothes.
I have less, er...butt now though, which makes me have to cinch my belt down tighter, and I had a funny experience earlier in the summer. We were having rabbits out the kazoo, and they were destroying my wife’s garden, so I told her I would trap the rabbits and get rid of them. (I am in a neighborhood, so I don’t have the option of picking them off)
I get the trap set, and one night, as I am sleeping with my windows open, I am having dreams of skunks. I woke to my wife whispering “Wake up! I think there’s a skunk in the trap!”
Sure enough, in my groggy state, I peered out the window at the trap and could see black and white in it. It was about 5 AM and just barely light, and I thought if I could release it quickly, I might be able to sleep another hour before I had to get up for work. So I grabbed a pair of pants, pulled them on commando-style if you get my drift, put on a t-shirt and shoes, and still completely befuddled by sleep, shuffled out to the backyard to release the skunk.
Now, this was a first for me. Never had to release a skunk, but I had talked with my boss about it and he said it was safe as long as you held a sheet or beach towel in front of you as you walked calmly and slowly towards the skunk, then you could gently cover the cage with it and release it.
This all sounded reasonable when you were in an office with fluorescent lights discussing it before lunch, but at 5 AM with a real, smelly skunk in your trap...well, I was a little nervous. But he had sounded confident, so I thought it should be just as he said. I walked slowly towards the skunk, which stopped moving as I approached. I knew this, because the tinkling sound of rustling inside the cage trap suddenly stopped, and the silence seemed...well...ominous to me! But on I went.
I reached the trap, and bending over, very gently laid the towel over the top. So far so good.
Unfortunately, as I bent and opened the other end of the trap to allow the skunk to run out, my pants started to slip down. I had grabbed a baggy pair of pants that really didn’t fit, and didn’t take the time to put on a belt. So just as the skunk exited the trap, my pants started to go, and it was a full moon starting to rise. I desperately cinched my elbow to my side, and looked up to see my wife’s grinning face in the window looking out at me.
I suddenly had this instantaneous vision of me, getting my fifteen minutes of Internet Fame from a viral YouTube video posting by my wife from her phone.
In this video, here I am with my pants falling completely to the ground as the skunk exits the trap. It stops, and gives me a spray right in my face before waddling off. Me, with my naked chalk-white butt completely exposed, blinded by skunk spray, groping around and gasping before tripping over the empty trap and falling to the ground.
All this went through my mind in a flash, and to my relief, my pants didn’t go down, the skunk didn’t pause, and my wife didn’t have a phone recording the whole thing! But she was grinning as she saw me struggling to keep my pants up!
I am a touch nervous about my book - it is meant to be an inside view of being a Marine in the '60s/what Vietnam was like for us and combat and being in the "river of wounded". It will likely not make me popular with the "Vietnam was an illegal, immoral war" crowd or the "poor me" crowd either.
I suspect that it won't elevate my status in the Officer's Clubs either, since this view of enlisted life is considered to be beneath my former rank - but what the heck, right? It's meant to be a marker in that time in history and maybe an antidote to the false histories that populate our books and movies about our war.
Anyway, it should be a fun read.