The Ratty Rambling Man

I have been sick, but not as sick as my wife who has had a fever and been mostly confined to extremely comfortable beds for a couple of days. I feel like today I am recovering and that was nice while sitting by the bayou with my dog.

I've talked before of the oddness of when I notice where I am and how I got to be there, and that oddness wandered through my spacious mind while sitting on a tree log amongst vibrant spring greenery, with my wolf, by a bayou under a near tropical sun listening to reggae.

I took the feeling of oddness and used it to examine myself, and today the examination consisted of the material possessions that I had. I reviewed them one by one and I shall do so again for you here, with the chance that it may reveal something about me.

On my feet were a pair of Teva sandals purchased within the last year from REI in Houston. A replacement for the last pair of sandals that were casually destroyed by the wolf this year. They consist of a rubber sole strapped securely to my feet with simple velcro straps. These are the newest and most expensive items of clothing I am wearing.

I am wearing a faded, off-white pair of carpenters pants purchased at Target three years ago for $15. They have a pleasantly thick, rugged material. They are deliberately purchased too long so that I roll up the bottoms. I do this because I like the way that they hang with this concentration of eight at the bottom.

My underwear is just a year old, also purchased at Target in a pack of three boxers for twelve dollars. Comfortable, thick, machine-woven cotton.

I have a black T-shirt which was a going away gift from The World Famous Kenton Club, the local bar I would frequent in Portland. The slogan on it is "Booze, Music, Regrets" and I have drunk a lot of booze in there, heard large amounts of wonderful music there, and player some myself. If I have a regret about the place it is that I can't go there this evening, I wonder if it is still bluegrass on Mondays.

The final piece of clothing is a Gap sweatshirt, modeled on the old wild west underwear, given to me by an old girlfriend just over a decade ago. The cuffs are frayed, there's a small hole or two, and something is encrusted over the selling of my belly. It is a navy blue. I think it was purchased to make me look more cool and smart than as my wont at the time. The process of time has turned this item into a statement of my particular style.

In my pockets are a set of keys, with two house keys for two different houses, two car keys for two different cars, a bicycle lock and a drum key for tuning drums, unused in years. There's an ostrich leather wallet purchased in Mexico. Two plastic shopping bags for disposing of dog poo and a barely used leash for the wolf.

Clipped to the belt loops of the carpenter pants is a tiny MP3 player with several hundred songs on it, mostly reggae, irish folk and rock. The headphones have a dodgy cord which has to be wound around the MP3 player in a particular manner in order to make both earpieces work. The headphones were scavenged from my wife after previous cheap headphones had perished, and this cobbled together job has lasted me for three months so far as I keep forgetting to replace something that hasn't yet quite failed. I think this MP3 player might be the most wonderful thing I have ever possessed. It contains the best musicians of the last forty years in marvelous quality and yet is almost weightless, almost physically unnoticeable, as if this music simply pours into my head whenever and wherever I am.