The uniforms of Sin City and turf wars come in all forms

Turf Wars take all forms and the various uniforms of Sin City Denizens

May 28, 2012
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By Royal Hopper
What do you think when you see a woman wearing pink shoes, a multicolored striped skirt, short enough to draw looks from even the most righteous casino visitor, big red-orange sun glasses and ‘’’’ughhhh …..assets to make any girl envious????
I walked by the woman three times trying to figure out what team she played for and what her occupation was and you know I never did.
It’s part of the allure of the City of Sin. Things that would often what would stop traffic and attract undesired attention in more normal environs doesn’t always warrant a second glance here.
 

A family enjoys the shade on The Strip
For Instance there was this Girl ?????
Even in Vegas there are times its so quiet you can almost hear the crickets chirp or could if someone would turn down the medley of golden oldies playing on the PA.
(These days Golden Oldies means Led Zepplin, David Bowie and those 60s guys I only got to listen to on the juke box at old cafes  or on trips when my father was too distracted to change the radio station.”)
In one corner of the casino a slot player won a jackpot and waited patiently to be paid. She was immaculately groomed and dressed to kill. I don’t know if she was a pro but it was the decided opinion of several people on the scene that she wasn’t …a she that is. She, It seems, was a he in well tailored leather lined skirt,  crossing her/his clean shaven well muscled legs crossed daintily and he/she waited patiently.
The thing is no one was bothering her. She was left alone either because it was O dark thirty in the morning and the place was more than half empty or because this is Vegas and in Vegas you have to be more than different to be _  well different.
No one bothered her except for the guy who I saw hitting on her/him not half an hour after she was paid his/her jackpot.

 Perhaps the would be suitor did so not knowing his/her’s secret or perhaps precisely because of the secrets hidden under her/his well tailored skirt.
Later in the week you see three drop dead gorgeous girls dressed in leather skirts in the middle of the day walking in a group toward rooms on the far side of a hotel what is the first thing that comes to mind. Mormon choir group ? the cast of the leather Vegas version of Cats? On dress rehearsal …stockholders in the leather and hairspray? Members of the nice girls of America Drill team ????? Really sexy Nuns????
Your right there is only one conclusion. There were leather skirt models on their way to make a big sale in a Las Vegas hotel room in the middle of the day.
Lastly The Turf War of In Microcosm

Its not often you see a turf war break out right in front of your very eyes but I saw it happened this week in the city of Sin right in front of my handsome forest green peepers
The turf war, and the turf,  I’m talking about probably won’t make the news in the City of Sin.
It wasn’t a turf war between rival mobs of gangster which were supposedly chased out the City of Sin in the 80s by the FBI. (no really that’s what they said)
It wasn’t a turf war between rival casinos who always play by Marquis of Queensbury rules in the competition for the billions of dollars that comes through the city every year. (no seriously)
It wasn’t fought by men with nicknames based on body parts or snack cakes. There were no Louie the Noses or Joey Bag of ding dongs in this fight and no Steve Wynn’s either.
This turf war wasn’t over billions of dollars or control of the City of Sin streets.
It was over a corner of the sidewalk just large enough for a man to sit on where he will be noticed by the tourist as they pass by and lasted around ten seconds.
This turf war was between two men and enough money to buy a hotel room or a new hat and a couple of Pepsis.
One residentially challenged man, ( PC for a crazy looking homeless dude) who honestly looked rough even by residentially challenged standards of Sin City tried to sit down near where another younger or perhaps better cared for residentially challenged man was sitting.
Scary looking homeless guy clearly wanted a share of a lucrative panhandling corner and
was depending on his younger colleague’s empathy to accomplish it.
He got unceremoniously pushed down on the sidewalk for his effort. The victor went back to work and the victim stumbled down the sun baked sidewalks of Sin City  his defeat already forgotten in the struggle to survive or because he couldn’t remember the event 20 seconds after it happened.
Like in all cities in the City of Sin those more deadly, more powerful or perhaps simply more desperate have the advantage in conflicts of turf, pride and survival.  Still later in the week a shirtless panhandler stood near the same corner as a salesman peddling time shares or show tickets perhaps. The salesman was well dressed and taken care of and seemed to be slick and good at his job. People tried to avoid  him with far greater effort than they made avoiding the homeless panhandler. What does that say exactly ?

Here there is there is wealth and poverty, there is loyalty and abandonment. There is gritty uncaring honesty and flattering deception raised to an art. Here you will meet friends you didn’t know you had and adversaries you won‘t remember when you wake up in the wrong hotel room. There is the kindness of strangers and the chutzpah to sell you T-shirts they stole from you two days ago.
. Such is life in the city of Sin.
Til Next Week
Take Care
This week’s Jogger Report:
The latest fad in Sin City pedestrian travel seems to be backpacking down the Strip which makes about as much sense as streaking through a barbed wire factory. That’s right hordes of Bermuda shorts wearing, polo clad hikers cheap sunglasses and two dollar souvenir shop straw hats snd all walking down Las Vegas boulevard wearing backpacks that look big enough to carry days of supplies. Bicycles were sighted on the boulevard and while riding a bike on the Strip is not quite Brave Heart material it is certainly a bit dangerous to cross the street against the grain and ride down the middle of the street traveling where a red corvette driven by an all night drinker of free cocktails is screeching his brakes trying to stop before hitting the old lady crossing the street like one gentleman was seen doing  is not without elements of risk.
PS
This week 100,000 convenience store owners descended on the City of Sin’s famous main byway desperate perhaps to find someone who charges more than they do for indestructible hotdogs and yellow spongy snack cakes.

Don't tell the redneck he's an alien and the weekly jogger report

Don’t tell the redneck he’s an alien and the weekly jogger report | April 29, 2012

Sometimes the people who find themselves in the Hangover movie paradigm are real issue babies, problem children who probably deserve the scorn you are heaping on them as you read this and little of the envy you may feel when you think about it.

Just so there is no doubt
The Lifestyle
Like the one gentleman a few months ago who stumbled into a local hotel three days after the event he was supposed to be in left town and or the one who crawled into another person’s bed in the wrong hotel and few months after that.
Sometimes they are just ordinary people who found themselves in the one city where they won’t ( did you know wont and aint  are officially proper English now hmm) be judged any harsher than any other hedonist in a town full of them and got in over the heads.
Like the woman whose friends ditched her when he was stone drunk and left her not knowing where her room was, her purse was or the room key she was supposed to have was or the medicine or money she left in the purse was or why she slept in her car the entire night etc etc etc ….
A hint to all you coming to Vegas if you are going to ditch your friend in Vegas make sure they are dozing in the right room in the right bed with the right person  with all their stuff before you leave them its just the right thing to do. It is part of the hedonist code..I think …..
Also this week …..I consider myself to be a calm person not one prone to silly belligerence and quite frankly I am too freakin old to be busting knuckles for the sake of …well anything ….but there are times when it seems the right thing to do.
Arrrgggggggghhhhh
This week I had to tell a cab driver he couldn’t do something. I wont go into detail because its  a workplace policy but this is _ what happened. I had a cab drive up to someplace he wasn’t supposed to be and I had to tell him he couldn’t do,  something he most likely he wasn’t supposed to do.
First this idiot mumbles something I can’t understand and when I get tired of trying to figure out what he is trying to tell me with his Monte Python routine “nudge, nudge, wink wink..you know what I mean ,” no I really don’t dude you cant pick up or drop off here….
Then this genius says no dumb ass I mean …well those of you who understand what it means to work with such people will understand when I tell you I stopped listening right there and told him to move his ass more or less and when he continued to make veiled threats I said either get out of the cab or get out of the garage.
Jmore to the point he said something about “No speakie English,” or some red neck BS.
Just for the record in case I haven’t made it clear I am 50-year old white guy  from Texas with what is quite literally an Anglo Saxon surname. I was born in a town that might accurately be called a modern day Mayberry. You just don’t get any more white bread than me and my family.
I mean I’m so white when I was younger  Ronald Reagan once called me a honkie mo fo. You honkie mo fos are always trying to keep the out of touch middle aged white guy down…
No really  I never met Reagan but when I worked at that newspaper in Texas I once paid a young man musician to help me be cool and have soul.
He took one look at me handed me my money back and said man I cant cure the rain ( see colorful southerner vernacular.

           The new Las Vegas motto–photos by Royal
The point is if you are trying to do something you are not supposed to do and have to ask to do it don’t mumble and don’t tell the red neck security guard you think he is an illegal alien.
This weeks jogger report:
I have always been of the opinion that if you want to look at yourself in the mirror and admire what you see try your bedroom or someone else’s bedroom or the bathroom of whatever useless trendy restaurant you want to overpay for mashed potatoes in.
Jogging past the slightly reflective doors of an older Las Vegas casino staring at your image in the somewhat reflective length of glass at its Las Vegas Boulevard entrance is not cool and its kind of weird. Even if you are minor celebrity and if you happen to be just short of a heart attack stop jogging. There are no security guards on Las Vegas Boulevard to call an ambulance for you if you go unconscious and stop breathing. You are going to die as people fumble for their cell phones and take pictures of you for their facebook page.
Man up strange looking dude with clothes from an I love the 80s garage sale and tell your wife you have to stop jogging or your going to fall on the ground. Woman up chick with the Kurt Cobain ensemble jogging suit and tell your jock boyfriend with the crew cut and the triathlon T-shirt you cant breathe.
Get a clue drunk guy who clearly doesn’t recognize what city he is in. Pretending to jog because you realize you look weird walking around in a pair of someone else’s female jogging shorts and an unbuttoned $3,000 Armani shirt doesn’t really fool anybody here and more importantly no one here cares.
Just ask the guy who stood at the corner of Flamingo and Pecos in a huge straw hat, long sleeve ladies western wear button up embroidered shorts with pink trim and floppy sandals…..boring and yawn…
Such is life in the City of Sin
Til Next Week
Take Care

Shopping in the City of Sin

By Royal Hopper
Question how often do you pack up the family and head out for a day on the infamous Las Vegas strip, a day trip to the center of the City of Sin no less and end up shopping for an hour and a half ?
Answer your wife and daughter want to go shopping and manage to drag you along under threats of a chick flick marathons and long sessions of meaningful conversation about feelings, fashions and first times. ( babe remember the first time we….. insert meaningless chick obsessions like the first time we held hands or the first time we watched television or played monopoly arrrrggggghhhhh)



Is this really a problem ????
Themed Shopping in the City of SinLas Vegas is home to vast seas of immorality, Disney like adult ( an adult means exactly what you think it does) tourist traps, legendary debauchery, themed gambling halls larger than many towns, prostitutes, billion dollar bets ( not really) and non stop drinking.
It is also the home of the state’s largest Coca Cola store and an M & M emporium that comes complete with a free 3-D movie and two hyper active Mcs . M & M coffee cups, M&M baseball caps, M&M tops bottoms and so on and so on and so on and all the cheesy themed shopping stores you can possible imagine.
  It is a truly bizarre thing to see people who were likely gambling their rent money  and gazing at the cocktail waitress …assets hugging Coca Cola Polar bears, and stuffing  Coca Cola T-shirts, Coca Cola coffee cups, Coca Cola dog tags, key chains, newspapers and machines that make any kind  Coca Cola flavor made in the known world in Coca Cola shopping bags.
The M&M store was truly an interesting experience. The teenie bopper hosts looked and sounded a great deal like living M&Ms and most of the people shopping in the store were well into their 40s.



The Pill
Did you ever work with someone or have a customer that made you want to pick up a tire iron and cave their skull in simply by walking in the room or speaking for more than 20 seconds?  It would be a mercy killing you say to yourself as you chant your inner peace mantras and humm you favorite Ozzie song as a way of distracting yourself from what you know is a righteous desire to…I’m going off the rails of a ….see it’s working….
There is an old saying that stress is the mental conflict that occurs when the mind interferes with the bodies desire to strange the crap out someone who desperately deserves it and anyone who works with the public or works with the people who work with the public has to develop the skill of distracting yourself from this righteous rage.
The kind of people who for some reason seem to know your name even though for six months you even see them in the same Vegas casino on a regular basis you thought his name was bald angry fat guy.
This is the kind of person whose own family probably refers to them as the bald angry fat guy. “Were here to see so and so,” ( I still don’t remember his damn name)
I’m sorry I don’t know that person…You know the bald angry guy…” Oh him..I think he went home….
This week alone I can count at least three times when I had to tell a tourist something was closed or moved or they couldn’t park somewhere and had them ask ‘why did they do that???” I suppose referring the magical fairies who make all the decisions at to hotels in the City of Sin.
You want to say something like, “you know its all my fault. I knew you out of the millions of tourist who come to this city every year were coming here from Okawalaphodog and did all this just to piss you off. Or maybe …Dude I’m dressed in a polyester uniform that hasn’t been in style since disco was hot and new and lava lamps were cool how much do you think people who own this hotel tell me .


Las Vegas on the run. No not really I was just experimenting with the focus
                                                         Photos R.M. Hopper


The jogger report
This weeks jogger report. The number of people jogging down Las Vegas Boulevard increased by the inverse of ooh my freaking God how OCD do you have to be to travel hundreds maybe thousands of miles to the City of Sin to go jogging.
Not that I mind watching the better looking lady joggers and you can always tell the real runners from the fakers like me who look at old pictures of themselves in military uniforms and forget that it isn’t 1986 and hasn’t been for a long time.
The real runners have thick well muscled legs and actually look good in running shorts. The fakers among us will pretend to run for a couple of blocks get that to hell with this look and then pretend they were actually just trying to catch the bus or beat the light crossing the street and just didn’t make it. I swear I saw one guy holding a soda and running suddenly cut across the intersection so he could pretend that’s what he wanted to do all along and he wasn’t jogging down a deserted Vegas road in the wee hours of the morning and ran out of gas.
Also in the City of Sin a lonely plastic mini bottle of Vodka was spotted sitting on the window sill where it was deposited the night before a lonely metaphor for this city, the city of Sin. Like Sin City this tiny bottle of booze is cheap, cheesy potent and powerful, brightly colored and difficult to ignore but in the end all about the fun and payment and regretting tomorrow…. tomorrow …..
Such is Life in the City of Sin
Til Next week
Take care

A week in the burbs and drunken confusion returns to Sin City

I took a few days off this week and fled to suburbs to visit ( as we say in the south) with my mother who was in town and to drink coffee and watch sci fi and Gothic reruns (sue me Im a nerd…”



A dusty portion of my dragon statue collection
absolute proof Royal is a Nerd..Photo by Royal

Even in the suburbs there are people who talk to themselves like the gentleman I saw walking down a suburban Las Vegas area street shouting something about “old White people…” being about white as you can get and having just turned 50-years-of-age needless to say I left that particular dangerous looking gentleman be.
I discovered in my brief isolation in my suburban sanctuary that now and then tourist and denizens of the City of Sin do find their way out to the burbs where they look even more lost than they do in the confines of Sin City.
“Where are the naked people and the occasional drunk laying on the sidewalk and the two for one cheap drink specials, the people in strange costumes, the hookers who call themselves private dancers, ( when I was younger and better looking they always wanted to tell me their life stories go figure)  the hordes of clueless picture taking tourist and the hustlers trying to sell them tickets they can get for free two blocks down the road”
Then you tell them that that this is the suburbs and there are no such things here and they run screaming down the street.
 “The suburbs that bastard dropped me in the wrong place, the suburbs…ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh……”
 My mother who is 69 this year bought me a tank of gas and my wife and I took the opportunity to go power walking aright the pain…all nerds and geeks everywhere send me your energy to preserve my sanity.
A week in the burbs makes you appreciate the great things about living in Sin City like all the great intellects you meet.
The 20-year-old trust fund brats who get angry because you allowed them to hire an escort named after a forest animal or tasty desert or seasoning ( Candy, Bambi, or Jasmine Lotus) from an ad in a flyer handed out by people from Seattle with green hair who haven’t bathed in days and then allowed them to get rolled by self same prostitutes after they have been charged $400 for a bottle of apple juice that is drugged.
In the good old days it was common for taxi drivers to drop naïve tourist at bars colloquially called clip joints where tourist would be seduced into buying $1,200 bottles of champagne that was actually grape juice and end up being dumped unceremoniously at their hotel doorway without getting lucky or even truly drunk.
Good things like people shout “Vegas,” in creepy sounding tones while stumbling down the street in a drunken stupor as many this week seemed prone to do. People who live here don’t shout Vegas it is just too silly.
Thegenius’ that will scream loser at random strangers who have different haircuts than they do or get drunk and make passes at other guys dressed in latex naked lady costumes.
This actually happened in the mid 90s at Treasure Island hotel casino.
  Good things like the lady who asked “Do you know where I can get some groceries?” “There are groceries stores down the street and several convenience stores on the strip,” I answered if memory serves. “You have stores here???” she said. “Yeah and schools and gas stations too,” I said as politely as I could manage. “Wow,” was the answer I got in return.
In the suburbs you get dog parks, dog park etiquette, teen age drivers, 24 hour fast food as opposed to 24 hour gambling and lots and lots of TV.


A photo of a Pinball hall of fame---sue me I was in the burbs most of the week


Today I went back to work and in the first hour we found two men lying drunk on the floor one at the bottom of an escalator, a drunken domestic argument where a guest wanted to kick the woman who was sleeping with his roommate and maybe his girlfriend too. Good things like the man passed out drunk in the seat of a slot machine with his hand on the handle and his head in his own lap and the gentleman counting a large wads of $100 bills on the table top by the security booth looking around and occasionally over his shoulder smelling of alcohol and newly purchased $500 T-shirts
A man discovered on the floor at the bottom of the escalator asked if he fell down the escalator said “escalator????” and a half empty whiskey bottle shattered into large dangerous pieces in a high traffic area eight feet from a trash can.
                                                                                      

You just gotta love this city
After all such is life in the City of Sin again
Til Next Week
Take Care

Shaggy haired dye job and Starchild embraces the wind

This weeks jogger report….
I swear I saw a jogger running with a cup of coffee in his hand. Maybe it was water but it sure looked like coffee. Now that’s a feine head (caffeine lover)
Anyone so determined to have that first drink of caffeine laden coffee in his hand when he is ready that he brings it with him on the morning jog is a dedicated feine head. Sin City might run on ego, alcohol and hormones but it survives the morning on coffee, old music and bad lighting.



“Do you want another card sir?…Sir do you want another card?”   “One minute,” might be the response as he takes a huge gulp of coffee looks at the woman beside him and asks “who are you???”  No not really..well sort of …
This week in the city of Sin I discovered long shaggy dye jobs are not just for chicks anymore. I saw a young man with a really attractive woman  on his arm and bright blue dyed hair walking across a local casino. For a moment I thought he was a giant life sized blue haired Cupie troll doll or a well dressed Anime character.

Self explanatory ---Photo R.M. Hopper





I think he was Canadian or a mutant same thing really. Canadians are always trying to swim when locals consider it freezing cold and passing out from heat exhaustion on pleasant 100 degree Southern Nevada summer days.
You see a lot of working girls here in Las Vegas, and no I don’t mean working girls, I mean working girls. After awhile you can spot some of them. They dress differently and know how to walk down a busy city street in six inch heels without tripping and falling on their ass, no mean feat.
Pun intended….. One morning, very early in the morning, I saw a woman dressed in a striped form fitting disco evening gown with wild frizzed hair, that was a little flat in the back if you get my drift.
It could be she was a rabid Tina Turner fan rocking that retro look at 6:00 a.m. or a business woman with shockingly bad taste in clothes and make up getting her groove back  but probably not. She was stumbling a little as she walked and I can only guess that she had a busy night.
Silliest crimes of the week. Someone at a local casino risked the wrath of the Buddha by trying to take pennies from a small shrine of the same sitting on  a table near a group Asian themed table games and one woman bummed a cigarette from a tourist and then quizzed the poor man on his life, saying she wanted to get to know him.
                                                                           http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=troll+dolls
                                                                                          


They both smoked after all and had so much in common.
This tourist who I will call Starchild after my late mother-in-law a genuine Starchild for the New Age who will be very much missed, later stood facing the sharp, gusting winter wind blowing that day, spreading her arms wide holding her open palms to the wind and closing her eyes as if to truly feel the wind and embrace it like a loved one.
I have one thing to say about that. “Rock on Starchild,”  If makes you feel, if it helps you deal, if it sees you through the day, don’t change, or sway . If that’s the weirdest thing you do in this city of sin, your not all that weird no way…..
Such is Life in the City of Sin
Til next Week
Take Care

PS I just heard that Nevada is the first state to approve self driving cars. Scary thing

Old people wandering the city of sin

By Royal Hopper

When was the last time you saw a golfer walking across a Las Vegas swimming pool  in the wee hours of the morning with a look of red eyed hung over determination guarding his precious clubs like a mother bear guarding her cubs.
It’s not all that uncommon here in the city if sin when there is a convention of Scottish cow pasture pool enthusiasts in town. The one fellow I spied appeared to have just checked into the hotel and the only luggage he did not check were the tools of his beloved pass time.
My father was a Golf enthusiast. He even managed a couple of courses when I was young and although my father assures me Golf is a sport, the sports editors of the Orange Leader, the newspaper where I worked for five years, say it is either a pass time or a secret cult on line with the Illuminati, Pyramid Society and the League of Women Voters. (This is Texas keep in mind)
Tall tales in Sin City
One morning I met an older woman who was roaming around the hotel pool. She was 80 at least and had obviously had led a life that was not exactly easy. She said her name was Anita. Anita is German. When she around 10-years old , she and what remained of her family,  found themselves in the Russian sector of a occupied Germany surrounded by Russians who hated them and she says herded them into “camps” in other countries for awhile.
It is a story of hand to mouth existence and of friendly small town folks who helped them have enough  to eat.
The story has faded in memory but she says her family was rescued by what she calls American Daredevils who refused to believe what Soviet officials told them. Because the clear lines of the cold war had not yet materialized and the barbed wire barriers and border guards that would later characterized cold war border tensions were still ten tense years away Anita and her family were saved, rescued from the Russian controlled sector and brought to the west.
As a adult she made her way to Canada where she now lives and  spends part of her Golden Years vacationing in the city of sin and telling bored security guards about her family’s life story.
A quick Google search with the words she gave Glatz the Vertreibung reveals there was a great flight of German settlers from Poland after the war and the Russians did control the eastern sector of her homeland and Poland half of which they conquered in agreement with Adolf Hitler. Life was indeed rough for Germans in the early years after the war the articles say. However I did notice that the last name she gave me, Lasko, was the same as the heater that was sitting next to me. Perhaps she just didn’t really want to be bothered. Perhaps the old memories were just a little to strong  or perhaps she was just eager to flag down the  Mickey Mouse look alike that spent part of the day walking down “The Strip” posing for pictures with eager camera toting tourists.
 Passing out on the sidewalk
This week was a lot like the last week in the City of Sin it was weird. Sunday as the shift started at one local casino a man was discovered passed out on Strip sidewalk. Apparently he and Jack Daniels decided this is far enough and laid down on the side walk to sleep.
This was just to cool to leave out a junction between two towers at one of Sin City's Landmark                           properties---Photo R.M Hopper                                                                                                               

Odd CouplesLater that day I saw a mother and son standing together.
The son was about ten or twelve maybe thirteen years of age. He had a huge green Mohawk with six inch spikes and Mom for her part seemed fine with it. They were actually a cute couple and I wanted to  snap a picture pf them but by the time I secretly fished my cell phone out of my pocket and turned the camera on they had moved on.
I also noticed that the 70s seemed to be coming back with a vengeance. The same tight fitting fashionable knee length leather coats with the sashes and the dark sun glasses and long straight 70s style hair and boots with high heels that independent women, including a lot of my mothers friends wore in the decade of neon earth tone appliances, bell bottoms Brady Bunch lunch boxes and is officially back in style.
I wonder if my mother still has any of my old bell bottoms.  I could break out the leisure suits and the disco lights or maybe find my old tie dyed Led Zeppelin  T-shirt or Alice Cooper concert tickets.
“You know I was such a boring kid that my parents actually drove me to see “Alice” at the civic center alone and left me there without concern. I hesitated as I got out of the car waiting for the lecture that never came. I actually think I wanted them to lecture me worriedly about the dangers of  smoking weed at the concert.
“We’re not worried our wonderful boring child, you‘ll have a small coke and a bag of peanuts and sit in the back?” their smiles seemed to say and I even moped a bit as they drove away unconcerned…Sigh
Incidentally what does blurble la gundago zonta…mean???  Is it some kind of Stars Wars lingo.
I had a Sin City visitor express those very words to me with great conviction and although I had no idea what he said to me I pointed toward a nearby elevator and said “up there I think.”
It seemed to satisfy his curiosity but he was far to “tired” walk to the elevator. 
 Such is Life in the City of Sin '
Til next week
 take care

We honor what we know or the fences we create and cats who think they are dogs

When I was a kid my family had this cat, a crazy old Siamese feline who was convinced she was a dog.


She was so convinced she was a dog she learned to bark and chase cars with the two family dogs.

When these two muttly brown and white canines, charged the fence of the gray tiled house to bark at strangers as they passed, the cat would charge along with them meowing for all she was worth. I think she even tried to catch a frisby once and this was 1965 or so when the frisbies were much larger.

Now keep in mind, that unless they are literally selaed in somehow, it is fairly easy for a cat to escape the average house and/or fenced yard and several times she would do so standing outside the fence to meow her displeasure at the passersby in a very canine like manner.

Eventually, when it was clear that her "fellow canines" could not make it across that chain link barrier as easily as she could and after being stared at and ignored or laughed at by the passersby she would give up and retreat into the safety of her fenced in dog yard where her dogness would be accepted. She even peed on a fence post one time, lifting her leg in such a dog like manner that for a minute I actually began to believe she was indeed a short, pointed eared, black faced dog with retractable claws rather than a mentally ill and deluded feline.

Fast foward more than 40 years to one of my family's current dogs Reddy, a cute 50 pound ball of red short haired energy.



She is part boxer, part hound and a bright ball of nerves and urine and teeth. She was kept in a kennel the first part of her life because she peed every time she became the slightest bit excited which was often and chewed on everything.

When first released from her kennel first she walked in and out of its open door several times and sat down and turned to look at the door waiting for it to be closed for the night so she could go to sleep.



After a while we removed the kennel all together and without her box to hide in she huddled next to my wife and I often squeezing in between us to get that same comfortable feel of being closed in.

Our other dog, Spazz, was raised as an outside dog and spent his early years chasing other dogs away from the two acre lot we owned at the time. Because of that experience he simply cannot stand the sight or smell of any other canine anywhere near his two acres of land which is unfortunate since we now live in a 900 square foot apartment surrounded by other people and their dogs with equal determination to protect their plot of land.

We constantly have to pull him away from other dogs so his angry old butt will not get in a fight with some neighbir's innocent cocker spaniel. He is also quite honestly getting to long in the tooth to be be scrapping with the Pit Bulls and Great Danes that populate the complex where we live and is to stubborn to change.

The point of all this rambling is a discovery I have made about fences. Not the white picket fence kind or the silver gray cyclone kind or even the nice upper class brick and stone kind. Its the kind we build in our childhoods to protect us from harm and the kind we end up carrying around with us the rest of our lives, hanging around our necks like some kind of ghostly psychic albatross.

In that process the very thing that protects us fences us in, later becoming so familiar that it becomes almost a mental security blanket tattooed into our minds with indelible psychic ink in ways that little, short of some kind of space alien mind wipe, can change.

After awhile because of the security this fence has provided us the security blanket becomes what we love. After all one of the reasons we love our parents is the security, both physical and emotional, they provide us.



Given time what we love becomes what we love the most. Thusly in this Herculean tragedy of the mind and heart, the thing that hems us in, that limits us in sometimes tragic ways becomes, against all logic and sense of self preservation and sanity, the thing we love the most. It also becomes something we hold onto with all our might because we simply cannot bear to let go of the security blanket that has served us so well through the years.

I don't remember what became of the cat exactly but years later there was a rumor circulated among my pack of siblings and I that the cat had tried chasing cars once to often and was finally done in by her canine ways.