Howdy my fine summery friends,

I'm kind of beat up and battered and I'm embarrassed to say that it's only from doing heavy yard work all day. Just yesterday I was walking with my friend, Brian, and we were talking about how our bodies cannot take the constant pounding that we used to submit to when we were both runners. I still run now and then, but I'm more a brisk hiker these days. I said, "can you imagine what would happen to our joints and bones and tendons if we played just half an hour of football these days?" He just winced and sucked wind through closed teeth. My sediments, bezactly.

What I'm sore from is from climbing into bushes with one of those hand-powered hedge trimmers. No electric, gas-powered, automatic trimmer for me, podnas, I'm all about making that scissor motion with my arms thousands and thousands of times, snapping those long blades closed and opening them way up for bite after bite until my arms fall off.

What happened is that the jungle kind of snuck up on me these last couple of years. I live in Seattle and it rains here. Then the sun comes out in June and grass grows a foot a day. Blackberry bushes grow a foot a minute - as does St. John's Wort, which is plentiful all around my front yard. In fact it had gradually swallowed all other plants, bushes and flowers. Why I did not notice this for such a time is a mystery. Perhaps it would never have happened had I not gotten to looking closely at my front yard and thinking to myself, "Shay thare, ain't this front yard considerably smaller than when ye moved in, ol' fren?" (that's really how I think - in countrified dialect. I dream however, in pure King's English - Say, my good fellow, is not yon garden encroaching fast upon fine cottage?)

Anyway, I started recalling things I used to do in my front yard that seemed impossible at it's current size. For instance, I once set up a long jump pit and would dash forty yards and leap like a gazelle for the entertainment of passersby. Impossible now. At best, I could do maybe one and a half hops-skips-and-jumps. I remembered the time some friends and I played polo here. The field was not full size, of course. And obviously, we had no horses, so we played in smallish cars; two VW Rabbits and a Lincoln Towncar cut in half. No way we could do that now. And so I went on and on with the reveries, recalling the most bizarre events, things that had not occurred to me since way back about the time of the salad bar accident. Oh! Have I never mentioned my salad bar accident? Well, I'm not sure this is the place to do so, I like to keep my website ramblings proper and to the point. But if you insist, I guess I have no choice but to tell you the good parts at least.
 

It was in the late 1970s and I was at the Big Texan Steakhouse in Amarillo, Texas. Which is where I grew up. Not in the Steakhouse, but in Amarillo. If you've never been to Amarillo, here is how you can experience it no matter where you are: find yourself a bucket of dry dirt. Shovel it out onto the kitchen table in lumpy hills. Now, sit about three feet from it with your face just at table level. Your friend on the other side of the table will now approximate Life in Amarillo by turning on one dozen high powered electric fans, blowing dirt, clods and grit into your face, hair and teeth at ferocious velocity. Welcome to Amarillo, birthplace of Mike Tomlinson, eventual folkslinger.

Oh yes, I was going to tell you about the salad bar accident. It hurts to even think about it so I'm going to make this brief. See, The Big Texan sits right there off the shoulder of Interstate 40, a giant model of a cowboy nodding to you from miles away. As you approach you will see signs advertising a free dinner if you can eat the 72 ounce steak and "all the trimmin's". Which, as you might imagine, are dizzying in quantity, a clump o' mashed potatoes the size of a couch pillow and more greasy hush puppies than you'd need to shoe a police force. (if they all dressed like Mister Rogers) Now, I began to live the vegetarian lifestyle way back in the vicinity of 1978 (the year I was born) and so a steak of any size was not for me, certainly, a 72 oz. steak was way beyond the pale. And besides, I was sick and tired of being treated like an alien from another planet just because I drank carrot juice, occasionally fasted for a week and did not eat meat. It was nearly impossible to find a restaurant in Amarillo in those days that could provide a meal for someone who didn't eat cows. I'd had it, so I walked up to the Big Texan manager and demanded that there be a free meal opportunity for a person such as myself, who did not like eating mammals of any type. To my utter amazement, he grinned and said, "Sure podna, (everyone is a podna in Texas) we can pro-rate the salad bar. You'll have to eat a bit more since vegetables is mostly water, but if you can eat six pounds o' salad - with a side o' bread and butter and a slice o' pecan pie - you can walk outa here free as a bird." This truly astounded me. I was used to being looked at like an idiot when I'd drive up to Whataburger and order a cheese burger with everything on it but the meat. To think that the Big Texan Steakhouse manager was going to cater to my special dietary needs was delightful, indeed. First, I took a good look at the salad bar. Heck, I liked almost everything on it but the hominy. I could work around that. "Do I have to eat some of everything or does it just have to weigh six pounds, no matter what I choose?" "Son, if you want to eat six pounds worth of iceberg lettuce or shredded carrots, God Bless ye. Have at it." He handed me a plate so cold that my fingers stuck to it and I had to use the edge of the table to pop it off my palms. Yeoowww! Was that a trick, I wondered? Was cold food harder to get down? I quickly forgot about that and started filling my plate. A waitress appeared at the table with a small scale and said, "We hafta weigh it first. We hafta weigh each serving before ya eat it." I said, "Why don't you just weigh me now and then weigh me after, instead of weighing each plate I eat?" "Oh," she said, "I guess we could but we just have this little scale and I think you weigh more than ten pounds." I had piled my plate sky high but after she took off the half-pound the heavy platter weighed, I only had 13 oz. of salad there. Damn. That was a tall pile of salad. I did a quick mental calculation and realized that I'd have to eat almost 7 1/2 servings like that. Oh well. I just started shoveling. Too late, I realized that I hadn't put any dressing atop it and since I'd already weighed and started eating it, they wouldn't let me add the dressing. That was some awfully dry iceberg lettuce. The carrots must have been lying out for days because they had more the consistency of wood shavings. Thankfully, there were cherry tomatoes, which I normally love, but these were so mushy they squished around all slimy in my mouth and I never could get a good molar on one. Eventually, I just had to swallow them whole. Well, this went on for some time, as you can imagine. My friends had long since finished their burgers and fries and were off playing pinball. I'd pictured it going very differently. Well, let me take that back. I hadn't pictured this at all. All I'd originally been doing was standing up for my rights as a vegetarian and I had no earthly idea it was actually going to get me into a salad eating contest.

By my fourth plate, which, though mountain high, weighed only 11 oz., I was growing despondent and shockingly full. My fullness was of the unpleasant variety you feel thirty minutes after a massive Thanksgiving feast. Not horrible, but if you hadn't thought to wear sweat pants you'd surely be moving four or five holes out on your belt strap. So what I'm saying is, half way through this ordeal I felt like a man who had eaten two turkey legs, three mounds of stuffing, a big hill o' mashed potatoes, three buttery dinner rolls, several spoons of cranberry sauce, a bowl of green beans, two pieces of pie and a slice o' banana cake. That's how I felt exactly, with approximately four more plates of salad to go.

It is about now that I feel I must tell you the part of the story that makes me look like a complete idiot. And I'm telling it in precisely the order that it all occurred to me. Now, if you didn't eat the full 72 oz. steak and trimmin's, you had to pay for it. That was widely posted and well known. Back in those days, it was $29.95. I could eat out of a farmer's market for two weeks on that kind of money. But what was not posted anywhere in the establishment - because I may have been the one and only vegetarian who ever wandered into the Big Texan Steakhouse demanding equal rights - was the price a person would pay if they did not indeed finish six full, robust pounds of salad from the Big Texan Salad Bar. Staring at my fourth dreadful plate of woody carrots and mushy tomatoes, this seemed to be a factor now. I didn't have much money. I never had much money. How I'd gotten myself into such a situation was, pure and simple, an example of what happens when a young man's ego runs amok and he gets just what he's begging for.

I was afraid to ask the price of failure so I dove back into my meal with renewed determination. I finished plate four and made a swirling motion with my right forefinger, telling the girl to keep 'em comin'. She appeared with another towering plate of inferior plant matter and weighed it right there at the table. Alright! That's more like it! This one weighed in a 17 1/2 ounces. I wondered how she got it all so compact until I got about two bites down into it and my fork hit a quarter of a raw potato. I looked up in shock. "Really? A potato?"

She grinned and shrugged. No reply at all. What the hell, I thought, it's heavy and it'll get the job done. I gnawed on that potato and managed to get it wedged between two mushy tomatoes and it slid right down my gullet. Hey! I'd discovered a method that just might make it possible for me to walk out of there with all my money. I'd needed water several times to get a wad of plant matter down my throat but the weight of the water did not count in my six pound total, they said, so I went without and just tried to force it down.

My pooch (not a vegetarian) likes to hitch hike.

Now you can force feed a baby, I hear. Though I don't know if that's politically correct anymore. And I know for sure that you can force feed a friend who has smoked too much pot and can't stop eating Ding Dongs. (man, I miss those days) But it is incredibly difficult to force feed yourself. The thing is, you know it's coming; the hard fist full of broccoli and green beans is hard to miss when it's your own. You have good intentions, you know you must get this done and do it pronto, but then you see your hand coming hard at your face and all set to do some serious stuffin' a pillow maker would be proud of, you tend to tighten up your throat muscles. That's what I did. Right there in the restaurant I must have looked like someone with two personalities. The one of me was trying to muscle some humomgous forks full of shrubbery down my throat and the other of me was grittin' teeth with veins popping out all over my forehead and neck. It must have been somethin' to see, because soon there was a crowd gathered around me, cheering, hollering out Hallelujah! and Geronimo! and Remember the Alamo! and shit like that and there I was clutched in mortal combat with myself: the me that feared what would happen if a check was brought to the table and the me that feared what would happen if my stomach burst open like ripped britches.

The rest of the story I have to relate from hearsay, as I was not fully conscious. Apparently, there was no rule saying who had to man the fork. The crowd had roused my friends from Pac Man or whatever thing they were playing and my buddy Carl, seeing that I was only half a plate from glory, gathered up all the lettuce, potatoes, beans, mushy tomatoes left on my plate into his big farm boy paws and, much in the way one might force a tire onto a car rim in the days when a man did that sort of thing, he wedged that wad into my pie hole, packed it down with his elbow, then pinched my lips with his strong fingers long enough for them to declare me successful. They say the Big Texan did their best bar business ever on that day. Bets had been flying right and left all during my last frenzied couple o' platefuls, and the winners spent their fortunes on buying drinks for everybody. I of course, wasn't in the mood for alcohol but my friends were. So I believe they left me in the pickup bed while they enjoyed a few triumphant drinks and basked in the golden glory of what I had accomplished. I think I'm still famous there, but I've never gone back to see.