Dart

I don’t believe in weather, but many who do were talking yesterday about a vicious windstorm tearing its way through my part of town, felling trees, taking out power lines, just generally causing all kinds of havoc. Coincidentally, as I drove home from work I noticed that all the street lights were blinking yellow, and as I pulled into my neighborhood I spotted tree branches and leaves littering the streets. The neighborhood across from mine was dark. Funny that all these people had been talking about this whole weather thing just around the time that the trees and street lights and power lines decided to fall down like idiots. Strange – almost like a cause-and-effect was at work here, but more likely just an example of group think gone terribly wrong. Whatever, I’m not a scientist, it’s not my problem to solve.

But anyway, all the rubbage on the street made me nervous. Well, I was already nervous, cause that’s how I roll – but I became even more nervous because I have a lot of tall trees in my yard, and I was sure that this was just the excuse they needed to kick my roof’s ass. Who, admittedly, kinda deserves it, as he can be really nasty when he drinks.

I opened my front door and peered inside…

Phew! What a relief! No ghosts. 5 years and counting, and still my house wasn’t haunted.

With that out of the way, I scanned the ceiling. No holes from fallen trees. Phew. I scanned the walls. No massive sticks poking through shattered window panes, pointing at me with their withered brown tips. Phew. I scanned the bar area. No basket of kittens with a card attached that said, “Dear Bones, please raise them with the same love with which I raised you. Sincerely, an older, wiser cat.” I hadn’t really expected that last one, actually. I peered out onto the back deck. A large log lay dead and broken across the wooden floor.

Damn, that’s a big log. Woulda done some serious damage had it landed on the roof.

I stepped outside to move the log and the rest of the vegetation that covered the deck. I picked up the heavy log and carried it out to the trees in my back yard. I went back and grabbed an armful of twigs, and… wait a minute. What’s that?

Damnit.

There was a hole in the floor of my deck! Not a huge one, but still, a full-on hole. I could see the ground through it. One of the deck’s floor boards had been smashed through, a clean hole in its place. Clearly, the large log had done this. It must have dropped from the trees above, fallen vertically through the air like a dart and pierced right through the floor board of my deck. Son of a bitch! Son of a bitch, that log was a dart. A log dart! Damnit, a log dart, I said! A log dart had dropped from the heavens and pierced a hole in my deck. And a hole in my heart. (See Nuno Bettencourt and Gary Cherone).

Now, truthfully, I kind of dodged a bullet with this one. After hearing about all the serious damage that had occurred to houses, cars, etc that night, this hole was but a mere inconvenience. And hell, had the log dart fallen a few feet to it’s left, it would have destroyed the wonderful bar that my buddy Thane and I had built into the deck with such craftsmanship. And had it fallen a few feet to its right, it would have gone straight through my roof and destroyed my inside bar.

It could have been worse.

But still, I have vowed vengeance against that log dart. And all log darts that I encounter going forward.

Thane, my old friend, and the builder of this deck, I’m sorry that you had to hear about it here on this blog. And I’m sure that if the deck that you’d built could talk, he would have emailed you and told you himself. I guess we’ll need to make future plans to drink beer all day and spend 10 minutes of that day replacing the one floor board.

Until that day of redemption, I have a hole in my deck that I have to name. I’ll name it Travis Tenderfoot.

Travis Tenderfoot

Fuck Smith, the concrete pelican, eyes Travis Tenderfoot with a calm, knowing suspicion. Proceed with caution, Fuck Smith.