Crushing Dog Heads and Crapping My Pants

In an effort to get in shape, and hopefully put off my demise, I'm starting to walk again at night. I "got back on the horse" last night, and the solitude and night air were conducive to thinking about...stuff. Here are some of my thoughts:

* I love walking at night. It's something I've done for a large part of my life. It started when I was a teen-ager and would find myself up in the wee hours with nothing to do (and burdened with my own natural voyeuristic tendencies; I had to be watching SOMETHING). It's a lonely, lonely thing, though. In fact, my Twilight Guardian book (the new version of which comes out next month) came into being as a result of the feelings and experiences I've had while wandering the streets between midnight and dawn.


* I hate yappy little dogs. Don't get me wrong; there are few folks who love the canine species more than me. But those little noise-bags that won't let you pass by a house without alerting the entire neighborhood (and then continuing their barrage when you're three blocks away), well, I have to admit I feel like picking them up by their grapefruit-sized heads and crushing their lemon-sized brains. Does that make me a bad person? And why the hell are they so often Yorkies? Were they bred specifically to annoy?


* You have weird thoughts at 3 a.m. For instance, while I was walking, I suddenly felt some intestinal crampage and "the urge." At first I started to panic, thinking "my god, I'm a mile from home, and there's not a public bathroom anywhere near me." But as I kept walking, a weird solace overtook me. I began asking myself what is the worst thing that could happen. I could crap my pants? And it occurred to me that even if I did, who would know about it? I was walking around a dark neighborhood in the middle of the night. If the "worst" happened, it would just be a sloshy kind of walk home, followed by considerable, but private, clean-up. The only hitch would be if the police happened to stop me on the way (a pretty common occurrence when you walk through residential neighborhoods at this time of night). The whole thought process made me cognizant of just how much our lives are affected by other folks and their knowledge of our faults, foibles, idiosyncrasies, etc. If we didn't feel constrained by a lot of that stuff, we'd probably have relatively stress-free lives. Imagine how you would live, how relatively free you would feel, if you were the last person on earth, and you could be completely YOU.

And no, I'm not suggesting that you crap your pants. Ewww.

Anyway, more walking reports to come. Time to go!