Wednesday, September 14, 2005
raccoons are the new dogs
We went camping last weekend at Lake Castaic, and it was everything camping should be: beer-filled, fiery goodness. Now don't get me wrong. Being in nature was great too, but really, the surrounding campers provided the most-watched scenery.
Two sites down, there was a group of men (not guys or dudes -- men), who had geared up for the weekend with some chairs and an ipod. For two days, they sat in a circle and listened to music. Their mix ranged from top 40, to salsa, to arena rock, to 80s, to Metallica ("Master of Puppets" Metallica, to their credit), back to salsa, to truly awful synth-metal, which sounded eerily like "You Got The Touch", the smash hit Dirk Diggler sings towards the end of Boogie Nights. The scariest part was the men spent most of their time sober.
A couple other sites had unhappy families, the kind with parents who think constant screaming will curb their constantly annoying children. The most amusing, though, was the lesbian couple across from us. From the looks of it, they'd been there for months. Their clothes were strung up between trees, they had a standing grill, bags every where, chairs, and of course, a pet parrot. It didn't ever say anything. It just squaked a piercing, shrill squak, a sound Marah described as a "a child being molested". A crass comparison? Perhaps. But accurate.
"Well a parrot's cool", you say. "But it's not like they had a pet raccoon". Oh but they did. They walked it around on a leash, which is what made it a pet, I guess. Some times they let it rest on their shoulders, others they allowed it to roam free. It seemed that these wilder-than-normal pets enhanced the nature experience for them, which is fine, but you could just get drunk and have the same results. I refrained from telling them.
We went camping last weekend at Lake Castaic, and it was everything camping should be: beer-filled, fiery goodness. Now don't get me wrong. Being in nature was great too, but really, the surrounding campers provided the most-watched scenery.
Two sites down, there was a group of men (not guys or dudes -- men), who had geared up for the weekend with some chairs and an ipod. For two days, they sat in a circle and listened to music. Their mix ranged from top 40, to salsa, to arena rock, to 80s, to Metallica ("Master of Puppets" Metallica, to their credit), back to salsa, to truly awful synth-metal, which sounded eerily like "You Got The Touch", the smash hit Dirk Diggler sings towards the end of Boogie Nights. The scariest part was the men spent most of their time sober.
A couple other sites had unhappy families, the kind with parents who think constant screaming will curb their constantly annoying children. The most amusing, though, was the lesbian couple across from us. From the looks of it, they'd been there for months. Their clothes were strung up between trees, they had a standing grill, bags every where, chairs, and of course, a pet parrot. It didn't ever say anything. It just squaked a piercing, shrill squak, a sound Marah described as a "a child being molested". A crass comparison? Perhaps. But accurate.
"Well a parrot's cool", you say. "But it's not like they had a pet raccoon". Oh but they did. They walked it around on a leash, which is what made it a pet, I guess. Some times they let it rest on their shoulders, others they allowed it to roam free. It seemed that these wilder-than-normal pets enhanced the nature experience for them, which is fine, but you could just get drunk and have the same results. I refrained from telling them.
