Hey, everyone.  I woke up from a nap today and decided I needed to write this.  Hope you enjoy it.  Oh, and to answer the questions from the last post:

1. Yup.  Golf carts are everywhere.  Locals own them, but mostly it is the tourists driving minimal distances.  I would say there were more golf carts than actual cars out there.

2. The pigs were causing too many problems and were all killed off years ago.

3. The buffalo are still there, but you have to get way inland to see them.  They were brought there to film a movie a long time ago, but the movie's budget ran out, so they just left them there, where they have grown in numbers ever since.

4. Yeah, we said that a few times.  We also learned that Marilyn Monroe lived on Catalina for a while before World War Two, Natalie Wood drowned near there, and at one time most of the island was owned by William Wrigley Jr., also the owner of the gum company and the Chicago Cubs.  As a result, the Cubs used to play their spring training games there.

Okay, anyway.  Here's that story that I just wrote that I was telling you about.  Hope you like it:

My mood was that of a sour funk as I walked through the snow past the grades school I went to as a kid, when I slipped on something and had to catch myself with my bare hand, which landed directly into an inch or two of cold snow and concrete.  But there was something in my hand too, it was plastic, horseshoe shaped, and as I looked around, there must have been ten or twelve of them.  It took a second or two for it to dawn on me that they were plastic mouthguards for football and then another few seconds before I put it together that they were there because that class of 5th and 6th graders on the football team had thrown them on the roof at the end of their season, just as I had 20-something years ago.  Dropping that mouthguard into the hot water and popping that hot plastic into your mouth, you felt like a knight preparing his sword for battle, and whipping it up on the roof at the end of a hard fought seasons was an important ceremonial right of passage.  

Our coach back then was a little off his rocker.  He had a crazed look in his eye when he would yell at you where you would not be the least bit surprised if he suddenly wrapped his hands around a scrawny 11-year-old neck.  His rants were often tangental, and looking back, I'm not even sure if he remembered what it was he was mad about by the end of one his motivational browbeatings.  He would get so flustered and outraged at our lack of discipline and athletic ability, that he would get speechless; just angry stairs, looking around at each and every one of us for what seemed like thirty minutes at a stretch, but was probably closer to one or two.  

My hand and the rest of me wasn't even cold anymore, and after all that reminiscing about mouth guards, my coach, and wearing football pads for the first time with my girdle pad slipping off my ass as I tried to keep up during wind sprints, that just like that ranting and pausing coach so long ago, I wasn't even sure what I was mad about to begin with.