Kittens and Rottermelons

Note: If there are an abnormal number of typos tonight, it’s because I spent the entire evening bouldering down on the Deschutes, and my finger meat aches to the bone. I can’t feel the keyboard. All I feel is pain. Dusty, tasty, hail storm pain.

Over Fourth of July weekend I bought a watermelon. My friend Mark was visiting and he bought a watermelon as well, but his was seedless so we ate it instead. I kept my watermelon in the kitchen until it got mooshy, and then I put it out on our back deck. I should have tossed it out, but after a few weeks it turned yellow and started sagging and didn’t look much like a watermelon at all, more like a rottermelon. Now that it’s been sitting back there for over a month and a half I’m afraid to touch the rottermelon. When I kicked it two weeks ago, a whole family of fruit flies came out. I’m afraid that if I kick the rottermelon now, a litter of kittens are going to pop out.

So there on the deck it sits, alone, dejected, the poor lonely rottermelon. I will have to take care of it soon, as Erik is moving out of Lava House this week to go live in a squalid house in the country that is so backwards it doesn’t even have city plumbing. Or neighbors. If things pan out, I plan on ejecting from Lava House in late September to go live with my Mountain friends Shane and Erin.

Ever since our neighbor Mike moved out from across the street, the Lava neighborhood has been losing its mind. A small yap-yap dog now lives across the street, and I think it killed and ate its owners a few weeks ago in an attempt to gain ultimate sovereignity. I don’t know how the dog plans on paying utilities and rent in the coming months, but I know it loves the cars who drive down Lava and honk for no reason, and the dirty noisy jays who have taken over the World’s Dirtiest Elm Tree (which just happens to unfold right over my car), and the car alarms that go off all night long and sound like the toy gun aisle at Wal-Mart, and the drunk that stumbles up our driveway and demands that we give him beer or a ride to the 7-Eleven.

It would seem that Lava House has served its purpose, and while I will indeed miss being within stumbling distance of downtown, I believe it is time to move on to something different. In the meantime, this house is in complete disarray. Erik’s move has uncovered new and exciting locales of intense filth, and as his domestic items make their way out into the juniper and sage, I’m left floundering for something to sit on, something to cook with, or something to sleep on. Ultimately, everything ends up on the floor, and I’ll probably raid my camping gear for any culinary artifacts I require in the coming weeks. What I will miss most, however, will be the spooning.

My room is an absolute mess. There’s a four foot pile of kiteboarding and windsurfing junk between me and my closet, which isn’t too inconvenient considering that most of my clothes are piled on the floor. My backpack is mixed in with that pile, and I have used it so much this summer that I need to rinse away the layers of salt rime deposited by my sweat. My bike blocks my bedroom door, and it will probably stay there until I fix the flat tire that I got riding at Swampy Lakes with Shane and Erin last Sunday. Random climbing components are strewn everywhere, left over from bouldering in Skeleton Cave with Laura and Mark, climbing at Smith Rock, or pumping tonight’s session on the Deschutes.

Yeah. Something needs to be done. But it doesn’t need to be done tonight. I’m just gonna nurse my sore fingers with some Australian wine and hang out on the front deck. The light over our front deck burned out two months ago, and I finally got around to replacing it with a black light.

Front deck. Not to be confused with the back deck, which is reserved for kittens and rottermelons.