meow

august
by john ryan gallagher
 
with the best of intentions, i began a journal on the first day of this month. after three or four days, as with most things, i lost interest. the journal died shortly thereafter. i have, however, taken some mental notes from adventures i’ve participated in over the past few weeks or so.
 
 we went camping in the berkshires instead of vermont. that was a mistake. it’s weird out there. we went to this gorge we weren’t allowed to swim in, but were then given directions to another swimming hole which we were told, by a nice trustees official, was awesome. we never got to see this hole because we got held up in the parking lot by these sketchy locals who forbade us entrance, after informing us that it was for town residents only. ordinarily i would have told a pair of assholes like these two to go shit in their hats. these were just two very creepy hillbilly vigilantes. even if we had gone in for a swim, i had a feeling we would have come back to find our tires slashed or parts missing from our autos. it’s a river, for crying out loud, and these two jackoffs definitely didn’t own it, but at this point they had us over a barrel. i went on instinct and got us out of there before they cut us or raped our women. we spent the rest of the afternoon searching for another swimming spot, but all we found was this place near a drain that reminded me of stephen king’s ‘it’. it sucked and i was kind of afraid we were going to be raped there too. we finally went back to the campground, had a local try to sell us a bird.  next we crashed these little kids’ hayride. then it rained.
 
i saw a pretty spectacular engagement take place at the mouth of the merrimack river the other night. some guy rented a catamaran called ‘the 9th wave’ and brought his bird out past the jetty. he then had a plane fly over with “eileen, will you marry me?” hanging in huge letters off the back. it was cool. my friends and i were on a nearby boat with our rods in the water. (fishing rods, that is). it was a lovely sight, complemented even moreso by the outstanding sunset. this jockstrap who’d come onboard our boat really drained our beer stash, so we had to go back into town and purchase more. finally we had to ditch him, but not before he started confessing all this weird shit to us, like how his wife had gained 60 pounds since he’d married her,  his credit debt, and being busted for taking fish out of the river that were too small… sketch city. he got even weirder when he somberly expressed how much he missed a male friend of his who had an even dumber nickname than he did. that guy could fucking talk. our captain told a story about how on another occasion he’d gone out fishing with the guy and at several points he seriously thought about taking his own life that day. 
 
all right, i wasn’t going to tell this story, but fuck it. i ruined my phone and lost all of my contacts when i dropped it in my mom’s hot tub after i took a picture of myself doing the mangina, which i was going to send to my friend matt. you probably have some questions, like 1. why did you have your phone in the hot tub? 2. why didn’t you have any pants on in your mom’s hot tub? 3. why would you take a picture of your mangina? 4. why would you send that picture to another guy? here’s the short answer to all of those questions: i had my phone in the hot tub because i didn’t have a book with me, and i didn’t want to just lie there and worry, so i figured i’d be super careful and just sit there and text my friends. i was buck naked because no one was home at my mom’s crib. it wasn’t like i had set out to take a picture of a mangina, or even do a mangina in the first place. it was the way i was sitting and i accidentally looked down and noticed what appeared to be happening. i figured it would be fun to play a prank with matt and have him think i was sending him a picture of a naked woman when in actuality, it would be my pussy he was looking at. after i sniped the pic, i realized that what i was doing was a bad and juvenile idea. i decided to put the phone out of the hot tub before i went through with the sext to my homeboy. as i was in this process, i fumbled it and it went into the hot tub. i probably could have put it on rice and in the oven, but i kept trying to start the damn thing. i guess i fried the wiring. whatever. i went six or seven days without a phone and that was almost paradise. i didn’t like the money i had to shell out for the new one, and in a weird way i sorta internally blame matt for the whole thing.  that’s what i do…
 
some other shit happened too, like i had to wipe my cat’s ass one day, (he’d had a little digestive problem), i read the novel jaws (spoiler: the chief’s wife had sex with richard dreyfus), and 21 friends of mine and i rode around boston harbor on a replica schooner. none of those things were as exciting as a guy telling you about the sixty bones his wife gained or worrying about crystal meth tweakers raping your nice friend name alice, or even doing a mangina by yourself in your mom’s hot tub. goonie goo goo and thank you for reading.

what have you spent the month of august doing? billyjoelfan69@gmail.com