Strike four your out " But I could not see the ball, there was too much smoke "

At the begining of the 2005 NFL season I was ready to give Ricky Williams another chance. He had dealt with his family resposibilities, drug addiction and was committed to playing another year with the Dolphins. Run Ricky Run. My feelings have changed. There is no defending him nor do I fell sorry for Ricky Williams. There can be no saying he wasn't propertly warned. With his fourth positive drug test, the years supension handed out by the NFL was not only just it was the NFL's duty.
Ricky never seemed cut out to be a football star. He always seemed as though he was a hitchhiker who had been thrown into a stretch limosine. Now he might be free of the NFL forever. Free to grow his beard, read his books, teach yoga, meditate or even live in a tent.
I am not mad at him for screwing up the Dolphin's season or even sad for him. If you were to tell him you were sorry for him he would say " Don't sweat it I am not " When he was ask about the NFL decesion to suspend him for the 2006 season he said "Right now I am happy, I've got gas in my car ". Statements like these sway people to view Ricky as a circus clown at best and a loser at worst. Some will say Oh! he fell off the wagon again or maybe he just did not read the lables on his alternative diet. It hardly matters, he used up all his get out of jail cards a long time ago.
Ricky does not care about anybody but himself. Selfcentered is a charastic of addiction. I can speak to that fact from self awearness. All that yoga, touchy feely spirtualistic stuff, globe trotting retreats and holistic medicine dose not make one an enlighted and humble being if one thinks he is so above everybody else that one does not need anything more than the basic necessities of life.
It's probely best to wish him well for he is an insteresting soul even though he never seemed suited for the athlete lifestyle. Ricky is more of a God's will sort of man who seems content to travel through life as a peice of driftwood carried by the current. Now that I can relate to. He will never have problems with his serenty that's for sure. I can just see him now, setting in the dark in the Lotus positum with a big smile on his face. How wonderful! But Ricky you still can not pitch your tent in my back yard.

A sink full of berries

I have never been much of a berry person, oh I'll eat blueberries on vanilla ice cream every once in awhile but that's about the extent of my berry diet. I do make one exception, that's for the dewberry.
The other day someone gave me a pint of blackberries and since the blackberry is a cousin to the dewberry I decided to try them. Well Mr. Blackberry you are sure no Mr. Dewberry! In my home town dewberry picking is a tradition and a money maker for some. Every spring hardly souls are willing to brave brambles, fight snakes, devilishly ichy chiggers, fire ants and poison ivy for the tart sweet morsels of fruit growing wild in rugged places. The dewberry plant forms thickets of thorny vines and grows in places most people would not tread.
Dewberries with sugar on them was ok but my favorite was dewberry cobler. I can still remember how good that cobler was that mother made. I can imagine one of those coblers now. Mom cooked them in a large glass bowl and the dark berry juice was always bubbling out from the top of the browned crust and oozing down the sides of the bowl.
You can't buy dewberries in the stores, the fruit is too fragile to survive packing and shipping. They ripen earlier than other berries making them a hallmark of Texas spring just as the bluebonnet is. Durning the months of April and May Dad was always bringing home gallons of dewberries and our kitchen sink was full of floating dewberries guite often. He usually paid six bits a gallon for the berries, that's 75 cents for you city foke. Today blackberries are priced at $3 for half a pint.
Dewberry picking is fading as new generations prefer to get their blackberry cobler in the frozen food section at their local supermarket. Beside most of today's generation can't even began to make a cobler of any kind.
Seems like I used to see the wild dewberry everywhere but today, weed killer and the constant maintenance of out road sides and rail ways have destroyed decades of old dewberry patches.
It has been a long time since I have baked a dewberry cobler and even then it was not as good as the ones I remember mom baking. The only cobler I bake these days is a peach cobler and with peach season right around the corner I better put an extra five pound bag of sugar on my shopping list. It would not be July the fourth without a peach cobler.

I'll trade you a Melon for a Coconut

There are lots of ways to get high and believe me I've tried most of them. Climbing high into a palm tree and falling out of it is not the kind of high I am referring to but Keith Richards does not know that. Maybe he was trying to find a new way to get high. Did Keith feel any pain when he fell out of the palm tree? That's a silly question, his mellon never feels anything much less pain.
The Rolling Stones member is now on the mend after cracking his mellon while in pursuit of a coconut. Keith, by all accounts should be dead by now from all the chemicals he has injested over the years. He should be on an astral plane somewhere not running around on mother earth. Maybe he is bionic and will never die. I hate to think drugs are good for you but who really knows. If I could survive all the drugs he has consumed I to could climb a palm tree, stick my tongue in a light socket and would never even catch a cold. Keith is like a human cockroach nothing can destroy him, not even heroin nor alcohol, not the extreme Rock lifestyle nor acting like an adolescent at the age of 62. Sooner or later he will do something stupid and become disabled but he will not care. He will collect disability payments from the Stones and won't have to go on stage to play his guitar anymore. All the while he will be making the same unbelievable amount of money because his disability interferes with is ability to work, if you want to call his guitar playing work
He might out live us all, I sure hope so! The world would not be the same without Mick Jagger prancing around on a stage and Keith Richards falling off that same stage from time to time. It will not be a surprise when the Stones find a way to make money off the palm tree act. Maybe their next big hit will be "Better living through chemistry" or maybe "A rolling stone gathers no coconuts".

Pinch em Peel em Eat em

Crawfish, otherwise known as crawdads, mudbugs and fresh water lobster are interesting little creatures but the only thing I think they are good for is fish bait.I am not about to eat a six inch cammibalistic mud loving eater of dead vegetation, worms, insect larval and rotting fish.
I remember fishing for them as a child and having been on the receiving end of a crawdad pinch, it was no fun. The longer I dangled my finger the harder it would clamp down. Sometimes we could really hall them in, they loved salt pork and we always had plenty of that. Those days are gone. The only time I see mudbugs these days is at a Crawfish Festival. The annual Moon River Crawfish Boil was held this weekend. The festival was so close to my house, I could see steam riseing from the boiling pots as I stood in my yard. The festival had lots of music, some arts and crafts and a biker event. Aparently bikers love the little mudbugs. The main event was the hundred of pounds of disagreeable, ugly, pinching, creepy crawfish that are suposely tasty when boiled in a spice mixture
Free entertainment, I am sure a sucker for that no matter what the entertainment is so of course I was at the Moon River Crawfish Boil. I enjoyed the Zidico music but the best part of the festival was watching lots of people pinch the head of such a mean and disagreeable creature. It was finnaly pay back time for all thoes mud bugs who grabed my fingers and would not let go. Bon Appetit!