on cowboy boots

These past few days have been pretty stressful, what with looking for a new place to live and figuring out how to afford it in the weird interim period with my new job slashing my income in half. Lots and lots of precise budgeting and I'm more than able to pull it off. That's been a huge relief in and of itself. I've found a place I'm definitely interested in, toured it a few days ago, and I'm applying for it tomorrow. Fingers crossed. 

The weather's been beautifully fallish lately.

And by beautiful I mean awful.

Winter may be coming a bit early this year, I'm afraid.

(That's what I've heard from meteorologists)

It's given me an opportunity to start wearing my cowboy boots again. I've gotten lots of compliments on them (and ZERO complaints). They're rustic, minimal, absent decoration, and totally real. They were $500 originally and on sale for $350. I'd just returned from Minnesota and had $1500 in my pocket. So I bought them. And a cowboy hat that didn't fit. Also, I got an alligator head on a keychain. "That was an impulse buy," I told Amos (ss if the boots and cowboy hat weren't). But as far as impulse buys go, these boots have been by far the best buy ever. I've had them five years, worn them rain, sleet, and snow (and ran over them with my car), and they're in just as good shape as they were when I bought them. I guess that's what you get when you buy real cowboy boots rather than imitations or knock-offs. 

Speaking of alligator heads, I'm reminded of my days with Jeff and Mindy and 412 Student Ministries back when I was in high school and running around with Chris, Pat, and Lee. When Mindy was pregnant, we threw a baby shower to celebrate, and everyone gave her all sorts of normal gifts. I decided to take an African statue of a giraffe, saw off its head, and attach a foot-long alligator head to the neck. Once that was complete, I put weights down in the base of the wooden statue so that it wouldn't topple forward. I added a note explaining that this would be an amazing first toy when their daughter was born. (She didn't give it to their girl, but she DID put it in their tropical-themed bathroom, and she said it scared her every time she went to get a drink of water in the middle of the night). Now that I think about it, I did have a tendency to give dead animals as gifts. Not the "dead and scraped off the street" sort of dead but the "dead and stuffed and treated" kind of dead. For one of our White Elephants one year, for example, I wrapped a squirrel fur around a smooth but ridged rock, wrapped the whole thing in tissue paper, and placed it in a small box. I poked holes on the top and threw it in the pile. It was one of the last gifts picked (surprisingly, I think; I would've been on that so fast), and as the girl held it, her face went a bit ashen. She shook it, heard something knocking about, dead weight in the box, and you could see she thought what everyone thought: "Whatever's in there has died." (you know, since there were holes on top). She unwrapped the package, reached in, felt the smooth fur over the ridged and hard surface--as if an animal had gone into rigormortis--and screamed and dropped the box. Classic moments of my days in student ministry. 

*SIGH* I miss doing youth ministry.

Youth ministry is sorta like a license to scare kids all the time.

Plus, you get to teach them about God and the gospel.

It's really a win-win vocation.

Point of all this: I really enjoy wearing my cowboy boots. I like wearing them any season, though I don't wear them in the summer because they just look plain weird with shorts. On Thursdays I work with W.O.J. and take my guys out to Gorman Heritage Farm in Blue Ash. The farm was built in 1818 (or something like that), and many of the original buildings still stand. I love plodding around the grounds in my cowboy boots, as if I were strolling the fields as an early-19th century farmer. This past week we launched pumpkins across the fields from a GE-built "pumpkin launcher". Right as we got started, hammering rains started falling, and we got a few launches in before we had to high-tail it to the main building. I rode in the back of a covered golf cart, my legs sticking out the back, cowboy boots slicked black with rain, soaked from head-to-toe, and I loved it because I felt alive. 

I like life rustic and raw.

Sometimes technology gives me a headache.

All the noise, the glaring screens, the buttons.

Sometimes I just want to "turn it off".

(Another reason I love NBC's Revolution)

On the topic of TV shows, Ams and I just finished the recent season of Parks and Recreation. In one episode, Leslie "faces off" with a disgruntled citizen. The challenge: last the longest living in a 19th century house. (I do believe they said 18th century in the show, but in the 1700s the only residents of Illinois were scattered fur traders and Indian tribes, not to mention the ruins of an Indian mega-city called Cahokia whose inhabitants had suddenly disappeared, probably from European disease carried forward by early Spanish conquistadores). Leslie didn't last too long, but the moral of the story (as I tell it) is that I'd love to live like that for a hot minute. All during the show I was fantasizing about living in that cabin, having it to myself, just being dorky and living "frontier style" for a bit. Just to try it out.

During my studies colonial America, I've become fascinated with what life would be like as an average 26-year-old man living in colonial Boston in 1775. Often I lie in bed at night and close my eyes and pretend that I'm falling asleep in a small upstairs room of The Green Dragon, imagining the den of the drinking below, the clinking of tea cups as gristly merchants complain about the closing of Boston harbor and how it's ran their business to the ground, young and boisterous men downing beers by the name of Blackstrap and Rattle-Skull, but no one drank Sam Adams' beer because he'd run his brewery into the ground by mismanagement and disregard. They cursed Parliament for its arbitrary abuse of power, for London's strangulation of Boston and willful disregard for the rights the townspeople had by virtue of being British citizens. Sometimes, on the verge of sleep, I hear talk of "standing armies", supposedly sent for the protection of the people, being the first step towards an arbitrary wielding of power that strips citizens of their rights, but the talk's silenced for a moment, and then there comes an uproar as two British soldiers enter the tavern. Shouts of Lobsterback! and Redcoats! and Bloodbacks! ring out. There's a fistfight, and the soldiers hold their own and then hurry back out onto the street. The tavern empties, the soldiers followed out into the dark, and it's then that I drift off to sleep, and I dream it's daylight in Boston, spring's blooming on the Boston Common; here we used to graze our cows, but now it's filled with tents and barracks. Down King Street people are milling about; there's far more women here than men, and far more children than adults. The town's ringed by docks, but they're empty, the ships taking off to sea or being scuttled in the weeks before the closing of the harbor. Here there's the quiet, the waters of the Charles lapping against the dock's moorings, and I'm wearing my cowboy boots and looking out beyond Boston, towards the sea, past dozens of craggy islands, where the town used to graze its cattle before the harbor closed.  

The heart of this rambling, somehow-tied-together-but-not-really post is that I REALLY like wearing my cowboy boots. 

And maybe now you can get a sense of why. 

It's an hour until The Walking Dead, Ams ordered me a pizza and it's just arrived, and John has the Colts vs. Broncos on. It's a big game, Brandy says, because Peyton Manning (I don't even care enough to spell-check that) used to be with the Colts but now he's with the Broncos, and this is the first game he's going to be playing against his old team on their own field. But all I can think is this: