Call of the Wild Manicurist

I treated myself to a manicure recently, and not in that sit down with a entourage of gaggling white women in front of an entourage of gaggling vietnamese women in order to talk about, of all things, "nail polish." That’s called a "real manicure" or an RM.
No.
Mine was what I’d like to call a Mountain Man Manicure, or MMM. The processes by which one procures an MMM is really enough to qualify one’s broken and cracked hands for an RM, but MMs don’t get RMs do they? No they don’t.
I had the pleasure of playing host to my beautiful girlfriend and our two friends for a week in Colorado that was also to include four days and three nights at our cabin in the mountains. If you’ve never been to our cabin, or even heard me talk about it, let me give you a tiny taste.
My mothers grandfather built a cabin with his bare hands what must be 100 years ago now. Over time it underwent many changes and at one time held residence to a roving group of hippies who nearly burnt the entire thing down to the ground. Fifteen years ago, we as a family (my grandparents and my mom and my uncle and their progeny) decided that we would take it back from the shallow grave that the hippies had dumped it into, rebuild and rededicate it as a mountain home for all us Snapps and Orahoods to use on weekends and idle summer afternoons. It is a forty-acre plot on the North Fork of the South Platte river. The main cabin just recently got electricity and still has, as part of its charm, outdoor "facilities" and no running water. Cell phones are just electronic timekeepers in this little off-the-grid locale. It is perfect.
So up we went, armed with raw meat and marshmallows, ready to rough it for four days - to pull dinner out of the river and eat it with our bare hands (or plastic picnic forks).
The MMM is, thankfully, a four day process that includes any or all of the following outdoor spa treatments:
1. The environment must be one of high altitude and low humidity. This provides a base of cracking skin that is integral in the MMM. We also recommend that you plunge your fingertips deep into a riverbed or a pile of mud to really get that thick line of refreshing mud beneath your fingernails. You may not realize it, but that mud is likely exfoliating those tender bits of fingertip that live under your finger nails.
2. Several salves and rubs are available and include motor oil, charcoal, ash, and mosquito repellent. The aim for these salves is to create food conveyance tools, ie fingers, that you wouldn’t touch anything with. There is, however, the inevitable "mosquito tolerance factor" where a MM will slap his own face, with good force, leaving some of his "manicure salves" in a streak down his cheeks. (See next weeks article on "MM Facials")
3. The "fire" treatment includes the handling of firewood, ripe with splinters, and the placing of logs with ones bare hands directly into beds of "hot coals" or even into "cast-iron stoves" that, after they’ve been cooking a little while, are just under the temperature of Satan’s left foot. This treatment will help the spa guest to increase the thickness of callouses on the hands and on the backsides of the knuckles.
4. The Fish Hook treatment is meant to aerate ones fingertips to let stagnant (and regular) blood out of those dead-end fingers. The MMM guide book encourages you to get a whole six-hook fishing lure wedged into the webbing of your fingers to "tighten up" those problem areas and loose skin. Rinse in the stream where the cold water and low Ph will over time eat away a full layer of healthy dermis.
5. The handling of animals, inside and out, whether guiding a horse that hasn’t been washed in eight months or pulling out the egg sacs of a pregnant trout that swallowed a hook - all of these massaging textures are meant to increase the success-rate of your MMM.
If performed correctly, the MMM will leave you with rough, angry hands similar to those of people who do actual work for a living instead of bouncing their soft little round digits up and down on a keyboard for hours at a time. . . grrrr, I’m a Mountain Man . . .

I'd also like to introduce you to the now late, great, MS - who was the original Mountain Man (M&M) and Chief Executive Officer of one of the Yahimake Subsidiaries, Yahimake M&Ms. . .

So Thirsty...

I think that filling the Windex bottle with a matching color of Gatorade is funny. I think it is funny when someone uses that Windex to clean something and succeeds in only making it sticky and worse. Nothing doesn’t-clean-up streaky windows like blue sugar water.
I also think it would be quite funny if you planned this ahead, making sure to mark the bottle where the Gatorade resides and come home from a particularly taxing day of physical activity - tennis, hair dressing, throwing batteries, what-have-you - - and in full view of your teammate/life partner/roommate/priest you dig beneath the sink saying something like: "I’ve never been this thirsty in my life. Jesus! (Sorry Father) how come we don’t have anything to drink in here?"
And then you would upend the bottle of Windex, chugging with all intent and speed as though you’d been deserted for years and your insides were a streaky, greasy, caked-on mess. Look at the advertising that both products use, they almost WANT you to mess with your friends. All those bright colors and in bottles lined up like little rainbow colored joke-soldiers. . .
What do you mean I haven’t slept in a while? Shut up you when you’re talking to me.

No, Mr. Bonaduce, You'll Have to Come with Me

I had a dream last night that I invented a type of special cigarettes for villains and thieves. The nice thing about these cigarettes was that they’d been pre-printed with barbecue sauce fingerprints of former child actor Danny Bonaduce. In my dream, a group of men in masks were fleeing the scene of a bank robbery, nothing but coal-black eyes, stubble and cigarettes - real men.
And when the police show up hours later, their boots crunching over broken glass and fallen crime scene tape, they find it: a cigarette that has only been smoked halfway.
But wait, there’s a fingerprint on it!
"Evidence," one cop will say to another.
"Evidence," he’ll snort back.
But later as our criminals have shaved their faces and are now boarding a small chartered plane dressed as a retired all-boy band, their guitar cases filled with cash from the heist, the police will have followed their only lead to the house of, you guessed it, Danny Bonaduce.

"Bonaduce!" one cop will say to another.

"Bonaduce..." he'll snort back.

I woke up thinking that I’d once again created the perfect way to quit working at a restaurant, to "do a bank job" and pin the whole thing on famous - albeit fading - Hollywood icons. I could pay waiters and waitresses in New York and LA to take a crime lab course and begin lifting and scanning fingerprints of famous people from water glasses, wine glasses, the backsides of toilets, etc. and when I had finally amassed a worthwhile collection of fingerprints I could put them on bills and coins and cigarettes, tossing the whole bag of marked items up into the air as I ran to the getaway vehicle.Winona Ryders fingerprints would be the only ones I wouldn’t be able to steal since she had hers lasered off to continue her shopping spree (notice we haven’t "seen" her in the news about it lately? Huh?)
They’d be lost for hours. We have several hundred sets of prints here, they’d say. We’ll never be able to get through all these, they’d say.
And even if they did get through all of them, they’d have to round up a hundred celebrities from photo shoots and movie sets around the world just to rule them out. . . I’m onto something.
So if one day you see this post disappear, you’ll know that its because I am preparing for victory. If you’re reading this and are remotely famous, wear gloves the next time you don’t tip twenty percent at a nice restaurant, you cheap has-been. . .