Ah nature

Up in Canandaigua, one day at the beat-up old tennis court I felt something on my arm and I looked down and it was a real spider. Not a grandaddy longlegs or something civilized, or a little corner scamperer, but a plump little brown booger with beady eyes and multiple legs and all. I shrieked like a schoolgirl and contorted violently, but I got away.

Later, walking in the woods of the Onanda reserve, I passed a seventy-year old guy out for a walk wearing a multicolored shorts matching a windbreaker he had on -- shirtless -- unzipped to his belly button (a look huge with the ladies). "Seen any bears yet? There's plenty of them around here." That got me to thinking, so I called Mary on my cellphone to confirm my memory of what you're supposed to do if you come across a bear in the woods. She remembers that stuff. Unfortunately, what with being in the woods in upstate New York and having a cheap shitty LG phone because I'm basically cheap, we had a poor connection and she basically thought I was calling because I had seen a bear. So when we got cut off she called back to see if I was OK.

When I got to one of the scenic overlooks in the park I saw that it was tagged with gang graffiti, probably the work of some of the country b-boys we had seen strutting around, yet another instance (like the bling wheels I saw on an Oldsmobile on a back road between Hillsborough and Roxboro, NC last year) of the confluence of hip-hop and cracker culture.