Mother Nature Is A Five Dollar Hooker

Pictured: Earth's gaping vagina

As I have mentioned before, sports and I go together about as good as black kids and neighborhood watches. So I always enjoyed the fact that my family always went camping for a few days during the first week of August, which was also when two-a-days began for football practice (football was again a failed attempt on my part to convince my father that I was not a homosexual; my upcoming marriage to a woman is yet another). The six of us: mom, dad, my two little sisters, myself, and my older brother Dale, would pile into our 1990 Chevy Lumina with coolers and fishing poles jammed between our legs. The trunk would be stuffed full of camping necessities, tents, grill, clothing, shower supplies, food, swim gear, sanitation items, pop, and copious, copious amounts of alcohol, which my old man referred to as his "suicide hotline." Our lake of choice was Viking Lake, a small body of water about an hour away and just on the outskirts of Red Oak, IA. The drive to the lake felt as though it was modeled after the Spanish Inquisition. Because of all the gear in the car, my young body would be smashed against the car door while the cooler at my feet forced me to contort my legs into a position that would make a pedophile blush. The long, unkempt fishing poles were of much distress, as each of them was still outfitted with an old hook, the crusty remains of baited worms still clinging to the metal. These fishhooks swung like Poe's immortal pendulum, threatening to puncture my skin, or at the very least get stale worm guts on me. The only distraction on that long drive to the lake was staring out the window at the endless desert of agriculture that was so ubiquitous to Iowa, or I could turn on my Nintendo GameBoy, a clunky piece of plastic about the size of a brick, and play Mortal Kombat or Super Mario Bros. or Tetris. Of course, I could only play for so long before the sister at my side would begin to complain that she wanted to play the GameBoy, and even though I would be balls deep in Warioland, my father, whose only goal in life was for people to shut the fuck up, would inevitably demand that I give up the toy and hand it to my sister. Of course she was much too young to actually know how to play any of the games, and every time Wario's death music beeped and booped through the GameBoy I would become filled with such rage. Dale never had to relinquish his GameBoy. As firstborn son, he was allowed such privileges. I would often glare across the seat at him. At that age, Dale was partial to acid-washed jean shorts, Seattle Mariners t-shirts that he always tucked in, and stiff, awkward ball caps that he wore over a dumb-looking bowl-cut that he always parted to one side. I didn't know the term then, but nowadays Dale would be called a "douche." My father, youngest sister, and mother sat in the front seat of the car, which meant that they had a monopoly on the air conditioning. Those in the back were left to sweat and gasp for air, and any attempt for water or pop to quench my thirst would only bring sharp rebukes from my father, insisting that I "stop complaining." Though, every once in a while he would pass me back the beer he was drinking and let me take a swig. After that unbearable hour, Viking Lake would eventually come into view, and seeing it would bring about a wave of relief, like that feeling when a black person passes you on the sidewalk and you don't get mugged. My dad would pull the car through the campground and we would park in a spot under the shade of some trees that was right next to the lake and had an electrical outlet. But as happy as I was to just arrive at Viking Lake, I realized that getting there was only half the battle. Setting everything up was a completely different set of horrors. Now, from the very start and no matter where we were at, going on vacation with my family was like the final ten minutes of The Shining, and everyone was Jack Nicholson. We all piled out of the car and spent a few moments stretching our legs. My sisters were allowed to go down to the playground, and my parents and their sons were left to get everything ready. While my mom unpacked the food and cooking supplies, the men-and I use that term loosely-set up the tent. Our tent was a large, nylon structure that contained three separate rooms and could sleep six. What began as an opportunity for a father to bond with his sons would quickly spiral into a three-hour obscenity carnival in which my father ordered my brother and I what to do with the stakes and poles. Any deviance from my father's instructions would be met by his insistence that my brother and I "stop acting like retards." Together, the three of us, or rather in spite of the three of us, we slowly but surely raised the tent into a livable structure. By that time my father might have drank four or five beers just to dull the disappointment. Next, we would have to build the large screen tent over the picnic table that we used to keep the bugs out as we ate. Then we unloaded the rest of the car. My brother and I slept at one end of the tent, my sisters slept in the middle, and my parents slept at the other end. Surprisingly, the thin layers of nylon were not enough to shield my ears from the suppressed moans of parental sex. Anyway. My brother Dale, he of the socks with sandals, loved to fish. He absolutely relished it. He would stand with the family or just take off to his own secluded spot with his pole and his prized tacklebox and fish for hours on end. And the many compartments of his tacklebox would be full of a multitude of hooks and lures that he couldn't wait to try out. I envied my brother for having a fun hobby that he actually got to buy things to promote. I didn't have anything like that, except for maybe the creams and special shampoos my mom bought for my sensitive skin. But while Dale ran off on his own to revel in the tranquil solitude of the lake and his thoughts, I had a very different relationship with nature. Even then, at that young age, I knew that I wanted to be a writer. I'd been writing short stories for myself since before I was ten and I loved to read, so from an early age I felt artistically inclined. Over the past several decades their have been a plethora of famous and talented writers who have expressed in literature the strange oneness that a person should have with nature. Literary giants like Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway have all commented on mankind's intimate relationship and appreciation of the wild world around him. And I think that their works have largely influenced this idea that artists are almost genetically inclined to love the peaceful respite that nature's bosom provided. Now, in no way can I compare myself to those great authors that I mentioned, but only because I fucking hate nature. From a very early age I came to love the calming effects of ice-cold Kool-Aid and central air conditioning. In an uncanny feat of Darwinism in action, as I grew from toddler to adolescence my body adapted a thick coat of flesh that suited me perfectly for long hours spent in front of the television and furtive trips to the fridge when everyone else had gone to bed. While a genuine, albeit misplaced, love of sports, hunting, and fishing kept my brother's body slim and wiry, my appreciation for being still gave my body a dignified, bourgeoisie portliness. So even though I liked to go swimming, drink pop after pop, eat snacks all day, and read my book, camping was really anathema to me. In early August the weather was unbearable hot, the air sticky, mosquitoes were prevalent, and stimulation was scarce. My mother insisted that I was getting "in touch" with nature, but really I was getting "fingered violently" by nature. Looking for any excuse to retreat into the loving confines of an air conditioned environment, I happily accompanied my dad to a local bait shop where he said he needed to get some live bait. I never really cared to fish, as I thought the practice to be incredibly boring, and before long my tactic for reeling in the big one became nothing more than casting, reeling in the line, casting, reeling in the line, casting, reeling in the line, and so on, and so on. When we got to the bait shop I wandered around while my dad looked for the things he needed. I would go through all the different lures they had, pick up a fancy pole here and there, look through t-shirts and various tchotchkes that were spread all over the place. As my dad paid for his items at the front of the store, I was suddenly confronted by a man who worked at the store. He must have been watching me as I mindlessly handled all sorts of the bait shop's offerings. "You got anything in your pocket?" he asked me. I shook my head feverishly, convinced he was going to start yelling at me for some phantom crime. "All right then," he said languidly, and passed by me. My father must have noticed the exchange, because in the car ride back to the campground he asked me what the man had said to me. I replied that the man asked if I had anything in my pocket. "What? Did he think you were stealing from him?" "I guess so," I said humbly, afraid that my father was going to renew the other man's theory. "Listen," he began, "the next time someone asks you if you have something in your pocket you say, 'Yeah, I got nine inches of swingin dick, a bucket of balls, and enough hair on my ass to weave a rug. Wanna look?' OK?" I nodded and said that I would, though sadly I can't recall a time when I got to use the expression. Most of my days were spent sitting in a chair away from the rest of my family either reading a book or playing my GameBoy. I would eventually join the family at my father's behest, and I would bait a hook (something I took sadistic, godlike pleasure in and something my brother thought was disgusting) and cast a line. Then, I would sit there dumbly, bored out of my mind, as I waited for a fish to fall for the oldest trick in the book. As much as I hated fishing, I couldn't hide my joy when I finally did get a bite, and would have to reel in the line furiously as I wrested the beast to the shore. In my mind visions of marlins and sharks and whales or some other great leviathan of the sea leapt through my mind. This mighty creature fights me so ferociously, I would think. I wouldn't be surprised if I have caught the legendary Cthulhu! But even though my imagination would take me to Lovecraftian levels of terror beneath the surface of the lake, when I finally did manage to bring in a fish it was always a small bluegill only the size of a person's hand. But where fishing was an exercise in monotony, I loved going to the beach. It was only a short drive from our camping spot, and even though it was pretty small and doubled as a broken glass factory, I couldn't wait to get there. My family would pick out a picnic table under a shade tree and that would become our clusterfuck for the next few hours. My dad would put one foot up on the bench and drink a beer while his balls dangled precipitously close to the edges of his trunks. My mom would begin the violent and humiliating ritual of rubbing sunscreen over every nook and cranny of her children's exposed flesh. When we were finally greased up, my brother and I would tear through the grass and onto the beach, which had roughly the same surface temperature as the sun, and finally into the water. We would wade through the murky, bleak water, thick with green algal sploog, as the slimy lake bottom squished between our toes. Equipped with a pair of goggles for each of us, we would set about exploring the haunting depths of Viking Lake. Our exploring usually devolved into piling large quantities of sand onto one of our heads (usually mine) and my brother Dale explaining, "I'm gonna see how long you can hold your breath under water." Every so often a pretty girl or girls would show up and strip down to their bikinis. Dale and I would stand in the lake, the water safely past our waists, and clandestinely watch girls as they swam or sunbathed, praying all the while for a rogue breast to bust through the confines of their tops. After a few hours, the fun began to wind down. My sisters would begin to whine, my brother would start acting like a dick, and no matter how much sunscreen my mother hand put on me, I always ended up with a searing red sunburn all over my body. The hours of drinking beer would erode any patience my father had, and as conversation became nothing more than snide remarks and passive aggressive threats, we packed up our stuff and left. Dinner quickly became the highlight of the camping trips for me. As more and more creature comforts were taken away, I filled the ever-growing void with food, and my father can cook better than a Mojave sun. Our nights were filled with the scents of grilled burgers, steaks, chicken, brats and hotdogs, fries, tater tots, baked beans. We all huddled around the enclosed picnic table while my dad took our plates one at a time and decorated them with red meat and accessories. I gorged myself like a Roman emperor for nearly a week. Which, of course, led to the biological necessity of having to shit...a lot. I'm the type who can only take a dump either in my own home, or my grandma's house. Otherwise I just hold it in until the buildup of solid waste just melts a hole through my intestinal wall. Ideally, I would have liked to have possessed the will power to hold off a shit for the entire time I went camping, but this would only result in me shitting myself after a hard sneeze. So generally I just held it in until it became an emergency, then I hustled to the bathroom and shot it out in one quick push, like a baby born on prom night. The reason I hated shitting at Viking Lake, was because the bathroom facilities were little more than shacks whose floors served as petrie dishes for all manner of living filth: snakes, spiders, crickets...The idea of putting my bare ass against a jaundiced porcelain toilet while my dick and balls hung haphazardly into the dank bowl terrified me. But the last event of the night was taking a shower. I would have loved nothing more than to go a week without a shower, but my father wouldn't have it. "You smell like shit," he would let me know. Clear on the other side of the campground, where there were no electrical outlets, there was a decent showering facility. Clean cement floors, nice wooden benches inside, and spacious showering areas. The only issue was only one shower was isolated to itself, the other two showers were in the same space together. My father took the single shower by himself so as not to expose my brother and I to what my father called "penis envy," and Dale and I showered in the double. While two males showering together in the wilderness would no doubt be considered homoerotic or downright pornographic, at that young age, showering with my brother was a masters class in immaturity, the zenith of which was me turning around to find Dale aiming the tiny proboscis between his legs up into the air and pissing in a wide arch right onto my stomach. Feeling clean, but never truly clean, the three of us would march back to the campsite together. The night would usually end by my sisters falling asleep in the tent and the four remainders sitting around the dying flames of a bonfire. The nocturnal cacophony of crickets acted as a zeitgeber that signaled bedtime. My parents would go to one side of the tent and my brother and I to the other, where Dale would educate me on some of the more mysterious aspects of humanity, like when he explained to me what sixty-nining was and that sometimes girls like to get shit on, or he would subject me to a severe assault of Dutch ovens. At home, in the comfort of my own bed, I could easily sleep twelve hours if left alone, but in the hot-as-hell incubator that was the tent, I would be up around seven in the morning. When I woke up, the first thing that greeted me in the morning was the sun beating down through the nylon fabric, and revealing a kaleidoscope of insect shadows, as the silhouettes of an army of bugs that had taken up residence on the roof of the tent could be seen from the inside. Leaving the tent had to be done quickly as to not allow any bug to penetrate the tent's nylon defences, and then the morning would start with some eggs and bacon, and the process of fishing, swimming, eating, shitting, and showering would repeat itself for the next few days. By the time the camping trip would come to an end, the entire family was ready to leave. We'd send my sisters off to the playground while everything got torn down and loaded into the car, again loud cursing being my father's most effective tool for this process. Then, the six of us would smash our bodies into the car and begin the long trek back home. Always accompanying me home on these trips was an undeniable sense of sadness. A melancholy that only young boys realize at the close of summer, because no matter how much I hated camping, abhorred the outdoors, and loathed nature...I fucking hated school even more.


The Moore You Know: Jesus Christ, I'm fat. That was a statement, not a prayer. I'm fat and I know exactly why: I'm completely addicted to food. I have zero will power and self-control when it comes to eating. Of course I get depressed after a binge, but fuck, I get depressed before a binge, just knowing I'm gonna do it. Eventually my body will just grow around and absorb my couch the same way a tree can consume a fence. Every day its just the nonstop ritual of sad and shameful digestive masturbation, stuffing my face with whatever unhealthy food I can get my hands on. It's just an endless slog of shit and chemicals being pushed down my gullet. But don't worry, I have a plan. It's called insanity, and it involves doing boatloads of heroin. If heroin caused man-tits, no one would do it, but it doesn't. You eat a large pepperoni pizza you get stretch marks and a gut, but you do heroin and you get a body like motherfucking Robert Pattinson. I'll probably be able to play the guitar too...

© Eric Moore - 2012