Backpacking... sexified!

Who says backpacking can't be sexy?

I went on a backpack to the Anza Borrego Desert back in January it was beautiful. Ted was an older gentleman who was tasked with job of leading our group through the West Butte area. He seemed like an ordinary older Sierra Club chap but what caught my eye was his very subtle sense of hiking fashion that only the keenest of eyes and most childish of minds would laser in on: Ted's red fishnet belly shirt.

It was fodder in the purest sense. Sadly, my smart-ass comments went suppressed and therefore unappreciated. The only thing I could do was snicker to myself, cracking witty, sophomoric jokes under my breath. There was no one with whom I could share my 12-year old sense of humor or at minimum exchange saucer-eyes coupled with my sphincteresque I'm-trying-not-to-laugh mouth.

So I'm attaching a picture so you can fully appreciate the story and in hopes that it inspires some childish thoughts of your own.

TV Dinner by Lisa Gonzalez (circa 1988)

This is a story I wrote a really long time ago when I was bored in a small office.

He sat back in the tattered armchair. Thinking. His old fork poked listlessly at the turkey in gravy TV dinner that sat balanced on his bulbous beer-belly. Smoke hovered stagnantly over his balding head. The television buzzed with static and conversation — Ozzie and Harriet were just wondering where Ricky was.

He kept blaming it on her...how SHE had made him this way. He knew deep down that he had let her get to him. What comes next? Twilight Zone or the Honeymooners? He hoped that it was Twilight Zone. He liked the way that Rod Serling could smoke a cigarette and look cool. He took a long drag of the Lucky Strike and grimaced as the smoke burned his eyes. He could never look cool smoking. Maybe it was because he was just never very cool. Cool people never ate TV Dinners.

The phone rang. He could have answered it in one ring, but he didn’t want it to look like he was waiting for her to call and let it ring another two and a half times. He picked up the phone and tried sound like he was in the middle of something very important. It was hard to do in the middle of a TV dinner and the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. He belched and could taste a cross between Lucky lager and half frozen corn backed up in his throat and swallowed it anyway. Just like everything else. He picked up the phone, but no one would answer. There was definitely someone there because he could hear John Cougar dinging about a chili-dog. He remembered how she hated John Cougar and was sure it wasn’t her on the other end of the phone. She wasn’t the type to play those games, but he secretly wished that she was.

He hung up and wondered which nightclub she might be at tonight. He wondered if she asked other men for a cigarette the same way she had asked him the first time they met. He never smoked before he met her, but she was the reason he started. She was the reason for a lot of things. She, with her long painted fingernails and sticky red lipstick. She never really cared about him. He wondered why. Maybe it was because he never really cared about himself. She could see through him like Saran-Wrap on a bowl of leftovers. And now, that’s all he was. Left over. He knew deep down that she would never call. She didn’t like leftovers. She didn’t like TV dinners either.