When I was a young and impressionable, nothing said manly more than a huge dip of snuff.  I grew up around cows and country stuff.  Men were men.  You could always tell if a person was a man by the dip in his mouth.  I’ve even met a few women that were men.  They could dip with the  best of them.  I know a guy that’s gay and dips.  He’s a man.  I started participating in rodeos when I was fifteen.  You could not rodeo and not dip.  Hell, they gave the stuff away at the rodeos.  You could get rolls and rolls of all kinds of smokeless tobacco.  I was determined to be a man.  Around thirteen years of age I took my first chaw of tobacco.  The world spun and I puked.  Being a man was tough.  I kept chewing and puking until the puking finally stopped.  I was a chewer.  Most days when I was outside I had a nice big bump in my jaw and was spitting perfect amber missiles through the air.  Life was good.  I even learned to like the taste.  Here’s the way things went.  You took a chew and you told a good story and you spat.  Yes, I said spat.  Of course you could get your ass kicked for saying a word like spat, but it’s the correct word and since I quit dipping three weeks ago, I don’t feel manly anymore, so yes, we spat.  Tobacco wasn’t good for just telling a story either.  It was good for doing hard work.  Spitting and pitching heavy hay bales up on a trailer seemed to go well together.  Of course you have to spit when you ride a horse.  Oh hell, I forgot, you hardly can’t fish at all unless you’re spitting tobacco everywhere.  I can’t quit fishing so I’ve substituted the next best thing, drinking.  It’s not the same though.  The drinking makes me want to dip. 

        So I’m chewing away as a young teenager and I noticed that a lot of the older folks were the chewers.  The younger hipper crowd were dippers.  I immediately gave up chewing for dipping.  The puking wasn’t quite as bad and I got over it pretty quickly.  I was a dipper.  Dipping and chewing are quite different.  When you chew chewing tobacco you actually chew it.  I know that sounds a little redundant, but I’m a thorough person.  A chewers chews the tobacco leaves and thus turns his, or her, teeth and lips turd brown.  You generate a lot of spittle as you chew so you get a lot more spitting action in.  Dippers place finely ground tobacco between the cheek and gums.  You don’t generate near as much juice but you don’t turn your teeth and lips turd brown either.  Plus the dip makes a much smaller bulge in your mouth.  Usually a bigger bulge, of course, would mean a person is more of a man but not in this particular situation.  A nice tobacco bulge slightly off center just big enough for people to see the top of the snuff jutting out of the lip, perfect dip.  You were a man and you were cool if you dipped.  It sounds stupid now I know but that’s the way it really was for me back then.  That’s the way it seemed to me.  My wife pointed out how bad it is for me and how disgusting it really is for almost twenty years now.  Recently I had a little issue with my heart and I decided to quit.  Yes I know it was disgusting.  Especially the spit cups everywhere.  Warm cups full of tobacco spit in the truck, in the car, in the house.  Yes I know it was disgusting.  I was addicted and it was part of who I thought I was.  Yes I knew it could kill me.  It still might.  It’s hard to give up something that you perceive as a symbol of what you are.  Add the fact that it’s a very addictive drug and you get damn near thirty years worth of spitting, and spilling spit cups everywhere.  I once volunteered to baby sit the three year old son of some close friends of mine.  I never told them that he took a big drink from my spit cup that night.  Yes I know it’s stupid.  I’m done with it.  I’ve quit.  I’m done.  I wrote this whole thing and never spit once.  It wasn’t as satisfying.

      I went to my first ever Oktoberfest this weekend.  I was dragged there kicking and screaming.  I was sure I wouldn’t like it.  I knew I wouldn’t like it.  We waited in the car for a while before we could get parked.  That’s always fun.  It was a long walk up to the event grounds.  Everything was going exactly as I had planned it.  It was sucking and I hadn’t even gotten in yet.  I could tell right off that these were not my people.  I’m a country boy.  I have been all my life.  These folks were city dwellers.  I could tell this by how so many of the men wore shorts.  My people don’t wear shorts in public.   We finally got in the gates and after my wife showed me where she would be performing later that evening I was free to wander about for a bit.  My first stop was a beer stand.   I had a pitcher of local beer that was really tasty and stout.  Things started to make much more sense to me after every swig.  Oktoberfest started to look like fun. 

     I wandered into a tent where dances were being performed.  Normally I would not have been very interested in dancing unless I’m cutting a rug myself which is usually after some pretty  hard drinking, but the beer put me in the mood to watch a little.  The dancers where  doing a hybrid form of dance which I have named tap-cheer dancing.  They very much looked like cheer leaders but were doing tap dancing.  The beer let me understand this odd form of Octoberfest revelry.  Without the beer I couldn’t have taken much more than thirty consecutive seconds of this tap cheering stuff, but with the beer I was really getting into it.  The tap cheerleaders did a version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.  It was incredible.  The beer and I were thrilled.  The tap cheerleader’s Thriller had a lot of kicking and tapping and big toothed smiling.  No one grabbed thier crotch.  There was an attemp at a moon-walk.  It was Thiller River Dance style.  I’m afraid of what this may have looked like without the beer.  Thank god for the beer.

       After being thrilled by the tap cheerleaders me and my son walked over to the carnival rides.  My son rode a swinging boat while I stood and watched.  The ride didn’t look terribly exciting.  My son didn’t look terribly excited riding it.  It’s too bad he’s not old enough to drink a picture of beer.  That would have been the greatest ride of his life if he had been old enough to bring the beer with him on the ride.  I saw some older gents on the ride with him.  They had had beer.  They were really liking the swinging boat.  They had their hands in the air as if they were on an enormous roller coaster and were fixing to plunge off the highest peak instead of gently rocking back and forth.  I stood and watched as my son almost fell asleep rocking back and forth.  By the time the ride was finished it was time to go to the main tent and watch  his mother, my wife, dance her dance.  A thunderstorm had popped up by this time so when my wife finished her dance we high-tailed it out of there.  She drove.  I get German culture now.  It really doesn’t matter how bad what you’re watching is, good beer will make it better.   A  lot better.  I get it.  Give me a pitcher of beer and I’ll watch men in skirts walk around and slap their legs and think it’s the best damn thing I’ve ever seen.  I’ll need some strudel as well.  Cheers.

       Times are tough.  Money is tight.  It’s actually pretty normal for me, but I’ll take everybody’s word for it.  I’ve always had enough money to get by and have a little fun.  I don’t get to buy very many new things, but if you  buy used stuff that’s been taken care of it’s like new.  I don’t get to choose the biggest and the best or the latest and the greatest.  My choices are careful endeavors between adequate and just above adequate.  That’s my place in the grand scheme of  things, adequate.  I am adequate.  I have adequate means and things.  I am tired of settling for just adequate.  I’m considering a life of crime in order to obtain the finer things in life.  I must figure out what kind of criminal I’ll be and what kind of crime will be my specialty.  There is one major component to my future criminal endeavors.  They must make money and lot’s of it.  This crime must pay.

      The first thing that comes to mind is a robber.   A robber just breaks in and takes what he or she needs.  There’s a lot of danger associated with this kind of criminal.  While the idea of taking someone else’s superior stuff does appeal to me, I’m afraid I could never actually do it.  Starting when I was a pre-teen my  families house began to get robbed.  We were robbed five times in seven years.  We had our Christmas presents robbed on two occasions.  My mother took to keeping all the presents in the trunk of her car.  Needless to say we didn’t get anything too big or too breakable.  The robbers really wiped us out a few times taking most everything that was worth anything.  After the third robbery our insurance company dropped us.  After that anything that was valuable had to be left at my grandparents house.  They were retired and home almost always so really important stuff was stored there like guns and fishing equipment.  My Dad did have his revenge though.  After the third or fourth time we got robbed my Dad decided that anything he and Mom bought to re-furnish the house was going to be old, heavy, and mostly worthless.  He stayed true to his  task.  He and three friends brought in a T.V. that had to have weighed five hundred pounds.  It was one of those old ones that came in a pretty nice cabinet with a record player on one end and a radio on the other.  It was probably six feet long and three feet wide and the T.V. in it was black and white.  It  was a pile of crap.  He also bought kitchen appliances that although they worked either made horrible sounds or shook violently during operation.  One by one he filled our house with junk.  It was terribly satisfying when the robbers struck again.  They took everything but the T.V.   They had moved it but not far.  Luckily the economy got  better and the robberies ended as quickly as they had begun.  Dad finally worked up the courage to buy some new stuff.  We had a color T.V. again finally.  I can’t be a robber.  Those memories are still to fresh. 

          I thought about being a embezzeler.  I don’t think I’m smart enough to be one of those, plus you have to be in a position to embezel.  I’m not in such a position.  I thought about maybe running a scam or a con but those things take a a lot of planning and preparation.  Those aren’t my strong points.  I don’t really plan much of anything and forget about preparation.  I was just about to give up becoming a criminal when I had an epiphany.  I know now what kind of criminal I am.  I am a black mailer.  It’s perfect for me.  I already know a bunch of stuff about friends of mine that they don’t want told.  It’s perfect.  If they want me to remain silent I will be paid.  I want small bills placed  in  ziploc bags thrown into my yard late at night.  This will need to be done at least once a week.  Your initials better be on the bag.  If  I do not recieve the money I will begin telling stories on facebook about all those not leaving me money.  I better have some bags in my yard soon.  You know who you are.  You know what I know.  Hurry up.  I want a new flat screen T.V.