Mother Nature Is Out To Get Me

My life before The Biggest Lavoie consisted of diligently avoiding any and all physical activity. I was never one for sports, I chose to be artistic instead. That's the choice you get as an adolescent, either you can be athletic and coordinated, or you can be chubby enough to eat your own finger paints using glitter glue as a condiment. I chose the latter. That was until the truth teller showed up in our living room. This addition to our home made me painfully aware of exactly how much glitter glue I had been eating all these years--numbers don't lie, if you know what I mean. This was when we decided, as a family, to exercise regularly (two words I've never used in company with one another.)

My dad and I's exercise routine includes the following:
25 minutes of uphill walking on the treadmill, sweating like a trucker in July and cursing the high heavens for the incline setting.
10 minutes of what feels like sprinting until my lungs explode, which is actually just a 10 minute mile for normal humans.
This one is followed by many minutes of repeating the mantra "don't puke pig" while slowly walking, hunched over.
15 minutes on the bike alternating between spikey little cliffs of doom that mean "hill" on the random mode.
Exactly one set of 12 reps on any given machine. (I don't have the heart or will power to tell my dad that this one is doing nothing for us.)
20-30 minutes of congratulatory boasting to one another. "Awesome sweat ring! It almost connects!" "Did you notice my RPMs on the bike? KILLED IT."

In addition to that I also attend The Way in Cranston (cue shameless advertising here) once a week. Here the workout is different every time, but what is the same is that a man, not much older than me and often times cripplingly handsome, yells at me for a solid hour while I do a variety of strenuous and exhausting tasks literally holding on by my fingernails to the time when they call "water." At that point, like an animal drinking from a trough, I gallop over to the cooler and gulp as much water as my fat little cheeks can store. Usually, around my third cup they start to glare at me, because of course I'm stalling, and I crawl over to the next station beginning the torture anew.

But last week was different. I wanted more. It was beautiful out, I hate the gym, and I suggested the unthinkable: change the routine. My dad, flabbergasted, fought tooth and nail for our normal regiment, but reluctantly gave in when I said we could do both. The alternative? Kayaking. Hard.

(This is him doing his impression of Aziz Ansari on the kayaking commercial)

Now, I should explain here that everything with my father is a project, but that post would take all night. Let's just say after roughly one hour of planning, we were in the car headed to Big River at Rt. 3, because it has two separate paths and it's his favorite.

Everything started out dandy, we were winding along, admiring the scenery, checkin' out lily pads, and tut tutting about the weather. It was leisurely at best, not at all the rapids I had envisioned myself kayaking through. My outdoors experience is about as limited as my history with sports; so, to someone who's normal idea of "wild life" is confined to dryer lint particles and the occasional bug graveyard collecting in their light fixtures, this place was outstanding. Breathy and panting every few seconds I would shout something like "Dad, LOOK AT ALL THESE ANIMALS, AND WATER BUGS!" "What's that bird called?" "DO YOU  THINK THERE'S FISH IN HERE?" He would ignore me. I blamed it on the fact that he was ahead of me, but I really think he was just choosing not to respond. Later, when he spotted a lump on a log and I had a mini-stroke he sighed "at least we saw a fucking turtle." 

That was until we entered a deep, dark, tunnel...

At first glance, the other side of the tunnel seems fine. But in reality, it was forbidden territory. Like something out of a horror film, the beast emerged from his cave, he scaled the hillside and leaped into the water, pistol loaded. "WHAT THE MOTHER FUCK IS THAT!?" I screeched as the monster stalked toward me. "TURKEY? DUCK? DINOSAUR?!?" At this point, my dad is fumbling for his camera, and I am paddling away as fast as I can. I've tried to save my father once before, I was not risking my life for him this time. "It looks like a damn chicken!" He calls from behind the lens. What it looked like, was a gang member. If a bandana had been tied to his head and a teardrop tattooed to his face, this thing could have passed for the most deadly of gang luminaries. And we were on his turf! If there were more of these misfitted crossbreeding chuckdurkies living in these woods, I was leaving. Fast.

Thank my father for this photo because blog worthy or not, you're fucked if you think I was gonna snap a candid of Chachi the Chicken while he was inches away from my jugular, knife between his beak.

Perhaps you're rolling your eyes right now, and you think that this hybrid monster is not so bad and I am being a yellow-bellied sissy, well, you're wrong. And if you want to be right, start your own blog elsewhere. 

Naturally, due to my agility and swift kayaking skills I survived this attack.

However, only a few short weeks later, I had yet another close call. Minding my own business, looking forward to the beach, my cousin and I ventured down the back roads hoping to avoid traffic. Unfortunately, we failed to factor in suicidal deer, and were granted access to a prime specimen in a near fatal collision. The deer sprang from the thicket, I don't know what a thicket is really but I think this is what it was, and went straight for the passenger side door. At this point, a normal person's fight or flight reflex will kick in, I'm sad to report I do not have this. I slammed on the breaks, white knuckled the steering wheel and howled a low guttural noise, much like this, only not in slow motion. Luckily, the deer missed my car by a few inches and rolled under another car driving in the opposite direction, he then did a tuck and roll type action and sprang away into the woods. No obvious injuries to speak of. After that, I began to question what I have done wrong to deserve these vicious attacks. I came up with nothing.

Please note that had I written this in the timely fashion that I had intended to, it would have been posted before YET ANOTHER mother effing deer ran into the road and at my car. This happened on the drive to Chicago mere minutes into our journey. The bastard lurched into the middle of the highway and then gave us the stereotypical deer-in-headlights-look, because deer really are extremely unoriginal and pointless. However, I did learn that I most likely inherited my slug like defense from my father because he too, slammed on the breaks and braced himself for the attack, rather than hitting the bitch or running away, like our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have known to do.

More on this road trip later. For now, I'll leave you with this adorable cartoon that I stole from the interweb when I searched "deer getting hit by cars."