Remembering the ODT

It's funny some of the things you remember better than anything else.  I feel like I'm pretty creative, like I've got a pretty good wit and sense of humor, my I don't hold a candle to my old man.

He was a funny-ass guy, much funnier than I could ever hope to be, and the other night my uncles, a couple cousins, and my sister and I gathered at Uncle Jeff's house and had some beers in the garage.  We dug out a couple of old audio tapes my dad made for deer camp back from about 1988 to '92.

The back story: The Orange Dog Tavern was born in 1970 when a group of sick and twisted St. Louis guys and a few buddies went to deer camp in Worcester.  The "orange dog" part came from a poem my grandfather once told:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow.
Everywhere that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go.
It followed her to school one day
And a big orange dog came along and fucked it.

So, that being the premise of the ODT, you can imagine what deer camp was like for about 35 years.

Everyone had a nickname.  Uncle Gene was Goat Lips I, his son oldest son Kevin is Goat Lips II.  Uncle Gary was The Green One, my father Ron was the Reverend RNNN (pronouced "rin").  Family friend Mike is Mr. Lunch, I've always been Skippy.  And so it goes.

Anyway, Dad created WODT, an on-tape "radio station" for deer season, completely packed with original -- and highly offensive -- material.  Highlights from the 1992 tape include a football game between the Steelers and Cowboys with commentary from Howard Cosell and The Hindu Wisdom Giver, an essay by legendary news anchor Walter Cronkite in which he compares the assassination of JFK to his sexual fetishes with his wife, community announcements sponsored by Reverend RNNN's Holy Church Of Latter Day Guys To Whom All Things Are Swell, and an AIDS awareness message so unbelievably funny and politically incorrect that the back of your head hurts from laughing so hard when you hear it.

I hadn't heard any of those skits in years, but we popped that tape in on Friday night and I found myself reciting almost every word verbatim.

"Uh, hi.  I'm the guy at the brain store, um, down the street.  Yup.  And today, we're having a sale.  If you come down today, I'll sell you some brains for... for two dollars."

It wasn't just the tapes, either.  There were written poems, videos, and even "The Book of Bambi" featuring cartoons of Stick Man and Barney, Bible verses from the Book of RNNN.  Birthday roasts with acted-out skits featuring characters like Roy Music, the Mayor of Worcester, and race car driver W.D. Forte involved not just my father, but all of the brothers.

I went to Barnes & Noble last night with Rose, and we flipped through a photography book that the Burlington Free Press published highlighting all of the devastation caused by the weather in 2011.  I was amazed as I looked through the photos at how little I remembered of the horrendous storms that hit this very area in which I live so hard not even a year ago.

But those tapes came on, and I remembered everything so clearly and vividly.  I like that.

We haven't had deer camp (by the way, nobody actually hunted at deer camp) in almost ten years, but I'm hopeful that we do again at some point.  Friday night was awesome.

Long live the ODT.

This One's For Me... And You, I Suppose

Hey there, I'm Justin.  You may know me from the 1,500 (give or take) articles I've cobbled together covering local stock car racing in the last decade-ish, or the radio programs I've done, or whatever else it is that I do in public.  I've been writing about race cars for a long time, but not really about anything else, and I'm tired of it.

Don't get me wrong here, I love telling racing stories and I don't see that changing, but I need an outlet for all my other ideas.  MySpace stopped being cool before it ever started being cool, and I refuse to go back to that for my blogging needs.  Facebook, meh, I could take it or leave it.  I do like the Blogger software that Google offers, though, and having been pretty familiar with it, I figured it was my best option.  (Wordpress is nice but it just takes too damned long to figure out what all the gadgets are.)

Anywho, this little blog'll be about whatever the hell I'm thinking at any given moment.  It may be about racing.  It may be about how much I love my girlfriend.  It may be about how much I miss my father or how awful the parental battle over my son has been for four years.  It may be about my undying love for this messed up little state that I live in (and I do mean Vermont, not anything else, sickos).  It may be reminiscing over good times, or looking forward to the future.  I may write poetry.  I may steal poetry and re-post it.  Posts might be funny, sad, or laced with swear-words and foul language.  In fact, I can almost guarantee the foul language, regardless of topic.

Balls and farts.  See?  It's started already.

The name "(802)zoom" is something I've been trying to find a use for for about three years now, and I might still use it for some other project down the line.  I mean, first of all, it sounds cool when you say it out loud.  "Eight-oh-two-zoom."  Bad-ass.  Second of all, it obviously means something to me because I'm an unabashed fan of Vermont, my home state (our area code is 802), and zoom infers speed or racing or whatever.  Third, when you use the parentheses as I've done, it becomes a title with a trendy, big-city, designer storefront douche vibe to it that might help it to catch on and get some regular readers who want to pretend to feel as hip as I pretended to feel when I clicked "publish".  Fourth, everything else I wanted was taken.  Fifth, I actually only tried two other titles and they were taken.  Seventh, I forgot how to count and I'd really like a sandwich.  Other seventh, I forgot what I was talking about.

So yeah, this is a start, anyway.  Thanks for stopping in.  If you wanna leave a comment, please, by all means, do it.