Walk It Off, Princess Read online

  WALK IT OFF, PRINCESS

  Copyright © David Thorne 2018. All rights reserved.

  WALK IT OFF, PRINCESS

  A Collection Of New Emails and Essays

  [email protected]

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, re-produced on the internet or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Activities and vehicle modifications appearing or described in this book may be potentially dangerous.

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  The fourth collection of new essays and emails.

  Wrap It In a Bit of Cheese Like You’re Tricking the Dog

  The fifth collection of new essays and emails.

  Walk It Off, Princess

  You’re reading it.

  Reviews

  “Pretty decent for the price. I like the color. There’s no way two adults will fit on this though. Even with just one adult it’s a bit wobbly. I fell off twice. Lol.”

  Judy Lawrence

  “This isn’t solid wood. It’s just a thin laminate glued to particleboard. It looks okay but the description is misleading. It should clearly state ‘wood veneer’.

  Colin Stevens

  “Hours of bath time fun for the little ones. ”

  Christopher Sanford

  “Caught fire. It should be illegal for Amazon to sell products this dangerous. If I hadn’t been home at the time, the whole house might have burned down. Was going to return it but I threw out the original packaging.”

  Daniel Murphy

  “Cute but smaller than I thought it would be. That’s probably my fault for not checking the dimensions though. It didn’t work for its intended purpose so I just used it on the cat. ”

  Erica Strickland

  Foreforeword

  From: JM

  Date: Friday 20 October 2017 11.41am

  To: David Thorne

  Subject: Foreword

  Did you receive the foreword?

  ................................................................................................

  From: David Thorne

  Date: Friday 20 October 2017 11.48am

  To: JM

  Subject: Re: Foreword

  Yes, thanks for doing that. It’s more of a ‘madman’s rant’ than a foreword but I’ll make it work.

  ................................................................................................

  From: JM

  Date: Friday 20 October 2017 12.11pm

  To: David Thorne

  Subject: Re: Re: Foreword

  I thought it was pretty good. You said I could write what I want because nobody reads the foreword.

  ................................................................................................

  From: David Thorne

  Date: Friday 20 October 2017 12.15pm

  To: JM

  Subject: Re: Re: Re: Foreword

  It’s fine. I’ll probably edit it in a few places but I appreciate the effort.

  ................................................................................................

  From: JM

  Date: Friday 20 October 2017 12.29pm

  To: David Thorne

  Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Foreword

  If you need to edit it to make room, feel free to take out the stuff about measurements and health care but leave the part I wrote about my father. I spent a lot of time on that.

  And the seashell story.

  ................................................................................................

  From: David Thorne

  Date: Friday 20 October 2017 12.40pm

  To: JM

  Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Foreword

  I’ll keep it to a few minor grammatical edits.

  Foreword

  I don’t remember agreeing to write this foreword but if David says I did, then I must have. It’s not as if he ever lies. That’s sarcasm just in case you missed it. Do you know how to tell when David is ? His lips are moving. In his last book, he wrote that I said stuff about owning slaves and shooting dolphins from a pontoon. Technically that’s defamation and people get sued for that kind of thing. I’m not sure how they do things in Australia but in the USA we have a little thing called litigation that protects from this kind of behavior. There’s a difference between exaggeration and outright lies about something someone’s said . What if one of my clients read these and decided they didn’t want to work with a racist or someone who shoots dolphins? .

  I’m supposed to talk about how we met and say something nice about this book but I books . I glanced through the first one, the one that apparently made the New York Times Bestseller list, and it’s . I prefer a wilderness adventure or political thriller any day. is a particular favorite because I’ve worked on a nuclear submarine. We had a name for people like David in the Navy, it’s <’eye candy’> and people take kindly to his kind of when you’re fathoms deep in .

  I’m not sure if it’s all Australians or just him but I’ve never heard anyone opinions. One moment he’s about Fahrenheit and Celsius and how the metric system is so much better than imperial, the next he’s about the American health care system and how Australia’s universal health care is far superior. When he isn’t units of measurement and health care, it’s the cold. I’ve never known anybody to the cold. Sometimes I’m not sure him at all. I’ve never met a more liberal, and with in my life.

  Most of the time David and I get on well though. We have different political views and come from very different backgrounds, but we share a similar sense of humor and interests. Just this week we competed in an tournament together, a pastime we both enjoy regularly. It’s through this pastime that we became friends three or four years ago. I taught him everything he knows about and and he’s a quick learner. We also both enjoy camping and although we’ve had quite a few heated around the campfire, I and . If I had a dollar for every time he , I’d be a billionaire. When you’re sitting around a campfire relaxing, nobody wants to hear , they want to hear or and I’ve told him a hundred times that allo
wed to ride the ATVs onto other people’s property. . It just comes down to respect. Again, maybe it’s just an Australian thing, a throw back to their convict days when they had no respect for or .

  I understand that David’s to rules and social norms are a part of the reason his website and books are popular with some people, but at some point you have to ask, <”What’s the expiration date on this cheese, Lori?”>

  Maybe it’s cultural, maybe it’s . My parent’s weren’t overly strict when I was growing up but they were respectful, law-abiding people with a good moral compass and my father taught me three valuable lessons in life:

  1.

  2.

  3.

  My father also told me a story when I was very young about a man who decided to build a house out of seashells.

  I think there’s something in that for all of us.

  There are of course moments when David is insightful and he can be quite funny at times. I remember sitting in a ravine at deer camp with him last turkey shooting season, it was cold and getting late in the day. I turned to him and asked, <”Shall we call it a day?”> and he replied, <”Sure.”> I still have a good chuckle when I think about that to this day.

  I do hope you enjoy this book. I’m sure it contains many humorous anecdotes, of which are true and some of which are outright . If nothing else, David has a unique way of and you’re obviously fine with paying the price he charges for what is essentially six weeks of effort.

  JM

  Part of the Family

  I bought part of a racehorse once. One-third of a whole one, not just a leg or anything. I’d worked at a horse-riding school many years before and stayed friends with the owner’s son, Michael, who convinced me that it would be a good investment. It was almost three-thousand dollars but, for the cost of the buy-in and a third of Run Harder’s upkeep costs, I’d be rewarded with a third of the winnings.

  There weren’t any winnings. Run Harder was a good looking horse - almost 17 hands with a dark bay coat and white blaze - but she was basically a turd in a ribbon. Her ratio of visits to the vet versus visits to the racetrack was thirty-six to two. Of the two races she ran in, she came last in the first and fell in the second. She hadn’t even tripped on anything, it was if she’d been running and then decided, “Fuck this, I’m going to see how far I can slide.” Her legs locked up like one of those fainting goats you see in YouTube videos and she slid on her side for about twenty feet. I was actually thankful when she was put down, which I realise is a dreadful thing to say but I was in ten-thousand and getting deeper when she broke her leg. It cost twelve-hundred dollars to have her put down - another three-hundred to have the body disposed of. I could have backed over her with a car a few times for free and rolled her down a creek.

  I know an elderly couple, Jack and Carol, who have spent over twenty-thousand in vet bills on their poodle. The poor thing is about six-hundred in human years, blind and deaf, and both its rear legs have been amputated due to cancer. They bought it one of those little harnesses with wheels on the back so it could get around but it developed arthritis in its front legs so it just stays in one spot now.

  I’m honestly not sure what the point of keeping the poodle alive any further is. It’s fed twice a day and carried outside to defecate but apart from that, it just lies on the couch struggling to breathe and smelling like weird warm cheese. Possibly from vomiting every five minutes from the bucket of painkillers it’s on every day.

  “What’s the funnel for?”

  “Time for her pills.”

  “You don’t think, you know, it might be time?”

  “No, plenty of life left in the old gal yet.”

  “Where?”

  “She’ll be right as rain after her operation next week.”

  “Another operation? How many does that make?”

  “Eighty-two.”

  “What’s this one for?”

  “The cancer moved to her front legs. She’s having them removed. And her tongue.”

  “Just let the poor fucking thing die, Jack.”

  “No.”

  I’m fairly certain Jack and Carol are going to end up with nothing but the poodle’s head on some kind of apparatus to keep the brain functioning. They’ll argue that she’s ‘part of the family’ and post pictures of the head wearing a Santa hat on their joint Facebook page at Christmastime. People will comment, “OMG!! So cute!!!!!!!!!” and, “She’s looking so well!” and Jack and Carol will respond with, “Yes, two more operations to remove her jaw and nose and she’ll be fit as a fiddle. We’ve set up a Gofundme page to cover some of the veterinary costs as we’re $500,000 in arrears and living in our car by a river.”

  I get that people love their pets but there has to be a point where people say enough is enough. I’m pretty much ready to have our dogs put down when their toenails need clipping. Or when Holly orders $300 worth of crap from Chewy.com.

  “Do they actually need any more dog toys, Holly?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a huge pile of them in the corner and at least fifty under the couch.”

  “They get bored of their old toys. Look! This one’s an octopus!”

  “The dogs don’t know what an octopus is. It’s shaped like an octopus to please the owner, not the pet. To them, it’s just a ball with eight pieces of rope attached. Like all their other balls with rope attached.”

  “Bullshit. They’ve been to the beach. Look! This one’s a dinosaur. Rawr!”

  Holly once ordered steps for the dogs. Carpeted steps. So the dogs could walk up carpeted steps to get onto our bed. The bed the dogs aren’t allowed on. She went with the green carpet colour option because, “It looks like grass, the dogs will think they’re running up a hill.”

  I threw the steps out while Holly was at work because A. Our dogs are huge - both can just step onto the bed, and B. They looked like one of those sets photographers sit children on to take studio photos. Usually there’d be a sunny day backdrop, maybe with a field, but in this case it was a bed.

  “You don’t think it looks a bit molesty?”

  “What?”

  “All it’s missing is a camera on a tripod and a frightened child undressing.”

  “You hate the dogs, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  When Holly arrived home and discovered I’d thrown the steps out, she stated, “Well that was a waste of three-hundred and forty dollars.”

  New Market

  An hour westish of Washington DC, in the Shenandoah Valley, lies a ring of houses built around a garbage dump named New Market. Technically it’s a town, but technically Waffle House is a restaurant. New Market doesn’t have a Waffle House. It doesn’t have much of anything. It used to have a hardware store called Randy’s but they shut down last year. I went there once to buy a replacement angle grinder, after accidentally grinding through the electrical cord of the one I had, but they only sold clamps and fridge filters so I went to Lowe’s instead. It does have a Dollar General store but purchasing anything from there requires communicating with one of the locals (of which 84% are registered sex offenders) who only speak Newmarketese - a language spoken by placing the tongue on the roof of the mouth and using only the consonants N and H.

  A standard exchange might go along the lines of:

  “Morning. How are you today?”

  “Nh.”

  “That’s good. Just a pack of Ma
rlboro, please.”

  “Nhn?”

  “No, the ones next to those. To your left. No, your other le... yes, that’s them.

  “Nnh n Nnnh?”

  “Debit thanks.”

  “Nhnn nn n nhhh.”

  “You too. And thank you for not raping me.”

  “Nh nhn.”

  It’s as if the surrounding towns rounded up all of their idiots, child molesters, and fat curly-haired women onto buses, drove to New Market, and dropped them off.

  “Right, everybody off the bus. This is your town, you live here now. Put plastic wishing wells in your front yards and leave the huge price tags on them... Carl, are you masturbating?”

  “Nhn.”

  “Don’t lie, I can see you in the big mirror.”

  The town actually grew from a single tavern, built in the mid 1700s, which catered to those traversing the arse-end of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The tavern isn’t there anymore, it’s a Dollar General store now. A trading post was added in the early 1800s and, over time, the area became a destination for local farmers to sell crops and hunters to sell meat and pelts - hence the eventual name change from The Swinging Nigger Tavern to New Market.