5,000 units of coffee infusion administered intravenously, stat.

If you set up your coffee cup and filter, boil water in your teapot, then at the last moment catch yourself about to pour boiling water into your coffee grinder instead of the filter cone…

…you might need a cup of coffee.

Also, late yesterday morning while washing a load of laundry (Yes, my shoulder has improved to the point where I can just barely agitate laundry, which is a blessing because all the oracles say the weather may be about to go to shit) I got a phone call from my good neighbors D&L, wanting to be sure I had Little Bear put away because they were coming over in a few minutes. Which is to say, they wanted to drop by during their daily horse ride.

And a picturesque sight they were, too; though spending most of their adult lives as California professionals, both D and L grew up as much more actively rural people than me, not to mention far more intelligent about managing their lives, and now that they’ve backed off on the 24/7 work schedule portion of their retirements they have spent a lot of money on horses and tack and it turns out they’re both actually excellent riders. They look like a Marlboro commercial.

And this reminds me of something every time I encounter them: Horses in movies, like guns in movies, are never accurately depicted. In a movie you see gangsters or soldiers or whatever blithely blazing away with guns indoors, and nobody ever so much as winces at the destructive pain in their ears. I sometimes wonder how many youngsters have deafened themselves by shooting a gun they thought was just going to emit a polite “Pew, pew?”

Anyway, horses are also completely different from what a lifetime of seeing them in movies would cause you to believe. In movies, cowboys or calvary or whatever treat their horses like sports cars; jump on, gallop for an hour across broken ground, casually toss your reins across the hitching post outside Miss Kittie’s Saloon and Whorehouse. In fact horses aren’t like that at all. As a hobby, I guess I can see the charm but as working animals, the obscene downsides of using horses as the only source of non-human motive power led directly to the invention of the automobile, and not a moment too soon.

When dealing with horses, every single thing you try to do, the horse gets a vote. And I’ve yet to meet one that will go along in a servile manner; they’re aware that they’re bigger and stronger than you, and so you need to constantly exert superior will until it’s just less hassle for the horse to go along with your program. Even then you will find yourself continually hampered by the truth behind the old aphorism, “A horse only fears two things: Things that move, and things that don’t.” A horse’s first defense against anything is to run away as fast as it can, which may require it to first dump this heavy load off its back. Even the steadiest horse will shy at some unexplained movement in the brush, or any other unexpected thing, without notice and (unless you’re constantly on your guard) with possibly career-ending consequences. Within a five-mile radius I personally know four people who have been seriously injured on horseback (or rather, suddenly off horseback) in just the past couple of years.

I mention this because when D&L arrived they were leading rather than riding their horses Bud and Coal. And when I asked why, L replied that Coal, a lovable goofball but flighty as hell and the reason L will probably suffer a broken back any day now, spooked at the sight of the Secret Lair and refused to approach after already being made uneasy by the close confines of the cliffs in my part of the wash. This was in country that he gets a walkie through nearly every single day, excepting those days when he’s been injured after picking some brainless fight with Bud and getting his ass – literally – kicked.

Seriously, the more I’ve been around horses in the past ten years, the more I appreciate cars.