Alchemy Anyone?

Temporarily Out of Service

2008-01-16T01:33:00.000-06:00

I guess it’s pretty obvious by now that my blogging endeavors have come to a screeching halt and I am guilty of the sin of silent neglect.

It wasn’t my intention to simply disappear, it just happened that way. It has been a frustrating time since the back injections offered some hope for recovery, only to be followed by a disappointing return to the same old aching bullshit. I felt like Pavlov’s Dog, even a passing glance at my keyboard made me grit my teeth and clutch my back. A day turned into a week, a week to a month, and here I am.

I am currently getting just enough mileage out of my spinal column to keep my business afloat and my potter’s wheel from gathering too many cobwebs. As much as I have come to look forward to visiting blogs, commenting and posting, I cannot survive without work and my clay addiction must be fed. More than anything, I have my sweet Jilly to consider. She is a woman of infinite patience, unconditional love, and boundless compassion. Even so, she has enough to deal with without me piling on additional miseries that are arguably elective in nature.

I hope to be back to blogging in the future. My back is actually getting better over time, but it is still a bit of a roller coaster situation with the ups and downs. I can’t predict when I will be able to risk posting, but I should be able to start visiting and commenting again, hopefully within the next few weeks.

Bye for now.

Art Imitates my Cranky Disposition

2007-09-26T02:16:00.000-05:00

I am going to elaborate on the injustices perpetrated against me by my ungrateful bones and unfaithful innards. After all I’ve done for them in the last few years, I deserve better.

My diet options are being chiseled away at an alarming rate by organs that arbitrarily decide they will no longer perform the functions for which they are intended.

I’ve given up a lot of delicacies over the years. I waved a fond farewell to liver and onions, chicken gizzards, wieners, potted meat and spam. Then it was mushrooms, carrots, legumes and nuts. No more peanut butter, bratwursts, aged cheese, or un-distilled alcoholic beverages. Goodbye my precious beer. I tried not to be too disappointed when shellfish, crustaceans, beef, turkey, chicken, asparagus, spinach, and cauliflower sailed over the horizon, never to return. And the list goes on.

Just as it seemed that I might learn to live happily alongside dry lettuce sandwiches on stale bread, unflavored water and air, the gods saw fit to crumble my brittle soul with words that I prayed would never come.

Please, oh mighty Zeus, I beseech you, do not render my last delicious condiment verboten, do not take away the only taste sensation that separates me from culinary oblivion, do not cast me into the bottomless pit of grocery doom. Take anything, take my homemade buttermilk cathead biscuits, pluck my pathetic testicles from their shriveled sack, just leave me be with my glorious vinegar you dirty bastard! Please! Not my precious vinegar!

It happened, vinegar is gone, and along with it all of the things that vinegar makes so incomprehensibly gratifying. Cheap yellow mustard, ketchup, even mayonnaise, gone. The giant sour dill pickles and pickled jalapenos, they have vanished from my life. Sauerkraut, olives, German potato salad…poof* Cucumber salad, deviled eggs, vinaigrettes, all gone. Malt vinegar, rice vinegar, cider vinegar, vinegar vinegar, they are no longer for me.

Think of something you really like to eat. Chances are it has vinegar in it. Chocolate ice cream has vinegar in it and so do big, fluffy, buttery sweet cinnamon rolls. Think of a warm glazed doughnut, fresh out of the hot grease canal, that’s right, vinegar! The next time you find yourself in synchronized passion with the one you love, arms and legs entangled in delirious ecstasy, quiet whispers giving way to uncontrollable wails of elation, you can get down on your knees and thank vinegar for making it all possible! Don’t ask me how or why, I don’t know.

This was the last piece of pottery that I made prior to that day when sweet innocent vinegar was torn asunder and unceremoniously ripped from my embrace. I was still happy then, I can see it in the reflection of the copper and iron that dance across the shiny surface.

Then I went to my dark place. A place where apple juice and popcorn are all I have left. It can’t be too long before they come for that too. I don’t care, take it, I’ll eat lawn mower clippings and dirt.

So this is what my clay has come to.

I Hate my Skeleton

2007-09-16T11:05:00.000-05:00

It is true that this blog has been seriously neglected for too long. My spine is the culprit. I can manage only short sprints at the keyboard and those have been reserved for the increasingly difficult job of keeping my little business afloat.

By the way, they don’t call them “spinal taps” anymore. They are referred to as “lumbar punctures,” or “LP’s by those too busy to spare the extra syllables. Sometimes LP’s leak, and when that happens, you get nasty headaches. Mine leaked and I’ve been lying on the couch now for three days in an effort to forestall having a “blood patch” procedure performed. That’s where they draw blood from you and inject it into the leaking LP, which patches the hole and theoretically ends the headaches.

The headaches are dissipating and my estranged spinal column is slowly coming to the conclusion that is just can’t live without me. I’m not one to hold a grudge, but I’m not sure I’m ready to let that unfaithful piece of shit come waltzing back into my life as if nothing ever happened. We’ll see how that works out I guess.

The Business of Monkeys

2007-08-06T16:54:00.001-05:00

The data that resulted from this study is, in my humble opinion, lacking in credibility for two reasons.

Reason number one: While the monkeys were stabbed, they were not robbed. If monkeys are to be utilized as human analogues, the sociological impact of the violent action should have to be factored into the equation. It is my understanding that in Humans, stabbing typically precedes robbery.

I heard nothing at all about whether or not the monkeys were verbally harangued during the stabbing. Do you know anybody who has ever been stabbed where they have not also been verbally insulted in the process? Me neither, and that is reason number two.

While I’m sure they meant well, I think they should leave the animal stabbing to the trained professionals at the cosmetics and pharmaceutical companies.

Wait, I’m receiving an update. Apparently, no monkeys were stabbed after all and it was all just an outrageous and totally believable hoax. As my sympathetic feelings towards monkeys are in the public domain, you can imagine my relief.

Jungle Fever

2007-07-30T03:17:00.000-05:00

It was the late 1960’s. The law of the jungle was broadcast every Sunday afternoon on a television show called Wild Kingdom. While obviously staged and comically over-produced, as wildlife programs go it was the only game in town. The master of ceremonies was a guy named Marlin Perkins, a kindly old grey haired circus ringmaster with a cottony voice and little concern for the Prime Directive. Each week, assorted wilderness beasts underwent detailed analysis in severely sanitized terms. This was, and I’ve said it many times before, an unfortunate manifestation of vestigial Victorian modesty. Stupid Victorians!

Most of the truly interesting aspects of animal life never made it past the censors, which is too bad considering there just isn’t a whole lot going on in the life of your typical Gnu when farting, crapping, screwing and birthing are deemed dangerously destructive to the developing moral framework of red-blooded American mother’s sons and daughters. By virtue of a stroke of the pen and a shear of the scissor, those natural facts of life found their way into the editor’s trashcan.

Prior to modern times, homo-sapiens and their progenitors had survived countless thousands of generations (300 generations for my Christian Fundamentalist compadres) of direct exposure to sexual activity and bodily functions of the foulest biological origin, and we somehow survived it all.

Things are different now. We are protected from the details. We throw buckets of water on mating dogs and blur out images of humongous elephant baloneys while clinging desperately to the image of the peaceable kingdom. It turns out it’s more of a queendom, but that’s another story. At the end of the day, righteous indignation keeps us all safe and sound, insulated from the most profound displays of physical attraction. Goddamn Victorians! Did I mention I hate those bastards?

Off the soapbox and back to my point, in the early days, nature film producers found themselves in a quandary. How do you create a compelling narrative when the star of your show spends most of the day eating grass and defecating? It was the predators in general and the lions in particular that filled the entertainment gap. You never saw them fart but that was ok because killing makes for some righteous Sunday afternoon relaxation with the family. The Victorians were apparently ok with that.

--------------------Bad Hair Day--------------------

Lions always put on a good show; a well-regulated social order and proficiency at the kill provided ample metaphor for their naturally predatory human counterparts. On the hunt, the big kitties are all about efficiency. They seek out the weak and the lame. To a predator, weakness is relative. In the absence of an obvious injury, a sneeze or a bad hair day might spark their interest. Prey animals in lion country pay a heavy price for even subtle deviations from normal behavior; few of them die of old age. Instead, they take early retirement, an option that typically involves being processed into little furry turds.

Cut to the scene of a shade-tree in the heat of the day, lounging predators nurse distended bellies and lick blood from each other’s faces. Marlin Perkins was telling my story. In those days, I was in almost every sense of the word one of those little furry cat turds that littered the ground under the shade tree. But I’ve told that story before and I don’t want to go over it again, gotta stay focused.

-------------------------Definitely Not An Eagle-------------------------

More than likely, you have imagined yourself as one of those animals, a leopard doing what leopards do or an eagle taking it easy on a thermal updraft. The animal that you imagine yourself as says something about how you view yourself, but maybe not in an obvious way. Maybe you do yearn to sink your teeth into the warm flesh a still twitching Gnu. It could be you’re just tired of looking over your shoulder, had enough of people telling you what to do. Chances are, given the choice and knowing what that choice would entail, you might choose a vulture. They don’t kill, they don’t get in any big hurry, they just take it nice and easy until the quadrupeds get a bellyful and then swoop in for a little buffet action. I think the mating hierarchy is a little less strict for vultures, which is a huge concern. Consider the lion, if you expect to get a little bit of that furry hind shank, you pretty much have to be the biggest, hairiest, meanest motherf*cker on the block. Any less and you’re left skulking the perimeter, watching the action from the sidelines.

----------------It's ok, Daddy's just tickling mommy!----------------

The same is true for all of the really cool animals that you might imagine yourself to be. All accept one, the Bonobo Chimp. They are fairly intelligent, mostly vegetarian, and they are all about scratching each others’ itch and keeping the flea population to a manageable level. Also, they have sex with whoever is in the mood, anytime of the day, any day of the week. They might be the only animal in the peaceable queendom with no rules when it comes to “making a ham sandwich” if you know what I mean. They do it face to face; doggy style, sixty-nine and three-ways are rumored. They do it hanging upside down, swinging from a branch, they trade food for sex, and there are also legends that have them ”playing the rusty trombone.” I would pass on that. They don’t care who sees their scary sex faces either. I find that a little disturbing too. If I were a Bonobo Chimp, I think I would tone that down a little, unless it was after dark, then who cares. Of course, my information on them is a little dated. If it turns out they’re a bunch of assholes like all the other jerks in the animal queendom, I don’t want to hear about it. Just let me have that one fantasy without ruining it with “data.” And no, I don’t consider having sex with hairy-assed monkeys a personal goal. But if I had to be an animal, that’s the one I would be.

Tomato Rancher

2007-07-04T02:04:00.001-05:00

----------------Harvested Yesterday---------------

Tomatoes are my favorite vegetables. Technically, tomatoes are fruits. According to those who know, they are fruits because they contain seeds, but then so do cucumbers, green beans and walnuts. By that standard, my testicles are also fruits. As evidence of that fact I point to Deuteronomy. Does the Old Testament not warn of the dangers of spilling your seed upon the ground? Do I not consistently fail to heed that warning? Either my nuts are fruits, or tomatoes are vegetables. You can’t have it both ways. Where tomatoes are concerned, the fruit versus vegetable debate is a slippery slope, a slope made even more slippery by seed spilt to no good end. It is a viscous [sic] cycle indeed.

The answer to the riddle is in the context. In my kitchen, those glorious crimson orbs (tomatoes I mean) are treated as vegetables in every sense of the word. Many experts will concede that the manner in which tomatoes are typically processed in the kitchen supports the contention that they can be correctly referred to as veggies. So it looks like my nadicles are not fruits after all.

As I said before, tomatoes are my favorite vegetable. As I stroll the aisles in the vegetable section of the local supermarket, I point and laugh at the waxy, tough skinned, pinkish-green knobs that pass for tomatoes these days. Sometimes in the off-season, when I have failed to practice good tomato husbandry, I fumble through the grocery store pile, reaching far to the back of the bin hoping to find an overlooked specimen, one that is just a little less abominable than the others. But they are all the same. I’ve never eaten a tumor before, but I have the feeling I would not be totally surprised by the experience.

----------------A single day of picking----------------

I’ve raised tomatoes almost every year for the last thirty-five years. I cook with them, can them, prepare them in every conceivable permutation, and otherwise devour them in logic-defying quantities all season long.
From the day my first tomato ripens on the vine each spring, until the last lid on the last jar of tomato sauce is popped off, my intestines maintain a state of agitation due to the high acid content of the varieties I prefer to grow. I liken tomatoes to one of my least favorite deities. They provide happiness and they promise more of the same for all of the days of your life. But they are also menacing and vengeful. If you rely too heavily on them for your daily ration of ecstasy, you will surely turn your blistered colon inside-out on some unhappy day. Not that it’s a bad thing.

These are my tomato plants this year. I trim the tallest ones down to seven and a half feet to keep them safely inside the tomato prison I built for them several years ago. I don’t have time to grow no stinking garden, so I have a garden that requires absolutely no effort to maintain. It has an underground watering system, a weed barrier so there are no weeds to pull, retractable netting, and an electric fence to keep my competition at bay.

The birds jockey for position around the top edge of the frame. They watch my tomatoes ripen to a luscious dark red, but there will be nary a beak hole in a single tomato all season long. The large birds take out their frustrations on the smaller birds and they all fight amongst themselves. Sometimes the tomatoes are almost within pecking distance through the net. I make sure my little tomatoes stay just out of reach of their filthy beaks. Those are my stinking tomatoes you damn dirty birds! My winged adversaries stay pissed-off all season long.

The squirrels run headlong into the netting over and over again. They climb it and try to dig under it. The squirrels don’t really like tomatoes, they just like to bite holes in them and knock them to the ground until there are none left on the vine. There have been a few in the past who figured out how easy it is to chew through the netting. I live-trap the smart ones and provide them with a one-way ticket to a city park down the road. There they will assimilate into a population of expatriate bushy tailed rodents who failed to address my tomato plants with an appropriate level of deference.

The worst of them all are the raccoons. When they found my tomatoes about four years ago, they breached the net barrier in less than one second. They devastated crop after crop. They ripped off limbs and ate their fill, lounging in piles of greenery with tomato juice on their paws and all over their faces. I tried all manner of defensive action until one evening; I looked out the window and saw twelve coons, exactly twelve, having a goddamn party in the tomato patch and laying waste to my jalapeño plants. I waded in amongst them with a paintball gun. By the time the last one made it up and over the fence, their fur matted with mutli-colored dye, I was sure they had had enough. Where brains are concerned, I guess size does matter; they were back thirty minutes later as if nothing ever happened. I installed the electric fence around my tomatoes the next day and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of them since.
Note: With the exception of a few sore rumps from the paintball incident, no animals were harmed during the tomato wars and no immediate family members were separated. It was primarily old bachelor males and breeding age reprobates amongst the squirrels and coons who were given their marching orders.

--------The first of this season's canned tomatoes--------

Being relieved of concern for almost all known threats to my precious tomatoes, I harvest and eat at will. However, as with any ecosystem where natural predators have been eliminated, overpopulation reaches critical mass early in the season. Rather than re-introduce the tomato’s natural enemies, I choose to fill that vacuum myself. It is for this reason that I often grip my belly and contemplate how much more my colon can take. According to my calculations, my colon will take all I can shove into it until the first frost comes sometime in December. At that point, I settle into the off season with the help of stacks of home-canned tomato products, e.g., tomato sauce, crushed tomatoes, stewed halves, and so on. Some will end up in spicy salsas, others in soups and the odd lasagna.

Blog Loot

2007-06-12T02:59:00.000-05:00

I won a box of internet loot in a caption contest at Judith’s blog a while back. The treasure chest traveled thousands of miles across the ocean, from Ireland all the way to Texas, arriving at a post office no more than a few miles from our house.
I have more than one address, in fact, I have several. There’s the business address and the home address and also a post office box. I have packages sent to the P.O. Box because our postman gets bent out of shape over having to get out of his little postman-mobile when boxes show up. I installed a larger mailbox, the biggest I could find, still not big enough.
Long story short, I was terrified of giving Judith the wrong address, international shipping after all, so I was very careful when I emailed the info. So careful in fact that I screwed up the zip code. The post office promptly sent my winnings all the way back to Ireland. I am known as a very meticulous person, anal in fact, and yet still prone to bouts of buffoonery.

Judith re-sent the package and it arrived here a few days ago, tattered and obviously opened and resealed, possibly three or four times judging by the layers of different kinds of tape. Those postal handlers are a curious breed.

The first item is a she-demon riding a banana. She’s holding her decapitated head in her lap and seems overly excited to be doing so. Naturally, I scoured Deuteronomy and Leviticus in an effort to put a name to the beast, but I had no luck at all. This seemed more than a little odd to me because, while Leviticus might occasionally fall short as a spiritual “search engine” of sorts, Deuteronomy never lets me down. Hmmm.

The second item is a bottle of what is described in the fine print as “Brown Sauce.” I checked and the contents are in fact brown. All appeared perfectly innocent at this point except for the name on the front label, “HP.”
As many of you are aware, I was recently victimized by a treacherous band of thieves and liars. Through several blog posts, I described how I had been driven to the brink of technicidal rage and ultimately screwed out of a sizeable sum of money by a name-brand computer manufacturer. Month after month, they plowed deeper into my pocket. Time after time, they thrust their faulty equipment into my office. I begged for mercy, they responded by flipping me over and toasting the backside. I threatened them with legal action; they transferred me to an operative who called himself “Merle Ricardo.” His job was to wear me down through stuttering miscommunication and when the time was right, to throw sand in my crack in preparation for corporate sodomy. Time and time again, they plundered my village and now, with my wounds still fresh and reeking of burnt wiring and extruded polycarbonate, I get a suspicious package in the mail containing a bottle of “HP” sauce and a voodoo doll in blood-red shoes armed with a banana.
Judith, if that is your real name, I never mentioned the name of the computer manufacturer, how could you have known? And what about this, Merle Ricardo is the only person who has ever threatened to “banana me with egg salad service.” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but it is all becoming clear to me now.

For those of you unconvinced by the evidence presented thus far, consider the remaining contents of the box.
A cigarette smoking nun! A nun that is smoking a cigarette! When you add the words nun and cigarette together phonetically, drop the “nun” then join the new word with Merle, you get “Merle Re-gar-te.” That’s right, Merle Ricardo!

A butt plug, carved from a single piece of bone, human bone in my estimate, or wood maybe. Either way, it is certainly designed to inflict pain and not pleasure as the ribbed surface might otherwise suggest. Once again, it all seems innocent enough until you consider that I had on numerous occasions told Merle Ricardo that he should shove all manner of things up his ass. I am certain one of my suggestions included a block of wood. I’m usually not a rude person but I assumed he couldn’t understand most of what I was saying anyway.

And last, but not least, a bar of “Dairy Milk” chocolate. Judith, or whatever they call you at corporate headquarters, I finally understand Merle Ricardo’s bizarre directive that I “put dairy milk bars in Henry’s chicken spleen.” You can tell your overlords that I’m on to their scheme. Tell them that I ate the chocolate, stowed the banana riding she-devil in a well secured box of Christmas ornaments, taped the nun to the top of my monitor, sanded the corners off the plug and they can say adios to the HP sauce.
It turns out that your so-called “brown sauce” has nothing at all to do with feces. Who could fault me for thinking “brown sauce” was a euphemism. Nope, brown sauce is what we in this part of the world call “bar-b-que” sauce. I rebottled it, added garlic and a couple of fresh jalapeños from the garden and I will be putting it to use on the grill next weekend. We will be having bar-b-qued chicken spleens, but I’m sure your sources have already informed you of that.

Monkey Wrenched

2007-06-06T00:56:00.000-05:00

Testing, testing, one two three. Is this thing on? Check! Check! Check!
Ok, thank you all for being here this evening.

-----Disclaimer: Yes, I know it's not a male monkey.-----

The first items on the agenda are my testicles. As most of you know, I have no shame. My innards (and outwards) are pretty much an open book. What little humility I might have still possessed a short time ago evaporated in the wee hours of a Saturday morning, 2am or so, twenty-three days ago. I was hanging out, minding my own damn business, trying to remember what I had done that day to cause my coconuts to register such discontent. One minute I’m considering a dull ache, a moment later I’m in the trusty old fetal position. I have found that position to be a versatile maneuver for trying times. It has amazing analgesic properties. Anyway, knowing that my first-aid kit contained not a single remedy for testicular tribulation, I began the process of deciding which ER should have the displeasure of seeing me on their doorstep once again.

Shuffling bent over into the triage area, I was greeted by a check-in droid who could not have been old enough to drive, I guessed ten or eleven years old. She handed me the familiar form to fill out and asked me why I needed to see a doctor. I told her my nuts were hurting really bad and I asked her what I should put in the corresponding section of the form. I mercifully cut short her endless re-phrasing and dancing about the issue by bluntly telling her I would write, ‘my nuts hurt really bad.” She said ok.

She asked me to describe the pain on a scale of one to ten while directing my attention to the little placard on the wall. Every ER has one, ten little stick-figure faces illustrating severity of pain in ascending order. The face of level-one is sort of a baleful stare. Stick-figure number ten has tears flowing and a mouth drawn in a perfect “O.” The “O” is hospital code for scaring the shit out of the other patients with high pitched howling and uncontrollable sobbing. It is always a good idea to add at least two frowny faces to your score in these situations, trust me on that one. I pleaded a solid ten with breached bulkhead imminent and then prepared to disgrace myself for affect. I didn’t have to go that far because they weren’t very busy anyway.

While being wheeled to my curtained-off cubicle, I noted a consistent trend in the ER staff, more rosy-cheeked children, like a middle-school lunch room with kids running about in lab coats and scrubs. I also noticed there was not a single male employee in the bunch. I’ve said it before; I prefer a female urologist, or any ologist for that matter, when it comes to handling the tenderloins. Female “ologists” are naturally more empathic and gentle. This was a primary concern at that time because I was rapidly taking on the appearance of those red-assed monkeys on the Discovery Channel.

The ER physician turned out to be female, which was a good thing, but she looked even younger than the receptionist. She asked the obvious questions. I hadn’t been kicked in the nuts or paid for sex in the recent past. She read my chart and posed her questions with a distressingly pained look on her face. Her demeanor spoke of dark times to come. I feared her runaway sympathy might hinder a thorough administration of medical care and I was getting increasingly creeped out by her pigtails and knee socks. I was about to receive a digital inspection of my comically inflamed man-parts from Pippi Longstocking. The nurse who entered the room twice during the pre-prod setup awkwardly averted her gaze and stammered at my request for a drink of water. There was plenty of irony to share with everybody that evening, very strange.

Back to the business at hand, with my hospital gown hiked and the danger zone exposed, Doctor Longstocking advised me brace myself for a whole lot of hurt. For the first few seconds, I was thinking, that’s not so bad. I guess it took a while for the nerve endings to recover from the initial shock, and then, discomfort! It spread through my pelvic region, up the spinal cord, into the brain and on to whatever specific region is responsible for relaying the signals back down the spinal cord, through the pelvic region and right back where it started from.

The examination now complete, Doctor L told me to start breathing and she would order up some morphine. I told her I had to work the next day, refused the morphine because sometimes I’m a stupid f*cking idiot, and I opted for Tylenol instead. In short order, another baby-faced woman-child carted me into the ultrasound room and started treating my poor nadicles like billiard balls, batting them about with a gel-coated tool resembling a post-war Norelco Electric Shaver, at least from my contorted vantage point. I gave the ultrasound tech two options, morphine, or stampede. I didn’t want to scare my fellow patients, but it was out of my hands.

I think it was for punishment that they administered the morphine in the form of a meat-shot in the upper front part of my left leg. My kiwis quit hurting but the morphine never did dull the pain from the knot that formed at the injection site. It must have been opposite day at the ER, I prefer a certain level of logic in my world but I can make due with less.

I did get a diagnosis, doctors call it “Orchitis” I’m on the twenty-second day of a twenty-five day course of antibiotics, which of course means I haven’t crapped in twenty-two days but considering the alternative, I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Unfortunately, because of all of this, my spine doctor refused to administer a third and final spinal injection. My back was on the mend, only to be thrown a curve and left to fend for itself until this other situation clears up.

And this is the story of why I haven’t been blogging in the last several weeks. By the time I finish each day’s worth of desk and fieldwork in a desperate attempt to keep my little business afloat, and take care of all of the home-life chores that fall within my area of jurisdiction, the thought of spending even one more second at a keyboard has all the appeal of a bathtub full of squids, but without the fun parts.

Let’s check the score. According to my research, in the last twelve years I’ve had every malady known to medical science except for Distemper and Monkey Pox. I’ve noticed my monkey has been a little poxy today, so I might be able to cross that one off the list soon. Damn monkey pox!

To See or Not to See (There Is No Question)

2007-04-18T01:38:00.000-05:00

I’ve seen this issue come up occasionally. I have heard the question dealt with on talk radio a few times and bloggers sometimes argue the pros and cons. Oddly enough, most people seem to have strong opinions one way or the other.

The question: Is it necessary, advisable, and/or appropriate to ascertain the effectiveness of your wiping maneuvers in order to determine when the job requires no further action on your part, i.e., should you review the results of your final wipe before reaching for the little chrome lever?

You might think that the debate would hinge on the issue of cleanliness. Logically, for me anyway, subjective definitions of the word “clean” and effective strategies for attaining a state of clean should be the only points of contention. I guess if it were that simple, there would be no public airing of grievances, accusations of negligence and incidents of indignant anger that keep popping up.

I figured it was time to lay the issue to rest, so I compiled and condensed the most commonly occurring points of view from both sides of the debate; two fictional men will present these arguments here in first-person format.

Neither of the imaginary antagonists are women. Why? Because based on the limited data at hand, it appears that most women do look before they leap and most are horrified to learn that many men do not, therefore, they skew the statistics unfairly in one direction. Besides, Jilly tells me that most women will have stopped reading this post after the second paragraph, when it became obvious that the subject is even worse than shit; it is about getting it out of your crevice.

I don’t understand that position at all considering that sphincters, rectums and human waste are a never ending source of entertainment. Anyway, my interpretations of the two primary points of view are as follows.

Position 1:
I heave my final log and I retrieve an enormous amount of wood-pulp-based-cleaning-material from the spool hanging beside the bathroom fixture on which I sit. I drag the haphazard wad of absorbent, and highly abrasive, material across my danger zone.

Things get a little murky at this point. I’m not sure of the mechanisms involved but it is during this scraping maneuver that thousands of miniature butt gnomes are deposited in my crack.

These tiny gnomes diligently search every nook and cranny. They set to work in a frantic effort to restore my danger zone to a pre-soiled condition. It is for this reason that I feel no need to look at the fruits of my labor. I have complete trust in my gnomes and as far as I know, they have never let me down, ever! Besides, if I were to look at that wad of paper and actually see my own deu deu, I would vomit.

I think people who look at their own dung are snobbish nasty freaks. I finish up, spray myself down with Axe Body Spray, and then leave the house for a few hours.

Position 2:

I have deposited my final offering and I retrieve a conservative quantity of wood-pulp-based-cleaning-material from the spool hanging beside the sanitary porcelain bowl on which I sit.
I pass a neatly folded pad of luxuriant Charmin (with Aloe and Vitamin E) gently but firmly across my holy ground, and then repeat.

Of course, there is no need to view the results of my first or second swipe since I am educated. I understand the dynamics of digested animal and vegetable waste. I also know that in my crack, there will be no army of butt gnomes to do my dirty work for me. It is my mess, and it is up to me to clean it up. It is for this reason that I look.

More often than not, on the third swipe I find the task has been satisfactorily completed to current cultural standards. Sometimes though, instead of unblemished Charmin there in my hand, I see vile filth and I am grateful that I performed a visual inspection. I repeat the process with visual examination until that sucker is polished squeaky clean.

People who fail to examine their work are nasty repulsive freaks. My ass is a temple and I have trained it never to offend; I will not desecrate it with dingleberries. I finish up and feel no need to saturate myself with over-the-counter stink abatement products or stuff my pockets with potpourri to camouflage the fetid vapors that would otherwise breach the thin fabric barrier between my ass and my fellow human beings.

I will now sit in Judgment:

In the case of onlookers versus non-lookers, I rule that personal sensitivities are doing a great disservice to personal hygiene. Bottom line, you must look. Unless your body excretes waste like Spock’s coffin in The Wrath of Khan, which I believe is not possible, you do what you have to do to get that thing clean enough to use as a serving dish for Thanksgiving turkey. Use a belt sander if you have to; just get the damn thing clean.

I can think of only a few scenarios where not looking is ok. Departure from even one of these requirements is a deal killer.

- Your spouse, partner, or date does not perform visual confirmation either and you live on another planet.

- You wash your undergarments in your own (non-public) washing machine or you take them down to the river on the end of a long stick and beat them against the rocks.

- You engage in no public activity that might surreptitiously cause your cheeks to spread.

If you have any lingering doubts, there’s no need to take my word for it, ask a granny, any granny. I’m glad I could help.

Needle Point

2007-04-05T00:48:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow morning, I will be laid out, locally anesthetized, and punctured with a needle. I have no problem with needles. I actually like needles especially when they are being used to deliver anesthesia of any flavor, local or otherwise.

The target of the aforementioned needle is my spine and I couldn’t be more thrilled about it. My back has been jacked up for maybe three months now and I’ve just about had enough of this shit. An MRI has confirmed that my skeleton is no longer performing the function for which it was intended, vertebras are degenerating and disks are “bulging.” I found a guy who says he can put me back in the saddle by poking a needle into my spine and injecting “something” into it. I’ll find out what that “something” is tomorrow.

I don’t really care what that mysterious “something” is, whether it be hammered goat testicles or motor oil, it just doesn’t matter at this point. I haven’t set foot in my pottery studio for months, my precious Les Paul is gathering dust and my biblical directives have been terribly neglected. What biblical directives you ask? Consult Deuteronomy, or maybe Leviticus, I can’t remember where it is but it goes something like this, “Go in unto thy brother’s wife and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother,” sorry, that’s not the one. I’m working by memory here but I’m pretty sure Gawd wants me to “know” my wife and “lay” with her or maybe it’s “on” her. The Laured and I don’t agree about…anything really, but I can get behind him on this point. Actually, I couldn’t care less what some jealous and wrathful deity thinks of my personal life, I just like saying “Gawd” and “Laured” almost as much as I like putting words in “quotations.” Bottom line, my back’s been giving me fits and I’m ready for that sweet, sweet needle.

Regarding my duties to wife, work and art, it is my potter’s wheel that has suffered the most neglect. My current state of physical torpor renders any thought of clayworking completely out of the question. So, as a memorial to the hunks of clay that are languishing in their plastic bags, I’m posting the results of my last Raku pottery firing extravaganza three long months ago.

I call this one "Urn." Seriously, I don't know where I come up with these names. Sometimes the pottery tries to name itself, stuff like "Despoiled Terra" or some other such lame self-indulgent nomenclature.

I call this one "Hopes and Dreams." Just kidding, I call this one "Urn." I prefer consistency.

I call this one "Urn," because to me, it just says "Urn."

I call this one "Urn with a smoke fired spout." I could explain why I named it that, but it's really personal and I'm not sure I trust you yet.

I don't have a name for this one yet, but I'm open to suggestions. I was thinking that maybe I would call it "Urn" but I'm just not sure.

Retribution Machine

2007-03-28T02:53:00.000-05:00

Many years ago, I worked for a mercifully short period of time in an office building. It was an interesting experience at first but it didn’t take long for the shine to wear off. Having spent so much of my life in close proximity to ripped Levis and steel-toed boots, I just assumed that a workplace noted for starched cotton shirts and men’s perfume would have more to offer in the categories of intelligence, honesty and civility. It appears that no amount of education will ever undo a hundred thousand years of natural selection (six thousand years for my gawd fearing friends). I have plenty to say about well-spoken liars and mealy-mouthed ass kissers but that will have to wait until another day because this post is about practical jokes.

Forgetting for a moment the misery of being cooped up with self-important nimrods and having to breathe their rank recycled air, I did meet a few people that I still consider good friends. None of them were natural born practical-jokers but they did ok for beginners. The gags started out small and fairly painless but eventually escalated to a level that could not be sustained. I knew the end was near when I walked into my little office to find what appeared to be a hundred pounds or so of trash piled everywhere. It was a simplistic gag but funny nonetheless. Then I noticed that several files that had been on my desk, files representing days of mind numbing data entry, had been dispersed in and around the detritus. The mound of trash consisted primarily of thousands of legal sized sheets of paper printed with black nondescript text. My missing documents fit the same description. I was so screwed. I used the downtime to plan my response.

The ring leader of that particular crime was a man of impressive dimensions, twelve feet tall with hands the size of ham-shanks. He was well over a thousand pounds of pure, unbridled teddy bear. Ok, he wasn’t that big, but he was big enough to warrant embellishment. I guess I could just hand over the cold hard data, but I think that would constitute negligence on my part. So that you might truly understand the enormity of this man’s physical presence, I submit the following.
I’m not a man hugger but every now and then I bow to social conscript and hug a man, always finishing with a hetero-style triple pat on the back. The triple pat is a common move that most men, even if they don’t use it, are familiar with. George Bush uses it on men and grieving widows alike. It is a maneuver that conveys the sentiment, “I’m hugging you but I’m not getting a boner.” There is a more modern version of the “homophobe hug” that protects against the accidental bumping of pee pees by employing a cross-the-body handshake. This method is fraught with affected machismo and is typically shunned by older males. Anyway, I did hug the big man once but a proper execution of the triple back pat was not possible due to the planetary scale of his person. I simply couldn’t reach around that far so I ended up patting him somewhere between his left nipple and armpit. I was terrified that he might think I was coming on to him and when I am terrified, I get a boner. We have never spoken of that event; he is truly a man of poise and decorum.

I have nothing but respect for the big man and I would almost never consider public humiliation an appropriate response to a practical joke, but he wouldn’t let up. He started sneaking up behind me during lunch excursions and hugging me. It was actually more grapple than hug, but to the random spectator, it was so much more than that. It typically went like this: He grabs me. I struggle. All heads turn in our direction. He looks at me like a porn star getting ready for the money shot and then he blows me a kiss. He finally stopped doing it when I retaliated by attaching myself to his leg at the checkout counter in a Soup-R-Salad. I felt like a Chihuahua dry-humping a redwood tree. He decided his little gag had run its course and we spoke no further of it.

Time passed and he thought I had forgotten about the paper incident. All the while, I was planning and building the Retribution Machine. The machine itself was an over-engineered manifestation of an anal inclination to convert two-dimensional pieces of metal into three dimensional objects, mostly for utilitarian purposes. The Retribution Machine started out as a flat sheet of light gauge galvanized sheet metal, a short length of pre-punched angle iron and a box of bolts, rivets and plastic tubing. For all of the resources expended in its construction, it was destined to be used as nothing more than a diversion, a gadget intended to clear the decks for the coup-de-grace.

-------------------------Front------------------------

-------------------------Back Side-------------------------

This is the Retribution Machine. It is a trip wire triggered device that sets off two cans of Silly String and an air horn. I originally designed it as a remotely controlled tracked vehicle, like a little tank, but I ran out of time and had to deploy it to active duty before completing the motorized carriage.

On his day of reckoning, I took the big man’s office door off its hinges and hid it in the file room to make sure it didn’t interfere with my setup. I then removed the fluorescent tubes from the overhead lights and closed the blinds. I tied the blind cords into knots and tucked them away out of reach, all except for one, the cord I wanted my friendly giant to tug on. I had just finished setting the trap and was sitting at his desk admiring my work when I heard a noise and looked up to see him standing at the doorway. He noticed the door was gone, saw me sitting in the dark, and knew something was up. He surveyed the office from a safe distance just outside the doorway. After checking overhead for the old water bucket gag and then hitting the light switch to no avail, he hesitated, allowing his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. Then he saw the Retribution Machine sitting on the desk a few feet away. After a short study of the situation, he narrowed his eyes and grinned, nodding his head slightly as if to say, “Not this time buddy.” Then he crossed the threshold. The five-pound monofilament fishing line serving as trip wire made contact at mid torso and began to stretch as he moved forward. I thought it might snap before putting my plan into motion. I saw the thin crease in his shirt deepen as the line pulled tight; surely he would notice and back off. As it turned out, he did not notice and the line held as long as it needed to hold. The smug look on his face gave way to wide eyes and gaping mouth. The blaring horn froze him in his tracks long enough for my twin cans of Silly String to cover his face, shoulders and belly with wet slimy gunk.
Phase one: Check!

Mr. “Poise & Decorum” closed his mouth and quickly regained his composure. “Yeah” he said, “I saw that coming from a mile away.” I said nothing as he moved toward the blinds. He searched for, but could not find, the cord for the first blind and then moved a few feet to his right, reaching for the only available string. As I said, the Retribution Machine was only a diversion, a setup for a much more primitive device nesting overhead. Had he looked up, he would have seen that the ceiling tiles had been shifted slightly but he would not have seen the container holding about two pounds of gold, silver and blue glitter. He pulled the cord. Time really does appear to slow down in moments of danger. It also slows down when a glitter bomb goes off. I watched as the initial wad of glitter made contact with his head, exploding in a shower of sparkles. I was amazed at how long it took for the cascade to end. He turned towards me, his hair and beard glistening in the low light, and said “OK, you win.” He was still sparkling like a Party Glitter Barbie Doll days later. I had sprung far more elaborate traps, but that one was one of the most satisfying.

What brought all this to mind is our ongoing problem with thieves in the neighborhood. From 1976 to 1989 I lived in a seriously high crime area. Vigilance was a daily affair but even so, rarely a week passed that some crime or another didn’t spill over into my general area of concern. Regarding this current batch of neighborhood shoppers, I’m not surprised in the least and I’m reasonably sure I can knock a dent in this little crime wave without causing any major bodily harm (legal issues), and even more importantly, without painting a big fat target on our house (common sense). I toyed with the thought of rigging up something like an industrial sized chicken plucker and I have to say that the thought of a thieving jackass hanging naked and upside down from a tree in our front yard gives me a warm feeling deep down inside. Gotta be civilized about it though. A retaliatory response is currently in the design phase. I’ll report back on that later.

Karma Comes Calling

2007-03-21T03:30:00.000-05:00

Our little neighborhood has recently been plagued by burglaries. Our little street alone has been burgled six times over the last six months with five of the intrusions in the last forty-five days or so. Practically all of my neighbors have been broken into and I’ve lost a few valuables out of my truck. While most of the incidences have been auto break-ins, they are also going into peoples houses while they are sleeping. For all intents and purposes, we have become a supermarket for the local reprobates.
I’ve been too preoccupied with my deconstructed spinal column and pressing work issues to do anything about it, until now. I build gadgets for fun and retribution and I’m working on a surprise for our local shoppers, nothing violent or dangerous, just effective. Considering I haven’t lived an overly virtuous life, I’m not getting too indignant over the whole thing. Even so, it’s my damn stuff and they can’t have it.

Stargate and Fried Chicken

2007-03-05T03:42:00.001-06:00

In case you were wondering, the video has nothing to do with the following comments.

According to my meat thermometer, the one I keep in my pants, pocket I mean, the one I keep handy when I’m cooking, in the kitchen…sweet mother of Zeus! Does everything have to be about sex with you guys? Anyway, I was talking about my penis I MEAN MY MEAT THERMOMETER! Now you have me doing it. According to my meat thermometer, the new laptop, or “notebook,” computer sent by the manufacturer to replace the one that caught fire is apparently capable of cooking a standard size cut of beef to a solid medium rare. That is 130 to 135 degrees Fahrenheit for my vegan friends.

How lucky am I? Not only does my brand new shiny laptop crunch numbers and render graphics with aplomb, it doubles as a pancake griddle and slow-cook crock-pot. To be fair, the keyboard maintains a balmy 117 to 125 degrees under most conditions. It is only when I “type” and “compute” that things really start to heat up.

A friendly tech support person assured me that this is completely normal and that I should purchase a peripheral USB cooling device to help lower the temperature and shield my delicate loins from heat related discomfort. Friendly tech person number two confirmed this assessment and then he unwisely transferred me to a hardware tech who quickly informed me that support persons one and two were retarded.

I told my new friend that I figured something wasn’t right when my scrambled eggs stuck to the keyboard even after a good swabbing with bacon grease and I wasn’t about to use Pam, not in my kitchen I said! He asked if he could put me on hold for “two minutes.”

I wondered how many millions of dollars they must have squandered researching the music that plays during telephone hold time. They chose an upbeat but not overly happy tune with a soothing undertone, a soulless and laughable attempt at mood manipulation. Mr. Hardware Tech left me hanging there for well over fifteen minutes listening to that drivel, but I didn’t mind. By the time he got back to me, I had calmed down considerably and felt oddly passive. The bitterness had melted away and I felt something along the lines of love for those hard working and underappreciated support persons. I think he told me they were going to fix the computer. I don’t remember exactly but I do know that Pam No-Stick Spray now comes in Organic Olive Oil and Canola Oil flavors. I wonder if I can get that thing to fry chicken.

Roasting Marshmallows

2007-03-01T16:28:00.000-06:00

As mentioned in an earlier post titled Volcano Head’s Little Trick, my skeleton hurts. I could go into all of the reasons why it hurts but I don’t want to be accused of gilding the lily, not that I mind gilding lilies. In fact, if you have a lily or anything else that needs gilding, I’m your man. The point is that the lilies are piling up around here because I can’t sit in a damn chair for more than a few minutes at a time without falling to the ground and screaming out in pain, which brings us back to my skeleton.

As pretty much all of my current maladies are self-inflicted, I expect no sympathy. The only reason I mention it is because my blog life has suffered considerably and the excuses are beginning to wear thin. I will be forever grateful to Stucco for pointing out the obvious and suggesting that I get a “lappy.” At first I was a little confused about how a lap dance could possibly be the solution when in all likelihood it was part of the problem. Long story short, I was lying on the ground in a pool of my own tears when Stucco’s words finally made sense to me, “LAPTOP.”

So I did it. Longer story even shorter, I bought a laptop, it crashed and had to be sent for repair, which resulted in another five days of agony sitting at my desktop computer. The laptop found its way back into my possession, finally some relief, and it promptly caught fire in my lap. I would be most pleased to report that the flames were licking at my flailing legs as I tried to escape the inferno, but this particular lily needs no further gilding. I removed the battery, took the little bastard outside, and regained control of myself just short of unhinging the outer shell with ten-pound sledgehammer (not to be confused with a “slaghammer.”)

That was eleven days ago and the replacement laptop just showed up on my front porch twenty short minutes ago. I should be happy to have it I know, but the (documented) twenty-three phone calls it took to straighten out the mess have rendered me less that amiable at the moment. It appears that all of the logistical issues that I encountered stemmed from an obscure division within the computer manufacturer’s hierarchy called the “Smoke and Fire” department. I find it less than encouraging that they even have a “Smoke and Fire” department in the first place, but they do and I guess that turned out to be a good thing.

I haven’t mentioned the manufacturer by name because my dealings with them are not yet over and I might need them again. I’ll be firing up the replacement lappy for the first time as soon as I post this diatribe and who knows, I might be asking them to pony up for skin grafts or prosthetic limbs in the near future. I know from the few days that I had a functional laptop that it was the right thing to do. I could actually feel my bones re-stacking themselves in proper order. So now let the healing begin, or the organ transplants. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Oh yeah, I forgot, today's my birthday. Yea for me!

Male Restroom Etiquette

2007-02-14T18:27:00.001-06:00

While it comes close, this video falls short in a few areas of Men’s Room etiquette. I suspect there will be some overlap in Women’s Room protocol but my qualifications to judge in that area are limited by insufficient access to that hallowed ground. I have crashed the occasional ladies room in times of great distress but if I were forced to come to a conclusion based on such a small sampling, I would have no choice but to judge females as harshly as males in the category of filth when it comes to trashing public facilities. Since this goes against everything I’ve ever been taught or have ever learned through first hand experience of the fairer sex, then it must be my own bad luck to have so consistently stumbled into the dirtiest ladies rooms on the planet.
One more thing, there are those of you out there who feel the need to smear excretions on the walls of bathroom stalls. I guess this is as good a place as any for me to ask this question, WHY? This is not a rhetorical question, I really want to know. I know I should consult Jilly before posting this. She is my “canary in the coal mine” when it comes to gauging offensiveness. What the hell, it’s Valentines Day and I’m not going to bother her with such details.

Part two – Hanging Tree

2007-02-07T17:23:00.000-06:00

This post will not make a lot of sense without the context provided at Resistance. Regarding the appearance of blind stupidity in this post, the Resistance post provides at least a few mitigating factors.

Children do not think in complex terms. They typically operate by trial and error and find a path of least resistance. From an emotional standpoint, children will guard themselves, sometimes in complex ways. You can call it instinct or hardwired knowledge or whatever you wish, but however you look at it, basic rules do apply.
Rule number one is, Violence Begets Violence.
Violence also encourages adaptation. By the age of six, I had already begun to develop a relatively sophisticated game plan to deal with the old man. Gauging the threat level was next to impossible; he was unpredictable and prone to explosive violence, where his temperament was concerned, there were only two settings, “Friendly” and “Angel of Death.”

At that time, vigilance was my only defense. In the coming years, a gradual evolution towards the use of subterfuge began to show promise, but at some point, the level of violence reached critical mass and my brothers and I turned on each other. It became a ruthless cycle of attack and retaliation. The old man beat us unmercifully. My brothers and I carried on his good works by beating the hell out of each other, and the old man beat us for fighting each other. By the age of nine, communication between my brothers and me consisted primarily of intimidation, insult and physical attack.

Vigilance and subterfuge were primarily threat management strategies. By the time I started experimenting with the hangman’s noose at the age of eight, it was not enough to affect a specific outcome where the beatings were concerned. I needed to find a way to stabilize the emotional damage. I found myself repeating, over and over, day after day, “I am amazingly well adjusted,” and “Other people have it a lot worse than I do.” Of those two statements, only one was actually true. I knew about poverty. I had heard of entire populations decimated by disease, war, and starvation. I became obsessed with the plight of the dead and the dying, and I maintained a constant state of mortification at my own sniveling weakness in the face of adversity. It might not have been the best strategy, but the conditions under which I lived were effectively trivialized nonetheless.

The idea of hanging myself in trees seems a little odd even to me, but I now view it as a primitive attempt to shore up and rebuild a shattered ego. If I could not stand up for myself against the old man, I could at least prove my worthiness through acts of what I considered at the time to be bravery. I was a kid, what else was I going to do? The adrenaline and self-satisfaction provided by hanging episodes faded quickly and it did actually hurt quite a bit so I moved on. Enter the obstacle course. I chipped a bone in my ankle while traversing a pile of sawed-off telephone poles and then broke my nose while dodging in and out of sawhorses and construction supplies. There followed a rapid sequence of burns, bruises, scratches, out-of-control fires, a near drowning and a particularly nasty fall that pitted one of my testicles against a very solid wood plank. My left testicle came out on the short end of that stick; the other lived to fight another day. While the list of injuries was well within normal parameters for a growing boy, manifestations of a life-long obsession with risk were becoming evident. I was also getting much better at pulling off successful (injury free) adventures.

Soon there would be the cactus incident, head first into a giant prickly pear and then a spear fight with big brother that ended with brother attempting to pull a large piece of wood out of my leg. The spear tip, buried deep at a steep angle of penetration, would not budge. Racing against the clock since the old man would be home from work soon, big brother retrieved a pair of wire pliers. The pliers worked like a charm but the wound festered for weeks before finally shedding the last splinters. A short time later, a similar wound in big brother’s hand became so infected, the rotten smell almost undid his efforts to hide his crime from the father unit. Blood poisoning be damned, it was retribution from the old man that had us running scared.

By the age of ten, things were heating up a bit. There were horseback ejections, hog mishaps, rooster gaffs, cuts, a punctured ear drum, gunpowder flash burns, stings and bites to name a few. I’m pretty sure if an animal has the capacity to bite, I have been bitten by it. It all started with dogs, cats, turtles and ducks and then moved on to squirrels, goats, horses, lizards, geese, a monkey, spiders, a possum, little brother, countless species of non-poisonous snakes and a milk cow. Who in the hell gets bitten by a goddamn milk cow? Me, the human chew toy, that’s who. It just goes on and on. I fell out the passenger door of a truck in a high-speed turn, rolled down hills in oil drums and found increasingly more creative ways to remove the skin from my elbows, knees, and hands. I assisted big brother in capturing wasp nests in mayonnaise jars. Wasps never attacked big brother, only me, and I had perpetually sprained ankles from sprinting across dried mud beds pockmarked with deep horse and cow tracks. I never made it all the way across without turning one or both ankles but I just kept trying, year after year. While all of this was going on, the old man had his way and never missed an opportunity to break his sons in the same manner that he broke his horses.

By the time of the amputations, I was exhausted from over ten long years of miserable family strife. The beatings had become more numerous and significantly more violent over time. The psychological stress of living with a ticking time bomb resulted in an aborted attempt to leave home at the age of fifteen and a successful exodus at sixteen. I landed a full-time job and promptly started a war with the local police department. Who could have seen that coming? Now fully endowed with an overblown sensitivity to injustice, I began showing my middle finger to any uniformed authority figure I deemed crooked or otherwise unworthy to wear a badge, as if that were my job. Consequently, I was manhandled, cursed, threatened, and/or arrested by a succession of police officers, one of whom had become so desperately bored with my antics that he finally just rolled his eyes, shook his head and drove away as I publicly questioned the legitimacy of his birth. Approaching a pinnacle of self-delusion, I proclaimed my anti-authoritarian behavior to be a service to the community. Apparently, society owed me something for keeping the system honest and I continued to marvel at how “amazingly well adjusted” I was. I won a few battles with the constables but ultimately lost the war after months of confrontation, two raids and the tiring effects of hypervigilance slowed me down long enough to graduate from high school.

--------------Me in the later years - Vancouver WA --------------

It was during this period, directly after high school, that something wonderful happened. I know what you’re thinking, but it had nothing to do with “Gawd having mercy on my wretched soul.” I went to work full time on an ironworking crew. On the first day of the job, I found myself creeping along on an I-beam high above the ground. By the end of the first week, I was walking narrow lengths of structural iron and scaring myself half to death. By month two, a circus trapeze could not have done a better job of satisfying my addiction to adrenaline. We were based in non-union territory, which meant freedom from the constraints of safety gear, i.e., no lanyards, nets, or harnesses. OSHA had no significant presence there so I rode the crane ball at every opportunity. The things I craved most, danger and adversity, had materialized in the form of gainful employment. The pay package was less than generous, minimum wage, no insurance, and no benefits. Even so, I considered it my own little slice of paradise.

I loved my job. Practically to the man, my workmates were psychotic reprobates dedicated to a life of beer, weed, fucking, and ironworking, not necessarily in that order. Hands blistered through leather gloves in the 100 plus degree summers and clothes froze to the iron during the winter months. Frayed blue jeans caught fire and lightening storms were of particular interest while clinging to what amounted to giant lightening rods. There followed a long procession of roach infested hotels, seedy bars with sticky dance floors, and paychecks that never materialized. Our jobsites, strung out from the Mexican border to Oklahoma and from the god-forsaken wastelands of West Texas to Louisiana, ranged from glorious to otherwise. Every jobsite had its peculiarities, one in particular sat adjacent to a huge fish mill located next to a shipping lane on the Gulf Coast. These mills turned unbelievably large piles of stinky fish into mountains of fish dust for use in cat food, fish sticks, and other tasty treats. The fish dust blew in the wind and coated everything, buildings, tools, equipment, and us. Rainy days came often. Rain transforms fish dust into fish goo and everybody knows that flies love fish goo. In no time, thousands of pounds of squirming maggots would appear, piling up like snowdrifts in nooks and crannies and generally getting into everything. On the first day of the job, one of our crew, a good friend of mine, pointed towards a dark protoplasmic blob on the concrete foundation. He mentioned that the gunk appeared to be boiling and asked me what it was. I told him it was maggots and he vomited where he stood. We were not wealthy people; food was a valuable commodity. He wasted a lot of food on that jobsite. Even years later, I could provoke a dry heave just by mentioning the phrase “live rice” to him at dinnertime.

I was mostly happy with my job and the rate of injury slowed a bit. However, even under those circumstances, I chaffed under the yoke of oppression. After about a year, I submitted an application for an Employer Identification Number, hired a crew, and started a steel erection business. Steel erection is the same as ironworking; it was just so much more fun saying the word “erection” every time I answered the phone.

I had found an outlet for a lifetime of frustration and I couldn’t have been happier. Unfortunately, acquiring a focal point for self-destructive behavior turned out to be a little counter-productive. In the next few years, there was a split kneecap, multiple car crashes, a broken collar bone, two concussions, one subdural hematoma, broken neck bone (not serious), bruised organs and internal bleeding, both arms broken simultaneously, rib fractures twice, multiple eye injuries including slag burns and metal debris removal as well as an unending list of punctures, cuts and nasty burns. I had no money or insurance so I stockpiled surgical tape, super glue, gauze, steri-strips, alcohol, and painkillers for emergency purposes. While I could handle most injuries on my own, for bone breaks, deep cuts and head injuries, I grudgingly sought emergency room services from the only game in town, a place known locally as the slaughterhouse. It took years to pay off my debts to that disappointing excuse for a hospital, which only heightened my hatred of the system.

At the time, even as I was getting comfortable with the idea that I simply could not be killed, I was pretty sure the odds were shifting in favor of a significantly shortened life span. I was sure I could beat the odds, but it was still inconceivable to me that I would live past the age of 35 or 40. Mutually exclusive concepts do make strange bedfellows. I did not intend to change my lifestyle so I guess it is obvious which side won the coin toss.

Then, I became a dad. If you are so inclined, click here for some of the details surrounding that momentous affair. My transition to fatherhood was a painful ordeal. It came as no surprise to some that I hated children. I hated the way they looked, sounded, and smelled. They were so needy and illogical. Most of all, I despised the misery they represented. From that perspective, it was beyond my capacity to understand why the human race had not gone extinct eons ago. Where my little girl was concerned, I had been impersonating a dad for a while. On this particular day, she was giving me that slobbery baby grin that I had seen a few times before. Instead of contemplating the contents of her stomach, and how I might dodge those contents should they spew forth, I had an epiphany. Simply put, it occurred to me that my history was not necessarily her destiny. This of course should have been self-evident but it was not. News flash! It turns out I was not so “amazingly well adjusted” after all. I was an emotional cripple in crisis mode, clumsily grasping at the simplest of concepts. Prior to that moment, I had wondered at what age my little girl would start hanging herself in trees. I never doubted that I would break the chain of violence; I would never put a child through the misery that I had known. Even so, it never crossed my mind until then that I might raise a child who didn’t want to kill me.

It may sound trite, but there is no other way to say it, with that one brilliant flash of insight, happiness and contentment settled into my life like a West Texas winter, that is, without warning and catching me completely unprepared. I had a lot of studying to do. Among other assignments, I had to figure out how to use the phrase “I love” in sentences having nothing to do with my feelings towards chicken-fried-steak and gravy.

Misery is an easy choice; the proof is all around. When offered an alterative to hate, people often can’t bear the thought of letting go of that old familiarity. It defines who they are and provides rationalization for a wasted life. I think understanding the self-destructive nature of hate doesn’t make it any easier to overcome it. But then I’m not qualified to make that judgment. I might never have broken free if not for my little girl. I’m certain she is largely responsible for my return to humanity. Don’t get me wrong, this was not a Hollywood ending. It took years of hard work with sporadic episodes of lunacy but I got the job done just in time to for Jilly to come into my life. Hooray! It doesn’t suck to be me.

Oh yeah, so much for my new year’s resolution to stop posting encyclopedic tomes. If you actually read this far into my post, I guess it sucks to be you. ;-)

The Hanging Tree

2007-01-24T20:56:00.000-06:00

I finally reached adulthood on my eighth birthday. The years leading up to that momentous occasion were difficult and trying times but I had finally made it. In honor of that auspicious event, I climbed a mesquite tree in our front yard and tied a rope to one of the branches. After fashioning a reasonable facsimile of a hangman’s noose, I placed the rope around my neck and hanged myself. I dangled there in the tree by the driveway contemplating the mounting pressure in my head. It felt as if my eyes were going to pop out of their sockets. Then, the rope slipped several inches. My feet were still a few feet off the ground and the tree limb that had been within easy grabbing distance was now effectively out of reach.

As they say, first impressions are usually wrong. A perfect example would be the driver of a car that happened to be cruising down the street in front of our house on the day of my first successful hanging. He jumped to the mistaken conclusion that rescue services were in order. As he came upon the scene of a kid hanging by the neck, in a tree, with arms and legs flailing, he couldn’t have known that I had discovered the secret to hanging for short periods of time with no significant risk. While it is true that my insufficiently developed knot tying skills had put me in a pickle, other tree branches and the tree’s trunk were well within reach. By the time my Good Samaritan exited his vehicle, I was running like a scalded dog, terrified that all of this attention might result in the old man finding me out.

In case you are wondering, it’s all about how you place the rope around your neck. The knot should go in front rather than the side or the back. Circus performers use that technique. I don’t recommend it unless you are outlandishly stupid, in which case it might be the best thing for you.

Up to that point, hanging myself was not the most idiotic thing that I had ever done. In the years to come, it would barely register alongside other increasingly sophisticated shenanigans. I chalk it all up to a profoundly impaired sense of self-preservation as well as poor judgment, all of which fall under the heading of “dumb.” The scope of my dumbness must be broken down into categories and collated into sub-segregated piles in order to keep them straight. This little pile belongs in the “Tardfest” category. I’ll file it away later.

This story is all about behavioral abnormalities resulting in gratuitous risk taking. Along those lines, I am amazed at the number of people I’ve met over the years who can’t believe they are still alive. They plan, and I use that term loosely, their lives up to the mid thirties or early forties and then panic when it becomes apparent that perhaps they will not go down in a blaze of glory but will likely waste away with bedsores and pneumonia instead. Many of them reach middle age in a state of befuddlement. I have a theory about that but my New Years Resolution is to stop posting encyclopedic tomes, so it will have to wait until my next post.

Captain James Tiberius Kirk

2007-01-16T02:21:00.003-06:00

Volcano Head's Little Trick

2007-01-14T14:45:00.000-06:00

It’s like this, as a result of a recent (and temporary) reduction in my workload, I went hog-wild in my little pottery shop for a few days. As I often do, I failed to take into consideration my diminished physical capacity resulting from so many years spent toiling at the keyboard. It’s all about the stretching you know. I’m certain that my spine has been reduced to kindling. What is left of it lies in a pile somewhere between my dwindled liver and equally shriveled testicular canister. I’m typing this note with the only appendage left with any feeling in it at all, thank Zeus for that “Y” chromosome. As sitting for more than two or three minutes at a time is just too painful, I’ve been unable to spend any meaningful time posting or visiting other blogs. I predict a few more days before I’m back to normal, so for now, I’m taking the easy way out.

Spiders On Drugs

2007-01-10T09:07:00.001-06:00

This explains 1974 through 1980 something. What was I talking about?

Nuclear Explosion Confirmation - heavy metal

2007-01-08T00:46:00.001-06:00

This is a follow up to my last post. A friend asked me the other day if you could survive a tornado by strapping yourself to a tree, I told him it would make it easier for the search teams to find his body afterwards. Along those same lines, as intellectually advanced and highly evolved children of the 1960’s were known to do, my older brother and I had a few ideas for surviving a Soviet nuke attack. The memories are vague but the storm cellar played a leading role in the game plan. As I mentioned in the previous post, at some point the reality of forces involved ended further discussions on the matter. In other words, it became clear that you might as well just strap yourself to a tree.
Btw, you might want to turn the sound down on your computer, the audio quality in the video is not good.

Civic Pride

2007-01-03T20:39:00.000-06:00

I refer to the town in which I was born, moved away from, and eventually returned to, as my birthplace. The word hometown is just a little too cozy for me and I think it incorrectly suggests an affection that I do not have. My inability to purge that dumping ground of anguish and depression from my thoughts, conscious and otherwise, is more than disappointing. The dreams spurred by my contempt for that cursed town are always nightmares. I wake from them feeling beaten and raw. I imagine a skirmish with a giant cheese grater might produce the same feeling. I wear my hatred for that place on my sleeve. Those who know me best can only guess at the depth of the grudge that I carry. No casual conversation is immune from digression, no subject matter, however innocent, is safe from exploitation; I will find a way to slander the place of my birth. With few exceptions, I hate every person, animal (wild or domestic), building, street, blade of grass and gust of shit-filtered wind that blows through that loathsome burg. If my regularly scheduled program was interrupted by breaking news that “hometown” was being swallowed by an erupting volcano, I would consider it a prayer answered and grudgingly fulfill my part of the bargain by spreading the word of Gawd’s omnipotence. So, how about it Gawd, the ball’s in your court, shit or get off the pot I say.

I said all of that in order to avoid a misunderstanding. It must be clear that in this context, I have the same regard for civic pride as I have for fecal vomiting and gas gangrene. Now that we have an understanding, we can begin the torturous meandering that will ultimately lead to my point.

I am an insomniac. It is unlikely that there has ever been a historical documentary produced that I haven’t seen on late night television. It was during one of those history-channel marathons that something strange happened. Black and white footage from a circa 1950’s Civil Defense film dredged up a mess of unexpected memories, I was stunned by a wave of something along the order of pride for my birthplace. For decades, I had considered the possibility that… maybe… there was something not altogether evil about that place. It seemed unreasonable to believe that one small town could be as offensive and pathetic as I remembered it to be. Even so, all of my efforts to conjure up fond memories had fallen short, and now, as long buried notions of civic pride stumbled from the gloom like reanimated cadavers, I found myself leaning forward to get a more focused view of the degraded footage. There, rendered in varying shades of grey on the television screen were children with happy faces, heavily greased proto-pompadours, and pressed shirts with button-down collars, dutifully following the example set by Bert the Turtle to “duck and cover” in preparation for the approaching nuclear conflagration. It doesn’t take much to push my gastrointestinal tract into a downward spiral of inappropriate peristalsis. Not least among the pressures growing inside of me was an urge to… reminisce. Excuse me while I do just that.

My birthplace is located in a section of the country known as Tornado Alley. If I learned anything from the periodic tornado drills of my grade school days, it is this, no matter what dark force threatens to separate you from this earthly existence, lying on the floor with an open textbook held firmly to the back of your head will render you impervious to harm. It did not surprise me to learn that the textbook protocol would also ward off the undesirable effects of thermonuclear detonation and radiation poisoning. While the instructions provided by most public service announcements were laughable in their obvious inadequacy, the looming prospects for nuclear cataclysm sketched a credible picture of doom, especially considering that approximately fifteen miles west of our little three-room school, B52 bombers with their bays stacked to the hilt with nuclear weapons, were in perpetual rotation. Being a Strategic Air Command, or SAC base, swarms of heavy bombers flew unending circuits over the West Texas wastelands, their aircrews anticipating a one-way ticket to Soviet airspace at any given moment. In addition to the ever present B52’s, countless nuclear missile silos dotted the surrounding countryside, each programmed with the coordinates of a military base or population center in the Soviet Union. And so it was that our little nondescript parcel of terra firma was classified among the top ten targets in the world for a first wave attack by Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles. Even so, the aforementioned Civil Defense films were conspicuously absent from the roster of safety videos that were shown to us in school. I understood the logic. It was common knowledge we would likely receive no warning at all before the ground on which we stood would be wiped clean with nothing more interesting than globs of melted dirt and the odd bone shard to show for it all. Regarding the prospects for survival, the old-timers cut to the chase, “you would not want to survive.” Consequently, we never discussed emergency protocols for nuclear war. I never actually verified our position in the top-ten target list. In those days, it was no simple task collecting that kind of information, no internet after all. In any case, I believed that we were important enough to be among the first in the United States to have our skin ripped from our bodies, our eyes popped from their sockets and the whole shebang turned to ash. This knowledge instilled in me a twisted but powerful sense of pride.

There in front of the television so many years later, it seemed odd that I would experience pride in the notion that others would have to wait their turn for annihilation. That’s right, no cutting in line dude, we were here first. I’ve narrowed the cause of these hare-brained ideas down to two primary sources. One is the inclination to accept as normal something that has always been. I was born into the cold war, so it was the natural order of things. The other point of origination was a pear shaped man with stark features, a “widow’s peak” hairline, and a perpetual glower. A World War 2 navy veteran and a survivor of multiple sea battles in the Pacific, he ran our little country school like a battleship, tight and squeaky clean. This squat and oddly shaped man could outrun the fastest kid in school. He was a sight to behold, streaking like a comet across the playground in his black suit, tie and spit-shined black leather shoes. With his arms and legs pumping with logical efficiency and his head and torso held in a mesmerizing state of rock solid inaction, he ran with a wild grin affixed to his face like a man possessed, and he never lost a race. On my first day under his command, the beginning of third grade for me, the Commander plucked me from the middle of a schoolroom altercation and held me aloft by my left arm. In a state of levitation, I left the classroom and flew through the halls with my feet never touching the ground. I finally got a look at the Commander after crash landing on a wood bench that faced his very large and imposing desk. My first impression, the guy was clearly psychotic. While I was confident he was not authorized to engage in the type of violent activity I was accustomed to at home, I nonetheless was dismissed from the Commander’s office that day with the knowledge that I was neither the “king of the hill” nor the “queen of the hive.” We had an understanding, he and I.

Because the Commander would play a major role in building the framework of my attitude towards death in general, as well as the more important issue of how death was to be faced, it is worth the risk of setting this story adrift to get to know him a little better.

Periodically, during regular school hours, an assembly order issued by the Commander had all of the boys scrambling into one classroom. More often than not, these tense and perilous gatherings were part of the Commander’s investigation of some unsolved crime that occured within the boundaries of his jurisdiction. During one of these episodes, we young males were all marched into the boy’s restroom and paraded, single file, to the opening of one of the stalls. There, on the front edge of a bright white toilet seat rested a tiny little turd. For thirty solid minutes, the Commander ran us through the rhetorical ringer, exploring all of the scenarios that might result in such an affront to the honor and dignity of this man’s ship. In a booming voice, each word enunciated to the full capacity of his lungs, lips and vocal chords, the question was asked of each of us individually, “DID YOU LEAVE THIS DOO DOO ON MY TOILET SEAT? When it came my turn, I was sure that I was the guilty one. Never mind that I hadn’t crapped in that restroom…ever, I did my “business” at home. Nevertheless, had he lingered for just a few seconds longer, I would have admitted to stealing the goddamn Lindburg baby, such was the force of the Commander’s personality. It was under these conditions that, on this day, we fifth and sixth graders shuffled into that classroom for the first of several indoctrination sessions to come. Sitting straight and stiff jawed as the last of us took our seats; the Commander glared at each of us in turn and then buried his face in his hands. After what seemed an eternity of silence, I was only seconds away blurting out my complicity in Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy scandal when the Commander drew his hands away like heavy curtains for the first act of Macbeth. I was used to this kind of treatment from the old man, most of my classmates were completely unprepared for the Commander’s bulging eyes, tight clinched teeth, and swollen blood vessels trailing up his forehead like knarled tree branches.

BOOM! Heavy guns were pouring fire onto the decks of enemy ships. Just like that, the Commander began recounting his experiences at the Battle of Midway. Anti-aircraft guns filled the sky with tracer and high explosive rounds. Enemy planes trailed smoke and flames, some crashing into the sea, others penetrating an impossibly thick shield of lead and shrapnel before flying headlong into his sister ships. Sailors worked as feverishly at pushing aside the human remains as they did at loading and firing the guns. Incoming rounds tore holes in steel and flesh. Bombs, he pronounced them “bums,” fell to the port and starboard, occasionally ripping holes and exploding below decks. The Commander took us through the battle in detail, and then the aftermath. He told us how, after the American fleet had defeated the enemy, the Destroyer on which he served set course for the enemy survivors, groups of them were now floating on rafts of oil soaked debris. We listened intently as the Commander described how his Destroyer plowed through the groups of enemy sailors floating in the water, dispatching many with the ships propellers. As a final act in the Commander’s bizarre play, he pantomimed a rifleman, holding his imaginary weapon in his hands as if leaning over the edge of the deck. He pulled the trigger and recoiled repeatedly as he finished off more of the oil soaked enemy, their bodies slipping past the hull, bobbing in the wake of his ship.
“This,” he said, “is your duty.” The Commander continued, “You will go to Vietnam and you will do what has to be done. You will kill the enemy.”

Cut to a room full of slack jawed, wide-eyed fifth and sixth graders. For me, it was self-evident. Of course, this IS what has to be done. I grew up with television news images of helicopter gunships, infantry scrambling back and forth, and body counts, the list of the American dead always countered with much larger numbers representing the enemy killed. As children, we played war, talked about war, and never dreamed that the war would end before we had our chance to make the Commander proud of us. In case you have ever wondered, that my friends is how you grow an army.
It was implicit in the Commander’s instruction that living in a primary target zone without complaint was a patriotic duty. We, my classmates and I, made jokes about Soviet missiles and repeated the mantra, “You wouldn’t want to survive anyway.” The statement, “You won’t feel a thing” was also very popular. The thought of moving out of the target zone, as far as I know, never crossed anyone’s mind. In a childish manner, we wore our disregard for the nuclear threat like a badge of honor. Contempt for Communism was icing on the cake. It all seems a little embarrassing now, but there is an aspect of that pride that I can still identify with, the idea of facing adversity head on.

There you have it; I found something good to say about my birthplace. In terms of tangible benefits, it barely ranks alongside those little wrinkles around a dog's butt, I’m not sure what the function of those wrinkles are, but they are good for a laugh every now and then.

Stone Age

2006-12-28T04:51:00.000-06:00

This is not me, but it might as well be. Apparently, I now live in the 1950’s. Jilly doesn’t know it yet, but it looks like from here on, she will have to load my lunch pail every morning before I drive the station wagon to work. I will clock-in down at the factory at 8:00am and work eight hours and then clock out. I will arrive home at 5:30pm at which time Jilly will meet me at the door with my slippers in hand and a cocktail at the ready. I will whip the kids (don’t have any, I’ll have to breed a few) and then we will have dinner, at the dining room table, in silence. Afterwards, I’ll watch the news while Jilly does the dishes. At 9:00pm, I will climb into my bed and she will climb into hers. Our beds, separated by a nightstand with an opened bible within easy reaching distance, will be kept four feet apart in order to avoid surreptitious physical contact in a manner not sanctioned by the “Laured.” How did this happen? Only a few short days ago, I was a proud member of the generation that dug the grave, and then shoveled dirt onto the corpse of the Victorian mindset. I hitched my wagon to the computer and trusted that my faith in it was justified. Yet, here I am, at the end of a long string of failed post attempts, unable to post videos and fighting to keep Word and Exploder from overheating and burning the g*ddamn house down. I remember what it was like before computers and the internet and this is worse. If things don’t start getting better fast, I’ll find myself living in the 1930’s or worse, Jilly will be washing our clothes down at the river and I’ll be clubbing small mammals on the head for dinner. I am not looking forward to tree bark, or gravel, or whatever they used before toilet paper was invented.

Twisted and Broken

2006-12-22T03:19:00.000-06:00

----------------This is what my job has done to me----------------

Ok, many apologies for neglecting my blog doodies. Bent to the breaking point, my otherwise turgid constitution was no match for the relentless and unforgiving demands of the pre-Santa Day tardfest that plagues my chosen profession. To make matters worse, I arrived back to discover that I had neglected a tag from Judith. So Judith, please accept my apology and this belated meme offering, I’ll try to do better in the future.
Meme follows:

1. Grab the book closest to you.
-- Ok, I have chosen the book.

2. Open to page 123, go down to the fifth sentence.
-- There are only 30 pages, so I’ll turn to page 1, second paragraph, and begin with the third sentence.

3. Post the text of next 3 sentences on your blog
-- Henrod held J’anus close to his hardened shank and groaned softly into her eyes. My love is aged custard, sweet yet sour, hard yet flaccid. J’anus gripped Henrod’s oily flanks, her engorged mcguffies plowed furrows through Henrod's verdant garden. No! Henrod screamed, wrong hole!

4. Name of the book and the author
-- Book: The Misadventures of Henrod Gash.
-- Author: Slagamus Hammerhung

5. Tag three people.
-- In the grand tradition of the nihilist, even though I’m not technically a nihilist, I break tradition and ask for three volunteers instead.

Blogger Beta Bushwhacked Me

2006-12-13T08:54:00.000-06:00

Well, the day has finally come. I lost the ability to post comments and was forced to throw myself prostrate (prostate is more like it) at the feet of Blogger Beta. Consequently, many of the comments from my fellow bloggers have been arbitrarily re-labeled as “anonymous.” I’m chewing a hole in my keyboard trying to figure that one out. That dirty, rotten, no-good, son-of-a-weasel Beta bastard has bushwhacked me!

Raku (i.e. Post Fire Reduction or American Raku)

2006-12-10T19:04:00.000-06:00

Raku, that’s what I’m doing when I’m not working or blogging. Gotta take a break every now and then to appease the kiln gods. These pics are in no particular order, different firings, different days. I have a big firing scheduled for next weekend, been concocting new glazes and I’m itching to try them out.

These pieces are being yanked from the kiln at about 1950 degrees Fahrenheit. The two in front are the work of a friend who does mostly standard fired vessels. She comes to my place when she wants to raku.

These are test pieces. The tall one is a wheel thrown thing I did more as a joke than anything else, we call it Mr. Microphone.

These are all wheel thrown and raku fired.

And of course I’m still doing raku lamps. This one has a hand-sculpted lizard on it. I don’t do many of these since all of the little fingers and toes fall off during the sculpting process and have to be reattached after the lizard is attached to the lamp, very tedious.

--------------- Just another lamp, the end. ----------------

2006-12-06T17:04:00.000-06:00

Acid Redux. 1960s LSD Propaganda Film

That dog, it was so hot, you know like, it was a hot…dog. That’s so heavy.
The girl talking to the wiener bears a striking resemblance to Kara. I don’t remember her coming to the party but I was sort of preoccupied. I could be wrong.

Off With Her Head

2006-12-04T18:15:00.000-06:00

Yay! Jilly ordered new christmas tree ornaments this morning.
Among other treasures, she scored the perfect tree topper for a particularly finicky friend of ours. It’s called the “Obsessive Compulsive Action figure.” The official product description follows.

-This 5-1/4" tall, hard vinyl Obsessive Compulsive Action Figure is worried about whether or not you washed your hands after you used the bathroom. Just in case, he's sure you won't mind if he wears his gloves and surgical mask when he shakes your hand. Or, even better, maybe you could just bump elbows with him. As soon as he finishes counting those ceiling tiles, he can get started on alphabetizing the canned foods. Mini surgical mask included. Packaged with a sanitary, hypoallergenic towelette to clean the figure before you touch it. Perfect!

I don’t usually get this exited about holiday trinkets, but I predict our Yoda tree topper is going to have some serious competition this year for the rank of “most highly prized tree-bauble.”

Novelty object number one is a Marie Antoinette action figure with ejector head. Jilly and I discussed the possibility that Marie might displace Yoda in the top position but I’m afraid her most desirable attribute, the ejectable head, would be out of reach and effectively non-functional. What good is Marie Antoinette if you can’t lop off her head when company comes calling, no good at all I say. She’ll be mounted at the halfway point for easy access.

Trinket number two is the “Crazy Cat Lady.” Other than being just plain funny (to both of us), this one has bitter/sweet significance for Jilly and me. I happen to be outrageously allergic to cats. When I first met Jilly, she had four of the little furry critters. The word “little” might be misleading, as two of the more corpulent kitties, weighed together, would have easily topped forty pounds. All told, there was approximately sixty-five pounds of kitty cat keeping Jilly company at any given time. The cat situation in and of itself was neither good nor bad, but because of my allergies, it was an issue that very nearly snuffed the smoldering embers of sweet, sweet love.

The first time I visited Jilly at her house, I paused in the entry hall for a short period in order to gauge my reaction. My symptoms vary from cat to cat; sometimes it’s no big deal. The place was clean, no drifts of cat hair in the corners and nary a hairball in sight, so far so good. It was at least a couple of minutes before my eyeballs began to leak. Not bad, I thought, so I ventured deeper into the kitty cat kingdom, eventually stopping at the kitchen to grab a glass of water.

It was at this most critical of moments that things began to get out of hand. My body started digesting itself. Cell walls ruptured and internal organs proceeded to liquefy. I feared it was too late to save my spleen but I still had a chance to salvage the liver. With tunnel vision closing in, I moved instinctively towards the light. After allowing gravity to schlep my corpus defunctus the final few feet to salvation, I stood in Jilly’s back yard and acknowledged to myself that the issue was settled, we could never be together. I had long since resolved that I would never be the cause of a person having to choose between their beloved animals and me. We fell in love anyway. Jilly broached the subject of finding homes for her pets and the rest is history. I’ve done my best since then to never make her to regret that choice.

Our fire retardant polypropylene facsimile of a Douglas Fir tree is going to be looking mighty stylish this year.

2006-11-30T03:56:00.000-06:00

Sweet mother of Zeus! I scored the big one! I just want to say thanks to all of the people who made this award possible. Most of all Serena at life is falling to pieces for all of the nice things she said in her review, and Bobbie Griffin at Bestest Blog for tireless promotion of the blogosphere and for going along with Serena’s half-truths and outrageous fabrications. Thank you, thank you very much.

Cannon Fodder

2006-11-30T00:05:00.000-06:00

Ignoring advice from my elders had been a lifelong obsession for me. Long before the summer of 1974, I had formulated an effective strategy of nonviolent dissent. At the core of this construct was an utter disregard for the opinions of the oppressor-caste. According to the standards that I had developed over time, the primary requirement for membership in that despised cartel was age, simple as that. At that particular moment in time, the benchmark was fourteen years. Not coincidentally, fourteen years was also the time elapsed since my exit from mother’s womb, the same mother who was now issuing another in a long line of prophetic warnings. As was so often the case, her wisdom was doled out with a stern glare and a hurried gait. Both of my parents were workaholics. I inherited the beneficial form of that disease from her, the malevolent strain from the father-unit. Folders and pamphlets in hand, she was making short work of her departure.

“Please stop doing whatever it is you are up to. You are going to end up blind or crippled!”

In my younger days, I was constantly amazed at my mother’s ability to stay one step ahead of me. It was only by virtue of exhaustive planning and impeccable execution that my more devious plans materialized. While her default method of parenting was unobtrusive and flexible, her authoritarian alter ego would rise up at the first sign of a rat in the woodpile. Of course, I eventually came to understand that outsmarting a kid is not difficult at all. However, accomplishing that task while preserving their sense of self-determination, now that is an art. While my mother was, and is, in every sense of the word an artist, her ability to outmaneuver me transcended the normal parameters of risk management. She was in essence a big-haired Nostradamus-in-drag and a force to be reckoned with.

Today was going to be a little different. Her powers of perception apparently deactivated, she did not notice that the small bowls arrayed in strategic disorder around my person contained gunpowder. All of my previous attempts to manufacture the stuff had failed due to a misunderstanding of potassium nitrate, an easy mistake considering the internet did not exist in those days. In any case, I had amassed a respectable quantity of black powder by dismantling leftover fireworks. Large piles of paper scriffens, the remains of countless firecrackers and bottle rockets, littered my workspace. The elevated pitch of a concerned mother’s voice barely registered with me; she passed through my makeshift laboratory and then vanished. True to form, shortly after her departure, I poked myself in the eye

It was not so much the physical act of poking that set this event apart from your typical “pointy object meets eyeball” scenario; it was the object doing the poking that had me marveling at the grand scale of my cataclysmic miscalculation. For you see, it was the denuded bone of my left index finger that I had inadvertently plunged into my socket.

----------------Btw, this is the actual cannon----------------

Ok, I admit it. I am a total fool for flashbacks. I love them and I don’t care what anybody thinks about it. Months before, in an astonishingly shortsighted breach of common sense, I was given a small brass cannon, a trinket of significant heft that had been purchased at a gift shop at the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. With minimal effort and minor retrofitting, this little jewel, when paired with my stockpile of gunpowder, became a fully functional bringer of hellfire and brimstone. The projectiles of choice consisted of tightly packed #7 birdshot. The plot thickens, but enough of this already, back to the future we go.

When I earlier hinted at the compulsive nature of my personality, I wasn’t kidding. I went to extraordinary lengths to confirm the stability of the gunpowder, including heat, hammer, and sandpaper tests. As an added measure of confidence, I noted that the cannon barrel was made of brass, thereby (theoretically) eliminating the possibility of sparks during the loading process. As I had already done many time before, I sat confidently on the living room couch with the cannon braced tightly between my legs and commenced the reloading process. I packed the explosives in the cannon barrel with the aid of a tamping rod. Gripping the rod between my left thumb and index finger, I alternated between adding more powder and then packing it tightly down, using a knife handle as a makeshift hammer. The preparations were almost complete. The cannon was loaded to the rim. The last thing I saw before my little weekend project ran afoul of logic was the knife handle making contact with the tamping rod one last time.

What can I say? One moment I’m sitting there minding my own business, next thing I know, my upper body is engulfed in a fireball of unknown proportions. I could make an educated guess regarding the force, temperature, and decibel level of the blast. I think it will suffice to say that the explosion rendered my eardrums inoperable, packed my eyes with bits of…well, me, and left a thick haze that carried with it the fairly well delineated aromas of spent gunpowder, singed hair, and scorched…yours truly.

Bonggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg
My ears were ringing like a church bell. As far as I know, I never lost consciousness, but I did experience an odd delay in reaction time, very similar to the likes of Wile E. Coyote after his box of ACME dynamite explodes, rendering his head crispy and smoldering. Although stunned and numb from head to foot, it was immediately obvious that my eyes were not functioning. They were full of debris; hence, my predictable reaction and the resulting, you know, poke in the eye. It was not my first or my last experience with explosives-gone-wild, but it was definitely the most dramatic. I used my functional hand to work the detritus from my eyes and surveyed the damage through a haze of carbon and smoke. While the anatomy lesson now underway on my left hand was an obvious point of interest, my eyes and yes, my precious tallywhacker, were of primary concern.

Checklist:
Eyes – Functioning now at maybe fifty percent of capacity.
Package - Apparently intact, mighty happy about that.
Legs - Breached bulkheads and bruised somewhat but serviceable.
Ears - Bass Clef ringing starting to subside.
Hair - Singed and going all “Albert Einstein” on me.
Left Hand - Thumb and index finger effectively shucked like ears of corn and shortened considerably, definitely gonna leave a scar.

Long story short, an ambulance was out of the question, too expensive. I was unable to locate transportation by phone but little brother convinced a neighbor to give us a ride. Having only recently moved from the old farmstead into the city, this was my first inkling that the crowded confines of town life might actually have something to offer. Access to emergency medical transportation was a definite plus. After a failed attempt to find help at a neighborhood clinic and an additional delay while an officer of the law berated my good Samaritan for running a red light, we finally made it to a trauma center. The on-call plastic surgeon was a no-show. Six hours later, my dear old ma employed the services of an old country doctor to put everything back together.

Big brother arrived home shortly after my hasty departure and assumed there had been a murder in the house. You would have to know big brother to understand why he didn’t call the cops, especially considering the scene of carnage stretching from the living room to the kitchen and out the front door. He was relieved when informed that everyone was still alive but his relief was short lived as the father-unit (him) showed up and pressed big brother into cleanup duty. The job description included collecting the odd bits of me and placing them in a neat pile on the coffee table in front of the now infamous couch. There my long-lost scriffens (I like that word) would remain until homecoming, at which point the father-unit ceremoniously paraded me into the living room and used the little pile of parts as a visual aid while engaging in the human equivalent of rubbing a dog’s nose in its own deu deu. I was trashed on pain-killers at the time but still mindful of my prospects for a severe beating. Lucky me, the beating was deferred to a later date.

Several years later, I took little brother to the same hospital to have one of his fingers re-attached. The on-call plastic surgeon noticed my healed injuries and offered that the old country doctor had done a stellar job on the thumb. The finger, we both agreed, not so much.
Oh yes, eyes and ears eventually returned to normal and the thumb and finger have become valuable assets at the potter’s wheel. Go figure.

2006-11-18T00:51:00.000-06:00

Puppets

Because it's funny, that's why.

A Christmas Story

2006-11-11T01:13:00.000-06:00

Trace residue of the holiday spirit has turned up once again in the most predictable of places. I reminded Jilly last night that it is time to gird our loins for the Christmas battles to come. Free-floating anxiety can be a dangerous thing if not quickly classified, catalogued, and deposited into the appropriate receptacle. Tranquilizer darts are at the ready; we guard each other’s back in that way.
Our main line of defense in the war against the Santa-Industrial-Complex includes a Yoda hand-puppet that tops our Christmas tree. Yoda, the rat-monkey-dog of Star Wars fame, presides over a mix of traditional and heretical holiday accoutrements. The reality that I cannot be held responsible for my actions during the holiday season is well established. Regarding the Christmas decorations, the task of tempering my desire to mix equal parts Christmas and blasphemy has fallen to Jilly. For this year at least, there will be no anatomically correct barnyard animals or sex toys gracing the branches of our fire-retardant polypropylene facsimile of a Douglas Fir tree.

In order to avoid the impression that our holiday activities include excessive amounts of lamentation, I should set the record straight. Dredged-up memories of crushed childhood dreams do make for some good wallowing and I admit that I’m partial to the seasonal piking of our enemy’s heads. However, after weighing the pros and cons, we no longer indulge in Christmas meltdowns. While I still have a few problems with this “St. Nicholas” business, my Christmas spirit has at least reverted to a pre-1990 state of cautious optimism. Not bad considering I had given it up for dead.

The year 1990 was significant for several reasons. Of all the undesirable events that transpired that year, one in particular stands out. It was the year I lost contact with my eight-year-old daughter. Her mother, sporting a freshly dealt felony conviction for an exceedingly violent assault, chose to run from the law. They crisscrossed the nation with the authorities in pursuit. Long story short, the skills that I had mastered over the years, e.g. expert pigtail installation and skinned-knee repair, were no longer in demand.

For the next seven years, my little girl would leave her childhood scattered along thousands of miles of open roadway with temporary stops in a succession of little towns and big cities from Texas to Timbuktu. She was gone and it was clear that I was not going to get her back, a reality driven home by the fact that I was not her biological father. If your next thought is, “Oh, stepdaughter, that’s different,” I hope you don’t say it out loud, especially if you have a stepchild. My little girl was still learning to walk when I became her father. While I could not have been a more unlikely prospective parent, the bond that developed between my little girl and me was undeniably as powerful as my spiritual connection to my own blood relatives.

Memories of those days drift through my mind on a regular basis. I recall standing at a bus stop. It was the little one’s first day of school and I was anxious to find out how it went. It was also her first bus ride and I had taken extra precautions to be at the right location, at the correct time. The bus pulled up to the curb, empty! Somehow, I had bungled the schedule! I flew into calamity-management-mode and began considering the options. There was a lost little girl wandering down a busy street somewhere! The door to the bus swung open. At the driver’s command, twenty or so little heads popped into view. They were so short you couldn’t see them when they were sitting down. It took several days before I could laugh about that one.

----------------This is my little girl at 3 years old----------------

I remember putting rubber bands on ten-thousand pigtails and staying up late with her when she was sick. I remember an endless supply of hugs and holding her little hand on long walks. There were seven years of birthdays and Christmases and countless times that I carried her on my shoulders while she gripped my ears like handlebars, turning my head in the direction she wanted to go and sometimes making funny engine noises as if she were driving a car. I watched her grow into a caring and loving little person. It all ended in the blink of an eye.

I don’t believe in fate and I am a staunch opponent of the theory that bad things happen for a reason. However, if there is a consistent theme to my life, it is that with every calamity, something good comes of it. So it was that a series of unfortunate events resulted in a protracted search for my purpose in life. The search ended with a stroke of the most unlikely good fortune. I bumped into the lovely and talented Jilly. Within five minutes of our first encounter, she was insulting me and I was slandering her good name. This was clearly love at first sight. We became each other’s best friend, cancelled a big wedding at the last minute, and ran off to a tropical island to get married. I am certain that any life worth living from that time forward is Jilly’s doing.

Not long after Jilly and I met, I received a telephone call in the middle of a busy workday. A voice on the other end of the line asked me to repeat my name and then inquired if I knew her mother. A mule kick would have been less dumbfounding. Somewhere in the prematurely aged tone of a teenager’s voice, I recognized the little girl who used to call me daddy. That was then. She is twenty-three years old now, married to a man worthy of her love, and has two children and one on the way. Since then, there has rarely been a week gone by that I have not had the opportunity to reaffirm my final words before her disappearance, no matter what happened, I would always love her.

As is our tradition this time of year, Jilly and I keep a wary eye on that creepy elf dude with the funny hat. Unfortunate as it is that vigilance should be part of our holiday tradition, it is simply not an option to let down our guard, there has been too much water under the bridge for that to happen. Even so, when I measure the good against the bad, I can’t imagine how I ended up so damn lucky.

Grand Entry

2006-11-02T02:11:00.000-06:00

I would like to address one particular side affect of getting old(er).
There comes a time in life when we, and when I say “we” I mean us guys, are advised to relinquish a measure of self-respect in the interest of health management. I’m talking about the rubber-gloved finger of shame. If you are in your thirties or younger, all I can say is, laugh it up funny boy, your time is coming. If there is any advice that I have to offer, it is this. When researching your physician database, choose a female urologist no more than four feet, seven inches in height. In this way, you can be reasonably confident that the finger utilized to plunder your precious rosebud will be no thicker than a McDonald’s french-fry.

Flashback – Alone in a urologist’s examination room, I am trying to make myself comfortable. My legs dangle from the edge of a tall narrow table. A thin sheet of noisy paper separates my bare rump from a cold, and distressingly stained, brown vinyl tabletop. There are lingering illusions as to my fate. Though I have anticipated this event for many years, the rumor mill has been strangely silent on the details. I hear a tapping on the door, the portal swings wide to reveal a giant of man in a white lab coat. The obvious correlation between body bulk and finger size has not yet registered. Moving quickly for a man of his dimensions, his arms fly about in random patterns. His hands simulate pathways and offer depictions of the organ of primary interest, all the while dropping the “r” word and the “p” bomb with none of the reverence that these most private of body parts deserve.

It was in the course of these wild gesticulations that the true scope of my pending violation was revealed. The good doctor had fingers the size of delicatessen baloneys. Overgrown patches of thick black finger-hair thinned somewhat at the knuckles to reveal deeply wrinkled knobs that could easily pass for malformed coconuts. The xx-large latex glove, stretched to the breaking point, only accentuated the immensity of his misshapen digits. Beneath the straining rubber, trapped mattes of coarse hair evoked the appearance of overstuffed laundry bags. By now, you could not have driven a nail up my ass with a ten-pound hammer.

Doctor DeathFinger is still talking but I am no longer paying attention to his rehearsed drone. His hand is on my shoulder as he guides me into position. I catch a glimmer in my peripheral vision; it is the jelly-like goo that will thwart any attempt to repel the invasion. His voice fades into the sound of blood rushing past my eardrums. The good doctor’s suggestion that I relax and just let it happen has fallen on deaf ears. The conundrum of the eternal struggle between the unstoppable force and the immovable object will be resolved in short order.

My decision to reschedule the appointment to a later decade came too late. As cold gel made contact with a region unaccustomed to such an assault, my deflating lungs reconfigured the phrase “never mind” into nevvaaaarrruuugggghhhhh! Doctor Torpedo apparently misread my grunting admonition as an expression of joy and proceeded to push my liver aside in what felt like an enthusiastic rush towards an unscheduled dental exam.

In a most unfortunate turn of events, Doctor BaloneyFinger decided that something didn’t feel quite right. I was ill prepared for most of what had happened up to that point. Now it appeared that my new best friend was pulling up a chair and getting comfortable. To make matters worse, he was engaging me in conversation more appropriate for a lazy afternoon fishing expedition.

How do you answer the question, “do you like sports” when there is a finger the size of a small monkey up your keester? I managed to blurt out an unconvincing “uuhhhharrrrrr.” Having reached a point where I could be humiliated no further, Doctor MonkeyFinger grew bored with my innards and withdrew. I was directed towards a box of flimsy tissues, each roughly the size of a dollar bill, and was given gratuitous instructions to clean myself “if I desired to do so” prior to leaving the room, as if I would choose to leave that place with slippery butt cheeks. He was nice enough to offer a conciliatory statement before departing, his uninspired exit in glaring contrast to the fanfare that accompanied his grand entry. I emptied the entire box of tissues in a futile attempt to wipe away the shame.

That was a few years ago and what a difference time makes. My new female urologist weighs in at maybe 90 pounds soaking wet and she has fingers like spaghetti noodles. On my last visit, I was halfway through an article in National Geographic before I noticed that she was done and heading out the door to her next appointment. Live and learn.

2006-10-29T23:57:00.000-06:00

GIANT ELEPHANT IN ANTWERP (ROYAL DE LUXE)

The elephant is part of the story of The Little Girl Giant. The Jules Verne adventures of a time-traveling elephant and a space faring giant girl can be found here.

2006-10-27T17:33:00.000-05:00

The Little Girl Giant

This is an old one but still amazing, and creepy too.

Of Cathead

2006-10-23T00:40:00.000-05:00

Preamble: For my friends in Great Britain, consult your English to American Dictionary and note that the term “biscuit,” as referred to in this post, conforms to the American definition. A terrapin is a yeast (dinner) roll in geezer-speak.

Due to a chronically issued directive from the powers that be, I started cooking at a very young age. I interpreted the statement, “If you don’t like what’s on the table, go make your own dinner” as a loophole in the contract of my indentured servitude. I don’t recall my age but I do remember pulling the kitchen drawers out for use as a stairway to access the upper level cabinets. That’s where the Folgers Coffee cans were kept, the ones filled with home rendered lard. Frying is always a good place to start. You can fry almost anything in lard and it will always be good.

My next target was the sourdough starter that my mother kept on the kitchen countertop. It was a thick broth of flour and water with an unmistakable sour twang. It was also a veritable bottomless pit of self-replicating yeast cells. The kitchen became a laboratory where I subjected those one-celled life forms to all manner of experimentation.

For me, the mysteries of piecrusts, terrapins and biscuits, were solved decades ago after an encounter with a sympathetic granny at a holiday get-together. I had previously attempted to squeeze the baking secrets out of a few grannies but had consistently come away with recipes that you could find on the back of any sack of flour. My inquiries were met with skepticism. Why did I want to know? This was when I became aware of one of the most well kept secrets in all of grannydom. At large gatherings, grannies do not cook for you, they cook “against” other grannies. Only after the suspicious matriarch was convinced of my sincerity would she break the code of silence. She complained that the younger generation could not care less for the wealth of kitchen expertise that had been passed down by their ancestors. I suggested that I could serve as a surrogate in the absence of the more traditional beneficiaries, the daughters and granddaughters.

I swore a blood oath not to divulge the information that I was about to receive to her competitors, those uppity in-laws and know-it-all upstarts in the “other” families. The few family members who were privy to her secrets were already well informed. Their successes and failures would be evident in the bowls and pans scraped clean by the hungry masses versus those that would be picked over and, in some cases, left relatively intact. Nothing could be more embarrassing at a family reunion than a basket of rolls left unmolested among a jumble of empty containers, a humiliation duly noted by those that mattered.

Now convinced of my commitment to the craft, she gave me a glimpse into a world enshrouded in mystery from ancient times. She took me to an unoccupied corner of the living room and spoke in a low voice. The grey haired woman kept a wary eye on the room as she handed over the keys to the kingdom. One by one, secrets were revealed, too many for me to remember. She agreed to provide more forbidden information at the upcoming holiday festivities in December. She didn't show up at the Christmas feast, I was told she was not well enough to attend. She did recover but my connection to her family abruptly ended with the demise of my relationship with her granddaughter. Nevertheless, the damage was done.

One by one, grannies, aunts, and other random kitchen queens felt the wrath of my newfound baking powers. I destroyed the mythical status of their rolls, biscuits and pies. I lorded my powers over them at reunions and holiday feasts. I conquered kitchen after kitchen until no granny in the land would risk sharing a countertop with me! Yeah right, in my dreams. Nobody but a granny can best another granny in the kitchen. I have successfully competed with an occasional apple pie or batch of terrapins, but no man is capable of matching the depth of knowledge held in the smallest forgotten corner of a typical granny’s head.

The granny factor notwithstanding, I have a handle on this bread thing with one glaring exception. My nemesis is, and always has been, the notoriously difficult to control “buttermilk cathead biscuit.” For those unfamiliar with the term “cathead biscuit,” consult your nearest geezer or google it. What you will find from geezers and google alike are endless opinions of what a cathead biscuit is. Everybody thinks their cathead is the quintessential cathead and all others are pretenders to the throne. That is what makes this elusive little jewel the touchstone of baking prowess. The objective is to reproduce the size, shape, texture, taste, heart, and soul of a cathead based entirely on a geezer’s romanticized recollections of a long lost mother’s home cooking. A smile or a compliment is the sign of failure. The only acceptable evidence of success is a tear in the eye of your dinner guest. If you see this happen, then you can righteously claim to have mastered cathead theory at least once in your life.

There is perhaps no other kitchen product that is subjected to such an outrageously diverse and uncompromising set of standards. They range from thin and tough as a hockey puck to tall and fluffy as a cloud. They are spooned onto a hot stone or they are meticulously rolled, cut and pitched into a cold glass pan. They contain lard, butter, bacon fat, or shortening and they are raised with either yeast, sourdough, baking powder, baking soda or a combination thereof. The ratios of salt, sugar, campfire ash, gunpowder and/or dust from the bones of their ancestors must be handled with utmost consideration for fragile sensitivities. Yeast rolls, aka terrapins, are easy. Catheads will take your pants down in public and whip your ass like a red-headed stepchild. Of the hundreds of batches that I’ve made over the years, I recall only one time where my guest geezer got all swampy over the biscuits. He said it was something in his eye but we both knew better.

Unfortunately, the age of the cathead is coming to a close. Each day, more of our old folks leave this world and they take their demanding specifications with them. For most people born subsequent to the rise of the Fast Food Industrial Complex, the biscuit tube is not only adequate, it is preferred. Just reach into the fridge, retrieve the cardboard cylinder of pre-mixed, machine excreted dough, slap that baby on the countertop and you are instantly rewarded with a satisfying micro-explosion of shiny white pre-formed and cross-sectioned biscuit food nodules. I’ll probably go to hell for saying it, but those Pillsbury Buttermilk Flaky Biscuits do kick some ass. I imagine the ghosts of a million grannies are not too happy with me right now.

Geocache – Part 2

2006-10-18T15:51:00.000-05:00

We have returned from the land of Iceberg Lettuce and Thousand Island Dressing aka small town Indiana. Our previous trip to the northern hinterlands occurred in the springtime. This time around, as expected, the clammy grip of fall had been very unkind to Cox’s Woods. Nothing is immune to the dulling affects of the dead season.
Since I had no pics of the geocache in the previous post, I dropped by the hollow log to rectify that oversight.

On the path to our log, we passed by this small patch of puffball fungi all nestled in a bed of forest floor detritus, very wintery looking and therefore very depressing. Did I mention that I hate winter, or fall, or whatever the hell that was?

Due to the denuded landscape, we found another hollow log. This one had been overlooked last spring because of the thick, lush, and hang on while I consult my thesaurus, verdant, juicy and luxuriantly alive undergrowth.
Now we come face to face with the previously mysterious, but now horribly overanalyzed and therefore boring, geocache.
I raise my proverbial hammer high and pound the final nail into the coffin of this subject. The contents of the geocache are exposed and drama-addict’s question “what did the post card say” is answered.

Buried Treasure

2006-10-12T01:26:00.000-05:00

I took these photos last year in Indiana. Jilly and I were snooping around off the beaten path when we came across a gigantic old hollow log with mushrooms and moss growing from every nook and cranny.

I looked into one of the openings and saw a military style ammunition can stashed not too far out of view. My first three thoughts were, weed, money and bomb, in that order I think. I searched and found no signs of wiring or other obvious mechanisms that might indicate a booby trap. Using a limb scavenged from the many that littered the forest floor, I poked, prodded, and then scooted the metal container into a position where I could grab it without having to insert any part of my body into what appeared to be excellent snake habitat. Having retrieved the box, Jilly and I discussed the possibilities for a short while until curiosity finally overcame my twenty-first century hypervigilance. I grabbed the latch, gave the lid a pull and !!!! nothing happened.

The ammo can was filled with a strange assortment of unrelated items including a popsicle stick, a postcard, an empty tube of lipstick, a guitar pick, and the list went on. It appeared as if someone had cleaned out their junk drawer and then went through a hell of a lot of trouble to hide the crap in a hollow log deep in the forest. The mystery was solved with the discovery of a small spiral-bound journal containing a list of people from various cities, states, and countries who had found this ammo box by way of GPS. It was a Geocache. I packed everything back into the can and left it as I found it. I later learned that in the Geocache world, I was what they called a “geomuggle.” Had I done harm to the container, its owner would be notified that this hidden trove of treasures had been plundered.

It was interesting but a little disappointing too. I could have used a tall stack of unmarked hundred dollar bills.

Porcine Tragedy

2006-10-08T18:56:00.000-05:00

It was approaching five years since I had forsaken the sun-parched flatlands and narrow minds of my birthplace. Less than a year had passed since I had discovered how surly Oregonians become when it dawns on them that you are not just visiting. I had long since established my “non-Californian” credentials, a less than subtle southern accent having made that obvious, and I was well on my way to mastering the native tongue. Acceptance into that exclusionary culture depended on swift assimilation. I measured the success of my transformation by exasperated accusations from friends back home that I had “forgotten how to talk.”

With a grievously depleted treasury now a primary concern, encouraging evidence of success began to materialize. A siege had been laid at the heavily defended fortifications around Portland, the walls had weakened, and now they were beginning to crumble. I had gathered my forces in preparation of storming the breach when the first of those letters arrived in the mail. The return address, bearing the name of my youngest niece, gave me a smile. I retrieved the contents with no regard for the packaging and unfolded the wax-laden paper to expose two crudely drawn stick figures rendered in heavy strokes of crayon. The taller one, sporting no feet, a bulbous head, misplaced elbows, and shoulder length hair, bore a striking resemblance to me. The other, a much smaller figure, had brown hair curled at the ends, fingers that if measured to scale would extend twelve to fourteen inches in length, and a triangle shaped dress. This was my beautiful little niece of course. I would recognize her anywhere. There we stood, ill-shaped appendages splayed at odd angles, awkwardly holding hands. My niece’s feelings about my sudden departure were unmistakable, the evidence of her despair touchingly conveyed in multitudes of tiny yellow dots, tears flowing like waterfalls from the sad eyes of our two-dimensional avatars. Large block letters below the sketch beseeched, who had taken me away and why would they not allow me to come back home? I had not seen any of my family for over a year and I had no expectation of that happening for at least another four or five. I returned the letter to its torn envelope and made a mental note to call.

My prospects for a successful relocation to the Portland area were finally showing promise. Then, another crayon drawing arrived. A week later, another, then they began to appear in the mailbox on a regular basis. I pondered the possibility that my sweet little niece had outsourced her production to an offshore sweatshop. Where the letters had originally made me smile and chuckle, the constant reminders of home were now causing a sick feeling in the pit in my stomach and a lump in my throat. The subject matter remained clear and consistent. There we stood, holding hands, both of us crying our eyes out. Why had I left? When would I return? Did I need her to come and rescue me? That is how I found myself back in the land of chicken-fried-steak and gravy. I decided that it was only fair that the parents of this loving little girl should shoulder the burden of my aborted move. I unpacked my bags at big brother’s house and there I would remain for several months, in the happy company of my nieces, my nephew, and their conniving parents.

---------------- Little niece's sketch of our reunion----------------

Shortly after my return, big brother’s family became aware of a void in their lives that I had apparently not filled. It was determined that these feelings of emptiness could only be alleviated with a pet. There had always been the fish tank and a few snakes hanging around but they were feeling the need for more interactive animal companionship. Something with eyebrows and vocal cords would be just the thing. So began a series of failed pet experiments that finally ended after ten birds, one cat, an iguana, a guinea pig, one tarantula, countless fish, fifty-six snakes, three dogs, and two Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, all within the space of a year.

-------------------Big Brother's House-------------------

Other than the trauma of living with my brother and his family, none of the animals were harmed and all were eventually either released into the wild or were placed in loving homes with families who had no idea what they were getting into. After all was said and done, the family was left with the fish tank, including the original fish, the few snakes they had started out with, and two promising candidates in the form of miniature piglets. Most of the animals were evicted from the household for obvious reasons. My sister-in-law is a compulsive house cleaner which explains the unsuccessful integration of those that failed to maintain control of all bodily secretions, excretions, and/or vaporous emanations. There were other issues; human eardrums sustain irreparable damage at decibels well below the level of casual conversation between Love Birds. The doves were boring, and as with the exploding population of snakes, had no eyebrows with which to convey their devotion, ditto for the spider and the lizard. The piglets on the other hand were well on their way to becoming full-fledged members of the family when tragedy struck. The fate of the pink female piglet would be settled by her fear of the dark and the resulting nocturnal offerings deposited on sparkling clean floors. Her ability to dance on command was deemed insufficient to overcome this shortfall.

The male on the other hand had everything going his way. He was intelligent, much more so than the hogs we had raised back on the farm. He was attentive and vocal without being overly obnoxious. The eyebrows were sparse and a bit bristly but well defined. He also understood the value of a tight set of sphincters while indoors. This was a high priority for the woman of the house considering she would empty her vacuum bag at least once per week, the detritus therein consisting almost entirely of beige colored carpet fibers from the extremely well vacuumed floors. Combine these positive attributes with a curly tail, a funny grunt and a comical stiff-legged gait and you have the perfect pet. The discovery that I could play the little porker like bagpipes further solidified his position in the family. I admit that while my control of tone and pitch left much to be desired, through gentle manipulation of Little Pig’s hindquarters, I was able to eke out a passable accompaniment to Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.”

-------------------Don't worry, just sleeping-------------------

On any Sunday evening, you might find the family all snuggled into their favorite spots, watching television with Little Pig grunting approval at a well-executed belly scratching or doing double duty as a pillow/heating pad. Our little cloven-hoofed housemate was never left wanting for affection.

Anyone with a working sense of animal nature could have predicted the tragedy that tore this happy family apart, but I guess love is blind. The hairy little sack beneath Little Pig’s tail had been left intact and the unstoppable forces of nature were now on the march. It would soon become apparent that deep inside of Little Pig beat the heart of a fully endowed boar. Then it happened. Piglet needed love, and Piglet found love in the form of Young Nephew’s head. From a certain angle, maybe his head did evoke the rosy hams of a sow in her prime, maybe not. Whatever the reason, Little Pig could no longer contain his love and he mounted Young Nephew’s head right there on the living room floor. To make matters worse, Young Nephew’s rapt attention to the developing plot of a favorite cartoon lead him to shrug off Little Pig’s advances as playful roughhousing. The few short seconds between Little Pig’s breakdown of willpower and a horrified response from Young Nephew’s mother very nearly provided the opportunity for a successful consummation of this unholy union.

As anyone who has ever experienced the power of love can attest, once acknowledged, there is no turning back. Little Pig’s love could not be denied and Young Nephew’s head would never be safe. As the oinker and a full complement of house-hog accouterments were loaded into the waiting car of the new family, I imagined that Little Pig would find other heads to love. In any case, Young Nephew’s would always be his first.

-------------Don't ask, how could I not include this one?-------------

Humanity

2006-10-06T01:24:00.000-05:00

There is a meme being passed around that issues a challenge to post a recent picture of yourself. I don’t have any pictures of myself. It has already been established that I believe having your picture taken steals your soul and the only way to get your soul back is to eat the picture. It helps to wash the picture down with a tall glass of warm tequila but you can avoid the hassle altogether by not allowing your picture to be taken in the first place. In any case, I found this picture of a chimp a while back. I am posting it as a representation of the person that I would like to be, without the fur and humongous ears of course.

I won!

2006-10-03T12:20:00.000-05:00

Yeah! I got “Comment of the Week” at Dr. Blogstein’s place. That comes with a 2-for-1 package deal including airfare and accommodations at the Four Seasons in Maui, free gasoline at all participating outlets for two years, and a lifetime subscription to Haitian Backdoor Love Affair magazine.
Ok, the good Doctor didn’t actually “offer” any of these prizes, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.

Resistance

2006-10-02T15:57:00.000-05:00

I had recently seen my eighth birthday come and go. It was another hot, dry summer day in Nowhere Land. The pungent aroma of weed sap and manure hung heavy in the air. This was, in the words of a farrier I had recently met, the “smell of home.” I was crouched, peering through the window overlooking our front porch. My attentions were alternating between the long caliche driveway in front of our farmhouse and a small patch of highway visible above the tree line a half mile away. A brief glimpse of a blue Chevy departing at high speed in the distance provided reasonable assurance that I could complete my mission in privacy. Patience though! The dust had not settled on the tire-rutted driveway and I had learned through trial and error to never jump the gun. The penalty for inaction was the intolerable misery of the status quo. To be discovered, or worse, betrayed, would bring unimaginable suffering. The crime that I intended to perpetrate today was nothing less than a capital offence. It was getting hard to breathe. A wave of uncertainty, a moment of doubt, I would not miss another opportunity to act.

A cursory rummage through the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink and the drawers in my parent’s bathroom yielded several possibilities. An expeditious survey of the various container labels resulted in nothing resembling the skull and crossbones that might settle the issue. I resorted to a more primitive method. One by one, I unscrewed the sticky, crust-covered lids and judged the lethality of the contents by their appearance. These were pre-internet days. The ancient encyclopedias that I used to read myself to sleep most nights offered no help with identifying the ingredients listed on the bottles and cans. Therefore, I settled on those with fumes that burned my eyes or at the very least, elicited a gag response. I gathered my prospects around a medium sized plastic bottle that I had rescued from the burn barrel days before. Not interested in taking chances, I carefully poured small amounts of several of the most caustic liquids into the empty reservoir. As an added measure, I topped off the noxious brew with Final Net hair spray and a drop or two of Chanel No. 5. With the cap screwed tightly down, I shook and then held the bottle up to the sunlight. This was surely a deadly mixture. Now it was time to put it to use.

By the luck of the draw, I was born a sickly asthmatic. Some of my most vivid childhood memories revolve around the never-ending quest for oxygen. I had devised a technique of forcing air into my lungs by clutching the nearest available stationary object. A doorjamb, a car or a tree, almost anything would do. By setting my entire body to the task, I would maintain a minimum threshold of oxygen in my system, thereby remaining conscious long enough for the episode to gradually abate. Like many children in my situation, I owed my life to those small glass ampoules of adrenaline as well as an adult capable of administering the emergency drug. That and a regimen of allergy shots guaranteed a steady supply of syringes. These versatile little implements would become a fixture in my life. By my seventh birthday, I was self-administering and even giving my mother her scheduled injections.

The container of syringes, always stored on the top shelf of the bathroom cabinet, was my next objective. One by one, I dipped those razor sharp needles and drew the soupy concoction into calibrated chambers, all the while taking care to avoid overfilling. An overloaded syringe is difficult to control and easily spilled. Although sensitive to the valuable moments slipping by, I could not help but sit motionless on the bathroom floor, loaded syringes at the ready, while visions of violence and fury ran through my mind.

These memories played a large part in my decision to carry out this desperate plan. They deserved another going over, so I allowed them to take me back to the day before. With startling clarity, I could feel those heavy boots pounding the wooden floor like thunder from a fast approaching squall. The interval between lightening flash and thunderclap becoming increasingly shorter as the storm draws near. I resolve to stand my ground. This time, I will take it like a man and I will deny that bastard the satisfaction. Then I see his face, blood-red and twisted by rage, veins bulging from neck and forehead, my legs weaken. I see his clenched yellow-stained teeth barely visible through pursed lips. Muscle-bound arms flex as his fists draw tight. A voice as loud as a freight train, and as overwhelming as an avalanche, speaks with menace of the coming tribulation. I stand with my brothers and curse the mother that gave birth to this beast. Like a medieval sword pulled from its scabbard, the thick, heavy leather strap swings into action and the beatings begin. Little brother fights back and tries to escape but his efforts are pitifully ineffective. Through the blur of flailing body parts, purple welts with bloody outlines take form on his partially naked body. His eyes wide in terror, mouth agape, I can hear little brother’s screams for mercy turn to gasping sobs and inhuman shrieks followed by the horrifying sounds a drowning person might make as he breaks the surface one last time. Little brother's feet rarely touch the ground, his body held aloft by one arm. Unable to fend off the blows, his free arm swings in random arcs and his legs dangle stiffly. His tiny body jerks and convulses with each impact. The leather strap is wielded with unimaginable power and mechanical efficiency. Time after time, the strap sings its song as it cuts the air. Little brother's flesh registers the onslaught with shockwaves and ripples as blue and red streaks compete for space on his back, legs, and arms. No longer counting the blows or speculating when it might end, I am waiting my turn. I hide my face behind clenched fingers and my voice joins the chorus of screams and curses. I will not allow this jackass to strip me once again of my dignity. I will go to my fate, standing straight and strong. In an all too familiar display of endurance and determination, the heavy strap is now flies with increased energy and enthusiasm. I have seen animals twenty times the size of little brother broken by these forces. Then the old man’s grip on little brother’s arm releases. Little brother collapses to the floor, he attempts to crawl towards some imagined sanctuary. The dirty bastard surveys his handiwork and re-positions for the coup de grace. The blows rain down in a maelstrom of violence, the final lashes delivered with brute force and cold efficiency. He turns from the sobbing, bloodied wretch now partially hidden beneath a dining room chair and chooses his next victim.

I relinquish the pathetic remnants of my self-respect as my feet leave the ground and I beg for mercy and then scream out in agony. My arm goes numb and is useless to me now but I struggle until my strength gives out. Now completely consumed by paralyzing jolts of pain, my lungs demand air but there is hardly enough to manage the choking gasps, none left over to humiliate myself any further. Countless times through the years, I would hang there in utter disbelief, flopping, flailing, and then crawling through an eternity of withering assaults, wondering if the final blow would ever come. Only after the capacity to form rational thought had broken down would the storm pass to the next brother in line. For this reason, I have no memory of how it felt to escape his iron grip. Even so, I know my own story by the terrible sight of my brothers as they were finished off. Like a fast moving hurricane, the storm would carry its destructive power through the house, out the door, and on through the countryside, leaving devastation in its wake. Afterwards, my brothers and I would avoid each other. There would be no words spoken and no eye contact made until the shame of it all had receded somewhat. Then the plotting would resume and I would begin the process of restoring my dignity and self-respect. I felt a wave of panic. How long had I been sitting there on the bathroom floor, clutching those syringes? A hurried reconnaissance of the surrounding area confirmed that I was indeed still alone. I had a job to do. Today, I would strike hard at my first and second worst enemies. One would die and the other would feel my wrath.

I set a course for the old man’s vegetable garden. I pushed the gate open and stepped over the line onto hallowed ground. I moved without hesitation to my intended victim. I found myself kneeling at the base of the first okra plant in a long row of them. I plunged the needle deep into the pulpy center of the stalk and pushed the plunger with all of my might. To my dismay, the tough plant fiber refused to swell and I had to settle for a smaller, less satisfying dose of the deadly concoction. One after another, I dispatched the okra plants to okra plant heaven with the faint fragrance of Chanel No. 5 drifting in the wind. After my initial success with the okra plants, I discovered a cache of pesticide in the tack room and achieved further glory by reducing his despicable garden to a barren wasteland, year after year, until it lay in ruin.

I held no grudge against the plants in the garden. They were simply collateral damage. By eliminating the garden, I had declared war on my second worst enemy. A nasty little creature that evoked fear on a par with that I felt towards my father. It was an unpredictable and intimidating predator, capable of sending a full-grown horse into a haywire conniption fit. This inch-and-a-half-long demon, sporting a sinister cog-shaped “wheel” in the center of its back, had an ongoing love affair with the okra plants. Or, more accurately, it had an insatiable desire to sink its long, sharp beak into the bellies of certain other bugs who had ongoing love affairs with the okra plants. They existed everywhere but were concentrated to a horrifying degree within the confines of that garden. They moved about the place on uncoordinated stilt-like legs and took flight with undersized wings that produced loud, erratic chopping sounds. They typically concluded their air travels with a particularly ungraceful crash landing, all the worse if the landing strip turned out to be the back of your neck, or worse, the hair on your head. I won't even go into that. When preparing to feed or in response to a threat, they would raise their comically small heads and unfurl an oversized puncturing devise normally kept folded beneath their bodies. Lurching forward, they would plunge their formidable hypodermic probe deep into the victim, injecting digestive enzymes that carry with it a pain that only I could imagine. The victim, instantly incapacitated and then internally liquefied, would be emptied of its contents; the empty husk discarded like a paper plate at a church picnic. Their excruciatingly painful bites resulted in tissue damage that sometimes took months to heal. I would sooner run head first into a nest of angry hornets than risk a single bite from one of them. Known generically as “Wheel Bugs” they were crawling and flying in great swarms in that damnable garden.
The wheel bug was one of many from a family of insects also known as Assassin Bugs. This particular variety was the largest and most aggressive. In stark contrast to the unrelenting misery of my home life, the wheel bugs were vulnerable. I could fight my clandestine war and send them packing as long as I played it smart.

Through those years of family turmoil and violence, I came gradually closer to my goal of taking the beatings like a man. I eventually succeeded. As my brothers and I grew older, stronger and measurably meaner, the person responsible for it all wisely transformed himself into the kindly old grandfather that he is today. The criminal justice system took over where he left off. They were more than happy to bear the brunt of our rage and they were largely responsible for my brothers and me eventually choosing the high road. In any case, we have long since been domesticated and we are reasonably well adjusted tax paying and mostly law-abiding citizens. It took a few decades, but I eventually reconciled with the old man. The change of heart was more a matter of self-preservation than forgiveness. I simply couldn't shoulder the burden of hatred any longer.

The Word

2006-09-27T14:24:00.000-05:00

This is Dr. Gene Scott. He has been taken to his heavenly reward, but his word lives on. I advise caution with your responses. If there is a heaven, this guy has probably taken the gatekeeper's job from St. Peter, by means of blunt force trauma.

Dry Heave

2006-09-23T16:33:00.000-05:00

A major American theme park has decided to repeat a marketing gimmick that paid off big time last year. A Halloween promotion offers free tickets and cuts to the front of the line for anyone willing to eat a live Madagascar Hissing Cockroach. This is not a new phenomenon. There is big money in getting people to eat disgusting things. The Entertainment Industrial Complex struck that gold mine generations ago. Sociologists have said all they can say about what drives people to engage in this type of behavior. All of the angles, profit, attention, self-loathing, and sexual gratification have been discussed ad nauseam. So it is settled, some people eat disgusting shit, I don’t know why, they just do.

I think there are more important issues to be addressed here. I believe there are vast numbers of individuals among us who secretly eat bugs. As children, they sit cross-legged in the dirt, feigning interest in the social order of ants. As adults, they diligently label and mount their scrumptious specimens for future “examination.” They wait impatiently for the next contest or special offer that provides license to publicly indulge in their secret desire. As bug is pressed against tongue, some conceal their ecstasy by contorting their faces in well-rehearsed expressions of horror. Others hide behind exaggerated, and therefore unbelievable, displays of euphoria.

Your fingers twitch in anticipation of the obvious question. Has my New-World-Centric bias blinded me to the obvious? Absolutely not, I am aware that bugs, worms, grubs, etc., are considered delicacies in places far removed from my sterilized environment. I also know that my own list of personal favorites includes items that would wretch the most fervent eater of bugs in those far way lands. The fact remains, those born into non-bug-eating cultures would sooner gulp a gallon of warm lard before they would grind the crunchy shell of a beetle between their teeth. So, it is settled. Learned behavior or not, eating bugs is disgusting.

I said all of that so I could ask this question. What about those of us who share our lives with people who put disgusting things into their mouths? (Silver platter alert!) Smokers married to non-smokers come to mind, but they likely knew what they were getting into in the first place. A better example is a recent incident where I walked into the kitchen and caught Jilly furiously stuffing a chocolate filled doughnut into her mouth. Only moments before, this pastry product had taken up residence in the deepest recesses of the kitchen garbage can. It had, by mutual consent, been deposited there along with several other ancient, and very aromatic, containers of decayed food. Jilly stood wide-eyed and motionless, with chocolate sludge on her lips and doughnut detritus littering the floor at her feet. Her eyes shifted from surprise to embarrassment and then quickly assumed the familiar squint of defiance. The awkward pause ended with an enthusiastic resumption of mastication. I stood in utter disbelief, arm outstretched, the accusatory finger held aloft in lieu of the scream that had become lodged somewhere between my lungs and my paralyzed tongue. In a scene reminiscent of a Wild Kingdom episode in which an Anaconda unhinges its jaws and swallows whole the struggling boar, the doughnut was consumed. There followed a flurry of rationalizations as well as “irrefutable evidence” of physical separation between the pastry and the decomposing waste. Her feeble attempts at damage control were all in vain, for in the time that it took for my eyes to behold and my mind to accept, I became the husband of a dumpster diver.

Ok, so I’m being overly dramatic. Who hasn’t eaten from a garbage can? Is it any worse than stumbling upon your husband, fingers plunged deep between the cheeks in an attempt to exorcise that demon itch? Is it more detrimental to happiness than the reflection in the bathroom mirror of your spouse, finger buried past the second knuckle, burrowing into the cerebral cortex via the nostril? Yes, it’s a lot worse than that. Bug eating is a deal killer. If you doubt this, envision the kitchen scenario with minor revisions. You enter the kitchen unannounced. You make eye contact with your beloved at the very moment she thrusts a fistful of cockroaches passed her delicate lips into that beautiful mouth that you have loved with every inch of your being. She freezes, wide eyed, embarrassed and then defiant. The bugs are consumed and then she beckons, “come give me a kiss baby.” So much for the victimless crime.

Yeah Baby!

2006-09-20T02:25:00.000-05:00

Daddy's got a brand new flea bag.

Stoned

2006-09-17T16:36:00.000-05:00

If you live long enough, you reach a stage where there are few blanks left to be filled in. Life becomes a multiple-choice questionnaire where a simple process of elimination results in a manageable burden of probabilities. Case in point, you can reasonably assume that visible blood in your urine is not an indication of multiple organ failure or an overlooked gunshot wound. Unfortunately, a simplified life does not amount to a worry free life. A fact of life emphasized with a gentle jostling at 2:30am. Jilly, in a tentative voice, informed me that her pee was red. I was instantly alert and on the job. The trusty multi-choice mechanism was primed and set to task. The usual suspects were lined up for identification. My considered response, rendered in utmost sincerity, was “What? Red? Are you talking Drank-Too-Much-Kool-Aid-Red or Took-a-Multi-Vitamin-Red? Precious seconds ticked by.

In the span of a few short minutes, an ambiguous pressure in Jilly’s lower back began to blossom with only a brief interval between “this is not good” and “RUN THE GODDAMN TRAFFIC LIGHTS!” A vigorous application of gas pedal followed by laborious debarking maneuvers preceded tense negotiations with the Emergency Room admittance-droid.

Jilly, now shaking uncontrollably and sweating profusely, was allowing herself a barely audible cry. This was a significant turn of events. She is known to shed a measured quantity of sad water at the odd wedding or funeral. I had never seen it happen in response to pain.

Unlike your typical food service establishment, ER personnel do not provide “wait times”. It took five minutes of hard bargaining to squeeze a time estimate from the droid, forty-five minutes to an hour before admittance and an additional wait for a doctor. A call to a more distant ER and another practiced application of blatant coercion yielded a more acceptable scenario, empty waiting room! The red traffic lights flew by. Jilly’s eyes were starting to glaze over. I pried her fingers from my leg and repositioned them to restore blood flow to my lower extremities.

Our grand entrance at the next ER would have made any B movie director proud. The drama, the suspense, the tenuous grasp on rational judgment, all joined in one brilliant display of urgency. To my surprise and relief, empathetic (and bored) health care professionals, who responded to my opening salvo by practically throwing narcotic loaded syringes at Jilly, proceeded before a single legal document was signed. The needles found their mark. Jilly’s convulsions began to ease and her white knuckled grip on my now useless left arm relaxed. Phase one complete. Next order of business: WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?

I kept one ear trained on Jilly’s medicated mumblings while I flipped the pages of my mental rolodex. Blood in the urine and excruciating pain, what could it be? Had she somehow yanked a kidney loose from its moorings? Was it rabies? My multi-choice cheat sheet was failing me. Through the application of Computed Axial Tomography, the mystery was solved. In medical terms, the condition is known as “bladder rat.” These vermin nest in the kidneys and only cause trouble when they bolt for the bladder via the ureter. They scrape the soft lining of the ureter raw, cutting deep enough to sever thousands of tiny blood vessels. The body retaliates by initiating waves of agonizing contractions similar to childbirth. The rats, once safely inside the bladder, rest and gather their strength. The tender lining of the urethra is next to fall victim in the escape attempt. More shredded tissue and breached blood vessels, more mind-numbing contractions follow. Minutes turn to hours, hours to days and, in the worst cases, days to weeks as the process saps the victim of strength and will.

The enemy exposed, a pitched battle ensued. For two weeks, they were at each other’s throats. In Jilly’s corner was the full weight of the medical industrial complex. To be honest, not an encouraging thought considering the bladder rat had millions of years of natural selection as well as the element of surprise on its side. All of the early battles went to the bladder rat. Only after a stiff working-over by another high tech gadget, a sonic blaster of sorts, did evidence begin to show up in the collection device provided by the nurse. This “collection device” consisted of a thimble-sized funnel with a strainer fixed to one end. A miracle of modern engineering, this little wonder did an excellent job of distributing urine evenly throughout the bathroom and all over Jilly.

---------------Artist rendition of bladder rat---------------

After several days of passing small fragments and jagged shards, the big-daddy bladder rat telegraphed its eminent arrival. With a peristaltic heave of biblical might, the dirty bastard gouged its way through the last few inches of Jilly’s urethra and landed unceremoniously in the thimble.
Introductions are in order. Blog Reader, this is Bladder Rat. Bladder Rat, this is Blog Reader.

---------------Jilly's actual bladder rat (kidney stone)---------------

If not for doctor's orders to the contrary, a flick of the little chrome lever could easily have sent the little shit to a permanent home in the city’s wastewater treatment facilities. Cooler heads prevailed and the rat is now on display in the “Stone Room” from 8:00am to 5:00pm Monday through Friday.

Roasted Chickens

2006-09-16T11:36:00.000-05:00

The plot thickens.
See Choked Chicken at previous post below for details.
In a distressingly common turn of events, the idiot who was dispatched to the afterlife last week by the two fisted grip of his intended victim was identified as a contract killer who was hired by the nurse's estranged husband. The brain dead husband apparently assisted the hammer headed hit man in disarming his ex-wife’s security system prior to the ambush. It is becoming increasingly clear how close the victim came to death as a result of the nefarious plot. I see a television movie in the making.

Jackass

2006-09-12T00:30:00.000-05:00

I met these two at a remote jobsite a while back. The jenny (female) wasted no time in hitting me up for an ear scratching. The jack (male) was not amused and immediately put himself between his woman and me. I was not interested in doing battle for mating rights, so I went about my business. Being true to his nature, the jackass could not let it go. So he did what any jackass would do, he mounted her. As is evident from the pic, there is no amorous intent. He is just letting me know that if anybody is going to be doing the business end of this little honey, it’s going to be him. He was still there when I left 10 minutes later, putting on his best “studly” face.
The cows are doing what cows do. They are engaged in the eternal quest for material to convert into manure. They are profoundly dedicated and very efficient at what they do.

Choking the Chicken

2006-09-09T01:07:00.000-05:00

I told myself I was not going to do the daily news commentary thing but I can’t help myself. Last Wednesday, a Portland Oregon woman came home to find a man burgling her house. Mr. Hot-Nuts-Burglar-Dude whips out a hammer and proceeds to threaten the damsel. The frightened, defenseless girl then goes about the business of choking the idiot to death with her bare hands.
See link for article.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/08/nurse.intruder.ap/

In my younger days, for a number of years, I worked alongside neo-Nazis, anti-government survivalists, klansmen and bikers, both hard core and sidewalk commandos. There were also home breakers, junkies, meth freaks, larcenists and garden-variety reprobates (No, I was not a cop or prison guard). As truthful as blatant stereotyping can be, there appears to be a roughly defined code of honor that runs consistently through these various cultures, with the exception of the meth-freaks & junkies. Most everyone has heard of the likely fate that awaits the typical child molester upon incarceration. There is a similar disdain for cowards, snitches, narcs, liars and those unlucky bastards who get thrashed by women (see sidenote at the end of this post for exceptions). You might be thinking to yourself, I took a serious beating from a female recently and I’m doing just fine. That is different, I will explain.

Let’s just say that I’m strolling along in downtown Portland and Kara mistakes me for a hippie. She insults me and beats me about the face and shoulders with one of those water wieners or pool noodles or whatever you call those things. After Kara’s lust for hippie blood has been sated, I call the police and press charges. Kara has to pay my dental bills and replace my blood stained tie-dyed T-shirt. There is a short blurb on the evening news where I tell the viewers how I overcame adversity and everybody is impressed with my bravery.

Now we alter the scenario slightly and see how it affects the outcome. I’m strolling along in Jackass Flats (east of the Willamette) and some crazy ho-bag comes up demanding that I give her all of my money. I tell Kara, it’s my damn money you ho-bag! If you didn’t spend all or your crack money on weed, you wouldn’t be up in my face acting like a fool! She says “fuck you asshole, I’ll be kicking your ass if you don’t cough up the cash”! So I say, come on! Kara beats me to the ground, chokes me unconscious, and takes my money. From that point on, ten-year-old kids and old ladies are going to be kicking my ass and taking my crack money. It’s not just because they can, it’s because they have lost all respect for me.

Had Mr. Nuts-On-Fire been able to pry open the fingers clutched around his throat, it is a safe bet that he would have done his time in the joint with a flashing neon “OPEN” sign mounted above his rectum. The market for fifi-bags would have crashed overnight. Then there’s the season pass for ass whippings from prisoners and guards alike.

I have no doubt Mr. Empty-Nutsack-Hammer-Dude would have chosen that fate, if it had been his for the choosing. In this particular instance, fate finally managed to kick open the right door. Close to the end, after his strength failed him and the struggle had settled down to the business at hand, as his lungs were burning for oxygen and tunnel vision closed in, there had to be a brief moment, before everything faded to black, where he knew that his life was over. I want to believe that the last thing he saw was his “easy mark” gritting her teeth as she bore down on his sorry ass.

Pricks like him prey on the weak. Mr. I-Got-Choked-To-Death-By-A-Nurse picked on somebody with the outward appearance of weakness. Being an emergency room nurse, the idiot lying dead on her living room floor was probably not the first corpse she had seen that day.

Sidenote: There are other exceptions to the stigma associated with ass whippings from females. In situations involving girlfriends and/or wives, I have seen men point to their scars with pride as they recount the violent episodes that resulted in their disfigurements. Knife and bullet-hole scars seem to be the most highly prized. A prime example is illustrated in one of my previous posts titled "Insert Bullet Here”. A more recent example is a first-hand accounting from a guy who's wife hit him on the head with a large, heavy skillet, while sound asleep on his living room couch. I had to ask the question, can you be knocked unconscious if you are already unconscious? Ironically, he could not answer that question.

Best Bone Ever

2006-09-07T21:01:00.000-05:00

Oh yeah, this bone is...so...good. I don't remember ever having such a juicy bone before. It's definitely the best bone…I just can’t get over how tasty it is. Oh yes…

Best Bone Ever

2006-09-07T20:49:00.000-05:00

Hey, do you mind? I'm kinda busy here. Do you not see that I'm working on this bone?

Turlit Delusions

2006-09-05T14:37:00.000-05:00

This woman did not fart within her lifetime. It is also unlikely that she ever had a bowel movement. She did not secrete noxious bodily fluids of any type, ever. The cultural phenomenon responsible for this oddity is alive and well today, though thankfully not in my neighborhood.

Year: 1979 (Final year of High School)
Place: Evening shift at the brass factory.
Event: Mandatory shift meeting.
First item on agenda: Shift manager announces that the people (yes, plural) responsible for plugging the sinks in the women's restroom and then filling them with urine will be terminated when caught.
Crowd Reaction: Randomly dispersed high-pitched giggling.

From the beginning, the “purity of womanhood” myth was aggressively instilled in my southern Christian psyche. We were expected to carry this myth to our grave. Southern women were expected to reinforce the myth by never providing evidence that any bodily function had ever originated from their person, ever!

The thought of a female being dry-docked and scraped for barnacles was not only subversive, it was preposterous. The image of a female lifting a cheek would never cross the mind of a southern gentleman because it simply didn’t happen.
In an unquestioned act of faith, I accepted the premise that those angels of purity could somehow complete their biological functions without splatter, gaseous emission or any of the dangers associated with the use of wood-pulp based “cleaning” supplies. As I grew older, logic indicated a more realistic approach. While the concept of the immaculate “evacuation” required occasional revision, I foresaw no event that might pose a serious threat to this tradition. The spiritual separation between those hallowed givers-of-life and the undesirable byproducts of life would endure. Now here I was, confronted with disturbing evidence to the contrary.

Years before, I had watched Santa’s sleigh go down in flames. I was not concerned. The Easter bunny laid its last egg. I could not have cared less. My parents rutting like farm animals? That was a tough one but I got over it pretty quick. One by one those ridiculous cultural oddities fell, including the myths of divine benevolence and the trust between father and son. A short sermon, throw some dirt in the grave and move on. No big deal. The “purity of womanhood” myth was going down hard and I was confused by my reaction. Who were these women stuffing toilet paper in the sink drain, hiking their asses over the edge and pissing, one after another, until the sink was full? Maybe it was the organized nature of the incidents, in which multiple sinks were allegedly topped off, that threw me for a loop. The fact that I would have gladly helped them fill those sinks if they had asked didn’t make my reaction any more comprehensible or less ironic.

These days, I am happy to live in a world where women can rip one off and laugh about it, and they are no longer expected to endure the unscratched itch. The proverbial pedestal is in ruins, an artifact from a dark age of ignorance, and we men are free to leave the toilet seat in whatever position that suited our last bodily function. I say good riddance to chivalry and long live equality.

Raku Break (Post Fire Reduction or American Raku)

2006-09-05T13:44:00.000-05:00

Had to take a break to catch up on some Raku (i.e., Post Fire Reduction or American Raku)pottery
firing over the weekend. I lost one to heat stress.
It was a piece of junk anyway but still
wasted effort getting it to the glazing phase.
It had to be this weekend because this was the first
period in a long time with temperatures below the high
90's or low 100's. It has been hanging around 90+ even
late into the evening. Factor in the protective clothing
and the kiln firing ~1800 degrees & that
does a little ass scorching. Not a whole lot of fun
to fire in the summertime. But still preferable to the
winter. Wet and (relative) cold increases the heat/cooling
stress and causes more crumbled pottery. It's also
wet and cold, I hate that.

Hellgrammites and the Rapture

2006-08-30T01:46:00.000-05:00

This is the infamous hellgrammite. You do
not want this nasty little bastard anywhere
near your underwear. Those mandibles are
fully functional ass biting tools of destruction.

This is the Rapture.
You do not want Rapturists anywhere near
your underwear either. They are also capable
of inflicting a nasty wound when provoked.

Note the carnage left behind as those who are
raptured are yanked from behind the wheels
of their vehicles.

Note the speed of departure from your
earthly garments. Imagine how ridiculous
this scenario would be if there were 72 virgins
waiting on the other side. Yeah, that would be
pretty ridiculous. Those Muslims and their
crazy ideas. Wow, 72 virgins, what were
they thinking? Looks like they will never be
raptured and fly naked through the air. Too
bad for them I guess.

There is only one thing that worries me out more than starvation, bird flu, intestinal parasites, hemorrhoids, televangelists, dogs with rabies, rampaging hordes of Muslims and hellgrammites in my underwear. That would be Rapturists. My mistrust of these people has nothing to do with religion. What freaks me out is the thought of educated people in positions of power subscribing to the belief that at a designated time, the streets will be littered with piles of clothing as the skies fill with naked people flying through the air with a one way ticket to paradise. Pilotless planes will fall from the sky with unsaved men, women and children plummeting do their doom. Ditto for the millions of driverless vehicles piling up in heaps of burning wreckage. From my first introduction to this concept as a child, I was never able to wipe the creepy image from my mind of old geezers with scrotums flapping in the wind and women with outstretched arms and legs pumping away like a cheesy Hollywood freefall stunt. The thought of it made me laugh when I was too young to understand how serious the issue was.
The main street through the farming community in which I grew up consisted primarily of a three-room school and four churches. From an eternal lake of fire perspective, the Methodist church that I belonged to came up short in the eyes of the competing houses-of-God on that street. The pious congregations in two of those churches did their best to save us from our ignorance of God's will, but to no avail. The Baptists were by far the most concerned for our salvation and after attending a few of their revivals, there was no question in my mind that if the afterlife was managed in the manner in which it was portrayed by the Jesus Industrial Complex, I would be one of those souls left behind. My own mother would join the naked hordes and wave a final goodbye, all memories of her hell-bound children soon to be erased. That freaked me out on several different levels.
Later, after hitching my wagon to a group of fundamentalist evangelical Jesus freaks, my failure to speak in tongues at the appointed time confirmed my worst fear, I was unworthy. I resolved to make the best of a bad situation. Thank God for tequila and the brotherhood of the weed. They carried me through those transition years between hard-core religious indoctrination and the glory of logic and reason. These days, I try not to judge too harshly. It would be easy to fall into the ex-smoker syndrome where addiction is replaced by indignant rage. Come to think of it, I am an ex-smoker and I do have a lot of indignant rage but I try to give my Christian friends the same benefit of the doubt that I give to subscribers of all belief systems that I do not fully comprehend. In any case, I've come full circle to where the thought of scrotums flapping in the wind is funny again but I still don't trust those Rapturists.

Placenta Skin Boots

2006-08-28T14:49:00.000-05:00

I need to get rid of a pair of placenta skin boots that I bought at an internet auction a while back. I was told they originally belonged to Tom Cruise and were only worn once. The boots are really soft and supple and they make your feet feel like they are still in the womb. Unfortunately, they are too small for my feet. I have to use tongs to take them off.
Any takers?

Eye

2006-08-27T01:38:00.000-05:00

I think eye have something in my I.

You talking to me?

2006-08-27T00:41:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I crapped in your shoe.
What the hell you gonna do about it?

Hypovigilance

2006-08-27T00:10:00.000-05:00

Little brother was not practicing the necessary level of vigilance considering his precarious position, sitting between his two older brothers on the tailgate of a ‘66 Chevy Pickup. The outside positions in that seating arrangement were hotly contested as those locations had something with which to hang on. The middle position could be a scary place when the old man was in a hurry. It would have been inconceivable to retreat to the relative safety of the bed of the truck or even worse, climb into the cab. You would sooner be caught stretching a fifi bag than suffer that indignity.
On the farm, the tailgate transportation system was as natural as the smell of chicken shit and a preferable alternative to walking. From the standpoint of the old man, it was an efficient use of resources considering the logistics of loading three grunts into the cab especially when the destination was likely not more that a few hundred yards away. It was a simplified process. Climb in, step on the gas and go. They either catch the ride or walk their asses to the next stop. Those short little hops between pasture and barn or barn to fence line were fast, bumpy, hot, dusty and fun. They were the closest thing to relief likely experienced during those long hours of slaving for the perpetual project-maker.
So it was that little brother, occupying center position, was bouncing and shifting in unison with the two older tailgaters on a day when the old man was in a big hurry. In an act suspiciously similar to “culling”, where the weak or lame are removed from the herd, the old man hit the gas pedal as the pickup simultaneously went haywire in response to a series of potholes. I say “suspicious” because the old man’s rut and pothole navigation skills were as flawless as any self-respecting tractor jockey could hope for and yet there he was, brazenly violating one of the cardinal rules of farm equipment husbandry.
Little brother catapulted off the tailgate. Subsequent to reaching the maximum altitude in his trajectory, he seemed to float in mid air for a brief moment prior to his dramatic reintroduction to the hard packed, tire-rutted roadway. Tumbling and rolling, arms flapping and legs flailing, little brother added significantly to the dust cloud kicked up by the balding tires before finally coming to rest. The old man hit the brakes but he didn’t exit the vehicle. The rear and side-view mirrors provided all of the information he needed to assess the situation. Little brother, having taken on a monochrome hue with patches of red here and there, picked himself up and resumed his middle position for the remainder of the trip. A spoon dropped in the gravy at dinnertime would have caused a bigger stir.

It barks for who?

2006-08-26T12:24:00.000-05:00

Ask not for whom the dog barks.
It barks for thee.

Territorial Terrier

2006-08-26T01:24:00.000-05:00

Last warning, step away from the bowl motherf*cker!

Dog Day Afternoon

2006-08-26T00:53:00.000-05:00

C'mon man, bust me out of here and take me with you! I know this good lookin bitch and she's got a fine lookin cousin and I know you would dig her....

Basting Ladle

2006-08-26T00:10:00.000-05:00

Who will operate the basting ladle?
I have become aware that my recently acquired vegetarian lifestyle has sapped the pigment from my skin. This truth became self evident last night as I stood beside my gay friend, Skiver. Skiver is a window into the bizarre world of hair “product”, 6000-thread-count bed sheets and wall mounted lube dispensers. His Midwestern white-boy roots are well camouflaged behind a polished “mo” persona. From a distance, the first thing you notice is the crispy Caribbean tan and photoshopped teeth that luminesce with a brilliance not seen since the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1996. Competing with that kind of perfection has never crossed my mind. It would be a waste of time anyway. The genes that drive a man towards the opposite sex are also responsible for Old Spice, Haggar slacks and NASCAR. Skiver knows things. I called him from the dressing room of a clothing store to verify that my choice of shirt and pants would not spoil the pictures on my wedding day. Jilly was standing next to me in the dressing room. She wisely abdicated her womanly authority in deference to the fashion sense of a homo. Unfortunately, the fruits from Skiver's tree of knowledge have not always been particularly helpful. For better or worse, I know what CBT stands for, which will come in handy if I’m ever offered a 50%-Off coupon for Cock and Ball Torture. Skiver gets a kick out of seeing me cringe and I am not alone in that respect. Even years after the incident, there is significant residual trauma from his “hide the banana” trick. Skiver had made an unsolicited announcement that he was born with no gag reflex. I was not there, but I was informed by reputable sources that those present were unanimous in their desire to change the subject. By all accounts, the banana disappeared down his gaping maw like a rat down a sewer pipe. Our friend Oz is still not able to talk about it. I believe she is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Back to the point, the tan. I can read fine print through my eyelids. I look like the x-ray dude eating lunch in the 8mm films they used to show in 9th grade health class. I am thinking the unthinkable. I’m going to pony up for a few tanning sessions. I’ll call Skiver tomorrow and find out where the hell to go and what to do once I get there.

Karmic Nightmare

2006-08-22T21:50:00.000-05:00

I thank god for high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated trans-fats. They transform mundane meal options into tasty treats and they are this country's best hope for keeping the Social Security system solvent long enough for me to dip into it before it goes bust.
I am no stranger to the glory of fried lard planks and pork fat smoothies but the doc says I have done remarkably little damage to my cardiovascular system over the years. Good genes he says.
Unfortunately, other health concerns require that I end my love affair with cattle squeezings of all kinds. In addition, cackle berries, yard birds and pig products are also on the chopping block.
It is beginning to look like fish might be my last best hope for retaining some vestigial connection to my hairy knuckled progenitors. That is a small consolation, as I do not consider fish to be a true meat product. It’s more like a scaly vegetable with fins and a vacant stare.
I’m sure a few years will be tacked on to my life span as a result. I’m just not sure how I feel about that right now.
Exactly how do you live without meat products? So far, only two weeks into it, I have become dizzy and disoriented, my eyesight has blurred, restaurants have become torture chambers, my testicles have shriveled in their sack and Jilly Bean has taken on the concerned demeanor of an emergency room nurse.
It is only by virtue of my extensive knowledge of levers and fulcrums that I maintain my husbandly duties.
I am living a Karmic nightmare.

Raku Lamps (Post Fire Reduction or American Raku)

2006-08-13T16:24:00.000-05:00

The wheel is addicting.
Raku kicks ass.
I'm doing lamps for now.
The heat stress in Raku firing creates micro-cracks. Not good for guacamole bowls or bongs. No problem for lamps.
The glazes are recipes that get passed around on the internet with a few personal tweaks here and there.
Raku is all about fire and smoke and shit flying everywhere. Throw them in the kiln and yank them out at 1200' to 2500' F with tongs.
They go straight from the open kiln into a bucket of sawdust, shredded paper, oily rags, old underwear or whatever burns well and produces a desired affect. Then you run around as fast as you can with scissors in your hands, mix beer with whiskey and go swimming right after you eat.
Sometimes they come out of the bucket looking ok. Sometimes you dump them in a garbage can. You never know what the end result will be.

Misdirected Talents

2006-08-13T10:51:00.000-05:00

In one of those rare epiphanies that manifest themselves at the most unpredictable times, Jilly Bean discovered on the way to the store this morning that she can fit eight Peanut Butter M&Ms in her mouth at the same time and still chew.
Now, if I can only find some way to convince her to use those powers for good and not evil.

Stranded in Paradise "Little Man v2.2"

2006-08-12T13:08:00.000-05:00

"Little Man v2.2"
Base and vase are wheel thrown & raku fired clay, 34" tall. Leaves and flowers are clay/hand- made & raku fired with blown glass beads at flower blossoms.

Parents not amused. Too creepy.
Jilly Bean loves it, I think.

More Than The Sum of his Parts "Little Man v1.2"

2006-08-12T12:16:00.000-05:00

This is "Little Man v1.2" Clay sculpture
His home is a raku fired piece that is finished but I can't seem to find the motivation to complete the wiring for the electronics.

Chair Rot

2006-08-11T00:18:00.000-05:00

I learned early in life that I was not suitable employee material.
The reality of it fell on me like a giant bucket of glue around the time that I became a man. I was eight years old. I had already come to the conclusion that working for "the man" was not going to be my fate. Unfortunately, I was trapped in the body of a 45-pound runt.
My desire to enter the world of independence and begin breeding was thwarted by the long arm of the law, which dictated that I chafe under the yoke of oppression for at least another 7 years.
The breeding part of my game plan came from the misguided notion that it was not optional. I was a product of the Jesus Industrial Complex after all. It was the master plan. Grow up, get married, produce children who hate your guts and then wither away.
Having been raised on a farm, the mechanical undertakings involved in the breeding process were no mystery to me. I had witnessed the courting behavior of all manner of furry and feathered beasts and for the most part, it all seemed fairly straightforward and somewhat consensual, except for the chickens. Or, to be more specific, the roosters. They did not follow the golden rule. Chicken sex is always, and I mean always, chicken rape. Anybody who has ever raised them will agree. It is a knockdown drag-out that tends to throw a kink in the old "unspoiled animal kingdom" myth.
I rightly considered the chicken model of "procreation" to be an undesirable aberration and years later, several years later, I fully embraced the mechanical act of breeding but left the procreation to my other more motivated brethren.
Back to the point, I began counting the days. I would endure another 364 weeks of a suffering before finally breaking free of that pathetic life of violence and fear. I vowed that I would never suffer at the hands of an overlord again which brings me to the point. I have a home office.
I have mastered the art of sitting naked, freaked out bed hair, eyes closed, slumped over my keyboard, talking to clients on the phone in my "prime-time newscaster" voice as if I were sitting in a leather upholstered boardroom surrounded by minions serving up my coffee and Wall Street Journal.
You might be thinking, that is a blatant violation of the first rule of home officing, “no naked chair sitting”. I am fully aware of the dangers of chair rot. Fear not, I am a trained professional.
Anyway, coffee tastes like burnt bean juice and I don't read the Wall Street Journal but my work is pretty damn important to me. It pays the medical bills and makes me feel like I don’t have to apologize for depleting the world’s oxygen supply.
So, on occasion, I strap on a business costume and parade about various “real” offices to prove that I exist. I spew esoteric jargon as if fertilizing a garden with the highest quality manure and trade offensive jokes with people who wouldn’t piss down my throat if my belly were on fire. It’s ok though because I'm not working for "the man".

Conflagration Station (Post Fire Reduction or American Raku)

2006-08-04T02:38:00.000-05:00

These pics are of a recent raku pottery firing.
I burned the bejesus out of my legs transferring the large piece to the can. I forgot to double up my pants. No worse than a bad sunburn but still a drag.
The prototype "little man" is there at the base keeping an eye on everything.

I've seen the future "Little Man v2.2"

2006-08-04T00:54:00.001-05:00

This is "Little Man v2.2" Clay sculpture
He has already found a home in a larger piece that I'm working on.
The "Little Man" pieces appear to cause concern within my family. Nobody has said anything in particular. Just odd expressions on their faces.

Insert bullet here *

2006-08-03T01:00:00.000-05:00

I was thinking about a friend that I haven't seen in 20 years or more.
We were on an ironworking crew together and we spent a considerable amount of time holed up in cheap hotels while working out-of-town jobs.
He was maybe 40 years old at that time which made him practically ancient in my view.
Likely as not, conversations during downtime would veer towards the supernatural and religion. In my eyes, he was a sort of shaman, or as close to a shaman as you were likely to run into in West Texas at that time.
In the grandest tradition of chivalry, he was gunned down by his fiancé’s jealous lover. He was in his own front yard, reaching for the doorknob of a pickup. At the steering wheel of the pickup sat an idiot who, only moments before, had lost his nerve and decided that being dragged from his own vehicle, in full view of the object of his desire, was too much to bear.
All six chambers would have eventually been emptied into my friend if not for a poor choice of firearms. The shooter was an idiot of the highest caliber and had settled on a civil war re-issue, black powder cap & ball revolver instead of a more reliable modern pistol.
The first ball entered his torso just below the sternum and traced a path, as ball shot is sometimes known to do, around the right side of his heart eventually lodging between two ribs on the left side of his spine. He fell backwards and attempted to shield himself with his hands and arms.
The second shot entered his right forearm and traced a straight path out the back of his elbow. There is some question in my memory as to whether the third shot was a glancing wound or if it actually ended up inside of him.
Then, click, click, click, the hammer fell on poorly packed and primed chambers, duds.
After receiving word of the assault, I left a fairly noticeable trail of rubber and smoke between where I had been and the only hospital in town.
I was told when I arrived that he had died several times on the operating table but was already in ICU.
Shift forward in time a few days. I am now standing beside his hospital bed, considering the mass of tangled tubes and wires entering and exiting the various natural and man-made openings on his person. He is sedated but very much conscious. The nurse is swabbing his dried and cracked lips with glycerin and his chest is barely moving with each breath that he takes.
This was the first time I noticed that gurgling noise that I eventually learned to ignore. The nurse moves to the side and I position myself in his field of vision. I look him in the eyes and he gives me one of those "really screwed up this time" grins.
We had agreed months before that if either of us ended up "on the table", we would do our best to remember, if not outright initiate, one of those mysterious occurrences. "No" he said. He had not had an out-of-body-experience. I didn't see any fear in him, only disappointment. I said, “Maybe you did and you don't remember”. He acknowledged with a raspy, "maybe".
I was pretty sure after it was all over and he was on his feet again, the memory of it would come back to him. After several months of the gurgling colostomy bag and an undisclosed quantity of liquor and pain pills, nada.
The object of all of this dangerous affection was a barfly that he met while working one of those out-of-town jobs.
The first time I saw her she was lying on the hood of one of our company trucks, proclaiming with enthusiasm her love for all mankind. She was in fact overflowing with love for all mankind.
Anyway, he did marry the damsel. Twice that I know of. There was a rumored third time around but I never verified it. They had a few kids.
More on that later, maybe.