The Unbearable Bobness of Being

Reason #563 Why Texas Should Grow the Hell Up

 

Me in high school, 1976.

I can't even say how much I hate a state that allows this crap.

BALCH SPRINGS, Texas - Pre-kindergartner Taylor Pugh likes his floppy hair just how it is: long on the front and sides, covering his earlobes and shirt collar.

But his long locks violate the dress code in his suburban Dallas school district. So Taylor again Wednesday found himself facing in-school suspension, sitting in a library with a teacher's aide while his friends played and learned together in a classroom.

"They kicked me out that place," said Taylor, 4, who prefers the nickname Tater Tot. "I miss my friends."

He's 4 years old and in school suspension because OMGZ HIZ HAIR IZ TOO LONGZ! What a collection of morons running this school. Is it any wonder we got the stupidest President ever known to man from this state?

According to the district dress code, boys' hair must be kept out of the eyes and cannot extend below the bottom of earlobes or over the collar of a dress shirt. Fads in hairstyles "designed to attract attention to the individual or to disrupt the orderly conduct of the classroom or campus is not permitted," the policy states.

The district is known for standing tough on its dress code. Earlier this year, a seventh-grader in the district was sent home for wearing black skinny pants. His parents chose to home-school him.

I mean, he's a little boy who prefers to be called "Tater Tot." He misses his friends. His parents are going to donate his long curly locks one day to a charity that makes wigs for cancer patients.  I can't even believe crap like this still occurs in public schools.  Seriously, Texas, get your shit together or risk becoming even more irrelevant to the world than you currently are.

On its Web site, the district says its code is in place because "students who dress and groom themselves neatly, and in an acceptable and appropriate manner, are more likely to become constructive members of the society in which we live."

Damn dirty hippies! What horrifying time warp do these people live in? Maybe this nonsense goes on elsewhere, I know the whole school uniform fad is always out there, but the cookie cutter approach to appearance just reeks of the same old white privilege and white domination that subjugates and punishes people of all races, ethnicities, and creeds in a nation that sometimes treats its Constitution as more of a set of guidelines than principles and laws.

Free Tater Tot. When he is free so you will be.

Trip Report: 12/15/2009 - Spoklahoma to Rainytown

Guess where? (answer below)

Spoklahoma Basalt Transition Zone (SBTZ):

Departed 1330. Unremarkable. 90 plowed and chemical'd. Wet and mostly bare.

Basalt Zone to Moses Hole:

Bare and wet. Cruise optimal 75 mph. One radar trapper WSP parked on snowy median steep incline camo'd in snow. Clever.

Basalt Zone Moses Hole to Hellensberg:

Snowing. Slush trap on passing lane. Saw one DOT plow. Road surface slick with doom.

East Slopes Crashcade Mts to Mountain Kingdom of the Snow Trolls Summit:

Lanes progress to total compact snow and ice. Lane dividers invisible. Heavy falling snow like a snow vomited forth from an Angry God of Snow Clouds(tm). Like a billion white angels suddenly annhilated by a massive sonic death pulse issued by a brilliantly evil Child of Lucifer(tm) with a furiously amplified organic subwoofer mounted deep into the tectonic plates of earth and directionally targetable at the perfect beings of heaven. Saw only two DOT plows working mountain pass.

Line of semis in chain up area reached 3 times around the earth. Two huge military convoys passed. The Socialist Forces of Obama(tm) have mobilized. He has chained them to his will and they are driving on the freeway kind of slowly, like a Kung Fu master sizing up his foe, should I use the Crane or the Tiger or the Frog or the Seriously Agitated Salamander attack?

Summit of the Mountain Kingdom of the Snow Trolls, West Slope Crashcades to Highway 18 Tiger Woods Mountain:

Thick heavy slick slurry like an Oatmeal of a Northern Forest Ogre Made from the Bones of His Enemies and the Milk of Stolen Kindness(tm). Semis de-chaining in a line that reaches halfway around the earth. Two SUV's lost the game of Ironyopoly-Bad Conditions Highway Version(tm) and slid into the deep unpacked snow of the median. Trip report author could not stifle a chuckle.

Tiger Woods Mountain  (Highway 18) to Rainytown:

Wet and bare, dark and foreboding possessing of the howling providence of all that creeps and slimes and slithers in the inky night shadows of the Greater Pugestupia Salish Sea Catchment Zone. I-5 Traffic densely stupid through Tacomaroma relieving post Fort Lewis where the Armies of the Socialist Forces of Obama(tm) continue to prepare for the complete and utter takeover of the United States of God's America(tm). Rainytown uneventful except for almost being sideswiped by tweak junkie in a POS sedan.Arrived at 1936. Total trip time = 6 hrs 06 min.

Trip Addendum/Mortality Cessation Rating Index (MCRI):

MCRI - 7.5  (angels kissing my cheek and singing sweetly the welcoming songs of heaven into my torn and bloody ears):  Two potential life removing events - semi on west slope of Crashcades 90 suddenly and without warning changed from passing lane to center lane where I motated lost in dreamy thought of idyllic locales involving transportation methodologies of gossamer winged zeppelins filled with the burps of baby orchids for inflationary gases and caused me to engage in sudden brake slamming behavior in slush to almost form the middle creamy layer in a hellish metallic Oreo cookie of highway destruction. Second MCRI rating contributory event was the afore mentioned tweaker in POS sedan.

Answer to photo location question: 90 westbound approaching abyss-like downgrade to the Columbia River - Vantage Bridge.

Say What?

 

Grampa, I'm in this cute outfit to stay warm and cozy not so you can make up degrading nicknames like "Baby Lumpkins." Don't traumatize me, man, can't you see I'm just an innocent baby???

Baby Blogs

Look buddy, this is my blog now. No more creative flights of fancy unless they are about me. And enough with the parallel worlds that only babies can see. The first time was tolerable, the second was just forcing it a bit, don't you think? Couple of rules - no matter how fascinated you are with my poop it never gets blogged, ok? This isn't negotiable, sport. No embarrassing photos, absolutely no more comparisons between me and monkey-human hybrids! That crap's gotta stop. You can blog about my mommy sometimes, y'know, she is the one doing all the heavy lifting around here. And my uncles, God bless em, even though someone's gotta tell that big sweet Shane kid that I'm not china and I won't break. Supporting my head is good though. A few other things - when your commentators leave nice comments you know you could ONCE IN AWHILE respond to them. Especially if it's compliments about me. Step up a little, nobody said being a grandpa blogger was always gonna be easy.

I guess that's it for now, I think you've got potential, don't get me wrong, you are more than capable of doing sweet and cute, although from reading the rest of this mess one woulda never known that. Oh yeah, mention sometime how I like how you use big words when you talk to me and I'm still waiting to get all bundled up and walked around outside for some fresh air like you're always saying I need. Saturday? Capiche?

Baths and Coyotes

Fresh out of the tub, wrapped in a thick warm robe and bundled in a towel. Everybody in your world adores you, pays nothing but attention to you, has only your very best interests at heart. One day you will grow up and realize it is no longer quite so, but that's a million years from now and at least a few thousand warm soapy baths.

I wish to believe you are not staring at the TV screen in the family room,  transfixed by large contrasting objects of light and shadow, but are instead wondering where your gramps is and how soon he will leave Rainytown and return to Spoklahoma and the Lazy Bar Bob ranchette, where the longhorn cattle pass easily through this world and the next and mostly range in the next because we never see them, but only occasionally, early in the morning while walking the fenceline, get a whiff of em, and the coyotes sing at night, mostly John Lee Hooker talkin' blues and Howlin' Wolf (for the less than subtle irony of top chain predator species envy) but on special nights when the moon hangs low and golden, swollen in the sky, like a God newly interested in the goings on of the earth below, the coyotes that cross the Lazy Bar Bob will suddenly break out in lullabies and the raccoons will stop stealing catfood left out on the back porch for the ranch cats and the horned owls up in the fir trees will blink and forget about boppin' the field mice on their little gray heads, and a baby girl will coo and giggle to the coyote lullabies, as she lays in her basinette, her arms outstretched, and nobody in the ranchette house will hear her as they either sleep or watch movies downstairs, but she isn't worried about that right now, she will leave them in the boundaries of their one world and she will enjoy the rising music from the other.

Life Lessons for the Young

 

Promo shot of my band around 1936 on our first Across Monster England! Tour

Back in the 1930s I played electric guitar and sang some background vocals (mostly woo woo's and ayuh's) in the Welsh  thrash-reggae band, "Burning Coal." We started out playing mostly bar mitzvahs, high school mixers and at pubs for angry drunk Welsh miners and goatherders who hooted and hissed and threw shovels, picks, and crooks at the stage until they would, almost reflexively and hypnotically, be seized by the 4/4 (downbeats on 2 and 4) reggae beat and dance and sing along with us. 

That wasn't an easy start to what later became a grand career of headlining all over Britain and Europe, but it was necessary to first pay your dues back in those days. There were rarely overnight successes during the Great Depression, it was all about slogging through the ankle and knee deep mud of persevearance and a special sub-categrory of persevearance I like to call "stick to it iveness."

In the end, we had a brief yet star-crossed career, made tons of money and brought joy and happiness to our little corner of the world. Many years after Burning Coal's farewell gig at Wembley Stadium, I was in London with some of my Finnish Special Forces (Arctic Snipery) charges on leave and we were wandering through an old record shoppe and they found a used copy of my band's only album "Burning Coal -  You've Got the Bloody Power, Mate!" and as they clapped their hands over their mouths in utter surprise and delight realizing their Dark Ops Sniper Adviser used to play guitar and sing some background vocals in a famous Welsh band, I was momentarily seized with a speechlessness that belied my usual boisterous hail-fellow-well-mettishness. Tears welled in my Arctic ice fields/solar reflection-induced permanently squinted eyes and for just a moment, a brief heartbeat of time, I remembered it all, the whole amazing rocket powered trajectory of fame and success and love and adoration, an amazing vectoring of talent and persistence across the starscape of the universe of possibilities.

I know, God willing, one day I will share this tale of reaching and grabbing the brass ring on the carousel of life with my little granddaughter so that she knows anything is possible. Anything at all. The human spirit is indomitable and fierce when it is ignited and fueled. I will probably not, however, tell her about the reindeer.

The Things She Sees

She sleeps in my arms and I watch her in REM. I hold my cellphone camera above and try to frame her for a sweet sleep pic, then just as I frame, she smiles and as fast as I can I press the shutter release button to grasp the picture.

She giggles and grins in her sleep.  Most certainly not gas smiles. Her giggle is a high soft trill. She is three weeks old. I want to believe the giggles and smiles are in preparation for the emergence of conscious social smiling at six to eight weeks. A rehearsal in REM.

No, that is a lie.

I really wish to believe babies possess dream worlds they visit to see the remarkable events and experiences that await them. In this dream world of their future, only things of love, magic, wonder and joy surround and appear in glimmering and gauzy forms, in air that sparkles, by a sea that sings to them with the faint, rhythmic echoes of womb music, of heartbeats, of a rising melody of their new world just beginning to form shape and gain tone.

When she awakens, her little eyes open wide and she looks at me and into the room. My left arm aches from holding her still during her sleep travels. We are both quiet for a few moments. I rock us in the soft recliner chair by the wood stove - the embers seem to whisper its warm enough, it's warm enough, it's warm and perfect.

Alaska, Diamonds, Alaska, BABY!!

If the search string fits: Somebody from Wasilla, Alaska searching for "hookers on cruise ships" landed on my blog. I think it is my favorite new euphemism for their former mayor and brand new public supporter of the crazed "birther" conspiratorial movement, the lovely and quite untalented Governor-Quitter Sarah Palin. A hooker on the Cruise Ship America. As an aside, I've never actually blogged about hookers on cruise ships and know nothing about either. I think they landed on one of my ethical dilemma posts, the one about the sinking lifeboat. Go figure.

I can't even keep up with the whole Tiger Woods stuff, he's apparently up to 3 girlfriends now and his wife has a new prenuptial promising her the planets Saturn and Jupiter, several newly discovered diamond mines in British Columbia and two precious metal bearing asteroid belts to be named later??

I'm flying home tonight to Spoklahoma in the Basalt Transition Zone-Rocky Mountains Precursor Area 51 instead of driving. I have to have some activity on my Alaska Air mileage plan at least once a year and I haven't used it since March 2008. So yay I get a break from endless miles of monotonous horror punctuated only by brief moments of bladder spasming terror as over-methamphetaminized truck drivers drift across the lane stripes as their bodies slowly convulse and their sweaty hands slide off their steering wheels. 

I wonder what's different in airports these days? I wonder if they still make you take your shoes off? Is belt removal now mandatory like it is when you walk through the metal detector at Spokane Co. Juvenile Court? Or is it still optional based upon a relatively subjective assessment of the metal weightage and surfacing of the buckle and studs if you got em. I think, quite frankly, if you wear a belt with studs or spikes you might as well just pull it off for two reasons, one, it's probably not going to clear the magnetonometer and two, the TSA security officers are going to make you just because it's studded and/or spiked and  looks messed up and three, because studded/spiked belts are acts of fashion terrorism.

Anyway, my flight is godawful late out of SeaTac as it was the cheapest mileage fare (15K round trip) and I will probably sleep the whole way to Spokanistan and miss the entire 38 minutes in the air of magnificent nocturnal wonder sights of miles and miles of pretty much effing nothing.

But the cool part of all that late night flying over the treacherous hell-lands pregnant with doom of the Evermean state is first thing Saturday morning, I will be ensconced in the soft and comfy recliner-rocker in my family room with a fire roaring and a cup of fresh french roast coffee and a little tiny cutie bug sitting on my lap and watching me with her big eyes as I'm talking all kinds of silly and making all kinds of goofy faces.  Can't wait.

Why Proto-Humans Formed Deeply Bonded Family Units and Smashed Sabertooth Tigers in the Head with Clubs When They Came Too Close to the Family Cave

 

My kiddo finally sent me a photo! We are back on track. Whining works, even if it is a bit unseemly and tragic.

I love how newborns look kind of like aliens (E.T. in particular) and as they quickly age into infancy they start resembling little hairless monkey babies. I adore monkey-people babies! Soon her cheeks will fatten up, her face will round out more and she'll get the full bore fully human baby look we all love so much with social smiling and burbling and cooing and spit drooling down her chin.

But for now she raises her tiny eyebrows and opens her eyes wide and reaches out with her hand as if to say "wow this is one interesting world I'm now in and I hope my grandpa gets an earlier flight home on Friday, because he's a blast (although he could learn some new lullabies and I don't care yet he's so off key)!"

You Never Write, You Never Send Me Pictures Anymore, I Guess You Don't Care About an Old Man Alone in Rainytown, You're Too Busy, I Understand, I Won't Be a Burden, Just Let Me Know When She Graduates High School, I'll Send Her a Card, A Gift Too.

I ask my daughter "please text me a photo of grandbaby every day while I am in Rainytown" and she does for one week. But then she stops and I have to go pilfer them off her Facebook page. Is it too much to ask a busy daughter with her first baby to send me a photo each day? No. Modern cellphone technology makes this easy and simple.  Should I have to jack them off her Facebook? No. I should be happily surprised each day when my cellphone buzzes with a new photo. Doesn't grandbaby look cute in her pink jacket and hood and car seat? Yes. She is cuter than a bug in a peach basket.

I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "man you've lost your edge here in the bloggo world, no more post apocalyptic hell visions, no more effing disturbing examples of the loathsome and evil creatures of the natural world, no more bizarrely constructed ethical dilemmas, no more of what causes us to slow down on our morning fast commutes on the bloggo highway and stare at the flaming six car pile up and associated carnage of your blog, man.  Yes, I'm afraid it's true (and I warned you) I am becoming a cranky and whiny old grandpa in bloggo world. I am losing my once raggedly sharp machete edge and morphing into a butter knife with big globs of peanut butter and honey on it.  Oh well, just wait until I start coming up with cute nicknames for her. You.have.no.idea.

:-)

On Holding Babies (Part 1)

Not how we hold babies. America eventually grows disgusted with politicians who refuse to hold babies correctly.

There are only a few basic ways to hold and carry a flaming battle-axe when being swarmed by rageful and deadly Visigoths or Huns as one defends one's castle or goat farm against them. Two handed or one handed, generally shoulder height or above, perhaps side armed or even under armed if attempting a return hack following a chop down on one's opponent. Holding and swinging a flaming battle-axe is certainly different, for many important reasons, than holding and carrying an infant.

For infant packing, one must first be aware of the infant's preferences and attempt to match to those, so if a baby prefers a cradling in the crook of the arm carry that would be the one most undertaken, realizing that in many cases it can change depending on various factors, e.g. infant comfort, carrier comfort, need or not to have a hand free, etc.

Some babies, if colicky, might prefer to ride up high against the shoulder facing behind the pack human, staring at a world in reverse, a world that reminds the baby that at such an early age everything is forward motion, little is history or to be reminisced, and the tummy pressed against the shoulder may gain relief from the colic as the pack human motates forward, perhaps even walking up and down stairs or over objects, e.g. curbs or boxes of baby wipes, causing some tummy ache relief. Or that might be the worse possible position for symptom amelioration requiring at least a moderate ability by the pack human to be flexible and attempt other carrying positions which may be more comfortable and relieving.

It should be noted that positions where the carrier can obtain and maintain an eye contacting gaze with the baby are, to my mind, preferred, so that the key social cueing and messaging and most importantly, pack human to human baby bonding, may most optimally occur.

In future blog posts, I will share what I have deemed effective holding and carrying strategies and methodologies per the phenomenological context of me and my little grandbaby. And I may even share how I discovered that she can be soothed when fussy, by being cradled in my arms while I run the bathtub faucet full blast and sing, horribly off-key, to her.

The Day After Tomorrow

Today is Tuesday and it is one day away from Monday and yet it is one day closer to next Monday. This is the Sisyphean horror of what it means to be a working person.  You flee from the gaping maw of one furious hellbeast and into the razor sharp teeth of another. It is the cycle of futility. The wheel that breaks you upon it over and over. The optimist is the one who chooses to believe that Saturdays beget more Saturdays.  The pessimist accepts this only to the degree that Saturdays are a cruel trickster who hands you a perfect golden banana when you are starving but brains you with a rock while you hurredly devour it. The optimist/pessimist yin/yang balanced zen-ranger believes Wednesdays are the chalk drawn start lines of the hopscotch game of life, that Wednesdays allow for a midpointing of extremes and in Wednesday's tepid spit water we can engage the endless repetition of work in a bearable manner. Me, I don't know. I do know that this Thursday is Thanksgiving, and with a little sweetie girl of a baby granddaughter in the house who has the name of a Roman princess and who will undoubtedly one day command her grandpa and her two strapping uncles to shine her chariot and bring her her ponies and we will race each other to do so, that I will not only stuff myself with turkey and a million other foodstuffs but I will shout in my head "thank you!" at least seven times.

Big as the Sky

 

Grandbaby falling asleep pictures. In case you're wondering, yes, this blog will likely become a grandpa blog with endless entries about my granddaughter written in a deeply annoying manner in which I appear to believe I'm the first grandpa in the world.  And since she and her mom, my daughter, both live with me and I'll see them every weekend when I drive back home from Rainytown, you can only imagine what an enriching and exciting experience this will be for all of you.

I am holding her in what I call the Modified Sitting Buddha Baby Position. Note the placement of the thumbs as they support her in front and back - holding her in a sitting stance and supporting her head in a midline position and maintaining her in a non-, what I like to call "floppy" position.  What you can't see are my palms and fingers expertly holding her back up and keeping her head from rearward floppage. It is the perfect position for her to scan her world and stare endlessly at her goofy grandpa as he chatters baby chatter and makes silly faces.

She is so alert and wanting to gain mastery over her world, looking around, moving her hands and arms in what appear to be very uncoordinated ways but grow more targeted and directed daily - she can already grab her hands together in front of her, and although it still looks a bit accidental when she accomplishes it, I have no doubt she will be applauding her world soon. She has a powerful rooting instinct and we all swear she was trying to smile at us yesterday.

I don't doubt the careful and gentle reader has already noticed the pizza sauce stains on my sweater. Me and my kids had a Papa John's Delivery Special Lunch Adventure yesterday and I was a bit messy as I ate and balanced baby in the Modified Sitting Buddha Baby Position and I know I'm going to have to clean up my act once she is high chaired and spooning big glops of green pureed stuff into her mouth, as I must model neat and tidy eating behavior for her.  Perhaps I should procure a grandpa bib to wear whilst eating messy foods.

My grandbaby is now one more person I will miss when I leave Basalt Transition Zone Land and drive back to Rainytown each week. And although she is tiny in size, she is as big as the sky in missing.

Holding Babies

The first time I held my grandbaby Sophia, adjusting the crook of my elbow to support her neck, holding a baby again felt novel and fragile, like I hadn't held a baby in a million years and needed my muscle and heart memories to reemerge and they did reemerge, my movements became smooth and sure and my heart strings twanged and thrummed and plucked and bowed into rolling crescendos of heart song, and not long after a few holds and carries I was nagging instructing my daughter on making sure to keep baby's head in-line and not let it angle too far forward or back and telling my son to not prop her up that way unless he supports her better.

As I held her some more, I felt I was carrying my own babies back in their hospital rooms all those years ago, then, just as suddenly, my babies seemed so long ago and I struggled to remember what holding them had been like. Experiencing this instant melange of then, now, all the intervening years, and the years to come for baby Sophia, was disorienting and melancholic entwined with warm and comforting. Smiling. Sighing. Time felt like a circle not a straight line.

And now, Sophia is our magical china doll baby possessing a fineness and delicateness about her none of my babies ever did, my kiddos were all very robust neonates in weight and height. Sophia seems tiny. She has such long fingers.  She sleeps in the arms of her rambling and overimaginative old grandpa. She makes time shift.  Oh the world has changed in wonderful ways because of you, little Sophia, look at what you've done!

She'll be a star basketball player of unrelenting grace and power AND a heartbreaking cellist of unspeakable beauty and feeling!

Baby Sophia the Coolest Grandbaby in the Whole World

My First Full Post Since Becoming a Grandpa

Damn kids. I catch those rotten neighbor kids cuttin cross my lawn again on their damn shiny bikes their spoilin moms and dads bought em, something's goin to happen! Dammit. I work too hard on rakin up the damn leaves this time a'year and let me tell you I'll never use a damn leaf blower like those idiots down the way, makin all that commotion and stinkin up the place just to blow leaves around! Damn fools.

Next time those kids come through lookin for a short cut to their damn public school fulla liberals and hippies teachin em to expect mollycoddlin' by the damn federal US government, I'm gonna seriously think a'stringin up some 80 lb test monofilament about neck high. Just like our boys did in the big WW Two when they flipped Gerries off their damn motorcycles and plugged em with M-1s! Except I do that and one of them damn poor dears gets a damn owie on their behind then I'll have the damn sheriff at my door, hasslin me, a law abidin and tax payin citizen, while them damn kids wreck yards and smoke their damn mary jane while poppin wheelies on their damn bikes or ridin skateboards in the middle of the damn street!

And I sure as h-e double damn hockey sticks won't be palaverin with no damn new neighbors just moved in with their butt ugly ski boat and noisy damn motorcycles, about no sittin down with these damn reprobates on their damn bikes and talkin no sense into them! Ain't my job that's a job for their damn parents. Straighten your own damn kids up!

That's all I got to say this morning I need to get off this damn dumb box here and go to down to Walgreens and get me some milk of magnesia and cascara, I'm backed clear up to damn Bonners Ferry. Damn it.

Grampa!

I am one! :-)

Could Use Some Duct Tape too ...

I haven't written one of these in awhile. From yesterday on Craigslist.

We found ourselves in a field near three ancient school buses floating in straw. Although ruined, the buses were still yellow as sunflowers. I said it was school bus yellow. You pointed to a honeybee and asked if it was school bus yellow, sunflower yellow, or honeybee yellow, except when you spoke, each word became a peasant woman and her child gleaning for straw . You said more but I could barely understand then I could not. After a time your tears flooded the field and the buses drifted away. The peasants made canoes of their straw and floated after the buses.  You laughed at the peasant children splashing the tear water.  We swam after the peasants as the clouds became flies and the sky grew dark with their sound. I asked if you remembered who we were and you said no, do you remember?  I said  if we don't get out of this water soon we will freeze. You said it felt warm, like when you are ashamed and your blood rises but cannot get out, can only heat the skin and flesh as it beats to escape.

 That afternoon we forgot the trepidations and scars, our minds clear as the bright empty sky not yet filled with flocks of migrating fowl, flocks like spear points drawn in the dirt by a child with a stick. You became an apple, a cloud, a clock frozen at midnight.  You said I dissolved in the unmoving air. I asked if you were frightened and you said the music was pretty.

The Levitational Toaster

I own the toaster of a dead man. Unlike my coffeemaker, it works flawlessly. Perfect toast all the time. I bought it at an estate sale of a recently (at the time of the estate sale) expired older gent. It isn't real old, but I couldn't tell you the age, as I am certainly not adept at toaster dating, maybe it is about a 2002. A simple toaster with two slots, not huge bagel slots but your basic bread slice slots. I acquired it because I needed a toaster and it was a great price and appeared to be in excellent condition. At the time I did not consider at all the fact I was buying an appliance of the dead. I had simply walked through the old fella's modest home perusing various items for sale and determined that the toaster best fit my needs at the time. And as I mentioned this toaster has never failed me, performing with an admirable uniformity of quality. Sometimes I wonder, though, if I fail my toaster, or more accurately, the memory and spirit of the deceased gentleman who owned it at the time of his departure from the corporeal plane. I mean, he may have been a horrid person, the type of cranky old man who kicks kittens and dumps out antifreeze for the neighbors dogs to drink and die brutal poisoned deaths. I don't know. He may have been the sweetest man ever or, like most of us, somewhere in between. I can only go by the operational dynamics of his toaster, my toaster, his used-to-be toaster, and as I've mentioned it works like a God - perfect, infallible, reliable, and demonstrating an absolutely stunning mastery of bilateral thermodynamics - leading me to believe that the fellow was also a highly transcended individual, perhaps one of the few standing at or near the pinnacle of Maslow's famous Heirarchy of Needs, breathing the rarified and dizzying atmosphere of the self actualized, the nirvana rangers, the pilots of the cloudships of the angels. It is not an accident he owned a pop up toaster and not a toaster oven. The pop up toaster launches the warm toast upwards, up to the heavens, out of the pits of flame, whereas the toaster oven traps the bread and burns it in an oven of the damned where only the intervention of man can withdraw it, and we all know the imperfection of man. So, I wonder sometimes, am I worthy of this enlightened and holy man's toaster? And even if I am not, and I believe I indeed am not, it would be acceptable to continue to deploy his toaster as my food preparation device because, afterall, how many of us are truly deserving of what Poseidon blasts upon the astonishing sea-stacked and driftwood-rimmed beauty of the wild Northern Pacific coast, yet we can visit and exalt in their stormy power and glory. No, it is something else. It is a stomach churbling fear that as the Angel of Death gently squeezed the hand of my toaster's father and lifted him, gently and perfectly, from his dying bed, that something went wrong, horribly awry, and my toaster daddy, infused with a majestic power that only the truly realized possess, was confused by the Angel of Death and as his spirit presence tugged away from Death's ruthless grip and wandered stunned and troubled into his kitchen that maybe he reverted to some long held routinized night time toast making behavior and put some bread in to make some peanut butter toast as his trusty late night edible hypnotic-sedative and during the insertion of the bread the Angel of Death caught back up with him and with his long bony fingers grasped this amazingly mortality-resistive and powerful old man, much unlike any Death had dealt with before in his earthbound existence-termination and soul-retraction tasks, and as he drew my toaster poppa away something happened - something like a little piece of the elderly man's soul was trapped in the toaster, perhaps a great fragmentary explosion occurred, a detonation of will, until the Angel of Death could reassemble the parts and complete his goal, that a little bit got left behind and that is what I sense and fear and respect and ultimately bridle under the impossibly tight yoke of perfection.  It is why I rarely make toast anymore, why I can't bear to walk by the frozen foods lockers at grocery stores with Eggo waffles of so many kinds staring at me through the quiescent frost. I can not have you, waffle! The making of you is too much to bear, too high of an ideal to wither under as I fail and fail again to meet his astronomical span of goodness and light.  These days I can only bear to live with the toaster as a testament to what man, or, and this is awful to contemplate, what only one man can become trekking along the  shining path to revelatory and supreme humanization. My raisin bran awaits me as if to say "it is better to be a king of a cereal bowl than a servant of a toaster."

Latest Lab-Grown Penis News

WASHINGTON - Researchers have engineered artificial penises in rabbits, using cells from the animals, who then used their new organs to father baby rabbits.

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A Mug in the Hand

My coffeemaker is the slowest coffeemaker in the world. But it isn't consistently slow like a garden slug making its slime trailing way across a brick patio after feasting on some gladiolas, no, it starts the brewing at a normal coffeemaker pace but after filling a couple inches of the pot with rich, dark coffee liquid it decides to almost completely stop. The red light is on, the partially filled pot squats over the hot plate waiting, waiting to be filled, yet the furnace and cistern, the very crucible of caffeine alchemy, do nothing. I am tormented as I wonder - is it dead now? Should I partake of what it has offered unto me before its premature expiration? I am thirsting for hot coffee, I need my caffeine, I need my morning routine to be preserved in a world of constant upheaval and random acts of horror, I need my steaming mugga! I get what I can. I take the coffee that exists rather than yearn for that which yet does not. After taking my cup,  the machine again, a few moments later, reinstates the brewing algorithm, reboots, and resurrects the blood of the bean. It will finally finish the cycle of life and death and rebirth. I wonder, why must it be like this? Does my taking of the early sacrifice, seizing the first heart tore out of the chest of an Aztec sacrifice and running with it still beating into the jungle somehow infuriate the machine to stab and dig again and again? How can I attribute these sentient emotional and cognitive qualities to a simple appliance, why cannot I just accept its eccentricities as falling within the normal limits of rational and logical electromechanical processes? The machine does not emote, it does not do this with a boiling malice and forethought to vex and annihilate my morning purpose. It is only a machine. Only a machine.

Ethical Dilemma: Saving Carmen Ollapi

We had landed safely in Orchid Zone - Alpha Zulu on Jungle Planet z-890.89 in the Gemmy Belt of Outer Horatio. Me and my crew disembarked and stood panting on the steamy, humid surface of Jungle Planet z-890.89. 

As Captain, or as I liked to call myself, "Admiral Bucky Top Dog of the Seven Heavens," I was responsible first and foremost for the safety of the landing crew. Unfortunately, in almost no time flat after setting down, a giant cattleya lueddemannniana maximus jungle orchid, displaying behavior very unorchid like, swept its flower head down and gobbled up my Weight Transfer Management Engineer IV (i.e. Maynard Sandak) just like that. We all started screaming as nobody expected these peaceful jungle flowers which had been seeded on all the Jungle Planets in the Gemmy Belt of Outer Horatio as they were steamy carbon dioxide rich planets with suitable soils for massive fertilizer bomb attacks as well as favorable gravitational dynamics and hydrological metrics, to be quite so, unruly.

Upon rapidly reembarking in the landing craft and wondering out loud what hellish monstrosities had we awakened in our highly paid career trajectories working for the giant florists of Alpha Centauri Florists and Gifts Inc. trying to determine the most suitable extraction technologies for all the now mature and, as we were quite suddenly made aware, robust specimens of former gorgeous earth flowerosities, I realized to my sudden horror that not all of us had reentered the craft and that our Soil Density and Hydrological Surveyer Trainee, Carmen Ollapi, was still in the jungle in Orchid Zone - Alpha Zulu. I attempted to summon Carmen on my radio but heard nothing. Then there was banging on the door of the craft, banging with a tool,  likely metallic, I guessed a Soil Density Probing Auger by the ring of it, and before we could open the door to bring Trainee Ollapi in, the ship began to shake and shimmy as huge orchids and bougainvilleas and vines and many other kinds of plants encircled and attacked the landing craft!

I had a command level decision to make in that very moment, do I risk all of our lives, in the few seconds we had to restart the craft and blast out of there before we were ingested by insanely evil mutant jungle foliage, to save Trainee Ollapi who, I must now confess (although the crew knew it all along, the bastards) was my space squeeze, my interstellar love thing, and who was, at that very moment, tugging and stretching my heartstrings as though they were strings on a Zorakian Skin-Lute, as she pounded desperately, furiously, maniacally with her Soil Density Probing Auger against the only door in or out of the landing craft if you don't count the escape pod bay release hatches below, easily opened from the outside or in. There was, according to the post-incident administrative investigation exactly a 32.98% chance of successfully retrieving Trainee Carmen AND taking off.

What would you do? What do you think I did? 

Your Orange Juice Glowers

One day you wake up and the whole world around you has changed. What were once cloudless sapphire skies are now dirt brown skies with frowning clouds, what was once a glass of cold, frosty milk is now a mug of steaming mud-lava, what was once a refreshing shower in the morning is now an acid rain you hide from lest it scald the skin off your very body, what was once a happy, embracing family is now a bitter tribe of deadly foes.

What does it all mean? Probably that you've accidentally slipped through an interstellar wormhole and are now on an alien world.