The Unbearable Bobness of Being

Transporter 4 - Leaving the Mall!

This sort of fighting seems to suit him well.

TOWWSG and I went to a movie yesterday. We saw Transporter 3, a movie about this muscular dude, played by the muscular former Olympics swimmer Jason Stantham, who fights bad guys using a unique style of martial arts in which he employs articles of his clothing as weapons. He also drives his big black Audi luxury sports sedan really fast and crazy, driving it off a bridge onto a train and stuff.

So when the movie's over and we're driving out of the mall lot in my jeep wrangler, I'm like pretending I'm the transporter and I'm slapping my stickshift into drive and stabbing the accelerator and jumping the jeep out into the slush on the road and just all intense even though we're only doing 10 mph maybe and I whip it into the right lane (two lanes turn to left) and cut past like a dozen cars all stuck in the left turn lane and go to the front of the line, I glance over at TOWWSG all proud of my transporter like display and he is grinning and shaking his head and says "Dad, there's something really wrong with you."

I am a Sammichite

When they are young we will feed them sammich soup.

Thanksgiving was awesome. Everyone was happy and the food kicked ass. The sweet potaters were especially delish. There is leftover turkey for the Feast  of the Turkey Sammiches, however, I forgot to purchase the most critical extra-sammich side item: salty potato chips! How did I forget these? I will have to make a store run this morning to get some as they are an absolutely critical item to a full gustatory celebration of the Feast of the Turkey Sammich.

As I drove cross the state yesterday listening to my coolest travel tunes, I play the cool jazzy snaking and honking sax infused and piano banging 70s classic by Traffic “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” and reminisce of my first rock concert in 1974 at the Spokane Coliseum (Aerosmith and Styx) and standing on the floor with friends  near the stage and the blue marijuanic haze was rising and on the PA system I hear The Low Spark and think what a cool song, man, and think who is that fox with the long hair standing over there?  I digress. But here’s the thing, I’ve come to realize that that song may have the dumbest question ever posed in a rock song (feel free to one up or one down me on this)

If you had just a minute to breathe

And they granted you one final wish

Would you ask for something like another chance

Or something similar as this

No, I’m pretty sure most of us with just a minute to breathe and one final wish WOULD NOT WANT ANOTHER CHANCE. Or something similar to that. Because that would, you know, mean we would like get to live our lives all over and fix stuff and not die right then.

I’m not Black Fridaying today as I refuse to join the retail-herd standing outside in the dark cold with twin contrails of hot smoke coming out of my nostrils as I paw and snort waiting for the doors to open. As I type this blog I see on MSNBC this morning on my TV that a Wal-Mart worker was trampled to death in NY this morning as the doors opened to the stampede of early morning shopper-cows.

I am going to take TOWWSG and TOWPGLG to a movie, maybe Transporter 3 this afternoon. I am going to dig the day with the boyos and celebrate the Feast of the Turkey Sammiches and have the kind of day that perhaps I would not feel the need to ask for another chance at.

You all have a great Feast day too.

I am Through Rocking the Goat and People They Open Doors for me Now

 

Hush little baby, dont say a word/And never mind that noise you heard/Its just the beast under your bed/In your closet, in your head!

OK, so here’s a pop quiz (pass/fail) for my readers.

1.       On Saturday, Bob did something he hasn’t done in 7 (seven) years, what did Bob do?

a.       Woke up and realized the world was not a spinning orb of flaming treachery and smoking doom with the broken dreams and hopes of all its inhabitants rocketing off the poles like the hellish contrails of some flaming meteor burning its way to a dull, ashen core.

b.      Caught two Haiku-Ninja assassins trying to scrawl autumn-themed warning-haiku on his garage door with ink loaded bamboo brushes while suspended upside down from Ninja-grade grappling hooks and nearly invisible silk cord.

c.       Got a haircut to a standard American male “Big Boy Haircut” short length.

d.      Danced at a local club to a cover of “Enter Sandman” by Metallica and did not once raise his hands in the mano cornuta hand sign of the devil’s horns or “rocking the goat” as heavy metal fans put it.

e.      The dishes all by himself.

f.        All of the above, except c.

Did you make your pick? Good. It was c – got a big boy haircut. Seven years! My youngest son, TOWWSG, is 15, so this was NEARLY HALF HIS LIFE AGO. Wow. Kind of weird when placed in that perspective – the perspective of what proportion of your life was something ago, or what percentage did something entail (like a bad marriage for example). I do that a lot, figure stuff out by life percentages, not sure why I do it because it’s kind of depressing sometimes and sometimes awe inspiring, but the hair cut deprivation schedule was 1/7^th of my life! And I’m effin’ old.

TOWWSG kept grinning as I looked quite different and odd to him; perhaps I looked like a normal dad for a change. Which brings up second son, TOWPGLAG, who has nagged me mercilessly for years (at least seven) to wack my locks as he’s hated my long-haired middle finger to the man, man, although he doesn’t refer to it in the terms of societal/cultural revolution, man, he derisively refers to it as a “skullet.”

But the funny thing is he was kinda bummed about me getting it shorn (although he came to Supercuts with me and watched it and grinned/smirked a bit) as he’s been adopting more of a rebellious tone to his world-view lately.

It was to the middle of my back. I was 43 or something last time I had it cut.  That beautifully sun bleached blonde hair (my current shortened hair is much darker now) left in an inglorious heap on the Supercuts floor had been through a lot with me,  relationships, vacations, injuries (two hospitalizations), moves, ocean spray, arguments, conversations, assignments, endless hours driving, etc, and probably deserved a prouder more Viking burial befitting its furiously adventuresome spirit – perhaps I should have kept the hair and braided it into a Viking/Outlaw Motorcycle Club hank and set it upon a wooden raft soaked in, let’s say for the sake of argument a flammable liquid like unleaded gasoline, and set adrift and afire on a vast and lonesome North Idaho lake. Perhaps my choice to turn my back to preserve what was left of me was the cowardly choice, the easy choice, the quick  choice, another word for quick which I shall name "expeditious,"choice. Sometimes that’s what you gotta do. I’m a new man now. And seriously, people treat you WAY different with shortish hair bereft of a war bannerish bandanna covering, they treat you like they are not afraid you will pummel them with your angry fists and steal their grocery bags or whatever. I actually had a dude open the locked exterior apt building doors where I live during the week for me as he saw me coming overladen with a suitcase, duffel bag and some other crap last night. And he smiled and was polite!

I think the next 100% of my life will be a life of follicularly-congruent conformation and regular (< 7 years) visits to the Supercuts for trimmings!

Frogot my ornament agin bluz

Oh wake up everybody.

EEW

I'm always amazed when old people, like my parents, tell somatic-related stuff that is perhaps better left untold because it quite simply burns holes in your brain. Generally, my folks are pretty discrete about gross stuff but this whole thing with my brother has probably introduced them to a level of cold, clinical, diagnostic medical information that they would have once kept to themselves and said EEW and not EEWed others.

:::Begin Warning - If you do not want a hole burned in your brain (and I know this will happen because I just told someone the following detail about my brother's recovery and it burned a hole in their brain like the one I now have. SO YOU MIGHT WANT TO STOP READING ABOUT RIGHT HERE - End Warning:::

I was talking to my mom and asking about my brother and how he was doing. She'd told me the other day about all his drainage - A LOT OF DRAINAGE - out of at least two drains in his abdomen draining stuff into drain bags by his bed. So, without prompting, without me even remotely expressing a need for a deep level of detail into, oh let's say, THE COLOR OF THE DRAINAGE, she described it as "reddish-brown." EEW. Seriously, mom, and I know you don't read my blog, but that was effing unnecessary.

So that was the first hole fired into my brain, it was a small hole, nothing you could even stick your little finger in. But it was nasty and I now hear a whistling sound in my head when it's windy and my ears are turned towards the blow.

So, back to yesterday, I'm asking how he's doing and all, and it sounds like he's recovering well, even up and walking with a walker a bit, but it's going to be a long slow recovery and anyway, STUPID ME, I was bitching about the fact I figured his pseudocyst blew open while he was in the Oly hospital and they let all the nasty digestive acids and enzymes kinda eat away at his pancreas while his doctors took their stupid sweet time sending him to Virginia Mason. My mom says she doesn't know if it happened that way but I suggested she ask the doctor, because dammit, that would suck. So anyhow, at some point in the conversation my mom tells me that some of the "reddish-brown" drainage IS HIS PANCREAS.

EEW X Infinity + eleventy ten thousand = Jesus Christ on a popsicle that's sick!

So, I pose this question to all of you, and feel free to leave comments with even grosser and nastier accounts than this because the hole burned in my brain over the unbidden information that his pancreas was draining out of him is cavernous and you could hangar a new Boeing Dreamliner in there anyway so you can't make it much worse, and the question is - if you were laying in a hospital bed is there even ENOUGH MORPHINE in the world to run through a pumpline into you to permit you to be so out of your head that you could stand having a bag hanging off your bed next to you with one of your VITAL ORGANS draining into it?

I'm sorry but my toes may never uncurl and I'm gonna have haunt ebay for 70s era earth shoes or baby blue crocs or something.

my neurostorm is rainbow

wet from this rain that is suddenly falling, not the crystal rain but real rain, real wet rain and it’s cold and I try to wipe it from my face but then the mists blow away and out of the corner of my eye I see something huge and metallic and it shrieks at us and it sparks at us and I try to spur our unicorns on, I hold my mane in my left hand and try to reach yours with my right but you’re already galloping and so am I but the metal-thing stays beside us howling its scraping and tearing cacophony and it isn’t the sparks spraying all over us from this metal monster but the screaming of it that terrifies me and I look to you and you gallop ahead not even seeming to hear this thing and the rain splatters against your face and I can hardly even notice it anymore except the damn cold and the barking shriek and the smell now of the sparks, a bright clean smell and it mingles with the night rain and the warm red suns and the regularity inhabits like a butterfly returning to its chrysalis broken and crawling inside with wings folded and antennae bent and that is us now we are becoming one with everything and nothing feels anymore and the rain won’t stop splashing and the world is inked and flashing and I hear voices, these damn voices and where is our herd of a thousand unicorns and where is the ghost smoke why these voices why We Got His Door Off - We Need a Board For This One and why are the red suns flashing outside and flashlights in here I see you your head is bent wrong your eyes are closed you don’t look right oh shit your femur is blown out your knee there is the broken end of it I can’t feel my legs or my arms I’m all twisted the bags deployed and the windshield is blown out there is glass all over us and it is raining like crazy.

No one grows a Hitler

 

What is my motivation for this scene? WHAT IS MY MOTIVATION!

A moustache is merely a hair smile turned upside down. It is a sad cry to the universe - “if everything wasn’t so topsy-turvy in the world I would be smiling above my mouth with this thick brush, I would have double smiles, that is how happy I would appear” but instead if you smile with a moustache you are simply neutralizing yourself, an ultimately non-ambiguous self defeating expression. And if you inhabit the dysphoria-despondency scale then a downcast mouth is quite amplified by the hair bug perched beneath your nose. It is, ultimately, an incongruent facial feature under most circumstances. Of course, like everything else in this world when you try to corral it with a fence made of rules and laws it neighs and bucks and leaps the fence and gallops off into the dust storm made by the huge snorting herd of other escaped postulates - and that is to say that the Moustache Anti-Euphoric Mirth Inhibitory Facial Semiotics  Effect  (MAEMIFSE) isn’t necessarily undesirable or discordant with the nose squirrel’s keeper. And what I mean by this is cops and 70’s era male porn stars.

It is a standard appearance/hygiene requirement in law enforcement agencies that male officers sport tea strainers. It is quite simply de rigeur amongst the men in blue to present their serious and stern faces to the world accentuated by a big thick stache. No pencil moustaches for coppers! Fu manchus are more the possession of graying old retirees on Harleys but they are not impossible for a law enforcement officer. Hitlers are out but that is the case everywhere, no one grows a Hitler. Even in a profession where the practitioners are, unfortunately and usually unfairly, considered Nazi storm troopers - a Hitler just says to the world you are fucking insane. Anyhow, the frownish countenance of a moustache works wonderfully in cop world and pair that with a set of mirrored sunglasses, a domineering non-nonsense attitude, and a cruiser trunk full of automatic rifles and body armor, and you have the MAEMIFSE at fruition.

As to the 70’s male porn stars - the mood-incongruence of a lady tickler on a man who at least was acting like he had the coolest job in the world, but in fact was stuck smack dab in the middle of the Sexual Revolution/Me Decade where everyone was a porn star and he was only a superfluous appendage, a veritable prancing circus pony or brightly painted clown juggling his balls and grimacing with a frightening rictus that seemed to bespeak the postmodern existential horror of performing naked in a film world before barbed wire and boldly inked tribal tattoos that permit today’s cinema sex workers to veil themselves from the prying world of pervs who want to judge (lest they be judged) on the mood-states of their grunting heroes. And let me add, although it seems to go without adding*, that today’s porn stars rarely if ever possess lip fur.

So what does this all mean for me? It means I will keep the goatee, including the moustache, for now as I am getting my long hair wacked this weekend and acquiring a big boy haircut and I am simply unprepared for this and will need my whisker crutch for awhile. But the chin-hair smiles as it joins the sad stache and completes the circle. Happy neutralizes sad and creates a vast zone of possibility. And, in the end, that’s what’s it all about - the possible.

*every style and grammar guide insists that the writer who wishes to rise above the pencil breaking scrawling of duncehood never use the phrase “it goes without saying/adding/mentioning/etcing” because if it truly goes without saying then why say it and I think it goes without saying that in my world rules are simply made to be broken.

Much Better

A great big huge thank you! to my awesome regular readers and others who came here just to leave well wishes and prayers. He's doing incredibly well since the first night and is breathing and alert and, last I heard, afebrile. Pretty amazing rebound. Months of slow recovery ahead. But each journey starts with a single step, or sometimes, a huge screaming leap over the outstretched, icy, bony hands of the Grim Reaper.

my neurostorm is rainbow

and you shift your hand beneath mine almost imperceptibly as I see through the gauzy smoke-air, through the coolness, two giant glowing red suns and these are not earthly suns wrought double, these are foreign solar invaders above my planet but how was this possible, you are silent to my imploration - the ballistics of my mind are nonlinear now and we gallop towards the red suns, you in silence and beatific countenance and me with successive approximations of terror and the unicorns snort and lower their horns and march in war-step, in a high stepping rage gait, and it all begins to disaggregate, to disentangle my neuro-nets all lit up like nets of bright multi-colored mini lights draped over junipers, over arborvitae, over blackberry brambles random and haphazard behind some hermit’s cabin hidden in the forest off some busy Western Washington highway and overtaken by shambling vegetation and loneliness and a Christmas season décor sense of a crazed menagerie of extension cords in serpentine and a million fireflies swarming skinny bare tree-lings bending them to their will and the blinking red eyes of packs of wolves hiding among the vegetation and renegades among the border trees and I shudder at what the crèche must be, I can imagine (but try not to) the baby Jesus is a scared and humiliated barn cat that wandered off some neighbor’s property to be trapped in a tuna fish baited cat trap and is now caged with a torn swaddling cloth it long ago fought free of, and now it hisses with a most non-messianic hiss and the three magi are hopefully walking through the Shady Vu trailer court now and not caught in magi traps here, and I look at you and I want to see your Mona Lisa smile reassuring me you still think I am a nut but you sleep as the crystal rain ceases and the mists burn away from the three red suns and I wonder why is there suddenly a third one and why the unicorns scrape their horns against each other like spear points on grindstones

All you do is pray sometimes

 

Update 1730: Breathing on his own, vitals stable, afebrile.

My brother is in the hospital and on life support. He had surgery yesterday for a badly damaged pancreas and when they opened him up they found he pretty much didn't even have one anymore. Just infection and a burning soup of digestive enzymes and God knows what else. They are trying to get him breathing again and cleaned out so he doesn't go septic. I've been estranged from him for around 5 years. I taught him to play football when he was a kid. He was a big kid. I taught him to block and tackle in the front yard and used to be the only one to go to his football games. He didn't stick with football, it really wasn't his sport.

I taught him to fight back when our other brother used to beat his ass on a fairly regular basis, until high school when he knocked the bully bro into next week during a brawling fight and he quit getting picked on. They later became pretty good friends. When we were kids he and I shared a big bed in a bedroom. One night he overate lasagna, a food I wouldn't eat back then (I was a very picky eater as a kid and hated foods with intense smells), he was always a big eater, and I remember waking up in the morning wet and slimy and smelling this horrid intense smell of lasagna sauce and I realized he'd rolled over during the night and vomited a copious amount of undigested lasagna all over me, then rolled back over and slept dry and warm. I remember being so happy when I finally got my own room in the basement, even if it was unfinished.

He's 46. We used to mountain bike together - outlaw riding in the Dishman Hills Natural Resource Area, screaming down from Mount Spokane past moose and vistas that take your breath away, down to our lake place. Used to ski with him when we got along. I always figured we'd make up one day. Bygones be bygones. Fuck.

my neurostorm is rainbow

and we are flying, it is silent in the mist-air except for the rushing of it all and the unicorns move as one carving the sky and now your eyes are wide open and you are laughing at the irregularity and irrationality of it all or at least that’s what I think you are laughing at but you can read my thoughts now like I am some old dictionary resting on the top of an antique dictionary stand and you can just flip the thin and fragile pages of my mind to find the words  “something that causes wonder, admiration, or astonishment; a wonderful thing, a wonder or prodigy, the feeling of wonder, astonishment, to be filled with wonder, admiration, or astonishment, as something surprising or extraordinary: I marvel that you think this is all irrational to me, that’s not what I’m thinking Bob, I am actually thinking, bemusedly, how you look kind of hot (and simultaneously a bit silly) riding a rainbow unicorn a thousand feet and climbing off the ground” but now I know you can read my mind I make you blush imagining what could happen if I was behind you riding your unicorn with you and around us the silvery birds return but we’ve left the mist and they no longer sing their rainfall song but sing like sun-rays and clouds melting and the birds are no longer random bird-rockets zipping around haphazardly, they now form into a giant arrow shape and lead us, they lead us into the cerulean and we are quite a sight! - we are you and I on our lead unicorns flying by the grace of a God who revokes laws of gravity and laws of flight physics (unicorns are wingless despite their sometimes over-exuberant depictions in chidren's books) and the laws of mythological creatures and behind us are a flying herd of a thousand unicorns all rainbow and all too painfully beautiful to even glance at but we know they are behind us because we feel the velocity of their magic and the pure wide open sky starts to rain a warm rain but there are no clouds and you’ve closed your eyes again and I yell in my head for you to open your eyes! You are missing this! But you do not stir you only hold the prismatic mane of your unicorn tightly and you gallop in the air a little ahead of me and the arrow-birds diverge and scatter like a metallic rain blown by a hurricane but there is no wind, there is no whirwind, there is no eye of the storm, there is no weather at all except the warm rain and the breeze from our flights and we descend, we are returning to the mist below and I lean forward and wrap my arms around my horned ride’s thick neck and try to wrestle him back to the sky but there is no ascent, we are in the mist and you blink without opening your eyes and around us falls a new rain, a rain of asymmetrically faceted crystal that is neither hot nor cold nor wet nor dry, just a rain of senseless glittering crystal and we touch down and the clacking and sparking begin anew and we gallop over the obsidian splitting the mist and I knee my ride closer to yours, we are side by side and I reach to your hand and you are holding the mane so tightly I cannot grasp your hand, I cannot entwine my fingers in yours like I wish but I can only lay my hand on top of yours and as we fly through the swirl that is enough and your hand is perfectly warm

my neurostorm is rainbow

we ride the unicorns into the lavender haze swirling and ghosting as our herd of a thousand magic-horned-ponies stream trails through the mist with their hooves clacking on the blue sheen obsidian shelves in a pulsing synchronicity with sparks crackling off the planar enraptured glassy dream and I glance at you and your blue eyes are shut and your shortish hair flies in the sailing wind and I try to shout you are missing the birds and the birds zip and rocket around us all these silvery birds refractory of invisible suns and bird singing their weirdly rainfall-assonant birdsongs - maybe announcing our journey, maybe begging for a storm, maybe crazed by the fog descendant and your eyes are closed and if mine were open any wider my prefrontal lobes would egress and splay orbicular and spray oracular all the thoughts and words and calculations that circuit via  wet-regulators and I cannot imagine galloping on unicorns with my brains trailing behind me so I squint like an old cowpoke drawing a bead with his thirty-thirty on a no-good rustler sitting and gnawing on a charred t-bone by his smoky mesquite campfire in some red sandstone arroyo salted with juniper and peppered with basalt and I roll orbicular and oracular over my halting tongue and imagine you thinking even now how you play with words while the unicorns are flying they are flying

Not the Ghost World Again

So, I’m finishing my coffee at this Denny’s like every Denny’s and I eye my empty plate (except for pancake crumbs and syrup with bacon bits trapped like flies in amber) and think oh I ate too much again. I won’t be hungry until dinner. I draw one last draw off the java, it’s now lukewarm not my favorite temperature for crappy Denny’s coffee when this little towheaded girl with red cheeks and I’m guessing about 6 or 7 years old walks up to me and says “the ghost world is large.”  Before I even think of anything to respond she walks up to the cashier with her mom and dad. She doesn’t look back at me, and they leave once they pay their bill with a credit or debit card.

What an odd thing for a little girl to say to a not so perfect stranger. Out of the blue and in a normal kid voice free of sarcasm or irony or barely concealed evil glee.  Not even a dramatic premonitory voice.  Oh well. I’ve got to get my truck in to a Jiffy Lube and an oil change before I hit the road.

I don’t know why people say “hit the road” because in a lot of ways if you drive 700 miles a week, like me, the last thing you really want to be doing is hitting the road.

I pay my bill with cash, $12.32, which is absurd for a basic breakfast these days, and leave a $2.00 tip, which may be a bit low end but the service was glacial.

Driving to the Jiffy Lube I feel my stomach protesting the mushy mix of pancakes, too much maple syrup, overly crispy bacon, hash browns and coffee.  Very full and ever since I had my gall bladder removed due to it being ruined by gallstones, eating big meals are a bit of a crapshoot and I think that with a very self-delighted chuckling. The bile just hits it all at once without the gall bladder sort of storing and releasing it as needed and sometimes, not always, it means I better find a restroom tout de suite.

I pull in to the Jiffy Lube and they’ve got three open bays. One of the two workers, a young man like all the Jiffy Lube young men workers, motions me in. Sometimes Jiffy Lube let’s you pull the vehicle in to the bay and sometimes they require you to disembark your rig so they can do it. I’m always guessing when I pull into a Jiffy Lube which one will it be - me or the dude with the little beard and wild shaggy brown hair and I’d wager a tattoo or three somewhere.

My guts are calming, I’m feeling pretty lucky as I’d hate to actually have to use a Jiffy Lube restroom having never been in one.  You can usually tell what the restrooms will be like by the state of the waiting area in places like this.  Their coffee thermoses with the pumps are empty. That’s fine, I’ve had plenty and jolting my tummy with more java at this point might be playing with fire.

They start right in on my truck - just the basics, please.  After smearing clean my windows and checking fluid levels in the engine compartment, the shaggy haired technician shoots the shit with me as I stand outside the bays and watch. The other guy is under the rig draining oil.

Shaggy tells me about his friend’s dad’s girlfriend who owned a truck exactly like mine and was drunk, although he didn’t say she was drunk they usually are in stories like this, and crossed the centerline on U.S. Highway 95 and hit a minivan full of Indians coming from the casino. She was killed instantly as were two of the Indians, the others were ambulanced out of there.

It was a really tragic story and I wasn’t so sure why he needed to tell me except when he got to the punch line of sorts, maybe more of a denouement -

“The dude’s girlfriend was really short like four foot something, and the airbag blew her head off, seriously, it decapitated her like you always hear happens to little kids which is why they can’t ride in front and everything. Fucking blew her head off! The ghost world got a lot bigger after that shit, man. Good thing you‘re a tall one.”

What. Not the ghost world again. Before I could even think to ask him, he walked back in.  A big red Dodge Ram was pulling up. Things were starting to get busy at the Jiffy Lube. Usually they work with at least three oil professionals, with only two today I thought they could get slammed if a whole lot of people thought hey it’s Sunday morning and since we don’t go to church let’s go hit the Jiffy Lube before the church crowd gets out. Then we can go to Walmart and buy underwear on sale, new watchbands, and a big case of dogfood in the individual wrapped packages that makes it easy to always feed the dog the same amount every day.

The Jiffy Lube technician signals to the Dodge Ram driver to pull up a little more. Then he steps up to the driver’s side window and says something. The driver gets out and the tech gets in and drives it into the bay.

Ocean Shores, WA 11.15.08

I am stuck in Olytown all weekend so I decided to take advantage of a loverly warm global climate change day and head for the beach. It's been like 3 months since my last Pacific thunder-surf sandy salt wind fix so off I went to read Chekhov short stories and walk and eat pizza at this little hole in the wall joint in Ocean Shores and wander some more and just dig the surf vibe. And yes, Dave, my incredibly disturbing streak/trend of blue sky warm sun Northern Pacific ocean visit days continues unabated like Poseidon rolling his seaweed covered dice and hitting 7 come 11 every damn time, man.

My size 13s encased in Tevas and being surrounded by a hungry, sentient sea foam, hungry for my Tevas, wanting the rubber so bad. So bad.

I decided to grow a full goatee this morning while on the beach. Should I keep the moustache or ditch it? I could shave the beard and keep the moustache but it's kind of a combo cop-70s porn star-biker scum-old cowpoke moustache.

The surf my spirit needs so badly to periodically recalibrate my viking dna clockworks.

A hideous gigantic flock of horrid sea-sparrows - the parakeets of Lucifer - they flew by me in waves, giant waves, their wings beating open the very gates of hell.

Razor clam shells, there were gabillionty a thousand clammers that showed up towards dusk, which musta been the tidal time (the tide was goin out then) to go dig em ups.

My sexy truck, so sexy.

My Tevas were eaten by the starving rubberphagic seafoam so I switched to the flip flops. That's a half a sand dollar - 50 cents!

A whole line of signposts, the signs said: Caution and Beware: "These Deeps Are Beknownst to Issue Forth Some Beasties of the Most Disagreeable Temperaments - Do Not Catch Thyselves Unaware of the Mighty Sea-Dragons and Octopi the Size of Castles - From April 15 - Labor Day"

Cuter than hell, amongst all the clammers, mostly large men and their larger gals with beards the size of small forests and ruddy cheeks beaten like tramp steamers run aground off the Ecuadorian coast, were these sweet little scuppers and their mommy.

The Trajectory of Coconuts

It is the middle of November, we’ve not froze yet, we’ve marched in the armies of pineapple soldiers blowing trumpets of rain-wind off the palms and the endless Pacific and if the rain stopped and just the storm blew astringent we might discover a light dusting of beaches on everything. What if these tropical storms rained mahi mahi and hammerhead sharks and surfers with horrified eyes wide open and curly blonde hair flapping in the downward breeze as they crashed and bounced off mini-vans and semis and rooftops and kersplatted into big lakes? Would we grab our children and run like crazy to shelter but find ourselves absolutely transfixed by the spectacle of island debris and ocean life pouring down?

I think I would join a church that had an amateur night or amateur hour open mic and I would sign up for my slot and when my name was called for open church mic night I would implore the congregation to not fear the Pineapple Express even when actual pineapples rocket down from the heavens and blast through windshields and blunt force trauma the joggers right into next week and to instead re-JOICE in a God who, because of His love for us, suspends the laws of science and reason so that we can see His power and majesty and to know that we are puny and mere but that He knows that too and is patient with us and that we will know His love by the trajectory of coconuts and for every coconut that detonates on the street blasting shell shrapnel into a metro bus tire causing an instant blow out and a tragic accident killing all the riders as the bus topples and slides on its sparking side through the storefront window of a Chinese herbalist’s shop in Seattle, elsewhere on this beautiful earth a coconut palm leaf floats slowly down in a rocking, hypnotic grace and a bright faced toddler stands, silent and awed, by His gentle gift from a world of cobalt blue oceans, emerald green trees, angel white beaches to a world where it hasn’t frozen yet. It has not froze yet.

I am Odd

I have a very simple rule of thumb about cds/albums/mp3s and that is cut 7 (seven) is always good. It is my “rule of 7” for playing cds (and I am using “cd” as the standard here knowing full well there are old school vinylists still out there as well as the newer mp3 world of storage systems measuring songs by the THOUSANDS).

So, if you’re like me and you are a busy person and you are playing new cds and you don’t remember which tunes were the killer ones and you are also like me in addition to the gaps in sequential song identification recall you also are impatient and an inveterate skipper-arounder on music delivery systems, you can never go wrong by playing 7. 

I don’t know if music producers plot this, although I am nearly certain they do, but it’s a remarkably consistent finding of music by number vis a vis the qualitative preference index.

3s and 5s (threes and fives) are also usually reliable. Sometimes 9 (nine) but if you ask me you are kind of taking your chances above 7 (seven). Into the teens is a foolhardy rush to judgment and I would, in the most strong terms possible, recommend you not dabble with a rule of 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 (teen numbers ten through fifteen).

Now, I am not a numerologist, however regular reader and not-enough-commenter Janet is and perhaps could illuminate me and my gentle readers with the reasons why odd numbered songs are usually better than their even numbered doppelgangers, but it is truly so. I think there are numerous theoretical underpinnings to the socio-psycho-cultural aspects of odds vs. evens and I certainly do not presume to know any of them, yet it appears to hold. I often wonder why death metal bands do not number every cut thirteen (13) or why producers for fragile drug addicted parasuicidal emo or punksters or classic rocksters and even your more standard garden variety country n western drunken oxycodone (“hillbilly heroin”) gobbling singers do not INSIST ON NUMBERING 11, 12, 14, 15 et cetera and just skip the whole 13 (thirteen) thing because of the bad luck implications*.

One thing I do not readily admit to although I am certainly unashamed of this is that I am a counter of things  - if I am in a conference room, for example, and it has ceiling panels or multiple recessed lights of something countable I will count them, if there are many of them and in a pattern, for example, panels, I will count number of panels per row and number of rows and multiply to acquire the total panels. I will sometimes estimate if necessary. I do not typically engage in this in a completely conscious sort of pilot flying through a flock of geese awareness but more a twilight consciousness level of awareness. I just kind of habitually do it without a lot of mental fretting and fussing.  I don’t think it’s an OCD (Obsessive Counting Disorder) sort of thing as I don’t always do it and if it gets interrupted, like someone asks me something or it’s my turn to present a PowerPoint or whatever, I do not become agitated or anxious and need to finish my calculations.  I will say this, if I had been compelled to count all the waterfalls draining the amazing amount of rain falling on Snoqualmie Pass and locales yesterday as I drove back to Olytown, I would have probably stopped at ELEVENTY TWELVIRTY GABILLION. 

Do you count stuff? Do you have any number preference thingies you’ve noticed?

*In a somewhat astonishing and anecdotally valid (case study level) proof of the hypothesis - BOTH of Nirvana’s big albums (Nevermind and In Utero) end at cuts 12. They have no 13.  However, this was not enough to prevent a heartbreaking ending to one of the great poets of the rock and roll era - along with Bob Dylan and John Lennon there is Kurt Cobain. Note how we often group our bests into triumvirates? Is there a neuropsychological basis to grouping in odds? Is there a profound meta-irony in using a binary fueled system to write about the power of odds?

This is your first cup of coffee of the rest of your life

You stare at your coffee cup this morning. It is mostly white with square 2 X 2 inch graphics, one on each side - the graphics are NASCAR graphics with a directive “Start your engines” (high octane caffeinoline engines!) and a yellow race car at the bottom of the graphic. The yellow race car is presented in a ¾ view with a sort of halo effect shadowing it that may suggest it is going really fast and its engine is definitely started. Above the car is half a circular dashboard gauge, it has calibrated lines along the top diameter and they are equidistant but include no actual metrics, like numbers or identifiers like “RPM” or “MPH.” So, who knows.You think it's probably a tachometer.

In your NASCAR - Start your  engines cup this morning is the first cup from the first pot of some ground Starbucks French Roast you picked up at a Safeway. Your cup is presently about 2/3rds full. The coffee is weaker than you  normally brew because the bag of Starbucks French Roast was nearly empty. You find weak Starbucks French Roast to not give you the typical first cup of enjoyment enjoyment. But you drink it anyhow because it is at least the first cup of wake up - you need to start your engine.

You look at the yellow NASCAR car and you wonder when you received this cup, because you are 110% certain it was a gift as you are no NASCAR fan and would not purposely buy yourself a NASCAR cup not even to be ironic. A Christmas gift you are almost entirely certain. But from who? You have two sons that once upon a million years ago were into Hot Wheels and shit like that, them? Probably not. So, you ponder this for awhile identifying the usual suspects, briefly assessing (more like “screening") for motives and opportunities but none fit until in a fit of logic you ask yourself “who buys me coffee cups for gifts almost to the exclusion of anyone else in the population of potential coffee cup gift buyers?” and you think MOM.

Weird though. Was she in a big rush and just assumed you loved NASCAR? Was it the car and she thought oh you love cars! Which is true. But it is a bit presumptuous for your mom to just assume you love NASCAR. Which you don’t. Well, when you were a boy you were ok with the weekend NASCAR races on TV and you liked Richard Petty and he was kind of the only round track hero you remember. You read a book, a biography you think probably not an autobiography (which is what all auto racers should write, you chuckle) about Richard Petty in junior high. Well, not about when Richard Petty was in junior high, but when you were in junior high. You checked it out of the Bowdish Junior High library and found his story kind of inspiring and noisy. But you did not carry your early adolescent interest in NASCAR into adulthood and totally don’t get the whole fan craze over NASCAR*. Grown women positively lust for these motor heads and grown men get in fist swinging bar fights over their faves. Well, you don’t know if they do for actuals, but you think it’s probably quite possible particularly in the bible belt. You remember once seeing a black Dodge Ram pickup (of course) with a sticker on its tinted rear window that said: Fans Against Gordon, but the FAG was big and bold and the ans gainst ordon were really small.

Your coffee is nearly drained you are really wet starting your engine this morning.  The yellow car, it bugs you.  It looks mostly like a Nissan 300 ZXYSX series which you know ain’t no NASCAR, man, thems  are American mades. What kind of car is this yellow car? You actually ask that with your self talk voice, you say it almost loudly in your head - what kind of car is this yellow car? Then you have the weirdest thought, you think what if I, right this very second, suffered a cerebro-vascular accident, an incredibly rare type maybe never before observed in the Annals of Neurology, and it locked your mind in the very question - what kind of car is this yellow car?

The rest of your life, you imagine, you wander around asking only that, what kind of car is this yellow car? And  you lose your job, your marriage, your kids, you lose everything because you cannot function in this world if all you think about is what kind of car is this yellow car (on this coffee cup you are constantly showing everyone).

Sometimes you get punched, laughed at, walked away from, sadly patted on your shoulder and told I’m so sorry, fake answered “oh that’s a 94 Chevy Citation - Dale Earnhardt Jr. Model!", kicked in the shins, told to shut the fuck UP about the fucking yellow fuck car fucker, your wallet stolen, hugged, your hand shook, ignored, and maybe one day, to add insult to injury, someone takes your NASCAR yellow car cup from you out of malice, frustration, misplaced helper responses, etc, and now you don’t even have your visual prompt anymore and as weird as you seemed with it, without it you are off the track weird. You are stuck on a permanent pit stop without a pit crew.

You’ve drank all your first cup of enjoyment NASCAR start your engines yellow race car of mystery cup of coffee.  Whoa, you think. That was definitely a bit of the old imagination skidding across the race track that only turns left, the proto-NASCAR course of course.  Then you walk upstairs to refill your go juice and you,  because you are so like this, scan your other coffee cups for interesting ones to have a cerebro-vascular accident while pondering and you see a very festive birthday themed cup with red, yellow, green, blue balloons and candles and the phrase “No more birthdays, just the parties” and you think well, that’s the cup to have when the big brain lock hits and you would wander with a big smile on your face asking “hey, where’s the party?” to everyone and every once in awhile you would find yourself at a cool party and you  could just keep saying “hey, where’s the party?” and peeps would just think you were really drunk.

*You completely missed the whole Dale Earnhardt thing - he of the anti-hero motif, the bad assed car swiping mustachioed buttkicker. You know something really horrid about him, though. Not long after he died in that tragic wreck you were in an AOL IM with someone who claimed she was a trauma nurse in Daytona and was on duty when they brought poor Dale in and she types to you:

Nurse: His eyes had blown out of his head from the collision.

You: Shit. That's horrible.

Nurse: Oh he died instantly.

You: Still.

Marching the Hate Machines (Into the Sun)

The ash falls over everything in the US of America. The blue stormwind is still to come, to blow it away wash it down the drains to the carbon seas to the sheen invisible. But the burn rate of despots is variable and we've endured 8 years of the very furnaces of hell. The ash falls like a dead rain.

The first time we merged, we were on the verge of the blue wind. You had a sign by your road. The clouds of change hang just over the winter horizon. Soon to roll like an army of sky warriors marching as to war. But not like the wars we've known these years. Something clean. Something that better be big. Something that better thunder like the Gods awakening to the mischief below. And we will just keep merging until the clouds come and we will keep coming until the clouds merge.

On Overthinking Kind of Everything

Let’s say you sit down across from me on an overstuffed black leather sofa, perhaps covered with a Pendleton blanket of red and green geometric American Indian designs folded lengthwise and carefully set upon the top of the sofa back, and in front of us is a deeply lacquered, almost painfully glossy, coffee table circa 1976 or so I’d guess because of the burned wood effects that I always hated, particularly on a too darkly stained pine. I’m not going to comment on my thoughts about this table as to its age or representativeness of 1970s furniture as you might have a deep attachment to this table, perhaps it was your first coffee table from your first marriage or maybe it was only a yard sale pickup back in the 80s when suburbanites were tossing these things as they were going for chrome steel and glass back then. 

So on this table you place with your right hand a large, juicy strawberry, maybe a Shuksan or a Rainier, definitely a June bearer since it is mid June and that is what everybody is picking now at the U-picks up in Greenbluff and Otis Orchards, and around this delicious appearing strawberry you slowly and carefully ring it with pebbles, pebbles that appear to be ocean or river pebbles, the kind that are very smooth and kind of different shades of gray and grayish-blue when dry but definitely more interesting when wet, which is why we often pick them up from the wet sand even though we know this one marbled green and orange pebble isn’t going to appear so luminescent and, frankly, even green and orange after about 15 minutes in one’s pocket, and one may even find it remarkable how green and orange can become grayish upon drying. It’s like the ocean smooths them and holds the color to them in a water suspension,  a type of color dominion, but once removed from its watery womb, the ocean, or even the river, keeps the beauty behind. One may even wonder why something as vast and godawful powerful as an ocean needs to be so selfish and possessive when it comes to colorful pebbles, and I even think this would be an interesting question to get your opinion on, but it feels kind of premature as you continue to almost delicately, using your long forefinger and thumb, set each in place.

You’ve ringed the strawberry with the pebbles and you look up at me. You smile a Mona Lisa smile and wait. I sit back a bit and feel my eyes automatically roll up and to the left (accessing remembered images) and then I look at you, just below your eyes, maybe your nose, and say

It represents seeds, the strawberry is the only fruit with external seeds, the pebbles are seeds.

You only look back with your Mona Lisa smile and slowly turn your head side to side in the non-verbal messaging code of no.

Well, perhaps the pebbles and strawberry are symbolic of a certain earth bound solidity or even solidarity, they are both of the soil and both underground and above.

Mona Lisa again signals nope.

You mean it’s possibly as mundane as shape? That the pebbles and strawberry are similar, well, I don’t know, maybe some of these pebbles, the more asymmetrical ones are, although they all look pretty symmetrical, some are oval-ish., but none look triangular-ish. No, I don’t think it’s a shape thing is it?

You turn slowly to your right and straighten out part of the blanket on the top of the back of the sofa, and it didn’t even look wrinkled.

It is the wheel, the wheel of creation, of life, maybe not a medicine wheel, it’s not right for that, but some more generic wheel, and the strawberry is the hub, the food as connector and turner, because the hub spins freely attached to the axle, if there is an axle, but the strawberry is where the wheel turns. Life giving and sustaining.

You look bored. Your eyes do not vector to any particular direction to signify what sort of cortical processing you are engaging but sort of go in a half circle, a politely restrained (or ambivalent) eye roll.

I am not good at riddles, I never was, not as a kid doing the silly riddles in Weekly Readers or as an adult where - well, actually I can’t think of ever doing riddles as an adult, maybe in some videogames once upon a time when I had the hand eye speed and coordination to play videogames, which pretty much left me at 40 something, in a highly frustrating bout of trying to get past this one level in a WWII fighter game, it was level 7 or something and involved flying fighters at very high altitudes over the ocean and trying to protect a US Naval fleet from Japanese fighters and fighter bombers and I could never clear the sky of them before they wiped out the fleet. That was exactly the last time I played video games with any kind of regularity or intent, I have maybe dabbled, such as with my youngest son on HALO last winter, where he alternated between being incredibly patient and kind with me to being very impatient when my character kept getting lost or couldn’t keep up with his. His character was like a battle hardened Special Forces soldier and mine was quite the facsimile (in terms of skillful killing) of a cub scout on his first day hike.

You can see I am at a loss and am accessing old memories of videogames and riddle failures and you are engaged by a certain kindness and empathy and decide to end this charade.

It’s a fucking strawberry you tell me, and you pick it up and shove it in my mouth. And it’s a damn good one. Juicy, sweet and fresh. Juice trickles down my chin. I leave it for awhile.

The Treacherous Velocity of Paint

Doe by Roadside - Jackson Pollock, 1948

I load the Icon Electronic paintball gun, 200 ball hopper and a large clear plastic bag full of orange and yellow paintballs into my pickup on Sunday in readiness for some deer hunting. The day before, me and TOWWSG son drove to the Army Surplus store on East Sprague, a dark and crowded little store full of Army gear -  such as desert and forest camo uniforms, netting, canteens, gloves, ammo boxes, and paint and airball gun supplies. The 14 oz CO2 tank, like a SCUBA tank for tiny swamp elves, is empty and we need to get it charged as well as pick up a missing hopper mounting screw and a 9 volt battery to power the firing mechanism. TOWWSG reminds me that the paintball rifle* has 12 (TWELVE!) firing settings including the semi-auto (which is all I use this weekend) a full auto, and a 3 shot blast auto. He was unable to state the other nine settings upon my rather intrigued yet deadly serious inquiry and I didn't entirely see the need for more options than those I already knew.

The Icon Electronic smokes as you blast away on a cool morning. It's actually just CO2 but it puffs out of the barrel and definitely adds a bit of violence to the visuals, which is kind of cool because the auditories aren't anywhere as percussive and ear ringing as gunpowder based projectile delivery systems. Basically, paintball guns sound like robots spitting. You also can't conventionally aim these things, as the large bulbous hoppers are external and top mounted so there is no way to sight down the barrel. However, because paintballs are large, brightly colored and expel at a velocity that is easy enough to visually track, you aim by following the paintballs and adjusting "on the fly" per their pathways and splatter hits.

The Icon Electronic has an impressive range, one that I did not measure but were clearly of some not minor distance, however long shots tend to hook and slice like a beginner golfer learning to hit drives. The guns are more a short range product, placing a higher premium on the shooter's use of stealth and available blinds.

The joy in paintballing is, of course, the lemon yellow and pumpkin orange splats (also neon blue, greens, purples, golds, reds, basically the colors of unicorns and rainbows) made by the paintballs. There is just something so fulfilling about splatting things - paintballing seems to combine the best elements of shooting and vandalism - the heady feeling of possessing creation and destruction cycles at your fingertips.  My other son, TGGWPLZFM, informs me that paintball guns are not necessarily non-lethal, not if you freeze the paintballs first. This is an adaptation to the sport I intend to remain blissfully ignorant of, that my deer hunting adventure was not intended to be a meat gathering event but more of a tagging of stupid deer that choose to wander on to rural roads and cause auto damage. Gun painting Bambi so drivers can spot which deer will wander too close to roads and be provided adequate visual warning to slow down as these yellow and orange safety splatted deer are not to be trusted and are to be provided a wide berth.

But first myself and my hunting partner (and landowner of the splatting fields) needed to explore her Ponderosa Pine and Serviceberry-dominant forest for any possible deer-targets that may have wandered down from the hayfields to nap or crap under the trees.  Unfortunately, the lure of the paintball fun was too immediate and pressing for the two of us to sneak all stealthy and hunter like into the woods so we blazed away at shit - trees, rocks, more trees and a songbird or two, so any deer-targets had plenty of warning as to our intentions. Thusly, I'm sure, we did not see any. But we did blast at stuff until I cracked the clear plastic mounting sleeve for the hopper. I had to hold the hopper in place with one hand while kind of cradling the barrel to shoot it after that point. It worked but it wasn't quite as easy and quick. 

She and I wandered about her steep hillside of deer-target glens and creek beds and thickets blasting trees and rock and were about out of paintballs when she pointed out a neighbor's nice bright white farm fence along one side of her land and this is where the shooting-hunting paradigm shifted easily into that of shooting-vandalizing. At first she merely suggested I pop a cap on the fence to my somewhat cool, ambivalent shrugging, then she asserted it more strongly, even to the point I was actually glad I had the paintball gun in my possession as I might need it for protection if she continued to press her demands for me to contaminate the viriginal whiteness of this perfect fence. Soon, her forceful demands turned to teary begging and sobbing pleading. It was at that point that I could not deny her what she so desired of me. I am a sucker for tears. So I blasted a fence post. Orange splat. Again. Yellow this time. Over and over and I felt like Jackson Pollack fucking around with a canvas. Finally, after a half dozen or more she told me I'd done enough. I could stop now. I teased her and said "remember how I told you these are filled with a glucose based biodegradable dye? Nah. It's actually an oil-based paint." Which I thought was nearly hilarious and she thought was nearly a prompt to throw a lichen coated chunk of basalt at my head.

So, here's the funny part, and by funny I mean country-ironic, - on the drive home, on the afore-mentioned rural road overpopulated with stupidly suicidal deer-targets, stood an idiot deer-target BROADSIDE to me at a distance of one rural road lane and a short spit. It stared at me moronically with no interest or effort to bolt away as I drove slowly by. I wanted to stop, to back up, to re-assemble the Icon Electronic Space Age Paintball "heater" and mark this tawny high leaping rodent with some serious orange and/or yellow. But I passed. It was daylight and cars were not unseen on this road and discretion is often the better part of valor as well as a reductive-mitigative force against the probability curves of near-immediate witness report/request for service to the Spokane County Sheriff's Office of some wackjob shootin paintballs at sweet little deers.

*The Icon Electronic is something between a pistol and rifle, with a sort of space ageish look. Paintball guns, unlike airsoft guns (a competing nonlethal gun battling technology) don't really look like real guns, they have huge CO2 tanks and weird paintball hoppers.

On Learning to Quit Remembering So Much

Sometimes when I walk on wet leaves covering walks and smell the weird sweet rotten smell of autumn I think these are the best memories - playing in leafy parks, in warm jackets, with footballs  - and sometimes when the first snowfall whitewashes everything and hides the grime and imperfections of the world, I think these are the best memories - snowball fights and sledding and dragging on a smoke on the porch of a gray and blue tiny first home I rented when I was 20 with those Ponderosa pine hills behind me and I could hardly taste the smoke for the cold, clean air - and sometimes when I walk through the leaves to work or drive past snow berms on mountain passes I think once upon a time these weren't even memories, they were experienced unbound from all that. Is it better that way? There are these dynamic tensions from the balance of being there then and being here and being now and being here now. Or maybe it's about being then-here-there-now. Most of the time I am on auto-pilot and I'm unsure that is the best way to fly.

Cuttin Bush

Dreamin of cuttin brush on El Rancho in Crawford.

My post election takeaway from yesterday was Bush's quite gracious speech in the morning congratulating Obama on his momentous win. It was a nice little speech but it wasn't his words that were impactful, it was how he looked. Beaten. Depressed. Worn out. Prematurely aged. He had to really be feeling, to the extent this evil old bastard feels much of anything, that the night before was a crushing referendum on the stunning and abject horror of his brutal eight-year mismanagement of America and the American dream. A giant blue wave washed across America to drown the remnants of Bush. And truly, how much is it sinking in to him that his horrifying failures have destroyed the GOP for now, have smashed a party from a potent political force that had the Dems on the ropes for years and possessed almost total political power to the smoking crater where the mighty Republicans once stood.  I'm thinking he's counting the days, like a prisoner scratching hash marks in his cell wall, until he is relieved of his bungling madness and can go harmlessly home to his ranch in Crawford to play with chainsaws.  Adios, you vile hateful incompetent wretch.

And if you think I'm kicking a monster while he's down (and I am) read this NY Times editorial:

So Little Time, So Much Damage

Published: November 3, 2008

While Americans eagerly vote for the next president, here’s a sobering reminder: As of Tuesday, George W. Bush still has 77 days left in the White House — and he’s not wasting a minute

President Bush’s aides have been scrambling to change rules and regulations on the environment, civil liberties and abortion rights, among others — few for the good. Most presidents put on a last-minute policy stamp, but in Mr. Bush’s case it is more like a wrecking ball. We fear it could take months, or years, for the next president to identify and then undo all of the damage.

Here is a look — by no means comprehensive — at some of Mr. Bush’s recent parting gifts and those we fear are yet to come.

CIVIL LIBERTIES We don’t know all of the ways that the administration has violated Americans’ rights in the name of fighting terrorism. Last month, Attorney General Michael Mukasey rushed out new guidelines for the F.B.I. that permit agents to use chillingly intrusive techniques to collect information on Americans even where there is no evidence of wrongdoing.

Agents will be allowed to use informants to infiltrate lawful groups, engage in prolonged physical surveillance and lie about their identity while questioning a subject’s neighbors, relatives, co-workers and friends. The changes also give the F.B.I. — which has a long history of spying on civil rights groups and others — expanded latitude to use these techniques on people identified by racial, ethnic and religious background.

The administration showed further disdain for Americans’ privacy rights and for Congress’s power by making clear that it will ignore a provision in the legislation that established the Department of Homeland Security. The law requires the department’s privacy officer to account annually for any activity that could affect Americans’ privacy — and clearly stipulates that the report cannot be edited by any other officials at the department or the White House.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has now released a memo asserting that the law “does not prohibit” officials from homeland security or the White House from reviewing the report. The memo then argues that since the law allows the officials to review the report, it would be unconstitutional to stop them from changing it. George Orwell couldn’t have done better.

THE ENVIRONMENT The administration has been especially busy weakening regulations that promote clean air and clean water and protect endangered species.

Mr. Bush, or more to the point, Vice President Dick Cheney, came to office determined to dismantle Bill Clinton’s environmental legacy, undo decades of environmental law and keep their friends in industry happy. They have had less success than we feared, but only because of the determined opposition of environmental groups, courageous members of Congress and protests from citizens. But the White House keeps trying.

Mr. Bush’s secretary of the interior, Dirk Kempthorne, has recently carved out significant exceptions to regulations requiring expert scientific review of any federal project that might harm endangered or threatened species (one consequence will be to relieve the agency of the need to assess the impact of global warming on at-risk species). The department also is rushing to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list — again. The wolves were re-listed after a federal judge ruled the government had not lived up to its own recovery plan.

In coming weeks, we expect the Environmental Protection Agency to issue a final rule that would weaken a program created by the Clean Air Act, which requires utilities to install modern pollution controls when they upgrade their plants to produce more power. The agency is also expected to issue a final rule that would make it easier for coal-fired power plants to locate near national parks in defiance of longstanding Congressional mandates to protect air quality in areas of special natural or recreational value.

Interior also is awaiting E.P.A.’s concurrence on a proposal that would make it easier for mining companies to dump toxic mine wastes in valleys and streams.

And while no rules changes are at issue, the interior department also has been rushing to open up millions of acres of pristine federal land to oil and gas exploration. We fear that, in coming weeks, Mr. Kempthorne will open up even more acreage to the commercial development of oil shale, a hugely expensive and environmentally risky process that even the oil companies seem in no hurry to begin. He should not.

ABORTION RIGHTS Soon after the election, Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, is expected to issue new regulations aimed at further limiting women’s access to abortion, contraceptives and information about their reproductive health care options.

Existing law allows doctors and nurses to refuse to participate in an abortion. These changes would extend the so-called right to refuse to a wide range of health care workers and activities including abortion referrals, unbiased counseling and provision of birth control pills or emergency contraception, even for rape victims.

The administration has taken other disturbing steps in recent weeks. In late September, the I.R.S. restored tax breaks for banks that take big losses on bad loans inherited through acquisitions. Now we learn that JPMorgan Chase and others are planning to use their bailout funds for mergers and acquisitions, transactions that will be greatly enhanced by the new tax subsidy.

One last-minute change Mr. Bush won’t be making: He apparently has decided not to shut down the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — the most shameful symbol of his administration’s disdain for the rule of law.

Mr. Bush has said it should be closed, and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and his secretary of defense, Robert Gates, pushed for it. Proposals were prepared, including a plan for sending the real bad guys to other countries for trial. But Mr. Cheney objected, and the president has refused even to review the memos. He will hand this mess off to his successor.

We suppose there is some good news in all of this. While Mr. Bush leaves office on Jan. 20, 2009, he has only until Nov. 20 to issue “economically significant” rule changes and until Dec. 20 to issue other changes. Anything after that is merely a draft and can be easily withdrawn by the next president.

Unfortunately, the White House is well aware of those deadlines.

We Said It!

He won huge. 68% of the youth vote. 349 electoral votes! 349! People wildly celebrating in the streets all over America (when's the last time a presidential election caused that?), particularly the new and youngest generation of voters, youth who have grown up in the hell of Bush's two terms and seen their siblings and buddies ship to Iraq, a movement that reached levels of idealism that many of us, myself included, found hard to believe and hard not to resist skepticism of. Well, last night was their night, and last night was the night for African-Americans to achieve what once was thought nearly unachievable, and last night was the night for many of us long suffering Democrats wishing for a government that protects and provides opportunities for all of its citizens again, not just the rich. I hope this vibe lasts a long time. And, to add the big blue cherry to the top of the election day sundae - Dems gained 5 seats in the Senate and more in the House and Washington kept its Democratic Governor. Too cool.

And lest I forget to pat myself on the back, I called this last March. Here, once again, is my blog entry from March 15 where I picked up on the whole new generation thing in a Denny's overhearing a conversation:

Obama will win this November. Guaranteed. How can I be so brazen, so self assured, so prescient?

I'll fucking tell you how. I was choking down a crapburger with extra crap yesterday at Denny's. Taking a late lunch because I had a busy morning. The table next to me looked like something out of central casting for a new TV show about blue collar Joe Halfracks salt of the earth white guys sitting around bullshitting. The apparent alpha dog was this deep voiced (sounded like Sam Elliot but deeper and more resonant) dude in his late 50s. The omega dog was a young guy with a shaved head. These guys were relatives or coworkers couldn't tell. Anyhow, they are gabbing about the presidential race. Alpha starts bitching about Hillary "if she wins just bend over and grab your ankles and raise your heads" and "she just wants to spend all the money of hard working people"

I'm not making this shit up. I stopped for a second from chomping the downer cowburger covered in nasty and allegedly cheddar cheese and looked around for tv cameras. Seriously, I half wondered if this was some movie scene. Or political ad filming.

The omega asks alpha what he thinks of Obama. The alpha grumbles a bit and bitches. The young dude, who later comments "we're all conservatives here," tells alpha that he finds Obama "interesting" and will probably vote for him. He sounds very earnest. Alpha sneers and continues his diatribe.

And that is why Obama is going to win. He's pulling young white republican conservative adults in. Does one incident in a Denny's in downtown Everett equal a trend, a staggering paradigm-buster of traditional voter blocs shifting madly? Well, sure. Just watch.

Obama will win this November. Guaranteed. How can I be so brazen, so self assured, so prescient?

I'll fucking tell you how. I was choking down a crapburger with extra crap yesterday at Denny's. Taking a late lunch because I had a busy morning. The table next to me looked like something out of central casting for a new TV show about blue collar Joe Halfracks salt of the earth white guys sitting around bullshitting. The apparent alpha dog was this deep voiced (sounded like Sam Elliot but deeper and more resonant) dude in his late 50s. The omega dog was a young guy with a shaved head. These guys were relatives or coworkers couldn't tell. Anyhow, they are gabbing about the presidential race. Alpha starts bitching about Hillary "if she wins just bend over and grab your ankles and raise your heads" and "she just wants to spend all the money of hard working people"

I'm not making this shit up. I stopped for a second from chomping the downer cowburger covered in nasty and allegedly cheddar cheese and looked around for tv cameras. Seriously, I half wondered if this was some movie scene. Or political ad filming.

The omega asks alpha what he thinks of Obama. The alpha grumbles a bit and bitches. The young dude, who later comments "we're all conservatives here," tells alpha that he finds Obama "interesting" and will probably vote for him. He sounds very earnest. Alpha sneers and continues his diatribe.

And that is why Obama is going to win. He's pulling young white republican conservative adults in. Does one incident in a Denny's in downtown Everett equal a trend, a staggering paradigm-buster of traditional voter blocs shifting madly? Well, sure. Just watch.

Blue Boy in a Blue World

You Betta, You Betta, You Bet!

The original Ho Chi Finh.

I've been reluctant to blog of this, as my mourning period didn't end until yesterday, but a couple of weeks ago my best swimming pal, Ho Chi Finh, expired. My Betta bud had not been very perky for a few days and was ignoring his feed and I came home after a weekend in Spokane and he was a goner. The weird thing was he'd been doing great up until a couple of weeks before he bellied up, but his tank had grown dirty, I mean real scummy and nasty and even though everyone says Bettas do best in filthy muck, barely inches deep, I just couldn't stand it. Ever since the cleaning he hadn't seemed the same. Maybe everyone knows what they're talking about after all.

Anyhow, so I am shopping at Hellmart yesterday picking up crap for the boys before I had to enter my Honda Ridgeline Transporter Device and beam myself on the slow manual asphalt beam back to Oly-town, and I wander down one of the pet stuff aisles and see the little plastic containers with Bettas and decided that I can't grieve any longer, that Ho woulda wanted me to replace him, we had really bonded like that, he cared deeply about my affiliation needs, so I examined a crapload of Bettas until I found a pinkish and bluish one that seemed to speak to me. His coloration is much different than Ho's so it wouldn't feel like I was trying to replace the irreplaceable, my first and favorite Betta, and yet he's a very beautiful new Betta all full of his own colorful self pride. I've named him Ho Chi Finh Two.

He's a frisky one! He darts about the tank like his fins are on fire. He'd be a great fighter I believe, perhaps bred of a more pugilistic and ornery nature than the peaceable and beneficent original Ho. The new Ho is a deadly finja warrior! I am just glad he's confined to a tank (although Bettas are known leapers).

So there you have it. As the gray, cloudy wet windiness of the coastal autumn transmogrifies into the dark, despondent, horrible damp chilliness of winter, I have no desire for a repeat of last winter where, confined to a hotel room,I entered a strangely unfulfilling relationship with a slowly rottening apple on my dinette counter. I need a new pal and I've got him and all I can say to him this morning is "welcome to your new world little buddy and remember this come January or February and you are projecting command hallucinations into my steaming hot, sensory deprived prefrontal lobes causing me to wander about desperately trying to locate the 11th Battalion, Robot Army transponder beacons installed in a moebius strip cross-modulater sequence in my neighborhood and you instruct me I must reverse returbulate the mobarity collectors so as to falsely vector the landing coordinates for the 11th Battalion Robot Army invasion fleet into a mountainside somewhere in the Chilean Andes where their only known natural enemies, feral Alpacas, can obliterate them with deadly hoof blows - that I will still feed you every day and love you and respect your needs and inspect your tank for murkiness and scum and we will, come Spring, again worship the Renewal Cycles of the Great Spinning Wheel of the Greatest Galaxy in the World, Mr. Ho Chi Finh Two!"

When you've lost a dear pet* do you quickly replace him/her** or do you allow some appropriate time to grieve or do you never get another one like him/her?

*The observant reader will note I am avoiding the horrifying use of the recently popular noun "furkids" to describe pets, recognizing, of course, that some pet owners choose to anthropomorphize their pets into something seemingly monstrous and recently escaped from the Island of Dr. Moreau.

**I have chosen to use the designation "his/her" in recognition that most pets are distinctly one or the other, however, I do recognize that some petowners may own hermaphroditic pets, e.g. earthworms, and the proper designation would more likely be "his-her" or even "hisher".