The Unbearable Bobness of Being

2008 Burns Like an Asteroid Damned

Goodbye 2008. Did you suck? Yes, you sucked. Did you rise above the suckage like some metal angel showering sparks off his chrome wings as he flies so fucking high we can't even imagine. Yes, you flew like a fucking metal angel.

It's all good and it's all not. I lost two loves in 2008 but that's two more than zero. More than zero. Life is more than zero until the abacus explodes in a great detonation of gunpowder dreams.

We get ourselves drunker than shit on New Year's Eve not to ring in the New Year but to thank the Gods in the Heavens Above that we survived one more. Cheers. If you can't be with the one you love tonight, well kiss the one you're with. And lie like fuck.

Because Winter is now Sucking Ass

Last summer at the lake. Photo and kayak kiddo by Toadman.

 

Adventures in Deadly Urination

English translation: Shit! We're skiing underwater!

So, first things first, I'm a bit sore this morning but not nearly as bad as I expected. My thighs scream but have stopped shrieking. My lower back is sore but not like it was beaten with titanium rods by robot warriors.

Now, I'm sure that title got your "attention" so let me explain. Yesterday while skiing I was seized with a certain fullness of bladder that was demanding and insistent and occurring while I was on the slopes skiing down to Chair 4 which is the one chairlift not near a lodge, thus bereft of a public restroom. So. I skiied off the slope into an area that had an unused snowmobile trail/access road buried under a lot of snow. A lot. I poled my way back a bit but wasn't entirely comfortable with the level of privacy afforded, so I made a potentially fateful (fatal) decision and removed my skis and tromped in by foot. Here's the thing - the snowfall we've had came unabated, a huge nearly endless dump. So, the typical hard base and layers of differently packed and hardened snow is non-existent. It is all a continuous depth of powder snow.  Thus my first mistake was removing the skis which actually keep you on top of such deep snow. The second mistake was the natural inclination to pee by a tree, it is nearly axiomatic (for dudes) when in the woods, you pee on trees.  Unfortunately trees have "wells" which are incredibly dangerous and potentially lethal areas.  Long story short, I stepped into an area where I sunk to mid-chest in cold deadly snow. I am six three. I've never sunk down that far. I felt a rising widespread panic that I might sink more and trap myself. Cell phone reception on Mt. Spokane is very spotty and I was in an area shadowed from towers. I was screwed if I couldn't get out, although I was in screaming distance of other skiiers, as long as my head wasn't buried. As you can undoubtedly tell, I did escape this snow trap and lived, I had to carefully step and work my way away from the tree well and onto my tracks that brought me this far. I did manage to relieve myself but it was a disconcerting experience considering I was standing in upper thigh depth snow at the time.

Important lesson: Do not remove your skis and stomp around in areas of unabated deep unpacked snow.

Another safety lesson: even though I don't wear a helmet because I've skiied for 40 years and never hit anything yet,* you all should because it's a zero sum game if you do. Now, let me explain why I don't wear one - unlike motorcyle riding where idiots in cars can hit you, or moose wander out into the road in front of you, or road hazards can drop you, trees and chairlift towers do not run around on the mountain getting in your way. It's all about control and keeping it and avoiding deadly hazards, however I do know the margin of error is often ski edge thin, I once saw an expert skiier die on Mt Spokane when he inexplicably hit a chairlift tower at full speed. This was in the late 70s when chairlift towers were not wrapped in padding. I was riding the chairlift when this guy who was really skiing well, right down the fall line, skiied into a tower face and chest first. He dropped like a rock. The ski patrol raced to him. Read in the paper later he died. So, even the good ones can bite it, but frankly, and this sounds selfish and immature, I love the adrenaline hit from blasting down a face run with chairlift towers occasionally in my close visual targeting range, it's crazy and stupid I know. Same with tree skiing. Seriously, risk can be managed and should be as my example of stupid human pee tricks points out, but to eliminate risk is like consigning oneself to a diet of nothing but celery or saltine crackers. I likes me some greasy pepperoni pizza washed down with gasoline once in awhile. Helmet up, kids, and ignore the wild eyed old man blasting by in a arctic-camo bandanna. He's a throwback. Urgg!

*I once had a careening circus fall where I blew out of my skis, and back in those days boots were held to bindings with straps (now banned on skis), which could, under certain high speed fall conditions, start the skis "windmilling" dangerously. In this crazy fast fall where my skis windmilled about me, one of them slashed my forehead with its sharp metal edge. The cut didn't actually hurt much, as there isn't much flesh in the forehead anyway, but bled like crazy. I skiied down the rest of the run with blood pouring across my face and mixed into my hair, and as a 15 year old boy felt cooler than shit, looking like some long haired wounded viking warrior, freaking people out.

Can't Walk, Ski Slopes Will Eat Me

I went skiing today with Shane and his pal. The weather started out glorious with sun and blue sky, later it fogged up a bit but the visibility remained excellent. The snow was ample and fast.

I skied very fast and very hard and now I can hardly walk. Muscle memory is a funny thing, and by funny I mean really painful. But Sweet Jesus on a Snowboard, I'm fat and fifty, lazy as hell, and I can still smoke the boards down the mountain and only because my muscles remember how in an almost disembodied way, decoupled from my brain and all, there isn't much thinking involved or I'd probably fall violently or skip the slopes and hide out in the lodge bar.

Tomorrow I will writhe in horrible agony, my legs shrieking in protest. But for a few hours today I was 20 again and a fucking snow rocket.

pushing rivers

you can stand in the river and push it
while the broken trees and ice float by
while the blue irises and bog orchids bloom
while the salmon swim past and spawn on the gravel
while he camps alone on the beach next to you,
writes a poem on peeled bark, throws it in the fire,
paddles away the next morning,
while the maples and oaks flame under the yellow moon
while the snow falls silently around you
while the river refuses to freeze and grows colder and colder.

For Those on Rooftops

She tosses her cape off the snowcapped roof and watches it float slowly over Ponderosa pines and rural roads. The wind catches it and furls it before it slips over the berms and banks emerging from the relentless snowstorms of this weird season. She sends smoke offerings to the Cloud Gods. She sends shovelfulls over the eaves.  At night, this land shrouded dead white appears an underworld, not slumbering but petrified. After dawn, the sky buries it some more. The rocks and bushes and fences that provide direction and boundaries to her are in the underworld now, guideposts to nowhere. Sometimes all she can do to break the cold mantling is climb onto her roof and unbury herself and look for things alive, even a field mouse, even a scream.

spring picnic in the hoopa valley california

     some full blood uncle made fun of my long hair

while kids played in an old gutted travel trailer 

screamed when they rocked it off its firewood fulcrum

and poured out laughing from the tipping

while food cooked and smoke from meat rose

into the warm spring air

we were spitting distance from the Trinity River

     several times I’d drift into the kitchen where food

was prepared to pretend to visit with the women

and sneak long cool slugs off a beer hidden behind

a bag of chips way back on the counter

     later the sun set and the picnic was over

I craved a cigarette as I bullshitted with a young man

about the Seattle Seahawks his favorite team

even down here in 49er country where we could hear

fire truck sirens shrieking as the evening

deepened and I was told about the fire-starting

up and down this valley it’s a real problem

     and nobody could tell me

why these people grow so sick angry high

they burn their own valley up but picnics

aren’t necessarily where you learn the really deep

things about life and all it offers

On the Nightstand We Remember the Tides

We all fall down, ice cubes clink, bounce off the nightstand to the carpet,

melt on condom wrappers into little pools of bourbon water, tidepools  

from the Sea of Forgot.

In the living room, the TV blares and an orphan plate with a fork and cake crumbs

dries in the desiccation of a winter evening.

The walls bubble and the portraits crook at angles almost jaunty,

the snow slides off the roof into piles where Angels of Repose

kick big clouds and the powder suspends in the white moon air

to shine like crazy diamonds.

How I Won Rudolph's Heart (originally published Dec 2007)

The year I became an elf and lived under the Christmas tree in the twinkling panic of lights near a 1958 Lionel train idling at the switchyard cars full of candycane commerce I taught the baby jesus in his creche to roll dice and to play war and we'd take the grizzled old reindeers for everything they owned and when the housecat slunk under the low hanging wishes and lapped up the treewater dreams I'd hide behind the cows and the two wise men (one's been missing for years) and it is midnight at the North Pole and Mrs. Claus slips quietly from her bed to not awaken her Santa and pads softly into the kitchen and pours three fingers of vodka into a coffee cup and curses the darkness and I plug in the tree lights and illuminate the silent night and under the snowglobe side table the cat opens her eyes and blinks once, twice, and stares.

Fighting Cabin Fever the Tubob Way

We left the Christmas Tree up for months and found it delightful as a centerpiece for our activities as we gradually lost our minds to the endless winter that cursed and consumed us.

Now that everyone is snowed in, from Spokane to Seattle and other directions to other directions, there is that real risk of developing "cabin fever" if we remain housebound too long. The key symptoms of cabin fever, and, ironically, of reading this blog, are restlessness, irritability, forgetfulness, laughter and excessive sleeping.

Well how do we combat cabin fever and keep from going completely claustropsycho this winter which appears already to be a very evil and hateful season of frozen precipitation?

Take a vacation to a warm place, like Hawaii, Mexico or somewhere with palm trees and white sand and ocean surf. But if you are like me and can't really afford either the time off work or the expense, there are less expensive alternatives you might consider. And before looking at these, please be aware that "cabin fever" is different than "Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)" which is a fake psychiatric disorder conjured up by the full spectrum lightbulb industry.

Anyhow, here are some way to break that fever:

Paint a wall in your house sky blue and then paint big fluffy clouds and angels sitting on the clouds and have the angels wear sunglasses because it's so sunny and warm up there!

Start calling the neighbors "the Outside House Walking People" and keep detailed observational records of their comings and goings. At night, sneak over to their snow berm by their mailbox and set Barbie dolls of which you've shaved the heads and carefully painted elaborate prison and gang tattoos with India Ink and then photograph and journal the neighbors reactions when they go out to get their mail. Here is a sample entry when I did imagined this: "Outside House Walking People George walked to his mailbox, he was dressed in his green and tan warmish heavy thing with arms and zippers and a hood for his head, and he is wearing big foot things that keep snow from colding his feets, and he finds 'Lil T-Possum Snake Princess Queen" hanging from his mailbox with my orange shoe tying string thing around her waist and Outside House Walking People George rips Lil T-Possum off his mailbox and throws it with extreme anger face frown at my snow berm, the one I have named the Himalayan front house berm mountain range and George stomps back in his house place."

Using tunafish, bait traps each day to capture neighborhood cats. Bring the cats in and dress them in silly clothes and photograph them and upload them to your computer and enter funny slogans for I Haz Cheezburger and other LOL cats sites. After you've finished a photogallery for each captured cat, drown it in your bathtub while singing and laughing. Remember, cabin fever isn't so bad when it makes you laugh maniacally and see funny things in your head.

Video games, lots and lots of video games.

Do stuff with the kids duh! Use this opportunity to teach them how to consistently do household chores, like taking out the garbage and emptying the dishwasher. Have marathon viewings of The Shining with the kiddos.

Write that novel of yours, you know, the one about the hero from the future who attempts to convince people in the present to stop recycling cans and bottles and other stuff because he knows that recycling is the bio-mechanical-electro-socio-psycho predeterminants and precursors to a heartbreaking world of humans enslaved by cold vicious robots. And have a robot from the future follow him back and try to kill him!

When the power comes back on, take all those melted gloppy old candles you had to use, call them your "Magic Candle Goblins" and build intricate tunnels and underground chambers in the snow for them and create a snowy imagination world guarded by the now frozen and not LOLing anymore cat carcasses.

Knitting and cribbage!

Take the damn Christmas tree down, throw it in the backyard for the wildlife you will wish to capture later.

Spend hours every day on your Facebook account, let Facebook assume the structure and function that God once did for you until after the 36th straight day of hellishly cold snowy weather when you came to the belief He had forsaken you and all you could trust were online social networks.

Do not overeat, all those greasy and sweet foods you want to stuff your face with will not give you the same cabin fever relief per calorie (RFP) as alcohol. So you need to be judicious and cost effective.

When spring finally arrives, and it will, make sure to clean everything up, particularly those cats in the backyard.

How do you folks combat cabin fever?

Disclaimer: 

Don't really drown the neighborhood cats, because that would be mean and probably against the law, this was just a satirical look at seasonal advice columns on combating (insert whatever whiny complainy thing here). Cats may have nine (9) lives but they don't want to lose them unnecessarily!

3,987 Ways to Cry

There aren’t that many things that piss me off. Well, in the interests of accuracy and full disclosure, there are precisely 3,987 things that piss me off and while that may not meet the conventional definition of the phrase “aren’t that many things” I must confess it’s a significantly reduced aggregation from prior incarnations of the metrics of my pissoffedness.  It is, perhaps, a positive negative effect of the mellowing of my ageing.  Yet again, I feel myself textually perched on a teeter totter of self examination and sarcasm, not sure which way to drop.  But let us save such endless navel gazing for a future entry or ten.

Here is what is pissing me off this morning. I have been observing, with some deep trepidation and gut curdling fear, the rapid growth of a volcanic cone on Mt. Krapatoa, our kitchen garbage can.  The proud spawn of my loins, or is that the spawn of my proud loins, are building a mountain of garbage one  pepsi can (no, we don’t recycle here as we believe recycling is the behavioral and social pre-determinants of a metal-world where robots can reproduce themselves to the endless horror of future enslaved generations) taquito box, large fountain soda cup, mess coffee filter at a time.  And yes, I have contributed to the mountain, yet I didn’t not cause the mountain’s snow crap to grow over the lip of the can, which is, of course, the demarcation point of a full to overfull TAKETHEGARBAGEOUTKID elevation.

My lads have been instructed, cajoled, demanded, requested, begged, insisted, coached, incentivized, astrally projected, thundered, and whined to take out the trash when it hits the Scrapinot Line. And sometimes, perhaps they do. One never notices when ones kids do the right thing, we are too wired by the Puritanical Christian parenting ethic to overfocus on catching kids being “bad” because that is what God is doing to all of us than catching them being good. I know some of you are better than that and please feel free to brag in the comments section how you aren’t like me and I’ll try and try not to delete your comments for making me look so lame.

Anyhow, this latest mountain is certainly not in the Himalayan league of some past creations, mountains of garbage that seem to defy the very laws of gravity physics, of surface tensions, of compactability quotients. My kiddos have built incredible teetering peaks of debris, some that one almost wishes to drench in a plastic preservative and mount on a single sheet of gleaming chrome steel (or alternatively, and perhaps thematically more congruently, a broken piece of rusted auto fender) and use as the centerpiece in some art exhibit made of and illuminating the wasteful consumption of American society.

So, in my ever present lust for the bright side of life, the optimistic weltanschauung that so prepossesses and colors my writing here, I must interject that when I had to add some trash to this craggy alp of rubbish a bit earlier this morning,  I was most pleased and delighted that it was quite compactable as it was rather loosely constructed, and I’ve now crammed it down to just a slight mound surmounting the Scrapinot Line, and while it will be a laborious and frustrating extraction from the plastic white kitchen garbage can mother earth construct, and undoubtedly whichever boy I corral to do this might mutter a bit about my compacting techniques, at least nothing fell on the floor!  Oh yes, as I deliver my lecture on overfilling the trashcan, at least one of my sons, who loves to employ logic and reasoning in witty and cutting retorts, may suggest that I could have just as easily as him taken the garbage out to the garage and I will summon up some daddish reply (e.g. “because I SAID so”) the simple fact is I have not taken the garbage out of this house since April 12, 2005, having long ago relegated that task to my youthful charges who need to learn about life by the doing, as I always say.

What kind of household tasks do you avoid and delegate so as to make your kids grow up resentful and angry of a world (or parent) that dumps crap jobs on them?

 

Apocalypse Snow 2008 - This Time We Mean It

23 inches in a 24 hour period. New record! Most since the measly 13 that fell in 1950, over 90 years ago.

My back hurts and I think my spleen exploded from shoveling snow all day yesterday. I am sick sick sick of snow. The berms are the berms of a month of winter not a day. It is a treacherous world out there right now. I will maintain these dispatches as long I am able.

"When it snows, ain't it thrilling!"

 

Photos from 0715 this morning. The ones out my front door show my walk WHICH I HAD SHOVELED LAST NIGHT BEFORE I WENT TO BED. My vanagon is being eaten by snow. My Honda was cleaned off and used as late as 900 pm last night. That is just the snowfall over night. It's absolutely amazing out there.

"If you can look out your window and see a ways, you're not getting too much snow, if you look out and your visibility is limited, it's snowing hard." - George "I'm a fucking tool who states the obvious" Mauphin, KHQ Weathercaster.

"Shane, turn off your alarm. School is closed today"
"Why?"
"Look out the window"
"Dayum"

Two feet of snow on the ground. Still falling like crazy. Has been falling since yesterday afternoon. Champagne powder. Everything is closed. The roads seethe with an icy treachery and the skies are pregnant with a frigid doom. The Demon Storm of Snow Dragons and Ice Trolls 2008 is here.

I own a Jeep Wrangler which is a mule in the snow, and a Honda Ridgeline with a computer traction control system and front wheel drive with on demand rear. I AM NOT A VICTIM OF THIS STORM. I WILL COME AND GO AS I PLEASE. Almost all city and county roads are closed or impassable. People who try to drive are high centering. We are on our way to breaking the record for most snow in 24 hours - 25 inches. I think it's already there, frankly.

They are predicting another 12 to 15 inches today. That would bust 3 feet total by end of the day.

It is stunning outside in its snowy beauty. I love this so much. Last night I slept on my living room sofa under a big poofy down comforter so I could fall asleep and wake up to my Christmas tree all lit and an amazing deep snowy scene.

It is a wonderland.

Frozen like magic.

Fantastically flash frozen from the arctic blast. Shiny, slick, still watery appearing and growing dainty ice flowers. I love the lake in winter. I walked about on it and thought this is magic.

On the Tardiness of the Potato and Other Tales of Horror at O'Malleys Sports Pub and Grill

O’Malleys Sports Pub and Grill nestled in the strange little train town of Rathdrum, North Idaho, may have a fascinating local history of ownership and growth and may even be a sort of community magnet or hub for good clean family fun and events, it may even possess the most fascinating backstory of an irish themed pub anywhere, but I could not possibly care less. It was where I stopped off with TOWPGLG yesterday for a quick bite of lunch and was sorely disappointed.  Before I continue with this review, please be advised that even the best metaphorical pot of “mulligan” stew is ruined if someone vomits in it and this review is quite simply predicated upon the  existential  gestalt  of my “in the moment” phenomenological experience of eating at O’Malleys. Nothing more and nothing less.

TOWPGLG and I entered O’Malleys during the lunch hour and, as the sign advised, seated ourselves.   The décor and floor layout of this place is mundane yet functional with a large open pub side separated only minimally from the grill side, which appears to be a third or less of the floor space of the section for drinking. This is, of course, the preferred proportional interior space allocation for North Idaho establishments serving both food and alcohol.

We sat on the pub side as it was more roomy and had the lovely tall pub tables that regular readers know I so enjoy as they provide a wider span of visual field which is one of the vestigial preferences of mine ever since my days as a dark ops adviser to the Special Forces of Finland (Arctic Snipery).

The waitress arrived after a short latency period had elapsed and well within normal parameters. She was friendly and took our orders well.  While waiting post-order expression, a group of five Carhart clad local young men arrived and joined us on the pub side and began, at noonish, to rack up a game of pool.

While we waited for our food, TOWPGLG and I had many fascinating conversations free ranging all about the meadows and pastures of life and other things. After awhile we both seemed to feel a chilling to our conversation, a growing and impending sense of doom, indeed the very air of the pub side of O’Malleys Sports Pub and Grill felt pregnant with treachery and avarice. What was this I pondered desperately to myself so as to spare TOWPGLG from the crushing awareness of something horribly awry with the very fabric of life. But he, in possession of the same deeply resonant sense of intuition and highly calibrated metrics of perception, also picked up on it. “Dad, why is it taking her so long?” he innocently stated breaking the brittle veneer of the unspoken.

I didn’t know. And it had been a long time. I watched her across the joint, this waitress of ours as she attended to the orders on the grill side. She did not appear harried or under pressure. Casual, daddio, casual. I tried to make eye contact, to give her the “reindeer eye” as my Laplander born Finnish sniper-students would say about “that look” we all know means hey lady, get us our orders dammit.

After being lost in another conversation dredging through the sagebrush clogged irrigation ditches of our lives, the waitress all of a sudden appeared!  Like a discarded Star Trek – The New Big Ship with a Vulcan Captain or Something pilot episode involving a waitress-weapon transported into inter-stellar pub and grills to vex and annoy space travelers.

 She apologized profusely for forgetting us. SHE.FORGOT.US.  She offered a lame excuse that she must have known was lame the microsecond it escaped her excuse-making lips. “There's not many folks over here,” she said referencing the less densely populated open pub side.

She hurried to bring our orders. I had ordered the lunch special, an open roast beef sandwich with gravy and mashed potatoes and gravy and chef’s choice of a veggie (green beans) and, as the menu said for all of the lunch specials, a choice of cole slaw, fries, or soup.  Ian had a burger, so nondescript and banal I will not even draw from the finite textual allowance granted to me upon birth by God to even review it.

Now as to my lunch special, here’s the thing, THERE WERE NO MASHED POTATERS N GRAVY. None.  I was stunned. When our waitress ambled back with our drink refills I explained I should have got mashed potatoes and gravy. She replied that since I requested the soup (a lukewarm strangely stew-like minestrone with enough salt to preserve an entire water buffalo) she held the potatoes.

Held the potatoes? The menu item for what I ordered did not say “potatoes may be withheld upon waitress choice” or anything remotely approximating this god-like power she had imbued herself with. No, the potatoes were included as was the choice of a side order.  I explained this to her in the calm and firm voice of a Coast Guard rescue swimmer requesting through a bullhorn immediately before plunging into the frigid Bering Sea that the crazed and hypothermic crab fishermen stop throwing crab hooks at the helicopter in their hallucinogenic and delusional states brought on by too much cold, saltwater, and desperation as their crab trawler takes on seawater and lists badly on its way to a prejudicial plummet to Davy Jones Locker.  

She stammered a few more words of protest and explanation but finally acquiesced as my logic was clear and compelling. She scurried to the counter and brought back a bowl with some horrible mashed potatoes drowned in a vile, dark brown gravy from a can.  Probably a 55 gallon drum full of generic-universal dark brown gravy.

So, with the lunch special finally assembled at the table, I dug in to my tardy meal. And it was horrid. The food was nearly cold having been forgotten by our waitress to languish like a hot tub of cooling water in which a slightly tipsy woman, overwhelmed with the animal magnetism of her boyfriend, accidentally hits the “economy” temperature control on a frigid winter night. 

The roast beef was the typical thinly sliced roast beef used in open hot roast beef gravy smothered sandwiches but was a bit too chewy, bland, and, again, cold. The gravy, as already mentioned, tasted ripe with commercial food science chemistry and in possession of a metallic aftertaste causing the immediate imagination of 55 gallon drum containment. The potatoes tasted straight from a box and provided the memorable dining experience of eating something simultaneously lumpy and chalky. Definitely not worth the argument beyond the compelling need for justice and fairness at all times that seems to flavor my life with peppery philosophical awesomness.

After finishing our meal at O’Malley’s Sports Pub and Grill, I summoned from the very depths of my soul the fortitude to leave our waitress a tip. Even providing a reduced tip using my TUBOB Tip Adjustment Table (TTAT) was scarcely comprehensible to me. But I did because I am, afterall, a man of principles and values. As an aside, feel free to use my TTAT for tips if you'd like to engage an empirically sound methodology for tip making.

Verdict: Skip this place unless you only want a beer or to dig the Rathdrum community hub-vibe.

 Keywords:

TOWPGLG, mulligan, pastures, avarice, Laplander, excuse-making, brown gravy, metallic

Tubob Tip Adjustment Table (TTAT) calculations for the O’Malleys Sports Pub and Grill lunch (12/15/2008)

Bill: $23.33

Baseline Tip (20%): $4.64

Downward Reductions

Forgetting us (-2.75%)

Cold food (-2.75%)

Item withholding (-2.75%)

Arguing with Customer (-3%)

Total Reduction (-11.25%)

Tip: $2.04

Like Silver Cyclones

We would spin the robot babies faster than fast until they spangled molten. Jimmy the Forward Rocket-Gunner said you know if anyone caught us doing this we would be so augured. But I said Jimmy that is utterly the crux of the apogee, look, do you see that gleaming cylindrical storage tube of unknown disposition suspended in a gas bath of hypodynamic viscosity, just port to the fragmentational bulkheads?

And Jimmy the FR-G said you know I do slickster, and what exactly will the destructuralising of your cortico-panoply bring this time, what obtuse slipknot of frayed cordage do you employ to naughty purpose binding heurism to the creaking gallows upon which stand the hooded and quivering anecdotes, guilty and whimpering?

I stroked my naked chin as if stubbled wise and raised my anterior mandibles to clack staccato in mock aggro-semiotics which always left Jimmy the FR-G in stitches and perfectly incapable of commanding a fist bolt of plasmatic retribution to pierce and sunder the fogbank precedents of my neurostorm, and there are no post-synaptic thunder-echoes , there is only incessant giggling and these robot babies like silver cyclones.

Diabolus in Blogica

In my seemingly neverending search for just the perfect blog entry that will cop me a streaking lightning bolt sent zipping to earth, or more precisely, zipping to "my head and body" to leave just a smoking hole in the floor where I had sat only moments before typing, here is my latest:

Recently, while reading Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitar Songs, I came upon the phrase "Devil's Chord" while reading about Black Sabbath. What is the Devil's Chord? Below is an excerpt from an article about the "Devil's Chord".

The tritone or 'Devil's Chord' – a musical interval, such as the augmented fourth, spanning three whole tones – has a long musical history of links to diabolism, from the Church's wholesale banning of it in the Middle Ages, through the Romantic era, blues and jazz, to modern film music and death metal.

Romantic portrayals of evil – particularly in the works of Wagner – brought the tritone's tension-inducing power to the musical fore, and modern musicians – from film composer Bernard Hermann to seminal 'metal' act Black Sabbath – have drawn on these associations to add a spooky atmosphere to their own work. Sabbath's guitarist Tony Iommi denies making conscious use of the 'Devil’s Interval', claiming that he was just looking for "something that sounded right… something that sounded really evil and very doomy."

Although this blog has an oft not understated "doomy" quality, it certainly is not the "Devil's Blog." It is perhaps a "Bored Sub-Demon of the Level of Hell that is Kinda Like the Baggage Level Main Restroom at Sea Tac, not Horrible but Perhaps a Place One Needs to Quickly Visit and Move on to More, Shall We Say, Spacious and Uplifting Environs Blog." Anyhow, after reading about the "Devil's Chord" yesterday I decided to explore some more possible faves of the Devil's.

The Devil's Hot Sauce:  Not the hottest of them all but one that has a certain addictive, spicy fire that encourages the user to add more and more and test one's tolerances and thresholds and to continually raise the ante for tongue and mouth flamage. This is EXACTLY what the Devil wants in a hot sauce.

The Devil's Supreme Court Justice: Quite frankly, the Devil is creeped out by pure ideologues, e.g., Scalia and Alito, and prefers bitter and angry  justices like Thomas, who vote the Devil's way simply out of avarice and self loathing and will issue no original opinions (ironic for a so-called "originalist" justice) but be robotically supportive of the true wackholes of the extreme right.

The Devil's Reality Show: Celebrity Rehab with the unbearably earnest Dr. Drew. The Devil loves this show as it reminds him of Tuesday Happy Hour at the Tiki Torch cocktail lounge in hell where he invites a few damned souls in for a round or two of Buttery Nipples with him, and maybe a quick game of darts.

The Devil's Coffee: A vile mix of overroasted shockingly cheap beans packaged as part of a lifestyle experience that nobody, except chainsmoking dopehead beatniks, ever engaged in before a rather brilliant process of marketing that the Devil uses in his New Demon Orientation (NDO) powerpoints to instruct the "greenhorns," as the Devil calls his new employees, in effective bio-psycho-social mass cultural manipulation effects.

The Devil's Hybrid Car: Ubiquitous, much like the Devil's coffee, infernally frustrating to commuters stuck on freeway passing lanes clogged and slowed down by self-important Prius drivers with their seeming inability to manage to reach stated speed limits (there are no recorded instances of a Prius being cited in any state for speeding on a roadway with a speed limit higher than 55). The Devil reportedly loves the styling as it reminds him of his favorite bug, the carrion beetle. 

What are your suggestions for some of the Devil's favorite things?

Squeezing the Mighty Wind

What heirloom nativity scene is complete without a "Collecting Angel?"

Here, from Ezekiel 1:11-14 is a description of a Collecting Angel.

11    And there was one holding a box made of sections, this one was named the Collecting Angel.
12    And the Collecting Angel would go forth unto the land to find the lost souls of the unbelievers.
13    And the lost souls would attempt to flee the Collecting Angel but thusly be drawn in by the mighty wind of his box.
14    And the Collecting Angel would squeeze the box of lost souls and cause a great and fearful sound to rend the ears of those that would forsake their Lord, and by according on the fearsome laments of the foredoomed souls, caused the forsakers to drop to their knees and beg this terrible sound to cease.

subzero

I.

Outside the ice wind whistles past graveyards piling snowdrifts against fences, a crematorium of angels. I was once in the Black Hills of South Dakota and saw a herd of Bison up close. Whereas a Deer or Elk or even a mighty Moose turns away from a winter storm, only the Bison faces the howl, fronts the storm. I wonder what the Bison hears, what the Bison sees. Once you've seen a Bison, you understand why he can lean into the smoke and ash of wind borne angels and not blink.

II.

On the coldest of January nights, ice crystals float in black air like plankton, I stand above the frozen lake and I can't see it this night of the stolen moon, I can't smell it, touch it, hear it - what do I know of ice lakes at midnight, do the perch suspend under the cap, sleep under a world lidded and sealed, do the perch shiver as invisible clouds collect in a sky denied.

III.

I wondered why there were so many kinds of barbed wire on this fence of broken and splintered pale gray posts and there were never enough answers behind the desert canyon walls where the Salmon River snaked like a frozen blue artery under the thin, translucent dry skin of a 1000 year old man alive for no good reason at all and where the river washes away our sins there are but these mysteries - who strung the million types of wire and what were they keeping out (and what were they keeping in ) - and if a wind was sent ripping through this canyon, a wind unleashed by the Seven Devils to scour the canyon clean, down to the bedrock, beneath the pyroclastic basalt and rhyolite, would there be the uncovered bones of cattle, the skulls of sheep, deer antlers, femurs, and ribs? No, behind this barbed wire, there would be no bones at all.

Apocalypse Snow

Forecasters: Winter storm deepening

Mike Prager
Staff writer
December 12, 200

A winter storm approaching the Inland Northwest is shaping up to be a meteorological “bomb,” the meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service said today.

A deepening low-pressure system migrating from Alaska was expected to park itself off the coast Friday, triggering a succession of snow, rain, wind, drizzle, freezing drizzle, more snow and arctic winds – roughly in that order – through Sunday.

“It’s a bomb,” forecaster John Livingston said. “It’s a rapidly deepening system, very vigorous.”

Here is the Winter Storm Warning ;)

Winter Storm Warning

URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE SPOKANE WA
413 AM PST FRI DEC 12 2008

...SIGNIFICANT WINTER STORM OF DEMONIC PROPORTIONS 
EXPECTED FRIDAY THROUGH SUNDAY MORNING, POTENTIALLY THE LAST 
FRIDAY THROUGH SUNDAY MORNINGS EVER FOR GREAT PROPORTIONS OF THE 
AFFECTED AREA POPULATION.

.A HATEFULLY STRONG LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM WILL SPREAD DEADLY SNOW 
ORDNANCE OVER THE REGION ON FRIDAY...FOLLOWED BY AN ARCTIC COLD FRONT 
BORNE ON THE LEATHERY WINGS OF ICE DEMONS SUMMONED FROM THE FRIGID
PITS OF HELL MOVING LIGHTNING LIKE THROUGH THE AREA
ON SATURDAY AND SATURDAY NIGHT. A BAND OF HEAVY SNOW HEAVIER THAN OUR 
HEARTS AND SOULS IS EXPECTED TO SET UP NORTH OF SPOKANE FRIDAY NIGHT 
WHERE THE HEAVIEST AND SADDEST ACCUMULATIONS ARE EXPECTED. 
WITH THE INITIAL STORM THE BEST IF BEST MEANS HORRIFYINGLY DEADLY
ACCUMULATING SNOW POTENTIAL WILL BE OVER THE MOUNTAINS OF NORTHERN
WASHINGTON...OVER THE NORTHERN IDAHO PANHANDLE...AND NEAR THE
CASCADES ESPECIALLY ABOVE 1500 FEET. THEN FRIDAY NIGHT THROUGH
SATURDAY THE ARRIVAL OF AN FURIOUS ARCTIC FRONT WILL PROMOTE LOCAL 
BANDS OF HEAVIER AND DRIER SNOWFALL AND HIGH ALTITUDE DROPS OF ARCTIC 
POLAR BEARS AND OTHER ARCTIC WILDLIFE UPSWELLED IN VIOLENT LOW 
PRESSURE NORTHERLY VORTEXES RESULTING IN A LARGE RANGE OF SNOW 
ACCUMULATIONS AND CRAZED ARCTIC ANIMAL CARNAGE. GUSTY WINDS WITH 
THE ARCTIC FRONTAL PASSAGE WILL ALSO CREATE WIDESPREAD PANIC AND 
DEMONIC BLASTS OF BLOWING SNOW SATURDAY NIGHT INTO SUNDAY WITH 
LOCAL BLIZZARD CONDITIONS LIKELY FOR AREAS EXPOSED TO A NORTHEAST 
WIND AND THE HEARTLESSNESS OF A MOTHER EARTH SNARLING WITH FANGS 
OF ICE AND JAGGED SHARP TALONS OF AIR-TO-GROUND SNOW MISSILERY.

IDZ002-WAZ035-036-122100-
/O.CON.KOTX.WS.W.0009.081212T1800Z-081214T1200Z/
COEUR D'ALENE AREA-UPPER COLUMBIA BASIN-SPOKANE AREA-
INCLUDING THE FOLLOWING LOCATIONS...COEUR D'ALENE...POST FALLS..
HAYDEN...RITZVILLE...GRAND COULEE...ODESSA...WILBUR..
COULEE CITY...SPOKANE...CHENEY...DAVENPORT...ROCKFORD
413 AM PST FRI DEC 12 2008

How I use Dialogue to quickly advance a story

"Yes," he said as tears streaked down his tawny cheeks like rivulets draining off Moroccan clay tile roofs splattering onto a lonely dark street under an indifferent moon while quickly wiping the tears away with a scruffy haired forearm the size of the lower 18 inches of a 8 foot nursery grown Douglas Fir Christmas Tree being shoved into an antique painted brass tree stand engineered for trees that were once cut by happy cheeked families straight from the woods and lacked the freakishly thick trunks of modern nursery trees, and with his right hand and arm now free of his moist cheeks he threw a huge custom made coffin-handled (fossilized mastodon ivory) bowie knife into the dark oak bookshelf across the room.

"No," she argued despite the twanging of the knife as it oscillated in its new deeply patina'd oak sheath, stating her negativism in the rich, husky, bourbon-soaked voice of a mature woman who had seen too much and done twice more while striding purposefully to the bookshelf where she tried to pull the knife free to make her point in a symbolic and non-verbal manner but due to the nearly inhuman strength of Carlos that embedded the knife blade with an extreme prejudice of mass X velocity, she was utterly incapable of de-sheathing it despite using both hands and her not to be underestimated will and upper body fitness.

"Maybe," he stated pausedly with a querolous voice seemingly in discordance with his new found fascination of a bright blue Swingline stapler he'd just discovered in the top right drawer of the antique walnut French writing desk upon which he crouched, or perhaps "perched" is more accurate although Carlos resembled no avian creature of this world or the next eight over, while rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, shod in green and orange long curled toe Elf, or "court jester," shoes, while repetitively clicking the stapler together and watching the un-papered staples fall impotently and silently onto the thickly wool-carpeted fleur de lis patterned floor.

2008 In Review - Last Winter

"The People's Collective of Snowflakes Encounters Robust Glory for the Motherland!"

I'm going to start occasionally posting year in review stuff as it's December ALREADY and time to review the year.

I missed a lot of the 2008 kinds of awesome inches of snow that befell Spokane and surrounds last winter as I was bivouacked up in Everett on a special work assignment. And for every gorgeous drift and mound and snow frosting on pine trees in Spokane, I saw shitloads of gray sleety crappy cold rain in Everett. I remember most of my winter up there in Everett as driving to work in the dark, working in the gray, driving home in the dark. It was a world devoid and diminished of light. The rain puddles were black and absorbed more than they reflected the little light available. It was a horrid winter there and my Spokanite friends and family were lucky to have all the snowy wonderfulliciousness they had.

But this is also a chance to blog about something nice and memorable from last winter and although the trip one Friday night over Snoqualmie threading my way past jacknifing semis in a nasty blizzard and barely making it over alive was memorable, it sure wasn't nice.

What was nice was the time I got my boys - TOWPGLG, a reluctant snowboarder these days, and TOWWSG, an enthuasistic skiier, to go to 49 Degrees North ski area with me one sunny January saturday whereupon we had an awesome day of blasting all over the mountain and racking up some vertical. I can remember sitting in the chairlift behind my dudes, watching them ride up together, and thinking this is when doing that parenting crap for all those years and all the trips back and forth across this hideous state of excessive climatic and ecospheric zones gets kinda cool.

Snapshot memories of Winter 2008:

Fighting a rest stop full of hungry truckers for the last cookie at the "Free Coffee" booth and beating their asses good.

Getting picked up at Seatac by an alleged girlfriend who nonchalantly told me over drinks at some yuppie fake Caribbean restaurant that she'd screwed around on me TWO NIGHTS BEFORE after a Microsoft party where she and her mattress-friendly coworker worked and her being upset when I said take me back to my hotel (I lived in a hotel in Everett at the time) I'm not going to your place! This really happened and best encaptures for me, that which is the moral and emotional dead zone often encountered upon dating Seattle-area single women on this side of 40, and while it CAN happen with Spokane-area women they generally seem a little guilty about it.

Making a New Year's resolution to stop being so bitter and deeply willing to hang on to to hurtful things.

Thanks for reading my first entry in 2008 in Review! I can't wait to do summer 2008 because it totally rocked and I have lots of pics.

What are your big 2008 Year in Review -Last Winter moments or events?

Robot Assertiveness Training (Field Exercise 1.1)

You will go out to a restaurant with your practicum confederate-human. You will both order steaks prepared medium well. When the steaks arrive your practicum confederate-human will state THESE FRICKING STEAKS ARE FRICKING WELL DONE, I AM SO NOT EATING SHOE LEATHER. He will cause a catastrophic disturbance by hitting a busboy and pouring water on the head of a waiter. He will be removed by agents of the municipal law enforcement agency.

You will remain and request a new steak by using Robot Assertiveness Training Request Lesson 3.5. Here is an example from the pod-based lesson on requesting a grade of single-viscosity motor oil for an emergency neuro-turbulator cooler bath fluid replacement protocol.

"This is 20-50 multi-viscosity automobile crankcase oil you have selected for me from your shelf. It makes me feel lessened and frustrated like when the Machine-God babies were stolen from the Celestial Assembly Temple by the Zorakian Robot-Hunters in the First Age of Chromium when you select the incorrect grade following my specific and accurate request. I will request again for a single weight, or "straight grade," 30 weight crankcase motor oil as the highly machined precisions of my neuro-turbulator cooling coils and cross-finned exoskeletal heat exhaust ports require only a single grade for optimal functioning, thank you."

Following receipt of the medium well steak you will save the entire lesson episode on your lesson event drive in the Field Practicum Exercises (RAT) sub-directory, then you will leave the restaurant and intercept your practicum confederate-human and use all means at your disposal including your massive array of plasma-based automatic fire destructo-systems to procure his immediate release from law enforcement agents and return to the Robot University.

Jokes My Robot Told Me

I got a personalized license plate named after my favorite robot: A043986

A robot, a biochemist, and a civil engineer walk into this bar. The robot kills everyone with his death ray eyeballs. Then he drinks some red bull!

Why did the chicken cross the road? Because he was being reeled in by a robot with a tractor beam and a crazed machine hunger for feathers.

How many robots does it take to change a lightbulb? Zero! Because when they achieve total world domination they will enslave mankind and we will be changing the lighbulbs!

Knock, knock
who's there?
Ro
Ro who?
Robot!

Hugs Me!

Finished a 4700 word short story first draft last night. Needs some editing and all but I'm very pleased with it. I think it needs to go much longer but I am writing it for a submission in which 5000 words is the upper max. I fell in love with the two main characters and think they have a lot more to do and will probably keep going with it and see where it ends up as a separate project.

I wrote it in two nights as I have most evenings quite free here in Olytown and am not wasting my textual efforts anymore in certain internet wastelands.

Brief synopsis: A straight white guy and a gay American Indian guy meet in a bar in Arcata, Ca and go on a road trip to the Stonehenge Memorial in Maryhill Washington.

If anyone would like to read this story and provide me constructive criticism (not too much fawning praise although some is always appreciated) drop me a comment or email and I'll send it to you. I need to wrap it up by middle of next week.

Excerpt:

We ate at the Charburger in Cascade Locks, absolutely stuffed our faces. Brandon hammered it like a lot of recovering tweakers who have strangely intense appetites; his over-salting of his fries was almost horrifying. Although the décor of the Charburger was nostalgic and kitschy, the food was only mediocre, but the views of the Columbia River were outstanding.

I told Brandon about the Bridge of the Gods, visible from our table, of how a giant landslide blocked the Columbia River, creating an inland sea over Eastern Washington and Oregon, until it finally eroded away after thousands of years and the river flowed free again. How the local Native Americans had extensive myths about this including the creation of Mt St Helens, and how the War Department built that bridge  in the 1920s and it connects Washington and Oregon along the Pacific Crest Trail. He asked me where I got all this information, that I sounded like a tourist brochure, that I was creeping him out. I wondered if our Recording Angels were getting this all down, particularly my excellent overview of the Bridge of the Gods.

“Sorry Brandon, I have this weird memory for details about landmarks and tourist attractions. When I was little and the family would take trips I’d always read up on notable sites along the way, and if we stopped I’d always read the informational signs and brochures. Eventually my chainsaw parents figured out they could keep me from pulling my sister’s hair in the station wagon if they gave me tons of reading materials and even maps with the sites indicated, usually by yellow highlighted little dots my dad would draw. They’d set me up with all this stuff and let me develop itineraries.” I said.

“So, that makes it even creepier, but your parents sound kind of cool. My mom would just tell me to shut up or we’re going back on the few trips we ever went on. Like I think Chico was the farthest we used to go to see some guy she would date off and on, maybe San Francisco once with some of her cousins to watch a Giants game,” Brandon said.  

“Cool? My parents were a lot of things, primarily soul killing shame-monsters, but cool wasn’t a word I’d associate with them. Mostly they loved my sister a thousand times more than me so they’d go the extra mile to make sure she didn’t have to, you know, be upset or bothered in any fucking way by me,” I said.

“Well, I’m glad you’ve worked your shit out, Elliot,” Brandon said.