The Unbearable Bobness of Being

Ethical Dilemmas: Nun Poker

You and a tour busload of nuns have been stranded deep in the forest for weeks following a tragic slide off a road covered in mud and rocks. Nothing to eat. No way out. Only each others urine to drink but fortunately you, as an intrepid well prepared trekker on a tour bus, who nonetheless forgot candy bars and peanuts, happens to have a water purifier which helps with the urine you have to admit. But the starvation is setting in and you all know you will soon start dying. You also know, because you heard it on the radio right before the radio died, that search parties were looking for all of you, even employing helicopters and specially imported  Austrian Nonnenjagdhunde (Nun Hounds). You know, if you all can keep going, it's just a matter of time.

These nuns run an orphanage for children with cleft palates and other birth defects in Central America and are truly the most saintly people you've ever met. You're nothing like them, really. Every one of them seems to glow with an otherworldly beatific glow. But you are so hungry now they are beginning to look like they are glowing with a sweet-hot mustard glaze!

After a long discussion you and the nuns agree to play poker and the first one busted as they say becomes supper for all the rest.  You ask the nuns if cannibalism is a venial or mortal sin. They answer by asking you if it meets the three criteria for a venial sin, which are, in effect, the criteria for a mortal sin stated negatively:

1. It does not concern a "grave matter",
2. It is not committed with full knowledge, or
3. It is not committed with both deliberate and complete consent.

So you say "well we're pretty much fucked then either way" and they simply smile and again ask you to put down your Ruger Super Redhawk Alaskan bear gun in the powerful yet wrist snapping .454. Casull caliber. A gun that is easily backpackable and one that you don't exactly wile away the hours plinking beer cans with unless they are in the slavering and angry jaws of a charging grizzly bear!

You holster your hand cannon and exhort "let's play some poker, sisters!" and the game commences. You are using pieces of broken window safety glass for "chips" and a deck of Northern Quest Casino playing cards you got as swag at a conference at the casino on "Renewing Mother Earth through Building Emotionally Intelligent Bridges Across Cross Disciplinary Stakeholder Groups."

Hours go by. These nuns can play some damn poker.  Finally you think you're going to bust one of em out, she's all in with her glass chips. So are you. The nuns have been kicking your ass for hours. It's do or die time.

The other nuns glance nervously at her as she holds her hand of cards tightly and quiveringly. You draw one card. Oh.my.God. It's the Ace of Spades. The toughest damn card in the deck. The outlaw motorcycle gang leader of cards. You're now holding a Royal Flush the most impossibly difficult poker hand and the one that cannot be beat. You lick just the corner of your lip even though you've been spittle-less for days but deep inside your cerebral wiring your appetite center is firing off signals "SOUP'S ON!"

But then it hits you like a ton of tomatoes, these nuns are actually making lives better for little kids, for Central America, and for the whole damn world. What are you doing? What? If you munch this nun to keep alive until you're saved what's that mean? You don't really believe in heaven or hell so it's not like that's a big issue but you do believe that each of us should do our best to leave the big global campsite cleaner when we leave it than when we found it. These nuns are making a difference and you go to conferences and blog and stuff.

Do you fold your hand and lose and become sustenance for all of them? Keep them alive to do their good works? Or do you call the hand and win and start a cook fire with bus seat covers and broken branches that slammed through the roof and windows of the trapped and lost bus?

What do you do? Pick one of the above or nun of the above. Defend your choice.

Danny vs Roy: Lawnmower Racin'

As American as apple pie and the 12 bar blues.

Some of the rules form the United States Lawnmower Racing Association (USLRA) rulebook:

Mower Requirements
o CUTTING BLADES MUST BE REMOVED COMPLETELY FROM ALL MOWERS.
o Non-stock mowers must be equipped with an automatic throttle closing device.
o All mowers must be equipped with an engine safety cut-off switch.
o Mower brakes must be in good condition, operating on at least 2 wheels.
o Fuel must be pump gas. The only additive allowed is STA-BIL Fuel Stabilizer.

Driver Safety Equipment
o Every driver must wear an automobile racing or motorcycle-type safety helmet.
o Every driver shall wear long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, gloves and shoes on the track.
o It is MANDATORY that all drivers wear an "approved for racing" neck support.

Rider Mower Classification
o Stock Class: As delivered from the factory.
o IMOW Class: (Int'l Mowers Of Weeds) Front engine, highly regulated.
o Prepared Class: Prepared (modified) drive train, engine, etc.
o FX Class: Major modifications allowed.
o JP Class: Class for kids ages 10-15.

So, let's not dick around with this one, Danny and Roy are racing FX Class with major mods. Why is that Bob you might be asking, well, because a couple of old gunslingers like these two aren't gonna be dillydallyin around on no fresh off the Sear's showroom floor Toro or somethin. They've both seen too much, drank too much, smoked too much, guitar'd too much for that.
 
I must digress from my thematic prong of Danny and Roy as a couple of grizzled old badasses blasting around a track on supercharged lawnmowers, to express my disgust that the rules require CUTTING BLADES TO BE REMOVED COMPLETELY. I find that sort of takes the whole "mower' part outta "lawnmower racing" you know? I'm especially dumbfounded by the "REMOVED COMPLETELY" clause as one can only imagine, with bated breath and quivering plastic mugs fulla beer, the excitement of PARTIALLY REMOVED AND/OR REALLY LOOSE CUTTING BLADES on these howling lawn and garden implements of doom. I would seriously fucking pay money to go to a USLRA sanctioned event if it meant cutting blades were zipping off heavily modified lawnmowers racin' around the track and decapitating or amputating the racers. zomg. Or even if they were heavily armored race mower drivers (and you'd think nobody would wanna do it if it meant high probability decapitation) and a shrieking cutting blade just knocked you silly and made you crash your lawnmower racer.

Anyway, back to the pronging of Danny and Roy - Who would win? This is, perhaps, the toughest of all the events in the big contest to call so far. I have no idea who actually was a better yard man of the two or who could drive the best. Sure, Danny had the muscles and look of a yard laborer but Roy had the airs of a sophisticated orchid man, a man who cares deeply about horticulture and the gifts of photosynthesis and aerophagia, a man who made his own soil mix. Tough call.

But hell, I've got to go with Danny on this one. Why you might ask Bob why? Because he fucking killed himself in his garage, that's why. Dudes. He got into a fight with his old lady, stormed out where? where? To a coffeeshop? NO. To a Target store? NO. To the manliest place ever to bite the God bullet. HIS OWN GARAGE. That's a lawnmowing kind of guy suicide.

Danny Gatton, you are the Lawnmower Racing winner. And you are growing a big lead, man.

Lawnmower Racing: Danny Gatton

Total Medal Count:

Danny Gatton (3)
Roy Buchanan (1)

Haiku-Ninja Peace Accords 2009

I did not watch the unofficial state of the pretty fucked up union speech last night, I did not need to in retrospect. How is that? you might wonder. Well, here's the deal - the Haiku-Ninjas visited me last night. I know! Don't scream. I'm fine. However, if they'd been on the attack as I like to say I'd prolly not be typing this this morning. Cuz the sneaky bastards came into my room with nary a flutter or HAAAIEEEE. But in they came. Like lightning bugs on a hot humid Michigan summer night hangin out by one of those Great Big Lakes and slurpin 40's, smokin sherm and poppin MAC-10 rounds at the tailights of an abandoned 93 Nissan Altima. Man, I love nights like those! Anyhow, the Haiku-Ninjas came to request a temporary suspension of hostilities and since they were, you know, like holding a somewhat daunting advantage at the time of the offer (involving katanas, stars, nunchukas, and a huge primered aftermarket spoiler off a Honda CRX) I was sort of "sure guys let's bury the hatchet! NOOOO, I mean let's agree to disagree!" They were like "dude, we still hate you and want you dead but considering the state of your nation and the fact we exist in a netherworld, a gray shadowland of transient corporeal existence and complex planes of understanding that utterly exceed your reach and grasp and are somewhat protected from the vagaries of a shattered economy and the soon to fail desperate yet bloated governmental intervention strategies, well we don't want to add insult to injury plus we do not gain honor defeating a foe in such obvious weakened and purulent condition." So I'm all "cool, when the economy improves, or shall I say if the economy improves and I'm not like 90 years old then it's on Haiku-Ninja bitches!" We parted not as friends and not entirely, as the paradigm would predict, as foes. That is my wild and crazy life in a studio apartment!

Floating adjustable rates
frog leaps off banker's desktop
lilypads made of doom

In the Nightstand Silence it Reminds

I stare at the book on my nightstand, it's Raymond Carver's "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" an early collection of his short stories. My son left it there, exactly like that, when he visited me here in my little studio away from home, a few weeks ago. I think about picking it up and putting it back on the bookshelf but I don't want to. I want to leave it exactly how and where he left it. He didn't even really read much of it and one evening he was bored and I suggested he read some more of it and how incredible Raymond Carver was. He shrugged and said no. We didn't do much while he was here, I had to work every day and he slept most days until the early afternoons. We went to town a couple of times, I took him up to Evergreen State College as night fell and was surprised how interesting the campus looked at night, it didn't look like weird Soviet-era architecture, like some complex in Siberia, a complex that stumped our military intelligence officers as they pored over U-2 spy photos, but almost graceful in the angular illumination.

I miss having him here. He's back in Spokane where I go most every weekend. I'll see him soon. My kids have visited me a few times in my work-world away from home. After they leave, their presence reverberates silently for weeks, for months. I am not intended to be a weekend dad. I am also not intended to be an unemployed and poor dad. That is the dilemma that holds that book over on my nightstand in its icy, unforgiving and unseen grip. I am not unaware of the irony of the title, a phrase (and variants thereof) I'd probably implored of my boys a hundred times and more when we lived together all the days and nights, and now one I never say when I'm with them. Please be louder, please, fucking please.

How it melts into spring

 

Me and Britt at the beach March 2008.


I've been craving hiking and camping lately and recently ordered some nice hiking boots, Scarpas. They should arrive any day now. I have bad feet. They ache every morning when I first get up and walk, I think they turn in funny during the night. The pain dissipates after a bit of walking about to use the bathroom and make coffee or whatever. I walk the night out of them. Moses Lake had its ice out and is mostly open water now. I'm craving canoe and kayak time when the knife of a paddle slices away thin layers of worry and regret. Powerboats churn it all under and boil it all back up in a noisy, fast disassembling  and remixing but paddling actually excises. I'm through with winter I think. Maybe hit the slopes one more time. When I drove the 90 past Moses Lake and saw blue water freed of its ice mantle,  I could sense the creeping of warm eastward, first over the lowland scab lakes then in the next month or so into the higher lakes tucked between mountains and forests. It's been a rough winter, one of the worst. I feel beaten by it. It needs to get behind me. I desire to hike in the woods beside streams and waterfalls and rivulets draining the dying winter. To hike along rivers coursing with the melt. To stand on a sunny Northern Pacific ocean beach and behold the surf pounding the river senseless as the last of winter shatters into random molecules, invisible and unbound.

Let's Go to the Spokesman-Review Blogfest for Free Pizza and Pop and Nice People!

My good pal, Dave Oliveria, Spokesman-Review gossip columnist and host of last year's and this year's Spokesman-Review's sponsored "Blogfest."



Me at least year's awesome Blogfest, visiting with former Internet Person, Larry Spencer, now Real Person Larry Spencer. We were discussing how Larry's hair gel could be used, in a crunch, for a Mercury Outboard lower unit gear lube.

There are two kinds of people in this world. Internet People and Real People. Sometimes the Internet People line intercepts with the Real People line and you get to meet Internet People in real life. Sometimes it is so fine you can hardly believe it!

Last year at a "Blogfest" sponsored by our local newspaper. The Spokesman-Review, I attended one of these remarkable experiments in the Blogophysics theory of matter colliding with anti-matter and it was simply awesome.  All these pseudonyms from a newspaper internet forum became real. Some I'd met before and some I hadn't. Such nice people except for one or two who glared at me with a cold envy, but when you get Internet People together you can expect some, shall we say, "gaps" in social skills.

So next Saturday is another blogfest sponsored by the Spokesman-Review. It's at a place called Moon Dollars in Post Falls, Idaho from 12-3. I'd encourage any of my readers to go read the Spokesman-Review's internet gossip forum "Huckeberries Online" at least once (it's not required or anything but I think it's fair before going to the Blogfest to load it at least once), then show up for FREE PIZZA (five kinds) and FREE POP provided by the newspaper to thank their readers for generating ad revenue and making their online presence approximate a business model that could be profitable one day.

I'll be there!  (unless something unforeseen comes up) I'll autograph whatevs you bring for me as long as it's not a monkey! I don't autograph monkeys because it is incredibly demeaning to the monkey and to the autographer. I do autograph hamsters. I LOVE to autograph hamsters, particularly with "warm" colored sharpies. So, bring the kids (free pizza AND pop) and their hamsters, or bring your drinking buddies cuz you can have beers there, although you'll have to pay for the brews as the newspaper ain't pickin up THAT TAB. I will have beers with you and if I'm in the mood I will write you a drunken haiku on a bar napkin, suitable for framing.

Hope to see you at my table!

P.S. Meeting Internet People in real life changes a person. Here's what I commented last year on "HBO" following the outstanding experience I had there:

It’s a weird thing when the curtain of internet anonymity is opened and the sunrays of faces, personalities, feelings, expressions and indeed, humanity, pour in and illuminate our living rooms and offices and dens with such bright lights of humanity one can hardly bear to blink or flip the switch off to surround oneself in darkness. Nah. I can’t rip on folks anymore. Even the pros. I’m embracing a new path. A path to light and warmth and machine guns loaded with Hersheys Kisses and rose flowers and ice cream cones. My razor sharp edge is dull now. I am but a butter knife. You all are but a tub of sweet cream butter. Except Sgt. Christie who kept glancing at me like she wanted to pistol whip me and hogtie me and read me my rights right before I passed out and woke up 2 hours later in the tank. Sigh ;)

In Which I Interpret the Meanings of Graffiti on Freight Trains

While the seagull appears to be a salvager of human detritus, a great squawking, wheeling recycler of our discarded wants and desires, he is actually the conduit between what lays dying on the wet salt foam streaked sand and what births beyond the swelling gun metal gray ocean horizon. His cries pierce the wind so to keep the wind from piercing us.

Magical Unicorns and Rainbows

I stole the cool "cornify" button in the upper right off Carin's blog. It totally has made my day because I love sparkles and unicorns so much. Click it over and over and vastly improve the content of this blog. Because if there is anything that makes for damn cool internet websites it's rainbows and unicorns.

In which I Interpret the Meanings of Graffiti on Freight Trains

We are all here together on this very earth and if we choose not to cooperate and coexist in harmony then we will live in a never ending state of strife, and no God-myths and no great Philosophies demand we must exist in such unrelenting pain.

The Slowing Pace

I used to be a fastwalker. My natural walking speed was too fast for most people, I was often asked to slow down when walking with someone. I don't know why I was like that, maybe a general sense of impatience, a generalized condition of existential anxiety I carry around inside me like a flock of sparrows from hell lifting off the ground in a brown cacophony of crazy birdwings, or something else. Was it me rushing off to be somewhere or was it me rushing off to escape something? Don't know. But fastwalking was my thing, my unconscious hard wired behavioral thing. I remember how, in my post-divorce dating experiences, I would actually notice the pace a new date walked, and being quite pleased whenever one seemed to be a natural fastwalker, when I didn't have to slow down.

The other day I'm walking home from work. I walk to and from work everyday. I live within a stone's throw of the Washington state capitol building. I walk to a plaza compound of governmental buildings. Every day. I get a big kick out of walking to work every day. I get to see bricks and cool old marble buildings and sky and stuff.

So I'm walking home and I realized that I was slow walking, that I always slow walk now, that I am not a fastwalker anymore that somehow someway in this insidious degradation by aging that I lost my fastwalking. As soon as it hit me, to no small consternation, I kicked it up to my prior walking velocity but it wasn't the same, it wasn't my natural speed anymore, it was forced, I had to make myself do it. How fucked up is that? Very fucked up, to tell you the truth. It's like losing a fundamental identifying characteristic, even if it was something that annoyed others, even if it was something that probably was symptomatic of a life lived uneasily running to and from delights and demons, still it stings. I am trying to get that rush back in my step, it was never length of stride, just pace, my stride remains the same but the pace is now the pace of everyone else in the world.

And I don't even know if it is a physical manifestation of aging or a psychological one. I am less anxious and wound up than I used to be. Which is a challenge in its own weird way, when you've been running on the top fuel dragster juice of anxiety for most of your life and now you're more like cruising in neutral in a convertible smearing a little sunscreen on cuz of the warm sun, well it changes things. Changes how you complete assignments at work, changes how you manage your life.  For the better I think, but still.

For me aging has been a slow process of denial punctuated by occasion blasts of insight that I'm losing, losing the sharp hard edges to the erosive effects of time waves repeating and repeating, slapping against me rhythmically, and the realizations hit and reverberate for years.

The last time I noticed a major loss was four or five years ago when hiking around on some big old rocks down by the Spokane River I realized I was inhibiting myself from leaping off them like I used to do with nary a thought. That day, I'd come right to the edge of the rock and stall, and literally could not force myself to mindlessly launch and land as I had always done using just the raw strength and balance and recovery of a younger body. I finally did jump off one of the boulders but it was a careful safe and measured jump and it was pathetic.

Maybe this is why skiing and dirt biking remain psychologically important activities for me, partly for the inherent fun and joy they evoke, but also because they are about speed, power, and danger about taking it to the edge and riding the edge as long as you can. But in the back of my mind I know  that if slip past the edge and screw up and hurt myself it means chronic pain, doctor visits, physical therapy visits, shoulder surgeries, long recuperation. It tempers the experience and heightens it at the same time if that makes sense.  But it constrains.

Last fall I played driveway basketball with my youngest son and his buddy. I beat their asses in a game to 20 relying on old muscle memory and wile.  For the next few weeks my left knee felt like it was full of congealing oatmeal and loose hot marbles.  I knew I was done with basketball but I kind of knew that already and was just pleased I got one more in.  It hurt but was worth it.

I won't leap off rocks wildly anymore, knowing my once powerful legs will absorb the shock and my once native levels of balance will coil me for another leap and another. I don't fastwalk as my default pace anymore, I mediumwalk and my coin of the realm is a coin that lies quietly on the coffee table not one that spins madly with a centrifugal force belying the inner chaos that starts it spinning. I guess that's ok even if it really is not. 

I do want the quick back in my step. But I know it will never be there automatically, without thinking about it and pushing for it, and this is what it means to get older.

At Night You May Hear the Clackety Clacking of Aluminum Ingot Filled Ghost Trains Bringin a Shine to the Thunderous Fist of America's Fury

Last Friday, I rushed from Rainytown to the Valley of the Beautiful Spokanes where my 17 year old was getting an emergency appendectomy. I got there a couple hours after and he was sitting up and gabbing in his room and everything came out dandy. That weekend plus the prior week all added up equalled a lot of stress for me. So how do I handle stress? Well, lots of ways and some are actually productive!

I went for a Sunday walk down on the Centennial Trail, a paved asphalt ribbon from Anchorage, Alaska to Trenton, New Jersey winding along rivers all the way. In our neck of the woods that would be the Spokane River.  So I got out on a kinda sunny, kinda blue sky day, it was cold and crisp yet strangely chilly except in the sunshine when it was more warmish, and the trail was essentially under snow. But that's fine because it was packed down by hundreds of prior hikers and plus I had on my Merrell Polar Tec Winter Boots.

I always enjoy the Centennial Trail down in the Mirabeau area of the Valley of the Beautiful Spokanes, as I've been going there since I was a teenager, mostly to drink and smoke and break shit, it used to be a remarkable graveyard of old cars and freezers, but that was before they enjoined the once dirt road of neerdowells and stoners to the mondo grand and trans-continental artery of the Centennial Trail. I actually once camped overnight with a girlfriend in my 65 VW microbus on a hill above the river and got rudely interrupted  in flagrante delicto by a Sheriff's Deputy asking why we were overnighting there. When I explained we were both out of our heads on angel dust and formadehyde cigarettes and we were staying put rather than pillage and loot "stop n rob" convenience stores with our unstoppable strength of 10 men, he said "well, you can't camp here, so leave in the morning." That's how special this place is to me!

So while hiking I came across this majestic bridge (see pic below). This is the historic Evergreen Spur Bridge #38. Burlington-Northern Pacific Union Railways uses it still. It was built back in the 40s as a spur to haul aluminum from Kaiser Aluminum for use in the war effort, they made cheap and light bombers out of aluminum, they called them "Kaiser Bombers" they were so famous. 

Anyhow, a few years ago the railroad company was gonna demolish this magnificent specimen of a Pre-War Rust Expansion Joint Girder Spanner bridge. They used to build a lot of these to move war munitions and cows but most have been removed. Not this one! The Valley of the Beautiful Spokanes Port Township Authority formed a Bridge Preservation District and sold bonds to save it. They used to take grade school kids on field trips down here to see the bridge and draw pictures of it and send post cards around the world to show what a fantastic bridge we had here. The field trips ended, tragically, when a 3rd grader from Sunrise Elementary got his arm tore off by a pitbull being run off leash by some gangsta. 

Speaking of which, I have this theory that there are so many pitbulls bred now that we've passed the tipping point of pitbulls. And that whenever I go on a hike in an area that is public and accessible to exurban and suburban neighborhoods that I expect to see at least one (1) pitbull. I will say on this hike there was nobody on the trail at all on the outbound. When I came back the FIRST PERSON I SAW, some tall, thin woman, had guess what? What do you think she had? Had running OFF THE LEASH? Why yes! A pitbull. God, I'm so tempted to buy a heater to strap on my hip just for pitbulls. I fricking hate them on my hikes.

Well, there you have it. My stress reduction and bridge appreciation hike. It was lovely. 

What do you do for stress reduction that one might call "healthy"?



Evergreen Spur Bridge #38. The graffiti script is gangsta code for "We love this bridge and wish it a long, resonant future of magic and wonder" (Photo taken by Blackberry Storm)

Danny vs Roy: Arm Wrasslin'

Arm wrasslin' is as quintessential American as all get out. It invokes images and smells of smoky, grimy bars stinkin of stale beer and broken dreams, of now fat ex jocks, maybe the star high school quarterback in little Buttpimple, Texas, livin out the string arm blasting drunks on pitted, heavily shellacked bar tables. We've all done it. If you're a man and you haven't arm wrassled somebody then go home to your momma. Get off my blog, man.

I used to be a helluva arm wrassler using, what I just found out by reading a Wiki, the "Top Roll" technique of rolling the opponents wrist over and takin him down. I used to arm wrassle football jocks in my dorm at WSU for beers top rollin these behemoths down. They could never figure out how a hippie like me could bust em. But this isn't about me so much, this is about Roy vs Danny arm wrestling in a dive bar somewhere for the next medal of the Danny Gatton vs Roy Buchanan TUBOB Carnival of Made Up Stuff  Extravaganza.

This one ain't even close. It wouldn't a been pretty. It wouldn't a been fair. Danny Gatton woulda smoked Roy's arm like he was pullin a chicken wing off a rotisserie'd Cornish game hen. Danny was built like a brick shithouse, like a damn dockworker throwin container crates full of Honda Elements off a ship with his bare hands. It ain't all about strength, sure, I think I used to prove that, but ole Roy, who was prolly the fastest guitarslinger ever, and prolly coulda fingerwrassled any of us into shrieking submission, wasn't what one would call a particularly athletic looking guy. Gotta give this one to Danny.

Arm Wrestling: Danny Gatton

Total Medal Count:

Danny Gatton (2)
Roy Buchanan (1)

Danny vs Roy: Impersonating a Liberal Arts College Professor

The jaunty beret. The mug of frosty beer in what is possibly a college town pub. He's unstoppable. Roy wins. Danny Gatton, who looks like a dockworker, had no chance in this contest.  Perhaps if it had been an auto shop or metal shop community college instructor impersonation Danny coulda been a contender. But not philosophy and humanities and mythology. I bet Roy got leather patches on the elbows of that nice suede leather jacket after he'd worn it a lot.

So far:

Impersonating a College Professor Champion: Roy Buchanan
Haiku: Danny Gatton

Total: Danny (1) Roy (1)

DECISION CONTESTED

Faithful and intelligent reader and commenter The Fool is contesting my decision here. He sent me a photo of Danny Gatton that he believes may move Gatton into at least a tie for Impersonating a Liberal Arts College Professor. You be the judge. Then read my final decision.

 

FINAL DECISION:

Roy maintains the win. Although the sport coat and tie-less dress shirt on Danny presents the casual ease and air of a Liberal Arts College Professor, the Elvis Rockabilly sideburns blows it all straight to hell. Roy's jaunty beret and full beard is perfect. Danny's burns are not.

The decision can not be appealed.

How I Probably Destroyed a Young Thug's Faith and Trust in his Contacts List on his Cellphone.

OK, this is an actual text message I was part of tonight with someone named Dan who accidentally texted me instead of god knows who.

Dan:  Whad up thug?
Me: Rollin w my whip yo.
Dan: Haha. Gangsta.
Me: Yo dawg who is this?
Dan: Dan lol.
Me: Must b wrong number sorry
Dan: Huh?
Me: You have the wrong number I think.

In case you didn't know, a "whip" is a 'car" and "rollin w my whip yo" means "driving in my car, Dan."  How I know these things and can quickly and adeptly text them to some young thug is a mystery you are all best off not knowing. Word.

Danny vs Roy: Haiku

Danny Gatton and Roy Buchanan. Two unbelievable guitarists, both specialists of the Fender Telecaster, both from the Washington DC area, both nearly unheard of by the general public yet considered influential Gods by those "in the know" e.g., fellow Guitar Gods Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. Both dead by their own hands at nearly the same age (Roy = 48, Danny = 49) They were known to rip each other off and be intensely jealous of the other's talent.

You could go into just about any random AOL chatroom in the late 90s and start a blistering flamewar arguing about who was better. People seemed to be either Danny fans or Roy fans. I'll confess I'm a Roy fan because I never even heard of Mr. Gatton until the late 90s when he was already dead.

Roy Buchanan hung himself with his own shirt in a drunk tank in some crappy jail after being busted for public intoxication. Danny Gatton stormed out to his garage after a domestic dispute and ate a bullet. They died right outta the music of the blues and the honkytonks they were so immersed in. Hangin and shootin. Drunk and angry.

Well, I'm not going to reopen the whole who is the better guitarist argument here, I'm more intrigued by imagining and evaluating contests between Danny Gatton and Roy Buchanan in areas not typically associated with them. I'll do this as a reoccurring series, probably quite a few until all but one or two of my readers have fled out of boredom or disgust with my tangential trajectories.

Anyhow, the first contest between Roy and Danny is who coulda wrote better haiku. To my almost nonexistent knowledge, neither published haiku, perhaps Roy wrote haikus on bar napkins damply ringed from ever present mugs of frosty beer, and perhaps he did not.

Although both could play slop and overfat with way too many notes, Danny seemed to possess a certain economy of style that Roy didn't. If this was a stream of consciousness poetry contest I'd give it to Roy. But since Haiku is a very structured and sparse poetry (5-7-5 syllables structure), I'm giving it to Danny.

Danny vs. Roy Haiku Champion: Danny Gatton

Things I Find Fascinating but You Probably Don't

Last weekend while parking my truck in a dug out area in a hard as concrete snow berm, I smacked the passenger side front bumper into the big assed berm.  I was going very slowly and didn't even know I dented it until later. The plastic bumper had a dent the size of a watermelon and about as deep. It looked like hell.

So, like the Internet Smartlord I am, I googled "fixing plastic bumpers" and discovered to my squealing delight that you could allegedly fix plastic bumper damage with heat and pressure. Sometimes. Easier with smaller dents. What the hell, I figured, might as well try it.

Now, some of the internet forum advice mavens suggested using a heat gun to really warm up the plastic with the warning that heat guns (used to remove paint for example) could remove the paint, for example. Well, I didn't want to do that. So yesterday me and TSWWSG went out to the driveway with a common 1600 watt hairdryer for the heat and my manly and steel coiled left arm for the pressure.

He started blow drying the dent and I worked my arm through the wheel well and behind the dent. After about 5 minutes or so of blow drying I could feel the plastic was actually warming up in the 30ish degree cold. I started pushing and pushing and grunting a bit but as there wasn't that much room to work in, I couldn't bring to bear all my excessive manly strength. But I didn't need to. The damn thing popped out right back into place! I couldn't believe it. The trick worked. The internet remains true and honest.  My bumper and my truck appearance associated self esteem is solid and unmarred. And, the fix was fun. How great was that?

Have you ever fixed something based on internet advice and found it worked? What was it? Even better have you tried something  based on internet advice and it failed miserably and dangerously?

I am so into you.

Happy Valentine's Day everyone! All year long you all make slow, delicious, intense, passionate love to me in my comments section and today is the day I wish I could give it all back. Well, metaphorically. I just hope everyone's having a great Valentine's Day and even though it was invented as a holiday by the greeting card companies, it does represent an important human condition, a desire, a motive and driver of so much - an appetite for chocolate. I keep picking at the heart shaped box full of Dove's chocolate I bought my kids. Chocolate is the heroin of the confectionary food group. I hope you all got chocolate and if you didn't go buy some it's on sale by now.

Happy VD kiddos.

Snowytown !

The bridge I cross walking from my apt to work everyday. Walking by the Korean War Memorial on the way to work. I didn't crank up the Sepia or Black and White on these Blackberry Storm photos yesterday, it really was those colors. Or lack thereof.

It snowed yesterday in Rainytown. Big assed white snowflakes coming down thick as rain. At times it looked blizzardish. At first, it didn't stick but then it did and before you knew it there was a thick heavy sloppy coating of real snow everywhere. It was kind of pretty. The snow here is a reluctant snow, it's not a proud happy annoying puppy dog snow like in Spokane. Here it is a brooding thing, too heavy with moisture, too thick and oatmealish, a snow always existing uneasily on the verge of the melt.  I found myself staring out office windows at the big bright flakes falling as it's so unusual here to ever see much of it. I commented several times on the snow and how we had a winterwonderland going. I was probably the most excited person about it. Interstate 5 was a slow crawling mess apparently due to slide offs and crap. Folks in Pugetdopia are horrible snow drivers. It is an unnatural mantle for the area. The rhododendrons seem to droop and shiver under snow coverings. Me, it just makes me miss Spokane more and again marvel at what two different worlds the Cascade Curtain separates. Enjoy your snow Rainytownians! You only get it a couple of times a year to remind you that sometimes the Frost King smacks Poseidon's ass down.

The Silence of the Stalls

I had a rare and always disturbing close encounter with Toilet Paper Man in the bathroom stalls at work yesterday. Toilet Paper Man has some OCDish thing with toilet paper where you can hear him constantly pulling off pieces of TP and doing something with them, not sure what but it makes a weird skritching kind of sound.  The aftermath, as I discovered later that day on a very unusual second run to the can, is a toilet jammed full of TP. I don't think that's the point though, just playing with it and dropping it, but something kinda obsessive-compulsive handwashingesque.

Speaking of work restrooms and I know you weren't, do you ever have the experience of finishing up a rather aromatic movement and as you are getting to leave the confines of the stall you hear coworkers come in and find yourself paralyzed and unable to exit the stall out of a neurotic hang up over refusing to be associated with the odor?

*crickets*

Oh come on! I'm not the only one for chrissakes. But yeah, it's definitely a showstopper for me. It's no better if there are others in the stalls, I still won't come out until the standers leave, no strength in numbers, no hiding behind the smoke screen. I feel an actual sense of relief when I make it to the sinks and no one has entered. I figure if someone walks in and I'm at the sink that despite the hideous malodor floating like a vile fogbank drifted in from a rotting ghost hulk-ship, I can't be definitively associated with it. One can't prove that I hadn't only been a stander and was washing up and some sitter had bombed the room and already departed.

I deeply admire those who have  highly entrained elimination systems permitting them lives of never having to unload solids at work. There is a school of thought, perhaps rooted in another work age when workers were tired of the man and fought back, that one should only do this on company time, that one should hold it until one is on the clock forcing  the man to pay for it. Personally, I don't hold to that rather mercenary set of bowel habits. I mean, sure, it's kinda cool to think one is being paid to do it. Yet, as we plunge into this catastrophic failure of our national economy, one may wonder how long it will be until sit downs at work will be eliminated or severely reduced as budget cutting exercises.  Who knows.  Perhaps we will get ration cards to get punched each time we go. I may just be full of shit on this. I don't know.

Do you have humiliating public restroom habits? What are they? Have you ever tried to change?

No Larry Craig jokes were used in the making of this blog.

On Zoltranogenitor and His Deadly Cousin the Bluetooth

Let's chat about robots this morning, shall we? I think we are all in agreement that eventually the world will be dominated by robot armies and robot overlords and we will be enslaved until we somehow break the machine shackles and furiously reassert the power and wonder of humanity. But there may be a few rough years or millenia in between.

I think I experienced this weekend two (2) fundamental elements of the coming future of robot civilization. Let me explain.

I purchased a very sweet cell phone holder for my vehicle from a Verizon store on Saturday. It has a suction cup that attaches to the windshield, a long bendable and adjustable arm, a cool universal holder that you squeeze the sides to pinch the cell phone and hold it in place. There is also a sweet quick release button. I wanted this device for my Blackberry Storm on my near weekly commutes across the Everbrown state. I was tired of trying to read my texts and emails at 75 mph in the dark on Snoqualmie Pass while holding the damn thing in my hand. That's dangerous! Now I can have it stable and right in front of me instead of in the center console or the door handle compartment or under the dash or on the passenger seat.

Here is a pic of a similar device, I can't seem to find my exact one on-line. But this shows the essential elements of a handy suction cupped cellphone holder.

So, I can't even say how much I love this device. It is as if the world has suddenly gained a new order, an organization and functional relief from its normal anomie and chaos. Things.make.sense. They work. This little passive device, this simple yet elegant little holder of things, has decreased my stress of driving by an exceptional factor of eleventy teen one thousand. Plus, it makes me think. It makes me think of a world of robot helpers giving us a peace and order we've never known as humankind.

I'm going to confess something at great risk of mocking by my usually gentle readers but readers nonetheless who always give me a feeling of impending doom if I ever slip up, that they are like a wolfpack patiently following a herd of caribou for miles, their tongues lolling and their deadly mouths turned slightly upwards into what one would mistakenly perceive as smiles, until the old caribou with the bad caribou ankle trips and stumbles and separates from the herd and then THE WOLVES ARE ON HIM.  What I'm going to confess is that my new universal cellphone holder with the suction cup and flexible arm has been named by me. Yes, named. He is Zoltranogenitor the Mute Robot-Prince. He doesn't talk directly but he facilitates communicative speech through his firm yet easily released grip on my primary mobile communication device. He allows me the freedom to gab away. Well, he is the catalyst, there is another primary device which I will soon mention that completes the circuit, so to speak.

Zoltranogenitor is the best of what robots will one day offer us. He will, perhaps, go in history of the world books as the naked Eve that led Adam to eat the devil's apple. I don't know. But I think so.

Now, how about the yang to my machine world of hellish destruction and agony thesis? Well, that would be the Bluetooth device. I am not going into all the cool stuff this provides as hands-free driving, I mean hands-free phoning, is axiomatically safer and prevents automobile crashes and certainly more humane to possums trying to cross the freeway. By the way, why did the chicken cross the road? TO SHOW THE POSSUM IT COULD BE DONE.

So, let's get back to the phenomenological aspects of Bluetooths and me. Here is what I'm discovering and in this discovery I believe is the hope for a remote future where we cast aside the metal webs of which the robot spiders have ensnared us - I LOVE TURNING THE FUCKER OFF.

ZOMG, I'm so not kidding. I love holding that little button down until the Bluetooth robot comm unit begins to die with a desperate red light blinking, blinking in its death throes, blinking to fight off the coming cold and dark, blinking desperately HELP ME HELP ME STOP THIS DO NOT CEASE MY FUNCTION HUMAN BASTARD NOOOO. Then, finally, the solid red of death. I've killed him. For now. I can resurrect him WHEN I WANT. I know he hates me, he purposely drops the volume output at times just to make me push him deeper into my ear to hear a call. He wishes he had more power so when I push him deeper into my ear he could send electronic tendrils deep into my brain where he could gain a horrible wet neuronal tissue purchase and take over my higher cortical processing unit as well as my reptilian brain. Oh how this failed and weak Bluetooth wishes he was more. But he isn't. He lives a hideous and futile life of pure servitude to a ruthless and cruel master.

He is angry. I am angry. He is stupid. I am not. I know that the pure avarice with which I joyfully and excitedly cease his life functions each day is what I hope all of us possess, or at least enough of us to create future races of human robot killers who will free mankind from hellish machine lords.

Anyway, that is how I figured it all out yesterday in the basalt blast zone between Moses Lake and Ellensburg. On the one hand, we have Zoltranogenitor the cute and bendable happy cellphone servant and on the other, the treacherous and parasitic Bluetooth. Blue.tooth. It sounds like the fang of a robot soldier doesn't it?

Have you recently purchased any devices that make life easier for you?  Will your new device/machine/item seduce us into allowing robots to crush us or will it enrage our basic human instinct to kill things stupider and simpler than us, allowing us to one day be free?

Renegades of Toast

I can't do orange juice with my waffles, I hate the mix of sourish-sweet OJ with sweet syrup. But he's the President and he doesn't need my advice.

My breakfast choices are sadly pedestrian and even more sadly almost always involve the drowning of cold cereal in cold milk. I think, in order to vary the soul-deadening mundaness of my existence, I may have frozen eggo waffles this morning, except of course I will toaster them first. I will add both butter and peanut butter to my eggo waffles as they need something heavy and oily spackled upon them to provide them sufficent substance to leave my feeling I've eaten a meal of sorts if you ask me.

Fried potatoes? ZOMG I love fried potatoes for breakfast. Do I ever make myself fried potatoes? No I never make myself fried potatoes.

Pancakes! I used to make pancakes for the boyos as a single dad with full custody and we'd eat em on Saturdays until they started sleeping in until all hours of the day if what you mean by all hours of the day is noon or later. Does the day start at noon? Not to me, the day starts when I have my first cup of coffee usually at 0530 even on weekends that is how pathetically my internal clock is wired.

French Toast! Although I despise eggs in their naked cooked form in almost every way shape and form, I can eat French Toast and actually really enjoy it. I used to make French Toast and bacon weekday BREAKFAST FOR DINNER, KIDS! nights that they quickly grew to despise in the earlier days of my full custodyhood. I didn't possess what one would call a very full quiver of menu options back then.

Speaking of bacon there are many, many fine meats for breakfast - bacon, sausage (linked and pattied), steak, ham, canadian bacon, eel caught fresh from the Trinity River and sliced into little chunks with your handy reservation knife THAT YOU NEVER PLAY WITH.

Do I ever add these to my dull as dishwater breakfast repertoire of like 5 or 6 different cold cereal selections or the rare and elusive Eggo waffle? No. No I don't.

I love oatmeal I just love it, with raisins and brown sugar and preferably half and half which I never have but milk for sure. Oatmeal is easy to make! Easy as pie if pie was something you dumped in a saucepan of boiling water and waited for 3 (three) minutes. Malt-o-Meal same deal except you're supposed to gradually pour in the Malt-o-Meal so it doesn't lump up into huge tumors of malted meal except I always dump it in all at once because I love to bite those big coagulated chunks of malted meal! I do for reals I'm not bullshitting this time. Remember Maypo? I loved Maypo! Remember Roman Meal hot cereal? It was a strange very fibrous almost like eating sawdust mixed with your wheat hot cereal I adored as a child. Can't even find that shit anymore. Anyway, you can see by my word count in this paragraph that I possess a certain passion for hot cereals yet I never make them for myself.

What is wrong with me? Why this breakfast inertia? Why this failure of imagination, this lack of drive and ambition to vary the fuel that motors me into the day? I should eat fruit too, sometimes I add blueberries to my cereal but when I read just recently that the anti-oxidants you eat don't really protect you from anything nasty like cancer I just figured fuck it why bother to reach into that cold freezer, grab that bag of blueberries and shake a bunch onto my cheerios. I love huckleberries in the summer, fresh huckleberries I've just picked or even the frozen ones but the fresh are more perfect except you only get them for like a few weeks, on my cereal or in my pancakes which I make exactly 2.3 times each summer usually at the lake and/or camping although my frying pan pancakes used to terrify my children due to their post third degree burn scabrous appearances in overly hot frying pans by campfires or whatnot.

So, do people eat vegetables for breakfast? I don't and I don't think I ever will except green peppers and onions fried into potatoes or whatever. I could not eat broccoli for breakfast or carrots.

Oh shit, I forgot I do make toast! I make toast two times a week I bet. Usually just butter and when I'm feeling very much like I wish to achieve higher aesthetics in the gastronomical void I uneasily inhabit, I will cut the toast diagonally into four half toast pieces to have with my cereal. The diagonal cut remains my preference to the boring straight cut as my mom was a straight cutter and I was a rebel as a child. A renegade of toast. I was a renegade of toast! Sometimes I put blackberry jam on my toast because that is the only kind of jam I buy, not because I don't like other kinds of jams including the yellows (like apricot, peach, orange marmalade) but because, overall, the dark purples of which blackberry is the finest and most reliable representative are the work horses, the peterbilt trucks, the swiss army knives of the jam industry. The yellow jams, much like buttery chardonnays and other white wines, are for candy assed California yuppies sauteeing baby snowpeas on their expensive gas grills out on their heartwooded redwood decks. They are ok once in awhile but if you showed up in a mining camp, let's say, with a jar of a yellow jam in your lunchbucket the other miners would beat you about the head with their shovels and pitch your silly ass down a shaft. Be careful with the yellow jams.

Are there other breakfast groupings or thematic organizations I'm missing? Like cultural/ethnic/religious breakfasts? Probably sure. Maybe sports breakfasts based upon your sport. Do ice hockey players eat sausage patties mostly? What do snowshoers eat for breakfast? I have no idea that's why I'm asking you.

In conclusion, I'm hungry and I'm going to eat:

one bowl of mixed brown sugar and maple frosted miniwheats and cheerios
two pieces of buttered toast sliced diagonally

Sounds good!

What are you having for breakfast today or already had and what kind of breakfast arrows do you pack in your breakfast quiver?

Climbing up Mt. Wednesday!

Every workday is like a mountain to climb and you get to the top (or nearly so) and you see, oh hey, there's another fucking mountain. Then the next work day you climb that mountain, let's call it Mt. Tuesday, and then you get to the top of Mt. Tuesday and you see Mt. Wednesday of the Workalayan Mt Range and you go "oh shit, there's another one" and you climb the next and so on and so forth. Until finallly, you summit Mt. Friday and you are all 'hell yeah, that does it" and then you stumble off the peak. You are so excited that you don't properly disconnect your crampons and sheath your ice axe and all those gleaming brightly colored carabiners jangle in the thin icy air as you tumble down the ice fields and glaciers and features with French names like coulouirs and crevasses and you fall into the weekend beaten, bruised and broken and you get TWO WHOLE DAYS to recover which you attempt to do by drinking vast amounts of alcohol mixed with fruit drinks or in a barley based brew and you get all sick each morning and take fistfulls of ibuprofen melting your kidneys a bit and you don't get half the shit done you said you would and you are forgetful about at least one (1) thing important to someone you love and you get some really bad diarrhea from undercooked pork chops and before you know it you're back at that Workalayan Mt. Range thinking oh what the hell here we go again.

That is the Way of the Pessimist. The Optimist, on the other hand, believes it happens exactly the same way except he believes that on the peak of each mountain is unicorn shit full of diamonds and gold and that even though he never finds it that is only because unicorns are rare and magical creatures and that he sure wants to be the one up there when the unicorn has finally passed on by leaving a big dump for him.

Are you generally an optimist or pessimist in life? If I told you which one lives the longest and has the best relationships and generally is happiest would that matter or would you just think I was bullshitting  you?

Works for me!

If I see an old bloodletting (leeches) chart in the urgent care exam room I'm getting out of there! Doesn't work for me.

Yesterday's post with all its French sayings made me think of my favorite personal saying, one I coined and use as somewhat of a mission statement: "that which works for me may not work for you."

I'll let you think about it for a moment. Say it aloud. That which works for me may not work for you.

Now, I want you to imagine a large naked man with his body painted brightly like a clown and he's wearing a big fuzzy pink clown wig and he's completely on fire. He runs screaming through an arena full of people and dives into a large tank of liquefied brown sewage. Then he emerges with a pained smile and bows to the now cheering and shrieking crowd. Work for you? Doesn't work for me. But it worked for him!

Which of course is my roundabout way of introducing the corollary to this postmodern proverb: That which works for you may not work for me.

So, if I like mowing my lawn with the sharpened jawbone of a moose tied on to a long shaft of yew with a rough sinew made from german shepherd hip ligaments and you will only mow your lawn with an actual gas powered lawnmower, like a Toro let's say, then both of my sayings are true. That which works for me (jawbone mowing) may not work for you and that which works for you (Toro mowing) may not work for me. It is like the wheel, an archetype of many civilizations, it turns and completes upon itself.

Do you like to poach chum salmon in your stove? Doesn't work for me!

I like to take baths with cheap Walmart betta fish that I buy in bulk so as to have three fresh ones each morning. Doesn't work for you!

I think much of life is about respecting the differences of others and trying very hard to "see things from their point of view." Except if that doesn't work for you. Then you might only want to be a self indulgent narcissist. Which really doesn't work well for me. But we all try to get along the best we can anyhow, because that's what we, God's greatest super-primate experiment ever, work best together at.

What kinds of things do you do that probably don't work for me? Do you have a personal mission statement? List and describe!

Le Ouch!

Bon sang ne saurait mentir!

What's bred in the bone will come out in the flesh, the French like to say. Screw them and their stupid Laguiole knives I like to say. I picked up a brand new one with a spicy, aromatic juniper wood handle and a handy corkscrew for my birthday. Very sharp with a thinly profiled "slicer" edge. Perfect for those picnics in bucolic spring meadows with wine and cheese and a nearby medivac chopper with a full crew.

Friday night I was dicking around with it while otherwise engaged on the computer, I was gently and safely sliding my thumb perpendicular to the blade admiring its chisel ground (one side of blade is ground in) sharpness when I decided to close it ON MY THUMB MEAT. They are spring loaded, they close hard and fast. The chisel ground sharpness sliced into my thumb like it was a willing soft piece of cheese and next thing I know my thumb is spurting red Bob juice all over the place and I'm rushing off to cold compress it with a wet towel and later wrap it tightly with 17 (seventeen) band-aids. And, it throbbed all night.

Saturday I went to Urgent Care and the doc looked in it explained to me it went into the "fat layer" and it should be sutured. He admired the surgical scalpel-like cleaness of the cut. The injection of Lidocaine directly into the nervous, fat-exposed, raw wound was just special, if by special one means "makes diarrhea happen" and the suturing was uneventful. The nurses bandaged it up in a fancy tube gauzed thinger that tied around my hand. I changed it out last night cuz it was an embarrassingly large white gauzy thumbmonster expanding disproportionately into a universe that is expanding at a much slower velocity than my thumb, for sure. While my home made contraption makes my thumb look less like Sissy's legendary hitchhiking thumb from Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, it is still annoying. I expect I will switch to common bandaids today, as I re-enter the work world where even one slight slip like an obviously bandaged thumb can lead the other members of the work pack to view you as weak and easily separated and taken down in a howling maelstrom of tooth, fang, and claw (and thumb).

And the perpetrator of this vile crime, the steely, edgy, violent psychopath? What of his fate? Well, he will be imprisoned away in some dusty box or shelf where he cannot do harm again. I generally refuse to carry a knife once it's tasted blood, or more to the point - tasted my blood. Certainly, I will miss the peppery juniper and the hair popping sharp blade. But these four gigantic stitches in the opposable digit on my all too dominant right hand, the primacy digit that now being robbed of 80% of its function leaves me grunting stupidly like a bonobo and doing things with my left hand that I've never had to do before, reminds me moment by moment of what a lapse of attention around the bloodthirsty can accrue.

As an aside, another thing the French like to say is Il ne faut jamais dire « Fontaine, je ne boirai pas de ton eau !

Never say never, or the more literal, as I prefer, "You should never say, "Fountain, I will never drink your water!"

I will consider the wisdom of the French before I give my juniper wood handled pocketknife a sad and empty life imprisoned away from meaty thumbs and rich dense networks of capillaries. I have another laguiole pocketknife, a much nicer one with a handle made of amourette aka snakewood, perhaps with some modeling and mentoring the future may change for my corkscrewed former pocket rider. We shall see. On ne fait pas d'omelette sans casser des oeufs.

What is your favorite French saying or proverb? Would you trust this knife again? Why or why not?