Working Nights

I live too far from the bar.

It is hurting my sex life.

A vast number of chubby women find me incredibly attainable. Now, I know that I am not the finest catch to ever drive a primered pickup through this town, but I would like to find someone where there might be some mutual attraction.

My introversion doesn't help much. I'm sure incredibly nice and stable women hang out in the clubs, but I don't want to put up with the noise and smoke. I'm sure that there are nice girls in church, but the stench of the world must be all over me, permeating my skin. The experiences and doubts of a rough life spent in places the red, white, and blue God of an old life doesn't exist, seeping out of my eyes and ears, offending their sensitive and tender spiritual offlacatories. I try to hang out in the coffee shops or martini places, but my agrarian roots are dug deeply into my speech and plowed into the furrows of my face, turning away all the prospects I could have in that venue. My vernacular and my truck draw in girls from the far reaches of the valley, girls who want to talk about Garth Brooks and wear Rocky jeans. I'm not a hick. Don't let the muddy truck and Hank Williams CD's fool you, sisters of the earth.

I see everyone around me as being so linear. At the most a parabolic curve of understanding and environment.

This is not my biggest challenge. You see, they make this magical juice of impaired judgment called "whiskey". As I drink enough of it, it slims down the heavies, fills out the skin and bones crowd, and slings me roughly into a state of non-committal conversation on anything. I know a lot, and when I'm drunk, well dammit, I sure can talk about it all with the authority of a veteran operator in incredibly diverse fields. Caterpillar diesels? Hell yeah I know about the integrated precombustion chamber on their injection plugs. Horseshoeing? Damn right I know about it., you best watch them toes. Event horizons? Black Holes? Penne, Robusto, Marinara? Don't get me started.

So, this leaves me in a peculiar state. At least in the morning following. A state of needing desperately to get the hell out of wherever I ended up quietly, so as not to wake her up. Awkwardness follows. There's something to be said of the Navy life of fake names and leaving the continent the next day. The only challenge there is the facing your comrades the next day. A couple months at sea sure knocks off some ugly points on your prospect, but your friends eyes are wide open, and they talk about it for months.

All that being said, the last time I wanted some of this "whiskey", I went to a bar claiming to be a river of said product. The Whiskey River was full of people. They ground and gyrated and drank. As did I, friends. In fact, I ground and drank and conversated my way into a ride home, though we both knew the terms and conditions of the ride. Tomorrow, I would have to tell her to go, and then deal with the smells of guilt and biology that take weeks to wash off. On the way to my house in the country, miles and miles away from town, something odd happened. The drive was long and winding, Grand Junction faded away, Fruitvale came and went, the slums of Clifton appeared and disappeared. By the time we crossed the river, I had sobered up.

A light of truth, reason, and responsibility flooded the car. I didn't want to date this girl. I wasn't even attracted, except that all healthy and young females excite me, at least a little. What would I do tomorrow when she wanted to stay? What would I tell her immediately after when I would want to take a shower and emerge from the steam coffin to find an empty house? How would I explain that my attraction to her had a statute of limitations? We got up to my house and sat on the couch and talked. Actually, she sat on the couch lustily, I conspicuously took the recliner and held it as an easily defensible position. We talked for hours until she left, disappointed.

I live too far from the bar.

What I'm listening to: Hank Williams, Long Gone Lonesome Blues

SprinkLers III: The Mire Strikes Back

Long Ago In A Pond Nearby...

The holes have been dug around the offending sprinklers installed in the bottom of a pond. Our hero has been knee deep in pond scum for two days at this point. The swingarms of CPVC have been unearthed up to the mains and exposed enough that the swingarms can be removed and caps put in their place as has been commissioned by Bill.

"Hey, I'll need your help today on those sprinlers."

Translated into the language of reality, this beam of information represents, "You need to do work on the sprinlers today while I dissappear until you're done with the messy stuff."

My day up until this point had involved a physics class and a long, restful stretch of internet browsing. I was not inclined to move from my place in front of the computer since my legs and back were still hurting from the last time I had been hijacked from my proper job and been conscripted into The Battle of Shit Pond.

I do, however, have a work ethic, and it was calling me to the silt.

I went outside and noticed no progress beyond what I had already done. No one else had even made an attempt on this mess. I was angry, but I was not screaming angry.

"Bill?"

"Uh huh?"

"Is there a reason that these holes look the same as they did the other day?"

"Well, we had a change of plan. We decided to just screw a cap on the little swing arms that are exposed there by the surface."

A Conversation From the Day Before:

Casey: Hey, instead of digging these huge holes, let's just dig out the sprinkler, throw a piece of iron in the hole and cap off the arm where it sticks up. It will save us (me) hours of work in that black shit.

Bill: I don't know, I'd rather cap it off at the main. That way the swingarm won't freeze.

Casey: We're going to blow it out this winter, right?

Bill: Let's just dig the holes all the way down to the main.

Casey: That doesn't make sense.

Bill: Trust me on this one.

Back to the present:

"So now we're just gonna cap off the swingarm?"

"Yeah, it'll get blowed out this winter, anyway."

I am angry. The holes have already been dug. Huge holes, three feet deep, filled with fetid water. I am very angry.

"OK, Bill."

I install the caps where I can and repair broken swingarms as I come to them. I take special care not to sink my left hand in the muck. A couple days before, I had injured it and there was an open fracture on my left index finger. An open fracture means that a bone is fractured and exposed. These are caused often by negligence in the saftey aspects of truing brake rotors on mountain bikes. I've heard, anyway.

Eventually all the caps are in place, save two. The rising level of water would not allow me to get into the pipe without using both of my hands under the muck.

I informed Bill, enraptured by an online game of Tetris what had transpired.

"Bill, I got all of them capped off except for two. I marked them with flags. I couldn't get down to 'em without getting that nasty shit in my wound."

"Huh? Oh, uh, yeah. OK. See you Monday."

To be continued...

Those other people are bad

I have no opinion on most aspects of homosexuality. In fact, I often can agree with some of the less tangible benefits of the practice. A life of men only associating with men, removing the inherent female emotional responses and such from gay men, would offer a life with little melodrama and probably fewer wars. It seems that the rape of the women folk, literally and figuratively of their beliefs and faiths, has been pretty much the prime motivation offered to the common man with a pike, rock, club, or air-cooled, gas operated M-16. In a homosexual world of men, it would be hard to find issues important enough to fight over. On the other hand, I am a huge fan of the female sex and can completely see where it would draw an eye away from the more utilitarian aesthetics of the male body. Also, the myths of fraternity and sorority would evaporate and men or women could operate on somewhat more intellectual motivations since the competition of the sexes is removed.

So, this is nothing more than my personal observations, I really have no opinion on the subject either way.

Lesbians are not the same as homosexual men. Besides the obvious physiological differences, there is the motivation. I have known more homosexuals than the average guy over my span of life. I have worked with them, had them over for dinner, stayed at their apartments, picked them up while they were hitch hiking, and had Thanksgiving Dinner with them. I hate even saying "them". There is really no difference that would segregate those individuals from the rest of us in a crowd. Just as there are the flaming queens of the homosexual world, we maters have our tramps and man-whores. I know that my opinion on this may shock a few readers of my other site, but really, it is and has been true for most of my life.

Everyone points out correlations as if there is some sickness to cure or problem to solve when it comes to their cross section of this world's population, but really, I don't give a shit. Operate on your own conscience and leave others be. Your morals are not enforcable in any setting where freedom is even given lip service.

That being said, I watched a movie the other day and previews for Brokeback Mountain came on. It made me squeamish. I don't like seeing men undressed or passionate in movies anyway, and two of them at the same time just kind of made me sick. I'm not sure if this is hypocritical or not.

In other words, you will not see naked men on this site. Sorry.

And Milfred, quit sending me emails offering "men cock naked and young beautiful".

Thank you.

Wash and swash

Shorelines are dynamic environments. If you ever see a stratigraphic collunm of an ancient shore, you see huge variences and shifting origins. Wedges of beach sand are cemented inside layers of bioturbated mud and the mud is between patches of back beach salt wash. Pictures of beaches running up and down the landscape, moving sideways, and moving back. Wash and swash.

I had a realization just five minutes ago.

I don't really have a whole lot of friends. At least not in this town. I have some excuses and some lies, but I have to admit it's my own damn fault.

I enlisted on the thirty-first of October, 2000. I quit talking to any of my friends left alive about two months before. We had habits and livelihoods that I didn't want following me into a my new life. I felt bad about leaving them behind, but it was neccasary. I severed those ties and have not ever attempted to regain them.

Upon arrival in boot camp, I found myself in a world of people who had no knowledge of the West, much less Colorado itself. I only had one person in my division from my home state and we tried as hard as we could to be friends, but somehow, his propensity for singing and acting didn't lend itself to my abilities of conversation. In a world of lining up nut to butt for chow and close quarter living, I was completely alone.

That is not to say I didn't talk to people. I have many conversations a day, just like I did then. One of those boot shining circle conversations led me to mention a 1970 half-ton Ford I used to have. From the other side of the circle came an accent that I confused for Norwegian.

"Dude, I got one too! I love that big piece of shit!"

That was Matt. My closest friend, maybe in my life, but I've had so many lives. We became very fast friends, stationed together in Pennsacola, then in Virginia. We have shared experience of the same boat and the same piece of industrial art called the Tomcat. I have met his family, and he has met mine. We've shared beers and women, and sometimes a tear for a buddy. Then he deployed and I deployed and we just never got in touch again.

Luckily, my deployment introduced me to a skinny guy working in 1st who asked if I was the "dude with the guitar". I told him that I was, so he showed me a beat up notebook of lyrics. He obviously had no musical experience, but we formed a very moving poem of his, called Johny's Kite, into a very good song. The business of being an Ordie kept me from seeing him too much more until our return to home station, but it was a pretty common sight in that berthing to see me and him reading Bukowski and writing in his beat up notebook. His name was Ash.

One day he walked up to me outside the ordie shack and asked if I still played my guitar. I told him yes, I did. He asked me to come over that night to jam. I told him I had a drummer I could bring with me, but we needed a bass player. Then he introduced me to James.

James was an amazing bass player and an amazing person who really needs chapters of a book to describe him in full. From that early start, we formed a band with my new girlfriend sitting in on drums. We were all very intelligent and well-read, or so we thought. Discussions on philosophy and literature were common. It was nice not to be just another drug taking/selling loser in a valley full of them. I was in a real group of friends. People who enjoyed my company and never had to be reassured they were wanted.

All of my friends left over time, only to be replaced by others, but never quite as close.

First Ash left, then my girlfriend, who had become my wife. Von and Cooley moved farther into my circle to fill the void. Robin was never replaced. Cooley left after I had spent a good long time sleeping on his couch and covering up my visceral pain with alcohol, insanity, and car talk. A string of our core friends dwindled until I had only James to hang out with. He was there for more than a few meltdowns, and I helped him through a hiccup or two as well. Then he left. Von was there.

Then I left.

I don't know anyone here anymore. All my old crowd is either dead or in jail or dissappeared in the manner of that type of friend. I have tried to make new friends, but they just don't seem to care about anything pertinent. I want friends who know about space and time and can speak and feel. Instead, I have had a steady stream of friends move in and on for whatever reason. Is enlightened debate and camping buddies that hard to come by?

Apparently, yes, they are. I could go out tonight and drink some beer and play some pool until I found a kindred spirit, but so many better friends are just a phone call away.

And thousands of miles away, moved on to their own lives of wash and swash.

SprinKlers II: Revenge of the Silt

So, coal, oil, and other flourocarbonates are formed usually in highly biotic ares where a biomass is buried and sealed in silt creating an anoxic environment. The overall rotting of the microbial sized to large sized organisms without aerobic respiration occuring will, over time, solidify into the carbon-rich stuff that powers cars and furnaces.

The reason I bring this up is because silt, locked in a hydrated area, forms a very anoxic environment. That means everything under the immediate ground smells just like a cow backed up to a hot stove and left a biological deposit. I know this intimately because of recent activities of digging in the bottom of a pond. As has been pointed out, someone charged my employer for sprinklers buried in a pond. I don't see why they need pressurized water flowing into the bottom of a pond, but I'm not king turd of shit mountain in this situation. I am but a low-paid student. I had to find the sprinklers using a shovel and my hands.

I found most of them and dug them out while kneeling down in the stagnate pond water and moving the conreted silt mud around. I found them one by one and flagged them. I figured that sooner or later, somebody would come out and take care of these little plastic problems.

The next day, one of my bosses came in and said, "Hey, thanks for finding all them sprinklers. What we now is for you to go out and dig them up back to the main."

I did as I was told.

As I was standing knee deep in the water that smelled of foul port-o-potty, I cut around the sprinklers with my shovel and moved the grassy soil off to the side. I dug to the base of the sprinkler and hoped to find a calcium white joint of PVC underneath it. I did not. I found a cheap rubber hose leading farther down into the muck. I dug and dug, unearthing more of the fossil of wasted fiscal rescource. The hole I was digging kept requiring expansion as I dug deeper and deeper into the future coal. I was angry. Angry and smelly.

A shadow crossed the muck. One of my bosses, designer extraordinaire of this system, was standing over me on the edge of the pond.

"Did ya find it?"

"No, it's got a CPVC swing arm on it. I got to dig farther down, but I've already crossed three pipes it doesn't connect to."

"Yeah, I hate them swing arms. Never can tell where they go. That one'll be deep since it goes to a frost line."

"A frost line? Why would they consider an irrigation pipe frost line? It get's blown out in the fall and the soil's dry."

"Well, yeah, but they had to bury it deeper since it's under a pond."

"So, you knew this was a pond when they put sprinklers down here?"

"Yeah. The water could freeze around the pipe and break it if it's up where the ground gets saturated."

"Bill?"

"Yeah?"

"Let me get this straight, you went to all this extra work to keep the sprinkler lines from freezing under a pond?"

"Uh huh."

"If this is a pond, why are there sprinklers here in the first fucking place?"

"To water the grass."

"The pond grass that's under the pond water?"

He looks at me as if I am a slow student. "Yeah."

I dug deeper into the silt and black sludge.

Wage Slavery

I have a job. That is to say I am employed. My job is to hand out tools to high school students and assist in the maintainence of the college motorfleet. This job is pleasant and easy. I get greasy and work on cars or I have some study time in between shop classes. Then there are times I end up doing incredibly unrelated tasks. Sometimes, this is fine with me. If they need something welded or a car hauled to the recycler, I get tasked with it. These things satisfy my need to do manly tasks when the doldrums of being a student want to drag me into a stupor of unhealthy feeling of impotence.

Then sometimes I get tasked with work no one else can do.

There was a time I was sent up to the roof to fix a skylight with a tarps and garden timbers. I basically lashed together a small raft to go over the leaking windows. That was not fun. Or I'll have to do whatever work the aged, tenaciously imbedded beauracrats are not permitted to do by their doctor. Such as dig up sprinklers. In the bottom of a pond.

The first question that should come to your mind is, "Why are there sprinklers in the bottom of a pond?"

I don't know. No one knows. They are there, and they are broken.

So, enter the student aid with a golf cart full of tools trying to dig up sprinklers in six inches of standing water in most cases, in others with a water table of about a foot. The sprinklers are hidden by a layer of sediment and no one asked the contractors who put the system in for a map of their work. That means I have to find the sprinklers under the mud.

It's just ridiculous.

The rocks cry out...

Faults crop up where land masses collide or rub or pull away from each other. In some areas you find a very obvious trending fault that follows a unidirectional path and has only small tangential faulting. Others are like huge fists punching into the surrounding terrain. The Uncompagrean Uplift is an example of this that is intriguing geologists the world over and it happens to sit very conveniently next to my house.

I spent the weekend counting rocks, making arduous hikes, and getting sunburned. I have never been more happy.

This whole trip was for the geology department of my school, so it wasn't like we just went out to get drunk around other geeks or something. The group on the trip was a truly fascinating and diverse crowd. Especially after a little Turkey fuel. On one of our hikes to maps river gravel deposits on the sandstone shelves, we happend to be the first white people to ever spot this arch.

It was a truly amazing weekend.

Mammon

A life well lived should have at least a couple moments where the odds are, you're not going to live through them. At least this is my philosophy. The people I work and live around everyday seem so shallowly motivated towards accumulation and personal space.

My sister, who I love dearly, wants a bigger house. In her words, she needs a bigger house. Her current abode is around 1600 square feet, nearly twice the size of home our family was raised in. And by family, I don't mean a single parent and two kids. I mean both parents, the girl, and three boys. Then we had a string of goats, rabbits, chickens, kittens, and dogs. Our house seemed plenty big, even with all three of us boys sharing an 8ft by 10ft room. My sister has only herself and her two daughters.

As she was discussing all of this with me over a little too much wine, I had flashbacks to living in a barracks room half the size of her living room with a room mate. She talked about how her yards was too small and I had flashbacks to living in a two foot tall coffin and having all of my personal space in the world in a six inch deep locker under that coffin. The wine dissappeared at an alarming rate, and I somehow felt cold.

Here, in this beautiful place, with her money and new car, my sister was unhappy. When she was unhappy because of some asshole who thought he could justify hitting a girl, I felt powerless because I was a kid incapable of damaging someone the man's size. When I had a woman to love who looked striking like my sister after they'd had too much to drink, become so unhappy as to make attempt after attempt to kill herself the first few times, I was on a boat, thousands of miles away fighting for oil and free trade.

Now, I'm powerless to help my sister because I can't help her with what she needs. I don't know if anyone ever will.

The only thing that will help her is freedom. Freedom from all her things. Freedom from her men, jewelry, and cars. Freedom from her beliefs. A freedom I had to fight for. A freedom that was only given to me after I showed the unforgiving government of myself that I was unafraid of losing my chains. Wife, car, dog, house, cat, religion, they're all gone now, and I have nothing but a beat up guitar and some worn out shoes to show for my life. I am free.

As touted on nearly every bumper sticker in this state, freedom is not free. The cost I pay is the sadness I feel for so many others who have never had this. I see the huddled masses of slaves who propel their own exploitation by the clergy of the International Curch of Mammon by wanting and desiring. The victims of a systemic sickness where sharing is the only sin because things are the only value held dear.

In my daily walk through a continued misunderstanding of God, I just hope that he can give me the strength to shoulder this burden of freedom.

Pain and Hank

I love the single track out here. I ride as often as I can, but sometimes I think maybe this heart of mine is blind to what somebody else, shit everybody knows but me. I have sinned in this life often enough, but it seems just loving these hardpacked dirt trails is my greatest sin. What can I do?

Well, I can spend a whole heaping shit ton of money on my bike getting it where it needs to be for this shit out here. Sometimes I think this bunch of red dirt spaghetti has no heart. I doubt it has shame. These trails take your true love, but leave you all the blame. Then again I guess that I should not complain.

Horribly expensive Hayes MAG HD brakes, meet juniper trees, juniper, meet MAG HD. What can I do, little evil dirt trails?

You win again.

No Thoroughfare Canyon

The phone rang at an ungodly hour this morning. It hurt my head to think that early. It was my dad asking for my help with some farm equipment he needed to move. His job is not to move farm equipment, but a friend had bought a furrower from the Western Implement and needed it up on Glade Park. It was a good excuse to get out on the road and see some rocks, so I agreed.

We had a hell of a time getting that machine up on the low-boy, but we got it all running soon enough. I took this picture on our way back of No Thoroughfare Canyon.


We had to get out of the truck a little after this and clean up a mess his trailer made when an air fitting blew off and locked up the tires. It's an amazing day, so we walked out to the rim of the canyon and I snapped this.