Something Heavy Coming Down

So this is how it goes:

This blog is bullshit, I have known that for a while. I started a new page I like more than I will ever like this place. I hate to say that, but it is true. So I'm leaving. And while I'm at it, I give up on blogging. No more of this what I had for lunch today business. No more of this handy sounding board to throw my voice out into the cosmos.

I will miss this page, that is no lie. I have met some good people who I first met when they left a nice comment or two. There were a few who stopped by when I had nothing to say and left when I did and a few who stuck by while I wasted everyone's time and had their faith vindicated.

This blog was where I went to be more of me than I could be elsewhere, but also where I could scream a little at my past and at the problems and burdens I had been given. Those issues are mostly gone or otherwise dealt with. Thanks for listening. That isn't the reason I'm hanging it up, though.

Do you see that post under this one about my brother? I will never do better than that, I think. Proof that beauty is not unknown in the world of rednecks who get there cars stuck in the mud and knock up women. So I am moving on. I have felt for a while that I had greatly outclassed this medium, and I mean that a lot less egotistical than it sounds. So for now, I'll leave this here as a record.

The String of Mediocrity Is At an End

For now, and for a while.

For Momentary Academic

Because she asked me to:


And into the black heart of the Mesa we rode at dusk and believed only in ourselves and only in our home and only in our women. We should not have.
When we shot through the clouds of lingering all day rain washing the rocks clean of first dust, and then clays, and then finally the silica broken free of its bonds to be transported away to the sea. Never the night to us or through us could travel a hundred mile highway of youth and golden copper youthful sun, burnished skin and ridiculous energetic smiles. We owned the land and we owned the sea that had once been and would be again.

And when we leapt out into the desert at midnight and into the mire
with
engine railing and wheel spinning.

When we tested our selves
and our machines and our endless supply of nerve
did we find in ourselves
the possibility of legend and the depth of our soul
into the night and
without restraint.

When we finally proved to you and to me that we
were braver than a machine
could be strong, but our will, the will to live
through the cold clear
adamantine night with thousand pointing glinting
stars, was strong and stable
and we were strong to walk and not faint, and
when the mud had not overtaken our
boots, yours soft brown boots for working
on the earth and mine black and waxed
for working into the earth, did we not
grow weary?

In the last sprinting freedom of our last glory night, we
lost the van into
the mud but found a story to tell.

And when we screamed down low over the Sangre de Cristos, the redded banks of earth, the blood of the Christ, heading south into the land of red and burgundy ground and brown golden people to retrieve your foil, your Alejandra, we were alone in a world adrift with the follies of young men such as we. Sensible things may have occurred to us about the night and day of highway running and the shotgun father waiting for you with words and lead, but we knew better than to say. When we poached of the land its bounty in years gone by we knew better than to question the legend as it formed and the story as it was breathing in our chests. When we would live on and on past the days of passionate youthful blissful rage, past the days of boundless energy to attempt the inane and impossible, we knew.

And when we knew.
We knew not to question or change the universe as we
unfolded it into a thousand morning stars.

We knew to leave the
story to be told and to let it happen.
Every
last and terrible thing
we did, and terrible women that
happened, we
knew. we knew to let the
creation continue and not to stay
our hand on
the lathe
of every man
creatures cosmos, the right to
determine how the
story
unfolds.

And thank you, Brother.

Vox Proletariat

Lately I have been reverting more and more to asshole behavior, which, if you are one of the two or three readers who who have known me this long, I used to journal about more often and even gained some fame*.

Those were good times for writing, but the site has since been disestablished, mostly because I see no reason to pay ten bucks a month to bitch. You can still find it cached in some different places, but I wouldn't recommend wasting that kind of time. The site basically revolved around Wild Turkey, mountain biking, and stupidity. In fact, because of the environment my vitriol was crystallizing in, I had all kinds of stupidity to talk about.

I am still a little amazed at how hard it was to maintain that sort of angry continually after i moved back to Colorado. With 285 sunny days a year and no traffic (or a reason to actually drive) I just could not maintain the aggression necessary for that kind of funny.

There are a few aspects of the site I miss:

• No comments. Now, I love comments, and have the requisite ego boost when I see that number crawl up into the teens. Unfortunately, my style of writing and journaling doesn not lend itself to large numbers of comments. I could try and change that, but honestly, I don't care quite that much. It would have to do with being funny and improving my grammar. Also, commenting on everyone esle's (and I mean everyone's) stupid pandering bullshit with pictures of cats and diatribes about "that guy on the bus who was SOOOOO mean."




• No fancy colors. Black, white, red and yellow, bitch. Since I programmed the whole thing from scratch (OK, copying and pasting and scratch), I had to keep it simple. There were three colors, not counting the background. And that background was black. You could be anywhere on the site in two clicks. I designed it as the anti-blogger. It was mean and simple. Dangerous looking, but sleek. It was not a place people shared stories of kittens. And I singed off with "Bitches."



• Drinking. Really, the drinking. Back in those days, I was known to put down a bottle of Turkey in a night. If I tried that now, I would wake up in the hospital, if at all.



• The name. Come on. That is the coolest goddamn pseudonym a non-WWF Superstar has ever used.



• The fanbase. There is something reassuring about women liking you for no other reason than your ability to convey emotion. Every fifth entry or so, I would talk about Freddie King, Andres, or Otis Taylor and how they applied to the homeland I pined for. I would invariably get an email consiting mostly of OMGs and smiley/frownie faces. One exception to this was Anne Arkham. She said something like, "Bitch, Otis Taylor is from Chicaaago."



• The supporting cast. Mostly old military friends. None of them got away from it quite as clean as I did.



• I miss talking like that. You would have to have read it to fully appreciate the awesome power of my potty mouth (Casey would never say that OMGs!!11!) and how funny I used to be.

So, why bring this up? Well, mostly I just thought about it more than usual. And Buddy guy just fired up The Devil In Her off the incredibly nasty and blacksnake moaning artblues project that is Sweet Tea, and by god fucking shit, I need to get laid.

*"Fame" here is relative. I will not live forever.

Seven Things To Do (Incomplete)

This is part of a meme I was tagged with about two years ago. I don't do memes, but this one section of it intrigued me. It took me two years to come up with five goals worthy of a list.

Traverse the Book Cliffs from Douglas Pass to Rifle Gap with nothing but a backpack and a rifle.

It's about two hundred miles, so it should take a couple weeks. I know I can do it, my capabilities are not in question. The only real question is how I would do it. Would I take down a deer the first day and pit smoke it so I have meat the whole trip? Would I take a few rabbits along the way? I know there's plenty of wild potatoes and onions along the back ridge of those mountains. The country is rough, and for the most part, wild. The wild doesn't scare me and never has. I am comfortable around the primal. My only fear is that I may never come home. Not that I would die or anything that dramatic. I am afraid I would see a little too much the basic fallacy of civilization. Freedom may be too hard to leave. That's a lot of obligation I'd leave laying on the side of the road.

Maybe I'll look at it as the final probation of civilization, the determining trial of society where I decide just how important it is to me.

Join a Band

I have been in a few bands, working and otherwise. I miss the camaraderie of the musical process. I don't want to be a rock star, and I don't want to be big some day. I want to commune with like-minded artists. I want to have guitar cables strung all over a floor and my old pedals strung up to an amp. I want to hear the same bullshit compliments everyone always pays the house band.

When I was younger, I would play out in the honky tonks and dive bars. It felt good to have the gear packed in the back of my Scout and later, to ride in a van and listen to warm up music, and fight over whether we wanted to be inspired by Korn or Buddy Guy (guess which side of that argument I was on). When the band was working, nothing was better. The feeling of four part communion in the creation of music is comparable to sex, but better than almost anything else. I hate to see more and more stages taken over by DJ's with their enormous boards and MacBooks instead of old burnouts and young delusional kids. There is something sacred about the playing of music. Not sure how it relates, but I really hate midi jazz. When I was in Asia the first time, I waited all day for a well advertised Live Band(!) to show up. When they did, it was a guy with a keyboard, a guy with a fake drum set and three sequined singers. Then they fired up the “jazz.” Somewhere in the world, all four members of the Lifetime hung themselves.

I need old dusty JBLs and analog. If it isn't chaotic in nature and prone to AC hum, it does not belong a stage. I got two nickels and a paradigm, it ain't spelled right, but it rhyme.

Build A Still

Obvious.

Build That 400

I got a Ford 400M sitting up at my dad's house under a tarp. I want to rebuild it and drop in the roomy engine compartment of Il Beasto. I would go into detail, but I would lose people. Well, I would lose the “men” that read this shit, and turn the women on. I got to be careful with that anymore. Suffice it say, high rise cams and four barrels.

Take That Trip And Write That Book

There are all these field guides to for different nerdy subjects: botany, rock hounding, butterfly collecting, etc. Invariably, these books are written by some nerdy couple who have a picture of their pickup camper out on some mountain pass in the book's color plates. Then they have some sappy bullshit dedication to each other in the forward. Anybody who's hung out with a significant other outside long enough can tell you that there is nothing like spectacular scenery, science, and fresh mountain air for catalyzing scare the bears off hair pulling back injuring aerobic country people bone bumping.

Basically, they travel around screwing out in the forest and pass it off as a field guide and then make money off it. At least 25% of their entries for a locale are along the lines of “We didn't quite have time to make it out there to look for the zeolites, but we heard they're there.”

So what are they doing if not looking for the subject of their book? Fucking. That's what they're doing. Then they run this scam where they write about whatever they happened to find in their free time outside of all the wilderness fornicating and charge you 12.95 for the paperback at Borders.

Well, I got a half ton 4x4, a bunch of camping equipment, an English 112 class under my belt, and a free summer. You put it together.

My plan though is to give more than lip service to the science of geology. But when I get into the petrology, I want to put in the important information those other people leave out. Such as:

“Basement rock is Black Canyon semi-melt metamorphic and ultramafic
granites, along with a few pegmatitic dikes. Rounded large boulder and cobble
size talus are generally found at the toe of free face cliffs. Rounded cliffs
are good speculation areas for tourmaline, micas of the biotite and white mica
families, and quartz varieties. Some topaz can be found in dikes, distinguished
from quartz by tetragonal crystals and hardness of 8. Lay down a blanket on the
rock if you plan on being naked, as friction will embed mica fibers in your ass
and knees and the palms and wrists of your hiking partner.”

The Trout Would Have A Different Take

In the night, with stars searing silver in the black sky, I crouched next to the small bed of orange coal and thick smoke I had been trying to nurse into a heating fire. The cold wind blowing up over the rim of the Mesa, the largest in the world, and over the lake had quelled the flames piled high into the quarter moon night earlier. Then it had blown the ash into the cool tuft of ghost pine and cottonwood it was now. The air was cold, alpine regions in November are not the warmest. Above ten thousand feet, the ice comes early and visits often.

The coals gave birth to a wispy yellow flame eating at a feathered strip of spruce bark I had prepared for this purpose. The light ate at the dark around the ash pile and shut off the stars in its flare. The flame crept slow up the bark's feathery inner reaches and then found the pine needles, heavy with oil and dessicated brown, flaring brighter, it found the pile of hatchet chips I had made earlier in the night. When the fire was still a living thing fighting back the night and me and my brother had sat on logs with our boots in front of the fire and meat frying in the iron skillet. I knew the heat would go away and we would need the chips. While I worked a pine log into a necrotized mess, Sean fried our food.

The fire eventually returned to us with my prodding. The light crept out over the ground in waves from the pit as the fire grew strong. The first of the pine branches caught and I sat back on my haunches. The heat came to me, driving out the cold that had awakened me. The undulating ring of the fire reached out to encapsulate all the rocks of the pit and then me and then our two bedrolls laid out on the ground, one full. The air glistened and condensed into a heavy cloud under my nose as i lived and breathed. Not too far away, people slept in their heated rooms, cocooned in their bedding. Me and Sean were planted thousands of feet up, near Leon Peak, ice crust on our bodies and beds.

He was across the flames from me curled in a ball snoring like he always has. The house we were both raised in did not quite have a thousand square feet to itself. Sean and I and one brother who ran from Colorado for good slept in one small bedroom with a bunk bed on one wall and a half a bunk bed on the other. The fire my dad would build on all the winter nights in our cast iron stove kept us warm against the tide of high Colorado cold.

While the fire built itself into the potential it had, I cajoled it along with food and air. Off in the trees, something big moved.

Sometimes I wonder if in the processes of the night, the foreign night that happens in the throes of discomfort to most, but the night that me and Sean can find solace in, some greater God comes to be. Not the creator of hominids who shit on their floor and cringe in anger at the unkempt dirtiness of nature around them and want to mold it into another floor to cover in their waste, but a greater God. One who has no idea that here in this galactic backwater, there are apes covered in skins they did not earn with flashing steel tools carving from the life of the wood fuel for meager comfort. The ground, heaving and beautiful covering the true iron nickel heart of this earth wrinkles and splashes onto itself with ferocity, but with a scale of time we can not even ponder with any skill. The universe stretches into what we can only behold as forever and we find in it's tidal backwater of time, our few years our few years, our vapor that flickers and fades, a reason for all of this.

I heard the hiss and gurgle of boiling liquid and saw the fire had gotten close to the enamelware coffee pot. I helped myself to a dirty cup of it and sat staring at the fire and across it my brother having a vocal dream.

Here in the city, the stars are not visible for the orange glow of our lights and the smoke of our heat. We are wrapped in our bedroll hiding from the cold current of nightsky that sparks on the flint of time and light and we hide in our beds and snore.

The greater god may come and go in the dark, but that night, I felt only the cold and the heat of brotherhood ownership and the stomach full of fish we had pulled out from under the ice of the stream. Greater truths may have been lost as I sat there in the dark happy and missing someone beautiful.

Rock Hammer

One time, back in another life, I had to attend leadership training. My particular methodology of motivating made people hurty in their feely bad spot, apparently. So, as it turns out, I did learn some valuable lessons. The be nice rule? That comes from there.

The reason I bring this up is that I see people instigate or exacerbate conflicts all the time with ineffective communication. When someone bumps into you and you see fit to tell them in profane manner how you are so incredibly inconvenienced, it is more or less worthless. You have lost your foothold the minute you raise their hostility.

A few months ago, I had to deal with citters. Urban hominids.

A gang or posse or whatever the current term would be of inner city youths was standing where I needed to be. They fucked with every single other white person (the youths represented several races) there on that sidewalk. They left me alone. When I approached the curb, they let me pass. While I would like to think it was because of my bearded grumpy face and Tonka truck build, the more likely answer is that carrying two rock hammers strung up on your backpack earns you some respect. Which makes me wonder how respect is earned. I ever get fucked with, and generally, if I need to ask that someone stop annoying me, they do it. Maybe people find politeness intimidating. Or maybe it's my god given talent for not smiling.

Or maybe it's the rock hammers. Maybe I should change my name to Rock Hammer?

Thoughts?

For Posterity

It occurred to me that, while certainly not something I'm shooting for in the near future, someday, I will probably have children. Then I made a list of life lessons I hope to impart first and foremost. The list is not complete or in any order.

The List:


You Must Be Nice

Before you accomplish anything else in your life, achieve niceness. Very rarely, statistically almost impossibly, being nice may not be helpful. Throughout the eons of human evolution, we have developed communication systems exceedingly complex, but the simplest and most effective and most universal means of making yourself understood is pleasant disposition. Before you try to assert, insinuate, intimidate, persuade, or manipulate, use the perfect love and universal medium of empathy. Failing that, relate to them with the sick and pale spectre of sympathy, even though you disrespect them when you do so.

A Wrestler Can Take Any Other Martial Artist In A Fight

If you are living passionately, and being perfectly human, you will be in a bar fight or two. Know that the fundamentals of combat have no tolerance for flash or flair. Long after the black belt man wearing American flag yoga pants has wasted his precious few moments of primacy, a wrestler has fight and wind and most importantly, core strength. A wrestler works on the fundamentals of the animal. Legs and wind and core strength. That being said, you will not impress others with flaring, spastic movements that are photogenic. Prioritize appropriately.

Mix the Butter, Cheese, and Milk Separately

Why? Well, the cheese will not melt in fluidly to the macaroni. If you melt the ingredients separately into a sauce in another pan, or even a microwave self bowl, you avoid the chunky and greasy consistency of most home made non cardboardgenic macaroni and cheese. Give it twenty years, you will understand this better.

No One Person Has The Answer

Including you. You will not find a human being with the answer to the questions you will most earnestly seek. Entropy is extant in all human endeavors, most importantly the search for truth. You must understand that you fight the irreversibility of all things every day and with every journey. The minute you stop moving inside the suspended matrix of knowledge and existence, you will be wrong. As are all others who have stopped their journey to the truth and believe that the truth is a location they inhabit.

Sometimes You Must Be Mean

This is important. At times it will be necessary to temporarily suspend being nice and find your fire. It is painful and forever creates rifts inside the web of human relationships you make. That changes nothing.

Metadrinking

Have you ever let a handy societal metaphor just slide right by because you didn't have the skill to use it? For instance:

Last night, I was feeling a little down, so I went for a long walk to return an overdue book and pick up another I had been half-heartedly wanting to read. Now that I see the book has been made into a movie starring a boring action movie guy who made his career off of trite teenager pandering hip-hop and murdering the legacy of Asimov, I feel it is a priority. Unfortunately, when I got to the library, it was closed (I'm sure some huge proportion of librarians are in fact combat veterans and deserve the day off) so I went to the bar.

At the bar, I experimented with their homebrew stout, it was OK, if a little too rich a malt. Then I tried their bitter, it was OK, but to hoppy for an ESB. On the TV, since I was too early to watch the (professional) football game, I settle for watching the Air Force v. Army game. The Air Force beat Army pretty handily, at least while I was watching. The victors were restrained in their celebrations by military bearing, which is refreshing compared to the rest of the NCAA where every third string defensive end has a signature endzone routine.

Once I had drank the two beers, I settled up with the card I had just activated and walked out into the night. On the way, I stopped for a pint of bourbon. I stopped and talked for a minute to my friend's sister as she exited the college library where she had been studying. Her husband will be home from Iraq before Christmas.

So, three loyal readers, start spitting out some good English major type dubious metaphors from that.

Hayduke Lives!

You know, I'm not sure that I would set off the bomb of a revolution, but I would probably hold the fuse for anyone who did.

I don't like the government. I really don't. The big monstrosity that is the federal government has no business over here. They need to stay back East where they've already gutted the Appalachians and destroyed anything worth seeing over there. They need to keep their big stinking hands off of the people who haven't already given their head over to the reins of a fat and more or less murderous regime. It isn't even George Bush. He was really only working off the extremely generous executive power he inherited from Bill Clinton when the Democrats had control of the legislature back in the early 90's. Remember Waco and Ruby Ridge? If that shit does not scare you, then you are a moron. Unless you believed everything the media said about those people. Then you are a fucking moron.

Trust in any government at this point in history is a pleasant delusion. A conservative estimate of the number of civilians killed in the last hundred years by their governments is around 151 million. How many have terrorists or common criminals managed to kill, maybe 10,000? I can say for a fact that I have never seen a terrorist. In fact, I have never known anyone who was attacked by a terrorist. I have, however, run into quite a few people who have had property taken, livelihoods destroyed, and health ruined by the US government.

Alright, so there might be one or two guys in a million who might have some sort of device strapped to them that explodes (terrible grammar; I apologize), there are a shitload of guys running around armed with pepper spray, tazers, batons, and full on loaded firearms that love to bully nonconformists. The terrorists aren't winning, they already won. They're on every street corner, they prowl around looking for someone with too much freedom on their hands, they walk up behind unarmed students who take too long to ask a question at a debate and beat him and taze him and then accuse him of a felony.

that paragraph will offend the shit out of a lot of people, I just realized. On the other hand, while those fat fucks hassled people who can barely afford to insure their car, keeping the county safe for old ladies and suburban tyrants, me and some damn good friends and criminals were actually sacrificing for our homes. I hate seeing those fucks swelling out their uniforms and pretending to be badasses.

Did you know that if a police dog attacks you and you hit it or fight it in any way, you are guilty of felony assault on a police officer? You are being attacked by a fucking dog, of course you're going to fight it. If a cop starts hassling me (and the camo jacket and beard make it a likely occurrence), I am not allowed to resist. I can tell you one thing, if any mother fucker hits me with a stick, I am taking his arm. And when that happens, I am going to jail. Just like that, me, peaceful and disgruntled and highly decorated veteran that I am, will be going to jail because I didn't do what some guy who has some reason not to make it into the army, a two year degree in criminal justice and a bad childhood told me to do.

To conclude:

I used to be a prison guard, and believe me, the only difference between your average prisoner and your average nine to fiver is that he got caught. I know most of those guys were in for shit I had done and got away with. The arbitrary nature of law "enforcement" guarantees that no one who is really dangerous to lots of people goes to jail. The profiteers who have the lives of those coal miners in Utah on their hands? Still free. Some kid who got caught twice with an ounce of pot? 1-3 years.

I fucking hate the government. Not G.W.'s government, any government. If Nathanael Greene or Patrick Henry were alive today, he would be jailed as a terrorist. Paul Revere would have been gunned down by the BATF. Motherfuckers.

Note: This post brought to you by veteran's day, when the country lets us know it loves us by offering us 90 days same as cash (w.a.c.) on mattress sets. Oh, and a free fishing licence if you manage to get a service related disability. Fuck you people.

This Is How I Get Chicks

Same flourite chunk from the other day:


Cue music:

I suck at photography, but this is what happens when shortwave UV light hits that mineral. Not a black light. Those are for teenagers to put in their basements to pretend they're on drugs. So, if you ever find a purple, green, or clear mineral, hardness of 4, octahedral cleavage on cubic crystals, take out your handy UV light and blast that shit, yo.

Fuck you, merle haggard

One of them cold nights. I've got rid of the last of the porter. The hard way.

Now, the problem with these cold nights is that I am freezing in this drafty house all on my lonesome. When I could be holding you tonight, doing wrong instead of doing right. Fuck all, she don't care what I think. I'll just sit here and...Take it, Merle.

Jesus, them beers is rough. I think my left eye just quit working. If it's working, it ain't pointing right. Bad alcohol can make an eye go wobbly. Four beers of this stuff, the equivalent of about 10 American light beers, is definitely enough to knock a screw loose. When did they start putting gay Phil Collinsesque saxophone solos in country? I'm talking ot you, Merle. Jesus, man, i thought you was on my side. Apparently not. Fucking Merle.

We were friends, man. Remember the old Ford? The '70 with the cranked out 302 with the four on the floor? Of course you don't. You were only there in cassette form. motherfucker. Merle will no longer be capitalized on this here blog. Nope.

The song used to could get me a little happy, then I heard this extended version where you turn into gotdam Huey Louis and the News. Ain't no woodwind gonna change the way I think.

I think I'll just sit here and drink.

Now, take a motherfucker who used to blast out of a rigged up stereo around diesel fuel and wood pallet holocausts out in the desert. you'd think the guy would be a little more of a Hank Williams kind of guy. Fuck, man. Settin' the Woods On Fire. Now, there's a song. No long ass solos. Leave that shit to rock music. We'll order up two bowls of chili. Settin' the Woods on Fire. Shit, man. Pyromania that all ages can enjoy!

I am aware that my membership in the Hank Williams Sr. Fanclub cements me in the throes of the absolute uncool. Fuck you. Besides, I think the mineralogy thing pushed me way over that line long ago.

I had a point. God, my left eye is not working. Surprisingly, since I am a rightie, my left eye is the dominant one. Makes firing a rifle a little bit of a challenge. With a shotgun or pistol, I am a fucking surgeon. At least when I'm sober.

Me and my buddy James used to go out to the Kings River and take a 24 pack of Natty Light and a 12 guage. The game was, drink a can of beer and then throw the can up in the air and shoot it. Yay! Obviously, by the time we killed most of the case, the game got more challenging. We ammeded the rules to mean the can had to actually sink in the river. So then even when we missed (because we were drunker than shit) we could just run up to the bank of the river and plug the thing full of lead until it sank. I fell in once. I think that one was one of our multiple case days. I woke up in a tree. Long story, but suffice it to say, I had some issues to work out.

Part of the long story is a woman, and the other part is some serious "Fuck, I killed a lot of poor religious (much like my kin)folk" issues. I forget exactly where those two intersect. Something about supporting freedom and democracy around the world or something. Hoorah!

Anyway, I am having trouble typing. thanks, merle. Asshole.

I Am Weary

I always knew it would happen, but I didn't want it to happen this way.

No, I wanted the sun to be hailing down from the reaches of an azure high mountain sky while the Monument Valley's thick red sand blows itself over me in a loving embrace of her native son.

I wanted to be out on the raging main throwing my back into jib lines and holding a knife in my teeth, ready to cut myself loose to fall and fall away into the final deep black of our halide original dreams.

I wanted to be off into the Revolution of some people against some government where I would fight and win and lose, finally whiling away my time in some far arroyo with a woman I make my own with skin the color of sun polished bronze and eyes that show you the world in their onyx sheen.

I wanted to be surrounded by a brood and grandbrood and great grandbrood of my descendants who would gather around me and ask me if I saw God in the failing twilight of my rheumy eyes, and I would tell them that I saw him everyday in the wrinkled hands of an elder and the pink powdered skin of a newborn.

I now face it down. I am staring down the bore of life's final stunt to get our attention before Life swallows us back into the bowels of its forever engine. It won't come how I planned, it will come while I am broke and poor and smell like a mediocre dopplebock. tonight, I will pull my guitar to my heart and tell her 'through the years, you've always loved me, and my life you tried to save. But now I shall slumber sweetly, in a deep and lonely grave.'

My eyes close as the moon rises and the stars navigate the sailors on the sea.

Of course, a person could say I am making way too big a deal out of a head cold. Those people are the ones refusing to send me baked goods. I will curse them to the valkryes tonight!

*************************************

I Am Weary (Let Me Rest), Traditional

Boring Cliched Blogger Moment

Now for the coolest thing a blogger ever does. It's montage time!

So, I realize this is not exactly fascinating to those not inclined toward the mineral arts, but I thought I'd show off some different prizes I have gleaned from the hills the last month or two.

First of all, I found a nice tumbled barite crystal in an arroyo out in the Bookcliffs. Sure, it''s not the prettiest girl at the party, but she'll turn heads. Maybe.

However, better than that barite, was the chunk of molten super awesome that I found in the Cave of Mysteries. It's a little known place I hit up on occasion for some fun. There I found the transparent and more sinister twin of the friendly icy crystal above:

Bizzaro Barite!

I know, still boring.

But then, hailing from the far reaches of the Uncompagre, there's fluorite!

And, fluorite again!

And some totally righteous biotite on a K-Spar and quartz matrix lovingly pulled from the black heart of the larimide. And I know at least one person will be checking out my badass Daddy-O, entedre intended.

With this much nerdiness in one place, it's amazing my Daddy-O gets any attention at all.

ECON 101

October's over, and all told not as terrible as it has been. You may thank one Jen for your not being subjected to sad and rambling missives on why everyone sucks and everything is fucked. And that was indeed a Limp Bizkit quote. I submit that I am the first in my circle of friends to ever use the genius of Mr. Durst in a post.

Now, I have a few things to get off my chest. One:

The GI Bill is not as great as cracked up to be. I would like to see the person who actually manages to go to school on that amount. Last I checked, you could expect to spend something like sixty grand on school, and by my reckoning, $1075 a month for 36 months works out to $38,700. Now, if you figure on living incredibly light and only spending $400 for rent (which means you live in a lungbox and you're spending $150 keeping it warm enough not to freeze the pipes), and only spending around $150 a month on food (a near impossibility), you can figure on tuition and fees being around $250 a month and you have exactly 125 dollars for every month. Now, let's assume you have something like a car to insure ($40) and a phone bill ($75), that leaves a hefty ten bucks a month sitting in the old pocket. Which means you may purchase one 24 pack of PBR a month. That works out to an average of .789 beers a day. That fucking sucks. Obviously, a plan B is in order.

So, let's say you use some of that $150 on food stuff that is not immediately edible. Let's say you spend some of it on barley, a little on malt, a touch on yeast, and the rest on little flower pellets called hops, you just spent $30 give or take. Fucking sweet. Considering that that thirty dollars of random grain and floral products produces five (5) gallons (U.S) of prime malt liquor beverage, you now have the equivalent of five twelve packs. Figuring on how a twelver of any beer worth drinking is no less than ten dollars, you figure on saving around thirty cents or so a beer. Not to mention that you have a two month supply that easily gives you a beer a day, or my preference, two beers every other day.

Sure, that's fifteen (15) loaves of Albertson's brand wheat bread or thirty (30) lbs. Of zucchini that you won't have, but beer provides quite a few nice little calories and some liquid caramel inspiration.

So, there is my rational explanation as to why I have five gallons of brown percolating liquid in my laundry room and 40 bottles of a porter I managed to cajole up to 13-14% alc. By vol.

Happy Day Are Yours And Mine

Right, cold rainy days. A sick drunk laid on. Everything is dying or dead. I know why this is going on and my normal chipper attitude is in the shitter. This time, though, I have someone to get me through it, sober and without drama. That's a big change from the normal way I get through this month.

Now, about the drama. I usually have no drama to speak of, though I have great drama potential. I mean, if you look at the sheer richness and amount of drama ore that I can extract, concentrate, and smelt into a nice, big, October related meltdown, then this will make sense.

It is (fucking) October. Some of you have been around long enough to know why I won't be back until November.

Semi-fictional Friday

This is neither purely fiction or purely journalistic. Some is true. Some is untrue. Some of it is both.

Into lives of no consequence friends come and go with the burning scream demon chemicals in our blood. Me and Andrew, friends of convenience and shared appetites for waifish addicted women and crystallized rocks of pure superman power, were of no consequence. We played with life and death as pathetic toys in the hands of giants. We were supermen, immortal in our young minds. The screaming noise of his 3/4 ton Ford truck cut through the dry and cold air.

The truck slewed around the turns down into the dry gulches of Mancos Shale that you used to be able to get by crossing the East Bridge over the EOM Canal at C 1/2 Road. We never knew how to drive our nearly identical behemoths without getting them a little sideways around the turns. How we survived cranked out and drunk and driving our souped up to all hell trucks, I still don't know.

As we cleared the bottom of the hill, a washed out section of road launched us skyward. In the cab we both hit our heads on the roof and crashed back into the sagging seat laughing like the morons we were. The truck slewed right on the rutted clay road into the side of the hill, rotating against the resistance. He laughed maniacally and gunned it sending the nose straight up the soft shale hill. The roaring truck cleared it easily dumping us down into another draw. The truck flayed into the creek sideways and tipped onto two wheels. We continued to appreciate the hilarity. In my hands I held a new Kenwood CD player jacked into a tapedeck adapter fed into his cheap stereo gaping out of the bare metal dash with wires swaying from underneath it. A band that shall not be named raged through cheap speakers we drilled into the doors.

I blame the artist for our manic attempts at proving mortality. Living fast and loose. I reached with my spare hand through the open back window of the truck and fished in the cooler bungeed to the front of the bed for more beer. I threaded my hand back through the gun rack and handed him a beer and repeated the process for myself. We were being dumb. I blame it on the artists invocation to live to win. I don't know why.

The shuffling CD player, held more or less steady in my hand as we rocketed out of the draw and back onto the road, found its next song about the time we were done gunning down the beers. The cans found their way back into the bed. We were not good people, but we did not litter.

Andrew shouted from his place behind the steering wheel, "God, I love this fucking song!"

I signalled my approval over my next beer. "Yeah."

"Listen to those drums!"

Andrew like to pretend he could play the drums.

I forget why we were out in the desert that day. I think it had something to do with shooting prairie dogs. I don't know, we were high. Lately I have rediscovered that particular artist and I always have semi-fond memories of that thoroughly retarded summer. We found our way in and out of trouble, living on whims and promises we did not keep. Everyday was an adventure in craziness and adolescent desire, but we eventually had to stop. He ran from the cops out to Nevada and I found my way into another desert far away from prairie dogs and Ford trucks. We both wound up with blood on our hands less than a year after this creek running. My hands covered in the mass killing of more or less innocent people I never met, his bloody hands eventually removed him from the dust of the chase. At least they never caught him.

He rolled into a speed metal high beating invisible drums with his foot burying the throttle into the floorboard. I see it in your eyes, take one look and die.

The truck departed controlled travel some time around there and my head hit the gun rack. The world exploded into white and jostled and quaked and gravity and mud could not come to a consensus on which part of the truck was facing the earth. The white flickered and revealed the brown clods of desert soil pressed into my window and then the sky and then the dashboard racing toward me. I was aware of a crack and burst in my nose, but I felt nothing but drunk and high. The truck eventually stopped. My feet were cold and wet. The door would not open and Andrew was gone. I crawled out of the open back window. Beer cans were everywhere. As was the remains of his .22 rifle and the gunrack.

I stepped up out of the bed and onto the dirt. I sat hard and looked at his truck half submerged. Andrew sat on the hood. Laughing. I laughed too, at the smeared and sticky blood on my face and the blood still running down his face. He smiled around a missing tooth, more blood pouring out and pointed up stream.

"Dude, the road washed out. That was fucking cool!"

Yea Is Not Exactly Yeah

So the guy next to me's getting saved. The guy next to him is using phrases like, "Are you ready to surrender control? Is that something you can do right now?"

He's got his Bible open, a tricked out signature model in a leather cover with gold leaf accents and (presumably) dual exhaust and a paddle shifting sport package interior. The other guy guy, Mr. Surrender, is following along in a bargain model, something youth groups and Churches hand out so they can keep their tricked out personal scripts in their lusty little polished hands. Judging by the Sesame Street wording of Paul, they're using a New Living Translation (NLT), New International Version (NIV) or something similar. New Expanded College Kings Holy Extended Amplified Translation (NECKHEAT) or some shit. I guess milking the hard parts down makes conversion a slightly easier task than something like screaming in pain while lions eat you¹.

Which brings up my problem with the Church crowd. I mean no offense to anyone's faith whatsoever. While I never quite donned the pastel polo shirt of Post-Modern Christiandom, at one time I believed about 90% in a good 40% of that particular doctrine ±3%, so I can't say much about it, also 90% of my extended family ±3% believe a good 80% or so of the same stuff. So, there you go. At one time, I probably agreed with between .27 and .45 of whatever you might believe if you attend a mainstream Americanestant Christian Church, assuming your beliefs add up to one, which seems the whole point of that faith anyway. My family has a probability of between .696 and .744 of agreeing with you (but not totally).

Anyway, the guy over here, Mr. Surrender, is surrendering his will. That's fine, but I wonder if he'll stay up tonight wondering how you surrender your will to an omnipresent/omniscient being without having already surrendered your will, thus negating the process, and if indeed the entirety of existence is under the control of Mr. O/O, how anyone at anytime is not surrendering their will. Even if they don't. I know I would. So, anyway, his surrendering is wrapping up, I hope he feels some peace, but really, before my will gets surrendered (voluntarily?), I would expect some answers to a lot more difficult questions than he has asked. Or does the questioning represent a lack of surrender, thus negating the existence (at least in your head, which is a whole nother can of existential worms) of Mr. O/O? I mean, if I shouldn't be able to move "...outside the will of [Mr. O/O]", does any movement at all not knowingly acknowledged by me to be voluntary mean that Mr. O/O will get offended and possibly in a smiting mood?

OK, So Mr. O/O hasn't smitten in a while. That does not seem a real probability to worry about. I mean, even if you think that Mr. O/O smote Sodom and G-Town for Sodomites doing Sodomite things², then it would stand to reason that he would smite every town with an established YMCA. That has not happened. In fact, out of the high number of human settlements, only two have been so treated. This is fairly reassuring as their has to have been more than a million towns with greater than 100 people established at this point in history, and given that any group of more than 100 people has wildly less than a 1% chance of avoiding the scurge. So, a city has about about a 4,500,000:1 chance of being smote in its entire existence, usually hundreds or thousands of years. Or smitten. Smitten sounds more pleasant, not that those words really matter. Basically, it doesn't happen. And considering the downward trend in smiting since wide-spread literacy, I feel safe from random firestorms. The jury is still out on hurricanes.

I'm not saying Mr. Surrender is making a bad decision, I'm just telling you why I would find it difficult. Now, studying holy writ is a fun way to spend some time. I love it, actually. More interesting is to get into it. Seriously into it. Pull out your Unger's and your Strong's and your Placher. If you want to study the Bible, don't just study the words on the page, that makes no sense. Study the book. Study the canon choices and the individual personalities responsible for your doctrine (hint: the majority are nowhere in your Bible).

So, the guy is now surrendered and so forth, at least, he feels "it is all clear, now,"³ I assume he must have picked up something I missed over there. Selah. He is currently getting a lecture from Mr. Gold Leaf Pages that surrender today might be tough tomorrow. And that those doubts are just "feelings" and that "that's what faith is for."

Kind of a confusing phrase. What exactly is faith beyond a feeling? It is not a tangible gas, solid, or liquid. It must be a feeling, which leaves nothing else. So, if feeling is first (thanks, e.e.), is faith possible without doubt? Isn't faith defined by doubt, or more accurately, a persons response to doubt?

Now they are making plans for a coming retreat. For those of you not in the know about such things, a "retreat" is where everyone with the same beliefs runs off to the woods to agree with each other. Surrender one day, retreat the next. Onward Christian Soldiers must have been about a different breed. Somewhere St. George is cringing.

Quite the murky pool Mr. Surrender just stumbled into. I hope he at least asks enough questions to keep it fun.



<sup>1. I'm afraid it would be too offensive to say I hate the majority of Christianity's doctrines since they quit getting ate, so I won't.
1. And nowhere in the Bible says it was.
2. His exuberance is lost here.</sup>

Reclamation of the Relics

I feel I owe you all an explanation. It's not that I don't care.

Every so often for the last few months I have written about liquid feminine perfection. I have breathlessly and talentlessly gushed about a woman. I am sure you are tired of hearing about her. I know my friends are. At least I assume so.

She was here. And there. In the vermillon red moderately high energy fluvial deposits of Onion Creek and Castle Canyon. And I have nothing. She went back home and I am beer drunk and whiskey high. See this: there are big thoughts and heavy words strewn about in my cluttered head.

We went to see Nina Storey, the sort of woman I would find myself powerlessly attracted to in a normal state of affairs, but I found myself distracted. Turned away. She tore the songs up and proved she deserves to be making money at being awesome, but I was only semi hearing her. I was distracted by candle light and brown eyes. Not really brown. More of sphalerite. Not the clear stuff. The rich and earth of virgin soil mineral full of zinc and (astounding) crystalline (perfect) beatific (indescribable) beauty.

My sister, whom I would hastily die for, got married this weekend. Her moment as a princess reclaimed seems such a minor footnote to the amazing central plot of the weekend which was a body in a blue dress and a neck wearing jewelry crafted by thin perfect hands.
I feel so fortunate. I have ignored you all. Sorry.

Not really.

Sleeper

I heard back East they got sections of the paper called “I saw you.”

I'm not sure what exactly it's for or why anyone would care that someone seen them walking around a park or feeding birds top-end sourdough breadcrumbs around a statue or running with the blue shorts and the tanktop t-shirt flashing mineral sweat through small groomed pores and meditating on concrete and trendy mp3s. It don't make any sense to me, but I'm not a huge fan of bulk-lot quantity humanity. Noticing anybody at all seems a waste of sensual apparati.

But I saw you, you fucking punk.

About the time I agreed with an untrendy mp3 about making a pretty woman love me, no matter what I do. My sweat was wet through with the hot sun and darkened by work. A broke car, a wounded beast of unnecessary burden, lay without the ability to generate 12 volts of alternating current to power its heart next to me. My knuckles bled into the yellow dirt and into the greasy heart of one of Dodge's biggest mistakes. The bass player pedaled the fifth for an interminable moment while you drove by and then Albert King rewrote the fucking book of Genesis with stars screaming flashing woman's hips bends of detuned steel gut guitar string. Not a huge deal, really.

I built a motor once. During my summer of speed and cheap women.

The 400M hulked on the engine stand while me and Jake run a hone up and down the cylinder jackets. We had the block stripped naked and dipped and bored thirty thousandths of an inch over the old cylinder radii. The air conditioning pump, smog pump, and any other extraneous homage to comfort or ecological responsibility was left in the mud. We loaded the heavy steel crank, the longest stroking crank offered in a Ford V8, and the rest of the rotating stock into the block. We dropped in the RV cam 12 degrees ahead of the factory timing, Nader be damned. We had the heads polished, satin in the intake ports, mirrored in the exhaust. The heads got stiffer springs to fight back the power of larger cam lobes. The rods were manganese steel.

The manifold was a Wieland aluminum piece of industrial art. The carburetor was an old school Holley with four barrels of 950 cubic feet a minute air delivery, manual choke, stainless steel fuel line. We took out his bondo, primer, and oxidation red Torino's tired 302 . We locked a 2100 RPM stall converter on the front of the C4 transmission since the Ford Motor Company's four hundred cubic inch displacement modified block is a goddamn torque monster with a habit of eating drive lines for lunch. The 400 barely fit in the engine compartment, the headers barely cleared the crossmember. We ripped out the electronic ignition modules, vacuum choke controllers, sensors, and little Detroit mystery boxes from the firewall and fenders. The entire electronic compliment of underhood electronics consisted of ten wires.

The posi rear end turned a couple 235 45 R 16's on black spoke Kragers. We prowled the streets in that monster. We rumbled and screamed down the country two lanes that now sport turning lanes and stoplights and subdivisions with streets named after the flora and fauna and streams they displaced.

That car was an ugly stripped down straight line machine with a fire breathing monster under the hood. That's what you call a sleeper, kids.

I saw you drive by, and I'm pretty sure you saw me. We didn't wave. I think I saw you the other day, too. With your thin wisp of English major goatee on that cherubic marshmallow face. I didn't recognize you right away, and honestly I was distracted by pumped and strained muscles I had been pushing to their limits in the gym and sore hands from working the heavy bag into a pulp.

I saw you. Anticipating what you probably knew would be your fate the day we met again. We have history. You went white. Whiter.
You've always been a bitch.

A Hand

Alright, who wants to be me? Seriously. I have too much going on over here and I am lagging on commitments, namely The Five.

So, we'll do it this way, all you guys have a grasp of the english language and/or how to mock me, so here's your chance. If you're interested, comment or email and let me know by tomorrow afternoon. It's not that hard, The Five is one of the easiest projects ever(!), so if you feel like not being a bitch, give it a shot. There is a catch.

I already have half of my contribution done, so anything you add will be added to my half completed post. I will not tell anyone which half is mine and which half is yours. So, you must sound better at being me than me.

Good luck.

Barely Worth Noting

An unotable source of some consternation has seen fit to make a big deal recently of one of my links.

I try not to take the jibe too seriously, considering the marginal nature of her webspace. Still, I wish she had linked when I had something better than a drunken and otherwise affected tribute to Thoreau and Douglas Adams up. She has truly proven to be a pain in the ass.

Seriously, scroll past it. See? I can write. I write better than anyone I know. And yet I get linked the day I Marley myself out and have a little too much fun.

No Comma

Perhaps possibly even odds are that drinking almost, but not quite, exactly nothing like half way not stoned is not a good idea. With some expedited instruction and reservation of indirect nature I can redirect habits leading to the ramble of perhaps a little too few commas and perhaps even remotely probably too much wine running the digits that reside on idle hands.

Without heart and soiled sullen soul and still without commas and residing silence in phrases set forth upon run ons to all hell and back through pearly gates of unchecked meta-discourse running through and in and over the sea of somewhat circuitous prose still not involving commas if it can at all be helped can I still dissuade the casual reader from putting up with this meandering washing and swashing breaking wave of semi lucid dream running type?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Brevity is the key. Brevity.

Simple declarations tell truth. Of what purpose are questions. To find truth in declaration. They exist for that purpose. No other. They do not flow. They do not run. They stand. They are. They will.

If I were to buy cabin making materials and live on a pond, thoroughly ensconced in old world, formal, all together unintelligibly intelligent, though running at time at length not acceptable, short of the occasional blurb of pondside ecological matter, I would buy those materials, all of them practical and of quality suitable but not over providing, from a poor Irish family, and there is rarely another type, who would provide me fuel, precious and reassuring, of my own stereotypes.

Comma splices are prevalent and always lurking, waiting for your inspiration, your thought. They rest on the tip of your pinky, tempting and illegal. Like that early 18th summer of mine, i was still young. When I found that girl attractive, fifteen.

Should this wine run itself out? I think not.

This Girl

She defies explanation and diction. She makes grammar a hobble and prose a noose tightening. I cannot explain her but to explain all others. And all others are pathetically explainable.

There are only five types of women on this planet.

You have your earth women. They are immobile and immutable. Their movements are so slow as to be invisible and their hearts are molten iron. To the earth, your time is a joke. They laugh at your goals as you die and they lock you in their icy chest for the other life they keep on and in them to find and consume. They never respond save to vent and explode when they can no longer contain their heat. They give you shelter if you are willing to dig it out of them and they give you food if you are willing to plant and cultivate it in their uncaring skin. They are beautiful. They display the history of eons before you when they split and rumble and heave. They remind you that you are not the first and that you will not be the last. When you freeze on their steppes they forget you to the life they host. They do not let you escape. They hold you to them in their hard body by dark forces of gravity. They let you see the stars, but shackle you with their disconsolate gravity drawing you down to them. I have known earth women. When they leave, they leave nothing. They are all consumed by the sun eventually.

Then you have air women. They ride in on their own wings and move into you. They set up their souls against the heat and cold and surface. They enter your body through processes of living and power you and your cells, though their argon hearts beat for no one and have been consumed for eons before you. They live inside you and around you, but never allow you to become them or they to become you. They roll up into the heavens and return unchanged. They are always there, though you can't see them. When they move, they cool or heat or destroy, but stay out of sight. You never see them come and never see them go. Their size is huge. They are spread through everywhere but they move at will. When they move into you, they move you. They push you through them and into them, but never let you get away. They love you with tender breezes and they hate you with forceful gusts. The most you can hope of them is that they do not leave. They will not be yours. You can not own the air. It is not bordered or collected, not totally. I have known air women. When they leave, they leave you gasping and choking on your own hemorrhaging throat.

There are fire women. They are never ignored. They are lovely and lithe and always showing themselves to you. They show themselves to everyone. In a dark room, one small fire draws the eyes of all others. You can not control them. You can only keep them fed and consuming and they are always consumed. When you no longer can feed her, you have to either give her away or watch her starve and die. They are never free of themselves. They can only eat and breathe. They take the mass of your copper dreams and the hardness of your tin future and catalyze you into a mighty weapon. They draw you into them when the air and the earth have grown cold. They burn you when you try to hold them. They are not to be controlled, they are to be cajoled and influenced. When they leave your influence, they must die or they will take from you your home and family and life. They are untouchable by nature and sickly by right. I have known fire women. When they leave, they leave only evidence that you once fed them.

Water women are alive. They move in and out through the low spots of your earth gouging them gently ever lower. They scour the gouges and scrapes in your surface covering and cooling and deepening them. They lick across your scorched deserts and make you tremble with their dam breaking flow. They eat you away and you love it. They transport all weathered parts of you farther away. They find where you are dessicated and light off the silver fuses of life waiting. When you need them, you need only them. All others are forsaken. They will allow you in their shallows to cool and soothe. When you plunge to their depths, they grow in pressure until they enter your lungs and your ears and your mind. They destroy you by nature of their depth. You drown trying to sip and sip away while you are sucked out of salt. They are there for you and they are unlikely to happen just anywhere. They live in the clouds and shade you until they become too heavy to move and then they fall. I have known water women. They never really leave you, they just disappear to return and return again.

Metal women exist. They live in and out of the rocks finding their way to the surface riding hydrothermal chargers up into the soil. They explode up into the mountains to wait on you. You have to seek them and dig for them and carry them away on your back. They are heavy and compact. They expect much and reward much. They will serve you after you sweat over a forge and hammer and slave yourself into slick sweat. They reward you with small trinkets or plows or swords. Their hearts and skin are cold. When you fight through the chill with fires stoked and accelerated by your constant slaving, you might be able to get some cooperation. Not everyone can smith metal. They take effort and perseverance and the reward is slight. After they reward you, you must polish and hone and oil forever or they will return to the earth and air. I have known metal women, when they leave, they are melded in another's forge to be another for them.

Those are the five types of women, save one.

This girl is the ether and the universe. Earths move through her rosewood hair and she breaths in water through her alabaster skin. She lives and lives again in the fire and the fire is in her and becomes her rutilated argentite eyes. When the sun shines on her, she is the light and the heat. When the sea calls to me, this girl answers with fingers running rivers over the deserts of my self. Her fine hands are stained black with bronze and silver from her crafting of music and beauty.

I have slept on the Earth, cold and shivering waiting for day. I have slept on the ocean, floating in a box of death and fuel. I have slept above fires propelling a city of men to another continent to destroy and rained down our own fires upon it. I have slept in the air, the sun and moon guiding and comforting the drab metal machines rocketing me from one life to another. When I sleep with her, time is no longer. My future and my past, both spotty and of some disrepute, fall away and the earth spins to the ground and fires inside me quell down under waters she brings and air she breaths onto me. When I lay and watch her sleep I am rested. When I sleep with her watching, dreams go away. Possibilities explode and contract and dance the universe into its unfolding.

Fiction Friday

More of the same.

“This is Jim Stiles. He'll get you started on some work,” the woman stood at the door to the small closet turned into an office, her official hands taken in a shallow wringing motion, she stared at John Pine.

Thank you, ma'am. I really appreciate your help. In everything.

His words drove through her tired eyes and tired hands pulling her and lulling her. She stood in the doorway with unofficial thoughts and unreasonable hopes. “Okay, John. I...”

Words hung in the dust swirling hair in the dust halo of government fluorescent light.

“I'll be leaving you two. Bye.”

An old pair of eyes watched the woman from the desk. Were he a younger and wholer man, he would have unofficial thoughts about Judith, the woman in charge of processing the wayward into new lives here in the den of public assistance. He saw her flush and her loitering. His eyes, older than his smile knew what was happening. Humanity had come calling Ms. Judith. She waved a small frantic wave and turned away from her charge. The door closed behind her.

The sheaf of papers on the table found its way into his hands. He looked down through the bottom lens of his bifocals, searching for pertinence on the tall man in his office. “Have a seat, Mr. Pine.”

John, sir.

“John. Good. Says here you know how to do plenty. Farm kid?”

Yes, sir.

“Jim. Farm kids always know how to do everything but act right. Anyway, I see you done your time in the service. Army myself. Couple'a tours in Vietnam.”

He gestured at his arm. The western cut shirt was twisted and tucked in where his right forearm once was, now a shiny steel hook protruded. “They call 'em IEDs anymore. Back then we just called 'em 'FUCK!'”

John laughed a quiet, self conscious laugh.

“Got half my right leg too, VA gave some bullshit stump stick to walk on. A while back, the office took up a kitty to get me a new one for my twentieth anniversary here at The Center. You gotta laugh about it. Otherwise I'd of went nuts. Besides, it's an excuse not to get a real job. Says here you know some carpentry?”

When I was younger I done a lot of it.

“Them days are gone. You gotta have a social security card and a background check just to flip burgers anymore. Speaking of which, we do need to run a check on you, before you work for any of our guys, policy. Anything I should know about?” gray eyebrows arched.

No. I had a clearance.

“Alright, it'll take a little bit for it to come back if you had a clearance. Where they put you up?”

Coyote Canyon.

“Jesus, I'm sorry. Let me do something real quick...”

His one hand put down the papers and picked up a phone receiver. After tucking it in to his shoulder above the absent arm, he dialed. Silence fell on the room.

“Yeah, Taco John, how the hell are ya? Good. Good. You still here? Come up and see me for a minute.”

The phone rested back in the cradle. Papers were recovered.

“Any problems seeing or telling time there, John Pine?”

No, sir.

The door opened heavy. A short and round man entered with skin the color of the Earth. His T-shirt, covered in saw dust, advertised a local breast cancer benefit 5k from 1998.

“Taco John, this is Mr. Pine. Says he can see good and can tell time.”

Taco John scratched under his ample overhanging belly. “Can you run a tape measure, there Mr. Pine?”

Sure enough.

“I need someone to cut some rabbits and glue for me while I do all the technical stuff in my shop like sleep in my chair and drink Coronas.”

The R's rolled shallow. John Pine nodded.

Stackable dado or router?

“Both. Be by my place tomorrow by seven. This gimp over here'll tell you how to get there.”

“I'll let him know to follow the smell of beans. You know how to starve a Mexican, Sargent Pine?”

John sat uncomfortably. No.

“Hide his food stamps under his work boots.”

Taco John laughed. “Motherfucker. That's a good one, Cap'n Hook. I need to get down to that new burger place on Morrison and take some measurements. I'll see ya tomorrow, John.”

Yes sir.

Jim speaks, “Yeah, me and Taco John, his name is really Juan, go way back. He's piror Air Force. Well, grab up your stuff, we got a bus pass and a bag of goodies we can give you to get started out right. Mostly crap, but it has some hygiene stuff, too. I know how you Jar-rines like to smell perty. Looks like your background check come through alright,” a conspiratorial smile crept onto his face and a stamp pressed onto the sheaf.

Jim Stiles deftly replaces a paper clip on the sheaf of papers that is John Pine inside the block building. The bag at John's feet hefts off of the cold and dirty tile floor. He stands up and follows Jim Stiles, lopsided and limping out of the room.

Fucking Full Metal Warrior Monkey

Yes, a fucking full-metal warrior monkey.

I have heard all the regular zodiac bullshit in my life. I am convinced you can not date a woman without getting a whole heaping load of horse shit about what your birthday means. Usually whatever they got out of some gas station rolled up horoscope. What the stars have to do with my movements through life makes no goddamn sense. There's more than one latitude on this planet, thus trying to determine what the hell you are based on what stars are where is illogical at best.

So I put up with it. Women put out. I like that.

Besides, my sign being some OCD cleaning lady virgin makes no damn sense if you have known me for five minutes.

Then I looked up my Chinese sign on a whim. That crap you see on restaurant placemats? Bullshit. If you look deeper, the zodiac gets deep as hell. First off, there are three animals, not one, and they are all complicated by the five classical elements of Asian persuasion.

You got your regular old egg foo yung animal, that's the one based on your year. That is what you project to others. Meaning: it is not who you are, but what you seem to be. So, the least important is what ends up on your year sign. also, if your birthday is before March, you probably have your sign wrong. Dumbass. My sign there is metal monkey. More on that later.

The inner animal is determined by your birth month. A corrected agricultural calendar, but a very accurate one as far as classical calendars go. This is who you are, basically. This is your behavioral motivation. When you get pissed off at the guy who cuts in on you in line and you want to strangle him, if that is your reaction, that is your inner animal. My inner animal is a yang-metal monkey. Metal has a dichotomous relationship with pretty and war. I am not the pretty. I am not the cute little ring, I am the forged blade and the graphite bronze shield. I am the death monkey.

Now, this complicates matters for most. Their inner animal is not their outer animal. They are not what they seem. Now, it is statistically unlikely (something like 5X5X12X12:1) that a person would be the same element-animal. And I am.

There is a deeper level to the zodiac. It is the secret animal. Secret animals are what you were born to be. They are the part of you that actually strangles the motherfucker who cut in that line. The secret animal goes off the suns position at the hour of your birth. Not real complicated if you have a handy farmer's almanac. I was born in the hour of the monkey. Meaning, take that first probability, which comes out to 3600:1 and multiply it by twelve. You get 43,200:1. I am one special motherfucker destined for conquering.

It also means something yours probably doesn't. I am exactly what I seem to be. I am not complicated. I am a driven martial attitude connected to motivated killer balls the size of several mid-size SUV's. I feel like Wild Turkey.

Gone

I'm in Denver this week.

So don't expect much.

She rests easy

She rests easy on the mind, but heavy. Her movements are never hurried. Her mind never screaming steam fitting ready to blow like mine. She does not drink whiskey.

I met her with a beard and a bottle of bourbon. She did not know how to two step. I did not know how to talk to someone so amazingly astoundingly beautiful with eyes like polished garnet, eyes like lost positrons forever falling past untold event horizons.

I told her something about wine, blood, and red rocks.

Stupid country songs about girls make sense in the pale noen halo and under the cascading swirling silver angels shining from silver globes on the ceiling.

Her mahogany hair matted down and shone with her sweat. The copper glistening skin of those around purples and reds in the club lighting. Her white skin for me. Her salt neck for me. Her small mouth for me and mine.

We left and drove and drove interminably driving the drunks home. We were sober from drink, drunk with air, dry and glowing and desert. Giggling laughing and noise behind us, we sit in shared silence. Anticipation. Something else.

She walks into the room, showered. Unashamed of wearing little. She makes it hard to breathe. My my square jawed steely eyed nerve, all that I am and all that I have, leaves me in her and is lost to her. Truth.

True things are whispered. And gasped. And lost forever. In greater bounding. Truths. Life is appetites. Mine are great. I want much and better. Morning.

That morning, officially the last remaining hope of us being a one night stand. We stood on a cliff and held hands. Her fingers through mine. I explained true things. Rocks pushing and bulging. The appetites of time. Lost to her. I said something ridiculous about fate.

I don't believe in fate. I don't. I said it.

She stood on the cliff and held my hand, in the dwindling coliseum, the crumbling cathedral to the red sand desert dunes hundreds of feet high towering into the graveyards and testimonies of brackish river sands and conglomerated river gravel calcite beauty.

We knew sand and cedar and sage. And each other. In the riparian moonlight along the cottonwoods and tailwater stream.

Heartaches and Grease

I start every day with at least four eggs and three pieces of bacon covered in roasted chili peppers. When I'm feeling the need for more mass, I fry up pan biscuits and use the rendered fat of the bacon to make gravy. In my defense I use whole wheat. On occasion, I have a beer or a little whiskey with breakfast. Just enough to open up those chilis.

I am aware this is not healthy. That being said, my family with it's tradition of longevity, barring production of ever more creepy charcoal self portraits in a mirror and then giving you brain a buckshot ride at a young age, is based on various rendered animal fats swimming in flour and whole fat milk. Gravy for those of you uninitiated. As well as over easy eggs, breaded and fried animals adorable enough to find their way into bitch-ass zoological parks on the Coasts. Whiskey gets an honorable mention. As does homemade fruit wine.

I look out of the window of a life that seems to have found its way good and gone anymore. The Jcrew crowd is closing in. I have gravel and grit where others have polish. Listening to me read poetry is like using an adz for trim work. Hearing me use pretty words is like watching a surgeon with a cleaver. Like RDX, aluminum oxide, and polymerizer trying to usher in peace and democracy.

As soon as my short arms could reach the trigger around the butt of a gun, I was taught to shoot. I've been hunting longer than I've been reading, and that is impressive as my mom taught me how to read in the sleeper of a semi hauling flammables through the scorched silver highways lost in miles of red desert around the age of three. When I was possibly four, I was hunting out on the rim of the Escalante with my father and a few other of the Brethren. My brothers and I had the job of walking unarmed through the bottom of a draw, the wardens were out and were weren't of legal hunting age. We were to flush the game while my father and one of the Brethren walked above us on the ledge ready to shoot down into the draw should food present itself. By far, I was the youngest and smallest there. Bear and mountain lion were pretty heavy down there back then. I asked, as tough as I could muster, what I should do about the cougars if they decided I was food presenting itself to them. My father, with some great ceremony, pulled from its holster a bone handled hatchet. He put it in my hand, which was barely able to grasp the thick handle. He put his diesel smelling hand on my head and told me with preacher's conviction in his eyes, “If you don't fight back, you ain't my son.”

We got a couple does and a buck.

In the fading orange sun of Colorado dusk in wildfire season, he would drill us. We had to know how to fight, how to speak, how to introduce ourselves, and how to treat ladies. We also had to know how to field a grounder, how to grab the ball by the laces and send it flying, how to leg tackle, how to chop block, and how to suck it up when we got beat up. If we cried or limped out
when us boys were engaged in the fray of brother wrestling matches, he would jerk us up to stand up straight and threaten us with something to cry about. He would remind us of our one immutable family law: If you ain't bleeding, you can't cry.

I wish he had taught us more important skills. Like how to chisel a customer. How to lie. How to bring your conscience under control when principle gets in the way of comfortable living. How to leave a woman and leave her casual. I have none of those important life skills.

On the other hand, I'm doing alright. For a kid who got his first pocket knife when he was still in onesies.

Still Lame

Out here, with the night creeping in on the edges of a dusk reality, life breathes slow. The insects scream and chirp. The frogs holler out for company of a fellow lukewarm companion. I missed it terribly when I was gone.

That first night back, I laid down in a borrowed bed and buried my dreams in the fabric of life. I had nothing to tell anyone before I went under the spell of night. I had nowhere to be. In my own way, I had no friends. In my own way, I had no life. The patterns of life lived wore into my tired soul. I knew I needed them, those tracks in my skin and in my head. The tracks that hinted at my soul's torn and tired flagging in a long night of dying to self. There was no self left after five years of love and killing. My eyes would close, but the racket of all the screaming life kept me awake.

Thirty five tons of machine had been landing above me, barely thirty feet of steel and working men was all between me and that noise. I slept as I never have under all that noise in a two foot box. In my other stations I had lived in poor ghettos where the sounds of life took on the screaming noises of people. Parties and cars and loud thudding sorts of music. I had slept there in that noise fine. I could sleep through that.

I laid here that first night home. On my queen sized bed that seemed so obscenely large after the life I had lived before, that friends were still living. That I still lived in steel and nitrate dreams. I could not sleep.

Noises would startle me awake with their random sounds of life. I would wake and jolt up, searching for threats. My heart would rocket off into tachycardic who knows what. My breathing would slowly return to me. The little white country room in a little white country house would return to me. So would She.

As a ghost. As a ghoul. She was supposed to be home with me someday. Not living in a hotel working, as they say. She was not supposed to be left behind.

My eyes closed and I listened to the symphony of chaos. I couldn't sleep.

What a Bullshit Return

I got a hotrod Ford and a two dollar bill.

Indeed. I also have an empty glass smelling of lightning jet fuel mineral smelling vapors. Those vapors, the remnant of a raptured Kentucky church of spirituous beauty, will shortly be replaced by more of Austin Nichol’s finest. The liquid is growing frost in my freezer, acquiring icy love of the first or fifth order. Importantly, there are five platonic solids, and damned if they all mean at least something to mineralogy with the exception of the most complicated and most numerously vectored among them. Yes, there is in fact a naturally occurring pentagonal dodecahedron in nature. We like to call it pyrite. Any pyrite, really. Five sides on the crystal faces, twelve separate non-intersecting vectors, fucking cooler than hell. Much like that one girl, the honky-tonking woman, the one that knows her rank well. In fact some of this stuff down here under heaven is just cooler than hell.

Anyway. The point is this:

Where have all the men gone? Where have they left to? Let me forgo the defining of the breed, you know them when you meet them. Or at least you should.

Why are there so many weak boys? Why are there so many of my sex that are such worthless specimens of the species? Why do they hurt my friends? Why do they make them cry?

I have no answer. They are weak, and in that weakness, they hurt my friends. I cannot abide by such action. Their activities raise up in me the warrior tendencies I have since sandy diesel stained murders tried to put to bed. I hate them. I hate that they hurt my friend.

Men are strong. With strength of any ilk comes the responsibility to protect. Whether your creator is God or selection, our human species depends on the strong defending the precious. When those jello-spined males do not live up to their role, the role of proactive manhood, of not being a little bitch, they hurt my friends and they insult my manhood. I want those males to hurt in turn. I want to make them cry.

I am no longer violent. But I can say this:

I have spilled enough real innocent beautiful human blood for bullshit ideology and capital gain that breaking a nose on general fucking principle is not going to keep me awake at night.

I hate that about myself.

Choose Your Own Damn Title

You know what? I'm bored with this.

I really don't want to do this anymore. This constant creativity. I'll still be around, and I'm sure I'll be back, but it will be a while. Maybe a month or two, maybe a week or two. I have a vague idea of a post I might put up in the next few days, but I don't know how to write it and I'm tired of this writing crap.

That doesn't mean I'm not going to stop by and say nice things to those who need it or mean things to those who need it (GSR). In other words, I'm not gone, just not being productive. Besides, I have drag races to go to. And mountain biking to do. And people to associate with.

So, anyway, that was that.

I'll email all interested parties when I decide to restart this thing. Or if I kill it off more effectively than this little message.

I'll still be playing around occasionally at The Five, and you're all welcome to stop by.

Arnold

So camping didn't happen. That's fine, I guess. Next week I go up to see the drags in Denver, but the week after I'm free.

Here and there I've been missing someone. A couple of them, really. At this point it's just gotten complicated to say I miss people. This one was a friend of mine who taught me important things. When to plant turnips. How to start grape cuttings. How to use old crankcase oil and spent gasoline to make smudgepots. Smudgepots are important. They keep fruit alive. He taught me how to irrigate and how to conserve water, never taking more than the absolute minimum. He taught me how to start a tractor using the crank start under the radiator. We spent years talking often under the shade of his shed. I kept up his house as time murdered his bones.

He told me over time about his life. The man had a grasp of the tragic, but he kept a grasp also of the comic. Good guys marry crazy bitches, apparently.

He died and I missed his funeral. I never got to hang out with him on his way out of this world. I was off in The Gulf. He saw one more war take away a friend of his before he resigned himself to the ground he had made his living.

I always miss him around this time of year. He died right after the Fourth.

I'm Leaving

I'll be gone for a while. Not cryptically gone. Not OMG! I'm leaving forEVER!

I'm just not going to be near any sort of networkish trash. I have a holiday to remember not to drink during, a boat-ramp-side memorial/fishing trip and burial-at-lake service (welcome to Colorado), and maybe a camping trip if the funds to get out of town come available. I also have this murderous physical training routine I have been subjecting myself to since by all current information, I'm still leaving soon. Important? Probably not.

Fiction Friday

The sequel to this.

The bus ground into second gear. The driver, short and ugly in the way of the unlucky, knew not to expect much from this particular bus. CCT No. 1125 was not known for legendary ability. The driver hated CCT No. 1125. This bus had a bad habit of stranding the driver with a couple dozen angry passengers along the trashy highways of his route. CCT No. 1125 smoked terribly, and the old sealing along the windows, long since been dried and rotted away by long, hot summers of dust and wind, let in exhaust fumes that had led to a number of vomit cleanups. The failures of the transit system, especially on this route, through this area where desolation sat on the terrain, were taken out on the driver. The driver by nature was a sensitive man. His wife had left him for a man less sensitive, but more assertive and exciting. Somewhere he had children who shared his eyes, his mouth and nose, but held the hand of an exciting (and taller) man.

He held the throttle down and cursed the Detroit 318 groaning and screaming against its governed maximum speed. CCT No. 1125 had no air conditioning. The passengers and the driver sweat in unison.

A passenger sat in the back of the bus, his leg over the faded green bag rescued earlier from the official carpet. A plastic shopping bag rested in his lap, still new. Inside the bag was a collection of the cheapest hygiene and food items that money could buy. When starting a life, the system of public assistance does not equip the journeyman well. John Pine sat straight and rigid, cheap headphones in his ears connected by a many times repaired wire to an equally cheap portable CD player. Music flooded his brain. Old Dylan tracks pushed out the cloud of angst and anxiety that wanted to erupt. John was not one to ride a bus. He had never attempted in his adult life, at least the last few chaotic years of it, to ride a bus, train, or plane without music.

Outside his window, the life and death struggle of CCT No. 1125 against the hill and the heat was ebbing down. Diesel fumes and chaos lingering on the fringes of his mind were giving him a headache. His sweat was not the sweat of uncomfortable heat. There was heat, heat from the sun beating down on the passengers; a beat up woman with bony arms and self-inflicted scratch wounds, a young boy of several recognizable races and probably one or two hidden, two skinny chocolate colored women in Wendy’s uniforms cooing softly in Spanish, a dilapidated waste of man wearing a white sleeveless shirt and an expression of either boredom or sadness, and a slew of the underground and unseen workers of every community. John’s sweat was of fear, and it soaked his heaving T-Shirt and ran down his pulsing neck. His eyes were closed against the onslaught of vision.

The driver, his charge rounding over Coyote Wash Hill spoke into his microphone, “Coyote Canyon, 3rd and Morrison.” Then went back to hating a man more exciting (and taller) than he. He expertly, but absently, pulled the bus into the bay of gravel and weeds that passed for a bus stop. A sign, long since riddle with bullet holes of various calibers, hung loosely from its post with a picture of a friendly bus welcoming the types of people who have to ride a bus.

John gasps, garnering the attention of a small child hanging on his mother’s arm. He stands with slightly more enthusiasm than most would have to leave a bus. The bag again makes a twisting journey on to the shoulder of John Pine. The bag speeds toward the front of the bus where a door, an escape, hangs open. The aisles trip him and cause stumbles that he does not notice. The door is closer. The last obstacle of the stairs flies past and he’s safe on the ground.

“You alright, buddy?”

The voice comes from the driver’s seat while John bends almost double panting in the dust and sun, his shaggy dust colored hair hanging over his face. A beaten and dried and cracked hand waves the driver off.

Thank you, I’m fine. Thanks. Sir. I’m fine.