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Something Heavy Coming Down

2007-12-28T14:38:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-12T05:57:00.000-08:00

For now, and for a while.

For Momentary Academic

2007-12-11T08:19:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-06T15:44:00.000-08:00

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)

2007-12-03T10:07:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-27T18:24:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-25T17:00:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-15T20:16:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-13T09:15:00.001-08:00

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!

2007-11-11T08:01:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-08T09:12:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-07T20:30:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-06T16:03:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-04T15:44:00.000-08:00

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

2007-11-01T11:55:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-02T09:01:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-28T11:14:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-19T13:19:00.000-07:00

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.

^{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.}

Reclamation of the Relics

2007-09-18T08:30:00.000-07:00

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

2007-09-10T20:29:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-30T16:30:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-28T20:31:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-27T22:03:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-23T22:13:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-16T13:38:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

I'm in Denver this week.

So don't expect much.

She rests easy

2007-08-09T17:29:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-02T11:25:00.000-07:00

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

2007-08-01T20:34:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-31T21:06:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-10T11:08:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-06T15:11:00.000-07:00

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

2007-07-03T10:29:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-29T19:43:00.000-07:00

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.

Fuck a Lexus

2007-06-27T15:18:00.001-07:00

I hate dumb hot chicks. They're like V6 Cameros. Sure they look good cruising around, but they just don't got it when your put your foot in them. Why is this important? By way of explanation:

A fucking Camero can lick my crack. All chromed up like some two dollar whore in Fresno who won't leave you alone because you're a white guy broke down on the wrong side of King's Ave. That shit is annoying. Shit, give me one of them Road Runners. Ass like a ton of bricks, nose like a shovel, hub caps off the county trucks, that shit is like that librarian chick with the horn rim glasses and the skirt down to her knees. She will destroy a Camero. Yeah, she ain't covered in chrome and metal flake paint, but she's got some hardware that will ruin your shit.

Yeah, give me a Galaxie. Let me get a hold of that 390 HP split-head V8 with the high rise cam and the Holley pushing out four barrels of "this is the best damn country on Earth." I want that Gallie talking back. Take your "smooth throttle response" and "responsible torque curve" and shove it up your well formed ass. I want to feel the throttle arm moving and the cable sliding in its housing. I want to feel that power valve kick over and those back two barrels of oxygen and love and gasoline explode into the ports of the manifold.

I want to feel the pistons, that huge bored out beast of hell, come up and strike top dead center. I want to feel the power stroke live and die in the veins of physical reality. I want to experience that piston defying metallurgical limits to return on its charger of hot rolled steel. Let me hear the explosion of spent gas rocketing to its cooling doom out the valve and through a set of headers. Then I want to hear the cylinder reborn hard. I want to hear the suction from the valves through a carburetor, pissed off and starving.

Fuck your hot chick with her fuel injection and 20 inch wheels. I want my girl complicated and finicky about how I treat her, not about what I feed her. Take that Lexus and show it off to your office buddies. I'll be the one on the line. In the tubbed out flat black Ford. I prowl after your Lexus. I'll race you for pinks. And that pink slip you treasure will be mine. We'll go gun for gun. You can't appreciate my tastes. Unlike you, I can keep that ass on the ground. I can keep that dragon breathing fire. I don't need a hot PROM to tell my engine what to do. She does as she pleases.

And she pleases me. Only because I know how to work her.

Anthropomorphic Geology No. 3

2007-06-26T07:51:00.000-07:00

Bad news. That was the last beer.

I think I’ll live. I’ve lived through worse.

The wind’s coming in tonight over the desert, in through the door and over me laying here. The night loves me. Maybe, anyway, it’s always tough to tell. She just might. One desert night I spent out in the middle of a littoral gulf. I built death. I sucked in sand and diesel and blew out the end of dozens, hundreds of people who never offended me. Another sort of desert than this one, blowing in the open door, wrapped me up in the eddying and heated wind. That war was odd in that the two sides claimed the same God to be fighting for both sides. Out there, with the sand and hail and the technological might, I could believe that God was fighting with himself.

Not to say I am God, but I can empathize with his plight. I often fight great and fundamental battles with myself. When I do, however, I rarely cause more than a bloody nose or two.

One night I sat up on the rim of the Grand Mesa. The vista spread out from the basalt cap that had once been the bowl of an ancient valley. Those mountains around that high valley are gone downstream now, but the basalt, all that damn silica, is not easily eroded. Now the river valley of the old Colorado and the new Gunnison flows and buttresses the West Rim. The vista is about one hundred miles of visibility and 1.6 billion years of geological history. The storms blew in over the desert six thousand feet below me in sweeping cities of condensed moisture. The trains of the water cycle fell across the desert with grand gray and dark flourishes. Lightning reached out into the mud shale.

A year or two later, I lay on a bed far away from the Mesa. My hands traced Her skin like those clouds over the desert. Instead of graying clouds and traces of rain drops, I had skin turned copper by the nature of nautical living and fingers battered by countless arming wires. I loved Her in a very temporary way. Her skin, instead of the pale yellow of shale, was all obsidian, charcoal, and cinnamon. Her back was a gabbro silvered river valley in the moonlight. The trace of Her spine told of a sinewy stream and her so very female bulges were the graveled mounds of some ancient confluence of curious genetic rivers. Her skin sheened by sweat and heat out there where humidity is a way of life rippled like a million years of a river’s journey under my light touch. In the blue and amber light of that city, her contours and monoclines and buttresses stood out with that light tracing them. She knew we were not forever.

I wonder sometimes if the Earth has some sort of sentience we are just not able to perceive in our perception of time. When the fragile and most private skin of her is brushed by the rays of the sun or the fingertip of a river, does she shiver like that other masterpiece in city light and moist air?

I hope so. I would hate to think that this memory is mine and mine alone, fading like a vapor in my short time here on this planet.

I wonder if She still remembers me. When she lays back on whatever bed she calls her own, does she lie back and remember my touch in spite of the ring she must have on her finger by now? Whoever put that ring on her finger must have been able to love her better and more permanently than I. Does she trace the places my finger tips were, all copper on her obsidian, charcoal, and cinnamon skin?

I sort of hope so.

I’m a bastard like that.

Fiction Friday

2007-06-22T18:22:00.000-07:00

This has been a plan now for months. On Fridays, not every Friday, but more less around the end of some weeks, I want to post a quick fiction. Not stories, necessarily, but maybe parts of bigger stories. Or something. I don't know. Whatever.

The bag had seen better days. Time had worn worried furrows and the sun had licked off most of the drab color. Dust had reclaimed the bag, run its fingers into the folds and flaps and pores, and marked its ownership with shades of neutral brown and gray. The bag let a small cloud of dust escape into the air of the Office. The thick pile neutral maroon of the carpet with vacuum cleaner tracks visible told a tale of care and cleanliness that had escaped the bag, and its owner.

The owner of the bag had fought a war with decades and was still in the process of losing it. Around thirty hard years had come and sat their trains upon his paths. The years had not been kind in the sense of being undamaging, but had been bountiful in experience and in fullness. Sparseness possessed him throughout, his clothing, his grey eyes, his dust hair, and his wiry frame. Farmer lean muscle deferred to the cheap pocket T-shirt tucked into the worn and faithful jeans clinging to his frame. He and his faithful bag had lived a thousand miles of rough road and a thousand nights out on the outskirts of humanity. They did not belong in the Office. They were an insult to all that offices stand for.

Shuffling papers cut into the dry heat and uneasy silence. A pair of soft and milky hands with reasonable and painted nails riffled through the paper. After the official looking text had been sorted, parted, laid flat and stacked, the voice of the woman with the hands spoke through the silence and swirling dust.

“Last name?”

Pine

“First name?”

John

“Middle?”

None.

The one line questions came out with the familiarity of repetition and were answered with the sparseness of the man. City of birth? Permanent residence? Felon? Veteran? Service? Discharge? Date? Last mailing address? Mental health issues? Can you read? Are you willing to find employment? Do you want housing?

Monument, Idaho. None. No. Yes. Marines. Honorable, Zero Five June Zero Five. 386 Oak, Lodi California. No. Yes. Yes. Yes.

The rapid-fire questions and tapping of plastic keys stopped for a moment. The woman’s hands found each other and folded together. She leaned back in her sensible chair. Her eyes searched the man until she found humanity. The eyes of her face, aged by two boys with no father around, wrinkled a little and a kindness crept into her official face. She hated being official with her skirt suit, official haircut, official nametag, and faux-wood desk and faux-wood life of moving people and paper. She had to find reasons not to be official. Her eyes locked out the official story of John Pine, veteran, non-felon, homeless John Pine, and look at him through her human eyes. A pastor tells her and her sons every Sunday about how Jesus saw others. Maybe John Pine was Jesus, not likely, or remotely possible, but the thought helped her love her neighbor.

“So, Mr. Pine…”

John, ma’am.

“John. What skills do you have?”

I spent a few years before I was in doing some carpentry and construction, a little mechanicing here and there. Not to brag, but I can do anything, really. I mean to say I ain’t picky. Ma'am.

“Okay. We have some more paper work to do. I’ll be giving you a voucher for one month at Coyote Canyon, alright?”

Sure.

The bag hefts up out of the jungle of piled maroon. The dust of a dry summer breezes around the swirling figure of the bag as it makes its twisting journey from the floor to the spare and hard shoulder of the man. The weight settles onto his right shoulder with familiarity. Papers shuffle on the desk in a poker hand of bland bureaucracy. Twisted into a sheaf and stapled together, more added with paper clips, the paper takes the form of a packet that is slid into a manila envelope.

“Alright, Mr. Pine. Let’s go next door to the Job Center and I’ll get you started on your new life.”

Appreciate that, ma’am.

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

If you see anything glaringly stupid I did, let me know. Thanks

I Am Not In The Cult Of Genius

2007-06-20T08:59:00.000-07:00

Note: This was written while I was in a very hostile mood, I might not really believe all of this here in the morning (Update: I don't). Also, I borrowed heavily from Ray Wylie Hubbard's version of This Mornin' I Am Born Again.

I despise drama. The sick whining and pathetic grind of a thousand little and insignificant monkeys with their little boxes of music digs into the bullshit of all the goddamn drama.

I've been pounding the beers pretty heavy. I have a swath of modernism to sift through and find at least something worth keeping. I hate poetry (outside of a few). I hate it with every fiber of my being. If you wish to communicate, form sentences, form statements, form a point. Communicate something. Don't tell me how you feel, tell me what you think. Don't wallow in your condition, improve it.

Why the tirade on poetry? Long story, but suffice it to say I have been drug through the mire of a bunch of goddamn whiners from the turn of the century. Please God, never let me be one of those.

Perhaps the meanest thing I can say is the truest. I hate them because I have known them all. Here, at the turn of this century, we have another grasping group of pretenders who know how to complain, but don't know how to do a damn thing. Give me all your drama, I'll ingest it and secrete sweaty work. Tell me your problems and I will find solutions. I have been born again complete. I stood up above my troubles and stand on my own feet.

Poetry, at least the poets that are not Noyes and such, annoy me. Find your feet, stand and be counted for something more than your supposed genius. Let your past be dead and gone. I've sat here blistering my brain with all this goddamn ramble for a grade, and because I hope soon this modernist crap will go away. Thank God.

I hope never to sit in my room complaining, whining about life with nos solution when I could be outside. I could be running. I could be fixing. I could be changing, out in the sun with a young sun. I could work outside, muscles working while I breathe like a sledge-hammer man, I would feel the sun upon me and its rays crawling in my skin. I could drink the blood of Jesus and old John Henry in. Fix yourself.

There is no heaven in the land of drama. The pearly gates lead nowhere. They stand at the vestibule of a land peopled by those too weak to believe in hell. Poetry is a process that is not a solution to a problem that does not exist.

That's why I hate it.

Long Post, Full Glass

2007-06-13T10:21:00.000-07:00

So this was going to be one of those witty posts. You know the ones. The posts that people read and say, "Wow, that guy is something."

Then I started sliding down the low road. That road leads nowhere, beloved. At the most, it leads into a low spot, where stagnation and rot occur. In the heart of all human trouble lies the road to nowhere that I now sit in middle of with dull apathy.

I'm afraid people think I'm an asshole. I am most definately not an asshole at least a good 95% of the time. My writing style hints at someone I am not, not really. My style, or voice or whatever English major types like to call it, is not a friendly one. People do not read me and say to themselves, "Now this is a guy to trust with nice thoughts of puppies and such."

My friends, and this term I use in this instance for those who have actually heard me speak and enjoy the practice, generally tell me that my prose style or writing voice is very masculine. I guess that means I don't sound like a girl. I find that fascinating. What do women "sound" like in the theatre of pointless blogging bullshit? I have no idea. I can tell with some certainty when I read a man's writing. They usually talk a little too much about beer and hint a little too much about some scandalous hooker who destroyed their faith in femininity. I hope I don't do that. I talk as much as I can about whiskey, not beer, and don't even bother hinting about that damn scandalous hooker. That was in jest; I am not aware of anywhere on this little corner of CSS that I have ever said a disparaging utterance about a woman. Perhaps I have voiced some perplexed frustration, but I have nothing but love for any written of here.

I forgot where I was going with all this. The cold and brown and toxic beauty in my hands has made me a little too speculative. The flow and ebb, the neep and spring, and the general psuedopodia movement of the universe is displayed in the slick of ice melting into the 50.5% death by Turkey in my clear sweaty glass. None of the movement is with purpose and none of the movement is with cause. The water and alcohol mix swirl in the random eddies of life.

In that life I find something soothing. I will be sad when this glass is empty, but were I not to drink it, the ice would eventually melt away and the water and alcohol, being the same temperature (I refuse to take the tangent of the inexact nature of measurement), will be able to blend away into homogeny. The beauty I do not want to destroy will destroy itself by the very nature of that pulchritude. Am I hinting at a scandalous hooker? No, not this time. Though I hope to one day remember the analogy.

The glass has more or less emptied itself into me. The ice remains along with whatever pretty little brown passengers managed to avoid their metabolization. I love me some pretty little brown passengers. Also not analogous, at least not this time.

The brown, such an ugly adjective for so golden and beatific a shade of caramel, cascades slowly down the monsters of ice in the glass. The flattening of the liquid against the glass, testament to the unending truths of hydrology, is beautiful.

The beauty, not only the beauty here, but the beauty of all things, rushes through me. The beauty needs an evangelist. I have not the words. Beauty is such an odd word in that its state defies its definition. Perfect imperfections and crooked smiles and so forth. I am failing beauty, and I am afraid if I fail it, it will leave. Beauty is a fickle lover, never tolerant of those who are unwilling or unable to love her with words that are true. I fail beauty, so it leaves. The golden caramel is nothing more than booze. The sunset is nothing more than deflected light. I have failed beauty and it has left me. Also not analogous, at least not this time.

I am saddened that it is not.

Another Lame Attempt to Help Someone

2007-06-05T13:12:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking lately of goodbyes. I can't claim that the thought occurred spontaneously. The weaving thoughts of goodbyes come and gone spilled over into my life because of another who requires in her life a goodbye.

I remember a time or two I had to write someone's epitaph in my life and their birth certificate into the pantheon of those gone before and gone forever simultaneously. The ghosts of that life and death struggle in your head to resurrect the dead or dying flit across your mind like demons of some pathologically flawed hell. You lay awake and dream dreams of a future you will never realize.

Then the inevitable confrontations. You offer them the questions that you have carved out of your dying flesh where they used to make a home. You offer them the sacrifice of your teary and unanswerable questions at the alter of all they used to be. You walk up to them on your knees with a little silver platter of all you have left of their person, the hows and whys. The unrealistic hope that this is just temporary. When all else has failed, you begin the whens: when did you stop loving me? When was the last time you still cared? When did the last straw hit your back?

The questions are placed onto the alter and burnt up to that dead spirit in the air, the spirit of their memory. Never again will that memory live on this Earth. Like God leaving the Earth forever because he could not abide the world once it had died in the sins of Eden. And like the original sinners, you wander the land of Nod, always east of Eden with your mark. The stigma you carry is to remind you and others that you have lived and died and sinned enough to be human.

Life is murder. Murder of all that came before today, and sometimes murder is fun. Occasionally, you murder an abusive spouse or an insane dictator and the Justice flows in your veins like a burned rock in a tin foil pipe. Sometimes, you have to murder a child who made the mistake of standing too near a tank with the wrong flag painted on it and the Justice burns your skin and the tendrils of your conscious thought. And in this way, the love and hate is balanced.

In this way, all life continues on, murdering the past. The blood will wash off, and the sacrifices of your own dyed flesh where another moved in and loved you will burn away. In the crucible of time, we're all just carbon. If you're lucky, maybe some day your bones will be subducted and you will emerge more beautiful. If not, the silica will be pulverized to sand in some future desert. Time will murder your bones.

This may not help, but at least it's here. All we can expect of thought, really.

With A Little Help From This Friend :)

2007-06-02T17:43:00.000-07:00

I've decided that the blogosphere needs some direction. There are way too many people that just don't seem to know what the f*** they're doing. Don't try and lie to me, I have seen your blogs. Informative, provocative, life-affirming. You are doing it all wrong. ^__^

Rule one: Profanity is fine, but only if you couch it in friendly looking letter replacements. F*** is OK, as is S##t. Phonetically spell F as a verb for added emphasis. Some people incorperate the standby @ss or A$$ variants. Never ever use profanity as it may offend someone who would rather be...

Rule two: Looking at Kittens

People love pictures of critters.

See, this is a kitten:

How much lighter do you feel now? It's easy to do, I just google image searched for kitten and found dailykitten.com. Sometimes you can use puppies. People will laugh and comment. Speaking of comments....

Rule Three: You must comment everyday. On everything. Did you read it? Then you must register an opinion, no matter how insignificant. Feel free to copy and paste the following:

OMG! SOooo True!!!!!
You are so lying ;)
AwwWWww.
Effing Yeah!!

If you cannot muster it inside of yourself to think of something to say after you read a post by anyone at anytime, you must delete your Blogger/Typepad/Wordpress account immediately. You have let down the blogosphere.

Rule Four: Strive for a picture to word ratio of at least 1:3, since if the blogosphere wanted to read, it would go to one of those book places. If you do not mathematically understand ratios, you most definitely belong in the blogosphere. I was most impressed once by a post about intelligent design (ID) which had a ratio of 48:1. It was astounding, you could not even understand the opinion of the blogger the post was so convolutedly covered in photoshopped pictures of George Bush and random endearing shots of monkeys.

Rule Five: Change colors randomly.

I don't know why.

Football v. Soccer

2007-05-30T12:00:00.000-07:00

You'll remember earlier this week that I asked a question about debate methodology. It was a clever trap. Momentary Academic fell into said trap. Her first salvo is on her blog over here. You should read that before you read my response below.

GSR moderates and scores the debate for us. His comments are in italics.

********

The distinguished gentle-woman from The District of Columbia makes a valid and important point about athletics in general. Everyone gets the opportunity at low skill levels to participate and improve their personal health.

I should note that never once in the history of my writing have I ever mentioned my shapely arms gripping the handlebars of my bike. You might be adding in your own fantasizing. I think that's super.

At this point, I should write a quick disclaimer stating that I have the utmost respect for athletes professional and otherwise regardless of what sport they choose. I make no judgements on the validity of soccer, indeed, I find many positive aspects of its game play, first and foremost that it is an activity that adds to the health of an individual.

Your central and eloquent argument pirouettes in a gentle declining orbit about a misguided point. That point, namely that soccer is the most accessible sport, is incorrect. I believe you fail to make the area of amateur and non-professional sport equally available to all sports in your argument. I remember many an afternoon with my brothers playing the game of football with nothing more than a vague imaginary line drawn between two convenient trees or fence posts. With only a ball, we were totally able to play an approximation of the sport. In fact, we could have changed the shape of the ball and just as easily have been playing soccer in the same yard.

If I were to choose one sport where equipment is truly a non-issue, I would choose as my sport wrestling. There are no real requirements save two competing egos.

This debate is, however, soccer vs. football.

My preference for football rests on the simple fact that it balances so well the kinesthetic and intellectual. Football is an incredibly intelligent sport, in fact more intelligent than any sport of which I am aware including soccer. While soccer is an exciting and very strenuous approximation of a tactical environment, the sport never satisfies the overarching definition of real-time strategy. I should mention here that the definitions of tactics and strategy I am using are standard military.

The purpose of contact sport is to simulate warfare or battle. Football simulates warfare on a larger scale than does soccer. In the real world, divorced I realize from the arena of sport, a nation going to war will utilize several totally disparate forces and resources toward the accomplishment of the goal, victory. They will mobilize strategic bombers to fly high and slow, they will utilize sea-borne assets with long range strike capabilities, special forces, etc. These assets will not operate in the same capacity as their teammates, or even their fellow services, none of which are nicknamed after the goddess of fire.

While soccer will have several possible plays and tactics available and certain players who specialize on the field, football has three different types of players who do not share the field. Defense, offense, and special teams function as strategic assets fighting the clock and the efforts of the other team. In this way, football better simulates warfare, and soccer better simulates an individual skirmish. I would prefer to see the strategy in a real sense on the field simultaneous to tactical feats.

As the moderator of this debate allow me to welcome both of the participants. The lovely lady from D.C. is someone I have known now for almost 5 years. The gentleman from Colorado is someone who has insulted me and intellectually jabbed me from the moment that I met him. To help balance this seemingly unfair dynamic The Momentary Academic is arguing for soccer, a sport that I never enjoyed playing or watching. Casey is arguing for football, which is the most tangible proof that there is a benevolent God in heaven that we mere humans can witness. So all in all, I should be able to stay impartial-ish.

In this first round of the debate M.A. does a nice job of playing the sympathy card. Her arguement that soccer can be enjoyed by many, regardless of income level, is quite compelling. It is supported by the overwhelming popularity of the sport in third world countries where the price of a baseball glove or a football helmet for each member of a team could be equal to the cost of a families annual income, but one coveted soccer ball can be enjoyed by the masses.

Casey, on the other hand, has done an excellent job pointing out that one football can also be enjoyed by a veritable neighborhood's worth of children. Having first hand experience playing backyard football with 7-10 friends, I can attest to the fact that the only pieces of "equipment" needed to have a backyard game of football are the ball, a working set of feet/hands, and some trees to serve as the goal marker.

More importantly, for the sake of the debate, Casey has done an excellent job of talking about the strategy involved in playing the game of football. His comparisons to modern warfare are impressive, and my one critique is that for those of us who have never gone to battle he could have at least worked in a Stratego analogy. But I digress...

The winner of this first round is Casey. He is awarded one point based on the merits of his arguements.

Codified Rambling

2007-05-25T12:48:00.001-07:00

I'll be gone the rest of the weekend, so this is what you get. By the way, the last post is still up for discussion.

I spent some time riding along the rim of a canyon. I stopped at the crest of the box end and found a rock to sit on.

Due, I'm sure, to the exhaustion and pain of sweat seeping into a scraped knee and abraded calf, several profound thoughts occurred to me, or at least vague notions I've been working on I can now codify. I once listed as a hobby "thinking." It is a hobby I never lost. Sitting in an inspiring place and reading my thoughts on the pages of my brain is beautiful and bountiful. One of those thoughts is mine and mine alone, but the others I will share in order of appearance.

1. All Life Is Sacred

Truly, whatever mystery we hem and haw and turn into religion must return to the point of life. Life is unlikely. Actually, extremely unlikely, especially in the form of awareness. Think for a minute about your consciousness. Why do you have it? Where does it come from? I am aware of the selfless theory in vogue now, the one that says identity is a coping mechanism and a fallacy. I don't accept that particular thought as it leaves much to be explained. The Buddhist ideas of selflessness on the other hand, though coping mechanism they may be, I find sort of romantic. A freedom is available to those who believe they are truly not.

2. Causality is Bullshit

There are no causes.

3. Pseudopodia

I am a physical person. I live a lot of my life between my ears, but I live a sizable minority of that same life between my legs and between breaths of action. I find that five minutes of motivation can easily replace twenty minutes of preparation. Consider the machines we use to assist our lives. At my former employment, I always found it easier to just get in and move the heavy and large objects that made up my day. We had a plethora of mechanized assistance, but by the time you went to grab the machine, chased everyone out of the area, and moved the behemoth to your work site, you could have been up and down an old fashioned ladder ten times over. My personality is such that I'd rather just grab the ladder and grunt and struggle and get it over with.

Sometimes, my coworker was Bill. Bill was in a wheel chair. I would be constantly up and down ladders, carrying heavy products from a random here to a random there. I often broke a sweat at work. Bill did not. Bill was in a wheel chair. Many other men I dealt with during my day were overweight, or old, or had some malady that angered me. Men with sickness or disability anger me. I don't know why, and I know it's wrong, but they anger me. I still have incredible empathy for them. I believe strongly that at this point in history, we have room for everyone. We don't have a herd to slow down, and regardless, humanity is descended of pack animals, a completely different mentality from a herd.

When I pass these wheelchair-bound or obese people on the street or when they see me with a bike helmet or with my forehead beaded with sweat and my bulging quadriceps, do they think I am showing off? It feels like I'm showing off when I feel my body's mahinery bulging up and straining so close to the surface of my skin in their presence. That makes me sad. Why should it make me sad? I am no more responsible for my genetic stock than they are. And don't pretend that even the obese are to blame. Any number of factors can contribute to sedentation. Remember:

Causality is bullshit.

4. Population

At this moment, humanity is stretching the limits of their home. I should not say humanity, as that makes it sound as if the species has blown past the checks of carry capacity. We have not. The Earth can accommodate us as an organism. What it can not accommodate is the damage of our wills. Were I to eat a deer, the tragedy to that dear, and one could argue to the immediate herd, would be great, but Deer in a platonic sense would be unaffected. When my body turned the deer into fuel and did not perform the task with greater than 45% or so efficiency, I would have to get rid of the deer inside me. The Earth could absorb and reuse what I would discard. Life would explode out of the nitrogen I did not use.

However, this plastic lid to my cup of coffee will find its way into the system. It will not die or be reabsorbed very quickly. For the first time in the history of large individuated life, an organism's discards will outlive the organism. You could argue that the discarded oxygen of the precambrian forms of life did much the same thing, but the stakes are higher now. And as such:

5. Humanity

As in Humanity can no longer change. Think on this: at this point in history, the further speciation of the genus homo is no longer possible. Humanity is too connected for a separation event to last long enough for the nucleic acids to mutate that much. We can no longer evolve. People the world over are mating with diverse other people, which I think is great. I participate in the activity myself whenever possible. Racism won't be possible when we're all the same shade of caramel. On the other hand, it also hands us a standard and unified truth. This is the only humanity we will have for a long, long time. There will be no waiting around for better people. We are all there will be. This is our one shot.

Shot to do what? Improve, I guess. Improve our lives, our culture, our species. We have the ability, we do not have the will. We need to get our heads out of our global asses.

6. Causality is Bullshit

There are no causes.

A Request

2007-05-23T15:14:00.000-07:00

If you notice, the last post was a statement of my being. That was something I've been wanting to do for a while, and I figured I would state a different being verb correlating to the alphabet for twenty three posts. The decision to spend time on self introduction sprang from a brief self-introduction of the author in one of my favorite travelogue. He said something intelligent sounding about people not being able to visualize characters without them being described. Then I realized I had nothing for "B."

I also realized that I am not the kind of person who can do the same thing twenty three times in a row. The thought is scrapped. I also have another idea that will be a complete departure for this site that may show up if I decide it's worth the time. Two departures, in fact. I think I already mentioned the Friday Fiction thing. Besides, lately my writing has been shit, so a departure might be nice.

On to the point:

So, I have an idea. I'm thinking of having a debate.

Recently, someone disagreed with my views on a minor topic, and I have to admit to being captivated. I have debated the issue, which I don't really care that much about, with others before with passion and fire. I have good ammo. I have presentations and parallels to show the wide-eyed audience. I considered making a PowerPoint.

I don't know how to do this. I want the debate moderated, but informal as I have no idea how formal debate actually works. The moderators should be people who are either dispassionate on the subject or people who are able to be rational. I'm not sure I have that many fans, for lack of a better word, who fit the criteria.

Also, the location of the forum. Gmail? Conference call? Smoke signals?

I don't even know why I'm giving it this much thought as it would be less debate and more of an argument, really.

Any ideas are welcome. I'll be more or less absent for the rest of the week and on into the weekend, but I may get a few minutes before Friday to worry about all this.

I Am Argumentative

2007-05-21T06:27:00.000-07:00

At some point I will have truly given up on this semidaily vomitous mass of words and I will start doing what I have wanted to do all along: just pass on links from The Onion.

I have read The Onion now for years. A friend of mine used to have a subscription and quite a bit of CPSD 51's Internet resources were dedicated to downloading their Statshot and Infographic features. I don't think I have a sense of humor of my own, I just adopted snide Tom Servo lines and memorized swaths of The Onion.

What truly makes The Onion funny as I get older and maybe more mature is the parallels I can find between the universe of my favorite root vegetable and my own life.

They have an article running right now entitled Area Man Somehow Roped Into Arguing Passionately For Green Day. I don't think you'd ever catch me arguing over Green Day, but this situation has become exceedingly common in my life. I find myself defending thoughts and practises that i really don't even like. Maybe it's because so many of the subjects are related to a demographic I pretend to identify with.

I have found myself in loud and impassioned arguments over the validity of oil-assist twin turbos in the International 6.0 Powerstroke. I don't give a shit about that engine. I don't even forsee a time in my life where I would spend the amount of money required to purchase a vehicle so equipped. Independent front suspension? Hate it. Don't know why. 7005 aluminium tubing? Yeah, just try to talk some shit about it. Go ahead, seriously. I will end up defending the crap.

I find myself defending entire genres that I hate. (CAUTION: MUSIC SNOBBERY) Country music is complete garbage. That is a lie, country music is by and large garbage. I bounced in a country bar, I have half of Nashville's catalog memorized and I hate every pandering bullshit lyric. But let someone say Hip-Hop is better. I will be spewing the musical equivalent of Luther's Diet of Worms speech. Why? I don't know.

I will argue the validity of motorsports. Specifically NASCAR, especially if someone is making disparaging or downright cruel remarks about the fanbase of the sport. I don't give two shits about NASCAR. I don't really care about that many practises or issues enough to hate them. Or love them. Why do I keep doing this?

I mean sure, everyone knows Soccer is pointless and boring and a game of sissies, do I have to find new reasons that are intellectually qualified to dislike the "sport?"

non-Fiction Friday

2007-05-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

So, I meant to start something new today called "Friday Fiction." You know, just whimsical fun.

I have a complicated reason for not doing that, but that would need a longer post. All I have today is this:

While sitting at home, with no classes to go to or work to do, I decided to turn on the TV. I never watch the TV. Anyway, whatever you do, do not turn this thing on after the news is over in the morning. There were all these shows that really entice a guy's sense of morbid curiosity.

Large women who don't know who they baby's daddy is, this show with Barbara Walters and some very loud older women, some bald-headed psychologist, etc.

I flipped through all four channels you can get up here on the hill and then I saw a familiar face. It was Gary Busey.

On the Jesus channel. Preaching. To Smokey Robinson.

I don't know what else to add.

Drunken Ramble #437

2007-05-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

I just say he was the leader of a steel driving gang.

What did I say to the captain (What’d I say)? You know, the time he brought the steam drill ‘round.

Shaker you better pray, if you miss your six feet of steel, Tomorrow’s gonna be your burying day, day, day.

Polyanne would have been a hell of a woman. Driving steel like a man and so forth.

Fuck yeah.

Oh Lord.

Whatever. Causality pisses me off. Women and men always try to lay blame here and there when the fact is that there is no one at fault. Sure, that last person to date was a bad person, they fucked around. They ruined good things. They were intriguingly melodramatic. At some point in their developmental life, they were used, abused, misused, misguided, or some other decent reason to be unworthy of continued breathing. Fill it to the top, cause I hit rock bottom this time. This paragraph was not autobiographical.

This song is fun. And rocks. Poor me. Poor me. Pour me another shot of whiskey.

Right, causality. Lately, I been getting into bluegrass more than normal. Banjo rolls are God speaking to the soul of man. Declarative sentences rock. “What does that mean,” ask you.

Well, that means I am shit-hammered, Soon as I make a playlist that consists of almost exclusively of Ray Wylie Hubbard, Hank Williams, and mandolins, shit has went wrong.

I want to play so bad. Music is pouring out of me, but is not flowing into anything. I am not religious, but I’ll be Goddamned if a Blackface Twin with a couple of JBL’s worth of tubes driven to the limits of physics don’t throw me into convulsions.

Warning! This Post Contains A Politically Incorrect Joke!

2007-05-09T16:32:00.000-07:00

So...whatcha doing.

Drinking. Studying. Drinking and studying.

How's that working out for you?

Eh. I am having some serious give a fuck problems at the moment. Impending deployment and all. I have a hard time worrying about Glassner's lame-ass book about paranoia where he tries to frighten everyone. I can see why Michael Moore likes this guy.

You know, you're the smartest person I know.

I am aware. I should be the only person you know, what with you being my conscience/internal monologue and so forth. You are exclusively my conscience, right?

Um, yeah.

Wait, you mean you work for other people?

Sort of, we've been through the amalgamation thing before. There's a few consciences I timeshare with. I'm also supposed to guide a conch fisherman in La Paz. That's why you seem to be obsessed with Baja, more than likely. Just like I'm the conscience of several Russian prostitutes and a handful of hobos.

That's kind of random. Do you have to draw straws? Like, why the baja kid? Are you sure you're qualified for all this?

We have an eight-week class and a cultural indoc for all the different people we have to be. I am current in several cultures, Indonesian, Indigenous New Zealander, Reformationist Hindu, and I'm working on my Appalachian qual. Kind of a tough one.

Well, most of my microculture derives from similar origins to most of your Appalachian people.

Really?

Oh yeah, I even knew how to yodel at one point. That and all the weird religious backstory is pretty much straight out of the hill people. I think anyway. You'll run into a lot of the same words.

Scrame?

That's one, I still catch myself using it sometimes. Past tense of scream. And Drame, past tense of dream. Also, scrempt.

Scrempt?

An indirect scrame, mostly.

Example.

"A call went out from some Brethren in Carbondale who had a young'n get croupy for the Elders, but they had to leave a day late; the elevator wouldn't take our beans early until Bro. Claudy went and scrempt at 'em."

I don't know whether to be fascinated or not.

I don't either, really. So, how much time do you really spend on me?

I just picked you up for the bullet on my annual eval, but you've taken up a lot of my time. The kid in Baja? He never needs shit from me. Of course, all he does is spear conches. I caught him screwing a tourist's daughter a while back, but I figure what the hell, the kid deserves to misbehave a little.

Tourists in La Paz?

Long story. Hey look at that, a sailor recalled even though he was discharged for being a fruit.

Woah, you can't say it like that! What the fuck kind of conscience are you? Besides, see where he was sent?

Naval customs battalion bravo, Iraq. Ha. That's funny, that's where you're getting recalled into. Know what the difference between your recall and his is?

There's a difference?

Yeah, he LIKES getting fucked in the ass.

Wow. Um...is it OK to laugh at that joke?

Quietly in your head is fine.

Research is Damned!

2007-05-05T14:22:00.000-07:00

I was rumbling through Wikipedia the other day, trying to find something substantial to say about the isolation theory of speciation. About halfway down the article, I happened on a section devoted to epigenetics. In typical Wikipedia form, they immediately circled the wagons around what is really not a controversial issue and breathlessly lined up a tier of pikes, "epigenetics is not a challenge to the Theory of Natural Selection."

I would never have thought that it would be. I see no way that it can. But, they doth protest too much. Perhaps there is something going on in the graveyard that I should be aware of, said I. So, after an exhaustive research of epigenetics, I found absolutely no reason to even ponder why this would be a challenge to TNS. I am biased here and must admit that I find very little that is a challenge to the theory.

Then I thought, "So, you wonderful bastion of sense and intellectual prowess (as I have titled myself), where could we find an opinion on this soft inheritance that could direct one away from the consensus."

I hate consensus and try to veer whenever possible.

Ah, thought I, Conservapedia.com. Were there ever a database of challenges to Darwin, sure this is it. So I typed out the address and struck the enter key with aplomb. I would surely find the chink in all of the scientific elite's armour now!

A page lacking refinement and class burst open in my browser. "Conservapedia" was stamped with authority on Old Glory waving in a badge upon a field of neutral and academic color. This is where those cretins with their doctorates from accredited universities do not want you to go. They will not control me, sayeth I!

I typed in the search field "epigenetics" and struck the enter key again. Nothing. No mention at all of this obviously Achillean problem to this simply unproven theory. Ha! Forsooth! I must have mispelt. I whispered a dastardly chuckle to myself, frightening a few at this wifi hotspot. Their bemusement was of no consequence to myself, the great disprover of the hokery of Evil-ution. I had them on the run now, cursed lovers of monkeys!

I typed carefully this time and hit enter once more. Nothing!

How could these do-gooders with nothing but the kindness of humanity in their hearts not know of this chink in the bricks of scientific conspiracy? So, I too it upon myself to type into the search field. Evolution. After a link was followed I was at a momentous occasion on this day. The Trial of Scopes' Monkeys!

I soldiered through a sentence or two. Apparently the main researchers of American science's last best hope are all in eighth grade. Bryan's oratorical skills were unmatched? How do they know? There was not a footnote. There was no proof whatsoever for the claim. What about Alexander the Great? He may have been a little light in his loofas, but he had to be fairly persuasive. Lincoln? Probably a better orator. What of Jesus? The guy went on for days on some occasions.

No, thought I, this is not the hope of science. This page is no help at all. Who writes these articles? "As crafty as the day is long, [Clarence Darrow] arrived in Tennessee armed with his bag of tricks." Not since sound found a home in motion picture has anyone resorted to such colloquial jargon in sholarly circles.

What the fuck? scrame I. Patrons of the coffee shop fled. So said I to the constable, "But sir, they posit that the defeat of the evolutionists allowed George W. Bush to carry the state of Georgia thus winning the presidential election of 2000."

He was unmoved.

After posting my somewhat unreasonable bail, I tried a new tack on Conservapedia. Surely they would help my revolution in science if I simply looked for the right article. The results are less than encouraging.

Last One, I Promise

2007-05-03T20:54:00.000-07:00

I swear, this will be the last post dealing with her. Maybe if I write it out, I can get her off my mind for good.

Who? Well, the girl who's been parading through all of the posts the last month or so. She flaunts my feelings for her across the ribbons of my mind and her scandalous wanderings through the backdrop of that mind paint any post I can give.

She hints at herself when I write about leaving. She insinuates herself into my words about sex and desire.

She's not a bad girl, just honest. She was honest about the prospects of her being able to wait around a whole year. I wouldn't have asked that of her anyway. Maybe she won't spend this year tied up in knots if I'm not someone she is officially tied to.

She was with me in life and death. I thought I was dying a while back and was absolutely miserable to be around. She stayed by. She held fast. There's a reason boats are named after women.

Now she's gone. I wish I could say she took all my money. My best friend.

Regardless, it's the same old story, and here it comes again.

I have to leave, not only my home and my plans, but I have to leave her. I laid on her, a woman all of ivory and tourmaline (fucking geology references), and I told her that when I come back I know I will not be the same person. Every combatant is a casualty. I have come home from these things before. I could not pretend with her that I would return and we could start where we left off.

I didn't know it was goodbye until her hug lasted a little too long. I promised to call her before I go. Her life is complicated. I have since been informed that before me she hated men. That is an understandable state given her past. I never would have guessed she had anything but love for men, but maybe that love was mine and mine alone, compounding the tragedy of it all.

I hate tragic people. I hate when I am one. Sorry for the lack of funnies and for the lack of anecdote.

I'll call her from the terminal when I'm leaving.

Some Titles Are Just Lame

2007-04-30T09:36:00.000-07:00

So I wrote a post today. It was a true account of someone I met and briefly allowed my life to intersect, though she was a slave. Possibly an indentured servant, I'm not sure what the nice word would be. The story ends with her family dying. So, I decided to leave that one alone. I think my serious writing has gotten a little too heavy. Desperation held me in its icy grasp. I considered doing a meme. Honestly, I'm afraid Laurel would make fun of me, and her scorn is more than I can bear.

So, to keep it simple, I found some old pictures I took a couple years ago. I like them and will probably throw some on here when I need to illustrate a point. For Jimmy Page Did Not Understand The Ocean, I wish I had had this:

It is too late. The moment is over.

When I do finally hit publish on the story of me and Misha, which is not her real name, I have a picture of her home. You can not make out the tragedy from the mists of the Straits of Malacca. You also can not smell the water by looking at the picture, which is probably best.

The significance of the individual is lost on the mechanizations of the Earth. I was reminded of this several times this weekend during the Mike The Headless Chicken Days/Fruita Fat Tire Festival (please ignore the first two government sponsored minutes of this video). The Earth reached up with its mighty paws and smote me. Luckily, no concussions or anything spectacular this time, just some blood on the trail.

I've tried to pick up women in locales unassociated with the cult of mountain biking before. It doesn't work. They look at your shins with the snake track of sprocket damage and scraped knees and bruised bones. Then they ask a reasonable question:

"What are you, twelve years old?"

Distractions

2007-04-21T21:15:00.000-07:00

Quick and dirty, I'm going to be away from here for awhile, maybe two weeks. Some of you are already aware of my accelerating schedule, so I won't elaborate. Since it takes no work besides being a pretentious prick, I'll keep up my minor, but sexy, half of The Five if I can. If you need placated, I always thought these posts were my best, proven by the fact I buried them before anyone could read them:

A Tribute To Ray
A Conversation With A Former Life
A Recipe
A Dream
A Rant
A Trip

I'm curious to see what others people may have liked, as this has been around a year or so now. Leave suggestions in the comments and I'll try to chime in sometime around next Friday or so.

In a side note of minor humorous value, I just had to go through all my posts to make sure I said nothing bad about waitstaff in the history of this site. Call me obsessive. I might be a little more self-conscious than I admit to being at times. I am perhaps a softie who hates to think of hurting anyone. Besides, I used to be waitstaff. If the job was demeaning and geared toward the uneducated poor, I have probably done it. Call me obsessive.

Concussion, Contusion, and Minor Whiplash

2007-04-20T11:42:00.000-07:00

I have to point out briefly the benefits of a spectacular crash and a new set of contusions.

First among the list is the endorphin and adrenaline rush that courses through you hematos dendrite self for a few hours. The rush I can only describe as euphoric is comparable to any number of chemicals that are fun and enjoyable, though illegal. It is not illegal, however, to place your face in the dirt and slide on it for a while.

The larger benefit is the bump in your personal stock price among the opposite sex. With blood trickling from my nostril and a severe reddish brown stain of bruising over my left eye, I found women enthralled at my mere presence. Yes, children, they love to see a man who has battle damage. Had I known this earlier, I would have spent less on drinks in clubs and more on two wheeled conveyance.

This is OK, I have basked briefly in the attention of an astoundingly beautiful woman whom I have been quietly fascinated by for weeks, I also have a date Sunday with another girl I would normally not consider in my league. She actually witnessed the crash, and she has assured me that it looked as legendary as it felt. She is a lovely woman, but her approach to proposition I can only describe as “predatory.”

In short, the skin I have lost is repaid by the gods of testosterone. Thank you, Ping the enormous and Pong the bold.

On the other hand, I have been phased out of someone’s life for good. She is perfect for someone, though I see a crashing pile of burning parts down our road. Not that it matters, she found my leaving to be too big a burden to bear, and I would not have let her wait for me to come home anyway. We talked things out, and things are still friendly. She was a good girl, and right now good girls are not a priority. Good girls always hate you for leaving, and I am not a fan of being hated.

Not that it matters, I’ve had enough and so I’m getting out. I’m leaving now. I’m a long gone daddy. I wish I could say I don’t need her anyhow. That is true in the strictest sense of black and white truth. I don’t need her. I need air. I need water. I need a drink. I don’t need her, in fact I know I am better off without her waiting behind me, dragging me down for a year.

I apologize to all the good girls of the world. Especially the ones I have met, since I only meet them on my way somewhere else. I'm always crashing something.

Giro

2007-04-19T17:37:00.000-07:00

I rarely endorse a product. In fact, I never endorse a product that is not limestone filtered and comes from Lynchburg, Kentucky.

I would like to thank and heartily recommend Giro helmets. I loved my old helmet, it's fit, it's finish, the refreshing ventilation properties. Now I have laid that helmet to rest, it has been given its due place in the carbon reinforced Valhalla. Fear not, it died honorably.

In all seriousness, I have seen these things take licks from a 16 oz. framing hammer, but today I managed to break one nearly in half. I'm not in the hospital, I don't need stitches, and my pupils are OK with life. The helmet took my 205ish pound bulk and the extra eight pounds of various gear and water I need to get my box of rocks up the hills impacting at whatever speed could make an object my size fly thirty feet over level ground.

The best feature of the helmet was the discount I got for bringing it back in. I appreciate those who appreciate loyalty.

If you need a helmet, check these guys out.

Pyro

2007-04-18T06:59:00.000-07:00

A memory accosted me in the street yesterday. I threw a quick jab into the throat, but it swept the leg, Ralph Macchio style. I went down, my knees are not my strong suit, the poor little guys been through alot.

So anyway, this memory was of the time I was set on fire. I've been on fire a couple times, but this was more memorable.

So I was on the flight deck of the USS Constellation, a badass old heap of cold-rolled Bessemer joy if there ever was one, and I needed to make sure my machine could kill innocents and conscripts when an academy educated white man decided that was necessary. The flood of weakened sodium lights washed down on us in the cold, dark night in the Gulf. The machine was a hulk of titanium, boron, and aluminium. You would recognize one if you saw it, it is quite popular. The machine festoons itself with bulbous apparati along its sinewy flanks and under its flat belly that are there to take other machines and put them on heads or in buildings. Or on ships, though the US Navy isn't in the ship killing business anymore. The apparati need checked to ensure that salt and sand and the erosion of time have not rendered them unlethal. First you have to get electrical power to the machine.

Along the non-skid (a combination of epoxy and broken glass) surface of the deck, you'll notice holes. Or you won't and you'll fall in one. It is dark on a ship of war at night. The holes contain the large cables responsible for transferring power from the belly of the iron beast to the heart of the supersonic death machines resting on its back. I will spare you what useless trivia I can about this process.

In the bad old days, when naval aviation afforded you higher risks of maiming and death than being an infantryman in the Marines, we had to manually lock in the cables and power. Meaning you had to start the voltage, 800V worth, from ship and confirm with an electromagnetically held switch under the nose of the bird.

I had a friend named Trim. We had been months out at sea and had not heard from loved ones in a good, long time. When the earnest killing part of a war starts, the powers of good usually remove your ability to communicate off of a ship. I suspect that civilization would be a hobble if it was allowed to represent itself in the form of wives and mothers. Hand lifting of thousands of tons daily and lost sleep over our later confirmed suspicions of occurrences back home had frazzled us. Trim forgot to await my signal to start the voltage. As I rammed the plug home, an explosion of various high current DC and AC sparks shot around me. The sparks burned my hands singed my eyebrows. My shirt, as all red shirts with VF-(insert number) on the chest and back, was soaked in a cocktail of jet fuel, hyd fluid, and whatever other nitrate laden substance I had been playing with. So, the shit caught on fire.

I beat the flames off of me, and since the shirt itself is not flammable it was not difficult. Once the fire was out, the next rational thought I had was of home and Colorado and the girl that was waiting for me. Trim, still kneeling by the rat hole, caught a face full of steel toe. I think I choked him a little. We both left the flight deck bleeding and angry. We were still friends.

******

Unrelated update: If you thought bullshit blogosphere pretense and argumentative subject matter needed a home, it now has one. The Five.

Also, it is raining.

Everyday The Same

2007-04-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

So it is uncouth to repeat themes every week or so in a blog, though I refuse to acknowledge that this corner of the Internet fits that definition. The maxim of subject rotation in internet writing limits severely what possibly can be updated.

Got drunk on bourbon and stared at the ceiling thinking all kids of genius into the world. Covered that recently, so it's out.

Girl is on my mind. No, not one I've written about much, one that I tried to keep from getting in and close on me. Spent a night with her dealing with my asshole tendency to be a little too perfect for women when our time is short. Covered that last week.

Curled 150 pounds. I am a badass. Cover that with some regularity.

I rode away my hatreds and frustrations, or at least beat them back into their cave in my worried and troubled mind. I love that damn bike. Covered that.

Women I know are having troubles that I can't assist. I can't help but wish that I could beat the holy fuck out of anyone who hurts people I care about, regardless of how much they deserve it. I am a violent person. That's been covered.

Leaving soon. Got it.

All this going on and nothing to write about.

This Is Indulgent

2007-04-11T09:39:00.000-07:00

The motivation to improve one's body physically defies explanation. The body is obviously a machine in working order if you are able to even consider improving it. The explanation of your need to change that body at the expense of comfort confounds those who view the state of their carnality good enough. You'll get no explanations today. I make excuses about needing to be in good shape and requiring absolute physical readiness imminently, but it has nothing to do with that on any deeper level.

Today I sat on a bench surrounded by the smells of humanity, and I very much hate the vast majority or humanities offlacatorially detectable qualities, and fought a battle. I won't say it was a battle with myself, or with and ideal, or even a battle with weakness. The battle was with two chunks of iron. I sat on the bench with them in my hands resting heavily on my thighs. I could feel their weight settling onto the ciclismo hardened quadriceps that I love in a very vain corner of my soul. The iron keeps sinking farther into them while I try to match my breathing, my thoughts, and every vibrating breath of my metabolic monsters that are aching in my chest to Lemmy Kilmeister's invitation to riot.

I lay back, intensity screaming from the large muscle groups that have already taken a beating. The last four sets, every lift and breath and focus was leading up to this. These weights have always sat next to my last maximum ability. When I would grab the hexagonal barbells to the left of these, the greater size of the weights in my hand would bourgeon and they would glow in haughty distaste for me. For my inability to master them.

I pull them away from my thigh and let them rest on my chest. With one last breath closely monitored escaping me, I move the weights outboard until their heft is held by my shoulders and chest. That's the way I like it baby, I don't want to live forever.

I shove. There's no need to control the speed, I haven't the power to move them any faster than a steady crawl. But the crawl is steady. Power chords ring in my ears as the two weights meet above my straining neck and ring out like bells. Four more. My spotter is ready for my shoulders tortured in their short life to fail me. The weights move up again with a determination. They ring again as iron and iron meet above. One more. Slow and unsteady, but still lifting. The weights rest on my bent arms, my chest feels torn under their gravity. My spotter is bored. I hate spotters.

I look up at the ceiling and tell him, "Two more."

Steadier, breathe out going up, in coming down. My awareness of the room is gone. There is nothing but me, Lemmy and the dumbbells. Two more down, the last straining. "One more."

I hate people who make noise in the gym. I don't grunt or yelp or make any of those other noises men make. I blow air out of my nose, clench my jaw and shove. And don't forget the joker. I get the weight up without effort, but with my chest failing.

I bring them down as I inhale. They sit on my chest while I kick with my feet to lift my body back up to sitting. The weights hit the floor, small and insignificant. They no longer matter as the stench of men and exertion touches me and the four walls of the dungeon gym pull in out of the dark.

Love

2007-04-06T11:04:00.000-07:00

I am in love, brethren.

But, you say, you don't believe in the convention! And no, I do not. Love is a loosely cemented conglomerate of several tasty states of being unless you are formed largely of bauxite and scandium. If you are a pleasing shade of aggressive and light to the touch, then I love you, or at least could were not my heart stolen.

So, with all the rocks (literal rocks, I eat them) eating up most of the displacement of whatever body cavity we love others with, where can this loose conglomerate of affection and commitment and lust among other, larger ideal nouns, this love, where does it live? See, love is a many splendored thing, but it must have some fairly light calcified cementation properties to its conglomeration because it easily is salted into small spaces. That is neither here nor there.

So, let us name what a loved one does for us:

A loved one supports.
A loved one enables.
A loved one obeys, though it gives commands.
A loved one likes to be ridden very, very hard.
A loved one responds to the slightest caress, but does not flip the fuck out when you over-correct.

Could this loved one use as little more rear travel? Maybe, but my affinity for hard-tails has left me cold for the soggy, soft bottoms of some black diamond beauty. Me and my Element, we went out into the wilds of the desert where the single lines of freedom run freer that the wind and we found our bliss. We were unable to capture it, but the pursuit, the following of our Bliss made us two in love.

My search is over.

I love you.

Pictures forthcoming.

Jimmy Page Did Not Understand The Ocean

2007-03-28T12:03:00.000-07:00

This is a long post.

Her: I like you.

Me: Uh huh.

Her: I mean, I think I've started liking you a whole lot.

Me: Hmmm.

Her: I mean...I know you don't believe in love...

Me: It's not that I don't believe in it. Define it and I'll believe in it. I just think people really shouldn't be banking their life on some word they don't even know what it means.

Silence as the boat founders on the reef. Small compartments begin to flood as the boat creeps away, oblivious to the damage. The conspiratorial murder of the boat, murdered by the cooperative effort of the captain's negligence and the reef's indigent nature, is a slow poisoning by seawater. Somewhere out in the sackcloth night, the boat slows as the drag of salt water tonnage drive her keel down into the resisting of the Sea. The draft drags lower and lower until the first wave drives over the gunwale in a lackluster charge of a bored army and its hydrological friends start washing over and under the deck. Brine seeks its own level and finds buoyancy to be a personal insult. The Sea, forever dead and lovely, claims the victim of negligent homicide, chewing up the last gasps of the floating pulchritude as it capsizes and gives the Sea its empirical tribute and right-of-way.

The flotsam drifts away and all hands are lost.

One time one of our birds with a good man in it hit the water doing an aggressive nose-down maneuver (this is fancy aero-speak for he fucked up and flew straight into the ocean) at nearly 900 miles an hour. Somewhere on the bottom of the Indian Oblivion, there is some crushed aluminium and bent titanium. They never found the aircrew; at that interface speed hitting the water there would be nothing to find. The Ocean breathes salty, won't you carry it in. In your mouth, in your head in your soul. All that was left was an oil slick for a memorial. Maybe if we're lucky we might both grow old. I can't help but hope so.

Bullet 104. For your sake, I hope heaven and hell are really there, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

The ship sank forever into the big, big ocean, the men married in the wedding supper of the plank to her hull went with her.

I always thought it was funny that our ideas of the ocean are so terracentric. We name oceans and seas as if there were borders on it unmarred surface. We name them after the arbitrary political divisions of the land. The great undiscovered country, and no--the term did not originate on Star Trek, rests on the face of the earth with only the occasional break in its monotonous beauty for smudges of dirt and growths of life. Life clings in little concentric rings to the shelves of our dirt smudges and we cling like amoebae to the lighted slide of the beautiful edge of the Ocean.

Bullet 104 and the fragile, mighty ship I use euphemistically are somewhere under the raging main. They are memorialized in the slicks and debris that are dispersed to all corners of our Earth.

I'll miss them both, though I had no agency in either. These stories are not my own. That is that and this is this, tell me what you want and I'll tell you what you get. You get away from me. We talked for hours before that meeting about life and our disparate circumstances of existence. As I told her of my cold wife with the briny heart and tried to explain Davey Jones and the gold and quicksilver sunset of a Persian Gulf sunset, she loved me. I saw it. At least I saw the pupils dilate and her ideas of commitment form. I tried to dissuade her softly with personal narrative of a time when I killed and fucked and drank my way around the World. With every story, she felt she knew me better, but she did not. Love and knowledge are mutually exclusive states of being. She loved the thought of my blood and sand and sea, but she did not know that it was not a phase. It was not a temporary change in my life.

The sea is who I am.

And if I die on the raging main
Davey Jones will bring me back again
Give me some
PT
Good for you
Good for me
Kill 'em all
Spill their guts
Napalm, napalm sticks like glue
Sticks to the mamas and the babies too
etc...

So, we have to part ways. That is that and this is this, when I asked her what she saw in my stories and she told me what she missed. When the Ocean met the sky. She missed the part where time and light shook hands and said goodbye. It is not her fault or my fault, and blaming the Sea is like trying to swallow the moon.

I'm leaving in June.

The Ocean Breathes Salty; Modest Mouse
Random Violent Bullshit Poem; Traditional Navy Cadence

I am not dying

2007-03-21T20:48:00.000-07:00

I have a lot to celebrate today. A bottle of Bushmill's will suffer terribly. As for that girl, well, she didn't suffer exactly. It is nice to know that I will live long enough to make some legendary mistakes.

So, how can you assist the party? Well, the next motherfucker going through a duty-free better cough up some of this.

Rambling Bullshit

2007-03-15T09:51:00.000-07:00

I walked out into the cool of the morning to see the sun cut new shadows into the raised Precambrian and Jurassic temple of all things passed on. The Wingate cliffs burned orange and showed the cracks and fracture of enormous pressure pushing them skyward and rolling them up like a scroll. The Precambrian metamorphic partial melt is thrust out of the ground looking like the corpse of someone’s ancient virgin bride, the skirts of her folding in on themselves in a display of granitic modesty giving the gold light of morning a place to play. She is a bride. She is your origin. Mine, too, but I prefer to think that my genesis was something a little darker than the purple skirts. I prefer stardust and comets tails colliding with a burning planet washed over with caustic HaCL and silica and carbon billowing over the face of the deep. I don’t think God meant “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” to be depressing or a reminder of our short and anticlimactic lives. To be the dust and to be the rocks is indeed a beautiful thing. It was a little too warm for me in the store; I hate heat, though I have functioned admirably in temperatures up to 135. Anything after that number and I start to whine. My record for exposure to a hot day fell sometime in August out in The Gulf, 160 degrees of absolute atmospheric misery compounded by jet exhaust and arduous work. If I remember correctly that loadout was one of the heaviest sorties pre-9/11 ever locked and loaded. The cool of the day would mean the temperature would soar down to around a buck twenty and the swamp fans running in the berthing couldn’t quite keep enough air moving to draw out the smell of men living close and dirty. It was not a good time. That is a lie, it was a great time. IYAOYAS! And so forth.

Now God walked down in the cool of the day and called Adam by his name. He refused to answer, he was naked and ashamed.

Tell me, who’s that writing?

So who cares if John of Patmos is John the Revelator is John the Apostle or not? I read the book of the seven seals as a reassurance to a small and embattled minority facing death and some gruesome torture. When people wonder how the Catholic Church got as bad as it is, I remind them of the men like Eusebius who were absolutely thrilled to see the Roman Empire become the Holy Roman Empire. If you’d been getting genitals burned off with hot plates of iron in front of thousands of spectators, a little guvie love would indeed seem the promised Kingdom of Heaven if you’re writing to the Jews, Kingdom of God if you’re writing to the Greeks. In fact, Constantine’s conversion was seen as the fulfillment of The Revelation. Apocalypto for all you Papists. So then the Turks took their shit back. Holy shit, another thousand years of terror for the Christians who thought they owned the rest of eternity. Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople. Call me crazy, but I don’t believe in the End of the World. Unless you’re talking red giant vulcanization. That shit is a fact, bitch.

I need whiskey. Or a woman. Women. Women and whiskey. Or maybe a walk through the Garden in the cool of the day. If I was God, I would stroll around in that hour before the sun is high enough to truly light up the sin and murder of humanity, but after the chill of the cobalt early morning. I would boast to the rocks that they were mine and I would be glad to share rocks and glory; that I had formed them with little mathematical fun things and physical playtoys I had given the Universe. I would bask in mornings like this. I would be happy to share of my abundance.

I miss faith, faith more beautiful than wisdom or knowledge. Knowledge leads to more questions, and Sophie was kind of a bitch, most goddesses are, though I miss the ones I have loved in the past. A kind parent is Faith who quells the monsters of random under your bed and in your head with soothing words. Faith can protect you. Faith kills worry, which has been an issue lately. For what man can add even a minute to his lifetime by worry? I wish it could, with this much worry in my head I could live forever in extra minutes. I don’t have a happy home. A sweetheart I cannot find. I’m not looking, so that might be a source of the famine of femininity. The only thing I can call my own is a troubled and a worried mind. When my earthly trials are over, which may be soon, cast my body out into the sea. Save yourself the undertaker’s fare, let the mermaids flirt with me. God in heaven or in the Earth, or on it and in me and you, however that crap works, I hope is there. Send a band to to gather around me and stand, and when the time is right, bear me away on their snow white wings to my immortal home. The kingdom can have me, I’m tired of all this self-agency. And I’m tired. And maybe ruined. Things are not going well.

Did God create the heavens and the Earth? Well, I can’t prove that he didn’t. I can pretty much prove it took longer than six days. Then again, I like to think the Universe took a little effort on his part. Twelve to fifteen billion years of creative non-involvement or public crafting could yield a work of exquisite beauty. So, I might not be atheist. I can admit it.

Long story short, it’s a beautiful morning, Idaho sucks.

John the Revelator; Traditional
Let the Mermaids Flirt With me; Mississippi John Hurt
Oh Come, Angel Band; Traditional
The Thing About Worrying; Jesus

My Curse

2007-03-09T09:08:00.000-08:00

An aspect of my person that conduits unnecessary frustration into my life is my ability to stay in good health. Half of it is my fault, the other half lies blame on my genetic history. I come from some pretty strong stock.

So, the half that is my fault accuses from one corner of the universe where chocolate, especially the sickening milk variety, does not garner preference over oatmeal. I love oatmeal. I eat it in serene bliss, the fiber and nutty goodness of steel cut oats suspended in boiling water with a small pat of butter and a touch of honey taking me to places I assume donuts take the overweight. I don't mean to be healthy, but my meal plan on a typical day involves salads, lean proteins, and a good shot of greens. Keep your snickers, hand me the blueberries. So, what is the big deal?

People hate me.

I recently made my way through the trough on the conveyor belt to pay for some groceries and the woman celebrating some fairly unkind decades who ran my food over the laser had all kinds of commentary. Her flappy jowls kept time to her tirade, wobbling fore and aft, her skin was yellowed and crumpled in smoker's jaundice. "Wow, what the heck is 'hoomis'? How do you eat these pita deals? That's sure a lot of celery, what you trying to live forever? Hey everybody look at this health nut here! Oh and you rode your bike? Boy, I think you're missing out on life. You trying to look pretty? I never ate any of that crap. I do fine."

I held my tongue, the line of dusty Carhartt jackets behind me shuffling back and forth try to get a good look at the garbanzo eating bitch. I said, "Well, ma'am, I don't want to live forever or even past your age, I just don't want to look like you when I get there."

That was brilliant and cutting. I only said it in my head, though. I'm a bitch.

This morning I had to get a checkup from the VA. I filled out my little form saying that I drink way too much, I eat like a horse, I have PTSD out the ass, and I am in danger of killing myself with some high risk activity (i.e. mountain biking, river rafting, etc.) imminently. When my name was called, I walked into the little room where an aged but beautiful silver haired woman told me kindly to sit. While she reviewed my clipboard of papers, she pointed to a scale. My feet touched the pad and LED numbers began to swirl. 197.5. I returned to my chair and my arm found itself in a cuff. An old man with a dusty ballcap modestly emblazoned with the black and white ribbon of a POW walked in and took the other chair. Judging by his gut, he knew his way around a case of beer. And judging by his eyes, he knew his way around some terror and unconsoled tragedy.

He was near my weight. We talked a little about the Connie while the strap grabbed on to my arm and caused a brief panic to shoot through my veins. I am claustrophobic. The machine beeped and the titteringly helpful woman, who I noticed flirted a little with the POW, looked over my shoulder to the infernal machine with its grip of death tunneling my vision. Her eyes rolled back and a look of contempt shot through her graying eyes. "111 over 73."

The words fell in a pile of lukewarm poo on the floor. She was angry at me. She met the eyes of her assistant and they both coughed out snide little laughs.

I can not vouch for any basis in reality past this point.

"Looks like we got ourselves some type of damn athlete."

"I'm sorry," i said, "did I do something wrong?"

Then she slapped me and told me to go out and run a marathon or some shit. Her words, not mine. The POW rose to come to my aid but the vicious Valkyries beat him back into his chair and slapped the blood pressure strap on him, it tightened and held him down. The swaggering woman smacked my knee with a mallet, harder that Hippocrates would have liked I might add. My knee jerked with immediacy. "Wow, I'll be goddamned, Champ Bailey, you made any touchdowns today?"

"Champ Bailey is a corner back, he rarely..."

"Shut your mouth, health boy." Her cold eyes searched me, "You got any healthy shit in that backpack of yours?"

"I...I don't know."

We both lunged for my bag, but my superior speed was defeated by the iron grip of her BP/P torture device. She ripped my bag from the floor, a bag of unroasted almonds falling from the open pocket.

"I swear I only eat them covered in milk chocolate and sugar!"

"Ha! You lie like that goddamn Kraut I 'interrogated' back before your parents were born. You a Kraut, boy? Or does kraut have too much sodium for you, sissy boy?"

"Um...no."

"Oh," she turned off the lights plunging our little room into darkness, "I think you may have a little Nazi in you. Health Nazi. You drink coffee this morning?"

I heard her booties scraping the cold tile floor. "No..."

I could hear her lips pull from her teeth in a sneer.

"...I mean yes! I drank four cups for breakfast. Five, and I drink eight for lunch. I don't even like water, I swear!"

The strap on my arm cinched tighter and the sound of cold steel filled the room.

Ghosts

2007-02-26T20:05:00.000-08:00

About four and a quarter years ago, I sat in a cold room in an uncomfortable chair with my eyes locked onto the screen of an expensive and sophisticated video player. The screen swam with gray criss-cross patterns. Data transferred back and forth on the screen giving coordinates, atmospheric conditions, and conditional release information for the product materialized in the sky by the work of my team. The room was striped in the garish colors of an old and tired unit established in the dawning days of aviation. Pictures on the walls proceeded through the years of fighting machines launched and recovered in the hands of men with uncommon knowledge of simple physics and smiling skulls on their jackets. The picture ran from the Curtis-Martin biplane prototype first launched off of a converted oiler through the heyday of Grumman’s legendary run of cats, Wildcats, Hellcats, and finally, the Tomcat.

The screen showed the middle of a town I have never had the opportunity to visit. The grids of streets slowly pinwheeled giving some scale to the enormous distance between the video capture and the target. Numbers cycled through while the screen switched back and forth between a tactical loadout of the plane and the resolutions offered of the town. The screen went back to its original target, white crosshairs arbitrarily selecting the tracked vehicle with the protruding weaponry. White ghosts milled around the machine, heat registering strong on the infrared. A mechanical and bored voice interrupted the silence of the taped occurrence. A new set of numbers on the left of the screen started a downward trend. The numbers grew smaller, into the teens, as a large and glowing machine pulled up to the track. The machine began expelling occupants, dozens of men who sat around smoking and talking. The truck full of men was not a target. The numbers fell past three and the screen flared white.

My job started then. I had to sit with my clipboard and estimate what the mess of white splotches represented as losses to the enemy. I had to estimate the number of dollars lost to our single drop of a ton of steel and PBXN-9. White shapes slithered away from the burning vehicle parts leaving trails of white, liquid warmth. None made it far before all movement ceased. The room I sat in was cold, as all steel rooms are, and festively decorated for the season. Behind me, the man who had dropped, or "pickled," the shot gathered his papers and his coffee cup.

He spoke from behind us, "Night, guys."

"Goodnight, sir."

"Oh, and Merry Christmas."

Pride and Prejudice: Notes

2007-02-23T12:56:00.000-08:00

These are notes from the movie I had to watch for ENGL 112. I took mostly serious notes, but these crept in there. And I left them in when I posted these notes to the class' shared folder. I kick ass.

1. Austen's use of cultural abnormaily -> expound later

2. We must have a ball! Oh, a ball! Tee hee hee. Bitches.

27. I hope someone dies of something violent soon.

35. God please make it stop. Pleasepleaseplease something explode.

38. How is this movie still going? Nothing has happend for FOURTY MINUTES

45. Darcy could beat the fuck out the skinny dweeby rich guy.

46. Bitch, he already chased you down in the rain, quit playing hard to get.

50. I could take Darcy.

51. Scandalous bitches.

53. Thankg you God for American orthodontic prowess. Keira's sister looks like an enraged squirrel.

72. For fucking finally. Two hours all to say three people get married.

Linguistic Differences

2007-02-16T11:57:00.000-08:00

I have been making great attempts at the language of Spain lately. I am in no danger of falling into fluency anytime soon.

The problem is that Spanish is so much damn work. Keep in mind that my native tongue is Rural-Coloradoan. Most of my English speaking experience is a little soft on technique. The key to speaking my native tongue is pronouncing most vowels identically and routinely dropping consonants that seem like too much work. You city folks like to call it mumbling. For instance, were you to want to explain to your Rural Colorado that you are not concerned with a choice, it would help to say this:

Ah'on't cur. Donm'ckno diffurnce t'me.

The key is to pretend that every movement of jaw and tongue is an extravagant effort that shouldn't be wasted on just any occasion. I have since learned English, but my native tongue keeps wantint'crep up. That is why Spanish is so difficult. The pronunciations are all so expressive and the mechanics pay so much attention to precise flow. I really didn't like the language until today.

You see, in English, I play guitar. It is an object held in my will, iron fists extracting some trivial game from the polished wood. In Spanish, toco la guitarra. To play insinuates a lack of concern, an informality in the approach. Toco, tocar, tocando, all mean to "touch." I do not play an instrument as a baggy clothed teenage boy plays a girl, I touch an instrument like la esposa. There is respect. There is an implied permission granted by the subject.

The difference in language carries into the musician. I submit that Jimmy Page, with his lightning speed and lightning jumpsuit is merely playing while he sashays and pinwheels all over the stage. He is producing music and putting on a production. He is using the instrument as a tool. As an axe. This is why his riffs make me want to drive fast, fuck girls, and punch faces.

Compare and contrast to the great Andres Segovia. His phrasing, so respectful, so tender, borne of years of intimate knowledge, makes emotions I have never been properly equipped to deal with flood into me and well up in my throat. I want to sit in a dark room and love this life, love a woman, feel every breath enter and escape. I want to hear every day begin again and share it with a warm body, light slanting down from the window in tiger stripes of rose and gold.

This is the difference in "to play" and "tocar."

This is Bullshit

2007-02-13T10:30:00.000-08:00

Shit, that is what I should be feeling akin to.

I do not feel like the aforementioned excrement, though I am righteously perturbed. See, I have a little tradition. On Wednesdays, for no reason whatsoever, I like to go out and eat a quality meal. I eat a vast amount of pasta-based one-pan creations throughout the other six days of a week for the intent and purpose of having enough extra money to enjoy my Wednesday night meal. This is normally not a problem.

Well, I rolled out of bed, shook off the feminist literature hangover, and what to my wondering mind should appear, but the CBS morning show (damn them bitches is hot), and some guy cooking up some type of lobster weirdness. He carved the carcass of the previously living, and one can only assume happy, lobster and put it into a feast for "someone special."

Don't get me wrong, I love cooking shows. I also love to cook. That being out in the open, hopefully some shining ray of heterosexual prowess will burst forth to quell the suspicions you may have, I would not consider in a million years lobster on a weeknight. So, why on this green and purple bentonite mud earth (and thus I submit the obligatory geology reference) would I have to watch some goddamn frog with a white coat decorated up like a goddamn NASCAR driver fireproof gay-o-tard cooking lobster? It is Tuesday, motherfucker.

Oh, that's right. Tomorrow is that day. That one day where everyone pretends to like each other more. I have no problem with any of that. If there is anything I learned from the string of pork rind women dressed up like tiramasou, it is that relationships thrive on the two people pretending to like each other more than they do. Do you women realize what kind of hair you leave in the sinks?

No, friends, what thoroughly annoys me about tomorrow is that I will not be able to go out on my date with the only person who's tastes I always agree are good and who's company is guaranteed not to annoy.

There is something wrong with the world when a man must make reservations to enjoy his own company. It takes all the fun out of being single. And thus I submit the tragedy of this February day, that I will have to order pizza or visit some sandwich shop on my hallowed day. It just don't seem right.

Flying V's and Charity Work

2007-02-07T12:17:00.000-08:00

This post is in two parts. One is drunken rambling, the other a plea. You figure it out.

Subject One:

I have decided to get published and therefore I need an editor/proofreader sometime in the next week or so. I am serious about the proofreading part. I would prefer someone with an eye for mechanics, word usage, subject/object issues, etc. I like my prose the way it is, so I would only need minimal content direction, probably centered around the fact that I sometimes take vague way too far. Pay is not an issue, because you won't be paid. Obviously, this makes it an imposition if you have a busy schedule and I understand. Blah, Blah, and so forth. Anyway, volunteers should contact me by whatever means get their goat.

Subject the Second:

Albert King is cooler than you. Albert King is cooler than most, so your tears are wasted, mortal. On the eighth day of creation the Serpent tempted woman not with fruit or knowledge, but with the subtle sinew of a fretboard burning up the key of Bb. This is not in your Bible, or in some creation legend from the plateaus of shadowed Ararat. Those legends are fine, imperfect as they are.

Eve, Lilith and the tenderized portions of your mind left open to loving the soft touch and vanilla and quince scent of the one woman you never truly got to know sings in round and full harmonics and symphonics. In the raised voice of a thousand parishioners in the Burning Church of the Mortal Human, you hear the wail of a Gibson Flying V scything down the furrows of brown, sweaty, and slick women with eyes the color of ebony, skin borne of the plains of Mahogany.

The Serpent is the twisted and strained neck, fretted in wire, strings so loose and detuned they hang precariously over the inlaid dots that are meaningless in the note-and-a-quarter bends fluidly draining you of the will to work, pay, or buy. You simply want to give your soul over to all the demoniac passions robbed of you by civilization.

Albert King is the silent dictator of a thousand shining cities where the citizens vie for the chance to cry in the streets. In the palace of the cool, he sits entombed in hazy, smoking tendrils. He brings Hell up to us as a shading cloud and Heaven down from the sky as a flaming pillar of fire. All your lonliness he'll try to soothe. He'll play the Blues for you.

Be awed, mortal. He once shared this Earth with you.

Snippet IV

2007-02-01T11:56:00.000-08:00

Got drunk by myself last night and they say that's no way to make things right, I just didn't have anything better to do.

That is a bald-faced lie.

Well, yes, but the song is amazing, though the production is terrible. I did have drink, but it was over pizza at the bar.

What song is that?

"Proud Souls" by Cross Canadian Ragweed.

That was real slick.

Hopefully enough people will like the song and buy their albums and they'll make music forever.

Always scheming. You are some sort of mastermind, aren't you?

Yes, but I try to veil it behind heavy doses of complete incompetence. Or heavy handed maneuvers like opening cans of beans with hatchets, keeps 'em guessing.

Funny, I thought the revolution is over.

That's exactly what I want you to think. See how genius works?

Awesome.

Speaking of awesome, I have new links. I might explain that my links are more for my convenience. I like to be able to hit everything of interest from one site.

And comment.

Um. Sure. I do that sometimes. It's only polite.

I am your conscience, I know when you lie.

Too bad you can't tell me when I drink a fat girl skinny at the bar, asshole. So, no, I don't comment much. I know how amazingly refreshing it is to have thirty people saying "OMG, I totally love, love, love ice cream TOO!!!LMAO!!!" It's reassuring on some level and Blogger has no referrer logs, so lurkers are unaccounted for.

What if they link back?

My links are for my own use, they're not recruiting tools. I don't care if they don't link, I don't even want them to in some cases. I don't think I'm the kind of company they want to keep. Creepy desert dreams, rants about killing people, posts that all seem to be about sex even when they're about rocks or guitars or some shit, not really blogosphere material. People's minds are dirty.

Or you're just always horny.

Such a crass word. I prefer toey. No one is sure whether I want to get in a fight or hop in a sack.

So, have you considered trying to write more to an audience instead of self-centered rambling?

No.

Hmmm.

Ok, yes. I even took pictures of squirrels and made up cute captions. It was real blogger activity, I even found a way to complain about Bush in a psuedo-informed manner using the squirrels as a foil, then I figured out ways to link all the people more popular than me in that post. It was amazing. I come this close to buying an iPod.

And then?

I shot the squirrels and made them into fajitas. Would it be gay to put recipes on here?

Probably.

The Anteroom

2007-01-22T21:06:00.001-08:00

Feel free to analyze the shit out of this one.

The wooden smell of lemons and the ionized smell of bronze and nickel hangs heavy and deep in the close air. With every breath in and every breath out, swirling galaxies are formed in the silver dust, coming together and exploding away into individual flakes of some greater, floating life. The wooden aroma is from the bodies of the art and the metallic is from the strings. Rosewood, maple, and ashes slowly enriching, and as all beings, decaying in the process of maturing. Necks losing rigidity and bodies impregnating on epoxies, lacquers, and polyurethanes, they hang from hooks or stand on strange, three-legged steel constructs. They are here to be bought and sold, hawked and bartered. The oils of untold hands worn into the necks, grinding string to fret with each emotion choked wail to the muses and to heaven and to hell, stains the fretboards. These are real guitars. A Thinline Tele, an old Strat with the cigarette case tremolo, Gretch Jets, 335's, 325's and the humble Dot. They all languish and reign in the dry air of the eternal, sun-drowned pawn shop. This is the room I find myself in.

The guitars, golden and battered in the slanting sunlight, hold dominion over the quiet, boxy hulks below with a heart of darkened wattage. My fingers trace the golden spiral into the dust icing of a Blackface Twin. Around me, tweed is the rule and black pleather the exception. All of these beasts of burden are loaded with a bygone art, long passed from the glory of cheap production and cajoled into the elitism of the boutique. Lights on top of the control panels of these electric, time-traveling craft are dark where they have glowed pink and purple and amber in thousands of jukes and honkytonks.

I pull away my hand, staring at the dust, ground into the spirals of my finger. I am silent. So are the beasts. So are the wooden pietas hanging from the ceiling.

I am looking for something small, portable. I am leaving soon, and to a place where battery power, resistence to the elements, and compact size are so very useful. The heart of the room is a silver Stratocaster, an angelic host. The gleaming of the metal skin is marred by years of tarnish without the honor of a loving polish. It hurts me to see it. Strung along on a jewel-studded cord run in circles and pinwheels and spirals, sits a small transistor amp the size of a pack of cigarettes.

From behind me, I hear sighs of exhaustion and I know I am not alone. This is no mere pawshop, it is the waiting room to a grand stage. Towering beams shoot up at angles supporting an invisible ceiling. The room is the cheap and cobbled together rule of any backstage, the effort of beauty was better spent in the great auditorium. All backstages suffer this fate.

I turn slowly, choked in the stifling room, to see four men dressed in maroon suede and felt. Their close cropped hair or greasy curls are uniformly neat and rest on top of their mahogany skin. Eons of decades have come and gone between their time and mine. They represent a world of shoes polished instead of blinging Jordans and stuffy suits instead of garish sweatsuits. They are the hiphop of their age, exploiters of the exploitation. The fatigue on their faces enumerates the grand stages they have played to white audiences who would lynch them for talking wrong to their cousins. They are the most exploited of all the huddled masses; the acceptable negro. In their method of vocation, they exploit the status quo in return. They are tarnished with sweat and sell-out.

They dutifully ignore me, the blue eyed stranger, as black men always do. In all of the fires of the ghettos yet to grace their children's decade, never will the thousand yard, ignoring stare leave their community. In my time, in the places I have been, I have experienced it often enough. They are afraid of me and what I may do or say. They are also speechlessly exhausted.

I turn back to the small amp, silver and black, with knobs grinding out of it and KORG scripted in block font across the speaker. It is a gadget and most guitarists love gadgets. The knob on the side has the many models of sound to choose from; clean, dirty, M. stack, F. twin, V. clean. I turn it slowly to the first notch. When the needle hits "clean," the unit glows orange in my hand and music falls out of it in a demo of the model. The music scratches at my ears with its unoffending terribleness. It is slow and plodding prewar big band music. The lush orchestra builds the all major chords into a power house of mediocrity. White folks music. I am embarrassed by it, but can't turn it off. Through the syrup of the music, nearly devoid of drums or bassline, a voice vomits through. With the long, over-pronounced vocals of an old Disney cartoon, the man sings, "I am going to Kansahs City, Kansahs City here I come..."

The singer continues while I start to chuckle a little and desperately try to kill the terrible noise. As I peek over my shoulder, I see the nearest musician staring at the box in a combination of disgust, perplexity, and amusement at the abuse of the cliche blues standard. The switches won't move and the lardy voice continues, "They got some crazy little loving there and I am going to get me some."

I rip the chord from the amp, the orange glow fades but the flatulent music remains. I turn around, the spell is broken, all eyes are on me. We are all amused.

I shrug, "At least somebody finally did something different with Kansas City."

The disgusted and amused musician laughed, "I was just thinking the same damn thing."

Then the dream was over.

Cohabitation

2007-01-22T12:09:00.000-08:00

A very wise man once said that two men can never truly peacefully cohabitate, that all they can accomplish is a bitter cold war of buried hostility. This is true. Has always been true.

Therefore, let me tell a story:

I do not think my roommate is unintelligent, mean, annoying, or in any way unlikable. He is a pretty good guy, all told. All that being said, I sometimes hate him. This is for no other reason than men are territorial by nature. I like my house best when he is out of town, and the opposite is true, I'm sure. We have lived together longer than I have ever lived with anyone for one unbroken stretch, including persons I may have been having sex with and/or married. I hate him, sometimes. Never when he is there, I have no problem when he is there to speak to.

No, I hate him when he is not there and his living evidence annoys me. For instance, I walked into the bathroom and found four articles of reading material, they were:

1. Don Quixote, Cervantes
2. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway
3. Travels With Charley in Search of America, Steinbeck
4. Swank Adults Only!!!, Various women in states of feigned ecstasy

3/4 of the reading material in the bathroom was mine. 75% of it would not offend a girl I may or may not have brought to my house. One fourth of the reading material has on the cover, "Put your penis in sticky Venus!", and my favorite, "Innocent angels spreads like Hell!"

Remind me not to teach graamar from the annals of porn.

But there, sitting ugly and garishly appointed in pinks and greens straight out of the Crasstacular Journal of all Things Dirty, was some girl wearing some type of fishing net with a finger pulling her lower lip down and with eyes sloppily drooped in a manner that is either trying to be sexy or simulating a seacow with missing chromosomes. That dirty filth rests on top of Travels With Charley and now I am worried about opening up that amazing travelogue because I'm afraid that a hand that has touched a penis and then touched the magazine that sits on top of my book that I would grip in my hands may not have been washed. I thought Oprah's book club was bad for Steinbeck, but her ugly giant "O" sticker on the cover of East of Eden could never dissuade me from fine literature quite so much as that well-thumbed copy of Swank.

Oh, crap

2007-01-17T13:52:00.000-08:00

You know, this may have been something that popped up in your consciousness before, but it rarely makes landfall on my own shoreline of rational expectations. I might die.

My life has been one string of near misses after another. What if my luck is out? What if it's out in June?

Is there any God waiting to meet me? I see now why poor people have always believed in religions. When your situation is tenuous, the stakes are pretty high. I have my own religion that is loosely based on one or two principles of a possible afterlife, but it isn't enough to calm my worried mind. At the very least I might luck out and something of me will make it into the rocks some day out there, further on up the road.

When I'm back there, again, what if I die? Will all my convictions die with me, bleeding out of me with my blood while I just grow cold and forgetful until enough blood leaves my brain that all goes black? Who will feel like I do, or want justice the way I do?

I have no children. Nothing of me will be left but pointless Internet ramblings slowly waiting on my credit card to quit paying server fees. Besides some memories, lionized in the minds of those who will not be subject to my objectivity, I leave this world nothing. I will just go away.

This is all assuming that the unlikely happens, of course. I'm just worried that no one else will ever see the World that I see ever again. It deserves it, I think.

Oh well.

Fuck

2007-01-10T15:09:00.000-08:00

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

So, the VA (Dept. of Veteran's Affairs) is full of chimps beating willy-nilly upon computing machines and if not properly stroked in their tenaciously entrenched beds of bureaucratic, simian filth will regularly go on pointy-headed power trips or merely lose whatever common sense and proficiency they may have. My lab tests that are part and parcel of my overseas deployment screening are somewhere between here and the Orion Nebula, but lost to myself and the greater dedicated medical branch of an underfunded and inefficient organization.

So, did this get me out of going to Iraq? No. I'm not upset about that, I've got myself pretty revved up to go. What pisses me off is that instead of Feb. 11th, I have been pushed back to June. In other words the frustration, the moving my stuff out of my house, the saying last goodbyes and setting up accounts, the sleeping with women I should not have; all of that was in vain and premature.

So, I says Fuck.

I know there's a lot of positives to all this, but if you bother pointing them out while I'm in this mood I may say terrible things about you mother.

I try never to use any type of italics or capitalization in writing, I like to think I need no training wheels. I will say this:

Iraq, Southwest Asia in general, in June FUCKING SUCKS.

Bitches.

Ducking Out

2007-01-06T13:07:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to be around much the next month. I have a lot to write about, but not the motivation. I spent a week or so in Denton participating in activities I should not have. Normally, The Meters rock. With the type of fun I had, The Meters become a minor force of nature. Like the gravitons of funk. Gravitons of Funk is a kick-ass name for something.

I got a solid date, at least. On February 11th, my fuzzy butt will be in Norfolk, Virginia for processing into SELRES and training. I will be there until some time in March. After that, my destination is predictable.

So, February, you might start seeing more of me. Until then, I've got a lot of stuff to do. Don't forget about me in the mean time.

Everything Was Beautiful and No Highwaymen Hurt

2006-12-16T14:10:00.000-08:00

It was night, wind a gusty torrent, ghostly galleon sailing and so forth.

Cold as fuck. Frost and ice clung on to every single surface, forks frozen, pipe frozen, booger froze in my nosen.

Some asshole had dumped over eight bunks of PVC sched 80 conduit into the back lot, a random act of stupidity, not an evidence of an over-all stupidity on the part of the dumper. Pipe of all sizes, ten foot sticks, dumped over and left over night for two nights, tied themselves in a dark gray love-knot. I had been equipped with only the shittiest of supplies, gloves a-shitty. And so on. Beautiful.

I built a new bunk of pipe, drug it from asunder, melded it in wonder. Motherfucker is six feet tall and eight feet deep. I hope I'm not, and somehow know I will end up, being the guy in a week or two who has to drag that PVC megalith inside and try to work it into the pipe corral.

At one point, the forklift, having found the drainage from a faucet left on for weeks, went spinning in the moonlight, careening in the moonlight, skidding in the moonlight and totally fucking knocked over a stack of iron 2 inch pipe.

I pulled in to the rollcage, barely saving my hand. The black pipe loosened in its casement and my face would have possibly burnt like a brand had not it been frozen. The black waves fell all around the forklift's breast in the moonlight. (Goddamn it, I wish I could see better in the moonlight). Fuck working in the moonlight. I'm pretty sure I shouted obscenities at the moonlight.

I stacked all that bullshit back up over the course of three hours, my hands freezing on the pipes. I lited the stack to a shabby former form and went to work on the PVC again. After a couple hours of wading through the , plaited, gray bramblefuck, I had another bunk built. I scooped it up onto the forklift after I used my truck to jump the battery that the cold had claimed. After rolling into the cage and lifting the bunk about two feet of the required ten, the forklift, victim of circumstance was dead from the blast of a broken propane regulator.

And so on. Beautiful.

Anyway, twelve hours and minor frostbite later, I would be home. But I will know that next time the wind blows a gusty torrent and the moon sails a ghostly galleon, and so forth, the rest of the broken bunks will wait with love knot tied in gray, woven plaits of bullshit.

11.9 hours (don't go into overtime!) of that shit last night. Fuck.

More Anthropomorphic Geology

2006-12-14T22:14:00.000-08:00

Twice today, two diametrically disparate individuals have asked me the same question.

"Do you miss her?"

Interesting.

To understand the question, and the askers cannot, you have to understand the tumult of me and her. We were explosive and beautiful together. We were partners, team mates, lovers of passion and soul. I don't miss her.

I am not callous or heartless. If anything, though few would ever guess, I am excessively sensitive to a select few. Friends and lovers can attest to a softie of unmatched proportion lurking inside the shit talker, pool shark, beer guzzler, and guitar strangler.

Have you ever loved and missed? I move drunkenly that, with notable exception, you have not. As the puppy eyes and coy smiles are not love and neither the comfortable proximity, neither is the slight ache from a business weekend or a week of tittering argument "missing". I ask have you loved and missed the way I ask have lived and breathed the scent of the being and their absence?

I stood away from the world, chevalier defending a weak hearted damsel never out of distress. We loved as I drink this Stella here, thousands of miles from where we started and where we ended, habitually and with every fermion and quark of my being aching for more than can be taken in. The gushing emotion of a thousand parishioners exulting in their perceived divine truth could never match the trickle of her hand on my cheek. The slowest, weightiest glacier could never match the sheer force of our fights. She found a wellspring of passion I never knew I had. She found the fire that I repressed after it landed me in the cooler or in a heap of beaten flesh a few too many times. She loved me. She did, and though I still judge the validity of that particular catch-all word on the merits of her lacking, when I'm honest, I can admit that she loved me more than any other ever has.

Her eyes. Have you ever stood in a canyon and watched the rain fall on a sunny day? The azure sky, filled with falling diamonds, the golden grass, used to hold me transfixed in her eyes. She had beautiful eyes.

I don't miss her, nor do I love her. Let me explain.

When a man loses a limb, for reasons of nervous continuity, he still hurts in that limb. They are referred to as ghost pains, pains of limbs long incinerated in a heap of other removed human paraphernalia. Have you ever skinned a knee and felt the wind bite into it if it was exposed to the air? Imagine feeling the swirling wind, full of salt and wonder, smarting an open wound along your side and under your loving arm where a person had been amputated. She used to stand next to me, always cold, huddled against my thick side. When the conditions of war and so on tore us two apart, the ghost pains shot through that part of me, in my meaty side, where we had grown together and been torn asunder. I missed her as I would miss an aching and amputated leg, wishing she was there, or had never been there in the first place, but always stinging along the torn side.

So, though I have feelings that many who have never endured that life-losing love and love-losing life of her and I would mistake for loving and missing, I don't miss her or love her.

I feel emotions that those who live their life in shallow bobbing flotation on the surface of the puddle of feeling would mistake for love. I sometimes grow wistful for her arms in a manner that those who have never been mired in mercury waters and sand drifts far from home would mistake for missing her.

It's all just sad. I wish she had never been torn away or she had never been there in the first place. She is a ragged stump, rolled in salt and cauterized with hot iron. On the other hand, I think I got away more clean from our union than she did. I'm lucky, I guess. It could have been worse. I could have been her. I don't even know how she makes it through a single day.

I guess I should wrap this up. Sorry for the downer, just thoughts you have under a prairie sky thinking a thousand lives dead and gone back from the grave. Where will she turn back into dust and sand? I don't know. I have a feeling she already has. God save her.

IM Quotable quote

2006-12-14T13:28:00.000-08:00

L. Gilmore, who has no intentions on my privates or on those of any physicist, has been a good friend for years.

Casey: "Don't you think caution is needed when using ordinary language to ascribe attributes to God?"
Casey: -Niels Bohr
MsL: "Fuck Niels Bohr"
MsL: -L. Gilmore
MsL: Make THAT a quote for your stupid website.
Casey: That's lame
MsL: It is not lame
Casey: Wait, you want to fuck Niels Bohr?
MsL: I would fuck Niels Bohr if he was hung like you
Casey: Now THAT'S a quote.

Pilgrimage and So Forth

2006-12-11T16:28:00.000-08:00

The last installment of the Pilgrimage series is done. I decided to offer parts I, II, III, and IV in one file. It's broken up into four parts, clearly marked. Anyway, there, that's done.

That was a pain in the ass.

Here is the link: Pilgrimage

I figured I'd answer a few questions I anticipate now that that's all over.

Q. You were 12?

A. Yes, I was, I also wrote it down, or rather typed it in WP 5.1 on a Tandy 1000. I've always kept journals of memorable dreams. Obviously, I didn't write it so well at 12 as I can now.

Q. So, are there more?

A. Maybe, these things are long and I think they lose readership, but that may just be my kneejerk reaction to any of my posts over three paragraphs. Also, I have many of them written in journals, but they're very dark and sometimes a little too intimate for me to share with all of you.

Q. Are you crazy?

A. No, but sometimes my writing takes that direction, usually in relation to music I'm listening to. The entirety of the writing of the Pilgrimage series was done listening to Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s, Yanqui U.X.O.

Q. Do you think you are/Are you Jesus?

A. No.

Q. Then why the dreams?

A. My life has a spiritual back story that you can't possibly imagine. I try not to write about it because there is no way for me to do that without your prejudices attacking a great and truly original people because their beliefs are not your own. Though my status within that group is sketchy, I love them too much to ever do that.

Q. So about that other thing...

A. February 17 or so, I'll be on my way to southern Iraq via Norfolk, Virginia, reactivated into the active duty US Navy. The best job description I can give for my new duty is either "Pirate" or "Coast Guard sans ROE". No, I'm not scared. Yes, I'll miss home. No, nothing can make me stay. Yes, I'll stay in touch as much as I can.

Pilgrimage III

2006-12-05T18:22:00.000-08:00

The first impression I had was of blood.

Crimson stalks of satin drapes, shimmering with oily iridescence, fell from the incredibly high ceiling and extended out into the floor, billowing in the breeze of our entry. The light shining through the gauzy body of the drapes gave the impression of a pool filled with swirling, red liquid on the marble floor. The walls were of heavy granite and slate; men in black, ornate uniforms stood guard lined shoulder to shoulder along the wall opposite our entry. The motionless rank extended down the hall into eternity. They held a gaze above our heads and did not move. They were dead.

We walked forward slowly, every step a ringing gunshot in the large hall. The cacophony of the circling helicopters outside pummeled the air and quenched as the doors slid shut. The agency of authority had not detected our entry into the building, though they knew we were coming. The courthouse of the damned had no windows save small squares immediately below the towering ceiling. We began to walk toward the brass-framed directory hanging on the far wall.

The directory was in some odd, glyphic language. There was no map. Down the hall to our right, the normal bustle of border crossing was audible. We had not come through the correct door. We were not supposed to be here, and anyone who saw us would know it.

The air was shattered by clacking footsteps of high heels on marble tile. We had no escape. It would be a fight. And I was the only one of our group capable of the fight. I stuffed the boy behind the solid line of corpse guards and directed the girl behind him. I feigned confidence and told them to remain silent, no matter what. The steps were reporting closer and closer. I crouched in front of the directory and waited to strike. I had no rocks this time. White heels and a sensible, though glaring, white suit walked in front of me and stopped. She turned towards me. I remained in a crouch, though I did not pounce as I had planned. She walked up to me and squatted down. She was a beautifully appointed woman of commerce and business. Her flowing, golden hair fell around her face and her eyes were pale blue.

She smiled.

"Are you lost?"

"Yes."

"Let me help you."

Her pale hand, manicured and thin, reached out for mine. Her smile ripened and showed her perfect, white teeth. I took her hand and she pulled me up out of the crouch as she stood. Her voice was without regional locution and her face betrayed no heritage. She was refinement and salesmanship made manifest. She was a business woman, like they had in movies, and she wanted to help me, a poor and country boy from the beans and the rich, brown Earth. Her hand was smooth, without callous or blemish and her suit showed no stains from working deep in the soil or caring for the sick, the dying, and the children. Her hair was not knotted or streaked with the gray of a hard life in a hard climate living the hard faith of the Brethren. She was like no woman I had ever seen with my own eyes, though she was alive and well in the iris of a dozen projectors in the Cortez Magnificente Theatre.

I couldn't take my eyes off of her. "I have friends."

"I know."

I called the two, and they came out from behind the displayed death. The girl's face was troubled and she looked suspiciously at the woman. The boy, without question, comment, or even recognition grabbed my hand. The girl followed with arms folded.

"We need to get to the North."

"Yes."

We walked toward the bustle of the crossing, her heels reverberating odd the slate walls and dead guards, the drapes billowing after her swaying walk.

Pilgrimage II

2006-11-30T08:52:00.000-08:00

The car kicked up no dust. Thick bedding of gravel groaned under the accelerating vehicle plowing towards the gate. Despite my efforts to keep up, the car was escaping. My legs ground into the gravel and my lungs sucked hungrily at my throat. My sides were on fire. The girl and the boy stood still and white against the rich chocolate clay of the fields. They could not move without me. The car could not avoid them. The men would get out of the car and murder or torture my charges. I had abandoned them to the forces of the authorities intent on killing us three. The gate opened for the car and slammed shut behind it.

I ran up to the gate, climbed it, and cut myself open on the cyclone wire and jumped over. The boy and the girl were occulted behind the white car that was now parked. The doors were hanging open with well appointed, but entirely gray men exiting the vehicle. The well dressed and manicured set of ghouls were moving around to the front of the car. I picked up a fist sized boulder and ran up to the first suit. He turned his face, or where his face should have been, pale and gray, toward me. I leapt on to him and choked him with one hand and battered the side of his head with the rock. Without any resistance or fighting back, he fell in a heap, clear blood running from his crushed head.

The commotion had drawn the attention of the other employee. The ghoul pulled out his pistol and began firing into me. Pain seared my resolve into a solid ball in my stomach. I threw the rock into his face and he fell. My momentum brought me to his body and I fell on to him. My fists beat his face of their own volition while he struggled to get up. As his face became soft under my hands, he struggled less and less until he finally lay still. I stood.

The boy took my left hand, and the girl took the boy's right. We began walking to the North. I apologized to them for the abandonment and endangering. They were silent and following. The brown dust rose around our feet while the sky, azure and pristine, shuffled the clouds away, the Indian paintbrush exalted in our survival along the road in minute explosions of red and yellow. My fists hurt, but I never bled from the wounds in my chest.

The laboratory faded behind us into the hills. The walk was long, but we were almost to the river. Beyond the river was the North. Unfortunately, my foray into the parking lot of the lab had alerted the authorities to our escape. The North clouded over and the beat of helicopters reached us from the darkened sky. Under the clouds, forboding and cold, sat an enormous brick building.

As we walked closer to the border, we saw brick stretch away from the building on both sides into eternity. On top of the wall was concertina wire and men with guns out and dogs with red eyes. The wall was impassable. The North had only one way in and one way out: through the building festooned with potlights and sporting an enormous seal above the door. Two lions ripping a man in two underneath a haughty perched eagle were painted in gold on the noble red crest.

Our little troop walked up to the doors, massive steel plates the size of a house. With a friendly ding, the doors slid open for us.

Pilgrimage I

2006-11-25T02:00:00.000-08:00

This is a dream I had years and years ago.

I was somewhere in the range of twelve years old.

The sparse landscape of Montezuma County stretched away on all sides. On all sides of the rolling fields of dark brown earth furrowed for the spring's beans, the mountains framed the surreality of the fertile valley. The La Platas, the San Juans, the Sleeping Ute, the sheer cliffs of ancestral sea mud to the South showed the gateway to the Great Monument Valley. We stood n a small swell along one of the nameless county roads that belted the emptiness of Southwestern Colorado. If I had to guess, I would say were were around Cahone.

There were two others with me, one girl a little older than I and one boy too young to have been in school. They were my charge. I had to keep them safe and get them north. We had to get to the North where we would be safe.

I walked along the rich, dark road and the way was paved with miniature explosions of Indian paintbrush and sunflowers. They weaved and bowed in the wind as we passed, worshipping the movement of the warm air. The sun was high and hot. Our shadows fell under us and the only shade was from the scrubs of pinon, cedar, and sage. I lead, but not from the front. I was on the right side of the road walking with my left hand taken by the small boy's right. To the far left, the girl held his other hand. They deferred to me, but I don't0 know why.

After an interminable distance over the swells and hollers of the stretching land, we came upon man. Not man himself, but one of his temples. Towering into to the sky with the imposing lack of any aesthetic value was a laboratory. The concrete building was a square but shapeless mass secreted into the open and wild land of my youth by greedy and hungry men. The structure reached into the cobalt sky and drilled into the ionosphere with smokestacks. The parking lot was full of cars. All manner of vehicle was sequestered in the lot surrounded by the high chain link and cyclone wire so in contrast to the simple cedar post and barbed wire that lined the rest of the road.

The wind stood still. The dust that gritted in our teeth settled down, but did not mar the shining perfection of the rows of cars.

Cars have always fascinated me. I had to get closer. I had to touch one and look inside, roll under it, feel the cool, steel skin. I found a gate and realized that the other two, for reasons that are more profound than a simple rule of existence can define, could not go in. They were blocked from the entrance guarded by an empty shack and concrete pylons by something sinister, spiritual. I told them to wait and I would return. I had to see the cars. The gate opened for me.

The cars sheened in the harsh sunlight of high altitude. They were so beautiful. a 1970 Bronco, a '68 GTO, some European contraption with the shape of a woman and the eyes of a dragon, a '63 Ford Unibody F-100. I rolled in the field, bliss found in the spotless chrome and glinting paint. I inspected each vehicle closely. While I ran my hand over the hood of an International Scout 80, the light changed. The sun had went behind a cloud. My reverie faded as I looked up and saw that the midday sun had become a late afternoon. This had all been a trap. There was an ugly, white, shapeless bureaucratic car prowling towards me down the lane of cars. The faceless car was dusty and heartless, owned by the laboratory. The drivers stared ahead, thoughtless. I ran towards the gate.

In the still air, I heard the engine rev and the crunch of earth under tires become steady. They were coming up behind me fast. I wasn't going to make it. They were going to run me down in the parking lot, my blood staining the gray gravel. Then the car passed me. I had not known terror until that instant. My life was not at stake. I ran faster, my lungs burned and my legs protested. Dread realization tore my gut in two. They weren't coming after me.

They wanted the girl and the boy.

Why the Next Few Posts Will Make No Damn Sense

2006-11-19T14:33:00.000-08:00

My whole life, I have been plagued by dreams. Not really dreams, but semiconscious and semi lucid scenarios. In the dreams, I'm running from other people. I don't mean running on foot through a crowded mall, but packing up and running off to the mountains or the deserts because the entire force of civilization decides that I am no longer a worthy inhabitant. Often, I have to drag various people, the vast majority women, off with me. Often the dreamscapes are recognizable topography, though sensationalized by whatever mind games I'm running on myself. The mountains will be spired and vertical, the deserts will be scratched open aeolian sandstones and infested with snakes and poisonous lizards.

Even the dreams that are so benign as to escape my memory the next day leave me bruised and scraped from some battle I had to fight that manifested itself in thrashing or waking up with starts. I have been told that I often talk in my sleep. Always directing some nameless group or arguing some passionate point.

There are only two constants in these dreams. One is that they involve, in detail, a vehicle that actually exists in my real life. The other is that I always have to lead, an activity much like The Holy Cross Trail in that it terrifies me until I get my ass out there and do it.

I bring this up because over the next week or so, I'm going to write down the dreams I can remember before they go away forever. With someone there, laying out next to me, I never have those dreams. Someday, I might not have the luxury of these dreams. A warm body next to me takes away all those crazy missions and chases. That is why they are mine and mine alone. As much as I enjoy every sacred, dreamless night I have spent with a good woman, somewhere inside me, I know it won't last. It brings to mind the celibacy vows of Gandhi. He never wanted the love of an individual to override the love of all men that gave him his mission and life's work. Not that I'm pretentious enough to compare myself to Gandhi.

When I see life spreading around the canvas of events, I wonder if I can ever have anyone here without losing my sense of priority, my sense of responsibility to the bulk of humanity. My dreams may be taken away for a while.

Sometimes You Need A Quickie

2006-11-15T20:11:00.000-08:00

I know I said I was going to be gone. I lied. I feel terrible about it, but when you look as good as I do in a red microfiber shirt, self-flagellation exudes a pretentious and simulated humility.

Microfiber has a purpose in this correspondence, though a small one.

I needed some pants suitable for physical training. The shorts just don't cut it here in my neck of the woods after September, and my knees are battered enough that cold can be a problem. All Sports Turbo Seven eXtreme Warehouse, or whatever ridiculous name they go by, had the best selection of jogging suits. I needed something simple and, above all, inexpensive. As it turned out, I had no real shopping to do, as my size is always the first one to be snatched away by greedy hordes of terribly ordinary men.

All preamble aside, if you see a man with no hair, striking features framed by the slanting evening sun of the high desert, sweat dripping and sheening in ways that awake parts of female neuro-centers and hormonal distributaries laid dormant by a generation of men who prefer tanning salons and designer jeans, you should not laugh at the fact that he is dressed as if the Bolshevik Revolution vomited upon him.

More to the point, don't laugh at his huffing and puffing from a year of lazy, civilian living.

Honestly, I usually write these correspondences for strangers and acquaintances and friends as a warm up to more productive writing, and as I enjoy outlandish goals I have no intention of keeping, I have a book to write before January.

That last sentence was very complicated. I might just need to go pour myself a glass of something cold, brown, and toxic. On that note, I'll start being productive.

Weekend Update

2006-11-11T12:04:00.000-08:00

That post about staying or going was a saved draft from October, thus the angst I think. The reason for all that questioning was the opportunity to voluntarily mobilize for a year. Then I settled on staying, happy and in love with another winter of snow and warm blankets, even if there won't be anyone sharing those blankets.

Long story short, any person ever part of the military knows that they only give you the option of volunteering for so long before you're just voluntold.

Of course, this is all assuming that the way is made straight and the path lit through all the screenings and so forth. I'd give my odds of missing another Christmas around 85/15.

If I'm still healthy when the MED screen goes down, come January I'll be on the East Coast for a couple months and tentatively accepting offers for beer on that strip of salt wash. Hopefully, I'll finally get to see a couple places over there that I missed during my on again/off again relationship with the chowder states. Namely, I will see Philadelphia, goddamit. I'm a little bit of a history nerd, and a little bit of an understater, so Philly has always been on my A list. So was New York, and then I took care of that. Virginia, but I got that out of the way ad nauseum. The Spanish Colonial towns of the gulf coast bear my foot prints. It sure is nice that I'm a history nerd because a couple months after I arrive in Virginia (again), I'll be in the "Cradle of Civilization."

With a rifle.

Instead of the simple, and exponentially safer, detention facility duty that I could have volunteered for, it's looking like I'll be working interdiction in the Gulf. That's where we board vessels and search the ships for contraband arms and so forth. Boarding parties are historically a good way to get your shit dead. All of this begs the question, "How do I feel about all this?"

I wish I had some sophisticated and high-minded word to impart. I thought and prayed, if that's what you want to call it, and the best response I can come up with in regards to this news is pretty much, "Fuck yeah."

Maybe that's why a life of roving and fighting draws me like it does. I'm not saying I want to do it, but I can do it, and very well. That's motivating.

Honky Tonk

2006-11-07T13:06:00.000-08:00

The throttle is twisted back to the stop. Screaming demons are at work under me, and a strung out angel is doing her best to hang on. Life is a commodity I do not appreciate fully, and Vulcan, angry angels of death are breathing chemicals in my blood. The four horseman of the apocalypse spin at thousands of revolutions in one of our earth minutes, propelling me at speeds beyond unsafe and beyond unreasonable. Suicidal and stupid would be more accurate. I'm 18.

Back then I had a few good timing friends who were pretty much worthless human beings. Andrew was one of them. The only reason I think we were such friends is that we had a tendency to get expelled from school together. We attended, to horribly abuse that word, a local alternative high school. They didn't like us, and we didn't like them. Eventually, I got in enough trouble that there was no use going back. Andrew met me in the parking lot and we drove off.

We shared several dead end jobs and untold cases of PBR. Our lives were simple and pointless. In retrospect, I don't even understand why we even hung out together in the first place. On the other hand, when you're going nowhere in life, you don't expect your friends to be beneficial to you. We worked the odd construction and landscaping jobs and threw away our paychecks in the bars and pool halls that didn't bother carding us. What was left over of our wrecked economies, I wasted on books and he wasted on swords and knives and other crap.

One summer, we discovered speed. Our lives changed drastically.

I was working a few nights a week throwing freight in a disreputable warehouse and he was selling wire work and bullshit little crafts at renaissance fairs. We were still partying out in the deserts outside of town, souping up our old Ford trucks, and swapping the kinds of girls that go for old Fords and desert parties. One night, we ran into a bonfire party with a warm keg of beer and some seriously interested women. The strung out angel was there, fucked up and dancing to Lyrnrd Skynrd's Simple Man in front of the diesel and pallet holocaust. Our beers were spiked with the strange new stuff and we enjoyed the effects immensely. I have always been told the dangers of drugs, but no one bothered calling the little pills speed, so I didn't know what I was getting into.

Besides blueberries and auburn women, I have no addictions. I never developed an addiction that summer, either. I just used the pills to stay awake or make the party last longer. When I got tired of them and figured out what they were, I quit. Andrew didn't make it out as clean.

The summer ended when Andrew had his picture on the news and a reward for information leading to his arrest. He borrowed my tent and some of my gear and stayed out in the desert with his girlfriend. I would bring him out some hamburger and bread and canned stuff and he would ask if they were still looking for him. We would sit out in the cold desert nights and drink cheap beer and Ten-High whiskey until the sun came up and I had to go to work. That summer, we had found ourselves wrapped up in the cash economy of drugs and parties, and he had went too far and got caught. I had bought a motorcycle. We were just kids, but that winter got cold and hard.

Later, I would memorize those constellations we were staring at and learn many more as I saw a greater selection of the Earth's available view of the universe from the world ocean, the cathedral of father time. But that night, the last I ever saw him or his slack-jawed girlfriend, all I knew is that the stars were beautiful. The strung out angel I had brought with me was inside the tent girl talking with Andrew's slack-jawed girlfriend.

"I'm leaving tomorrow," he said over the top of his can of beer. His face was softly lit by the portable propane grill I had lent him.

"Where you headed?"

"Nevada. I got a friend works the mines out there said he could get me on."

"Think you'll ever be back?"

"I don't know, dude, depends what they'll (he gestured to the glowing city in the distance) want me to do."

I was leaving town, too, but I didn't know when. I didn't know how or even why, but I knew. I predestined myself to leaving. Selah.

I stood and brushed off my pants and smiled, "Well, alright buddy, been fun."

He smiled back, "Sure has."

The strung-out came up out of the tent and shivered.

It ain't something you control. I waved to his girlfriend and jumped on to the red demon. My temporary life-guest crawled on behind me and put on the helmet. I put the bike in neutral and pressed the starter. The four horseman leaped up into a whine.

Stratocaster hearts and hard wired souls. On the interstate now, going home from that desert, I have the throttle twisted back until it wrenches my wrist. De Beque canyon screams by and I'm going way too fast. The speedometer goes up to 140 and it has been buried for six miles. The foot pegs leave a valkrye train of sparks behind me when I cut into the corners. Her head is nestled into my back out of the wind, she's too fucked up and in love to be scared. I won't ever hear from Andrew again, because he wouldn't make it through the next five years.

It's live and die rock and roll.

_________________________________________________

Ray Wylie Hubbard, Live and Die Rock And Roll

Debating

2006-11-06T13:11:00.000-08:00

Stay or go?

Stay.

Why?

It's safer.

I hate safer. Safer is the whole problem I've been having.

You hate it there.

No I don't. I liked it. It was a nice place, just sort of hot and dusty. But gun oil, desert skies, men and women who live life, the way the derricks lit up the sky at night, that was beautiful.

It will be another year of school postponed.

True. I don't want to be in school till I'm thirty.

Another year of your life gone.

What life? The life where I scrape and scramble for every little two cent income I can grab and spend every night in my house watching PBS? Is that really something that shouldn't be interrupted?

You could die there.

I could die here.

Why do you even want to go?

I don't. But I have this part of me that needs to go. Besides, they want me. No one else does. They could give me some people who think like me and walk like me. What would that be called, a yearning?

Insanity?

The pay is good. I could really use the money.

Do you remember the ache of being away from all of it?

Away from all of what? I had something to come home to. I had a wife, a dog, a house. I had a life. I had something that drew me home. All that's gone, now. I have no reason to live here and do this anymore. I hate it. I hate the day in, day out bullshit and the Home Depot orange. I hate school and I hate that the really cool people I know are all so far away. I would be able to see Jim, and VA again. I could reclaim that place from Her, and make it mine. I could erase everything and just lose myself in the sand. Again.

This is a terrible idea.

I know. It's only a year. It's only one year.

So, stay or go?

Bravo Sierra Delta

2006-11-02T07:45:00.000-08:00

Yes, it is one of those days. BSD Day. Everyone has them.

That term, BSD, goes back to a former life I had. It was a crazy life where rigorous physical activity was combined with bat-shit crazy and rolled around in booze and disreputable women in exotic locales. Bake for eight months at 140. Serve hot in Perth.

I come up the ladder with an eighty pound rack on one shoulder and carrying a fifty pound maintenence box in the other. "We got it, burned relay. Changed it with 3r from 104, knocked down the 138, and jett checked it. It's up and ready."

'We got a warbird, son!"

"Yeah we do, jefe."

"Goddamn, Natural, you havin' a BSD today!"

Side note: every person I have ever known in my old line of work had a nickname. Mine, inspired by the fact that I would buzz my hair down to fuzz every time we went anywhere, was Natural Born Killer.

Sorry for the departure. Ah yes, BSD Day.

Say you nabbed a girl that everyone would be talking about, in a good way, for months. BSD Day. Say you jumped through hoops of fire and managed to get a go up and gone with all manner of challenges to face. You're having a BSD Day.

BSD is about ego, but the kind of ego that doesn't whimper for attention, it merely sits in place staring at the world with one appreciative eye and revels in the world's appreciation of it. BSD Day is the day you walk across the green fields of conquest without stopping for self-criticism.
When you have one of those days where you just feel like running a marathon in your jeans and work boots to show those pansies with the band-aids on their nipples (runners are weird) who the fuck they're dealing with. On a BSD Day you walk a little taller, talk a little louder, and neglect not the oppurtunity to pursue the opposite sex.

There is something aiding and abetting your success on BSD Days. Confidence lights up your eyes and screams out your approach to the rest of the huddled mortals. It's Big, and it's Swinging.

The onset of a BSD Day is usually something that seems a little benign. A friendly game of flag football at Thanksgiving that ends in bloodshed and half hearted laughing apology. Realization of a newly found single status. Realization of a newly found attatched status. Killing something big. Working a composite function the size of Rhode Island with pencil and paper algebra. Concussive detonations and mass conflagration (this one might just be me). The day after you invite the girl over for a three course meal, a little too much good wine and things end predictably. All causes of BSD Days, at least in my own life.

Today, I have:

A) Set the curve in anthropology (paranthropus boisei, bitch!).
B) Rewrote the damn 113 test.
C) Correctly identified the piezoelectric response of tourmaline and indentified correctly willemite, zincite, franklinite, and calcite matrix.
D) Moved over twelve thousand pounds of freight. Over three tons by hand.

Sure, nothing blew up and no one died, or even got all that bloody, but it's all I got right now. And I have to tell you, BSD is in effect. At least today. This might also be the fault of some girl, who knows.

Or maybe I'm just being egotistical. It can be difficult maintaining humility when you are me, but you are not and probably have no idea what I'm talking about.

No title for you

2006-10-30T15:50:00.000-08:00

Thanks for putting up with me this month. Octobers are rough and I normally feel like dying by the time it gets going good. This month was made ten times worse by a catalyzing spark of a miserable anomoly. Obviously, this involves a woman.

Things are picking up.

They aren't perfect, but they've come around. I don't have much to offer as far as writing at the moment. Sooner or later, I'll find myself inspired and on the Internet at the same time, but I've been burning up some creative resources on a side project.

I'm considering whether or not to undertake a huge endeavor next month. It would fall on the run up to finals and I don't plan on having any time off any time soon, so it may be a doomed proposition. The heavy handed palm-slap of this month has yielded some writing ore that may not be gold, but possible mid-grade native Cu.

While the terrible crash of October is over, I have to warn you that April may not be a happy field of poseys, either. Obviously, a woman is invloved.

Fuck October

2006-10-26T08:18:00.000-07:00

October is drawing down, at least a little. Everything is still halfway dead, but at least it snowed this morning. I hope this whole fucking place is socked in this winter.

Went down Cortez way this weekend. Besides weddings, I can't think of anything that turns my frown upside down like a good anniversary party. Especially when it's for some ridiculous number like seventy years together. I made it one thirty-fifth of the way as far as my grandparents have. I suck. Then they had to hug on each other and kiss and smile all the time. I didn't punch them, but only because they are old.

I walk down the street, no gloves again, snow finding its way into my collar, and see all the people who are huddled close with someone special against the cold. I don't punch them, but only because my knuckles get real sore in the cold.

My brother wants me over for dinner. It's not that I don't like him or his wife or his kids, but I hate seeing his perfect little happy family. He has four beautiful children and a wife that's worth keeping. They sit around the dinner table and offer thanks for the food. They talk about work and school and my brother teaches them in the ways of the world. After dinner, he goes downstairs and builds a fire while the kids sit and watch. He tells them stories from when we were little. They soak them up and turn us into something we are not, but something good for them to believe in. Last time I was over, the oldest daughter asked me if I had a girlfriend. I chuckled and told her that I didn't. She informed me that her parents would not allow her to have a boy friend stay over at night. I told her that was probably a good thing, as boys and girls do not have sleep-overs. She asked me why I had girls sleep over at my house. I had no idea what she was talking about, of course. Then she described my "friend" who had slept over once, long ago. The tall, blonde girl that smoked. I didn't punch her, but only because I was too sad.

I lost my driver's license, the physical card, not the priviledge of driving. I lose things when I've just got too damn much on my mind. The lady at the liquor store carded me, of course. It makes sense, I shaved my beard off, so she probably thought I was buying the twelver for my eagle scout troop. When I walked out empty handed, I was pretty upset. I didn't punch her, but only because I was too sober for it to seem like a bad idea.

So, if you wonder why this post sucks, it's because I'm sitting here, with snow down my back and knuckles that the cold causes to hurt from a life that was a little rough, dead sober.

Fuck October.

*****************************
Update: MP3 Player broke, this is bullshit.

A departure from the grimy depression

2006-10-23T16:18:00.000-07:00

Buddy Guy just started playing The Devil In Her and I just killed that last glass. On top of that, I remember someone, somewhere trying to define men, but more importantly find out what they want in women. A nice turn of narcissistic speculative metaphysics, there.

Therefore, I'm drinking and Buddy Guy just fired off a swampy, black-hearted song about a lascivous woman. I'm no longer angry or depressed, though I know it's right there, crawling under the door, sniffing for the first sign of fear and weakness. Let it come. I have memories and appetites requiring attention.

What do I want in women?

Teeth on collar bones and hands under the strap of her thong concealed by tasteful clothing, for one. I'm a carnivore with a sweet tooth when it comes to women. Meaty and true and substantial in the soul, I love that, but they have to have some syrupy quality I know will drag me into states of nausea later with sickening sweetness. But goddamn if that clingy and shy smile brings me down. Or up. Depends how I feel about life just then.

Me and this girl were pinned by our own weight into the door of a cheap hotel in a cross town Cortez casino with no one to control us but self-control itself. I had my mouth on her neck and she had her hands under my belt. She was mostly dressed just enough to ruin a guys morals. I'd spent the afternoon and evening at an old fashioned singing, four part harmony and sacred thoughts and feelings shared between me and God and congregation of archaic religion. I sang my part, a little baritone and a little bass, but always low, always in a state of predation after the belief, the mystic that I yearn for in this cold world. After that yearning is gone, there's a girl with some rum in her glass at the blackjack table and her own conscience to kill. We cajoled ourselves into a state of high humanity, me being convincingly the heavy handed hunter and her the rabbit losing all will to run. She shoved me on to my back and followed me down to the floor.

She got the Devil in her, I guess.

I don't want any more meaning in life, I don't want a mission, I don't want no Goddamned home made vegetable soup, unless any of that shit's got a metaphorical meaning that needs my attention. Don't get me wrong, I love long conversations and the way a phone makes my ear feel after a few too many hours on it, but right now, right here in the Fall sun with my blood full of brackish rocket fuel, I want something less worthy of philosophical talk, but more profound. Fuck a conversation that stoops to the stodgy level of breath blowing past a box full of muscular fiber in our throats. I want to hear breath so ragged it misses any mechanism for intelligent communication.

I met a girl at the airport, once. Some crazy airline bullshit had lost my guitar and my clothes, but I left the nice lady at the counter telling me she was going to find it when this girl, this apparition, walked into the terminal. Without a care that I own very little and most of it was lost, me and her turned into annoying mall teenagers right there, in front of God, the Devil and everybody. Mouths and hands were exploring new and unknown galaxies. The clothes became a non-issue shortly after walking into her home after the long, painful drive from the terminal. Our bodies were unearthed mysteries and salvation for grinding carnality.

She got the Devil in her, I guess.

It's a beautiful day. I have a phone number and some spare time before work. It may be a beautiful night, but if all goes well, I won't see it to care.

God may still live in Lewis, Colorado, there to stay with four part harmony and dinner on the ground, but right now I hope like hell there's a devil. I just may need his assistance tonight.

My phone just rang. It must be the cold, Autumn sun.

She got the Devil in her, I guess. And she says, with the way she won't take no for an answer and with the catch in her voice, but not in her words, she feels like doing something wrong.

A letter

2006-10-21T10:18:00.000-07:00

Friend,

You picked a tough row to hoe, and I'm sorry that this is what you have to go through. Today's going to be tough, but then again, so is the rest of the year. Know that I care about you and that I'm here to talk to. We may have been growing apart for a while, but that doesn't mean we've speciated that far away from who we used to be. The people we were when we could talk for hours on the phone about pretty much nothing. Obviously, some of our old subject matter is off limits.

I'm not jealous of what you're going through now, but those couple of months of domesticated bliss must have been great, and I felt a twinge of envy. I remember playing house with you, and you make a fine living companion.

You should know that when he comes back, and there's no reason to suspect he won't, he'll have a hard time. The adjustment to living with a woman is not easy for a guy returning from an environment such as that. He'll still love you, even when he wants to be alone, and even when he just wants to hang out with somebody, anybody who knows where he's been and it won't be you. You'll catch him leaving your room and your continent in middle of a conversation and you'll know he's off, away from you, away from TV and Denny's and the predatory used car lots (E1 and up financing!) and used, stripjoint harlots that sit right outside the gate. After an initial rush of joy, he'll hate the country he went to serve for a while.

It doesn't happen to all of them, but understand when he has to hide his eyes from you or pretend something's in them when the colors are paraded or a filmaker utilizes pandering, patriotic bullshit that catches him in places he has reserved for deep and personal tears.

You'll both be changed. If you stick to your goals, and enslave yourself to the treadmill the way you plan, you'll be frighteningly independent. On the other hand, that slavery will lead to your unearthed "sexiest mama." Your wording of those goals is adorable by the way. You'll be the kind of woman makes a man stop, throw back his head and howl; smooth, red lips and liquid hips, seems more than the law would allow, in the words of the Ray Wylie Hubbard song you liked so well.

Be true to him. If you are not, you may not lose him, but you will lose me as a friend. I would never talk to you again. I know you're not Her, but to me, when I'm being honest, all of the women with a man somewhere else, fighting, are Her, at least a little. You're stronger and don't have the same habits, but temptation will be there. Never from me. Never, ever, till this Earth is swallowed by the forces of an exploding sun, will I ever be a threat to that virtue. You already know that, but you might let him know when the twinges of jealousy that turn into pangs of fear grab him while he's so far away.

He's doing his job and his duty. And when he comes home hating October, just let it go.

I'm holding a little piece of myself here, away from the hate and the depression and the alcohol, for you. For what you need me to be. My phone's always open, and I'm strong enough for you to weigh me down. Come to me, tell me your anguish, lay your burden on me, I can take it. I'm a pretty stout individual.

I will be praying to a guy I don't believe in much for you. For you, I'll pretend to have faith.

I miss you, and when I'm drunk on cider at sunrise and don't need a teleological definition of the word, I love you. I'm here for you. And him. Tell him I'm buying the next round when he gets home. Dawg.

More joy

2006-10-19T13:29:00.000-07:00

Alright, so I decided to make some concerted effort to take down the specific gravity of my little site here for a few days, but it isn't working. Any effort I have ever made with that goal in mind came off as pretty lame, anyway. So, for reasons that might be clear later, let's just assume anything I write in October will be hateful and crazy. That's just the way it is.

I hate October. I hate it with a passion I usually reserve for hating commercial radio and Toyotas. The sense of impending doom and gloom drags me down into a deep seated fear of another year going away. October is the month of loss without hope of renewal. October is when the niceties of summer give way to the cold and dark nights of winter. I didn't used to mind winter, but I usually had some form of accompaniment to keep the chill out. I shouldn't say usually, since that has been a singular unlikelihood in my adult life. Whether it was the nasty Chicago winter when I was twenty or the long, cold winter down RimPac way, I knew they were going to be miserable by the fact that they kicked off in the godforsaken month of stupid people dressing up as morons.

A quick tour of the bad things I have dealt with during the winter over the last few years:

10/05. Transitioning out. Go ahead and think it's easy.

10/04. Going somewhere for the Holidays? Sure you are. CVN 72, bitch. Merry Christmas! How about Happy New Year '05 down in the death smelling waters of Indonesia littered with corpses!

10/03. Have fun being assigned duty as a prison guard, try not to get attatched to a bunch of guys who are getting their lives fucked by a bunch of elitist prick officers. Make sure someone you love comes down with an incomprehensible disease. Then have your Toyota have a design flaw blow chunks of expensive, foreign parts out of the engine block. Make sure the cost of repair is five months pay.

10/02. Goodbye, wifey. Hello Connie. USS Constellation, that is. While you're at it, throw in a war. And your best friend dying.

10/01. OK, this one was alright. Except the part where they told us we were deploying two weeks after we got home. Fucking Osama.

10/00. Bootcamp.

10/99. Broncos go 6-10.

Octobers have held particular angst for me over the last four years for obvious reasons.

Some nights I can't sleep and I don't know why. I've lost twenty pounds since the first of the month and I don't carry that much extra. I blame it all on the cold and on women and on money, but it comes down to the simple fact that I'm in the wrong place. I miss my guys. Milf, Coleburg, Frank, Bart, Little Bart, Crispy, Flower, Gunner, Chief, all of them. They're not doing any better than I am, I know it. I can feel it. The old friends I stay in touch with are having the same problems. We all feel like part of us missing and we need to find it. A call has went out through the haze of oil fire and jet noise.

I know where it is. It's sitting out there in the sand and fire. My body came home from that fucking bullshit, but my soul still belongs there, in the action.

She sat on the porch to our small home with tears running down her pretty face and cried through the cigarette smoke and the California haze, "You changed. All you fuckers changed. It's like you never came home from...that shit."

I didn't accuse, but asked, "Are you sure it was us who left a part of us out in the Gulf? What did you go through while I was gone?"

It was terrible on her. She never answered, but the tracks and hollowed eyes told me what I needed to know.

Years later, we were supposed to be preserving life for a change. The aftermath of the Connie had run its course and I had no one to go home to this time. I looked over the rail into the prairie fire sunset. When I first saw the families float by, bloated and devoid of the golden shine that they would have had, down there by Thailand, it reminded me that some people are lucky enough to leave everything in the waters of the world ocean to be consumed by the engines of life. Some of us only leave half of ourselves out in the blue.

Proofreading saves a lot of trouble

2006-10-17T11:31:00.001-07:00

Yeah...uh...sorry about that.

See, every six months or so, I have a one man holiday called "Crazy Veteran's Day."

I should have seen it coming. I've spent a lot of time out hiking and dammit if my camo field jacket isn't pretty damn comfy. Oh, and my hair has been getting shorter and shorter. Sorry to subject you all to such a rant. I'm better now, I just had to get all of that out of me.

I better news, I found my old stash of pictures from the last couple of years. I enjoy photography when I can afford it, so some of them are decent. Sharing photos is the only real marketable value of the medium. Therefore, expect a few to be popping up shortly.

Once again, sorry.

I meant this to be short and happy

2006-10-16T12:36:00.000-07:00

This might be a little too long or a little too short. I'm not working off an outline, here, just being honest. At the moment, I'm thinking it likely there won't be too many more posts here.

I have never in my life, which has hardly been a gilded path, had so many bad days in a row. I don't know what's going on with all this. I keep having a string of disappointments gang up on me and beat me down. The challenges may seem minor to all of you, but I don't deal well with interpersonal drama. You need me to run three miles on a broken toe, no big deal. You need me to kill a bunch of conscripts and civilians and sleep at night, I can do it, mostly. You need me to beat the holy living fuck out of someone or have the holy living fuck beat out of me, I been there before. What I can't do is deal with ordinary people in an ordinary disappointment for more than a day at a time. I hate it.

I can blame it on a lot, this little inability of mine, but I place it mostly on the last six years. What I did for the last six years was different from a terrorist in manner and sponsorship only. I still have dreams where we're all just glowing white hot spots against cold black sand in a FLIR pod, give it a flash of what I was very fucking good at, and then we're just white blobs of moist heat, draining a stream of white into that same sand. I gave my life over to it, the job, but what I didn't realize is that I was giving over was my conscience. I hate it. I respect human life more than anything, and I want to devote my life, what's left of it, to preservation of life and keep it from mindless destruction.

Then I get drunk, usually with another pretender to humanity like myself (same haircut, anyway), and I feel the rush. The rush a person accepts and lives when they are on the number one team in the sport where you don't lose points or games. You lose lives. And I was among the star-players in the televised event. Here and there, a rifle may take a life or a grenade dismember someone, but thousands of pounds of matrix delivered by systems that just don't miss is what wins the game. What won the game.

I high-fived and cheered watching the after-action assessments and making our estimates of how many actual and collateral lives had been lost and establishing financial cost of equipment destroyed. We were out there doing Iraq before doing Iraq was cool. There was no war on terror and September 11, we were just fucking up a bunch of unwitting combatants for no Goddamn reason. Came back next year and they called it a war. CNN was watching us work. Letters poured out of the cities of America, England, Australia, Singapore telling us they were proud to get to know us.

Let's be brutally honest here, killing people is fun. The conscientious aftermath is not, but the act, the team scoring the ultimate touchdown, is invigorating and fulfilling. When I watch football and see the faces of those around me aligning themselves with some team of people they've never met, I see it all over again. If they took away the rules and gave John Elway an M4 and the Raiders AK's, and Jason Elam a carrier air wing of his own, the fields would change from friendly green to bloody red and hazy, but the faces of the spectators wouldn't change. Your team is winning.

I don't have party to the death of anyone anymore. I've been home long enough, I quit having to hear that I'm a hero. I have my old medals lined up along my desk with the ribbons growing dusty and the copper and brass getting tarnished. My old red shirt that meant everything to me not too long ago is collecting dust on a rusty nail. My old wedding ring sits in a dish I reserve for spare change, sits on top of a Dinar and some mystery coin with Asian characters. My trophies of a life that cost me my own small family, and the ability to deal with all these fucking civilians and their fucking bullshit sit about eye level from my chair in front of my computer; Armed Forces Expeditionary, with three clusters, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Good Conduct, Sea Service, three clusters, GWOT Expeditionary, GWOT, Homeland Defense, Joint Defense, one cluster, Humanitarian Service, Military Unit Commendation, Naval Unit Commendation, Expert Rifle, Expert Pistol, achievements here, commendations there, citations sitting in a tupperware bin in my closet; In the words of Paul, I have nothing.

The other day, a girl stuffed full of a margherita pizza I had made and some wine I didn't want to open, happened by my desk.

"Those are pretty."

When I get asked why I did everything I'm only proud of when no one is looking, I usually give them some bullshit answer about college money or travel. So now, being honest, the truth is more complicated. I let my innocence and respect for life, I let my ability to be optimistic about humanity's plight dwindle and die, for a bunch of reasons. I did it for you guys.

Please don't thank me. I think I was duped.

Sorry for the Crazy

2006-10-09T13:20:00.000-07:00

You'll notice over the next couple weeks that I won't update. There is no need to worry. More than likely I am not dead, though in two or three weeks who knows what can go down.

Basically, I have some shit I need to do. The biggest of it is to get my head back into the game. The real life game, not the Internet and cell phone bullshit game. In fact, I am going on a little bit of a fast. These are important in my raising beliefs. Anytime you felt you had slipped out of touch with God, or you had a general foreboding about the future, or you heard knocks that I won't even bother explaining, you went on a fast. Or when times got tight and you needed the assistance of the Divine. While I don't really believe in God, and don't plan to start, I think the idea is sound. So, I don't believe in that God, don't intend to start, but I'm going on a fast; you may think that is wierd. I assure you, it is not.

Reasons for this are numerous, but one of the most urgent is the need to deal with my own reliance on anything or anyone but myself. I have slowly but surely let the World creep into my life like ivy under a poorly fitted door, creeping across the carpet and around my ankles, far too long. Also, I don't know why, but when I figured out some pretty major symbolism in my odd dreams I speak of in the posts titled Preternothing, I decided never to finish that group of posts.

Anyway, the fast is really just an experiment in fighting a sickness we all have with a remedy handed down from generation to generation in my line. Feel free to use alcohol or other chemistry experiments when you deal with yours.

So, to sum it all up, food is not on the menu for a while. I could stand to lose a few, anyway. The other aspect of the fast is media.

I will be away from any form of electronic communication for a while, save the half hour I have allotted myself for returning calls and checking email (nothing important gets to me in a steel mail box, so this is necessary) every other day. I will commence this at 2100 today and keep it going until I feel like stopping. I may throw in a quick update at the end of a week or so if its still going, just to check in. I will be, for the most part, off the grid unless you email me and I have time to get to it. I'm also limiting personal visits and social gatherings. TV is out, though I never watch anything but PBS anyway, and music not produced in my vicinity by fingers on strings is not going to be listened to. In other words, I'll be my own company for the next little bit. I feel scared about this. It's a little like going around the dark side of the moon.

Which is exactly why I'm doing it.

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

I have to admit now, at the 25 minutes till phase that I'm questioning the whole thing. Since I have no answers to those questions and no one to call within the next 24 minutes to ask, I'll open them up. That, and it's one last gasp of the self-involvement I am going to have to lose to survive this.

Questions for eventual discussion:

23a. Is Casey really social enough anyway to need a break?
23b. What will keep him alive for the next week?
23c. What implied behaviors are also going to be cut?
23d. What about beer?
23e. Why would a person need to know what they're alike when no one else is around?
23f. Does this have anything to do with being born in a desert?
23g. Are there just no good deserts to walk out in for a while?
23h. Fuck, what if I'm Elijah? Can I handle that responsibility?

Prinipia Methodologican Petronity

2006-10-05T12:29:00.000-07:00

Or: Spritual Geology

I, Cassius, son of Locomotus Truckae, Son of The Most Mightiest, have been visted by the angel Cassiterite, who smelled of sulfur and had impressive dual octagonal and mackeled breasts. After noticing my vector of eye, she smite me for looking at her twins. She hath given one or several revealed manifestations that may or may not be secret until the end of the Age Suburbia. This is important, or it may not be. As it were, all spelling mistakes are property of her mackel breasted self.

Manifestation Unit of Truthicality I:

We are all mostly oxygen, with some other stuff, too. Or not.

A. This is important, though may not be, because oxygen has an atomic number of eight. Originally, there were eight aliens who made it off the "Ark" and started making whiskey in Turkey. These aliens were part of a "Homestedd reelokashun" plan, as you should already know from your learning institutions.

B. Oxygen, when combined with the principle building blocks of this earth makes them sort of flaky. In fact, this is also a race of aliens. I know Flaky people. They obviously are alien Homestedders. They should make whiskey, but do not. They used to, when they immigrated to the Southeast and they interbred until, even today, they are still at least a little Flaky. Though sometimes they are not.

C. The earth is principly formed up Eyerun. When thrown together with Flakies, it produces Fe₂O₃. When The Green Cactus Monster taketh away the Flakies and the Eyerun, it leaves but ₂ and ₃. The last days approach when 23 holy cows are, or won't be, abducted by these new Homestedders, as they will mistake the cows for your average caucasion at that point in history.

That is the word of Cassiterite. Or it may be not.

Note: So, at the reccomendation of Anaglyph, I decided to check out Discordia because of the truly disturbing frequency of "23" in my life as of late. And I figured since Australians invented cheese, they can't be all bad. My tireless research, exclusively in Wikipedia while I ate Doritos, led me to the Principia Discordia. I had to quit reading about the point they mention baptizing the dead to redeem them to the Green Cactus Monster. I am in a library, after all. That is when Austin Nichols shew himself to me and introduced Cassiterite. Her boobs were pointy and vaguely botryoidal. Feel free to introduce this new belief system into the Big W.

Fall

2006-09-27T20:41:00.000-07:00

It was cold.

I had been wearing a plain white T-shirt earlier in the bright sun of an Eastern Seaboard fall. They don't do Fall in the Middle Colonies, really. Just hot, then cold. If you live by the sea, your life is determined by cycles of currents and climates you may never see. The Atlantic hates people. It has dealt with expansionist humanity for so long its disgust pours out in abstract weather patterns and bitchy little hurricanes.

I lived next to the Atlantic. The Atlantic decided to be cold. In the space of my twelve hour shift, the sky turned clear and the waters froze. I looked up into the cold from the mildew riddled concrete of the CALA. The stars were arrayed as clearly as I ever saw them back East. The cold chased away the smog. Dippers and warriors and lovers scorned were snapshots of the human condition manifested in the original Rorschach.

I packed up my guys and our tools into the ordie truck after the watch was set on our live ones and we went back to the shack. She was waiting there to take me home.

I don't mond the cold. I find it invigorating and affirming. She shivered, she had no insulation against the humid, icy atmosphere. I opened one side of my field jacket and let her squeeze in next to me. She took a deep breath with the coat over her nose. She loved the smell of jet fuel and nitrates. After she smelled it, she settled into me a little deeper. I waved to the flightline gate watch. Her little hand poked childlike from out of my coat to wave. He giggled in a way men with rifles rarely do and reciprocated.

Later, in our little shitty apartment, she was laying in bed. Though it was cold, our clothes found themselves lost and crumpled in the floor. I had needed a drink of water and returned to our little slice of temporal attained conglomerate bliss. We always got along when I was set to leave soon. I tripped over the packed seabag in the doorway. When I crawled into the bed and pulled the covers up, her icy body clung to mine and her face burrowed deeper into my chest. I could hear her internal little girl seeping out through the grown up she tried to be.

"You're always so WARM."

I love Fall.

How To Eat An Animal, Part II

2006-09-20T18:12:00.000-07:00

To return to the issue at hand.

The animal is dead. You have killed, and forces of economy staining your manicured hands or forces of saltpeter and nitrate bruising your shoulder, it doesn't matter. The animal is dead and it's your fault irreversibly. The cut of the animal is a blade roast, and the animal is an elk.

A quick note, shoot a cow elk, preferably small, the meat tastes better than the huge majestic bull, though the trophy is more profound and so subtle as to impress no one. No one displays good taste on the wall of their den, but there are many men, and women, who have enormous racks (antlers) of killed beings festooning their enclaves. The statement, subtle as vodka vomit on the stairs, this makes about the man or woman's self image is so obvious that I won't even waste my time.

Take an onion, I prefer it to be yellow. It should not be plunder of another mindless trip to the grocer, but an example of the bounty of the good, red earth. My onion comes from the quaternary deposits, prepared with work and sweat, behind my mother's house. Discard the husk and first two layers of the onion. Cut it into quarters and then eighth's, the onion, if it is from dirt you have touched, is strong and full of fiery flavor. Onions are beautiful.

Select four or five potatoes. Pick the red potatoes. They are the sweetest. As you wash the good, red earth from the potatoes, reflect on how much love a person must have to take time out of her schedule to provide her family with such bounty. I like to cut them in quarters if they are of a normal size. If they are the enormous monsters sold in a grocery store, they should be cut smaller. The potato should be a bite, all by itself independent of the powerful punch of flavor in the elk.

Four turnips, planted in the dark of the moon, and make sure they are too small for bitterness to have taken them into its grasp. As you skin them, remember the man, the friend who taught you that small turnips are best and that they should only be planted in the void between the wax and wane of our lunar friend. Miss him, as he is dead.

Slice celery into four inch segments. It is good and flavorful.

Take a cutting board and coat it in black pepper and a small touch of cumin. Hold the blade roast in your hand, feeling the coolness. Reflect on how much that trip out to the Northern, rough country means to you. Roll it into the pepper and cumin, careful to grind it in with your own hand. Rub in a good amount of minced garlic, game meat tastes best without lame spice-in-can, but with robust flavors. Savor in the world of memory the experience of dragging the heavy beast four miles to the road. It was a good day. Exhausting, but full of laughing. And snow. Heavy, heavy snow that added another ounce of misery to extracting the 600 pounds of meat from the lap of the Earth. Remember your father's hopeful and infuriating comment, "Well, this snow'll sure make good ice tea come summer."

Roast peppers in a hot oven. I prefer pablano and chile piquin, but you may use any large chile. Mine come from my sister-in-laws little slice of the ever ancient and creepy Monument Valley. Somehow the red sand and fickle creeks, combined with her ancient and equally spooky name, produce amazing chiles.

In the pot, stack onions, another bulb of garlic (skinned), the potatoes, the meat, and on top, the celery and peppers. Salt and add sprigs of fresh oregano and mint as well as a lime, quaterred.

Turn slow cooker to a medium setting and go to work.

Incremental Honesty

2006-09-18T13:27:00.000-07:00

Fr: c#####e@hotmail.com
To: Casey
Re: that chick

Casey, you've never thought chicks dig you that way.. have you asked her? How can you know if you don't ask her?

Fr: Casey
To: c#####e@hotmail.com
Re: Re: that chick

Well, you have a point. I haven't. I have a feeling anything between me and her would be pretty much physically based. Not that I mind. Well, geologically and physically based. She's coming out of a long relationship and there hasn't been anyone else. Our hypothetical relationship would probably be hiking, mostly, then recreating naked. The other day, well, it would have been cool.

We went for a quick rockhounding trip and got rained into a cave under a waterfall. I controlled myself. I am a good person. But thunderstorms, caves, and tall, skinny women with issues are pretty much the capping pinnacle of what I find erotically stimulating.

When I finally decide to be honest with myself, I might admit to finding that kind of stuff what I want anyway. Some insightful discussion on the latest Nova and some corporeal communication. PBS and lovemaking would be the goal. Well, nerdy wilderness talk and fornication. Maybe just outdoor expedition and some less than moral fun.

Ok, I want hiking and fucking.

How To Eat An Animal, Part I

2006-09-13T21:21:00.000-07:00

The first step to eating an animal is to kill it. You may prefer to do this with a credit card slid through a machine at the grocery store or through the placement of a gun shot. Either way, the animal is dead. Practically, most prefer the labeled friendly pink packages that let them disassociate the act of consuming from the act of killing. That is your prerogative. The initial step of preparing to eat the life that used to be, is to be suitably mindful of the gravity and beauty of what you are doing. You are contributing to the potter's hand shaping the pot. By eating another living thing, be it a carrot or a caribou, you are propagating the balance of life and death necessary to the beautiful mechanization of all living things and their orchestration in a grand improvisation.

Before you eat an animal, or any living thing, this is the first step:

Gratitude.

There are two prayers that have made their way trickling through generation after generation of men of faith who share my adjective surname. This is profound as my family is Protestant. Actually, it is incredibly more complicated than that, but "Protestant" is what my mom told me to tell the other kids who asked me about my religion. Protestantism, at least the American rural variety, finds organized prayer to be a good example of why all those worldly churches are empty and soulless.

The first prayer, preferably prayed in a cold, cold river at altitude fed by snow melt, is thus:

(Insert name here) has made it known that he has wanted to join with the blessed family in the Household of Faith. He has received the lead of Holy Spirit and is a Believer in the birth, death, and resurrection of your son, Jesus Christ. He understands that this baptism will give him the right in the eyes of God and men to preach, teach, and testify in the General Assembly and Church of the Firstborn until such time as you see fit to take him home or return in Glory. (Insert name here), I now baptize you in the name of the Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The other is even less formal, but still pretty important to me:

Heavenly Father, we thank you for the opportunity to meet here in the presence of our Brothers and Sisters to partake in this meal. We ask that you look in on our widows and orphans that cannot be here with us today and hold them in thy perfect thoughts. Lord, we ask that you keep a kind heart and watch careover our Brothers and Sisters on the highways and serving their country overseas, and bless them to return safely to the fold. Heavenly Father we ask that you'd bless this meal as nourishment to our bodies and our bodies to your service.

Amen.

This last prayer is also used loosely when an animal has fallen to a bullet and will be consumed by the hunter and his family. It may come as a shock to many, but in the part of the country I'm from, the difference between hungry and fed in the winter is still the taking of an animal during the Fall's hunting season. Well, sometimes in season. Strict compliance with the law has always been the luxury of the rich. We were always so poor. More than a time or two, God and Winchester fed our huddled, poor family when times got tight.

These prayers meant so much to me. Rather, they mean so much to me. I may not believe as the rest of my family, but I did have a small and insignificant conversion on the road the other day. The road was not Damascus, it was Little Park, and the light was not from heaven, but from my two misaligned headlights. My conversion was not that big a deal, really.

Anyway, my favorite cut of elk meat, besides the ambrosial backstrap roasted over a fire, is the shoulder blade roast. The best way to cook it is in a Crock Pot. I will provide this recipe in part two.