No title for you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

06SEP1980

I had a really amazing and heartfelt piece of literature to impart to the world in this little corner of a big waste of time. Then Blogger ate it. I don't know where it went, I don't know why it seemed tasty. I do know that I can't for the life of me remember what I wrote.

Anyway, forgot it was my birthday yesterday until a friend left me a nice email message. I appreciated it greatly, even though I don't give two shits about birthdays. I thought birthdays were cool as a child, but I also thought Transformers and the gravel in the driveway was cool.

I might still think transformers are cool. Gravel might hold my interest sometimes. Gravel is so important. You blog people don't even know. Go on talking about iPods and clothing options. You know what you would have without gravel? Nothing. Take a look around you and count the concrete structures you need, both above ground and under. Concrete is a mixture of portland cement, sand, and gravel at a ratio of 1:2:3, usually. In other words, your grocery stores, theatres, highways, tunnels, and pretty much everything else you need if you don't live in a grass hut is mostly gravel.

Transformers are giant robots that turn into cars and trucks and shit. I stand on the solid base of my tastes in cool.

Now, birthdays are, much like almost all fornication in certain parts of Asia, a commodity. You have only so many possible, and the stock in the those birthdays is a function of the continuing formulae of supply and demand. While the number of available birthdays, like my own, is suspected to be great, such as when you are mid-twenties, or if you prefer the cold ten year rounding, late-twenties, they mean very little.

In other words, I find no reason for ribbons and streamers, or any foofiness whatsoever for a birthday that has no significant numerological value or dwindling forecast for future possibilities of another birthday.

A birthday for 1-10, sure. It only makes sense, as you haven't been alive long enough to flood the market with years in which to celebrate. 13 holds the distinction of being the first in our language of numbers to carry the suffix "teen," thus deserves noting. None of the following teens, save voting age in your locale, carry any weight. 21 holds some meaning in the US for no other reason than some fairly ridiculous legislation. After 21, there really is no reason to celebrate. You've had enough childish little shindigs and need no more.

Welcome to adulthood where no one cares how old you are unless you are targeted for procreation and people make fun of you for playing with Transformers. Your life is over. There is no reason to note any occurence, save marriage or the creating of a new set of birthdays in the form of progeny.

I will allow my minions to celebrate any birthday of mine after 100, but it will probably be more of an imperial holiday at that point, anyway.

Tassels Are The Only Proper Send Off

I had decided my funeral would be some type of odd memorial where there was no body and no one was sure entirely that I hadn't just joined some random revolution. Whether or not I got euthanized by execution would be an enduring mystery. There would be rumors of me living in the hills of (insert country here), holed up with a new, young and native wife. Rumors would be that I was cavorting among the bushes and a new tribe of brown-skinned children with blue eyes and home-made rock hammers could be found nestled in a mysterious valley.

That was the plan.

Then I found a much better memorial arrangement. I obviously can never have my funeral in China now, but hopefully I can get the ceremonial ball rolling before it's illegal here, too.

Just send the one with the lop-sided implants my way and stick a rolled up dollar bill in between my blue lips one last time, please. If I'm already laid up, it don't matter how many pathogens she may be hiding in her person.

All I Can Do

I had a good buddy one time. He used to have a sweet tooth for some Wild Turkey and he had a tendency towards irrational behavior, we had a lot in common. Not that I would let him get into my Turkey, but the guy was huge; he sort of got what he wanted. He had an interesting part in my life for a short, and sometimes tragic, time. We used to enjoy eating dinner together and watching the paint on the walls fade to an even duller antiseptic white. He would wake me up for work and remind me I had obligations when I forgot I still had reasons to breathe in and out. He was a good guy. I would defend him to the last. When I had to leave, I told him to live with my mom and dad for awhile to keep them going.

I make him sound like some type of little brother. In truth, he was usually the grown up. He would take care of me and do the best an independent man can do for another independent man when comfort or a shoulder to cry on is needed. We were brothers without the inborn hierarchy of birth order.

He went on to whatever reward or anticlimax waits to meet us all when we lose our individuality to the engines of Life. I loved the guy. He died shamed and alone. He never knew what he did. His psychic pain took him out of civilization for good. He's been turned to ash.The crystalline structure of a diamond is that of an octahedron. They are octahedral in nature because that's all they can be. Carbon can only bond with seven brothers in such a way. Shoreline critters and plants in the fires of a subduction zone, the organic matter of a continental shelf, the Life, is poured into the forges of Vulcanus and catalyzed and purified into the basic building blocks of the one true individuality. In the loss of the temporal bodies to this terrible maw of famine and extinctions and illness, they prove that there is some order, there is some Platonic Idea of perfection. They never see it, but they prove the mystery simply by having existed to fuel the engines of survival for this little chunk of carbon we call life. Heaven may or may not be, but by passing on, Duck the Dog proved that he is perfect. In the gleaming white robe washed in the blood of time, he is one of the elect.I had a very close friend lose someone who was closer to them. Somehow, I don't think this is going to help.

Sorry.

Damn that guy

I have more than one voice in my head. While I am a ray of fucking sunshine at all times and only leave the world with the coziness of rose petals and tender Balian honey, The Devil's Advocate is a thistle and a skunk.

DA shows up when I'm riding high on a wave of undeserved euphoria to remind me that my rent's due or that my life consists of sitting alone in the dark studying shit no one cares about in a shitty, Boo Radley house on the Mesa That Time Forgot. Or that giving a girl your phone number is not the same as receiving her phone number. Or that my writing skills are so terrible I have to resort to italics for emphasis. He can really ruin a mood.

I was thinking of what to drink with my frozen pizza I scratched together the other day, and he made an appearance. He always does this when I have impressed myself with amazing cooking. I thought to myself:

"I need some beer. Maybe I'll run get some before the stores close."

Why buy beer if you're going to sit and drink it alone?

"Because I wanted to be alone tonight."

Did you?

"Fucker."

You know, you could open that bottle of wine. The one covered in dust.

"I told you, I'm not going to open that just for my own consumption, it's a five year old reserve Syrah. I'm not wasting it on getting drunk and watching SNL. I'm just waiting for someone who deserves it to come by."

How long have you had it now?

"A...while. I still have faith that someone will deserve it."

Before it's vinegar?

"Sure. That takes years. And years. No more wine talk, please. I'm getting depressed."

OK. So, why the frozen pizza when you have that ditalini in the pantry gathering dust and the pancetta in the fridge waiting for the next power outage to make a fool of you?

"We've been through this before the ditalini and the pancetta are not for me. Besides, a bolognaise would go great with that Syrah. I'm saving them and that's final. "

Do you realize how unlikely it is you will ever have anyone over in this shitbox house who would even appreciate it? Or the cook?

"I think those likelihoods are on the rise. In fact, I think there just might be hope for it. See, you're going on some old intel, buddy."

Something I don't know about?

Morphology

The interaction between the mass populi and I has been altered. I walk into work and the men go out of their way to say hi. The women whisper, but are a little shy if I approach. A look of primal lust and titillating fear ripples over their calm facade. I have become some sort of god-man.

The change is subtle, but for someone who has a tendency to notice minute and unimportant details of all my human interaction, this new mysterious subethereal communication of status is a little disconcerting.

I stopped by the Ghetto Gas and Save on my way to work the other day. The section of town is known as Clifton and it is populated mostly by cars with tiny wheels and men in wife beaters and gaudy bling. The August heat was baking me in the cab of my old truck, I was flush and sweaty. I exited the truck and began the journey towards the door. I try to ignore people in Clifton. They, in turn, ignore me. I could feel eyes on me. I looked to my right to see several men of questionable moral nature leaning and sitting on an Impala. Their uniform white shirts and baggy shorts signaled that they were not of a type who would appreciate my company. I met their eyes. I had a feeling this could end badly. The loudest of the group returned the gaze and gave a slight nod. Not the polite society downward drop of the chin, but the pointing of the chin at some celestial body on the low horizon. I returned it. The others of the local posse of indigents mimicked the movement. Odd.

I walked in with my coffee cup and filled it full of black tar Sumatra. My skin still had the sheen of sweat, hilighting my sun-browned skin. Veins bulged tastefully from my forearms. I pondered my new Olympian limbs. I slapped the lid on my coffee and looked up at the mirrored display behind the tobacco. I didn't ever remember seeing those defined of shoulders hiding under my ears. I have always been stocky, but there was a lean quality, a mean quality. I noticed my plain T-shirt collapsing and bulging out where muscle tone seems to have excreted itself out of my pores. Under my chest was spare and desolate country where once a very minimal beer belly had resided. I have been working out, but not this hard. I scared myself. Even my two-day beard was intimidating as it outlined my square jaw and blocky cheekbones, somehow pulled tight like the cheapest chuck shoulder steak.

Confused, and a little arrogant, I walked up to the counter with my swirling oil to lubricate the skids of an ungodly shift. When I set it on the counter, the girl with the red vest and name tag looked up for the first time in our consumerist history together. She was openly staring. I greeted her as I do all counter help.

"How are you doing today, ma'am?"

My delivery startled her. In truth, it frightened me as well. She stepped back a millimeter or so, but her body leaned towards me. When did my voice acquire grit? It sounded like a cellist pedaling the C with his bow too heavily rosined. What was wrong with me?

She blushed, contrasting her nose ring against pale skin flaming in a state of fiery hemoglobular bliss.

She stuttered twice and then caught her breath.

"The Mountain Dew is behind you."

"No, just the special coffee, like always."

"You don't want Mountain Dew?"

No, never touch the stuff," I was positively rumbling, "I only drink water or coffee, really. As long as the coffee is good stuff and I'm not having a good wine or something."

"But...'do the DEW!', what about that?"

"Nope, I don't like the stuff."

"Red Bull?"

"No."

"Full Throttle?"

"No."

"A Jagerbomb?"

"Hate 'em."

"Well...", she was panting, "I guess just coffee then."

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you very much."

How could gratitude sound sinister?

I paid and stepped away from the counter. She followed me with her bloodshot and unremarkable brown eyes. A young girl walked in the door, caught my eye and tripped. The loud teenage boys at the end of the magazine aisle who began to laugh and belittle went silent with a look from me.

I looked back at my reflection.

I saw it. The change. The animal ferocity of uncaged masculinity was channeled by my sheened scalp into my distinctively broken nose to be radiated out by heavy-browed eyes. I had messed up my normal No.2 to No.3 fade with my clippers, so I slapped on a No.1/2 and went to town. It would be ugly, but it would grow back in a couple weeks, I thought.

I never anticipated the change when a person's civilization is left in pile on the bathroom rug.

I walked as unassuming as I could to my truck. The girl in the Lexus was unabashedly gazing. The man in the VW was trying not to. I began fueling the ugly beast and folded my arms as I leaned against the door. I couldn't help but arch an eyebrow.

Marine Engineer, Savior of the Universe

There's something I've played around with for a while now. It's not really an actual project, it's just me having fun practicing writing in the first person. It's fun, really. I also started writing on this before I had any formal writing instruction (my one comp class counts as formal writing instruction in my world), so its rough. I used to have a little better inspiration living in a sunbaked alkaline sink called Lemoore. Luckily, I have escaped there for good, and this project suffered.

Anyway, this is not a promise that it will be updated with regularity, so comments over there may be ignored. The plot has no plan whatsoever, so don't bug me about it. In fact, don't even read it. No, don't even look at it. Just forget I said anything.

Billy Hodges.

First Commandment of Blogging:

Thou shalt give time for readers to comment and comment alike before adding a new entry.

Fuck that. See, I was sitting here puppy sitting, and came to a conclusion.

Before the conlusion reached en utero thoughto, a brief story.

Years ago, I was standing outside my little Government issued family house, the house absent of a family at this point, drunk as all get out. In this case, "all get out" must be defined as "hell." I am rural and use terms such as this when I try to make polysyllabic points. I also inheritted a baritone voice free of gravel, but towards the left hand of a piano's scale.

To continue:

I was not sober. I was pontificating, as I am wont to do in states of any "all get out", when I stretched the definition of death, hell, and the grave*. I remember beating on the hood of my Scout to drive home every fourth or fifth gerund as my strange haiku unfolded. I told of dancing demons and firy graves of innerspace galactic drama. I called down pyrological deluges from heaven and pummeled the disgusting draw of our humanity towards our fellow man as a photophyllic ameoba towards the pond-water sun. I decried the Whore, yet called also for empathy and a small touch of the calming ethylene-glycol of masculine reason and masculine acountability. Hell was not merely in my words. It was a real sulfur proceeding from my mouth to kiss and fondle my gathered friends at the temple of closing time. My rumbly voice, product of too much alcohol and too many preachers in the gene pool, wooed their senses into my state of being and made them agree with the hateful lies I tried not to believe.

My rant and rave and sermon was nearing its climax wherein I no longer cared whether the stupid children who rode out into the street may get run over or the dirty tramp thumbed her way across the West Coast for a blowjob and a bump of rock, when I noticed the wide eyes and slightly hypnotized stares of my compatriots, my brothers in arms. They held their beers at waist height, frightened at the world I weaved out of my phonetics. They believed everything I said. I saw whites of eyes making room for irises. I knew the look. They might as well have been sitting on a church pew listening to my father.

Thus, I shut up and threw my two-pint glass over my shoulder. My keen hearing, conditioned by a few too many years at the business end of super sonic death machines, heard it obliterate the cross-walk behind me. They snapped out of the stupor.

One of my best friends, a guy named Baron Peter Christian von Blah Blah Some Elitist Horseshit, looked at me as an alien creature. I was no longer his friend but a Sunni mystic, one hand pointed towards the mysteries above and one pointed below to the dirty soil of life as I spun our way to freedom.

"Dude, you should fucking write."

He had honesty, and frankly, good taste in literature.

My papist wop friend, Fabian, agreed with a solemn hush and a heartened nod.

The conclusion:

To answer a quick question I get asked with remarkable frequency, that is why I write. Maybe if my shared thought is nothing more than ones and zeroes, it won't be an hypnosis. Maybe it won't be a sermon.

Sermons scare me.



_{*This is a Pauline term I had hammered into me, "...triumph over death, hell and the grave." One of those letters to Corinth, I believe.}

I'm Fucking Crazy

I've been thinking about a girl. Actually, she's one of the letters. Her name means "beautiful."

In this life, it seems like all our little inconsistencies and hatreds build up into more than we are. She made me face the truth. We weren't made of the same ethereal bullshit as most others. Our selves were not little pretty things, or little ugly things, simply the product of worlds gone mad. There was no miracle to our destinies. We were just animals trapped in the vestiges of polite, sane humans. We were the darkness that makes up the majority of the universe.

She picked up, dated, and betrayed my best friend. A couple days later, I was in her bed. Honestly, the world was backwards and confusing when I knocked on her door by semi-Freudian accident. I bottle of Sailor Jerry and enough despondency will do that to a guy. Her liquid fingers in my beard and her words in my ear were salves on psychic contusions I don't think even she fully understood.

I had a dream about her last night. A confusing dream of apocalypse and famine. We had to run away and build a fortress. That part of the dream was vaguely frightening.

The rest of the dream was not frightening. In fact it was so unfrighteningly pleasant as to be none of your damn business.

Denton

Fairly recently, I went to a party and had the cookies and the chocolates, realizing not that the two were under no circumstances to be mixed. The cookies settled me into a philosophical and protracted state of turbocharged brain function. The chocolates made sweet, sweet love to my optical nerves and romantic, silky lust to some various other neurological processes. The most powerful image, with the exception of the pillow constructed Hebrew Gollum sitting next to me in the jungle chair, was when I was sitting on the porch watching the mellow flow of sodium light dying the universe mute orange.

Two people walked up to each other and out of their heads, a disc expanding in infinite distance, was a beautiful galaxy full of all the beauty of the cosmos. When they walked up to each other, the small girl in her red sweater and short skirt and the man in his baggy jeans and hoody, the galaxies overlapped. As they said their small hellos and shared a word or two, a new constellation burst into the overlapping discs. As they smiled and parted ways, the constellation split and followed the two galaxies away, bound in centerfield by the two neuropathway machines inside the heads of the two.

I stayed in my stupor of peace, feeling the need to connect to someone with touch and galaxy collision. I needed to see someone else's universe. I looked towards the living room and saw the object of some earlier inspiration. The chocolates made me perceive her in Platonic idea and pagan, pantheist bliss. Not short, not tall, flaming locks of auburn hair. I saw her in statuary and driftwood idols. With her smile, the universe decided to be a happy, golden place. She was to be respected and worshipped. I wanted to sit at the temple of her femininity so we could worship each other as celestial god-beings. We were after all, children of the dust of stars. Gods of small universes. The cookies made me lazy. I decided to sit on the porch a little longer.

Gradually, the reality I knew and repected returned. The green leaves were no longer the living testament to hydrology. The stars were just balls of gas far away. My friend, my good old friend, came out and sat next to me. We heard the repetitive, boring music of the stoned and saw the flashing blue and green of a light show designed to keep the mind from turning on itself in states of pharmos. My friend was over his chemicals as well. We sat in the cool breeze, smelled trash and something dead in the bushes, and looked at each other, no longer mystical machines, only biological miracles.

"God, I want to fuck the shit out of that chick."

"Fuckin' A, dude."

Rethinking

I've been considering, lately, my choice of vocation. I'm not making any changes to my major just yet, but I have trouble considering a whole mess of similarities I have with this ball of predominately slow moving silica and oxygen. While I understand that geology is a science preoccupied by the past, I sometimes wonder at its effectiveness in understanding myself and others, as is the goal of any science or art when the stuffy academics drop the pretense. So, here am I, rethinking life choices based on not much at all.

While men and women the world over find little parts of themselves in their jobs, great or small, I plan on going into a field that pretty much negates the worth of a person's miniscule time of inhabitation of the rock. While we have destroyed and repaired ecological left and right in the last few centuries, no man has ever fought terrus and won. Sure, there was some ingenious and frantic redirecting of lava flows in the last few decades, but even that is nothing more than dodging a half-assed eruption of slow, felsic lava.

When I lived in Hawaii, I saw a lava flow. As we sat and watched it encroach in small foot wide transgressions, the fauna that didn't burst into flames due to proximity of the silica melt was simply covered, forever and ever, by the impartial flow of new rock. Trees would stick out of the lava for awhile, a sick spectacle of melodramatic, teenage need to be accounted and acknowledged before the slow death of burning. The tree fought the crushing wait of the lava until its heat weakened stem buckled slowly, sinking into the red-hot mire. Not even the dignity of a quick snap or tragic holocaust was given to the pitiful pest in the way of the advance of the Earth.

See, life has been around for only a brief time, and even then, the massive variety of flora and fauna available to study at this point is even more recent. I think this lends it a gravitas in a way. The quick explosion against all odds and whatnot. Maybe I'm going into the wrong field.

I wonder if littoral biology should be my focus. Possessed of a voracious appetite and libidinous to a fault, I share primary motivations with many animalia available for study in warm, shallow water.

Getting wet and dirty in the compulsive search for good food and good copulation suits me.

Half There

The metal was hot enough.

A little red around the edges, but mostly white, the fire of saffron acetylene and cobalt oxygen reaking havoc on the poor Fe atoms. Beads of sweat rolled down my forearms and exploded sizzling in the white noise of thermal expansion. I had the tongs grasping it as I hooked a Vise-Grip jaw plier on to the 2X6 and clamped the strap to the board. I took a hammer and beat the iron around the perimeter of the wood and the small 2X3 stud. The metal was pliable and supple in my blackened hands. The strap wrapped around the board, cajoled into perfection by a combination of gentle engineering and brute force. I drove spikes through the holes I had blown through the iron with a torch into the douglas fir. Good. Not too much burn through. I was almost done with this timber leg. I doused the metal strap with cool water and winced away from the steam. The steel turned green, then blue, then finally the cold rainbow of temper as it shrunk in on itself and the wood, condensing them both into a stronger unit than either could be on it's own. A few more of these to go.

"...so, then the guy was like, telling me that his friend was dating this other girl the whole time I was out there, and I really should be upset, but I'm not, it was like, 'I don't care', you know?..."

A New York accent. Incredibly fast and very modulated. Girly. Very girly. Gilmore Girly. Electronically filtered. Piezo distorion of some kind. It fell from the burning blue sky on to my bare, sweaty shoulders.

"...I mean, come on, right? I guess they were in counselling and the relationship was on the rocks and everything, but its still kind of screwed up. So I said...Oh wait, you went to sleep..."

"No, I didn't. Well, not really. I was dreaming, but I still heard you. I was building a forge."

Fuzzy house. I'm laying on the recliner with a phone buried in my ear.

"What?"

"I was building a forge. It was a nice one."

"See, this is why I love talking to you."

I whine, "Now I want a forge."

Critical Thinking

I spent a good portion of Saturday sitting on a cliff, staring into the past. I don't mean this in some weird, melodramatic way. This was no Dark Night of My Soul, it was just a restful break from the grinding activity of employment and civilization. I wasn't looking into my past. My past is insignificant in comparison to what I was seeing.

I was sitting on top of a formation known as Grand Mesa Basalt. Named with the whimsy geologists are loathed for, it sits predictably on top of the Grand Mesa. Basalt is volcanic rock. The Grand Mesa which towers over the Grand Valley in regal snooty contempt, is formed, as most Mesas are, by a cap of erosion resistant material sitting on top of softer, more mutable material. The Grand Mesa is very young. The cap is around ten million years old in mythos du jour. Under the cap, the largest formation is Cretaceous Wasatch.

I sat on the edge of the cap, a cliff section of the western bout appropriately called Land's End. The shale formation know as Mancos formed the low point of my vista, almost seven thousand feet below me, but only twenty miles away. The Mancos formation is the mud bottom of a littoral sea that stretched from Northern California down to Mexico City about 90 million years ago.

To the West of my show was the massive cliffs of two different deserts, millions of years apart. The Jurassic had seen the formation of a brilliant red sand desert with dunes reaching three hundred feet in this area, which a few million years later would be covered by a river much like the Mississippi. Under the blood-red Triassic Chinle, the dark stain of precambria pushed up out of the ground, exploding to the surface hinting at the great forces grinding away in the Lithosphere. This section of rock was 1.7 billion years old.

From my perch, I could see from the very recent history of upright walkers, through the flowering plants, Down through the ages of Mastodon, Stegosaurus, strange amphibia, protozoa, and finally to the very origins of life. It was stretched out like a scroll with tick marks millions of times the span of my years.

My friend engaged me in conversation. As I usually do, I engage in incredibly small talk when I'm thinking massive thoughts. I mentioned camping out on this rim in my old 1975 International Harvester Scout. He looked at me funny. Not at the waterfall right next to me or the towering cliffs, ten million years old. The far Uncompahgre with its claim to age in the billions did not raise a pulse of thought on his brain. He commented flippantly, "Man, that Scout that was a long, long time ago, dude."

"Yeah, six whole years," I laughed, "Dude."

Re:

Part of the fun of knowing me is random inebriated emails. Most of the time, I forget what I said until I get the reply. This one made me laugh, so I thought I would share it. This was an email to a friend I've kept around off and on for a few years. She's occasionally cool. Sometimes, I enjoy her company. She sort of means something to me every so often. In a platonic sort of way, of course.

Hi. You whined one time about a lack of emails I send you. I felt terrible and it kept me up for weeks. In fact, only recently have I quit crying.

A pleasantly grouchy woman acosted me today as I was placing heavy things in a high place and said, "So, are you the person...", she put great emphasis on that word, "...who has been working electrical?"

I replied, "Sometimes. I do when Patty doesn't or can't because of her fear of heights. Acrophobia is the dreadest of fears, for just the other day I was pontificating..."

She had none of it. She kicked my ladder and hissed, "Well, that explains it. I find cartons misplaced and displaced every morning, thrown at random into coves and hollers for which they are not designed."

"I find that amazing and amusing, Creature," I said to the hissing, vile menace, "for I, and most of my fellow night workers, have complained on numerous occasion of the disheveled condition which we inherit every day from your fellow day workers. Perhaps the real villian lies outside the coziness of our own Orange camp."

She ripped out a shelving unit with her dripping mandibles. Crushing it for effect, she intoned, "Thus will I do to the workers of the night, evil with laziness who destroy my order!"

I leapt from the ladder to the ground and pulled out Fayre Laurelle, my trusty safety-designed utility knife, from it's enchanted scabbard (latin for scabbard is vagina.) She blew fire from between the seeping nostrils atop her head which I blocked with my enchanted orange apron. I thrust the knife into her loins and with great cry did she begin to melt. I shouted thus:

"Can you not see, foul creature?! Forsooth, our lives are beset by only two truths: that energy is conserved and converted in all systems and that entropy is undeniably present in all systemic procedures! Anon, we fighteth the tides of physics so! Your organisation of your feif will fail, and that miserably, without constant attention from your minions and my people. Why do you insist upon being such a contankeruous bitch? Were it not for the disintegration of all man's puny plans, what job would we have? I shine the light of reason upon you!"

I made the symbol of entropy on her forehead. She immediately turned into Natalie Portman. We rubbed parts and she bore me twin boys who will one day rule the People's Republic of Colorado with justice and mercy. Their names are Jamis the Bold and Ford the Steadfast.

Thus did we live happily ever after.

Bitch.

The People Examiner For US!

Lately, I have had to read magazines. No one is forcing me, but on my breaks at work, I have the choice of smoking, court TV or magazines.

You know what? National Geographic, hell yeah. Smithsonian, absolutely. Outside, sure. Men's Health, um...Sort of. There's way too many half dressed guys in that magazine. No, I have a magazine that is either titled "Us", as in a group of you and me, or "US", as in United States. I haven't been able to figure it out, it has nothing to do with either me and you or the country at large. There is a magazine called "People" in which they focus not on the populace, but on a small set of persons to a very obscene extent. A publication by the name of "Examiner" worried me until I found that it did not deal whatsoever with any matters of a gynecological or liturgical nature.

It inspired me. There is so much news out there that I had no idea about. I spent most of a decade outside the loop on day to day American and world gossip that didn't pertain to incendiary devices and mass conflag. That being said, someone went to the trouble to print this crap. It must be important to have made such a huge dent in the ink production of this country and several third world dictatorships, but how many other people are ignorant of all these important events? Surely anyone who avoids the use of smileys. They should not be in the dark, as I was. So, I have a new addition to this site:

The People Examiner for Us

All the real news!

Watch out for the next SoCal non-potable water shortage since it looks like the women of Hollywood have been drinking ho's water for the last couple years I been away. The chick with that one song that used to be popular was seen making out with Jared Leto at some bar or some shit like that. The stupid blonde chick, you know? Married to the Backstreet Boy? She was Daisy Duke in the last piece of rednexploitation. Yeah, she hit it off with the guy. DWTF? He had his paws all over Jennifer Connelly in Requiem for a Dream and he goes for some peroxide bimbo? Standards are lost on this guy. About five years ago I saw his band, 30 Seconds to Mars play in Virginia Beach. They sucked.

Speaking of ignorant backwoods Americans, obesity is blowin' up the spot! A lot of famous people are getting fat. Some moron followed them around long enough to get a picture of them showing some very average bellies in unflattering light, now they are on the cover of magazines. Fame is so fickle! Also A lot of famous people are dangerously thin! Usually the ones who were fat two months ago. If they had LA eating habits in Wisconsin Cows, no one could have any good cheese.

Speaking of melodramatic bovinous creatures with eating disorders, Britney Fucking Spears. DWTF??!! Something went very, very wrong there. A trailer park is rolling over in a tornado right now seeing the way she's been acting. Just like most people from Arkansas, she doesn't realize she has gotten fat! She did an interview with a guy who looked like a reporter and the photo from the session clearly shows bat flaps under her glutinous triceps. One good thing to come from her manteca career was her first single, Hit Me Again and Put Some Stank On It, Bubba Joe. I think that's what it was called anyway. Something about hitting her back when she was sixteen in any case. The song was terrible, but it launched the career of bassist Andy Hess, eventual replacement for Allen Woody of Gov't Mule.

Speaking of people who should procreate:

Angelina Jolie had a freakin' baby! What the hell? I didn't know she was pregnant! The dad is the dude from Fight Club, and apparently, he's been tapping that ass for a while, now. Also, Angelina must be a total skank because she already has four kids and NONE OF THEM LOOK ALIKE! Not a one. Shit, they don't even look like they belong to the same ethnic backgrounds. My advice, keep your legs shut for longer than it takes to pull 'em out of the stirrups at the maternity ward!

Speaking of skanks popping out kids, Tom Cruise knocked up a twelve year old runaway. Her name is Katie something and she must be famous because everyone else knows who the hell she is. I'll meticulously research this for a future update. Stay Tuned!!!

Oh yeah, the singer's name is Jessica Simpson. The chick from The Dukes OF Hazzard married to the gay singer? And holy fuck, she's got a sister! Her sister actually looks a little more sultry, less like a Jack Russell Terrier, and she's the one who fucked up on SNL. Yeah, that girl, the one who forgot how to lip synch, and Jessica are related. Who knew?

Not me, and not you. Until now!

See you next week!

UPDATE!!!

The rest of the world is very happy this week. The US Soccer Team lost the Football World Series. Apparently, there was a group of shepherds from some obscure country in Africa that handed asses to Our Guys. In their defense, they were a soccer team and it was not fair to trick them into a football game. They probably didn't even have the right pads or cleats. The official statement from the US has been, "We have a soccer team? Well, we may have lost a game for skinny guys and wusses, but we were too busy being heavily armed and easy to offend. Keep laughing, Uganda."

iFAQ

Yes, infrequently asked questions. I have had some form of internet presence now for a year and a half or so, and here are some of the more interesting questions from all my creative time wasting pursuits. These are actual questions I have received in relation to my sites. Obviously, a couple of these questions are not from this site. Some are kind of dumb, and therefore funny:


do you totally hate_____?

Probably not anymore than I hate anyone who isn't a hot marine biologist or writer. A hot poetress marine biologist. With a Sratocaster, wait, Thinline Telecaster. Hmmm. What was the question?

So, how do I start my truck with a screwdriver?

First of all, this is either referred to as jumping or gap-starting. Make sure the truck is not in gear. Make sure the truck is not in gear. Finally, make sure the truck IS NOT IN GEAR.

Next, take a wire and jam it into the positive battery terminal so that it will stay put and run that wire to the positive post of your coil, you can find your coil by following the center wire from your distributor to its source. Be careful not to make an arc your fingers between the post and your coil's ground. It hurts very bad. Once the connection is solid, find your starter solenoid. If you don't know what that is, you should question whether you need to be doing any of this at all. On one side of your solenoid will be your positive battery cable, on the other your starter cable. Arc those two. I use a crescent wrench and a screwdriver. The motor will start.

This is good to know how to do in case your ignition system takes a shit on you. That means your stranded and being stranded is for pussies.

Are you drunk all the time?

Um, no. Believe it or not, I hold down a job and function almost normally, most of the time.

UR hot, R U going to Whiskey River this weekend?

Yeah, make sure you wait around for me. You sound super cool.

You gun loving redneck nazi

Right, because the first thing the Nazis didn't do was disarm all their genocide fodder. Right? I mean if you're going to accuse someone of something you have to at least have some semblance of knowledge of the subject, right?

Dude, did you totally fuck (insert random woman's name here)?

It would be pretty ungentlemanly for me to tell you if I did.

What is your myspace page?

I sigh loudly at your insolence. MySpace is a place for friends. Friends have let me pass out on their couch. You have not. If you are hot and female, feel free to persuade me.

dude, george bush is such a fucking tool

He might be. I don't know the guy, but I know he made me spend valuable years of my life killing people I didn't hate. In his defense, he isn't any worse than anyone megalomanic enough to want the Presidency.

America is fucked up, asshole!

Yes.

America totally fucking rocks, asshole!

Yes.

Oregon/Minnesota/Illinois/Utah/California has geology, too, asshole.

Technically, yes. Spiritually, maybe.

Are you looking for vi@gra?

No. I have mineralogy and mountain biking.

Have you considered writing erotica?

Have you ever read my stuff on geology? Shit, I wrote a small entry on tertiary river gravel deposits that caused my hard drive to burst into flames and four women jogging by to get pregnant and give birth to quartzite, gabbro, selenite, and some type of plutonic igneous that can fuel the space shuttle for six years.

It involved the undulating river lapping back and forth over the supple Mancos shale formation, leaving little evidences. Pulsing, writhing through the receptive sand, dendritic fingers of hydrological influence coursing over the burning skin of the valley...

Actually, I probably could write erotica, since the bar is very, very low, and the attraction and interaction of two people follow the same physical laws than awe me in all aspects of the universe. That being said, erotica, for me, is very inspired, individual actions between a man and a woman on a commission basis.

If you are an erotically inspiring woman, feel free to commission me. You must like old trucks.

I'm still hung up on the marine biologist.

RU looking for H0T women in your area!!?

Well, yes. Funny, though, I bet your shitty personals don't list a marine biologist at all, the pinnacle of hot and sexy. I saw this PBS special the other day. Wet suited smart woman who can swim for hours, I mean come on, it isn't even fair. Fuck.

Friends.

Heaven reminds me of a country club in Virginia. Not to say that the greens or fairways are associated with heaven, I have never in my life stepped onto a golf course that charged admission. It seems that heaven itself is formed on exclusion. There is not a heaven if they let just loddy-doddy every-goddamn-body in to partake in everlasting paradise. Believing in heaven precludes any non-existence of hell. Heaven is the most exclusive of clubs, formed by the most exclusive of judges.

My one and only experience with a blue-blood country club came at the expense of a girl near and dear to me. I slaved semi-patriotically in the most blue collar of jobs, ensuring that another blue collar semi-patriotic slave waving a different flag, would die alone and without fanfare in a desert country somewhere, spectacularly minced by my handiwork. My girlfriend worked for a mortgage company. Only the most brutish of the proletariat took a job in my field, supporting and defending the right of rich men to sleep well knowing their sons were safe in college. The sons of men who ran mortgage companies.

As luck would have it, the company had a Christmas party at an extremely exclusive country club. My girlfriend was invited along with a guest. I fancied myself up in high order with a hand tailored suit from Singapore, a blue Egyptian cotton shirt tailored in Dubai and a plain black Navy issued tie which perfectly matched my plain black Navy issued shoes. There is no way to make a military fade look classy.

My luck continued to spiral out of control, eventually landing me seated at the table of the president of this quaint little mortgage company. The yuppies talked of plays and concerts. I talked of arming times and glove vanes. They were impressed, as I am impressed by a dog that can fetch me beer. One of them brought up a play I'm told is famous. It is called Les Miserables. I scratched my close-shorn head and shifted in the plush seats, I had seen this play. I had seen it in Bahrain. With a Russian whore. Drunk.

"Oh, I've seen that."

"Did you like it?"

"I don't know, I was too drunk to remember it and my buddies got us kicked out."

"Oh my goodness."

By the end of the night, I had dropped the Martinis and went into the club's stash of Wild Turkey. The old man who had boot-strapped his business up out of the mire in his younger, wilder days liked me. He also liked Wild Turkey. We became well drunk. Our women were not pleased. Neither were the rest of the guests. My girlfriend was so angry at my foolishness she married me in a thoroughly malicious manner.

The point being, I got well drunk last night and came home to spend some quality time with an old friend. The first time we met, he called me by Tom Joad. Last time I spent time with him, he called me Adam Trask, and he was correct. This time, he called me Tom Hamilton and was even more startlingly astute.

The problem is, as I understand heaven, my buddy John and I will never meet in the hereafter, which is sad because he died twelve years before I was born. We could have been great friends. His insight into me over the years is uncanny. Unfortunately, he didn't belong to the exclusive club I was born into. Poor guy.

"Thank you son for wanting to honor me with the truth. It is not as pleasant, but it is more permanent."--Samuel Hamilton to his son.

It seems like the struggle to get into heaven, that morality itself, is a struggle against natural human entropy. To be moral, a person must slave patriotically against nature in one long continuous battle of will. Obviously, there will be exclusion to the reward.

Entropy long ago swallered me whole. I don't quite revel in it, but it revels in me. Interesting thought to have at five in the morning sobering up. It made me think of bears stealing beer and a black Ford Galaxie driving a marine engineer and Luke Skywalker around. My all consuming funk may be lifting because I now know myself better. I'm not Tom Hamilton all the time, but I have been lately. And the dark side of Tom is a character named Billy.

Billy reluctantly saves the universe, you see. Maybe he's ready to fight again. He might need an assist from a poorly spelled suburbanite who sometimes deludes himself into becoming a deer.

Me and my friends may form an exclusive group in the hereafter, yet. I think Sam Clemens will be allowed in as well.

See you there, fuckers.

Potty-mouthing

Today I offended someone. I accidently called him a bad word. I called him a measure of kindling in Victorian vernacular. Turns out, some relation of his was not a fan of women as erogenous targets of life-inclusion. This made me feel bad.

I've been trying lately to think of stories from the Navy to impart to a reading audience. There aren't many to tell. Not because the time was not interesting or because it was void of powerful moments of inspired humanity, but because no one would get it.

Most of the readership of polite internet land would be turned off about the fifth time a quoted phrase started with an "F" and ended with "ucking, cocksucking, one-way, faggot-ass, no-cigarette-sharing bitch", then people might look elsewhere for work-friendly entertainment.

Which is too bad, you punk-ass bitches have no idea what the fuck you're missing being such little

PreterNothing 1.2

This a serialized account. Read this first, or this will just sound crazy. Crazier, anyway.

My mind had retreated almost completely from the fabric of consensus reality. Nothing that I saw was fake. Nothing I felt was false. The one shining, glaring conspirator of the Darkness squeezing in my brain and sucking out my reason was the Visitor.

The Visitor formed from the malevolent void flowing from inside my head. The void became so dark and so dense under my east window that it could have formed nothing else. The window warped around the dark image. Darker than the night, blacker than the sackcloth air.

She became real.

When our bodies are slipping into sleep, strong and rapid from the boat launch of the things we expect to see into the seething river of unconscious, the first act of unwill is the paralysis. To keep you from acting out your day all over again with violent or dangerous consequence, the body shuts off your limbs. If you remain lucid, if not conscious, you feel tied down to your bed. Or as if something is sitting on your chest.

She brought with her a foreboding. She didn't just carry it. She was formed in the furnaces of the hell that are fueled by the small guilts and sulfurous lies we wish we are afraid not to tell. Foreboding was her. All the fear and hate in the world was brought to my room. Though formed of fear and hate, she was not afraid or hateful. The same as my blood is not iron and oxygen.

She had love. Love like I have feared and felt small twinges of. Mad, mad, murderous love, the love of a mother to her leprous child. The love of a lioness as she kills her own offspring to control the consumption of food. The love of a betrayed lover. Love is a many splendored thing, indeed. And it has bloodied the whole world.

My world was awash in black, festered blood. It ran from the hems of her tattered, midnight cape. The cape rose abover her head and covered it totally, shadowing her face in another shade of the same festering black. Her tall form, sucking in all around her, radiated insanity. As surely as she was formed with quarks of fear and hate and love, insanity was the fermion of the whole. Embittered maternity stood her apart from the reality of my room.

She walked towards me with measured gait. I tried with effort rarely mustered to tell my eyes to turn to her. I'm not sure if it was the paralysis or the fear that held me at bay. She moved closer. She loved me. I could tell.

I knew a woman once who was told her whole life she could not bare children. She was a stunning example for all femininity, but she could not close the deal with Eve. Her and her husband formed a lasting and true relationship in their little home in the country, in the shade of the largest oak in the county. They formed a Garden of Eden without knowledge of a Fall.

One day, after fourteen years of medical belief to the contrary, she conceived. The small microsm of The Brethren lit up in joyous celebration for the miracle, the goodness of God. Her nest found new purpose as a room was prepared for the honored guest and a tree house was put up in the old oak. Around term, she had the child. A dark, inhuman, malformed lump of lifeless flesh. The single child she dared not hope for was a dead monster. The Brethren offered plattitudes and privacy to the destroyed woman, it was all they could do. She gave birth to dead love. Her womb was cursed by God, as was God by her, but never out loud.

In the autumn months that followed, she adopted the manner and meter of an ever-expectant mother, tittering about her house, busy and insane. Madness crept into her once and still beautiful eyes like algae on a pond. Her love killed her. The husband found her hanging from the oak tree.

Madness, in her dull, flowing cape, little red riding hood from Hell, paced towards me deliberately.

She loved me, I could tell.

another snippet

Comment moderation? What does that even mean?

Why do you even bother? They all see through you, poseur.

Wait, I think it has something to do with the lack of comments.

No, that's because nobody loves you, everyone hates you, you might as well eat worms and die.

Can I doctor up the worms in a chili or soup or something?

No, straight worms.

I think I can fix it, now...I need Bloggers help.

:)Hi I'm Blogger!

Cool, fix my shit.

:)Hi I'm Blogger!

What the hell?

:)Hi...

Yes?

:)H-h-hi...I Blgoer .);

Right...I need to....

:]Blogre

What a moron.

Yeah.

:)I'm Sorry Blogger is having difficulties. An engineer has been notified.

Are you kidding me?

:)Hi, I'm Blogger

A brief snippet

Are you drunk?

Um, yeah, but I can explain.

It's eight in the morning.

That is correct. I, however, just got off work a little while ago. This is my evening drinking.

Even so, it's only Tuesday..um, Monday I mean. For you, anyway. It's Monday, right?

So judgemental with nary a glimpse into my life to assume your moral superiority.

It's sort of my job, asshole.

It is? Who put you in charge of this boat?

Technically, I am an imalgam of your parents, society, various authority figures, Petty Officer Swain, AO1 Parker, etc.

Amalgam, you mean. Kind of an odd genesis for an asshole like yourself, don't you think?

Well, I am your conscience, I have my work to do and so do you.

I know, but fuck it, I'm lazy. Besides, I have creative pursuits to deal with.

Like a stupid Flickr badge?

It is not stupid. OK, it's pretty stupid. I remember now why I hate blogs. I now have one. Shit. I can't stop myself and I'm terrible at it.

Honestly, you probably have few good reasons to think that. Readership has a lot more to do with whether or not you are an attractive female than anything else.

Is a conscience supposed to say things like that?

Oh, come one, read this girl's shit for instance. Trite, boring, sophmoric. 38 comments. How is it different from Anaglyph's or any other dude's blog?

Uh, it sucks?

Right. Do you see what makes a good blogger now?

Smileys and LOL variants? Mispellings and boring, geocentrist material?

You forgot over-use of elipses. No, cute snapshots of a girl. I don't know why I bother with you. ROTFLOL ;D

Ha. I wonder, does that mean people are actually rolling around on the floor laughing an ass off and whatnot? I'm just saying it all seems hyperbolous and you know how I, we, hate that shit. Want some wine? I heard that makes me easier to deal with. ^_^

Nice. Give me some of that shit. Woah, that's nasty. Yeesh, what the hell is this shit? Goddamn.

California Delicious Red. It's more pinkish and definitely not delicious. I'm just glad they didn't throw some snob-barrio Spanish in there and call it "Vino Colorado".

Pinkish wine. Ha, I hate Californians. You got any Wild Turkey?

California hating and bourbon? Wrong website, buddy.

Shapely, Well-Oiled Shiva

As much as I try to make myself sound single, I do have a steady girlfriend in addition to my increasingly one-sided relationships to a couple old trucks. She's more of a wife. In fact, she's the only girl I've let spend the night in my bed in years. She used to lay next to me in my little coffin shaped rack in the bowels of the USS Connstellation. More than a time or two, she's seen her share of my tears and my drunken pawing.

We hooked up back in 1999 when she was brand new to the world. I decided that her name should be Monica, after a woman with whom many a trait is shared. Curvy, dark, sultry, Rosewood. It just made sense to me. I found good reason to keep this moniker to myself. For one, I always found men naming objects after women and women after objects to be a little creepy.

Monica defied any non-specific name. I could call her "the maroon one", but it would just seem like she's one of many in a collection and would never capture the deep port complexion. I could call her "the Fat Strat," but it has the same effect. My only option would have been to give her so much detail in her name, a littany of features, I would sound not like a lover of her, just a collector, a breed that will never show true love for their subjects, be it postage stamps or trophy wives.

The second reason I felt it necessary to keep her name to myself was the simple fact that my brother's girlfriend became his wife. She shared the beautiful three syllables with my girl. In my family, the name Monica became synonymous with my dark, rosewood sister-in-law. I don't think my brother would have liked knowing I had my dirty, concrete stained fingers running all over Monica. And it raised some fairly conflicting feelings in me towards the two Monicas.

Now, she just sits, often neglected, with her name being a secret silence between the two of us. Probably the way it should be. She's still pretty damn hot.

Tequila Sunrise

I just ate a left-over breakfast burrito, courtesy of my mom, made me a margherita, and sat down to watch Good Morning America. Something is very, very wrong.

In other news, I mentioned that I think the story of Jacob wrestling with God is a mistranslation in the wrong crowd. Somewhere a Baptist Satan is preparing a Baptist Hell for my ass complete with Baptist fire and Baptist demons to poke me with Baptist pokers. Fuck those guys. Last I heard, they didnt support consumption of alcohol, either. Well, I prefer to listen to the Big Man on this one, I'll just take me some booze and drink me all of it. So let it be wrote, so let it get done.

Shoot, Ben Franklin said, "Beer is proof that there is a God and that he wants men to be happy."

Jesus performed his first miracle when him and his desciples were "being well drunk".

Who am I to argue with that?

Nobody. I am but a sad, wayward pilgrim swimming in the seas of vice and corrupted humanity. Fuck the Baptists. I need a shot of Burbon, a nice pipe, and an immoral woman.

Miles Davis®Jack Johnson Sessions® Ali

I'm out.