Saturday, February 04, 2006

woooooooo...........the evil 'tree' post!

first published february 3
if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?
Does anyone remember Barbara Walters asking poor Kate Hepburn this question? I saw the interview when it first aired and remember thinking "Oh Jesus God, Barbara, what the fuck.' I still don't know what kind of answer she was expecting.
If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?
1. Why, A fuzzy tree, Barbara. The one that the itchy man was climbing in the Elvis song.
2. The one that falls on your car and causes you to go off the side of a hill where you die a slow, anonymous death after spending your last pain filled days sucking the dew off the steering wheel and licking up ants.
3. Bitch, listen. I'm Katherine Hepburn. I'll be Katerine Hepburn when this interview is over and I'll be Katherine Hepburn when they lay me in the grave. You, on the other hand, will from this day onward be the dumbshit who asked me what kind of a tree I resembled. *Slaps Barbara Walters briskly across the face several times*
Waiting for the Goonybird and the Stainless Steel Amazon to show up. It's black as the inside of a cow, no stars, no moon, just milk trucks going past. Ah, but no wind either, and best of all, no rain for the moment. The evil dogs are pleased-they hate rain. I keep telling them, they're DOGS, for Gods' sake. Something that licks its own ass has no right to be finicky about anything. Still, it is pretty saturated out in the back yard; they're leaving belly deep dogfoot-sized puddles after every step. Just the right conditions for a big south wind storm to start taking out trees. (later note: do I know my shit or what? i'm fuckin'cosmic, is what i am.)
Last year we finally convinced the city to take down a dying tree that was about to crush our house. This thing had a trunk that my daughter and I together could just barely circle with our arms, and that was stretching to tickie fingers on each side. Problem was it was a softwood; Lombardy poplar. Probably twenty years before somebody had pollarded the fuck out of it so it would limb out instead of growing straight up like a pillar, but in the doing had left the core wood open to the elements; it promptly rotted out. So we had a mature tree in our front yard the size of a small Spanish galleon, no exaggeration-the only thing standing due south between us and Seattle, and the fucker was full of waterlogged cottony slop instead of solid wood. Giant limbs would calve off and shatter in the driveway every time we had a storm from the south-and we get some horrible storms in February, 70mph winds, rain like an ocean wave continuously crashing over the house. (later note: and it happened two cocksucking hours later, baby.) Anyway, it took a couple of years of making ourselves intrusively friendly at city hall, but they finally did it. Wanna visit our tree? It's down at the city compost. The trunk sections are taller than your car. And they're hollow. I was horrified when they were taking it down; I knew it was bad but not that bad.Still, we got action, and it was free. Small town life in the year 2006 aint too bad. When you can roll on in to the halls of government and grab the mayor for a chat wearing trashed gardening shoes and a 'speed racer' t shirt, and he does what you ask, thats just the good life. (Yes, pants too; please.)

Friday, February 03, 2006

Not a fun one. Might want to skip it.

Bit of a preamble:
Everything in this blog is true. This is where I get to have my full, unedited say for a change. The following is true. It's kind of disgusting, but it's true.
______________

My mom, once she had her hooks in something never let it out of her grasp again. She was a hoarder, of the variety known as 'Diogenes Syndrome'.

Back then it was called 'being a saver' and lots of people who survived the Depression Era did it. I'm certain thats what lie behind why she did it. At least, I'm certain thats one of the reasons. The other is that the woman was simply greedy and gloating. There was nothing deep or pathological about what she did. It all boiled down to a simple schoolyard bully singsong... 'I have it and YOU DON'T.'

The biggest and sickest manifestation of her disorder had to do food. You could buy it, but you couldn't eat it unless she cooked it....and mom was NOT A COOK, so we ate out a lot. This is probably why I survived my first 18 years without any major diet-related illness beside severe anaemia (which cleared up after living on my own for three months- and never came back.)


We had moved to a brand new house in 1964. Of course the contents of the pantry came with us. It stayed with us, too. In fact it's still there, last time I looked (1985).

Over time, she gradually filled up every available kitchen space- and I mean packed the cupboards until the doors wouldn't shut correctly-with food. She then packed a wardrobe-sized pantry the same way. Then asked dad to build her another pantry space in the basement. In a matter of months that too was stuffed to the ceiling with food. Things she had canned and never opened. Institutional containers of vegetables. Jars of capers! Capers, for the love of Christ! We never ate capers! I didn't even know what a caper was until a few years ago!

The contents of the refrigerator were guarded like the Hope Diamond. When things finally went bad...furry, slimy, semiliquid unuseably bad, they were smuggled out of the house under cover of darkness into the outside garbage.

The woman who never baked bought flour by the 20lb sack and let it get grey with shed weevil parts until she would consent to let my dad take it out, screaming in rage the whole while. Sugar turned into a yellow solid mass in the bag. Things went unused for so long inside closed cupboards that when you went to move something it had to be pried free, and left a sticky ring of grime behind it.

She saved bacon grease in a container stuck to the back of the stove until it became so rank you could smell it in the front doorway. Then it too was snuck out of the house in rolls of newspaper.

Obviously, the woman was no housekeeper.

Besides food she also hoarded paper. Things like pamphlets and books and clippings. But although she had stacks and rooms full of that shit, you never found it hidden behind the towels...what you did find was old antique Halloween candy she'd stolen out of my bag. Paper was her avocation, but food was where she veered off into 'Batshit crazy' territory.

Every room of the house had stacks of crap. The dining table was buried under newspapers and junk mail. The living room was a reeking den of stale cigarette smoke, old upholstery, scorched dust, and books. Their two bedrooms? Don't even ask. We had a full daylight basement. Oh yes, it was full, all right. Absolutely full. Not of daylight either.

And nobody saw a thing.

Now my father would reach a certain stage about halfway down the bottle and start bitching about the state of the house... and boy, then the fireworks would start. With a certain justification...his areas, the garage, the outbuildings, the yard, the things only he had anything to do with-those things were beautifully, even compulsively kempt. Outwardly we had the nicest house in the area by far.

But yeah; he'd get his dutch courage up and then it was nothing but ranting and screaming and ranting and screaming.... until I was drug in and ranted and screamed at by both of them for not keeping the house clean.

Which, had I been older than six (when it started in earnest, and from then on until I moved out) would have been somewhat reasonable....
...that is, had I been allowed to clean. Oh, yes. Oh yes!


The sickest manifestation of my mothers' hatred for everything living happened after I moved out in early 1979.

My room was taken over instantly by my mother as what she termed 'a study'. It happened a couple of years after having met the Lord (the way a semi meets a bug) and her pious horseshit had moved from the 'Jesus loves you happy rapture' stage to the 'deep purple, bible thumpin', satan is everywhere' stage.

I had come to visit.
My mom was grinning when she threw open the door to my former room.
My room was filled to the ceiling. 'Well', I thought, 'I expected that.'
But once I took a better look I realized that my former room was now filled to overflowing with religious things.

Posters and holy cards were pinned to every wall.
Bibles-not singular, plural.
Devotional statues, to the point it resembled a Santeria chapel.
Boxes and boxes and boxes of tracts stacked along the walls and out into the room.
Just imagine the most insane, over the top collection of God-related anything all thrown together in one stale little room with a lock on the door and the curtains clothespinned shut.

And topping it off was the Crucifix of Doom.

This was a full on, bleeding Jesus Catholic crucifix, really a rather beautifully executed thing, and that easily enough judged for its being FOUR FEET TALL.
Where does a layperson even find a thing like that?

The corpus was like an illustration out of Greys Anatomy. If you've ever seen a lifesize Mexican waxwork statue of the Agony of Christ, or ever been in the Church of St. Michael the Archangel in Tijuana, then you know exactly the type of over-the-top, S and M, eerily lifelike - special effects realism I mean.
And there it was in my room. Bleeding. A lot.

I have never.
NEVER.
...been so taken aback in my life. I mean I literally did take a step back in horror when that door came open.

And she laughed at me.
_______________________

When I finally broke off from these people for good in 1985 , one particularly irritating and self- righteous cousin kept after me for years about how I should shut up and play nice, finally saying 'At least do it for the money! They've got to be loaded!' (Yes, he's a class act. They all are.)

Surprise!

There's none left.

My mother was a fanatic, remember. She'd spent every single cent my father made on T.V. preachers.
She looted my bank accounts, so money that was supposed to come to me in trust never did.
She emptied their savings. Not even the house or the property remained in the family. It's all been left to Jesus.

If anyone happens to run into Jesus, would you ask him what he did with it?

Thursday, February 02, 2006

middle aged and sick of bitches

I was casually playing internet roullette yesterday when I came upon a picture of a young Japanese lady in a shower standing on her head -I mean, completely out of the blue, now-that I can only describe as a Recirculating Japanese Mustard Fountain.

I really wish I hadn't.

But I admit I took a good, long look. And in looking I realized that, even though this woman was exposed in the most explicitly proctological manner imaginable, the one molecule of girlyness she had left had lead her to cover her eyes so she couldn't be recognized.
It flat out cracked me up.
No pun intended.

I mean, my grandmother remembers being terribly offended by the guys who would wait by the streetcar stop to cop a glimpse of feminine ankle as the ladies stepped onto the trolley. You'd almost be tempted to say ' Gosh! We really HAVE come a long way since then, haven't we?'

Nah. Bitches be the same, yo.

I was at a product party not terribly long ago. If you're foreign you have no idea what I'm talking about. Think of the term '[product party' as meaning 'an excuse to gather all my friends and co-workers into one room and guilt them into buying shit they don't really need rather than just crassly asking them for a loan because that would be tacky'.

Now the kitchenware parties? Hell, bring them on. In fact, just show me the catalogue, I'll get my checkbook. But I don't know who thought it would be a good idea to invite me to a Yankee Candle show, or why they thought I might need a candle, but I played nice and showed up so the sponsor would get her party gift.

I sat through the sales pitch. I handed round the selections... 'Ooo, look, a gel candle! It looks just like phlegm with a wick in it! Damn thats fucked up! Pass it to the right, yes, please, quickly!....'

About forty-five minutes into the thing my eyes were watering, between sitting tit deep in scented candles and all the fortysomething partygoers bathed in Avon 'roaches die instantly' perfume... fuck, the vinyl flooring was starting to curl. So I retreated to the kitchen.

While I'm helping tray snacks, the hostess introduces me around, and tosses in the phrase, 'She's the hippie Martha Stewart, you know. '

Why no, I didn't.

'I mean, she's just out in the yard just growing flowers and vegetables and taking care of her house and doing embroidery, she just does everything! She even hangs clothes out on a line! I mean, she just makes me sick!' continues my hostess, all grinning and singsong.

This is what's known as a 'for fucks' sake' moment.

You know what; I just let her fall flat. I just couldn't be bothered to put on a show. She pissed on the floor, now she had to stand in it. I let her stand in it a good, long time.

I smiled and made small talk, oh yes, I really do hang my wash out on a line, have a cookie, and made myself a nice big sandwich, paused, casually reached past her, grabbed a couple of beers out of her fridge, stuck them both in my coat pocket and...left.

You see? Age does bring wisdom. Years before I would have fronted her up or keyed her car or done something really uptown like taken a big ol' dog dump in her bathroom and not flushed or something.
This way.....? Ah, this way, I showed class. AND I HAD BEER.

This sort of thing, the female underhanded smiling dis....this my husband simply does not get at all. He can be sitting in the same room and hear the same thing I do and not even realize that a very bitter exchange of insults has been taking place. If you point it out to him he just takes the infuriating attitude 'Oh gosh you must be mistaken you delusional oversensitive little violet, this is one of those women things my father who hated women warned me about' making me want to hurt him violently with a violently violent fucking shovel, violently.

His mother pulls this. Every time I visit.
The man is utterly oblivious.

Our dear friends' aging bitch of a mother pulls this shit repeatedly on the guy's wife, making sure she has a nice, big audience, an audience my husband usually happens to be sitting in.
Just plumb eludes him.
Zoop.
Over his head.

But most maddeningly of all? You explain what happened. You translate. You re-enact it even, carefully, word for word. You lay it all out...
... and he airily dismisses it.
So what? Doesn't matter.

Well it does matter.
But what matters most?
Winning.
And getting BEER.




*Damn, I just went from The Wall, past Aretha Franklin and landed on Ozymandias in one swell foop. Not too fuckin shabby.

Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Make a note of it

Dates to remember in FEBRUARY:

Monday, February 20...........Dia de las Presidentes, Puerto Rico.
On this day all Puerto Ricans gather together to comemorate the Presidentes' return to their roosts in the picturesque, ruined chapel of Capistrano.
Lets all sing:
o festival é feliz para meu fígado, Mariao softener da tela,
meu fritar é doloroso, simcante, o meu pancreas hostilpara
baixo no prado, no poo bitty ittymina,
a frase erectile do yorena
costa atlantic selvagemdo
thee eu canto


Translation:
The festival is happy for my liver, Maria softener of the screen,
mine to fry is painful, yes, sings my pancreas
hostile in the Prado,
in poo bitty mine,
the phrase erectile, phrase erectile, the wild coast atlantic,
of thee I sing
.



February 2- Groundhog Day. Nobody knows what this holiday means.

February 28-Mardi Gras. Go to New Orleans, get dog-raping drunk, show your tits, puke, get arrested, go home. Yes, we know how to party here in America.

February 12- Lincolns Birthday. Inventor of the famous childrens building toy. He freed the logs.

February 22-Washingtons Birthday. I live in Washington. Nobody told me about this.
Lets all sing:

Sie sind glücklich, glücklich veil das Vieh,
wenn die Sonne einstellt,
Verzweiflung

Translation:
They are lucky, lucky to veil the cattle, if the sun adjusts,
mocking Patti LaBelle,
forgotten never our Patrimony
those violent socks of despair.

February 24- Dia de la Bandera. Day of The Band. In Mexico, they really, really like Bob Dylan.

February27- Dia del Cevismo. Day of Beer in Brazil.

Conversational Brasilish:

Ach, du Leiber? tentamos alguns de este deliciouso braino. Fiz -me do the corpse.
Have a cevismo? It is quite delicious.
Tente chumpam meu dick se ousa.
Don't mind if I do, Mr. Brazil person. Thank you kindly.
I el-misso a roupa interior por vezes.
No, not at all America person, we encourage drunkenness.
Dar todos os seus dinheiro, sair.
Mr. Brazil person, you are truly a civilized man.
O cheiro como o meu gato., gosto de estrangeiro.


February 14-Washingtons birthday. No wait, St. Valentines day. St Valentine is the patron saint of pawnbrokers. His motto: If you can't sell it, then you just sit on it, 'cause you sure aint' givin' it away.
Words I live by.

February 22- Washingtons Birthday. What did these women do back then, just lie around and breed presidents? Jesus!

February 5- Aniversario de la Constitutio, Mexico. Anniversary of Walking, also known as National Constitution day. How is your constitution doing lately? I know mine is a little under the weather.
That was a political joke! Ha!

February 6 -Waitangi day, New Zealand.
Lets all sing:
Waitangi, waitangi, a laissé le désespoir de blokes de ghoulish!
Les oiseaux de la lumière ont-ils collé rapidement
dans le gril de votre automobile?
notre greatness de foretathers brille sur le newt dans le dell,
ainsi chantez chantent chantent mes enfants,
vont, Biloxi, vont!


Waitangi, waitangi, oh, the desperation of blokes of ghoulish!
The birds of the light have stuck quickly in the grill of the automobile.
Ours, the greatness of forefathers shining on the newt in the dell,
So it sings sing sing my children,
Some other stuff, yeah!

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

lord, get me out of this house.

ah shit.
noshit is a girl. and I am a big retard.
go here immediately and read: http://drivingthebustohell.blogspot.com/
note to self - reread 'Our Bodies, Ourselves.' Use highlighter.
I just heard a flock of trumpeter swans go past like a schooner under full sheets. Such a big, beautiful looking bird, the most pure shade of white this side of paradise, yet what an underwhelming song. Not the call to arms you might expect with a name like 'trumpeter' but a vaudville 'frap! nork! nork!' as they go overhead. Not too damn far overhead either, although when you're the size of a compact car and you can fly, people probably get out of your way.
This time of they year they are still paired up and travelling with the young they fledged the past spring. You can tell that the winter has been wearing away at the fabric of their patience with this arrangement. Instead of catering to the every whim of the cygnets the adult swans now chase them off. 'Goddammit! Get off me! You have wings; get a job!'
I remember those days.
As the days lengthen my gardening dna is beginning to act up bad. I notice myself spending more time pacing in front of the picture windows thinking 'Jesus, the yard looks like shit, it just looks like shit. I need to mow. I need to weed. I need to trim. I need to.....'and so it goes. The front beds are just a pathetic disaster. The scene only lacks a bewildered third world child with no drawers chewing on a shoe to complete the squalor. Please, give generously. It takes only pennies a day.
There's a henbit just outside my front window in the middle of my lillies that has been mocking me all winter long and all I can do is just stand and stare at the thing hating it. Now would be the perfect time to go murder it like the wicked scum vegetable that it is, since henbit, as my grandma would put it ' has a Chinaman hanging off the other end' and it's easier to pull chinamen through soft mud than it is to chip them out of the soil later in the year. But if I go out to pull it, I'll sink up to my ankles in the mire as soon as I step off the porch; and it knows that. I hear it at night while I'm watching CSI. 'IIIIIIIm ouuuuuut here.........IIIIIIm groooooowing.......I can reach the latch on the window beHIIIIIIIIIIIIIND youuuuuu.....'
Fuck I need to dig a hole!
No, it REALLY IS that bad. The last place we owned sat on a lot which was pretty small, and as we usually do Rq and I divided it down the middle and flipped a coin to see who gets right and who gets left. My side was so small, and I finally became so desparate that I went to the owner of the house next door and asked if I could garden there as well, because I had flat run out of things to dick with in my yard. Think of it as horticultural colonialism. It worked out pretty well. He got free maintenance and I got to make sure that the people next door didn't trash the fucker up and make my place look bad. Which they probably wouldnt have done, but you never know.
I made that sapsucker BLOOM. I turned it into a perfect, self-maintaining native plant paradise. No of course I didn't take plants from the wild off fresh logging clearcuts where they would have just died anyway and thereby continued the process of native species extinction due to loss of habitat. That would be tresspassing and tresspassing is wrong. Because, boy, if somebody else owns the land, say, the state of Washington, or Weyerhauser, or Japan, well, thats their land and you should just stay right the heck off it.
.....Oh hell yes I broke the law. No justification. Had fun doing it too.
So do I have a problem with the nutty people next door's overgrown tangle? Not at all. There's no trash. Since they tend to stay indoors (talking to the mothership via the static channel) they have a whole, undisturbed, wild mini habitat going on...raccoons, foxes, bats, squirrels, falcons, dang. I kind of feel bad though, since I birdwatch, and it can't be comfortable (for people who already suspect the CIA is using the plumbing to influence their thoughts) to see the neibor lady standing in her window with a pair of binoculars and a notebook. But I think a balance has been struck... My dogs eat all the cat crap in their yard, a free service which I provide out of sheer community spirit; thus, they owe me gratitude for witholding the wrath of the Almighty God Cthulhu and his minions, who long to take them bodily, gibbering and screeching in dawning horror, into the eternal utmost blackness of space where Nyarlathotep, the crawling chaos, reigns, amid the hateful whine of unseen flutes urging on the mindless Elder gods capering awkwardly and obscenely in the abyss.
And yes, THATS what happened to the trick-or treaters who egged my car.

Monday, January 30, 2006

Call me 'puskahosu', will you?

I got kind of curious after writing the entry about my grandads funeral, so I went a-roaming on the World Wide Web. And check out what I found...grandad was IOOF!!

International Order of Odd Fellows, that is. Sort of a Catholics and workingmans' budget version of the Masonic Lodge. Their main thing was disaster relief funds for their members and burial insurance; kind of like the Grange* does. Of course, the Grange is also a quasi-Masonic thingie; a rural one. Those darned old quasi-Masonic thingies, them.
Anywho, thats how grandad rated the funeral from Verdi!

Grandad was a guy who never learned English-or so he'd have you believe- a drunk, a wife beater and a pig, who worked in the woods for months at a time. Rather than suffer the disgrace of putting his son out to neibors, because that would be asking for charity, left him instead in an orphanage. Although to hear it told it sounded more like one of those lockers in the bus station. He'd drop off my father and then come back around when the mood lead him and 'redeem' him.
And did this repeatedly.
And sometimes forgot him there for years at a time.
Reflect: this was not the orphanage out of 'Annie'. This was something out of Dickens, if Dickens had been into child porn.

My memories of my grandfather consist of him being old, drinking coffee out of a saucer, drinking Old Crow hot with spoon of sugar, dropping his upper plate to freak me out (and you'd freak too... old man spit googling around in a toothlss pink maw is not pretty), and either smacking me or tripping me with his cane whenever I came into reach.


I would like to express here my sincere gratitude to the International Order of Odd Fellows for giving me such a vivid and lasting memory of this vicious mans' demise.
And for encasing him in not one, not two, but three separate containers-a steel casket, a steel vault and a cement enrobement.

That oughta hold him.



*I was actually SCOUTED by the Grange. I seriously was. They wanted me to join but I balked at the whole 'beer stein full of piss' thing. Thats' not clean.

Don't bother looking for this on their website.

Do you live in a foreign country? Have you suddenly found yourself suffering from a need to laugh at how fucked up Americans are? Then this post is for you, sugar tit.

I was released long enough this past Sunday to do some shopping and visit a garage sale or two. Because I live in a tiny little town, and am a bad hippie and don't care about my carbon footprint, I head to the nearest shopping-sized town, which is Lynden. Yeah, it's the town where the Lynden Fryers grocery store chickens come from ( although I have yet to locate the processing plant or the chicken farms. Maybe it's all done by Magic Dutchmen. Like the Keebler elves, only repressed and filled with hate.)

Once my shopping is done I hit the garage sales. And let's not kid ourselves: this is the real reason I'm here.

A lot of people with more money than sense live in Lynden. They throw the best garage sales in history. Something goes out of style or they've worn it in public more than three times, out it goes. New stuff. Kids stuff. Furniture, water heaters, pallets of shingles, cryogenic semen storage cannisters (oh yes); hell, an AIRPLANE-dig it! at a garage sale! They don't care, man! And you better stay the damn fuckedy hell off my hunting grounds, buckwheat, cuz I've pissed on all the posts. MY TERRITORY. I OWN GUNS.

'K. Anyway.

Lynden is known here in Whatcom County for its very vocal, active, megamonstertruck-type Christian conservatives. They range from super separatist homeschoolers living completely off the grid, to mere Real Estate Christians, but besides being hardcore Christians all, they share two things:

1. They are the most thoughtlessly acquisitive people on the planet and,
2. They ARE their brothers keeper, baby. They honestly will come up to your door and point out the unseemly number of liquor bottles in your recycle bin. True story, really happened. Man, we are lucky to have people like this, right? People up there on their higher moral ground who take mercy on us sinners and take the time to show us the error of our ways and such, like so many pink little Imitations of Christ?

Here's their dirty secret, though.
THEY'RE KLAN.
As in 'Ku Klux'.

Back in the bad old days the Klan was big news out this way. In the newspapers and everything. They used to represent HUGE in the Lynden 4h of July parades. Let's ignore the fact that back in the 1920's there may have been two black people in the entirety of Whatcom County, ok?...and I guarantee you there wasn't a damn one in Lynden. Yet there they were, keeping their fellow citizens safe from the tsunami of rape-crazed darkies threeatening all that was good in America or whatever the hell they were high on.
Hell, they even ran a float. Perched atop the float was that years' Miss Klan, a pretty cornfed Dutch girl, waving and smiling, wearing a 'Miss Klan' sash and all. Following that came all the local Klan members...nice old dairy farmers and local businessmen and Lady's Christian Aid Society wives AND THEIR CHILDREN in their dress whites, pointy hoods and all.

This is a stone fact. Anyone who wants to can go to the Photographic Archive of Whatcom County, housed in the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham Washington, and view the stacks of photographs and newspaper articles documenting this fact. I used to volunteer there. I helped catalogue them.

It went on for years. Then suddenly, poof! gone! No more Miss Klan! No more float! No more parade! What Klan? What parade? Never happened! Not here!

Well, what do you expect, I guess. I applaud them for even having a sense of shame about it, however money motivated. But the thing that bothered me for the longest time was, what the hell was a chapter of the Klan doing at all in the Godforsaken, howling, Injun-infested wilderness of Whatcom Fucking County? It doesn't make any sense. Back then the scapegoats 'round these parts wuz the Injuns. You tossed them a bottle of whiskey and problem solved. And as for culture, forget it. Nobody in Lynden was from the South; they were all from Dutchpersonsylvania, which is somewhere in Holland. We are so far north of south that you simply cannot go any further away from the South than here and still be in America. You end up in Canada, and nobody wants that.

Ah, but then I started attending garage sales there in Lynden. And what I found gave me the answer.

I think the churches brought it.
And that it was a conscious, deliberate, church-sanctioned doctrine of hatred.

What evidence do I have to support this wild allegation?

Say Granny pops her clogs and the kids hold an estate sale. Lets say it's on beautiful, tree-lined 17th Street, right in the center of Lynden, although it could just as easily be out on a nearby farm.
You go to any one of these estate sales and you will find boxes, honey, boxes and boxes filled with tracts bearing titles such as 'What the Jews Have in Mind for You' and 'How the Catholics are Buying America' and 'God Wants the Races Separate'! See, and those are just the titles that come immediatly to mind.

I see this shit at EVERY SINGLE ESTATE SALE I GO TO IN LYNDEN!

So judging from the dates on these things, back until not too terribly long ago-like the 70's-you could go to church in Lynden, and after services were over you could stand in the foyer, chatting with your pastor, and put a couple three of these in your purse on the way out the door.
Son of a Bitch.

This Klan bullshit lies deep in the mindset of the Lynden Old Guard. Although their actions reveal as much, let's look at the dates involved just for kicks. This reveals the fact that, more than likely, their parents were marching in these parades. Some of their grandmothers and mothers and sisters and aunts were 'Miss Klan.' Very possibly they were marching too, on their little stubby legs, right alongside the float. Now they belong to the Chamber of Commerce and the Christian Businessmens' Association and City Hall.

Yes...I live 6 miles away from this motherfucker. It ain't far enough. This brand of cultural leprosy taints the entire area. Having grown up with a Born-
again religious fanatic and blue-ribbon hypocrite I can smell this shit stinking by moonlight. But I tolerate it. Why? Because I am just a wonderful awesome human being like that.

And they DO throw a hell of a garage sale.

Sunday, January 29, 2006

The alzheimers is taking root

Geeze, before I forget, Here:
http://carrieouoftown.blogspot.com/

and here:
http://collagemama.blogspot.com/2006/01/rooney-rants.html#comments

Two women nearly as cool as my daughter. Good writing, interesting lives!

also here:
http://drivingthebustohell.blogspot.com/

a wacky brrrrrriticher person who has the brain of a duck, you know.
Oh, so is my laughing humor! Not really. He's GOOD.
And I think he's a wacky new zeeeeeeelandiche person, anyway. I could be wrong.

I love you John. Despite which.

It really, really bothers me that John Cleese expects to be paid 50$ to join his 'official' fansite. I'm glad he got a lemur named after him. I freely admit he's a genius. I've been true-blue to my Johnnie since 1973. Still, one draws the line somewhere and I draw it at being dog-hosed by a man old enough to be my grandfather. Christ Almighty, John. It's not like you're paying British taxes anymore. Yeah, it supports research of some kind. Fine. I still think you ought to be paying us. We're the reason you're John Cleese.

Still, I regret not having realized earlier in life that he was straight. To the tune of 'I wish he'd fathered my children' and I mean that SINCERELY. I mean look at him. Not only is he a genius, he was fine. He had a smokin' ass too. Hell, maybe he still does.

And pay the devil his due; he gave Graham Chapman the best eulogy in the history of public speaking. I always say, a funeral isn't really quite complete unless at least half the crowd is given cause to gasp in horror during the eulogy. It was brilliant. It was inspired. It was breathtaking. It was perfect. Cleese may well be a dick in some ways, but he has more raw class than Lee Marvin standing on top of a pile of burning Harleys drinking whiskey out of a dirty glass.

I'm a girl who knows her eulogies. When I was a kid, my family were the caretakers of the pioneer graveyard in our town, so we saw a lot of funerals and heard a lot of graveside oration. The other reason why is my parents were quite a bit older themselves, and water seeking its own level resulted in their pool of acquaintance being on the elderly side. I went to a lot of funerals. I became something of a connoisseur.

There were funerals where people wept, screamed and fainted-those were the best by far. Of course these were not Catholic funerals...Catholics, at least white ones, have no public emotions.*

There were funerals where you hoped someone was standing by with spare coffins, because the deceased looked healthier than the mourners did. And back then everyone went to a funeral-whether you wanted to or not, apparently. Some funerals would empty out the old folks' homes for miles around. I don't think the staff worried too much about what the patients thoughts on the matter were, though, because lots of their charges were barely registering beyond the next bowl of oatmeal. Can you imagine being so old you're translucent? And bedridden? And being wheeled in to a funeral home on a gurney for the love of God? What do you imagine was going through these poor old peoples' heads?

There were services performed under the auspices of fraternal orders, and these were just strange for a little kid. Grown men I normally saw in overalls walk in dressed for HMS Pinafore, wearing pirate hats and carrying sabers. (this must have been K of C).
My grandfathers' lodge (IOOF) really sent him off in style. There was marching, speeches, singing, ceremonial maces, silk flags; and every bit of it in Finnish. They laid two real swords on his coffin when the floor show was over. Oh, I wanted those swords bad. One of my weird boy-cousins and I were discussing the matter of how to obtain them when his father told him they were going to be buried with Gramps. Boy Cousin threw one of his patented Boy Cousin Screaming Goddamn Cows. In fact he actually tried to sneak back into the funeral to steal them.
They had to take Cuz home.
I didn't put him up to it.

But it was always a good show. I don't mean to sound harsh. You have to bear in mind that most of these poor people were 240 years old and had spent years warehoused away in some grim , piss-soaked care facility (This was the 1960's in rural Oregon. Regulations were unknown and inspectors non-existant.) You met these poor souls once- which at eight years of age meant standing next to a hospital bed amongst the chugging, beeping machines, on a level only suited to observing the solemn march of thick fluids draining down into various plastic bags...or blatting intermittently into buckets. (Remember what I said about it being the 1960's in rural Oregon? yeah. It was that grim.) The next time you met them they were in their best suit of clothes resting on billows of white satin.

Funeral parlours in those times were big on Utah-sized sprays of gladioli. I recall sitting in the front row during my uncles' service and only being able to see his nose heroically jutting above all the floral arrangements. I looked at that nose for the entire service completely mesmerized. A dead nose! A dead nose!

I've heard a lot of eulogies. Some of them were in English. Some were very good, and some were about very good people. Not one could hope to compete in the same arena as the one John Cleese gave his best writing partner. Not one. Check it out on YouTube if you don't believe me. One minute everyone in the place is drawing in a collective gasp of horror, just outraged, shocked to their foundations - and in the next instant they're laughing hysterically.

It takes a lot to make people at a funeral laugh, It takes a fucking GOD to make them crack up so hard they fall out of the folding chairs and spit their teeth out.

yeah, I know, here I've just slagged Cleese all to hell, so there's no chance of him doing my eulogy now. Because he's going to be around, you know. He's going to live forever.

*I was baptised Catholic so I can say whatever I want; so THERE.