life. death. saturated fat.

All three of my husbands' parents have lead extremely active, healthy lives. In retirement they continued to be active, mom and stepdad participating in nationwide amateur golfing events-and winning them- and the playboy of the western world travelling the world leaving a trail of broken hearts in his wake.

And here they are in their late seventies and they're sick.

Fuck it all, folks. No, really, fuck it ALL. I'm never dieting, never going to stop drinking, never going to take it easy. If this is how it ends up anyway then there's nothing that's going to prevent me from living while I have the chance. I mean, Jesus Christ; all Lance Armstrong's ever done is ride around on a fucking bicycle drinking protein shakes and he's minus a nut.

I say this because yesterday I unleashed upon an unsuspecting world the cholesterol death quiche from Planet Tallow. Now, nobody does a pate brisee like me. I am the pate brisee Goddess. Half a cup of butter went into shortening that little honey and it came out fluffy, light and perfect. Homemade pork sausage, mushrooms, onion, smoked basa and shallot filled it. Oh, and four eggs; can't forget them.
Topped with a cup of caraway gouda.
Utterly dee-luscious.

Hey, at least I'm no longer shortening them with schmalz. Or duck fat. So that makes it healthier. Right?
Inasmuch as cobra venom is healthier than being hit with a tactical nuke; then yes, it does.

UPDATE:
oo! oo! i found a pinto!
Yes, after tirelessly searching the web to bring you the best in human misery, I present to you Jesus Is Lord DuFresne doing the perp walk:





Have a Happy Easter, won't you?

The Horrible Grey Rhino King Is Hell's Messenger

This is shaping up to be one of those days that I have.

The Goonybird came into the kitchen this a.m. while I was wandering around the Web and began to pace back and forth, taking very deliberate, measured steps. He paused, then he resumed walking, only this time taking tiny little shuffling steps like a Parkinsons' patient. Suddenly he stopped, looked over at me, shook his head sadly, and sighed a long, dramatic sigh. Then he walked out.
Then he ran back in chasing a fly. "Wheddo go! Go! Go, bee! Tove no! Fooo! (blowing vigorously, flapping) Foo! Oo! Go car!"
Translation: "Where did you go? Aha, there you are; go! Go, bee! Oh, so you think you can baffle me with your foul imitation of a stove? I blow at you! I blow at you a second time! Oo, I heard a car go past."

I followed him and the fly into the front room, where he completely lost interest in it, walked over to the windowsill where my plants are, scooped up a handfull of potting soil and swallowed it.
"Hey! No no!" I said.
"No no!" he agreed, nodding, and walked away.

Now he is talking to the coffee table. I have no idea about what...I doubt the coffee table knows either. But it seems serious.

Usually it's the stove that gets this treatment. He and the stove seem to have a lot of ups and downs in their relationship. Sometimes he'll walk past and give it a friendly little kiss...and then other times that stove has just messed up like a big dog and gets read the riot act. "NO!" He'll yell, standing with his face thrust out belligerently at the oven door. 'Tove! You tove! Go car! go shoe car!"
Translation: "NO! You stove! You utter and complete stove! Just get in the car and go! Well; what I mean is, get your shoes first, then get in the car and go!"

And speaking of things that make you wished you'd remembered to wear your tinfoil hat....

When I was younger and everything was made of chipboard , I used to have birthdays. Now for a number of years there, starting in 73 and all the way up to about 81, every goddamn birthday someone, or two, or more, would give me a David Bowie record. Not too unusual a gift given the times, right? but odd in that I wasn't a David Bowie fan. At all. Nothing against the man, I just wasn't a Ziggy Stardust kinda person. I was not glam. I was daaaaaaaaaaaaaaark. You know...one of those world weary types who liked wearing black and leather and black leather and drinking beer and sitting around on the floor smoking dope. The music you would hear in my place (from about a block away) was either elderly black men singing about killing their wives, or Englishmen who sounded like elderly black men singing killing their wives.
Yeah, I was a riot.

And yet here I was with this all this fucking Bowie. I'd only opened one album over the years. The rest was pristine linoleum still in the cellophane. I think I ended up giving it all away to a club.

The last time this happened, it was husband#1 and my best friend who both gave me the Bowie bombshell. I just sat there looking from one to the other and thinking 'do these people know me?'
'Well, thank you....but, why on earth did you get me these?' I finally asked.
They looked at each other in exasperation. Apparently the answer to this question was being pulled across the sky behind Snoopy on his Sopwith Camel.
'Because you're WEIRD', husband #1 explained.
'You're WEIRD' agreed best friend.
"And Bowie's weird, too" added husband #1 helpfully.
"And weird people like weird things,' said best friend.
"Anyway, all you have to do is look at your record collection to tell who your favorite singer is" finished husband #1.

Mystery solved.

all hyped up and nowhere to spazz

The playboy of the western world is still in the hospital, and as long as he doesn't try to walk, he is fine. They're pumping him full of coumadin. Blood thinners notwithstanding, they've moved him to another room because his fan club was disrupting the floor; SSDD.

The 'strokes' he was having weren't the product of aeneurysm but a narrowed carotid; so think of it as more of a really BIG headrush than a stroke. Not that it isn't killing braincells; it is, but not the way a stroke does, taking out entire areas of the brain at a time and impairing function. So that is a HUGE RELIEF!

Despite my worst fears, father and son had a very low key, normal discussion about home care. Fil's best friend is hooking us up with a guy who knows how to maneuver around all the paperwork. The best thing of all is that we are arranging to get someone in there that fil already knows and who has assistance training. In a larger city where the general population is a little more sophisticated this wouldn't be much of an issue but in a small town like his it's huge. And you know, if you were in your 70's and still had a life wouldn't it suck to have to give that up just because some prig of a visiting nurse might be inconvenienced?

I crank myself up. I know.

Why can't he just be better?

Wikipedia refuses to post this. I am bummed.

At times I stop to reflect on how ugly, yet how pervasive cultural stereotypes are. Hate is truly a learned behavior.

And so, in the interests of furthering social weakness, ignorance and arbitrary divisions among people, I humbly submit my

FIELD GUIDE TO LOW-INCOME WHITEY
profusely illustrated

1. Cracker.
Similar to the U.K. 'chav' (I know because I Wiki'd it.) Television, clothes, booze and drugs sum up the raison d'etre of the cracker.
Here in the northwestern U.S, cracker culture has a strong mystical (some say surgical) connection to the unreconstructed South and the polyester glam of the 70's. Prized lifestyle trophies include state of the art home electronics, feathered hair, badly pitted skin, tribal tattoos, Chevrolet Camaros with Night Ranger and Kenny Rogers cassette tapes scattered on the floorboards, and a satellite dish the size of Montana overturned in the front yard.







The children of the cracker tend toward the wigga. Behold the future of our nation, muthafuckah.















2. Skank Beasts (Woods-Dwelling)
Gary Ridgeway and Diane Downs: the pentultimate skank beast tag team.




Now, some crackers can be righteous people. Righteous, with really really bad taste. But with the Woods Dwelling Skank Beast you open a whole 'nother box of cornflakes.

The Skank Beast is a shy creature, emerging from its two-bedroom rental only to work an obscure job, commit a few random murders, visit the quickie mart and then return to its perpetually curtained pied a' terre. Even in suburbia their dwellings are surrounded by rank and untended landscaping and frequently sit at the very rear of the property at the end of a lengthy drive.

Despite their pallor, poor hygiene and antisocial habits they are keenly driven to share their intimate secretions. They frequent b- and c-list swingers clubs and spend a goodly portion of their meagre pay on porn site fees.

Like their cousins the crackers, Skank Beasts own killer home electronic systems capeable of diverting international air traffic when in operation. I have no idea why this is, but it is.

Newly re-zoned logging areas are a magnet to the Skank Beast with a jingle in his jeans and a few family secrets to hide. Entire Skank Beast families are typically found pioneering these raw tracts, living in foul, algae-covered construction portables or 're-conditioned' mobile homes, huddled around the television in the darkness of their living rooms watching Pat Robertson while dad furtively fondles the kiddies and mom pretends not to notice.

3. Holler Monsters
Which twin has the Toni?
It is a mystery, but what what is certain is that Spitstains on the right there obviously lost the placental battle. He is almost a Pinto (see below)

The Holler Monster is the feral offspring of the Woods-Dwelling Skank Beast. Raised on incest, neglect, instant mashed potatoes, and endless hours of television, the young Holler Monster roams the hills and 'hollers' ( hollows, or valleys) freely and has since birth. Holler Monsters typically spend their early youth sans lower garments and can be seen standing on a lawnmower peering through your bedroom window or crouching on the side of the road next to a mailbox, a runnel of snot decorating their cleft lips, watching the cars go by and letting the liquids and semi-solids fall where they may.

A Holler Monster is a simple being. He is random, a creature of sudden whims and appetites, most of them having to do with road kill, shoplifting and being really itchy. He is frequently found weeping in the rear seat of a squad car, adorned with zipties and vomit, or crouched next to a newly dug grave, trowel in hand, picture of Momma in the other. The perennialy popular Ed Gein represents the pinnacle of Holler Monster celebrity.

Meet Chris Kemp...one of our own. A genuine Washin'ton Holler Monster. As this photo illustrates, the ability to avoid injury (as in, ' I wonder what would happen if I jumped face first into a big fuckin' patch of sticker bushes?' ) is as alien to the nature of the Holler Monster as is being allowed to use the restroom down at the gas station.











4. Pintos
Pintos are the rarest of the rare, so rare that I had no luck in finding an illustration. However fabled, they do in fact exist.
Oh ok. You remember that movie where Jeff Goldblum was in this machine and a fly got in by accident and when he came out he was all gross and turning into a fly because of his molecules and he started eating garbage and there was disgusting mucus and these wierd hairs coming out all over him and Gena Davis was all freaked out and she wouldn't shut up?
Take that machine, coax these two on the left inside it with a ten gallon can of shortening, plug it in, and what you end up with is a pinto.

Sometimes in nature, two wild creatures meet and the result is a tiny new life. And then sometimes, while roaming near the edge of the dump with a plastic bucket and a pointy stick, two or more holler monsters bearing wobbly parts in the correct combination meet in a perspiring tangle of Copenhagen plug and holey underpants. The result of these unions is a pinto.
It takes generations of concentrated incest to produce this, a being whose skin alternates with translucent patches of bluish tissue through which the underlying goop is visible as it oogs around.* A tiny round baseball head wobbles above abnormally narrow shoulders, tapering to a steatopygic base, the whole effect resembling a pile of undercooked porkchops wearing Adidas.
Small-eared, web-fingered and frail, the pinto is sometimes spotted standing in the middle of the supermarket staring vacantly as a puddle of pee slowly spreads around their feet, although their usual habitats are padlocked bedrooms with tinfoil over the windows, or secret rooms under the garage. Or working at Wall-Mart.





*Not vitiligo, but a true condition caused by prolonged human inbreeding. You see what you can learn here at Rancho FirstNations? And it's FREE!!