editing

You might notice I edited the crap out of yesterdays' post. I felt like shit knowing that was out there. My husband, Rq, is a good guy and he doesn't deserve that kind of lampooning. Plus, imagine him taking a notion and reading this...you just know that would be the post that popped up. And then all of yesterdays troubles would redouble themselves.
Which would suck since all of yesterdays troubles are gone! YAY!
We've had a car for sale for a little while-I sold it yesterday afternoon. A man came up, drove the car around the block and handed me 2 bills to hold it for him while he went about the rest of his day. Never asked me my name, never asked for a reciept...that, my friends, is life in the country.
My daughter came in with good news about her life and plans...which in a circituous fashion solved part of the problem with my father-in-law's care. I'll end up with more time to look in on him without the goonybird in tow. Normally thats kind of amusing, watching Great Grandpa be totally charmed watching the 'Bird lay waste to his home, but not real practical now since both of them are unsteady on their legs.
I'm wondering what the next few years will be like, taking care of an elderly person. My daughter is the one who is brave. She used to facilitate for the challenged; she's the one who can wipe up dirty asses and deal with geeking and drooling and not think a thing of it. Not me. Frankly, sickness and infirmity scare the living fuck out of me. Incapacity repels me. Both of these things combined with old age....fuck, I'm having trouble typing. Forget it.
Make of that what you will; there it is.
What I am certain of is that I can suck it up and deal with it.
What I worry about is being able to deal with it with grace. I want to be a blessing to the man. Certainly there are things in this world more awful than helping another person on the toilet or cleaning up after they miss.
It's the level of intimacy that is geeking me out. That moreso than my detestation of human filth, although that is running a close second.
So theres the whole issue in a nutshell. It will probably turn out to be one of those things that isn't nearly as bad as the anticipation of it is. After all, I love the man. Meanwhile I deliberately go to gross-out websites and read the ill stories and look at the ill pictures to kind of steel myself for it...and God willing, nothing in my future is going to be as bad as 'the Death of the 600 Pound Man" or the *ahem* Recirculating Japanese Mustard Fountain. No I will not post links you icky potty person.

y'all see this ass here? BITE IT!

heres the links again:
http://marlowefish.blogspot.com/
http://dflatchimebar.blogspot.com/
http://drivingthebustohell.blogspot.com/
http://www.myspace.com/witchbabywiggbat
http://wornoutshoe.blogspot.com/
http://collagemama.blogspot.com/2006/01/rooney-rants.html#comments
http://greatsheelephant.blogspot.com/
.....I tried to post them in the sidebar but apparently thats beyond my capabilities at the moment. But I tried! I did!
Warning: what follows is
WHINING! UNREPENTANT, UGLY, SELF PITYING WHINING! YES! THATS RIGHT!
Adulthood just blows. Not all the time, and really, not that awfully much, until lately.
My husband, as he does every year after a prolonged interval of bad weather, has decided that we are poor. But not just poor; no, we are at the doorstep of the workhouse poor. Eating rats poor. Wearing rags wrapped around our feet, Charles Dickens poor.
This is not the case. This is SO not the case.
Just like it isn't the case every year.
Every.
Single.
Year.
For the past 20.
Yes, this is seasonal dissaffective disorder, I know...see, but its one thing to know that and quite another to have to live with it.
Anyway, as I do every year around this time, I look for work. Which stresses the hell out of me because simply anticipating having to work alongside the same people day in and day out makes my hands tingle with anxiety. Knowing this probably isn't necessary in the first place again adds to the merriment. But it makes dh feel so validated, and it makes me feel like I'm doing something, even if it doesn't make any goddamn sense. Wierd, the funny games and rituals you find yourself performing. Still the stress level around Rancho FirstNations is pretty high.
A contributing element is my father-in-law, who is loveable; really...he is in his mid-seventies and lives alone in a huge house with bad stairs. Of course, he also has trouble walking. Of course he refuses to move. And then theres bad habit he has of, oh, just fainting for no particular reason and DYING TEMPORARILY. The man's heart just stops and starts again for no reason anyone can determine. One time he came to stuck between the toilet and the vanity, no idea how long he'd been there. Thought it was pretty funny. Mainly he calls us from the hospital and airily announces "Guess where I am?"
This is the phone call we got last night. "Mmmnhello-oo......guess who? I'm in the hospital again; came in this afternoon.....I really don't know why....I felt kind of dizzy. Well yes, I fell down. But I'm fine. I think they'll be releasing me tomorrow....unless they decide to keep me...."
Fuck I hate trouble in my house! Everybody just get a fucking grip for the love of Christ! ' *slappity biffity slappity slap*
Yeah, thats gonna happen...not. Everyone else can be a puke; ah yes, but let mom have a moment and ITS JUST ABSOLUTELY UNFUCKINGFORGIVEABLY THE WORST THING EVER!
Why now, I ask you? Why now, I beseech the skies?
Its early spring! We have blue skies for the first time in months! The snowdrops are up! Its beautiful! It's not raining! We have money!
Thats my new mantra. If I say it often enough, it'll come true.

As near as I can figure it

I am sitting in the kitchen typing away, and Goonybird grandkid rushes in.
"Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!" gestures of great amazement.
"What, honey?"
" Oh no! Oh no! Dog dog!" pointing into the livingroom with great emphasis.
"What about doggie?"
"Dog dog nose! Ow! Nose! Ow!" smacking self with an open hand on the nose.

Translation: Grandmother! I've discovered the most amazing thing! The dog and I share a common feature! We BOTH have a nose! Its inconceivable! Furthermore it hurts every single time I do this!
___________________

I am folding laundry, sitting crosslegged on the floor. The Goonybird is racing around me in circles.
"One two! One two! One two! One two! One two! Oh no! Got go! Got go!" pointing at me.
"Go where, honey?"
"Go! Go go! rrrrrm! buk! One two!" pointing with great intention at the front door.

Translation: I am marching! Quite determinedly! On your stacks! Of clean clothes! We need to leave immediately ! Go start the car, woman, I need a book from the library! In the meantime It's vitally important that I continue to march on the laundry!
___________________

Goonybird comes racing up to me as I carry clothes into the bedroom.
"Wheddo go? Whaddoo gots? Go! Buck a buck a buck a buck!" gesture of confusion.
"I'm going into the other room, kiddo."
"Oh! Shit! Geddoo go! buckabuck! Rmmmm!" both arms raised over head.

Translation: where are you going and what in Gods' name do you think you're doing with my grandfathers clothing? Very well, move along. In the meanwhile I will imitate a chicken. Oh shit! Where are you going, did you say? Ah yes; fine. Carry on. Here's my chicken imitation again. Now heres' a car.

a triumph of the embalmers art: The Rolling Stones live at halftime

I remember it as though it were only yesterday. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was some other shit. It was THE DAY THE ROLLING STONES PLAYED THE HALFTIME SHOW AT THE SUPERBOWL.

Yes, and what a show it was. The Rolling Stones! Can you hear them back at the NFL boardroom? Oh, dude, we grab the boomer demographic and make everyone forget about that whole Janet Jacksons' tit thing!

The problem? The Rolling Stones are deceased.

They need to retire. Retire, retire, retire. Please, please, please. I sat through the whole thing hoping for I don't know what. I just did.
Man, it was like watching a breakdown in the air conditioning at the House Of Wax. They don't play their own instruments anymore so much as they just randomly flap away at them while three other 'mystery guys' tucked away at the back fill in the blank spots. (exception: Ol' Charlie Watts was keeping his end up.) It was blatant, and it was sad and ludicrous.

I cringed watching old Mick breathlessly trudging around the stage chasing chickens off the porch, yelling lyric fragments when the whim took him. Keith Richards staggering about picking up cigarette butts off the floor and looking for his Vicodin.
There were four of us watching. We sat here, former rockers every one and three of them Stones fans, and do you know what we said as we watched this debacle?
Not 'Gosh, you just gotta admire those Stones, they just keep on going!'
Not 'Wow, they're still SO GOOD!'
No, what we were all saying was 'Mick, keep your shirt on. PLEASE keep your shirt on. God, keep your shirt ON, Mick.'

The only equivalent on the 'painful to watch' scale was the pathetic last years of Frank Sinatra, another man tried in the court of Not Knowing When to Take His Hat and Go and found guilty. Maybe it's a generational thing, but watching the Stones creak through the same farce was somehow more pathetic. A lot of it had to do with Mick. It was just gross. He's still out there flogging the sulky youth -gamin- rough trade thing. With a more attractive man, it would have been a caricature. But as played by an underfed 63 year old frog wearing hiphuggers and a demi-tee........fuck, the indignity.
Old age does not have to be that ugly. Jesus God Almighty.

So no, I was less than impressed with the halftime entertainment.

BUT I LIKE IT and you have to too.

So I'm driving down the road, the rain and wind rocking my little beater car, and I'm listening to the radio, when what to my wondering ears did appear, but jolly Led Zeppelin playing Whole Lotta Love, and eight tiny reindeer.
Forget everything ever written about how lame and sad it is to listen to the music you liked your senior year- I was 17 again.

And I was ROCKIN THE FUCK OUT.

I pulled up into the parking lot of the store and parked, and I'm still showing John Bonham how its done, man, I'm singing, I'm playing air guitar, and I look up and another car has parked next to me, and the passenger is looking at me with the white showing all the way around her eyes.

'Aw, you poor thing', I thought, 'You probably feel bad because you want to listen to the nice music too.'
So I turned it up.

I have a good stereo. If you'd walked by my little car you'd have seen it was probably whoomping in and out like a paper bag on a hysterics' face. But hey-it was Zep. You understand.

And that is the point, after all-it was Zep. Some things transcend time and fashion. Led Zeppelin is one of those things. Another one is Jimmi Hendrix. In particular, the recording titled 'Hendrix Live'.

I've pillaged and burned my way through TWO MOTHERFUCKING vinyl copies of 'Hendrix Live' and one cd so far. Everyone knows Hendrix is best enjoyed at the 'Ears bleed; small animals die' setting, right? RIGHT.

Nothings changed now that I live out in the country. When the neigbors' cows start giving paisley milk, thats when Hendrix is being played at the right volume. And seriously, it is my job, nay, my responsibility, being a former resident of civilization, to bring culture to these poor toiling rural proles. And what better way, I ask you?


When I lived in Portland Oregon I had a third story apt. at the top of Hall Street (1984 was the address; is that not cool?) I'd get up early Saturday morning, crack a beer, fire up a joint, face my speakers out the window and blast Hendrix' 'StarSpangled Banner' straight down 5th Avenue into downtown, baby. Damn, you could hear those notes rising and bouncing off the buildings and echoing down the streets all the way past Burnside and trailiing off into the distance, and man, it was BEAUTIFUL! All over town, you could hear people doing concert screams. Bums would wave up at me. College kids would start rocking out on the sidewalk. Man, it was fucking glorious.

So if you lived in Portland during the 70's, that was me, and you're welcome.

That was also me on 9th and Pine.
And Republican and Queen Anne in Seattle.


And driving through Wenatchee a couple of years ago.

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.)

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

You need a REAL WOMAN in your life?

Well then don't look here.
Look here: http://www.myspace.com/witchbabywiggbat
This is my daughter, the Goonybirds mom; the Stainless Steel Amazon.
Yeah, she reads this, but after all, I had to put up with her butt while she went though the vilest puberty on record so I have a God-given RIGHT to embarrass her.
There are some things you just have to bite your lip and overlook when you are a parent. Teenagers in particular. They shoplift cigarettes. They sneak out the window at night. They bring a person home who is so wildly innapropriate that at first glance you know, know how ugly its going to turn out, and all you can do is try to be friendly and hope they don't steal anything.
Or they get a really really really bad tattoo.
I bought the kid a tattoo for her graduation present. And why not? Her father has two full sleeves and a quarter piece on his chest. I have two on my left arm. So fine. She swore she had found this guy who was really good and so off I went to meet her there and pay the bastard. I get there in mid-session, and there is my daughter, my beautiful daughter, sitting on a grubby, sticky old dentists chair with this mook drilling on her back and he was BAD.
BAD, BAD, BAD. Oh my God he was BAD. I have seen better tattoos done with a sewing needle and soot.
This dipweasel is putting this horrible thing on my daughter and all I can do is stand there and make pleasant conversation because she is watching me very closely indeed. I DARE ya to have a cow, mom. I DARE ya to.
And so standing there a horrible sinking feeling came over me. There simply comes a time when you realize your children are the product of the way you raised them. Like it or not, you have to take responsibility for the fact that you may have made some mistakes along the way. You have to shut up, suck it up and let your daughter walk around with a moonpizza on her back. A big moonpizza with an antler-fairy-boobygirl thing sitting in it.
In BLACKWORK.
Oh Jesus, the horror.
We now move foreward in time several years. She has secured a plum job right out of college with (big plane builder) as an engineer. Unfortunately she is still being followed everywhere she goes by this pizzaboob thing on her back, and as the years have gone by it has begun to blur badly. Now it not only looks crude, it looks sinister too. It is beginning to make long distance calls and charge them to her account. It forges her name on checks. Most importantly, it has long outlived its intended impact. She realized this. She was a bill paying, baby packing adult now, and a professional to boot. So what did my girl do?
Did she find a plastic surgeon and have it lasered?
Did she undergo surgical dermabrasion?
NO. my dearest daughter sucked it up, saved up her nickles, found another artist and had it completely obliterated with a larger piece.
And IT LOOKS GLORIOUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*sniff* I'm so proud!

My stand on gun control, in rhyming couplets.

......Ha ha! No, Dear old First Nations would not do that to you. But I eventually do mention it, so there.

Everywhere I've ever lived I wind up next door to nutty people. Not loveable nuts or even wacky adorable nuts but pathological fucked up fucking nuts.

I got thinking about this when my dogs went out to bark at the neibors' cat this morning. The cat owners live across the lot from us in a big old house surrounded by overgrown garden. The whole fam damily is comprised of nutty people and so, in accord with the Nutty Peoples' Charter of 1756 they own an untold number of animals, mainly cats...much to the unending delight of my dogs, who enjoy the tasty snackfood they produce.

The daughter is a pallid, unwashed behemoth with tits like two mammoth unwashed behemoth conjoined twins dangling from her chest. She likes to stand on their back deck at 11:pm and shout gibberish at the top of her lungs (but only in good weather).
The mother is a tiny, tiny little wren of a woman who trembles like she's being electrocuted; the obvious source of her daughters' grooming tips. She seems to occupy the livingroom downstairs. I've peeked in...it's a warren of paper boxes and newsprint and dog crap and a cobwebbed Christmas Tree with an aging labrador retriever sleeping under it.
There are two sons, both redheads, twins, in their late twenties or early thirties. One escaped and lives at the end of the block with an actual female type woman.
The other remains at home, getting fatter and paler, emerging only to mow the grass. If you wave at him, and happen to catch his eye, he might wave back. Unless he decides to pretend he didn't see you. And this is painful to watch; he doesn't realize it's obvious.

Nobody has seen the father for going on four years now. When we first moved here he would wander around in the yard occasionally in his pajamas, but then suddenly he was gone. I kind of suspect he's the source of all this. Theres a good deal of pain going on inside those walls.


The last place we lived bordered a wooded greenbelt. Directly across from there lived a tall, rather handsome man in his middle thirties who was a foaming schizophrenic. I would be out working in my yard and he would stand right next to the surveyors' flag at the ultimate edge of his property, facing me across the greenbelt, and scream. Not words, just...screaming. Until the veins bulged out on his neck. He'd clench his entire body and tremble with the effort. After awhile I figured, scream at the fat lady's ass all you want; I'm still going to pull weeds.

Place before that, it was the guy who worked for the business next door. He lived in the parking lot in a camper. Every weekend some big ol' girl would come rolling out of the back all blearyeyed and hungover and drive off, and he would come out and sit on the back bumper looking straight in through my glass patio door, grinning like a Halloween pumpkin.
He opened the shop up in the mornings. As I was getting my daughter ready for gradeschool every morning you could hear him berating the help. "What're you doing, faggOT? You fucking FAG! Get the fucking RIGHT wrench and bring it here, faggOT! God! I oughta BEAT your ASS!" Oh yes... like the call of the lark at days first dawning.
One night he went through each of our cars, I know it. And sometimes at night he would walk around our house, around and around. I heard him out there a couple of times, and I found his fingermarks trailing along on the siding.

Back in Seattle, it was the upstairs neibors Melvin and Sheila. Melvin was a stewbum who always wore a white construction hard hat, and Sheila was his live in something or other. She was about fifty, weighed maybe 90 lbs - none of it where it was supposed to be - and she earned her living as a street prostitute.
This woman would go out in one of those 80's t-shirts that had been shredded into tassels and then beaded. Yes, sans brasseire. Yes, her long old tits hung out the bottom like a pair of athletic socks with a baseball in each toe. And she got play, kids. Kind of makes you lose faith in humanity doesn't it.
Once or twice a month old Melvin would get lucky and she'd break him off a chunk. What came next was a couple of hours of elderly 'OH, BABY, BABYBABYBABYBABYBABY, OH MAN BABY, OH YEAH BABYBABYBABY overhead, making the chickenwire securing my ceiling plaster flex, until she finally bucked him off. Seriously. I guess she'd get tired of it or it went on too long or something. You could hear him hit the floor like a sack full of antlers and then they'd get into a huge screaming fight...no more baby baby then; it was 'YOU DIRTY OLD FUCK! YOU GIT YO ASS OUT! THIS MY PLACE! I DON'T WANNA SEE YOU DIRTY OL ADD HERE AGIN!
She'd put him out of the room butt-ass naked. Except for the hardhat. You'd find him crawling along the hallways on all fours like that, or on the stairway, or the balcony...anyway, he'd wander around with his situation hanging out and his white hard hat until he passed out in one of the share baths in a puddle of piss.

Before that, it was a roomate. He was an official in the Church of Scientology. Chief of Public Relations. Oh yes. And an admitted child molester. No, I wasn't dating it. But I mean, we lived in the same house, and he admitted it to ME, folks. TO MY FACE. Like it was nothing. After all, he was a Scientologist and that was only some 'out 2D' shenanigans. But he was over it.
Meanwhile, here's me with a baby on the way? Yeah, I got the fuck out RIGHT QUICK.

Before that there was the 9th and Pine building, a virtual Roach Motel of weird. The freaky inbred landlord-family was right off the set of the origional Texas Chainsaw Massacre. All night long and all day long they spoke to each other very loudly and very toothlessly in stgrange, Kentucky-accented hooting sounds.
There were the Moron Lovers, two people of such identical filth, rotundity and feature that I still think they were brother and sister. They would sit out on their front stoop in the summer and neck for hours, until the spit ran down their shirts.
There was the car-dating Potato Prostitute who looked like just that; a Downs' Syndrome potato in white gogo boots. One day I witnessed the amazing power of heroin thanks to her...I was sitting out on my stoop one afternoon, and out of nowhere she plunked herself down next to me, pulled a spike out of her purse, nailed herself right in the foot, took a deep breath... and suddenly became a normal person. My God, I have never, ever seen anything like that in my life. It was like watching Lon Chaney in the werewolf movies, only she stayed pretty much as hairy as she'd started out.

But it turned out all right. Now the nutjobs are dead, or in another state, or at least live in another building entirely behind lots of foliage, where I don't have to hear them and don't have to deal with them.
But tell ya what, hippie or not, I own several guns.

God Bless the Second Amendment.
God Bless America.

Stop and get a grip

Worried about the state o' the nation?
Dear old First Nations will lay it all out for you.
No, you bad potty person, not that way. Dear old First Nations prefers to remain terra incognito.
American Politics explained.
1. Americans, almost to a person, proudly proclaim 'We are a democracy!' In private, in public, on NATIONAL TELEVISION.
America is not a democracy.
It is a republic.
You don't have to listen to anyones opinions about American politics after they have said 'We live in a Democracy.' Just walk on out; have a sandwich. No one who is that loud and that ignorant of the form of government they have deserves to have an opinion. For the love of Mike, they live here! But apparently it requires just too darned much grey matter to figure out that when you go and vote for a person to represent your interests in government, you are engaging in the process of republic, not democracy.
2. George Bush is not a very bright man. He is not an evil man or a man with bad intentions. He is just an instrument who was, in retrospect, quite poorly chosen for the task at hand.
By the people in #1.
3. Nobody in the Middle East likes us.
4. Follow the money. Forget political philophy; follow the money.
5. Apparently, British private schools (they call it 'public school'; those wacky British persons!) are no longer a sort of fast-foreward romp through the hallways with older, stronger boys buttraping younger weaker ones and everybody being whipped onwards by evil headmasters brandishing chalked canes. Well done, Britain! Good to know. Not germane to the above, but I thought I'd throw it in.

Field notes: Some observed behaviors of the juvenile Goonybird

The Goonybird is my grandson. This is a typical day in his life. I offer these observations in the humble hope it may add to the fund of knowlege regarding the mystery of our species.

INTERPRETIVE DANCE
Subject runs into the room and stops suddenly, listening....then raises both arms in celebration of the dawn. He stomps in a little circle repeating the phrase 'Oh, no!'fifty times. He then spins until he falls down, chanting 'woo, woo, woo'. Getting up, he pauses to strike a pose of sudden amazement-then runs to the wall and hesitates. Five sumo squats are performed. Then carefully, slowly, he backs out of the room.

FOOD SHARING
Disappearing whole into the kitchen cupboard, the subject emerges with a potato. He then runs into the front room and puts it in front of the dog. This is repeated until all the potatoes have been distributed to family, guests, houseplants, large books and stuffed animals.

FOOD SHARING II
Dogs and child share the same bowl of food in a demonstration of interspecies cooperation. Or something.

BATHROOM PLAY
The family toilet is manually explored and assessed for flavor. It is loaded with all the toys the child owns and then the whole lot is then mashed down the hole with the bathroom plunger. The bowl brush is then used in attempts at self-grooming.

SIZE AND MASS EXPLORATION
The child becomes caught in the dog door by the waistband of his diapers. After exhausting the play possibilities for this pose (prone, sucking on the threshhold with dogs walking back and forth over him) he shimmies out of the diaper and runs onto the porch. Once there, he assists the dogs' efforts to defend their property by barking at people on the sidewalk.

FIELD OF VISION
The child explores the possibilites offered by a large picture window facing a main road. At first the moon is noted and attempts are made to blot it out with spit, this being applied labially in a back and forth motion which people passing by seem to find fascinating. The child, in its increasing sophistication, realizes that there is a barrier which exists between it and the outdoors, and settles upon simply standing in the window naked shouting at the moon to shut up.

I know stuff. Would you like to know stuff too?

It just tickles me no end to find out secrets. Any secrets. Ya wanna know some?

Let's start with Scientology!

Now, I was a member of this sad association of the self-delusioned back in the days when L.Ron was dying. Everything was in commotion and lots of stuff slipped out through the security in place because the more intelligent higher-ups were realizing that they'd been taken. In fact, I was a staff member (which means the same thing as 'I was hall monitor in second grade' since anyone with a heartbeat and nothing better to do with their evenings could end up -believe it or not- RUNNING a Church if they worked the nightshift.) A lot of rather sensitive materials went though my hands. And a bitch read it all. (yes, former culties, and had it 'word cleared' too.)
Why was I involved with this sad crap? Because I wuz in luuuuuv. With a Scientologist. Which evolved being used to beat the shit out of me on a regular basis, and....
...but thats a post for another day. If ever.
OK,onward.
__________

You, little buddy, are a spirit that forgot to stop living in a body.

You have been around for gazillions of years, living on different planets and in different galaxies even, during which lots of stuff happened that suspiciously resembled a very bad science fiction story from the 'Fifties, and everything was apparently run by 'Fifties second-string Vegas 'cool cats' who used sad, doofussy, white-people slang terms for shit. It's really really interesting and we have gazillions of classes and stuff where you'll learn all about it.

But, HA HA!

None of it really matters in the long run even though we made you sit though endless hours of this marginally entertaining horseshit, because YOU MADE IT ALL UP ANYWAY.

Yeah, you.

All your problems, in fact, come from the fact that over all those gazillions of lifetimes during which you committed unspeakable crimes and were generally a total bastard, you really didnt because it was all made up. And even though that doesn't make a lick of sense, lets move on. You made it all up, and all of it was stupid, and then you FORGOT it was all made up, and then you forgot you even did that!

Feeling that dick in your brain yet? Lets wiggle it around a little bit more then.

...Furthermore, most of those lies aren't even yours!!!!! They're ideas that come from one metric gazillion other spirits that somehow got superglued to your spirit in an atomic volcano explosion in California.

Once thoroughly convinced of this (and if you ain't, you out...and who likes to be out? Particularly when you are banned by an honest-to-shit international edict from ever entering a Scientology church again FOR E FUCKING TERNITY so nanny nanny boo boo to you ) you are then ready to learn how to get rid of all that forgotten lying spirit gluedness of the made up California volcano type badness that is preventing you from being beautiful, healthy, happy and a millionaire and giving all your money to Scientology. You do this by...

1. Attending hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of expensive fucking classes. Occasionally someone will come by and bullyrag you for being inattentive.

2. Purchasing seven metric shit-tons of books and course materials, all of which will be recalled in a couple of months for being 'Out-Tech', whereupon you will have to go out all over again and purchase another seven metric shit-tons of books and course materials, and

3. Purchasing an e-meter...nothing more or less than those voltage resistance meters you used to mess around with in autoshop testing your dick. It will require frequent, expensive 're-certifying', despite which, and despite it being a pretty simple device, it will operate for jack shit.

The important thing to bear in mind is that nothing comes free in Scientology. Every single bit of it is so obscenely overpriced as to make all notions of overpricedness that have gone before seem like tender childhood fantasies of overpricedness.

Nobody masters this shit. You can spend decades taking classes and using the E-meter and never master it. Why? Because it's all fake. But some people are real good at convincing themselves that they have. Those people are invariably wealthy, oddly enough!

At this level of Scientology, you have to have been some kind of useless drone heir to a retardedly immense fortune. Years of classes and the associated bullshit that generally defines any group of Scientologists tends to winnow out everyone else; i.e those capable of logical thought, independant reasoning ability, and the need to pay bills and buy groceries. Those few left are encouraged to believe (in no small part by the amazing and outrageously manipulated context provided by living an entirely Scientological life) that they can now dematerialize at will, move, create and destroy things with the power of their will, and travel to distant planets on the aethric plane. Did you know, these godlike beings have even 'handled' the worlds' powers to prevent any future nuclear wars?
No seriously.

Yes, you are perfect now; perfectly healthy and free of any problems
...unless you enjoy them.

That's the catch. If things aren't working according to your 1000.00$ textbooks, why, then, it's YOUR FAULT BUCKO. Not theirs. SCIENTOLOGY IS THE ANSWER. Make it go right, loser!

Of course, you can go on numerous websites and find this crap out for free. All the levels, all the dogma, all the policies are there.
Ah, but see, if you hear it for free, it won't work. You gotta pay-or wait, I mean, provide material proof of your willingness to receive the truth. Besides, all those websites are full of lies. Spies from the US military establishment as well as overseas interests are constantly at work discrediting the teachings of Scientology in order to take it over and steal all their secrets...and in fact, not all of those agencies are FROM THIS PLANET. Alien civilizations are also at work against the TRUTH. Serious as a heart attack, kids. Hell, throw in the Illuminati, the Knights Templar, your mom, and the Ninja Turtles while you're at it.
Poor Scientology. Everyone's agin' it.

_________________________________

SECRET #2
The Masonic Lodge.
You wanna know what their big secret is?
Gods' name is JHVH.

Kind of a buzzkill, huh.

__________________________________

3. SATANISM

Everything sucks, including the devil, who you worship, and Satanism, which
you believe in, and you. Your job on Earth, to be completed before you die and go to hell, where everything sucks, to make sure that everything sucks real bad here on Earth.
___________________________________

5. I once applied to be a nun, and they turned me down.

the fool(s) on the hill.

You know where a lot of people go when they get released from prison? Here. The Great Northwest. The Fourth Corner region, to be specific...gateway to the Cascades - and a hugeass swatch of heavily wooded land running right along the Canadian border that doesn't even have logging roads going through it.

It makes sense when you think about it. If someone spends 20 years locked up in a cement box it only stands to reason that they're going to head for the biggest stretch of wide open they can find when they finally get out. The ones with enough chutzpah- or at least the ones with no federal offenses in their background, able to cross international borders, head for Alaska.
The losers stay here. Yay.
They pick up a camper (or a car, or a tent, or a couple of blue plastic tarps, or some garbage bags and cardboard boxes), find themselves a nice turnaround on a logging road waaaaaaay back in the brush, and settle in.

Guess who didnt know that?

Guess who found out? Wearing a nothing but a pair of shorts and a bra?
___________________________


Backcountry motorcyclists may be annoying as hell, but they're dedicated to their sport. Sapsuckers cut a mean trail, too. You see signs of shovel and chainsaw activity, but for the larger part I think what these guys must do is rip throttle and randomly head in a direction, balls out - thorns, logs, creeks, come what may, the twistier and hillier the better, and just take shit out with their faces.

The foothills around here are full of these racecourses and they make a great hike in the spring. By summertime they're so overgrown that travelling them by foot is boring; just unending green three feet in front of your face (although imagine travelling that at 60 mph! Monstrous!) but in the springtime, it's a Chinese landscape of lacy bare branches, mossed over tree trunks and the occasional blossom.

Once you cross over onto the north side of a hillock, though, theres an immediate change. If the area is particularly protected from wind there will be an actual frost line in the dirt to mark that change. One side will be experiencing early Spring, the other side, separated by milimeters, will still be frozen in late winter. Softwood trees like poplar and cottonwood on the borders literally explode. In just the right areas, they receive a sudden early morning blast of hot sunshine just as full morning comes over the mountain shadow. Having been hard frozen full of water all winter long, weak cells rigid and split by crystal formation, the wood on the sunside begins to heat and steam, and suddenly the trunks will split as though lightening spiked them, top to bottom, with a report like a gunshot. It isn't a legend. I've seen it happen.

I was walking one of these trails one late spring day with the idiot dogs taking it all in, happy to be outdoors. We were playing 'rock'. Pay attention; the rules are complex. You throw a softball sized rock up a steep trail cut, the dogs run up after it and then follow it down and bark at it. If it happens to stop, they give it a bump and start it rolling again and bark some more. When the rock comes to a rest on level ground they will stop and bark some more.
Then i come huffing and puffing up and throw the rock up the hill and we all start over again.

So here comes the fat broad crashing through the underbrush. Opie the boy dog is joyfully romping after me headlong into trees on his stout little legs; 'Oh BOY! This is GREAT! I have NO IDEA whats going on!' and Jet, the mighty Yutz of the Woods, is climbing trees and eating dirt and barking at skunk cabbages...just a happy little group of morons out for a hike.
...when we all enter, quite suddenly, someones camp.

Now I had been shedding clothes for an hour. Sweatshirt, henley and finally t-shirt were bundled around my waist, and there I was with my awesome moontanned gut hanging out and my fetching black sports bra.

We had wandered into a sudden clearing about as round as the average front yard is wide. In the middle stood a filthy tent, a firepit and a clothesline strung from the trees. Had we not discovered it by chance we never would have discovered it by design. It was in a perfect little bowl in the land, sort of tented over by windfall and undergrowth. I swear to you, had I been three steps off the path I would have walked right by it.
'Dang,' I think.

The idiots are just excited as all hell, coursing the ground back and forth sniffing like two little steam engines.

Right when they go into the tent is when the tree I am standing next to moves.

It was not a tree. It was a guy.

He had been standing perfectly, perfectly still...and he was standing close enough to my side to bump me with his shoulder. He was about six foot, skinny as death, grey skin, long grey hair and long grey beard, all dressed in grey and black. Perfectly camoflaged, he blended right in with the mossy grey bark of the evergreens.

but this is the creepy part.

When I say he moved, what I mean is,
HE OPENED HIS EYES.
HE ROLLED HIS EYES SIDEWAYS AT ME WITHOUT MOVING HIS HEAD.
'
Oh gosh, Im so sorry, I didnt see you, here, Jett, here, Opie, I'm really sorry, man, I had no idea you were here, get out of the mans' tent guys, I'm so sorry, how rude, seriously, I'm sorry,' and I'm grabbing dogs by the collar and slinging them into the brush and HOLY SHITFIRE MOSES I just pick a direction and RUN.

I mean flat out RAN. I was MOVING. No Hayabusa on Earth could have beat me; me and my two hairy little retards. 'Wow! Check out mom! Cool! Right through the creek! Go, mom!' My shoes were full of icewater, I had pine needles and dirt in my bra from falling down a couple of times, I did NOT care.

I dove right into my car, hit the gas and blazed down that mountain, slinging gravel. All the way down I'm saying 'ohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuck' like a mantra. I drove until I hit Welcome and then I pulled off to the side of the road, ran into the quickiemart, still in my bra mind you, straight into the restroom, and pissed like a goddamn racehorse.

Then, and only then, sitting there on the throne in my bra, did I get scared.
_______________________


Was it merely some harmless, nature loving nut up on that hill?
It could very well have been.
Was it some dude that had just served 20 years for raping infants and violating the deceased? Just as likely.

Am I going to ever go back? Oh HELL no.

I explain agriculture and how to steal.

It's a good thing that gardening is something you can do virtually for free if you know how to propagate plants. Being real cheap (but not easy) I do. Any given weekend I'm off 'collecting' (in places better left unmentioned as this would constitute proof of trespass) with my thievery supplies.

....And now, you can too!!!!!

KIDS!!! ASSEMBLE YOUR OWN BIOLARCENY KIT AT HOME!

The following can be found around the house. feel free to improvise!
-Long plastic bags, like bread bags. Roll tightly and distribute in pockets, socks, bra, etc.
-Plain water in a container-a sports bottle looks innocent.
-A clipping (or slicing) instrument that can be hidden in a pocket; a large toenail cutter with a sharpened knife works good.
-An empty tin, like a candy tin. Or a keychain dry-match holder. This is for seedheads. (Forget pockets because, face it-you will. Seeds generally do NOT go through the wash well at all.)

-Check out the book 'Pirating Plants' from the library to find out what to do with this stuff. But trust dear old First Nations; its SO cinchy.
Now go forth and steal.

But don't steal from private nurseries. They deserve your business and support. WalMart, go right ahead.
_______________________________


Why is it, I wonder, that anthropologists have decided agriculture was invented by women? I've seen the reasons and they just don't wash. Women are supposed to be the gentle gatherer type, and because they didnt want to range too far afield they started transplanting things nearby; so they were apparently lazy too. Yeah. OK.

Men are the violent hunter type, and so they rambled miles and miles away up hill and down and killed shit with their teeth for the sheer savage joy of weiner havingness.
Uh huh.

Anyone who went to grade school knows that the nastiest, most violent thing on Gods' green earth is an eight year old girl. And hunt? Tell you what, if you had a pretty pencil or some candy stashed away those bitches would find it...then stab you with the pencil, stand on your chest and spit the candy in your face. (Jesus it creeps me out when I think how some of the girls I went to school with probably went on to become mommies.)

And let's all pause and consider the savage violence it takes to hunt, say, deer; shall we?

1. You get up early and hang out, remaining completely silent and motionless in one spot where deer are known to pass, and wait for a long, long time.
2. The deer passes; you shoot it. Or it doesnt, and you have salad.

Does that really sound particularly sex-specific? It aint. I have had numerous deer wander within petting range of me out in the woods. No shit. As for agriculture, nothing I've read in the instructions mentions genetalia coming into play at any point in the transplanting process. That is, pulling a plant out of the dirt in one place and then putting it into another hole in the dirt closer to where you live. But to each their own, I guess. You dig the hole, you get to use what you want.

Oh yeah, you say. I can just see you killing poor little Bambi. Girls think deer are cute! Oh yeah, deer are real cute. Yeah. Particularly when they eat my Goddamn garden. Cute as hell.

Not a problem. Not a problem at all. If I can slaughter a giant, ugly pig and peel it and bust it down and portion out it's guts (which I have), and if I can catch a sturgeon as long as I am tall, pull it into the boat and do the same(which I have), and butcher out salmon and chickens and rabbits (Oh yes, death stalks Americas' heartlands disguised as your grandma!) then I sure in the fuck am not going to have a problem with Bambi. Deer are just pretty cows for heavens' sake. Pigs? Those assholes fight back. Hard. You can shoot a pig at close range between the eyes with large calibre ammo and the thing will try and eat your heart right up until it bleeds out and dies, and then it will still twitch and leap for 45 minutes afterward. (It's kinda metal.) Bambi, at last report, is still more of the run-away type.

So Bambi me no Bambies, guys. We all invented agriculture and we all killed shit and ate it. Starvation sucks. You die. If it's a choice between eating a cute bunny and starving to death, Peter Rabbit is gonna die and having a vagina won't have jack shit to do with it.

So there.

Danger Muk bitches about white people and hikes with dogs

Tell you what; there is nothing I have come to enjoy more than listening to a roomful of Dutchmen and Germans complaining about how the Juggalos, Klingons, Caribs, Whigs and so forth have ruined America for REAL AMERICANS.
See, I'm usually the only person in the room with any claim to that title. I just sit there and smile.
Nah, I don't have that kind of class; I wait until everyone is in good and deep, then I break the news. And I hear:
A. ...Wow! You dont look native!
Yeah, sometimes I have to put down my bottle of Muscatel andtake off my tavern jacket. It won't happen again.
b. Yeah, well, you know what i mean.
Actually, yeah. I know EXACTLY what you mean. I'se passin'.
c. OO really? You are? What tribe?
The tribe that ate your grandmothers heart on Lookingglass Ridge and raped her dog, baby. What tribe are you? Visigoth? Gaul?
Thats me, kids, tirelessly fighting stereotypes one white guy at a time.
________________________

My wily native forbears would have been embarrassed to tears by some of the stupid shit that has happened to me out in the woods.

One time, I took the idiot dogs up to the community compost heap on the edge of town a couple of years ago to let them run. It's in a cleared anmong some trees which is literally on the border-the dogs regularly wandered in and out of Canada (I apologise, Canada) The only thing around is this stand of alder trees, a pile of compost that the city workers dump there, and a huge U.S. Border Patrol spy tower with a remote-pan camera.

It happened to be a warm week in February and we all had cabin fever real bad. We hit the clearing so that they can run off some excess energy (and so I can poke through the comppost heap because I am a scrounge.) The idiot dogs suddenly shot yapping off into the stand of alder after something and I think 'Aw hell, I hope theres nothing dead back there; I don't want to take them to the vets again.' (Someday I'll tell you about the time they discovered the garbage bag full of baby diapers. I dont know what those people had been feeding their kids but my dogs damn near died.) So I turn to follow them and am taken aback at this sight: 19 bald eagles silently watching us, perched in the alders.

A sow eagle, in case you have never been close to one, is a bird roughly the size of a two year old child. It has sharp stabby things on each end designed to prepare and serve raw meat meals of idiot dog-sized animals.

So yes, I cleverly set off down the trail right through the center of the flock. Because I am smart like that.

It truly was extraordinary, seeing all these giant birds peacefully perched in the bare branches. The roosting chatter of a bald eagle sounds exactly like what the inside of a chicken coop does on a warm afternoon. The eagles croon and cluck and rustle and gabble just like sitting hens. They pick feathers out and drop them, scrabble from branch to branch to visit each other, and shoot chunky liquid shit out their asses for a distance of about seven feet.

Meanwhile I'm just busy worrying about what the idiot dogs have found, and sure enough, at the end of the trail was a farmers dump, and lying on top of it was a dead calf.

I call them idiot dogs because after all is said and done they are simply not bright doggies. They have the instincts of a retriever and a scent hound respectively, but not the body mass or the training to do anything about it. From my observation what happens is they get carried away with all this primal type imput and have no clue what to do next, so they do what they know best: mill and bark and pant and grin and sniff each others butts.

Luckily this is what they were doing in regards to the dead calf-'OH HOLY CHRIST, MOM, LOOK AT THIS! ITS A DEAD CALF! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT??? SOMEBODY LEFT A DEAD CALF HERE! COME LOOK! ITS THE MOST AMAZING THING EVER!'

All I had to do was throw them a stick back down the trail and off they went, all thought of the Amazing Dead Calf completely wiped clean.

So back we all go, strolling through the gauntlet surrounded by 25 huge, dangerous, carniverous birds. Downy underfeathers filled the brush and wafted down into the mud. The dogs emerged from the stand at the other end of the trail, and being good doggies, they take off into Canada and run up and down the street and bark at trucks.

I find myself alone.

I look up. All the eagles have gone silent, and every eye is turned towards me.
I make restrained haste down the path. Every single head turns to follow me.

All of a sudden I hear a sound behind me like a hundred umbrellas opening all at once. The eagles are taking flight. Some flap on branches and hiss at me, while others, one by one, rise into the air.

I make haste a little faster.

All the eagles have risen into the air and are circling around above the trees, over me, over my dogs, diving lower and lower with each turn. This is altogether too unsettlingly like the behavior of buzzards. I get in the car and call the dogs, who, being idiots, run back into America, towards my car, past my car, and into the trees.

Aw fuck.

In my minds eye I am seeing the flying monkey scene in the Wizard of Oz. I know these pterodactyls are going to swoop down and grab my poor moron dogs.

But instead the eagles just circle a couple more times and then drop down onto the dead calf. And begin AUDIBLY RIPPING IT TO PIECES.

We leave.

Somewhere in the film archives of the Border patrol there is a tape of all this happening, too, because all the while I could see the two beady binocular eyeballs of the security camera tracking our every move. I made my people proud that day.
Yup.

Website Smackdown: Babyman vs. Tucker Max

Babyman looks like a middle aged guy in a baby girl costume.
Tucker Max looks like a middle aged guy in a yuppie fuck costume.

Babyman smells like baby powder
Tucker Max smells like stale bar, vomit and pussy.

Babyman only shits himself. Then he cleans it up.
Tucker Max shits on everyone.

Babyman has used his inherited wealth to live out a peculiar, yet harmless dream.
Tucker Max has used his dads' money to live out the motto 'I suck, you suck, everything sucks, suck suck suckity suck suck.'

Tucker Max adds 'Wah, I'm a rich asshole; I live at the bottom of a bottle.'
Babyman adds "Wah, I'm a baby, would some lady come give me a bottle?'

Barring natural disaster or accident, Babyman will live a long, healthy, weird life.
Barring natural disaster or accident, Tucker Max will die in five years when his liver leaps out of his abdomen and runs screaming into the night.

BABYMAN WINS: a lifetime supply of Similac, with iron.
TUCKER MAX WINS: a handful of Darvon, a glass of water and a plastic bag. So far you've just been dipshitting around. Get serious.

You awaken to find yourself seated in a dentists' chair...

A sound behind you resolves itself into the form of a small, tidy looking man wearing a khaki apron. More than this you cannot see; your head is tightly restrained. As are your limbs, you find to your growing horror. The man approaches you and seats himself at your side. He reaches into his breast pocket and withdraws an instrument which glints in the light. You can only look from side to side in desparation as he bends towards you and asks you to answer this question......
1. You are having sex with a person who is wearing a funny animal suit. Are you fantasizing that the person is really that animal-say, Tweetie Bird (30 pts.) or a real animal, like a big, strong fluffy horsie?(3 pts.)
2. List one good reason you should pay to enter a man-on-plush toy sex site when everything you wanted to know about these liasons has just been revealed to you in the opening banner (50 pts)
3. You find a no-fee site where you can watch a five minute video of a man being fucked to death by an American Quarterhorse. Is the horse being cheated out of royalties he rightfully earned?(60 pts.)
4. Naughty Barely Legal college girls douche that smelly pussy. Do you call PETA?(34 pts.)
5. I'd like to fart on your stomach. (22 pts)
Is it safe yet?

More backcountry adventures with M.A.H.

Middle Aged Housewife. Get it? Mah? Like 'Ma'?
Golly, I am a rambunctious retard.
My husband is the worlds best breakfast chef. This is a man who understands his complex carbohydrates. I just sat down to a plate of biscuits and gravy with eggs that you'd have been happy to pay 20.00 for. Jesus. I love this man. Then he does the dishes afterwards. I suppose I'll have to let him watch the Seahawks later and just keep my mouth shut.
Whenever we've taken camping vacations we made our breakfasts in camp. Usually Rq (husband person man, *fanfare*) makes the main part and I help with the auxilliary chopping and washing and stowing. We eat like royalty. Imagine two big grubby trolls cooking over a fire in a pavillion, rain just hammering down on all sides, making hollandaise sauce and chopping chives.
When I used to go rambling on my own I ate pretty well too. Here in the forest there are thousands of good things to eat, including a wild apple-maybe it's a domestic variety that went wild-that tastes like roses and honey. Blackberries everywhere. I taught the evil dogs to pick their own salmonberries and they became very adept at lipping them off the shrubs and stuffing themselves. Then they'd burp for the rest of the day and smell each others breath when it happened...(Oh dang, you made that noise again!' 'Yeah, now I taste berries.' 'Yup, smells like berries.' Oh wow, I did it again! And I taste berries again!' 'Yup, smells like berries too! Dang!') The apple trees, in fact, are where I got my first clue that perhaps I was not altogether alone in the woods. Usually one of these trees are surrounded by a circle of neat grass like a lawn, even though the tree itself might be canopied with blackberry vines and fallen fir branches. Deer love apples and they keep their secret apple garden well tended by nibbling. You can find tidy little pathways through the tangle leading to every tree if you have a quick eye. Then you can stand underneath and pick apples and be perfectly hidden and have a feast. I was doing this one day, happily munching hot apples I'd shaken from the top of the tree with juice running down my face and shirt and both arms, when I noticed the rankest stench. I had stepped in a giant pile, and I mean a GIANT pile of gleaming shit. If you've ever taken a crap in the woods you have the picture. I'm thinking 'Oh Jesus, how nasty; some fisherman just took a dump here like a big ol' dog and didn't even kick it out of the way. Thanks, shithook.' Scraping off my shoe in the grass I began to notice certain details that lead me away from my initial judgement, though. It was full of pin cherry pips. And apple seeds. And long, black, coarse hairs. And rabbit bones and hair and teeth. That brought me up short. I looked around at the well trampled grass, and the apple fragments scattered about, and the conspicuous lack of toilet paper or gas station wipes, and the light came on over my lil' head. Aha. bears.
Recent bears.
And so, being a safety conscious type of person I stopped to load up my shirt and my pockets and my jacket with apples, and then wandered back to my car with my dogs spazzing around me. 'Car! Oh boy, Car! I love Car! We're going somewhere!' I am so surprised that the fucking bear wasn't waiting for me with the engine running so he could take my wallet, looking back at this incident. Yoo hoo, beaaars, here comes the walking loin of housewife a la pommes frais!
Another time I was up above the snowline, walking through a clearcut throwing sticks for the evil dogs. They were way out ahead of me. Their version of stick is, I throw the stick, they compete with each other to find the stick, and the one who wins chews up the stick into splinters while the other one smells its ass. I ranged up around the far end of the cut and followed my tracks back down. My tracks were the only tracks crossing the field, until I found the other tracks braided around them. Facing the same direction. Crossing my tracks again and again. I don't know why, but that still gives me the willies...crossing my tracks.
Wolf tracks.
Not coyote tracks. Definitely canid. Dogs walk with their toenails always out, making a dot over each toe mark. heres the scale:
chihuahua
my dogs
normal dogs, coyotes, labs, goldies
WOLF
I went and looked this up at the library. It was no joke. I never saw the bastard and I never heard it either.
One more wild animal story. Walking along a logging road on Mt. Baker, I pause by a broken off snag to see if there's any visible bird holes up in there...I'm sort of casually birdwatching, I have my binocs and my field guide, the evil dogs are with me, off barking at skunk cabbages and eating frogs. So I take a good look at this snag, I walk all around it making kissy noises, hoping I'll make a baby bird poke out its head. No go. I note a sudden, strong aroma of cow barn. I think 'Hm. cows.' And I wander away down the road.
Returning later, I note that all the bark is missing off the snag to a height of six feet. On closer inspection, I note four parallel rents cut deep into the wood running the length of the trunk, about 2 inches between each groove. And a steaming pile of(what I now know is) Bear Shit.
BIG bear shit.
Aggressive male bear shit marking his territory. This according to the books I lived to read. Interesting to note as well; bears smell a lot like cows. But they have to be quite close indeed for you to be able to smell them. Yay!
Once again, the idiot dogs were absolutely no help whatsoever. They would stand and bark at a skunk cabbage like posessed maniacs but when it came to dangerous forest carnivores, fucking forget it. "Oh hey, bear dude, no problem. Whatever you gotta do, man. Yeah...I guess she's single...why?"