UPDATED: Thomas Kinkaaaaaade the Painter of Liiiiiiiiiight

With a tip of the bicycle helmet to Sopwith Camel!*

Because I have no sense I am going to take on one of the 'big' questions and answer it definitively.

So then. What is art?

A creation by a human with something detectably human about it...evidence of the creators hand and thought that registers beyond the immediate sensory impression.
I don't make distinctions between high art and low art because that's deeply fucking repulsive. There isn't one. It all comes down to a question of 'does it communicate something beyond its apparent form?'
It really isn't any more complicated than this.

Now that we have that little issue cleared up, what about those so-called artists who give the whole effort a black eye? Whose work is so bad, so irresponsible, so contemptuously produced that it makes baby Jesus cry?
What is BAD art?

Let's ask a hamster!

guest deceased hamster Bluto Schmuggleware, recently gone to his reward via an overdose of amyl nitrate, yet STILL completely without odor. Call the pope!

"Mr. Schmuggleware, define 'bad art'.

A guy named Arthur with a police record.

"Your attempt at levity has not added anything to the intellectual tone of this inquiry. Bad art is...?

Listen, I mainly look at the ladies. You keep asking me to critique this shit and-

-wow.
OK. Now that's BAD.



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Let's interrupt this for a moment and check on Baby Jesus:

...stone trippin.

Damn.
Ok. Now let's go on.
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"...Philistine; that is the work of internationally renowned Thomas Kinkade, the Painter of Light! He creates some of the most sought-after images of our time!

Fine; I'm just saying that I've had bad gas in public restrooms with better wallpaper. That includes the graffiti.

"You cannot tell me that this next image does NOT stir the very depths of your rodent soul:

Isn't that that one scene in 'Mary Poppins' when they go through the chalk painting...?

"No! This is clearly an image of reverence and devotion.

It's that planet where the Care Bears come from...?

"It is a Garden of Prayer! You can tell by the magic cotton candy trees.
This next one might be a bit more accessible. Here:
Um....ok. It's the fabled Lost Temple of the WASPs...?
"No!
The 'Wee Kirk o' the Rill Tainted With Agricultural Runoff'?
"No no no! It's not even about a church! Everything about this scene evokes the solace of religion. Even the title was chosen to convey a sense of God's promise...'Sun(you see the play on words here?) rise Chapel'. As in 'The Son has risen!' Get it? Sun? Son? Risen? Morning? Two messages in one! A beautiful harmony of meaning beautifully and harmoniously joined together like twin ply toilet paper, the pink** scented kind with the wavy designs embossed in it.

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People buy this stuff by the metric shitpile. Why?

1. It's pretty. Everyone likes pretty, right? It's not like, say, beautiful, because beautiful demands a little interaction. Pretty is just....nice.

2. Look at the palette. Remind anyone of a particular decade? That's right! It goes with old people's furniture! Pink, peach, grey and green...Mom and dad have all that disposable income now that the kids have flown, and what better way to display this newfound affluence than by purchasing a piece of art? One that already matches their decor?

3. The subject matter is easily recognizable. By God, a house looks like a house and a tree looks like a tree. Nothing at all like that modern stuff where you can't tell what the fuck its supposed to be of.

This guy's work is the visual equivalent of a prostitute smoking down her cigarette while she waits for her client to 'get finished'.
Is it art? Yup.
And the message is 'write the check, asshole'.

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*And a 'thank you kindly' to Tickersoid, our man in Pontyhotpant, the word 'Sensory', and his amazing brain.

**I wonder if the artists preoccupation with the color pink might be evidence of a deeper level of symbolism? A subtle yet overarching acknowledgement of the female creative principle? Or maybe it hints at a primeval spirituality that can be apprehended only after ingesting certain hallucinogenic cacti and tripping on children's programming?
I think the answer is obvious.

Fickle Green Luna Moth: The Pupa Insane of Rage!

Remember when I asked y'all to help me figure out what to write? well, I aint forgotted. Here's whats left...

1. Art Rant
Nobody voted for this. That's why it's next! Someone suggest a subject. If not, you'll take what I throw at you and like it. So ha ha!

2. Mental Disorders Serve the State!
Unformed half-notions and poorly thought out arguements guaranteed! This one will go a long ways in convincing my daughter once and for all that I wear a tinfoil hat AND underpants.

3. My Lovely Garden...yeah, yeah yeah, same shit different day.

the following are from the suggestions corner......

4. Fluffy Kittens
Y'all are just SICK. There were two votes for this. Be careful what you wish for.

5. Why are Bin Men Lazy Cunts-Eddie Waring:
Now see, I'm sure this is something Eddie just tossed out there with no thought whatsoever, just to have something to contribute so he'd look all cool. Well, Eddie, I'm gonna front you up on this one. Now don't you wish you'd thought things through a little better? You could have chosen something meaningful or interesting but noooooooo, you had to be all flippant. And look where it got you.

6. Dugongs:
Now see? You could have asked for something cool, like dugongs, Eddie. Danator asked for dugongs. But nooooooooooo, Eddie was careless. Eddie was thoughtless. And now there's NO GOING BACK FOR EDDIE.

7. Old Knudson: This one will write itself. Can you dig it? Yes I can. (I know CB can. she's been waiting such a long time for Saturday.)

8. Gypsy moths, shitty ass caterpillars and arm rashes: any connection?
Claire asked for this one. Yes, it plumb eludes me too. Nevertheless, I will put my powerful powers of paranoia to work upon these seemingly unrelated items and laboriously hammer out a connection between them, which will in turn convince my daughter, the Stainless Steel Amazon, to have me involuntarily commited to that special exclusive spa where they administer the Xanax via enema. Yay enemas!

9. Ooo, and guess what? One might think I have exhausted the chancre full o' sepsis that is the Meadows clan, but that is not so!! No, my darlings, they is just like Jello...there's always room for more!
Although if the Meadows really were like Jello it would be that realy icky vanilla Jello that looks like the stuff that comes out of a zit, not nice good Jello that's clear and a pretty color because that's not the type I mean.

I am a fantastic grandmother.

My grandson, the Goonybird, and my girldog, Jett, are seated in the middle of the kitchen floor eating kibble off the carpet.
I checked...it's not one of the brands on the 'chinese melamine' list.
So it's ok.
Carry on.
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Whats more fun than a three-year old running around the house wearing a large pillow and cargo shorts? Handing same a giant tub of Kool-Wip and a spoon for breakfast, and watching him pick cheese fragments off the coffee table and drop them in. It's like a garnish. It is.
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The Goonybird has walked into the kitchen and asked for an ice cube, and I gave him one. He put it down the back of his underpants and walked away.
I swear to God I never dropped this child.
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While we were outside picking blueberries I taught him how to hear the eagles calling down the valley. 'They're yelling and yelling!' he was delighted with this. 'Do they have breakfast?'
"I guess so. They have fish for breakfast' I replied.
He thought about it.
'No, they eat cowards,' he stated.
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He removed his shorts and his underwear, and his sandals. The sandals have been replaced each on the wrong foot, and the underpants and shorts carefully turned around. 'Did you know those are going on backwards?" I asked him as he tugged them up over his butt.
Yes', he said. 'They're better this way."
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He has taught the dog how to eat blueberries.
They are lying on the floor in the kitchen sideways eating blueberries.
Sideways.
off the carpet.
With their faces.
Lying sideways on the carpet eating blueberries, scooting themselves along after the rolly berries with their hind legs.
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Umber Whippet Is Vexed !

Finally we get to go on vacation! We are heading towards Eastern Washington late next week. This is the great thing about America...you drive a couple hundred miles or so in any direction and you're in a completely different environment.*

For the first ten years we were together we vacationed on the Peninsula, which is a kind of Tolkeinesque fantasy land. Morning fogs, huge trees, ferns like lace, hanging mosses and perfect lakes...but ten years was enough, and when we decided on a change, we changed big time.

Eastern Washington looks exactly like the setting for every Western movie you've ever seen, with rimrock, sagebrush, brown rolling hills and green valleys full of Ponderosa pine. This is more than likely because it IS the West. The REAL west.
OK fine, the Northwest. Still.

Many of the old boom towns are still inhabited, although those inhabitants might number 30 or less and the town be nothing more than a sign by the highway. You can drive through rangeland and see cowboys and their dogs herding animals using atv's and small helicopters, sometimes horses too. Fields of late snow high up on the hillsides get up and wander away when you crack the throttle, surprising you by being fifty or sixty sheep.
Granite cliffs and sudden basalt towers plunge out of the ground through the brown hilltops. Swifts and swallows stunt dive and circle in the updrafts they raise. Buzzards sun on fence posts with their dirty wings held half-open. They watch you with one freaky blue eyeball as you go past, hoping you'll crash.

Besides rangeland, there are unimaginably vast stretches of land out there where nothing but wheat grows, rolling out from you in all directions, filling the air with a smell like bread and grass. Wheat grows out of the crevices of the rocks. Stunted wheat grows by the side of the road as a weed. In wheat country night never gets black because the stars illuminate it with diamond dust from horizon to horizon. A falling star out here will make you completely step outside of yourself for a few moments, more dramatic than a hundred fireworks would be.

On a motorcycle travelling though wheat country you pass through invisible streams of temperature and smell. The cool of the shade on one side of a hill follows you a few seconds into the heat of the sun side, and you can smell the superheated blacktop just around the next bend before you drive into the shimmer coming off it. You know beforehand when you're approaching creeks and rivers, cattle and horses, towns, truckstops and gas stations. The background of it all is dust and a distant sweet hint of wellwater.

Some road cuts reveal banks filled with clam shells and scallops, snails and marl, a dry ocean bed that's landlocked now, uplifted past the pavement with a crown of windblown topsoil. If you stop to examine it, you hear nothing at first. Just the ticking of the exhaust pipes cooling. Heat rises in blooms from the pavement all around you. You can stand in the middle of the road and turn in a circle, put the bike on it's stand. No cars for miles. Not a dog barks. All you can hear is the wheat sliding past itself in waves as the hot air slips through it.

We usually stay in the town of Wenatchee on the Columbia river. Wenatchee is literally central to everything east of the mountains. It's a wonderful place. The town has preserved it's heritage and architecture, the public spaces are beautifully maintained. What I like best is that Wenatchee is filled with gardens and those gardens are filled with roses, every rose you can imagine, all enjoying the perfect climate. Every evening, when the sun goes behind the hills surrounding the town a wind begins, coaming like surf down from Mission Ridge, gathering dust and leaves up high, rising and rolling down the length of town, carrying the smell of all those roses with it. One night it caught us as we were riding. It was perfectly quiet. The warm wind came up from the ground behind us, rising against our backs and up past our faces, heavy with the smell of roses, and moved over us and past. We sat at the light at the top of town and watched it slowly lifting papers up past the windows of the office buildings on it's invisible crest as it rolled towards the river in the bottom of the valley.

In the evenings we cruise around from neighborhood to neighborhood and down the main drags which crisscross the town. Everywhere you go tiny quails break cover and zip around, all in a row, biggest to smallest. They look like little grey bowling pins gliding around on ball bearings, and each one has a little black flurp on top. They never seem to have a specific destination in mind, but it seems ABSOLUTELY IMPERATIVE for the whole family to dash out in front of speeding vehicles at random, at the last possible moment, to get there. I've have yet to see a dead one.

Downtown is full of vintage advertising signs, many of them pure boomerang Googie and at their best all lit up and grooving. Stopped at lights you can hear the sounds of dishes and glasses and feel the air conditioning from the open doors of restaurants. Motorcycle riders wave as they pass. In your lane they pull up alongside to see what you're riding and where you're from. Goofy kids wave at you from the rear windows of cars, and crack up laughing and hide when you wave back. Grinning dogs bark and wag from the backs of pickup trucks. Guys in cowboy hats driving trucks make traffic part around them when they stop to talk to their buddies passing by in the opposite lane of traffic.

When you cross off onto a residential street from the middle of town the sidewalks are shaded by trees. Men sit on their front steps and smoke cigars, women sweep their yards and water red geraniums in pots hung from the fences. Big dogs watch you from the end of chains and medium dogs run out to jump and bark. Kids stand in groups around their cars with the stereos up loud. Halfway down the block in someones front yard is a statue surrounded with silk flowers and votive candles. Everyones dinner smells like heaven.

Up another street everyone in the neighborhood is sitting in lawn chairs out on their driveways, watching kids play basketball in the street. Horses with riders walk along the sidewalks plucking overhanging fruit off the trees. Laughing groups of people sit on their porches, burning incense stuck in between the cracks in the stairs, passing joints and paper plates of fried chicken and potato salad. Teenagers bomb around stuffed eight into crew cab pickups. Retirees mow their lawns. Sprinklers pop up and rain. Neighbors sit on blankets near the sidewalk, shouting to their friends as they go by. Everyones' door is open. Coyotes come shadowing down the arroyos and sneak across the streets, acting suspicious, stalking cats. Chihuahuas yap at them from up on someones shoulder or out open windows turned blue from television light. Meanwhile the rich folk booze cruise up and down the river, laughing and smoking.

Commercial tree fruit is grown everywhere in the Wenatchee valley on whatever land hasn't been sold to developers, even within the city limits. When the fruit is ripening each grove gives up its aroma in rich currents that are amazing to ride through...apples, peaches, pears, nectarines, plums and more. The whole Wenatchee valley is rolling full of things growing and ripening in August. For me the tomatoes are the worst... beckoning you with indecent tomato promises and making your mouth water as you pass through the smell of them.

Most of all, underlying everything, you can smell sagebrush. It's almost a perfume yet almost unpleasant, something like lavender but also like burning paper, soft but pervasive. You can smell it in the dry cold air pulled through the air conditioning. You can smell it in the clothes hanging on the racks in the stores, faintly. You can smell the sagebrush over the hot coffee you're drinking in the morning.

Three days isn't going to be long enough. It never is every year.

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*or maybe in the ocean or a lake or something, or at the dump, or maybe in a big mudhole. be careful.

UPDATED: Yellow Manta Ray Execution Day!

Go here
and read the post entitled 'She Shines'

This is my Podling, and he is a miracle.
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When I was a kid I rode my bicycle everywhere. This made me a target for the neighborhood bullies, because the bike I was forced to ride was a huge dorky clunker of a thing*, made even dorkier by the addition of apehangers, banana seat, and a sissy bar by my father. It was slow, it was fat, it looked like clownshoes and unfortunately, it was indestructible. I used to go over to the lot where the kids had build a dirt course and 'accidentally' leave it lying around. Pretty soon one of the boys would 'steal' it and start doing jumps with it and letting it go down the hills by itself and crash at the bottom. Not a scratch. Not a dent.
Rotten, unkillable bastard bike.

What the thing did, between having to make fast escapes from marauding kid gangs and simply trying to keep up, was give me legs like a draft animal. I had to work twice as hard as the spiderbike kids just to make the big, heavy sonofabitch move, and we lived in a hilly neighborhood. When I finally, finally got a normal bike (a white Schwinn Suburban 10 speed) I could make that thing FLY.
But here's the bike I really wanted, little design whore that I was:
pix from this site:http://www.lostamerica.com/
go here NOW.

...A Schwinn Stingray. And to this day I want this bike. Unfortunately, so does every collector out there, and they're being bought up and cut apart by the dozen to make these:



...Lowrider bikes. Something I also desperately need.
What can I say; once a design whore, always a design whore.

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I went to Seattle with the Stainless Steel Amazon a few weeks ago for a nice 'girls day out'...and it was nice. Seattle is still cool. It's still recognizable as the town I once lived in. Except for one significant absence: where did all the winos go?

I keep coming back to this at odd times ever since I got back. It really bothers me.

Back in the 80's, Seattle had a very visible, very large homeless population. You could see them on the hillsides beneath each highway ramp, underneath each bridge, inside and next to every abandoned building and tunnelled beneath every overgrowth of blackberries on every vacant lot. There were entire villages, with pathways. It was like a city within a city, a third-world one.
Not now.

Seattle has turned it's commercial downtown into an enclave of shiny, happy condominiums and cheery street art. There are nowhere near the number of abandoned properties that there once were, and very little land goes unused nowadays. That might have something to do with it...but how much? Seattle is a huge city. The police are finite. I wasn't spanged once, and as I've advanced into middle age I have become a bum magnet. Nobody. And I saw nobody..no schizos, no shopping cart people, no urban campers, no bums in doorways, nobody. It was strange.

I won't lie and say I miss them because I don't. I was a single woman with an infant (and no car or income) trying to navigate the streets back when Seattle was slap-full of predatory homeless. I was easy prey and made very keenly aware of this fact every minute I lived there. It didn't matter if I was on the sidewalk, riding public transportation or inside my 'secure' building-ha!-or not. I resented it like hell.

But nonetheless, a huge population of human beings has simply disappeared off the face of the earth, and whether or not I liked them I'm still weirded out by it. Really weirded out.
Can anybody answer this for me?

Anybody with something other to say than 'Soylent Green is peeeeeeepul" that is.

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*this bike:

...of course nowadays the stupid thing's worth beaucoup buckolas because it's a 'classic'. the picture doesn't really indicate the sheer mass of this monster, though...it was like a fucking parade float and it was made of solid pig iron. and you know what? i'd still have it crushed. bastard got me beat up more than once. quite a bit more than once, in fact. they wouldn't even let me park it near the cool bikes in the bike rack at school. *snif*

NSFW: a little something for the motionless

Faux motivational posters!

With the greatest of thanks to JunglyJane and Zen Wizard!!

I don't know if these stupid things have spread to other parts of the world, but they fricken' saturate the U.S. They usually appear in the workplace right around the time they've settled a lifetime promise of employment on the Untouchable Workplace Prick that every place of business seems to have. Because if upper management can't make you love your job, an empty motto beneath a picture of a hanglider will, right?

























































And heres where you can make your own!

Lemme tell ya, this site is just WAY too much fun!

Muk at the Movies!

Took the Stainless Steel Amazon, the Poor Bastard and the Goonybird to see 'Transformers' last night and thought it was EXCELLENT.

I don't know if everyone is familiar with the Transformers toys that came out in the 80's, but they made me wish I was a little kid so I'd have an excuse to collect them because they were simply an amazing toy. You got what looked like a small truck or a rescue vehicle or something, but by extending certain parts and re-folding them, stretching others apart, turning them halfway... something like a 3-d puzzle, it would turn into a very credible robot figure while still retaining something recognizable of the original vehicle about it. Car doors became wings, helicopter blades became a sinister cape, an item in the grille turned out to be the robot's 'face'. They were ingenious!

The cartoon series that was made to sell the things was pretty cool too...the big selling point were the 'transformation sequences, of course, and the good robot
vs bad robot battles.

Take that idea, update the underlying technology, and run it through a bunch of cad geeks with unlimited hard drive and you get 'The Transformers' 2007.

Transformers is cartoon action-adventure on a kid level and doesn't pretend to be anything else... a perfect fun movie for just about anyone up to the age of
ten. Like me. A fairly conservative family could all go see this and be perfectly happy...there isn't even any kissing and only one 'bad' word (shit) that you have to
listen really fast to hear. None of the violence is bloody (at least you don't see it, although you know that more than one person buys the farm.) It's much, much tamer even than the first Star Wars movie. An easily scared child probably wouldn't like it, but my 3-year-old grandson sat through the whole thing and didn't bat an
eye, although it got a little loud for him in parts. It's obvious to an adult that the whole thing is basically an excuse to sell some action figures and showcase THE MOST amazing CGI I have EVER seen.

Fans of the cartoon will be pleased that all the old first-season characters are here; Starscream, Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Megatron and others. Large portions of the original transformation sound effect was mixed into the updated version as well.

Ignore the story. For all intents and purposes this is simply a bunch of action sequences with an excuse holding them together, and that's OK. The action sequences are worth the price of admission. And bear that in mind - this movie was meant to be seen on a huge screen and I'm glad I did.

The new Transformers are mind boggling. These things don't just unfold a couple of extra parts and go; they rebuild themselves right down to the bolts into a new machine. And the new Transformers aren't' just a few blocky shapes. Each one looks like it contains several extraterrestrial factories and junkyards
full of parts, each one of which get progressively more battered and chipped as time passes. They don't have to stand in one spot to transform as in earlier days... these transform on the move. FAST.
Fighting.
Running.
Doing martial arts.
In mid air.
At random speeds and angles to the line of motion.
This is cutting edge CGI, not the old curved vector stuff...this stuff operates while being 'viewed' from a moving pov while in logical balllistic motion, each one of thousands of parts maintaining it's own vector, all of it remaining consistent.

But forget about all that techie stuff and what you end up with is a cool movie about cool robots with weapons that have lots of fights. Man, they are hell on urban infrastructure. Once these robots took an attitude, anyone who didn't use a parking garage in this town was rat fucked. Buildings, please. They kicked their own footholds and ran up the side of them. Powerlines? Busses? Fuggeddaboudit. And just to mix things up a little bit they'd transform at random into semi tractors or giant tanks or armoured antiaircraft vehicles...turn into a jet fighter and blow out every window in every building for a two mile radius, and then halfway through a screaming sideways helldive through the canyons of main street turn back into a huge somersaulting robot and land in a martial arts stance, firing giant glowing shiriken out of shoulder cannons...fiery explosions, huge chunks of pavement flying, water mains broken, car alarms going off...
-AND the military mixed up in the middle of it all
-AND actual factory concept cars
-AND government plots
-And plucky kids who save the day
I tell you what; I wish I was ten years old so I could go back and see it all over again for the first time!!

Fuck the Factory!

What I did today!

1. Bought tabs for our car (it's like a license plate for your license plate, Brits. No, it doesn't make any sense.) While the Yummy Biker did that, I went around the corner to a store and used their bathroom.
2. Went to Wal-Mart! I boughted two bras and a tin of Altoids.
3. Went to a gas station. To buy gas.
4. Went to a boofay eatin' place! We had fried chicken and fish with mash potatas and fruit and waffles and salad! It was lee dishes!
3. Bought a brand new motorcycle! This one!*


Thank you, Big Aluminum. Thank you.

What did you do today?


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*http://www.victory-vtwins.com/victory_8_ball.html

...the Victory-UK link. Take note, Tickersoid.

Sable Lynx : Car Having Fast Law is Broken!

Tim Footman and Patroclus, here you are:

TEN AUTHORS I MUST SMASH WITH A BAT UNTIL THEY ARE MOTIONLESS

1. Coming in at a solid numero uno is Ernest Hemmingway. Self impressed, mediocre, uneven...take away the Papa Hemmingway myth and that's what you have left. The guy was a drunk and he wrote like a drunk. Period.

2. JG Ballard. Just for writing 'Crash', a classic of the 'Oh My God I am So Incredibly Goddamned Cool' school of writing. It manages to be both icky and mind-numbingly dull for the simple fact that the entire point of the book is to showcase the author being all blase and intellectual while writing about sexual perversion. That's time I'll never get back.

3. Clive Cussler. The man responsible for taking action/adventure fiction to a level so ass-clenchingly bad it actually causes pain. Protagonist Dirk Pitt is to Clive Cussler as Ferrari is to balding man with erectile dysfunction. One weeps.*

4. St. Augustine of Hippo. I have tried, I have failed, I have tried again, rinse repeat, yes, if you want to understand the early church you need to read Augustine, but dammit, the man NEEDS TO FUCKING GET OVER HIMSELF. Reading the Confessio is like sitting next to a retarded kid obsessively picking a scab. GAAAAAAH.

5. Dante Rossetti.What a nasty little puke he was. More known for his artwork than for his writing. Seeing as how his artwork is all about him, I assume his writing sucked just as bad, dripping with false sentiment, passive aggression and self-aggrandization.

6. John Norman. His 'Gor' series constitutes a crime against both writing and humanity. On a more personal level this series was probably responsible for more than a few real crimes against women, simply by feeding the seething resentments and secret hate fantasies of abusive personalities. I have never known an abusive man who did not absolutely LOVE the 'Gor' books. (That latter is probably a generational thing. I can't see anyone nowadays picking up one of those pathetic 'Gor' abortions and thinking 'hey, this is REALLY cool'.)

7. Antonio Vasari. 'Lives of the Famous Artists' will actually make you stupider.
Plus I hate him.
It's personal.
He knows why.
Oh, yeah, he knows.

8. Maya Angelou. Everything after 'I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings' is all about what an amazing, amazing human being Maya Angelou is. (Yeah, she's a good writer. She makes my butt itch, but she's a good writer. Fine.)

9. Margaret Cho, for writing 'I'm the One That I Want', a book so completely marinated in hate that I felt like I needed to wash my hands after I read it.

10. Steven King, for 'Cujo', and particularly for 'Rose Madder'. I know damn well he wrote that while Amy Tan was sitting on his face . Honestly, what the fuck, King; 'Rose Madder'? What the hell was that? (Although I like King more than not. He's a excellent writer when he tries. It's just that he knows he doesn't have to try anymore, and it's obvious. Being held in contempt is one thing, but King expects you to pay for the favor. And people do. And he knows they will. So, um, yeah.)
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So why aren't, say, Truman Capote or Hunter S. Thompson here? Because they never made any bones about the fact that it was all about them all the time. Although in certain moods Hunter S. makes the list because he reminds me of this one guy I hate named George.



Now I have all these pinecones piled up next to me here, but you just ignore them. Look! Bread! Bread heels! Mmmm! And stale dinner rolls! Look, I'm breaking them up! Heeeeeere, duckies...
Heeeeere duckies...

( I tag NOSHIT SHERLOCK who can just damn well come out of hiding and do the fricken meme even if she just does it in my comments lounge....CHAUCERS BITCH, MANGONEL and whoever else feels like it.)

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* well of course I've read all of them.

...why yes, it's raining. how did you know?

Ok fine, THIS is why I haven't been blogging lately.
1. I'ts been HOT OUT. During the mornings I rush to get my usual household chores done, then spead the early afternoons painting the shade side of the house. Then I spend the rest of the day supine, shotgunning lager and sitting in front of an electric fan, periodically firing a blast of ice water (scented with patchouli) at myself with a small trigger sprayer.

2. Because I've been painting my house. Scraping, by hand mind you, no pusscake pressure washers for this muklet- each individual centimeter of siding, setting nails, re nailing where necessary (and it is, LOTS)...then PRIMING, by hand, each individual board of siding, all of which have the surface of an unpaved road upon which Sherman tanks have been drag racing.....and finally PAINTING, by hand, each individual board of siding and trim with liberty and justice for all.

3. Because it's been hot, and I've been painting the house.
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My girldog, Jett, is a small black terrier. Instead of the usual hard terrier coat, though, she ended up with the double coat of a Labrador retriever and the undercoat density of a Siberian Husky. This is not an exaggeration. The animals' fur is packed closer than velour. In this kind of heat it's only humane to shear her down, and this I set out to do.
The clippers burnt out.
I go through a set of clippers every year on her in just this fashion. I swear to God I keep this animal brushed, folks!
Finally I resorted to sewing shears, and struggled through that animals pelt for nearly an hour. For once she did not spaz and tweak, and I think some dim idea of the favor that was being done her might have shot through. Which is probably wishful thinking on my part; she was more than likely dazed by the heat. In any case, I now have an even smaller, grey dog which looks like a whippet with a Labbie head sitting on top.
And because I had to use a scissors, she's bumblebee-striped. Like shearling, but ridgey.
My dog is corrugated.
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The heat has brought my garden forth like an Imax special effect. There are spaces so closely packed that the ground cannot be seen....hemerocallis of various types, Love In A Mist, Pot Marigold, phlox, all kinds of papaveracea, knautia, penstemon...it's wild! Things that normally finish by June are still blossoming. I finally stopped my Easter Lilly; I was afraid it'd bloom itself out and exhaust the bulb.
I attribute this to nothing on my part except maybe planting too closely. The late rains combined with the sudden sunshine, heat and humidity are what did the trick.
__________________________________

Around here you get used to odd combinations of sound...all the usual countryfied songs like cows bellering, roosters, bees and birds, alongside police sirens, helicopters, military aircraft booming overhead, and automatic gunfire (we live close enough to Abbotsford, Canada to be able to hear the drug dealers picking one another off when the wind is coming from the right direction.) The rest of the sound track is thanks to an overeager local and state police force, Lynden Airport, Homeland Security, and The Border Patrol.
Lately the last two have been running NUTS. I don't think I'm ever going to get used to armed personnel flying overhead so low you can smell what they had for breakfast. If all you had to go by were the number of government, military and law enforcement helicopters in the air, a person would think that Sumas is Los Angeles North.
Now. Does all this increase in official activity mean there's been an increase in illegal activity around here? I don't think so, no. I think what's happened is that the weather's been nice and all the uniforms are out profiling in their shiny toys like a bunch of teenagers.
Not three miles from where I sit begin miles upon miles upon miles of unpatrolled, uninhabited border marching up across the wooded hills, headed east. You see nary a black and gold helicopter up there, though, heck no. They're all doing circles over my back yard watching the fat broad flip them off.
Everyone knows that the illegal activity happens UP THERE. You want to take a bite out of crime? Stop burning avgas needlessly. The criminals you want are too bright to come through the damn border crossing AT SUMAS. Homeland Security in particular has no excuse because they have broader powers of stop and search. Go sit your black and gold asses down on Mt. Baker Highway, switch on the A/C and start randomly stopping vehicles.

Yellow Capybara: Mandate Have Retaliating!

This is why I haven't been blogging lately.....
********************


As I was sitting in my backyard
A UFO touched down
An Alien kinda guy got out
And took a look around
His head was like a chicken

the rest of him was too
a headless naked chicken
without no feeties, ew.

The crew jumped out the hatchway
and shouted 'Hip Hooray!
They all took off on bicycles








and went to Monterey.**

The captain sat his chicken butt
right down upon my lawn
the grass all died and I got mad
but all he did was yawn.
I ran and got the garden hose
I turned it on him, hard
He ran into the garage
and hid, 'cause he was scar'd.

In haste he'd dropped his spaceship keys
I grabbed them (you know me)
I jumped into the drivers seat
And backed into a tree.
I think I might have squashed a kid
I think I greased his cat
It may have hit the windsheild
It sounded pretty flat.
But once I figured out the dash
My Native ass was flying
I flew out past the nudist camp
and did some nekkid spying.
I chased some cows, I chased some nuns
I buzzed the local Wal-Mart
I chased a bunch of fat guys

...the running made them all fart.

As I was doing loop de loops
Over City Hall
The Minuteman Militia
responded (at a crawl)
Beau loaded up his shotgun
with rocksalt, nails and phlegm
Cyrus grabbed a shortcase
and tossed a beer to Clem
Abner lobbed some dirtclods
I dodged them all with ease
I lit a joint and flipped them off
The rednecks were not pleased.

So now I have a spaceship
It makes commuting fun
Traffic aint an issue
with your phasers to 'stun'.
My Biker customised it
With kickass thumpin tunes
a Hemi with a blower
ghost flames and baby moons.
As for the spaceman-chicken
He lives in my garage
He really keeps the mice down,

But he's getting kinda large.


_________________________________







**...but they got lost, because they forgot to bring a map.

recipes

Frobi and Ziggi wanted recipes, so here's recipes!

SANDWICH ONIONS...so simple yet so delicious
developed in the test kitchens of Rancho FirstNations by the Yummy Biker

1 quart jar of Kosher Dill Pickles, minus all the pickles, juice retained. I don't care what you do with the pickles. Stick them in your ear, decorate the Christmas tree, teach the dog to fetch...

1 large Red Onion, sliced thinly into rings

1 head of garlic, crushed...more or less to taste

(1 dash red wine for color, optional)

-Put the onion and the garlic into the jar of pickle juice. Put the whole thing in the fridge overnight. The next day you will have an excellent accent for your hoagies and sub sandwiches....fish out the onion and pile it on to taste! This takes the place of vinaigrette...you get the vinaigrette flavor and the onion kick without making your sandwich all goopy!!
*************************

Ziggi wanted WALDORF SALAD...or, as it came to be known via an unfortunate spelling error, HOT TO MAKE WALDORF SALAD

I am sorry, I'm afraid we're all out of Waldorfs just now.

(apples, mayo, celery and broken walnut pieces served on a piece of lettuce.)

Mellow Possum Three Handed Twist To Fate!

Portland , thanks to the mismanagement of it's city council, decided to go the 'tourist destination-renovation' route back in the mid-70's.
Of course, the first thing you do to turn your dying midtown core into a tourist destination is rip up all the streets in the main shopping district and put all the stores out of business. Then you make all those streets one way, no motorized vehicle throughways! And run the worlds saddest excuse for a public transit system through the middle of it all! In fact, you turn it into the central transfer hub of the entire far-flung metro system and pack it full of grouchy lost people making minimum wage and make them stand in the mud outside the closed department stores in the rain. Xerox off a few sheets that say 'Bus Stop' and staple them to some two-by-fours, call it a 'transit link' and there you have what passed for urban development Oregon-style.

Don't forget to stick a couple of hot dog carts in the middle of it all for that 'Noo Yawk' ambiance and man them with drug dealers.

It was to one of these hot dog stands that I was delivering a shipment from Hawaii. I had on my 'don't look at me; I'm a secretary' outfit and was carrying two ki's in my denim handbag, artfully hidden by a scarf and a pack of Salems.
There I stood in my denim smock dress and slingback shoes, reeking of Charlie and Clairol Herbal Essence shampoo, mildly stoned and thinking about the money I was about to get. I could have walked the ten or so blocks up to where my hot dog guy's stand was, but I was wearing high heels and couldn't be bothered. Any bus that came though would take me there, and I wasn't worried about paying the fare; since the new 'honor ticket' system had been implemented on the buses nobody paid the fare. You could , however, buy more than a ride from most of the drivers, and I was halfway hoping I'd get a cool one so I could do just that. It was beautiful: incompetence at the city level had turned it's transit system into city wide dope distribution-mobiles operating on the public dime.

I waited for my bus by the wall in front of the old courthouse, a beautiful grey stone building that dated back from the earliest pioneer days. Behind me, past the spear-tipped iron fence, a group of hippies were camped out on the lawn in quilts, selling bamboo bongs, roach clips made from hemostats and beads and jewelery twisted up out of discarded stripey electrical wiring. Next to me sat a tall Northeast guy dressed in a lavender suit and four-inch platform shoes. He gave me the hanging eyeball but was too busy to make conversation, using a credit card to clean an ounce of shake on an open album cover in his lap, letting the seeds fall to the pavement. College students passing pipes made from plumbing joins sauntered past in groups and left a trail of reek behind them.

A cop rode up on his horse and immediately a crowd gathered. Mounted policemen were another innovation intended to bring a little big-city flair to dirty old Portland. I flirted with the policemen while I petted the horses nose. Flicka stuck his head into my purse and started lipping the scarf off the dope. I rolled the scarf back around the plastic bag of bricked up ki's and the cop and I laughed. "You got a bale of hay in there or somethin?" he grinned.
The cop rode off, trailing mommies and little kids. The guy cleaning his dope smiled up at me and said 'The got those things trained like drug dogs, you know."
"Oh fuck you," I grinned.

That was my 70's.

1922

As long as I have to stay in the house anyway I may as well write, right?
Stupid rain.

For some reason my imagination has always been attracted by the image I have of what the 1920's must have been like. America was still largely rural, but the economy was booming, the cities were lively and growing and nobody had a hint of the coming Crash. The clothes, the architecture, the intellectual movements, the modern art, everything about it draws me.
I would have made a great farm wife...and I would have made an excellent flapper too. Isadora Duncan? Please. I would have done her pale.
I remember reading one of my mothers books years ago....the title was 'Flaming Youth'. And it was about young, devil-may-care children of wealth coming of age in the 20's, all gin and sin and fast cars and the Charleston. Now I remember it as being a cautionary tale, but I stopped kind of short of the caution and just dreamed on the cars and the men and the music, the cocaine and the rolled stockings and the Deusenbergs filled with slim laughing women.
I love to picture the southern women of the era in their beads and feathers. I think of them gossiping and blotting their lips on their hems as they repair their Tangee Red in round mirrors and take lights off each others cigarettes, or knocking back white lightening out of mason jars at some house party waaaay back in the woods...so far back they have to pipe in sunlight, smoking hot country blues falling out of the windows. And I wish, I wish I could have been there.
Early radio, the crooners singing over the static coming through the wooden horn of your Stereola...78 records played at the drop of the needle on the black shine and that anticipation of crackles right before the music soars out...damn.
I was able to hear some faint echoes of this era when I was a child and the grown-ups around me would reminisce, or show me the contents of their closets and boxed memories. My grandmother had a collection of boy-chested dancing dresses from her own flaming youth, covered in long golden moonbeam trumpet beads. Imagine all that swinging around in a room full of saxophones, whirling around the center circle of a laughing woman taller than all the rest in the room.
It would have been amazing to be in on the eve of radio, speaking to strangers from continent to continent and hearing the voices of strangers come back. Back then, s.o.s was CQD. My father was a little boy with a crystal set he'd made himself, listening to the catastrophes and the announcements of strangers abroad in languages he'd never imagined.
One friend down the block had a brother interested in ham radio and in the small hours, in the middle of winter, sometimes he would catch a reflection straight out of time. From the darkness of space, in the middle of the night, amidst all the Bakelite knobs and indicators, old broadcasts first issued live from the Sky Rooms or Music Halls of some long forgotten nightspot in Chicago or New York returned to replay in full. I can't think of this without feeling some kind of mystery come over me. All those happy people, dancing and applauding, the musicians all a little nervous because this was a live broadcast, captured on a wavelength and by some chance of meteorology or orbit going out and returning from some hard place deep in space all those years later. And the lone man listening in the night, in the silence of his makeshift radio room, to...'it is nine 45 in the evening, friends, and this is a live broadcast from the Starlight Ballroom, coming to you from Cincinnati Ohio. My name is Charles Sinclair, the date, November 23, 1922.'

Damn. November 23, 1922.

Violet Weasel The Gland Is Powerful ! NauseaTail Revenge! !

Last post I mentioned a men's aftershave fragrance called 'Andron' that came out in the late 70's. If you go to this* site (brought to my attention by the lovely and talented Homo Escapeons) you can read the masturbatory fantasies-recounted-as-facts of one (chinless, single, Linux-coding) individual who apparently swore by this crap back when. Oh man, the chicks were ALL OVER ME! It was CRAZY I tell you!
Riiiiiiight.

Andron was, quite simply, the most God-horrid shit ever marketed. Even worse, because of it's ridiculously over-inflated claim 'Proven by science: Women are powerless once they smell it!' it rapidly became the signature scent of the desparate loser. Nothing said quite so clearly quite so LOUDLY 'I have no social skills and I live with my mother! ' than wearing Andron.

What did it smell like? Imagine the delicate aroma of a tender lime...one which Frankenstein had wiped his ass with. Sweat, limburger dick, buttfoot and a note of citrus...all these things describe the subtle, lingering fragrance of Andron. Knock a buzzard off a shitwagon...? Thank God they don't make it any more.

For a short while when it first came out Andron was marketed via the sleazebag advertisements found at the back of men's magazines and singles/swingers newsletters. For a very, very brief window of time, wearing Andron meant: " Hey! I fuck!"
But that was a very, very brief window of time, and it only said something that should have been pretty obvious anyway. Remember too, that once upon a time a perfume called 'Shalimar' said something very similar about the woman who wore it...oh yes. It was considered quite risque when it first came out...shortly after the beginning of the last century. Now it suggests orthopedic shoes and Afternoon Bible Study (although you gotta wonder if Grandma stills feels naughty wearing it.)

As a general rule of thumb, then, men should avoid wearing fragrances that were heavily marketed as magical sex bait, particularly if they came out during the Vietnam War era or before. Not only will it convey the message "Aint been laid since the night Gerald Ford took office! PLEASE BABY JESUS SEND ME SOME ASS!!!!"
...but you will, more than likely, find that you are wearing the same fragrance as her father wears.

You want to know what the ultimate turn-off is for a woman? Instant? Like a lightswitch?

KISSING A MAN WHO SMELLS LIKE HER FATHER.

Once upon a time, I bagged a fineass sailor boy who was all ready to present arms- when I got a whiff of his neck. Hoo! FULL REVERSE! Sent his fuzzy ass right into the shower.
Yes I really did this. Why? The man was wearing Old Spice.
My father wore Old Spice.
No soup for you!

And for some reason Old Spice continues to be popular, particularly among military guys and aw-shucks types. Why? Please, God, WHY?
No. Gentlemen, NO.
If there is one fragrance which you should avoid like the very plague, make it:

Old Spice.

NO.
NO NO NO NO NO.
NEVER.
EVER.
EVER.

Because everybody's father smells like Old Spice. And that's just ICKY.

Similarly: Bay Rum, Tres Flores, Wild Country, Ebony, Jovan Musk for Men, Hai Karate, Brut, Mennen Skin Bracer or AquaVelva. None of these convey 'hot sex ahead' to anyone with functioning sinuses. What they convey is that lingering funk in the hallway outside grandpa's bathroom.

Down at the other end of the spectrum, AXE is rapidly becoming the signature scent of the 'squat to pee' set. Check that I.D. Smell like 'Axe'? He's a pup. Fact.
'What dirty boys wear'? Yes. In Jr. High.

"Anything marketed by Avon" is an entire category of fragrances that all men should avoid. Nothing says 'I live in a trailer park where no grass grows' louder than Avon for Men. Child molesters wear this shit. Yes. Her uncle Sid? The one her mom told her never to be alone in a room with? He wears this shit.

In the non-aftershave categories, the biggest offenders are two.
The first one is Right Guard spray deodorant-antiperspirant**.
Do I have to tell you this? It should be obvious, if you have a nose. The object of deodorant is to make you de-odorated, right? Not to make you smell like a shoe store full of elderly Polish men.

The second is Irish Spring bar soap. They make this crap out of real Irish people, folks! Come on! Rather stew in your own juices than wash using Irish Spring bar soap. Not only is this shit an insult to the Irish as a nation (and their dead,) it smells like that freaky pink deodorizer thing in the restroom at the gas station.

LENGTHY DIGRESSION:
Same thing goes for perfume. Ladies, read and take note. What is your fragrance saying about YOU??


Bonnie Belle: sleeps in a 'Tigger' t-shirt
Coty: Trying to smell French, and (sadly,) succeeding.
Emeraude: 80's hair, drinks boxed wine, stands too close
VanillaFields: saving for a boob job
Rare Gold (Avon) : lives in, has lived in or is destined to inhabit a mobile home
Obsession: perimenopausal
Poison: " "
Opium: " "
Anaiis Anaiis: dom/switch, works in a library
J-lo: ass wider than shoulders, myspace addict
ex*claim*a*tion: still convinced she can pull off the 'virgin' thing.
White Shoulders: aging badly ( In Oregon: gay, aging badly. )
Lady Stetson: convinced she can line dance, will demonstrate same after 2 beers, cries easily.
...it gets worse. Lady Stetson inevitably graduates to
Krystal: perm with visible scalp, goes through a lot of pantiliners
Charlie: works in banking, diabetic, son still lives at home
Patchouli: leather, hot, righteous titties
White Diamonds: old
Clinique: old hypochondriac
Estee Lauder: old and wants you to think she's from New York
Charisma (Avon) : old, always orders a cocktail, wears a 'Longline' bra
Chanel #5 : old, pretentious
Red Door: old, feels up waiters
Guerlain: old, addicted to prescription medications
4711: very likely deceased
___________________________

Now you are all set! Spritz on the appropriate fragrance and go hit that stuff!
I can't do anything about the polyester slacks or the tape on the glasses, but I'm not in the business of working miracles here. God helps those who help themselves. Still, isn't it nice to know that, even though you might be one, you no longer have to smell like an asshole?

__________________________________

* http://www.sosuave.com. Use the 'search' function to find the post on cologne. It's hysterical!


** In fact, Right Guard is used by undertakers. They spray it into the mouths of the dearly departed before they glue the lips shut. This kills the 'dead' smell before it leaks out the nose. Oh yes.


Ok fine not really.

Joanne, I am sorry I accused you of being spam.

I only thoughted you were Spam because I had just received, a mere ten minutes before your comment popped up, a long, psychotic, rambling comment about God, conspiracies, public health and medical experiments from some benighted soul in Brazil. At first glance I said to myself 'Self, this is more of the same'. But I was wrong. Wrong, wrong wrong.
So very wrong.
I'm also really embarrassed. I shoulda not been so quick on the 'post comment' trigger.

Joanne, you are not Spam, and you are always welcome here.
___________________________________________________
...and now, on to our main feature...
PREVIOUSLY WITHHELD STORIES ABOUT THE MEADOWS

Things with The Dishrag went from pathetic to pathetic, deranged and violent in short order during the last month were lived together. The final straw came after I found out where he'd been spending all his time. I thought he'd been going to work, waiting tables for the dinner shift at a local nightclub, and closing the place out. Supposedly that explained the strange hours he was keeping.
Wrong.
After The Dishrag had gone missing for two days without a word, I happened to look out my kitchen window early one morning. There he was in the park across the street, dressed in the same clothes I'd seen him in last, minus shoes...filthy, staggering, obviously in some kind of an altered state and accompanied by several street people.

Ah.

I arranged for a truck.

The next morning I was still running on pure adrenaline. I couldn't sleep and I couldn't eat a thing; I was so freaked out by having just a. found out that the person I'd been living with had been lying to me about having a job and was in fact an honest-to-snot druggie street freak, and b. performed the worlds' fastest bug-out.

It was in this state that I was sitting (vibrating, chainsmoking, talking nonstop) on the couch in my buddy Sonnyboy's place when a visitor arrived at the door. It was a friend of Sonnyboys, and she'd just been in a motorcycle accident. A laydown. And she'd been wearing shorts.

While she and Sonnyboy conversed I marvelled at her injuries. Basically, all the skin on the streetside leg had been grated away when the bike went into it's slide and used her as a brakepad...and the inside of the other leg had been burned all the way down the inside of the calf when it fell against the heatshield of the exhaust. I was amazed that she was still able to walk.
"Oh yes!" she grinned, and brushed at the peeled side. A piece of gravel fell to the floor. "They got out all they could at the emergency ward and they told me that over the next few weeks more would probably come out by itself, but I'll probably have gravel in there for the rest of my life" she explained cheerfully.

Well, she left. Sonnyboy and I sat and expressed our amazement.
Another knock sounded at the door.
It was Eldest Brother Meadows.
Sonnyboy practically drug him inside by the chest hair and threw him against the wall.
"I know you did that" he accused.

"Wow!", I marvelled, settling in to watch. I'd never seen Sonnyboy angry before. Not even irritated. This was way more entertaining than living with the Dishrag!

Eldest Brother cringed and whined. " Well, she wouldn't have anything to do with me after I'd taken her out and everything! I mean, I spent a lot of money on her!" He explained.

Sonnyboy and he puffed and blew at each other for a couple of seconds.

"You had no right to do that. She's got a kid! That was really stupid of you," Sonnyboy continued angrily. "And what are you doing over here? She doesn't want to see you! Did you expect her to change her mind or something? Does she know you had anything to do with her accident?"

I was getting lost.

"No.....how could she? But I thought maybe she'd be, you know, willing to give me another chance or, um..."

Oh yeah, I was lost. The timing was off, for one thing. Ms. Motorcycle Injury's big adventure had occurred the day before, while Eldest Brother, Sonnyboy and I were busy moving my stuff from my apartment. We'd been together for the entire day, from 6: am on until about 10:oo that evening. So how could he have...?

I asked Sonnyboy once Eldest Brother had left. "What did he do, fuck with her bike or something? Did a friend of his run her off the road? What?" I was fascinated. I'd partied with Eldest brother years before, while Sonnyboy and I were dating and 'violent' was not the impression I'd been left with then. Perma-fried, prone to hallucinations, needed to get out more, yeah... I mean, the guy was such a brown-rice hippie he humane trapped the mice in his kitchen.

"Have you ever read Journey to Ixtlan?" Sonnyboy replied calmly. Then he just sat there and gave me this smug little smile.
Blink.
Blink.
"Oh come on. Oh please."
Same expression.
" Do not fuck with me. You know what I've just been through."
Same expression.
"...Ok. You mean you really think he somehow mentally caused her to crash her motorcycle or something?" I was laughing. "Wooooo! Psychic planet waves! Please. I mean, come on. That guy?"

Sonnyboy just shook his head. "He can do things. That's all I'm saying."

Right then is when I should have run out, bought a copy of the paper and started looking for 'Roomates Wanted Milwaukie Area' . Sadly, I did not.
These people were NUTS. I couldn't wait to see what happened next.

And I did.
____________________________
No place to live? Check. No expectations of earning any money? Check.
Time to throw a party for everyone you know!

Eldest Brother reached across and threw open the passengers side door of his pickup truck. I hesitated, because...well, it was Eldest Brother, after all, and I'd just learned that he had inexplicable psychic telekinetic motorcycle causing to have wreckingness powers.
-And he was ooky.

But there sitting next to him, greeting me with a big ol' goofy smile was his dog Laddie, wagging and happy to see me! What a good boy! Everyone knows, mean people don't own nice dogs, right?

Anyway I needed to get my money where the beer was at so I hopped in, made sure my shorts were covering everything, and off we went.

As we drove up the street Laddie stood up, turned around, put his ass in my face, slapped me with his tail a few times, then rearranged himself, knocked the rearview mirror off the windshield and clambered up into my lap so he could put his head out the window.
Having a lit cigarette, this was alarming.
Being a large dog, this was uncomfortable.
Being a large dog with intact testicles, this also meant that I got bapped in the side of the face with this dogs' giant hairy dick every time the truck hit a pothole.

I tried to push him away and he just sat down. Now I had a giant warm dog dick, two giant warm dog balls and a giant warm puckering dog asshole on the bare skin of my legs.
Then he started licking my face.
"I guess he likes you!" said Eldest Brother.
I had already suspected as much, in fact. When we got out of the truck, sure enough, Laddie was sporting a big ol' dog hardon.

He jumped up in the window and commenced barking while we walked away, his appendage blooping out in time with each "Arf!' like a pointy red cucumber. As we walked around in the store all the other customers kept looking out the windows going 'Jesus; whose dog is that?" I was trying to look like a cat person. Eldest was cracking up.

Because this was a small town there was no way I could sit in the box without us being pulled over. There was no way Laddie could ride back there because he'd jump out. So we all crammed into the front seat for the ride back. This time I threw an arm around Laddie's shoulders and held his collar with the other to make him stay in his own space. True, as he sat there and panted the cucumber kept poking out to say 'Hi!' but I kept ignoring it. At least it wasn't stuck to my leg.

As I was getting the beer out of the back of the truck I happened to look into the cab and there was Laddie, good boy Laddie, standing on the seat, slurping, wagging his tail.
At first I thought Eldest Brother had given him a treat and he was eating it.
But no.
No, Laddie was busy licking the seat. Where I'd been sitting.
I stared at this frozen in utter revulsion.
Eldest grinned back at me. "You know what they say..." he began.
" That your dog is fucking disgusting?" I replied.
" No." he smiled. " Like master, like dog."
And he drove away.
________________________________________


Kelvin was Eldest Brother's younger brother, one of the most messed-up people I have ever met and a testament to the psychological impact of environmental dysfunction. Yet even though he had more than enough material resources to work with he knowingly refused to better his lot, determined to remain a creepy, perverted loser dipshit.

Because he worked nights the only women Kelvin saw were exotic dancers and elderly truckstop waitresses. And none of them so far had been so desperate as to let him come close enough to touch anything, which explained by Kelvin spent so much time touching himself. Or maybe vicey voicey.
Anyway. He had a collection of porn that he kept locked in the trunk of his car# that he'd pull out and bring in if there was a gathering going on...his idea of appropriate. He'd pass out stacks of the stuff to everyone in the room, chortling like Scrooge McDuck doing the backstroke in his Money Bin, and people would sit and look at each other just completely incredulous at this guy's cluelessness.

He read these things until he wore the shine off the pages, cover to cover. One of the things that had caught his eye was a new invention that he was eager to ask someone about.
That someone was me. A few beers into it he finally stammered out " Do you like aftershave?"
I looked at him.
" I mean, not for you to wear, but for me to wear. Or for anyone to wear. Men, I mean. For men to wear. Do you think it smells good?"
I said yes.
" Ok, then so, have you ever heard of this new stuff called Andron?" he asked, and turned red up to the tips of his ears.

Oh yes, I'd heard of Andron, as had everyone in the room, and we all cracked up laughing. This stuff had recently been in the news, in fact, the supposed 'discovery' of a male pheromone that attracted women like bees to honey ! Women were powerless against it's allure! It made men IRRESISTIBLE! IT WAS SCIENCE!!

While we hooted and joked Kelvin heatedly argued in favor of this magic potion, until he became so angry that he gathered up all his porn and stomped out.
Turns out, Kelvin had already bought some.

It was 35.00 the bottle back then, and that was in 1970's dollars, so considering this guy was too Dutch to even pay for his own clothes it said something about his level of desperation.*
How did we know? Oh, we figured this out the next time he came strutting in wearing a brand new jacket.
" Take a look! It's leather! This was a hundred dollars! I call this my 'pussy gettin' jacket!" he announced.
The paint on the ceiling began to blister. In the distance, dogs began to howl.

He had soaked his brand new, 100$ jacket in Andron.

I mean, he had unscrewed the cap and dumped some in each pocket and squashed it around, poured some more in a line around the inside of the collar and the cuffs, and then sprayed the entire inside and outside surfaces with this stuff. You could see the oilstains it left.

He'd only taken one turn around the living room before everyone kicked him out. He went and sat in his car and sulked and read Penthouse by himself while the paint on all the body panels began to bubble and run.
YOU COULD SMELL IT OUTSIDE THE CAR.
And it? Anyone remember what Andron smelled like?
Andron smelled like lime soaked assfoot.
After an hour the lime wore off. Then the assfoot portion got sockier**. And the warmer it got, the bigger and sweatier and nastier and funkier those invisible, evil assfeet-socks got till you had toes all in your hair and the whole place smelled like an outhouse full of barefoot ass foot socks and your eyes were watering and you couldn't stop sneezing.

Perhaps that was the secret of Andron. It stupified its intended victims though lack of oxygen.
_______________________________




# why? to keep his father from stealing it.

*not to mention his poor thinking skills. the going price for street ass back in 1970's oregon was something like 20.00 and it's not like there was a shortage.

**You could not wash the shit out because it was an oil...and trying ruined the washer and dryer and everything in it then and for the next few loads. This shit was AMAZING. It was like skunk. And like skunk, the only way you could cut it was with vinegar and tomato juice. I had to run all my clothes through the washer twice with a full quart of Snap-E-Tom and Heinz cider vinegar together just to get the shit out, then hang it on the line.

CONFIDENTIAL TO ELLE!

I CAN LOG INTO YOUR SITE, I CAN READ YOUR SITE.
I CAN NAVIGATE AROUND YOUR SITE,
I CAN SAY ' WOO! A PICTURE OF A TINY SNAIL!'
BECAUSE I CAN SEE YOUR GALLERY ON YOUR SITE.

HOWEVER I CANNOT LEAVE A COMMENT AT YOUR SITE!!!!!

I FEEL IGNORANT, AND ASHAMED.
MOSTLY STICKY BECAUSE
I JUST MADE MASHED POTATOES.

COULD YOU FIX THIS PLEASE? OR GIVE ME THE SECRET PASSWORD?
*SNIF*

...because I have MISSED you.

The girl in the chickenwire cage

When I was eleven my best friend was Kami. Looking back we must have been an odd pair...she was sunny and sweet and very, very straight, and I was Wednesday Addams in flowered bell bottoms.
Both of us were on the artistic side, though, and we were both profoundly angry little girls from two very different but very dysfunctional backgrounds. Our sixth-grade art projects reflected this: one was a riotous collage of unclad women and strategically placed flowers- Freud would have had convulsions!- and the other was a triptych depicting an Aztec priest removing the heart from a live victim with an obsidian knife and taking a bite out of it (guess which one was mine.) They had to put them both on display out in the hallway case because kids kept sneaking into our classroom to see them and disrupting classes.
This was us.
This was sixth grade.

Kami's family were straight out of a Jeff Foxworthy monologue. They had a picture of Jesus hanging on the wall that lit up when you plugged it in, didn't read and were all related to each other several times more than was usual even for Milwaukie. My first exposure to ecstatic religion came when I was invited to stay overnight and attend church with their family. One minute the congregation (mainly older, well-dressed people) were sitting quietly being lead in prayer, the next minute a sixty-year-old man was standing rigidly at attention, shuddering and shouting " KayANDA falala ragananda taraWARA! A WUNDA kerra shafiroonda! RegeVANDA wanolo darANDA!" at the top of his quavery old voice. At the end of his pronouncement he went completely rigid and fell over backwards like a caber into the arms of his family. We spent the next 45 minutes or so quietly praying for someone to be given a translation. During this time a few other people gave way to yips and exclamations and one was carried out vibrating from head to toe in some kind of ecstatic state.
It scared the crap outta me. It was also incredibly interesting to an eleven year old, lemme tell ya. I couldn't wait to go back. It certainly was more entertaining than watching Father Wachter, half asleep and fighting a hangover, startling like an infant when the altar boys rang the chimes during Consecration.

One weekend Kami and her sisters were teasing hard to visit their Aunt Margie's house. I was invited along, and everything was set, when Kami's mom said 'Now you know, Margie's daughter is retarded. Did you guys tell her that?"
Yes, I'd been told. Anyway, hell, Kami's oldest sister had Downs' syndrome. I was used to her. Beside her, my only other experience of special kids included the ones in the mainstreaming program at school.
I was not prepared in any way for Margie' daughter.

Margie lived with her husband and daughter in a small house at the bottom of Stanley hill...roses in the yard, curtains in the window, a house I had passed hundreds of times in my life.
The three of us girls rode our bikes into the driveway and knocked on the door.
Susan and Kami were grinning. 'It'll take her a couple of minutes to get to the door" she giggled.

Inside the noises were rather alarming. Thumping, chairs falling over, a heavy table being pushed across the floor. Cans falling from shelves. "I'll be there in a minute!" a woman called.
A screen door slammed. Metallic scraping noises. Thumping on the floor and the walls, as if someone heavy were running laps in their bare feet. A scream of some kind, almost like a tropical bird. "Now you be quiet!" the woman said again.
More slamming and thumping.
Silence.

Heavy breathing and coughing came closer to the door. The floorboards under our feet flexed and I looked down in surprise while Kami and her sisters giggled into their hands.

The woman who opened the door was the fattest human being I had ever seen up until that point in my life.
" Well hi!" She smiled cheerfully. "You're Kami and Susan's friend, huh? Come on in!" she said, turning away.
Her turning away was a motion like a huge container vessel at dock slowly moving against it's mooring lines as smaller ships pass near it's hull. Nothing happened quickly but flowed in a smooth, huge progression of waves and troughs. Her first step started at her shoulder and moved down across her fat like shifting grain, until her impossibly small child's foot lifted from the floor and moved forward under the impetus of all that momentum. That foot landed with a creaking sound, raising the flooring... planks glued with linoleum so ancient that it had torn along the lines of the floorboards and looked like separate stripes of pattern. The next step had already begun at the opposite shoulder while the first pink foot was still in midair, so that when it came to rest the motion merely continued to flow tidally across the enormous lobes of fat. Her midsection came around halfway to greet me-carried her starboard side arm around in its wake, and back, and then the next little foot met the floor and raised the planking.
I let Kami and Susan go ahead of me so I could watch.

Margie sat down in a chair at a round oak kitchen table. This occurred in a series of amazing, practiced heaves, lifts, grunts and shifts in exactly the same way a sea lion moves, all shoulders, and the entire bulk of her settled into a new shape.
I was absolutely enthralled.

I had for this entire time completely forgotten to be embarrassed and appalled, but now as she greeted her nieces that all returned as I pretended not to look at her.

She was dressed in a flowered sheet with a hole torn in the center of it for her head. There was a pink chenille robe over that which settled across her shoulders and back like a bolero jacket. Her hair was a fluffy grey-blonde cap, on top of a head with a face tilted perpetually towards the sky so that she looked somewhat down her nose to see you. Her face was held in this position by a perfect 'C'-shaped wreath of fat. A crease began at one temple, circled just under her chin like a soldiers helmet band and ended at the other temple. From that her chins went down the front of her in perfectly graduated masses, widening each time until they completely encircled her at the equator. You ended with a very unusual impression of a small woman whose skin had been inflated from the ears down and was now dangling from this mountain of fat by her chin and drifting about inside it.

Something smashed loudly into the door behind me and I turned to get my first glimpse of Virginia.

It was quite a close view, in fact. Virginia's face was only several inches away from mine, and her fingers were reaching out for my hair.

The door behind me was a structure that filled the entire archway between the kitchen we sat in and the front room of the house. It was made of wood reinforced with metal gussets at the angles and was screened with chickenwire on both sides. The chickenwire was stretched to its limits and bulged out from it's moorings. The whole thing was locked shut with a huge hook and eye screwed into the wood frame of the archway, and both of these pieces of hardware were bent. The hook was almost straight and it's shank had a distinct curve. the eye was shaped like an egg. Old scars in the woodwork showed how many times it had been replaced.

The hand pressed against the chickenwire and never noticed the barrier. The wire skreeked against the staples.
"She likes your hair" said Kami. And just then Virginia caught hold of a handful and drew me towards her all in the same motion. It all happened so smoothly and so quickly it never occurred to me to resist; by the time it did my head was pulled against the chickenwire and Virginia had my ponytail in her mouth.

All three of them, Margie, Kami and Susan, gathered around me, speaking to to Virginia, pushing her back from the door, and untangling my hair from the chickenwire and from Virginia's fingers. Still, she'd come away with a nice lock of it, which she kept wrapping around her finger and sucking on as she looked at me out of the sides of her eyes.
The next time I saw an expression like this was on a woman suffering from extreme cocaine psychosis... her gaze shifting and glassy, unable to hold a point. Virginia looked like that, if healthier, and that gaze returned to me again and again and again like a record skipping.

I'd had a good view of the room Virginia lived in while I was hanging backwards and upside down from it's door.

All the windows were shut and wood screws fastened them into their tracks. The whole frame was covered in barriers made with angle iron and more chickenwire, tripled over to keep her from stretching it, tearing down the curtains and breaking the glass.
The front door was nailed shut with boards applied all around it's perimeter and screwed into the frame and the floor. The window was boarded over, the handset removed and that gap also covered with wood and nails.

Once everyone was seated again the visit resumed. I scooted my chair around a little closer to Aunt Margie and she laughed and patted me with the smallest little princess hand I had ever seen on a grown person. We all put our hands out and compared them on the table and laughed.

In the background Virginia circled and talked to herself. Occasionally she growled, a genuine canine growl like a dog at the fence, with her face pressed into the chickenwire behind me, making it bulge into the room. Occasionally she would call 'See you later, alligator!"
Mainly she rambled around the room, playing with her toys, scratching her nethers and smelling her fingers. She jumped on her bed and growled. Every now and then she'd take a running leap at the door and bounce off it a few times. Once she jumped at it and landed clinging to the wire a couple of feet off the ground. As she clambered higher her mother reached for a broom and shoved the bristly end at her. "If you don't get down I'm gonna tickle you!" she said. " You want to be tickled? I'll tickle your tummy!"
Virginia crowed and dropped off the screen onto the floor, making 'tickly fingers' through the wire at her mother while her mother smiled and said' Good girl!"

We were sent outside while Virginia ate her dinner. This involved Margie going into the room, closing and locking the door behind her and then literally wrestling Virginia best two falls out of three until Virginia was tired out, when she was put into an adult highchair and fed with a spoon. I know because we watched through the windows. It was amazing. This huge woman fighting this burly, hair covered 32 year old woman, and I mean a real athletic workout, too, since Virginia had the muscle development of a man her age. It was something. And never a voice was raised, no tears were shed, and gradually Virginia got tired out. Finally Margie was able to keep Virginia seated in her eating chair long enough to fasten the feeding tray across her arms and Virginia went limp and compliant and opened her mouth to be fed each spoonful like a baby bird. Margerie sang to her while she spooned in the chow, 'la la, there we go, pop goes the weasel" just as anyone would sing-talk to a small child at mealtime. This one had an appetite like a horse. We were outside for a long time.

There was no wallboard left in the kitchen from years before when Virginia had torn it all off, so the spacers between the exposed wall studs were used as shelving for canned goods and what have you. There was one light high, high up in the center of the kitchen ceiling, and this had to do...all the electrical outlets had been boarded over and the only lightswitch was behind a locked door.

The story I got afterwards was that Virginia had become uncontrollable quite young, and that all their money had gone towards keeping Virginia in different institutions. They still owed huge bills all these years later. Virginia had been abused in several of these places, which explained why she fought at mealtimes, and after the last one had returned her so badly injured that she'd had to be hospitalized her father had modified their entire home and built the caged-in room for her.

I never smelled a thing in this house apart from the Comet cleanser under the sink that you smelled in everyones' house back in those days. I recall that clearly. The place was clean. I recall that too. Virginia was clean and combed and dressed and healthy. Mom was clearly up to the challenge and seemed to accept it head on, without anger.

The father I saw only briefly as he came home from working third shift at a plywood mill and went upstairs to sleep. Anyone familiar with mills knows how brutal that kind of work is, and back in the early Seventies it was far, far worse. He was deaf from the whine of the saws. He'd been working there for 30 years.
30 years in a sawmill is something I cannot imagine. Ten years can kill you. My father only lasted three years and came out with partial hearing loss then- and whatever else he was, 'weak' wasn't included on the list.

I never told my parents.

I can't begin to tell you how many times I have turned this over in my mind and examined every detail. And I've always wondered what became of that family, and what became of Virginia. She must have outlasted both of them.
She could still be alive somewhere. I bet she can still wrestle her weight class, too.