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?"

Adventures of a middle aged housewife

A few years ago I used to range out a lot further on my own. Looking back, (particularly after the story I'm about to relate) I can see that I was a murder statistic waiting to happen; at least somethings' dinner. But at the time I was still in a recovery mode (clinical depression; they finally got the medication right and it was like the lights came on again all over the world, as the song says) and I guess I was sort of going through a postponed idiot teenagerhood where you take stupid risks because it never occurrs to you that you'll die. See, I always thought I was going to die back in those days. Then I stopped thinking that in my thirties and so what do I do? Damn near drive my car off the side of a mountain.
Nobody ever knew where I was. It never occurred to me to tell anyone. I'd just load the idiot dogs up in the car and pick a direction. My husband still looks at me in surprise when I tell him about some place I went hiking or just visited for the day.
This one day I decided to take a trip up past Nooksack Falls. The falls themselves are just beautiful, and theres a nice park there for camping and hiking, but theres a road that goes over a bridge and up into the wilderness from that point. It's closed most of the year because of snow. Only for a few weeks can you take a car up it, and this was one of the weeks, so I went. The car I was driving was peculiarly suited for this kind of trek; a front wheel drive Toyota Corolla. A bitty tin box on wheels; yet I regularly went places in it that 4wheelers couldn't go because it was so light and had better traction.
Which made me cocky.
So I drove back, back, back into the hills, through clearcuts, over giant heaps of elk crap, past bobcats and bicyclists and deer and huge boulders bigger than a house....just merrily driving along. Stopping now and then to hike a bit, or take a splash in the creek, let the dogs play, pick some berries, having a good old time.
Went past the furthest point I'd ever been; just kept on going, checked the gas gauge, fine....went uphill, fine.....
waaaaaaaaaaaaay uphill, fine....
I finally noticed that for some time the landscape had begun to resemble a severely trimmed Japanese garden. Utterly beautiful....moss with tall threads of orange around artfully gnarled evergreens, wierd trippy rocks, that kind of thing. I rounded one corner and had to stop my car. It was too beautiful. There was a distant white mountain framed by the center of the valley I was in, capped by a huge sheet of white, a glacier cloud, that slowly lifted and fell in the wind over the peak like the worlds hugest sheet billowing. I have never seen anything like it.
All around me is this amazing biome, picked out in perfect diamond detail. There are eagles flying beneath me down in the valley thermals. The hillside next to me was full of little whistlepigs, and they were all whistlepigging around in complete indifference to me, making the dogs nuts...
Finally I get in the car and start the drive back down.
All it took was one glance away from the road and I drove my car off the side.
I hit the brakes and kept going for a few inches, then the undercarriage met some rocks and stopped.
My car had two wheels off the side of the mountain. The passenger side of the car was hanging off in space.
Now I sat there for what felt like a good twenty minutes trying to get my shit together. I wasn't panicked; you couldn't really say I was afraid either; I was just thinking at 100 mph.
Finally I very carefully got out, climbed down the hillside under my car, and built a ramp back up to the road surface with rocks. It's probably still there. I had all the time in the world and I sure in the fuck was not going anywhere. Then I jacked the front wheel up and put some extra traction rocks under it, same to the back wheel, got in, and drove away.
It only occurred to me several months later that nobody would have ever found me if something had happened. I had filed a movie of the terrain in my brain someplace I couldn't get to right away. Then all at once, several months later it all played back, and I just sat there and shook.
I was up in the alpine regions of some unnamed foothill of the Cascades. My car would have rolled down and fallen into some huge crevice in the rock field and never been seen again. The END. Two well-fed black dogs would have been found back at the bridge and been adopted by someone nice on vacation and that would have been it.
But it didn't happen, and here I sit sucking down a Miller, so thats 'ku.

Work is for people who can't garden.

So I'm sitting here by myself for the first time in days, enjoying the fact that I don't have to answer to another living soul. I may even watch the news later. Buy a six and put on some Howlin' Wolf, even. A sybarite; simply an unabashed, decadent kicks-vixen. Thats me.
When I get like this even the telephone is a rude intrusion so you're going to have to leave a message. Should I begin to feel lonely I'll go to the store or the library, or maybe garage sale-ing. Thats about the level of socializing I need to keep me happy. We went out to dinner last night with friends, and four people, even friendly people I like, was too much.
People in general are a complete mystery to me.I have no clue what goes on in other peoples minds. Making it not one whit better is the fact that, while I do very well on the phone, in person I have little tolerance for dipping around, and most people dip around. Thats standing in doorways as you're leaving and suddenly breaking into a huge conversation with the door hanging open and the cold getting in, or feigning a kind of conversational indecision that just drives me up the fucking WALL ('Do you want the salad?' 'No,.....well, I dont know...what are you having? I'll have whatever you're having.' ' I'm having the shrimp.' 'Well...I dont know. Maybe. Why don't you have the salad too? Or maybe I will have the shrimp. How much is the salad?')
GAAAH! DIE! NOW!
Obviously this makes me the worlds worst employee. I do NOT work well in groups. Period. I do NOT learn quickly, unless it's just me and you and things aren't busy. I am NO GOOD WHATSOEVER in a panicked situation. Deer in the headlights. I do NOT tolerate the public and they are not always right.
Understandably, then, I do not work in restaurants. My vision of hell is the kitchen of a struggling one-star dinner house on Saturday night. But since I already had this job once, no matter what I've done in life from then 'til death, I can still hold my head up to St. Peter and say' Sweetheart, I worked for NENDELS', and he'll apologize and make me a cocktail while I wait for my limo. The one Brad Pitt is driving. Naked.
By the way, in this day and age there is absolutely no excuse for the kind of fitlhy, unsafe, abusive working conditions you find in most kitchens, but sadly the staff will collude with management to keep it from changing because they think they're this special breed, see, they can take it, they're tough and cool and all hard and shit. No, they're most often skag losers who couldnt find work any where else because theyre vile, and don't think management isn't taking full advantage of that fact...and don't think the health inspectors aren't taking full advantage of THAT. We used to shift the inspector cases of booze for our 'A' card. Left them outside the delivery door; he never set foot inside the place. Fucking disgusting.
I had my own business for awhile cleaning rental properties, and I'd probably still have it if my health had held out. When I work on my own I have to live up to my own expections, and they're really high ones. You would have been proud to live in a property after I'd gotten done with it. Theres places I drive past to this day with happy families living in them that make me think "Geeze, if you only knew what I took outta there...." I would be driving down the road with a full load of garbage, going to the dump, and I would pass some real estate babe in her Nissan with her hair all done and her dress and I'l feel so fortunate!
I had a deal going with the guys who ran the dump-they could scavenge my load before I took it up top, and once I was up top I could scavenge without getting shot at. Doesn't that sound skeezy? And Joad? Maybe it is. But I've helped furnish lots of college kids houses with what I found up there and I earned a nice piece of change doing it, too. Remember, this is the 21st century. People in America toss things because theres a new model out. For example, I cannnot tell you the number of times I picked up brand new bridal shower gifts that the newlyweds hadn't seen fit to donate for some reason...probably because charity resale is for icky poor people. So they put it (new cuisinarts, full sets of towels.....etc.) in the garbage bag with all the wrapping paper and ribbons and took it to the landfill, so that nobody icky and poor could ever get their hands on their unwanted stuff EVER. Or something. Who knows?
I sure didn't end up icky or poor out of it. Cha-ching! I had a set of muscles on me like a swimmer, too. But since I have asthma I also had a neverending case of crud which finally blossomed into bronchitis and from there, finally, pneumonia; which feels like getting better from bronchitis, so I was walking around there dying for awhile and had no idea.
Went back to college, got a two-year in admin. ABSOLUTELY HATED IT. I'm good at the skills, just not at the lunchroom aspects of it. Office culture, is the term. The most bland, safe, beige, television watching bunch of people I have ever met. You cannot go outdoors; you cannot wear anything comfortable (if you're female) and you are not allowed to be anything other than a paper cutout. I think I was a pleasant person to work with, on the main, but it ate away at me from the inside to where I'd drive home and just cry, feeling like an empty shell. I slept11 hours a night; just exhausted, although all I really did was make copies and tot up numbers.
So I don't do that any more.
You oughtta SEE my garden.

p.s...
Did you happen to see in the news where they've genetically engineered pigs that glow in the dark? This is no shit; luminous pigs. Just regular pig-type piggies that glow green. You know what I want? A Luminous Wrinkle Dog. Or a bunch of them. I would take them for a run at night through the field behind our house, and it would look like I was being chased by a Blob family. Or I'd make a little howdah and put the Gooneybird on one's back and let them waddle around. Oh my God, the Blobs have taken my grandson! They've made him their King!
Going on a beer run now. Do ya latah.

Babies are good.

Being a grandparent is SOOO much better than being a parent; you can't even begin to imagine. I get to mind my grandson during the weekdays and on the main he is a sunny little person. Right now the Goonybird (my grandson) is happily eating Ritz crackers and watching kids tv.
I have no problem with letting the Gooneybird watch tv; I've watched all the shows with him and we picked out ones we liked. I'm pretty impressed with a lot of what they have these days for the little-littles, actually. I just make sure its the channels without commercials. I've got so that I can tell what time it is by the sound of the show coming from the next room; Go, Diego, Go! means it's 1/2 hour til naptime.
Diego and Dora are the shoutiest damn kids, though.
Diego-Hi! I'm Diego. I help ANIMALS. Oh oh, do YOU hear THAT? What animal makes THAT noise? Do YOU know what ANIMAL makes a noise like THAT?
Dora- help BOOTS find his WAY to the ICE CREEEEM STAND! say, ICE CREEEEM! Saaaaaay ICE CREAM! Say ICE CREAM! Good! You helped BOOTS find the ICE cream!
Indoor voices, for Gods sake!
We have a weird show here called The Doodlebopps, which is-and don't quote me because I'm not sure I've understand it-three aliens who are related somehow, in a band, who are little kids but tower over everyone else on the set. DiDi, Rooney and Moe Doodlebopp, they're called. I have no idea what the point of this show is, unless it's to indoctrinate children early into attending live rock concerts or something.
The actors who play these alien rockers are actually quite talented people. I know one of them is queer as fuck in real life, and I wonder if he gets a lot of play ('Oh man, you'll never guess who I just blew in the men's room-Rooney Doodle!')I hope they go on to have fabulous careers because, you want to talk about paying your dues. They have to wear a metric ton of makeup and total bodysuit costumes with just their faces sticking out, AND sing AND follow choreography that often includes huge casts of kids AND memorize lines- 'Oh Moe! Don't worry; you'll get big someday!' 'Aw, but I wanna be big NOW!" At the very least they deserve a raise. I hope they get craft service because they have to be losing a lot of weight jumping around like that in those foam rubber nightmares.
Another strange one is Breakfast With Bear. This is Bear from the Big Blue House, which he leaves at intervals to roam at large and visit children and have breakfast with them; and this merits a program of its own.
Bear has the patience of a saint. Some of these kids are just total tumors; so utterly gobsmacked by having this giant carnivore in their homes that they have no idea what to do other than stare at the camera and mumble.
The person inside that costume is another unsung hero of television. He manages to project this cuddly, kind, loving personality from inside a seven-foot costume with one arm stuck straight up over his head and the other one hampered by a four fingered glove covered in layers of foam and dynel, and then only allowed about 12 inches for his inseam so he has to swing himself along as though he were wearing a ball and chain. And that bear suit is grubby. You can date the programmes by the darkening mats in poor Bear's fur along the motile side. Folks, give the guy a break for the love of God, WASH THE COSTUME.
Another puzzler is the Backyardigans. There seems to be no message whatsoever. That's not altogether a bad thing, but you gotta wonder why Nick picked it up. They're supposed to be jousting with Disney for the hearts and minds of toddlers, meaning mommies and daddies, so you think there'd be something, like 'be kind to animals' or 'don't pick up crap off the sidewalk and put it in your mouth' or something. But no. Its just a happy little show with the best music, and little dinosaury-moosey kid things that play make believe games in their back yards.
We had to stop watching Blues Clues last summer while Grandpa was on the couch. Grandpa memorized Blues voice and started imitating it to make the baby laugh...which was funny, but then grandpa started doing it all the time. And that was still kind of funny; a 275 lb biker with full sleeves toting a hysterically laughing infant and going 'Oo oo oo OOOOOO!' in the middle of Wal-Mart. But then it became a kind of verbal tic. You'd hear him drop a wrench out in the garage and go 'Oo OOOO!" when the baby was in the house, a couple hundred feet away, taking a nap. So we turned Blue off for awhile.

The Stainless Steel Amazon

see her blog here: http://www.myspace.com/witchbabywiggbat
Theres naked stuff. naked, naked, naked. Boy, is it naked. I tell ya. Such nakedness.
Parenting is a tough issue to try and write about. I know exactly what I'm supposed to say so that I sound like 'hip mom, been there, dealt with that', which you can go to any motherhood site on the freakin web and read; and arent they interesting? (Where are all these caring, baby-first mommies? Out on the sidewalk in front of my house with baby in a stroller at 11 at night taking a ramble down the block to go pick up a deck. Swear to God. They go by every night at 10:30, and return all jolly and fuck by 11, raucously discussing attached parenting issues. Or something.) I suppose I could go the route of 'cute things the kid did' type stories, *yawn*. As you may well imagine, those type of stories take on a somewhat Dadaist shading when taken out of context, given THIS family.
So I'll just brag.
The Stainless Steel Amazon came into the world in the attic of a house in Seattle, and the first thing she did was take a steaming evil black babyshit on her father. We had to trade that one in and get a new one. She shit on him, too, but luckily he was brought up in Alaska, eating whale blubber, riding harleys naked through the blizzards to carry serum to smallpox villages cut off by the weather, and killing small animals with his teeth; so he was made of sterner stuff, and we kept that one.
She went to public school, got good grades, was nominated for the gifted students program and eventually finished her 12th year on the honor roll, despite which she managed to obtain an education. Puberty was evil, evil; she survived that. Boys ran the gamut of sweet darling throw pillows to sweet darling abusive disgusting sick pervy wads of fuck that need to die before they can reproduce. She survived them quite nicely. She survived the parents of these boys too, which was no mean feat; a couple of these folks were total turd casseroles. She purely refused to be cowed down by anything or anyone. She had no problem telling adults to go take a flying leap when they were trying to run that 'you have to respect me; I'm older than you' bullshit on her...she called a fool a fool. AND SHE WAS RIGHT EVERY SINGLE TIME.
She never stopped talking to me.
She is a fantastic mother. She gave me the honor of helping deliver her son, and she had him right here in my front room ( the carpet's been cleaned). She had a midwife who took care of all the 'southern hemisphere' stuff while I mainly tried to stay out of the way and be useful and not tweak. And she was a goddess. She was the image of God. It was amazing. Her son was born a little buddha, quiet and cerulean with a little caput indicating divinity, and when he woke up, he looked as though he already knew everything in the world. I cut the cord. It was ooky.
She and her son live in a cool little house in the woods adorned with tibetan flags. When she isn't there she is either attending college or working.
SHE IS AN ENGINEER. DIG THE FUCK OUTTA THAT.
She is a drop dead gorgeous blonde bombshell with a non-traditional job and a kid. She can do incomprehensible mathematical equations pages and pages long; she put together her own computer, she votes and she isnt drug addicted, on welfare, or a furry.
I'm happy with her.

I have a headache; so you get a list.

...The motherfucker refuses to go away, too. This headache feels like all the initial agony of snorting crosstops without the subsequent blood and itching.
I feel cheated.
Did you ever wonder who invented the idea of snorting things, just as a passing thought?
THE STORY OF PRIMITIVE SNORTING REVEALED
So you get a bunch of teenage cave guys sitting around bored and one says something like 'You know, man, you ever think how a good sneeze is like, you know, blowing wad, almost?' (there are people who think this, too. gaaah.)
So after the other teenage cave guys get done telling him what a fag he is they all start trying to sneeze and they agree out of teenage cave peer anxiety. 5000 years later someone says 'Dude. If it's this good when you use your finger, maybe it's better when you use a stick.' And the rest of them all tell him he's a fag, and then go out looking for sticks. Sticks, rocks, pinecones, mice...it all leads to refined heroin. Evolution has been set in motion; its' course is inevitable.
Although by the time I was in my partying prime, it was
'Dude, check it; Pats' out.'
'No way. Wait, he is. Fuckin Pat, you're bagged, dude.'
'Piss on him! Piss on him!'
'No wait, stick this up under his nose, dude! Make him sneeze!'
'No way.....aw, fuck, geeze! He pissed himself, man...oh nasty!'

That works, by the way.

A LIST OF THINGS THAT MAKE ME UNREASONABLY PISSED OFF
Thinking about this lead me to an interesting realization: lots of fabrics have this effect on me. What the hell is my problem; I swear...
and so 1. TOILLE DE JOIE
Jesus Christ I hate this shit. It's little vignettes of happy peasants and rural scenes in one color on a contrasting background. And it just looks like a dogs ass. People seem to lose all sense of dignity when confronted with this fabric; you see entire rooms done in the shit and it's supposed to look very 'FRONSHHH' and chic. Red toille is popular now; an entire room done in red toille looks like an abbatoir. Hows that for french?
2. Wool. This was the nasty stuff they made our school uniforms out of. It smelt like dog and it felt like wearing burlap. What a fucked up thing to do to a little kid.
3. Heavy upholstery orlon weave with a shine. GEAHHHHHHHH! BLEAAAH! EEEEGH! I can't even touch the stuff. Its hot and slidey and rippy and pilly. GAAAAAAH.
4. Early American furniture from the 1940's. It was brown. and yellow. Everything wood was turned; everything upholstered had a little skirt and a bow. Including the lampshade, perched atop a rusty milk can turned into a lamp. Along with a braided rug and a coffee table made to resemble a cobblers bench-rendering it unuseable for coffee or anything else since they had a downward slope of about 40 degrees- you have the charming, Early American ambience of a room full of squatty Native American Michelin men in frumpy dresses looking for a place to set down their coffee. Add to this the fact that in the 1940's most people didn't have upholstery vacs and DID smoke, and you have a fatal attack of asthma waiting to happen. By the time I came along in the 1960's this stuff, no matter whos' home it was in, was uniformly god-horrid; reeking of stale cooking, cigarette smoke and crusted with filth. gheeeegh.
5. Plastic clothes. I mean real clothes made out of plastic, like nylon and ban-lon and polyester. When they came back into fashion in the 90's I predicted a national outbreak of yeast infections; and I was right.
6. Trashed up homes and yards with kids. I hate this. You want to live like this; fine, don't inflict it on children. And don't live near me unless you want, say, a ten-pound bag of ancient freezerburnt halibut in your foundation vent. Or my cat box contents dumped underneath your bedroom window in the deep weeds where I know you'll never find it because you haven't put blade to grass since 1967. (Neither of these people had children, by the way. Why should I add to some poor kids' problems?)
7. Chronic lateness. These fice always know exactly what they're doing and they invariably think it's one of their endearing little quirks. it makes me want to go out with a baseball bat and bash out all the windows on their car.
8. Art where the peoples eyes lOOk out right at you. I'm sure the artist thinks this gives the image a lot of impact. No, its just creepy. I was brought up in a home filled with pictures of Jesus and the Pope and Mary and they were all watching you as you sat on the pot or put on your underpants. And most of them were inviting you to explore the inner workings of their chestal parts by holding open their ribcages to show you their hearts STUCK FULL OF THORNS AND ON FIRE WITH THE BLOOD DRIPPING ALL DOWN AND SHIT. See, thats just unneccessary. The eyeballs were more than enough, thanks.
9. Those phony graveyards with all the little white crosses and a sign saying 'Cemetary of the Innocent'. Every year some dutch fuck puts one of these up on the main road leading into the United States from Canada. Welcome to America! We're a bunch of ignorant shitholes! Have a nice stay!
I apologize, Canada.
10. Long descriptions of the layout of someones' house in the middle of a story. It never matters a fuck to the story and it's boring. One hauntings site I visit has a bad case of this; whenever the person submitting starts one of these long architectural digressions I just move the fuck along because the main incident is always going to be something utterly horrifying like 'and so I saw a shadow move across the hall into the bathroom.' (theshadowlands.com Otherwise a great site you should go visit if you like getting so scared you feel like you're going to pee yourself.)
11. People who claim to be vampires. This is not about clothes; I kind of like the clothes, actually. No, I mean the lame dips who claim to be actual supernatural vampires.
There is no such thing as vampires. Not energy vampires, not psychic vampires, not blood drinkers, not any kind of vampires.
You are not a vampire.
Do these people hold jobs? Yes. They are the people you see in the background when you drive up to the take out window, there behind the fryer thinking "Yes, you see me now in my paper hat, but in actuality I am Demonicus the Dark and I thirst for your blood! Muahahahaaa!"
Your mother must be so proud.
12. Certain people. And I don't know what it is about these people either, but something about them makes me want to go up and grab them by the front of the shirt and slap them till they bleed. One is that bald dude who plays the asshole cop (IIIII hurt my self, todaaaayyy.... to see if I still feeeeel.....) Just looking at him pisses me off.
13. This guy my husband knows named George. Ho, the things oy've done! The ploices oy've been! I live in my car and never bathe! But I party with ( ) and sell drugs to ( ) and I used to own ( ), ( ), and I've blah blah blah blah yeah, right, ok, fine, bye.
14. Packrat people. Specifically their houses full up to the tits with CRAP. And dead newborn kittens you have to chip off the floor and empty jars and plastic butter tubs and old clothes and FILTH. I cleaned rental properties and I saw a lot of this. You had to wait 30 days or something before you could shift the stuff because of abandonment laws as I recall, and so I'd come to these shitheaps 30 days after the health department had posted them and the tennant had been evicted, after having had all the time in the world to move it and there it'd be, festering. I emptied out truckloads and truckloads of shit from these places-and sometimes there they'd be, the former tenants, parked in their car across the street looking at you. Not one thing was of any real use or value, ever. It was all crap. Garbage bags full of rolled up plastic bags. Bread heels. Shoes, baseball caps, golf balls... 25 pound sacks of potatoes that had turned into LIQUID...broken bicycles; oh, if I had a nickel for every one of those...and Jesus, the clothes, boxes and boxes of clothes smelling like stale people, stuck together in bricks with mold and cat piss, closets stuffed so full the doors had been forced open and the striker plate was torn out of the jamb........this still makes me so angry I get sick to my stomach. Grew up with a hoarder. Nuff said.

more later? its probably inevitable.

Little girl likes her brain

Gentle reader, the time has come to admit something.
I like my life.
As lives go it's not 24, certainly. Living out here in my rural idyll has not made me go all 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek' (bleugh) either. Still, its a mighty good life.
Do you know many people who can say that with a straight face?
I think mainly I like my life so much because I spend little time worrying about other peoples opinions about it. So I do as I fucking please, and what fucking pleases me is, well, lots and lots and lots of things.
The thing I am proudest of is that I have a very well stocked mind. I worked hard at it too. If you ever have to be trapped in a submarine with me, I will be the one you can count on to go batshit and start eating people and screaming and banging my head.
No! That is a joking, ha ha! Oh, is so to my humor lip!
Actually you can safely count on me to be the last person who takes that route. I'll be the one writing graffitti on the bulkheads with a burnt match while all the weeping tweakers trip over me as they scramble around in their own urine and vomit. I know how to keep myself amused.
The key to having a well stocked mind is READING.
If you have a library card, you are wealthy. The American public library system is the gem and envy of the rest of the world (except for maybe Great Britain. But did you know you can access their system using ours? Hooooooo, yes. Dig the fuck outta that.)
Once you have a well stocked mind the rest of the world falls into perspective. Really, you become freed from lots of greed and envy and coveting of things simply by being well informed. You stop making quite so many bad decisions for the same reason...with nothing moral, nothing that takes great will involved, just by simply having taken in the information. You have to agree, thats a likeable thing right there. Really. You HAVE to agree. It's my blog.
I also like my life in large part because I finally chose the right person to spend it with. Ladies and gentlemen, this was due to nothing on my part at all. It was pure luck. (Thats all I'm going to say on the subject because I don't want you theiving, man-hungry vipers bothering him at work. now that ive made that comment, watch; i claim to be a feminist a few more lines down.)
I am a homemaker-type person, as it turns out. Someone has to be, and lo and behold it was me...the last person I ever expected, and the last person probably LOTS of people ever expected. I really like it. I really do. I'm good at it, too. And so thats what I do, and when it comes to what I do I am serious as a mass fucking grave full of heart attack victims.
That makes me just about a minority of one, until I go through this Rod Serling warp in space and wake up in the same boat as the christian separatist moms (and they all squish over to one side in horror). Nobody else takes us seriously except Martha Stewart.
Let me digress . Well, no; screw ya- you have no choice in the matter.
The womens movement sure did JACK SHIT to raise the average persons level of respect for the diaper changer and the goer-to of school programs in the middle of the day. They say 'every mother is a working mother' but in reality the general feeling is, if you don't work outside the home it's probably because you're stupid.
You know what? Fuck'em.
I'm a feminist; I raised the Stainless Steel Amazon to be a feminist; I daresay having lived the courage of my convictions every goddamn day for the last 21 years makes me more truly a feminist than nine-tenths of the broads out there with NOW stickers on their cars. Refusing to put up with second place no matter where you're planted is what makes you free...although you don't spend as much time wafting through daisy filled meadows wearing tulle as the douche commercials would leave you to believe.
Although my present life kind of does resemble a douche commercial, now that I stop and think. And don't you wish you could say the same thing? No, really. I have a garden here that I waft through quite frequently, a real one full of plants, and tourists stop and take pictures of it. It's kind of strange thinking that I'm in some strangers vacation memory book wearing a holey 'Speed Racer' t-shirt with my bra full of compost. But it is truly glorious in the spring and summer, and maybe its pretty enough so that people mistake me for a yard gnome.
It's the second major garden I've ever done and it is quite frankly fabulously beautiful. If there is anything femmy-girly about me, this is where it gets fully expressed. Right smack out on the main road through town with a big hippie standing in the middle of it.

everything painted after 1519 is a footnote.

Leonardo DaVinci was born in 1452 and died in 1519. By the time his light is extinguished America is discovered, old works of science are re-discovered and translated so that learning can proceed, and Roderigo Borgia has shit all over the face of Christendom.
But what a time to have been alive! And what a time to have had the quality of mind able to appreciate it!
The idea I get of Renaissance Florence is a mixture of Chicago during Prohibition and Enlightenment England. But all on a very intimate scale. All the major players knew each other in Florence and the surrounding area. Undoubtably most of the minor ones too. As in any city at any time in history, human society was a perpetual event, 24 hours a day, slaves out killing rats talking to washerwomen dodging the half-feral pigs and dogs that swarmed around eating the garbage, pimps talking to drovers, women and children carting in in produce before sunrise, everyones conversation overheard by everyone else and gossiped about from window to window across the streets, written on the alley walls of the church where people went to shit and repeated in the kitchens and on the stairs and finally at the tables of the great. Everyone knew everyone else, at least by sight, and every other person lived in on the same land their first Etruscan ancestor broke with his plow.

But for some reason-and I'll spare you my musings on that-the general feeling was no longer as conservative as it had been. This is not to say they all turned into rampaging hippies, because after all even Leonardo was a devout Catholic. But there was just a very subtle shift on the part of the average person away from the rigid fire and brimstone side of religion. Into that moment comes the greatest creative mind and the greatest visual artist the world has ever seen.

You'll just have to swallow that sweeping assertion.

DaVinci's work has been called the apotheosis of the art of the middle ages, and I think that's very apt. He mentions Giotto with great respect. He worshipped in churches painted with the art of the past and the past before that, learned his craft at the knee of a man very much bound by the conservative tastes of the rich. Although he pissed off a lot of people, it wasn't because of the quality of his work, it was because he was an asshole and a prima donna. DaVinci painted nothing you could call iconoclastic. What he did was paint what everyone else painted, but better, far better, and with unbearable truth.

Now, I am nobodies new age goofball. Honest, I'm not. Feel free to feel just as weirded out by the following passage as I still am, but I swear to you this is how it was. Bear in mind that what I am describing is an object well over 400 years old. It is generally a pretty thing but I wouldn't want it in my house to live with, though it was a painting I had always admired and so when the Leonardo DaVinci exhibit came to Vancouver I was there to see it.

I've been to a lot of museums; I've seen The Raft of the Medusa, I've stood in front of Picassos' Guernica, which is huge and powerful and everything its reputation says it is. But when I confronted one of DaVinci's paintings for the first time in person it went through me like a knife through the chest. Like I didn't exist.

I felt overawed. I felt like I was in the presence of nature instead of art. I still can't describe what I felt but it was bigger than me.

The painting was his Virgin and Child with St. Anne. Mary is seated on St. Anne's lap. She reaches down to pick up the infant Jesus, who plays with a lamb. I can take it apart into ingredients.

The subject of the painting is pretty standard; it's already been done hundreds and hundreds of times before Leonardo. The image of Mary the woman is taken from life, the studies he made of this woman and her child still exist though we don't know their names. The actual sitter, the one modelling the drapery and the pose was a young man. He probably sat for every adult figure. Marys' hands are the hands of DaVinci, which are the hands of his terracotta Lady with Primroses and his final St. John the Baptist too.

So those different elements come together in crafting this picture, pretty basic stuff. These follow after having met the demands of buying pigments and grinding them, and selecting a ground and preparing that, transferring the drawing using tissue pierced with a pin and a bag of soot, only being able to paint in details for minutes a day, carefully protecting the unfinished work from dust and smudging over weeks in a rural environment not terribly kind to delicate things, letting the painted areas cure, picking out hairs and dust with a needle and then having to patch up over that and match the tints, and always being a slave to the temperature and humidity and the angle of the sun and the time of day.

Let's step back a bit further yet. There was no electricity. Water was taken by hand and used and re-used until it was black. If you happened to let a minor abrasion become septic you could die from it. There was little or nothing that separated a person from the perils of the natural world.

That there was anyone with the leisure and inclination to paint, or to perfect the craft of portrayal is extraordinary, and that the same person was able to expand their genius into that goes past extraordinary no matter what the era. And yet there was this man who infinitely surpassed those boundaries, who took on a subject ridiculously beyond the grasp of anyone human and succeeded, who captured and revealed the image of perfect love.

And yes, everything after that is anticlimactic.

Wherein I extoll the virtues of rural life

I'm sitting here looking out my window wondering to myself, 'self, why is the sky a funny color?' It has stopped raining, thats why. So for the moment, voila-it's 50 and the pussywillows are budding! Yet at a moments notice a vicious, dry northeaster could sweep through and freeze everything down to the ground in a matter of hours. Standard winter bullshit.
Weather notwithstanding, government helicopters and planes continue to fly over regularly so that I will feel safe. Thank you, America. I think.
See, I live close to an international border, and GW. likes to keep an eye on our strategic sileage stockpiles. Meanwhile, on a nearby road which parallels the boundary (which for some reason the DEA hasn't discovered yet), suitcases filled with ganja and money go flying back and forth like tennis volleys in the night. Every so often a farmer on our side* lucks out when one of them busts open, provided he gets there before the rightful owners or the livestock do (cows will eat bud. Got milk?)
You know how in crime neighborhoods the quickie marts sell shit like roses in glass tubes and butane cans? Well around here, what they sell is mini maglites. TONS of them. No streetlights out in the middle of a pasture. Hard to see. And so, on any given summer night, on one side of the road theres a bunch of people named Vanderveen and Buizenhoffer tiptoeing through the cow flops in the darkness with their little flashlights harvesting unwanted samsonite bags, while on the-we'll call it 'Rabbitsford'- side of the road, (and you can see this clearly from my backyard) there'll be huge police chases taking place with gunfire and the whole shizzmafuck. Later on you can go inside and watch the same incident on To Serve and Protect. Thats Cheese COPS, for those of you unwise in the ways of the wily Canadien.
I won't be moving in the forseeable future, though. Well, fuck; it'd take more than that, for sure. ..I have a great house sitting on four city lots that I have filled with beautiful flowering plants. Out my bedroom window I can watch eagles add limbs to the nest they've been building in the same tree for the past five years. This thing is half the size of a Volkswagen by now. They fledge at least two eaglets out of it every year. Theres a creek two blocks from my front door. It runs through the center of town (or the handful of business that we refer to as town, anyway.) In the gloaming you can watch coyotes slinking along the waterside using the creekbed as their highway. Trumpeter swans and great blue herons feed there. In the spring huge salmon come schooling up from the ocean. I mean, right through the center of town, two blocks from my front door.
This isn't wilderness, though...it's dairy country. My neibors still live on small farms and raise chickens and sell weaner pigs and butcher their own beef in the field. You see rural France touted as this giant paradise for foodies, but this is the middle of heaven. Homemade cheeses made in real homes, for the love of God. Duck eggs. Quail. Game. Organic everything. Everything.
In August, nearly every road is a jungle pathway through huge fields of feed corn. One year for a surprise I took my daughter out in the middle of the night to watch the Perseiid meteor shower. We sat on the trunk of the car and watched streaks of stars falling for hours. Coming back late one night we even saw Northern Lights. I pulled over and turned off the car, and we could hear them. Imagine that.

*On their side, they luck out even better. They get beautiful, green, untraceable cash that buys 1/3 more baby wipes at Zellers. Although theirs is prettier.

Wherein I decide this blogging thing is so much fun, I'll go for two.

Can you tell I have cabin fever?
It's been raining for 27 days straight. Actually its been raining here for thirty days straight; but the national news, in its wisdom, has declared that if it doesn't happen in a major city then it simply doesn't happen. So anyway, what with watching a one-year-old and living out in the ass slap of nowhere I get out of the house on the average of once a week during the winter months. This sucks.
On the other hand, it leaves me with lots of spare time on my hands as long as nobody needs a diaper. I have wallpapered my dining room and part of a bedroom with sheet music, which looks pretty snazzy, I have made some nice abstract collages, I have read some books and I have spent some time on the internet. I have also had a lot of time to think about things. And you, gentle reader, reap the benefit.
Comes article the second:

I LIKE FOOD
I see that lately 'bacon' has become something of a trend reference, and I have nothing but good feelings towards bacon boosters. Bacon is particularly good. After all, its a food. And food is good.
Many people, mainly female ones, fear bacon. Probably because of a. the fat, b. the salt c. the nitrates d. it's made of pig and pigs are icky. I don't. I fear no fat, including my own. There exists not one calorie or carbohydrate that I eschew. This is not to say that I have an athletes metabolism-just that I've stopped caring, and it stopped being a problem, weirdly enough. I have only been on one serious diet in my life and after losing 10 pounds I said 'fuck this, I want a goddamn ice cream cone.' Am I built like Kate Moss? Oh Christ no. Never have been. But the point is that when I fianlly decided that I liked to eat more than I wanted to look like Kate Moss, I didn't automatically start shovelling pasta unstoppably into myself like a salmon conveyor. I weigh something like 185, and I look fine.
Heres the deal. I'm not a six year old boy. I am a middle aged woman. Period. And while other women are weighing cod filets, all the world is open to me, the whole good world of food. I eat precisely what I want; when I'm full I stop and if I want more I get more. Sometimes I even cook using that most dreaded of all substances... chicken fat, y'all-the 'fattiest of all the fats' according to Richard Simmons.
Have some broccoli, Richard. No really. You can eat all the broccoli you want.
I remember the very first morbidly obese person I ever saw; I was 12 and we were at Disneyland. Remember 'Pearl' from the first Blade movie? Yeah. So there we were waiting in line to go on the submarine ride....her chins spread out onto her shoulders and rested on her boobs, her boobs hung to her stomach, one down either side of it like a pair of rubber bota bags, and her stomach hung to her knees and daddled about out from under her blouse like a big, red, flubby scrotum.
I didn't see another one (a morbidly obese person, geeze) until I was in my 20's. And then suddenly, they were everywhere. I don't mean people with glandular disorders or people taking cortisone or people who are just built big-I mean people who have invested serious time and money into doing this to themselves and who now look like a pile of ambulatory tits.
Tell me why. What is the attraction in stuffing oneself like a dog at the dump, as though next week the entire world was going to STOP PRODUCING GROCERIES? For fucks sakes; eating too much hurts.
Yeah, I'm a heartless cunt, right? Thats aside the point.
See, according to the literature on the subject, I grew up with all the psychological issues that morbidly obese people have, minus the avoirdupois. And it came to pass that those issues finally landed me in group therapy with five other women, all of whom had stated issues with overeating and weight. And yet during the entire year I was there not one of them brought up the subject. Yet they were the first ones to take offense; we would go out for lunch and they were cutting their eyes around and imagining insults everywhere, going on at great length about how ashamed it all made them feel. But God HELP you if you finished your meal; they'd blush and look down and titter and smirk. I had no idea what their problem was for the longest time, but apparently in their eyes, my not leaving half a sandwich on my plate equalled being a rude, obnoxious, gluttonous pig. I was the only one who never went home with a doggy bag. I was also the only one who a. wasn't morbidly obese, and b. didnt have a BACK SEAT FULL OF CRUMPLED DOGGIE BAGS. Now tell me, what the fuck is that??
See, now I'm hungry. More later.