life. death. saturated fat.

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

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

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

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

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

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





Have a Happy Easter, won't you?

The Horrible Grey Rhino King Is Hell's Messenger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mystery solved.

all hyped up and nowhere to spazz

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

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

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

I crank myself up. I know.

Why can't he just be better?

Wikipedia refuses to post this. I am bummed.

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

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

FIELD GUIDE TO LOW-INCOME WHITEY
profusely illustrated

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







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















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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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











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

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





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

corruption at the highest levels

Actually it was more like corrosion at about waist-height. Our internet connection has been down, and having ascertained that the problem lay within the walls of rancho FirstNations and not at the server end of things, the yummy biker removed a chunk of sheetrock and revealed a phone jack dissolving into a solid chunk from sheer age and damp climate. Now things are back to (as) normal (as it ever gets around here.)

I have gardened. I have mown; yeah verily I have weedwhacked, trimmed and edged. I have done so with great vigor, with careless abandon, with no thought for the fact that I am no longer 30. Therefore, I hurt. This has lead me to prescribe one order of spaghetti alla marinara, 5 ciders, two naproxin, and one acetominophin for myself. And I was feeling somewhat better.

And I was still feeling somewhat better right up until my father-in-law, the playboy of the western world, called. 20mg. valium was added to the medication rota. More than likely another 20mg. will follow.

He is in the hospital again. The emergency ward. For dizziness. Again. Oh, he's fine. Again.
Then we got a phone call from the friend who took him to the emergency ward. The story changed.

He had a stroke. His second one. Those dizzy spells? Were cerebral incidents. Yeah.
So tomorrow we have to go visit him and try to hammer something out concerning assisted living-whether home or in a facility. What I'd like to hammer is somebody right onto a log placed across the path of a speeding elevator.

This is not going to be fun. One man minimizes or outright lies about his physical condition so as not to get in the way or whatever the fuck his excuse is-personally I think it's vanity-and the other man, his son, avoids any kind of difficult interpersonal situation the way I avoid Fundamentalist Christians. Then you have me, someone who was so traumatized by the treatment her grandmother received during her decline that I still cannot talk about it. And somehow I have to make those two jackass men sit down and forge out a plan of action taking into account all those favorite manly topics like the inevitable decline of health, death sooner rather than later, the inability to take care of ones basic needs, money, property, legal issues, selling the house, fuck fuck fuck.

Then of course there's that whole bargeload of unfinished business between father and son about father being, oh, GAY and everything. And not discreetly small-town gay either. Full on. No excuses, no regrets, young men in and out at all hours at the house and even up in the hospital room. (My father in law rocks so hard!!!!!!!!!!) So that just puts the ketchup on that order of fries, doesn't it?

YAY!
I am so out of my depth.
I am so PROFOUNDLY out of my depth.

If it was just me dealing with fil, no problem. I am an a to b type of person. Kind of like Harvey Keitel was in Pulp fiction. Quilts on the back seat, rinse off under the hose, car sent off to be reincarnated as Furby parts; problem solved. But add one more player and it becomes the dance of the seven fucking veils with everyone avoiding the subject at hand as though it were the plague. And its kind of a serious subject, y'all. So if I play the responsible party here I have to keep the conversation on track and thereby come off as a nagging bitch. (Admittedly no stretch.)

Remember how ol' Harvey caught a lot of snipey bullshit from Chilli and Fro Guy after everything was fixed? Yup. Once you've sorted everyone shit out, is there gratitude? Are you thanked? Do people say "Bless you, you magnificent example of womanly strength? No, you are resented for making everybody face the mean old unpleasant nasty thing.

Actually what I just described is motherhood. So never mind; I guess I can handle this.

Get a goddamn grip; or, Reality part deaux

ECCO STROPHION!!!!!

This image was pulled from Ebay and shows us a man in the act of exhibiting one of my bras for public inspection.

Actually no. But I think he may have just removed it. And his pants too for some odd reason. Perhaps the weather is a tad sultry where he is. (We will cling to this assumption like barnacles to a rock anyway.) Now in order to make this tatty old bra that much more saleable, he could have upped the ante by describing all the little floaty spots you can see drifting around as ' spirit orbs' and by claiming that this bra is haunted.

But no. I quote from the sellers' description: "Sorry about the spotty picture".

Whatever else he may have (we refuse to speculate) this hairy, naked guy selling a bra has INTEGRITY.

"See! Our superior spookiness has attracted a powerful phantom ally! You cannot defeat our SPOOKY FU!!!"

This photo was posted on a ghost site. We are helpfully provided with two red arrows which point to the terrifying circular anomaly hovering above Bad Devine and Premenstrual Woman(apparently Scary Bathrobe doesn't rate supernatural hoverage.)

Now, what I find most disturbing about this picture is that there appears to be a great weight pressing down on their house which is bending the wall over on the right there like a banana. I think that they missed the REAL picture. I think while they were busy immortalizing their Dungeons and Dragons personnaE a BIG HONKIN UFO LANDED ON THE ROOF. And what would have totally kicked ass bigtime is, if what happened next is that they all started melting and smoking and getting big gross blisters from UFO radioactivity and then some landing gantry things came spearing down from overhead and skewered them like a trio of costumed Ball Park Franks. Now THAT would have been a cool picture.

I used to play around with hobby photography and darkroom stuff. This type of thing just makes me rabid. Ladies and gentlemen, its not a ghost. It's common household dust.

Now maybe Naked Guy spilled the urn containing Aunt Rita and didn't get all of her out of the carpet. Or maybe he lives atop an Ancient Indian Burial Ground. Lord knows, America teems with these; we have to fly our deceased around in airplanes because the ground is so goddamn full of dead Indians. In any event, even if what we are seeing in that picture is particulate human, it is still DUST. And God bless him, Bra Dude may be naked, he may have bad panelling, and he may even be kinda icky when everything is said and done, but the man knows the difference between shit that doesn't exist and a dirty lens.

muk at the movies

My first movie review! My little heart is going pitty pat!
To see another, more inclusive review of the same movie by a man who knows his film, go here http://www.wyndhamtriffid.blogspot.com/

The yummy biker and I rented out "Capote' since we were intrigued by the notion of someone attempting to portray such an off the wall personality, and we have liked the work of Phillip Hoffman in the past. The contrast between the role he plays in 'Patch Adams" with the one he played in 'Boogie Nights' is a good example of why. They're both types, but not played as stereotypes.

This is exactly how he handles the character of Truman Capote. That had to be like trying to cross Niagra falls on a tightrope.

I have a living memory of Truman Capote. As a kid, I was fascinated by him and made it a point to catch him on all the interview shows. He was bizarre. (And well into pills and booze by this time, so compound the bizarre factor by four.) You just can't imagine how a personality like his looked to the average person in the 1960's. And yet how interesting he was to listen to; and how much you ended up liking the man! And that despite a truckload of traits which are still considered very real drawbacks in a media personality. He was male, but NOT manly. He was not handsome. Poor man, I don't think he had a handsome day in his life; he was even a funny looking kid. He was short. He was round. He had tiny foetal baby features set in a squashed, weak-chinned head, and he was swanny as hell. And that voice. Fingernails on a blackboard, a whining child with a bad cold, a whinny, a bleat....those only come close. Back in 1969 they were unforgiveable sins. And yet there he was. And you liked him.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays him to perfection. Simply perfection. The voice. the turn of phrase. Stoned, sober, everything in between. He has every nuance down perfectly, right down to the odd breathing noises that Capote used to punctuate his conversation. The walk. The puckered forehead. Sitting and standing. The languid wave of the hand that hesitates in midair, and then wanders up to scratch the head...I have never seen an acting job quite like this. There is not once false note.

It is all the more remarkable yet for its having been held in restraint. Capote in person was a much more vivid character even in his subdued moments. Hoffman plays him at about 3/4 brightness. It's an acting job you can almost measure in inches, yet it flows and it rings absolutely true. This movie could very easily have ended up as the 'Look at Truman' show. That is what Capote's life was, after all, yet that point's made very clear by the movie as a whole, not just by Hoffmans portrayal.

The entire movie is done in subdued tones in order to point up whats at play here: the mirroring of a deeply flawed charactor in an unexpected surface, and the reaction to that image. They do it well.

In fact, where there are flaws, the error was on the side of restraint. The connecting scenes are almost like watching paint dry. A lot of the lead in tone is interminable. And why some scenes didn't end up on the floor of the cutting room eludes me. They seem to have been retained just to make the movie seem arty. Capote answering a phone. Capote lying on a bed while another man walks past with a box. Capote standing by a desk. And then there are those Kansas cornfield shots, as Wyndham points out in justifiable exasperation. Hell yes, already, it's Kansas; we get it. Alienation. Emptiness. Americas bleak heart. Fine.

The film also suffers from an excess of tinkly single note piano playing to remind us that this is a drama, dammit...the aural version of the cornfield shot. Whenever we cut away to a scene in New York we are suddenly assaulted by loud jazz and conversation, and again, I get it. We're in civilization now.

That's all I can come up with to complain about concerning the movie itself. Worth watching. A good erudite college date movie with espresso and conversation afterward kinda movie.

My only other complaint is that I do have a living memory of Truman Capote, because that knowlege rather got in the way of my enjoyment of the picture on it's own merits. If someone who doesn't, say, oh, NOSHIT SHERLOCK, were to watch this film and then give it a critique, I think that would be awesome. Consider yourself tagged, my darling.

the type of people who give liberal hippie scum like me a bad name.

Today is the opening day of the farmers market season in Bellingham. The Stainless Steel Amazon and I are planning on making it a 'girls only' affair, and the goonybird gets to have a male bonding day with the yummy biker.

But there is a cloud on the horizon of this day, a little hairy cloud named Emily.

Emily is the phobic, whining, twat that married 'my' cousin, the supercilious prick. Thumbnail sketch: 'My' cousin ran for city treasurer a couple of years ago, a position which I have to admit he was well qualified for. Not only that; his opponent was pretty much just a high school kid with a notary seal. And she won by a landslide. Nobody voted for him. He is not likeable. And remember, this is the country that made Howard Stern a rich man.

How do you describe Emily?

For years she worked for the NEW YORK TIMES (fanfare) where she was shop steward for the union, making graphs. She moved here and got a job on the local newspaper where she worked for fifteen years and was shop steward for the union, making graphs. Recently she bought a share in, and is the editor in chief of, the floundering local Liberal newspaper, which has no union, and where her vast journalistic background in making graphs has paid off in hard hitting editorials about subjects nobody remotely cares about, with lots of graphs.

This is a woman who, when she first met me, bragged about having been able to 'pass' as a straight Christian all her life when in actuality she is a gay Jew. (What lead her to marry a straight irish catholic, one wonders? Particularly the one she chose? And why brag about it to a stranger you know is related to the man? It is a mystery, like the chupacabra, but with more hair.)

She followed up that statement with the SHOCKING LEFTY REVELATION -at least it had to have been to a simple country turd like me, right?- 'You know, back in NEW YORK our babysitter was GAY. And a MAN. And he was BLACK, too."

WOW!

OMIGOD!

Emily! You are SO LIBERAL! THATS TRIPLE POINTS!!!

So anyway, family issues of a vicious, revolting nature rear their ugly heads, sides are taken accusations are made, letters and phone calls fly back and forth and finally I make break with them all. And that is all. Just, 'the end.' Goodbye. No more contact of any kind. None. Nada.

That was 19 years ago. Time moves on.

Except not for Emily. Emily, who was only on the utter periphery of this affair but took up arms despite that like a woolly little Hun. Emily, who hardly knows me.

Well, how dare I indeed? I can't just run around all acting like I have self-respect; all choosing who I will and will not associate with like I'm somebody and all! I'm just a simple country turd! I drive a compact car! I HAVE to associate with her until SHE says otherwise! SHE is from NEW YORK!!

I'm going to gloss things over here and just say that her misdeeds are legion, and tawdry, and her cheap antics at one point became a therapy issue for my daughter *. The woman is, frankly, bizarre. And there I will let that matter rest.

..........except to say that if you are at the beach and you spy Emily in the distance coming towards you wearing a bathing suit, cover your childrens eyes and RUN THE OPPOSITE WAY. You do not ever want to see Emily wearing a bathing suit. Or shorts. Not even long shorts. Not any kind of shorts. Ever. Ever.

No. I do not like Emily.

This being opening day of the Farmers Market, Emily is very likely to be in attendance. What, and miss the first big event of the Granola year? Unthinkable! Plus she has to be there to record it for posterity now, too, I suppose.

God help both of us if I see her hairy little face. I'll fucking break it.

*until my daughter tore the bitch a new asshole to match the one in the center of her furry forehead. if you ever wondered why I refer to my daughter as the Stainless Steel Amazon, wonder no more.

at least it isn't shuk yon.

My yummy biker has been diagnosed with deviant Buford syndrome.
is this:

a. a medical condition caused by eating fried pork rinds at a Klan meeting
b. a medical condition caused by shouting 'WHOOOO-EEEE!' through the bathroom door at your mother
c. a medical condition caused by swerving your Harley in order to see how far you can kick a possum
d. a pathological lesion of the glenoid labrum, a triangular fibrocartilaginous structure that serves to deepen the glenoid
e. a medical condition caused by your first cousins' five 'o clock shadow


the answer is b.

He'll be going though physical therapy. Eventually he's going to end up with a permanent suture which ought to be giant heaving heaps o'fun for all involved. Poor guy. Send vicodin.

I'm just about the only person I know who isnt in physical therapy now.



update-
dang, folks, he'll live! (you are nice.)
I've already received a phone call about this. deviant buford syndrome is an injury to a piece of cartilage in your shoulder. its nothing so serious as a rotator cuff injury, even, but it makes it hard to reach overhead without pain. its only about this __ long.
sorry.

oo! i have the b manuscript too!

While some are born to serve the Lord and, some are born to battle, I am born to garden. That is my vocation. I'd say I have a green thumb, but that doesn't go nearly far enough and could lead to a series of unfortunate but tempting analogies concerning green body parts. Still, if I lived in a climate that permitted it, I would garden all year and live outdoors, right smack dab in the middle of it all in one of those southwest chikee hut things (with plumbing.) In total abject poverty, gnawing on a carrot and starving for want of food with a face, but doing so in the middle of a bitchin stand of delphinium x var. chinensis 'Blue Mirror'.

Yes, this could very easily become a gardening blog for the next few months. I'm making no promises. I'm already guilty of referring to plants by their botanical names in casual conversation, which I know annoys non-gardeners to tears. But they roll off the tongue so mellifluously! hemerocallis lillioasphoedelus! lonicera japonica! papaver betonicafolia! plus you can Google:Image the name and see exactly what I'm talking about better than if I said ditchlilly, honeyjasmine, poppy.

Now, after all that having been said, I have to admit that lately I have been doing just about zero in the garden. Yeah, after spending all winter bitching about how I just HAD to get outside or I'd go nuts.

Last year I put gardening to one side because we were all busy rearranging our lives around the new addition, Mr. Goonybird. And lets be honest- its more fun to play with a sweet dumpling baby than it is to turn compost, though some of the aromas produced are similar.
This spring I am paying for that. Bigtime. Oh hell yeah, bigtime...I put on 20 lbs right off the bat because I kept eating like I was digging ditches when all I was doing was gazing in adoration at the sweet baby. While chomping on a burrito.

So this spring I look out onto beds where last years cobby old stems are still nodding. Grass is growing in lush hummocks out of the middle of my groundcovers. The HENBIT OF DOOM is still there, laughing, mocking me, despite it being exactly the right time to yank it out and stomp it and set it on fire and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh

So today, while the 'bird is napping, I will go outside and do some long-overdue housekeeping. I promise.
(update2:30pm .....and i did, too. yay!)


Now a little blog housekeeping.
Check my link. If I submitted it, I may very well have put in the wrong url. It's supposed to be
1hplovecraft.blogspot.com
Thanks to Piggy for the headsup!

i explain reality

Some folks out there (not you, my darlings) are continuing to experience problems making that big emotional leap from 'It's SO OBVIOUS that the X Files was real but the government forced them to write it like fiction' to 'There is no Laura Croft really, but I will manage somehow.'

But hey, don't feel bad, you pathetic dork, I am here to help you! So sit down, shut up and let dear old First Nations root around in your brain with a stick.


See, there are things that are true, and there are things that are not. No matter how hard you try to make an untrue thing true, it never will be, no matter how elaborate the buttress of lies you erect around it. The only thing that you will make is yourself look like a moron.

Now. Bearing that in mind, repeat after me:

1. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS VAMPIRES.

Question: How goddamn lacking in self esteem do you have to be to run around in white pancake makeup and fake fangs like Eddie Fucking Munster? Answer: Pretty goddamn lacking. But you are different? You really drink blood? Well gosh, why didn't you say so in the first place? That is SO COOL! Now go slap yourself across the face and drink a gallon of tetracycline you pathetic retard. Congratulations! You're a plague vector. I bet your mom is proud.

2. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FAIRIES

Or Sidhe, angels, elementals, fauns, genie, peris, dryads, naiids, leprechauns, cluricauns, any cauns, kahunas, gnomes, kobolds, ghouls (except for Pickmans' Model; in fact, everything Lovecraft wrote was taken directly from personal experience because I said so) Bigfoot, Mothman, Boogieman, or Stick Indians. Even if they talk to you. That happens because you need 1. Interests other than World of Warcraft and 2. MAOI inhibitors. Fast. Now. Run.

3. YOU DO NOT HAVE PICTURES OF GHOSTS.

It's not a vortex, it's not ectoplasm, and its not an orb, it's you not knowing how to operate a camera, fuckwit. Yes, it would be cool if it were a ghost, but ghosts are bullshit and we can't all be ballerinas, either.

4. THE DEAD DO NOT SPEAK THROUGH PSYCHICS.

The dead are dead. They don't do anything anymore. Psychics? Take Sylvia Brown (please? somebody?) If she could really attract ghosts, wouldn't an aethric Versace have beaten her to death with a handbag by now?

5. YOU DO NOT HAVE AN INDIAN SPIRIT GUIDE. You can have a TV Guide, You can have a Michelin Guide, and in the UK you can even have a Girl Guide. You cannot have an indian spirit guide. You can have a disassociative personality disorder caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, though. **

6. ASTROLOGY IS JUST, NO. PLEASE. JUST NO.

7. AND DON'T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON FENG SHUI.

My bitchy, innapropriate, rude ex-sister-in-law, rather than seek real help for her many problems, instead paid some lemming to come in and Feng Shui her house. Yes indeedy, that's a little lemming who laughed all the way to the bank that day.


8. OUIJA BOARDS ARE CREEPY.

...and this Halloween I will tell you my creepy, true ouija board story. Now, do I think it's Phil Spector making the planchette move? No. But...

9. RELIGION? GOTTA AGREE WITH MARX.

Offended? Stop reading me immediately. Honestly. I mean it. You will not like it here. Don't forget to pick up your Rice a Roni on the way out.

THERE!
Yew are cleansed!
The eeeeeevil has left you!
Now go fowerth, brothers and sisters, and THINK!!!!

I mean really, for the love of fuck.



* I blame Anne Rice. No really, I do. I just want to puke when an interviewer jokingly asks "Was 'Interview With The Vampire' real?" and she acts all coy like 'oo, if I say too much the Talamasca will put a hit on me!'

**Why do people think that dead Native Americans have nothing better to do with their afterlife than hang around with fat white women who dropped out of high school?

***'Ex Sister-In-Law and the Delusions of Entitlement' would make a sweet-ass name for a band, wouldn't it?

CSI Sumas

Well, we made it through yesterday in one piece. Seems to have been just a bug after all. The forensic evidence follows.....

1. Instead of lying on the couch all day and subjecting me to the spectacle of his misery, he WENT TO BED. In the bedroom. And slept.
In the early stages of diabetic wierdness, he lies on the couch all day moaning and yet insisting nothing is wrong and that he's not acting defensive...defensively, and scowling and talking to you as soon as you're out of earshot and then pouting when you ask him to repeat himself. Occasionally he'll get up with his hair all sticking out like Astro Boy and stumble off to the bathroom holding one side of his stomach as though his liver were migrating. Where he spends 45 minutes making odd noises, reading magazines and snarling when someone asks if he's going to be much longer. Then it's back to the couch for another round of 'how long can I irritate my wife before she puts me out on the curb in a heftybag? IN PIECES?'

2. He actually took pain medication. For pain. *
Instead of bitching all day about having a (headache, backache, toenail ache...) and then getting all defensive (and denying it) when you ask him if he's taken any asprin.

3. He barfed. The clincher! Not a person who just goes around chunking up chow on a whim, he.

Now, I play this for laughs here, but actually it's not funny. It flat fucking sucks to have to keep second and third guessing the actions of someone you respect like a spy, particularly when you know they're not feeling well. On the other hand, the suckage factor goes way up when you have a 250 lb biker who benches 300 lbs undergoing a diabetic event in your house wandering at large and hallucinating. Its just not fun. Getting said into the car to go to the emergency room is not fun. Keeping him in the car is not fun. Having him check the speedometer every fifteen seconds to see if you're speeding is not fun.
Now don't go getting all worried and shit. That only happened once, ten years ago. I'm just venting off some excess paranoia. But keep us in your thoughts, won't you, because I just may take a baseball bat to him yet.


* just poopy old naproxin, dammit. wheres the fucking vicodin? someone call keith richards for me.

For sale cheap: biker, used, stretched front end, wide glide, custom paint.

This morning finds me stuck at home with TWO children...the goonybird, who has as his excuse lack of years, and the yummy biker, who has NO EXCUSE WHATSOEVER.
Now before you go rolling your eyes and saying "oh geeze, another man-hating 'guys are such children when they're sick' thing" let me just say that this is a 'yummy bikers with Monday-itis make me want to set shit on fire' thing.

Actually, let me qualify that further. The yummy biker has diabetes. Diabetes that is inoxerably making its way from type II 'everybody thinks this can be cured with diet' to type I 'blindness, foot amputation, running sores'. It's genetic. Runs in his family. He could be an uber-healthy kenyan marathoner who subsists on a diet of air and spirulina and it would make no difference.

One of the side effects of diabetes in men is depression. In his case it manifests itself by turning a normally wonderful person into Satan's three-year old boy. This is not an exaggeration, my darlings. I wish it were. He gets phantom stomach aches, gets weekenditis and mondayitis, sulks, pouts, refuses to go to bed...yeah.

Any change in his body chemistry is presaged by odd behavior. He becomes absolutely convinced that we are broke. (remember the last time that happened? He needed his meds adjusted bigtime, turns out.) He also does this thing where he settles in on the sofa for the evening and becomes COMPLETELY INERT. He kind of semi-dozes, semi-watching tv and semi-paying atention. Meanwhile the goonybird could be making long distance calls or butt-naked, chasing the evil dogs with a chainsaw...but if it doesn't happen to cross his line of vision, he takes no notice whatsoever.

Which for some reason makes me blisteringly pissed.

Even though I know its not that big a deal. Still. When he's howling like a bad shakespearian actor for the bazillionth time that day because the goonybird smacked him in the 'nads with a book again, you just want to heave them both out in front of a silage truck.

Heres the problem.

Maybe this isn't Mondayitis.

Maybe he really does have a bug. God knows it's going around.

Or maybe it's not.

Fuck.

quaint vignettes from my rural idyll

IT IS SPRING!
I have daffodils. I have vinca. I have snowdrop and crocus (somewhere) and best of all, I have a wreath of gentle, fragrant clematis armandii around my front window framing my little slice o' paradise.
I also have moles. No, not personal moles, you zany madcap person who is wacky, lawn type moles. Moles overrunning and undertunnelling my front and back yard. Moles chewing through the tether holding the water meter housing in. Moles burrowing around in my flowerbeds. Moles making little volcanoes everywhere.
Last year when this situation first began I decided to put the hose down one of the mole tunnels and turn it on full blast. Up washed a mole on a column of water, just like in a cartoon. The cutest, snubby, chubby, velvet soft little animal you ever saw, just like a hamster wearing catchers mitts.
As soon as he hit the grass he was off again digging away. I picked the little guy up by the tail and he just kept on furiously digging away in midair.
Awwwww!
So I let him go in the hay field across the street.
This year, everyone on Front Street has moles.

Yesterday the guy across the street ran the mechanical Opie around on his property. This is a chubby, hindslung tank full of strained cowshit that drives around and around spraying seagull food behind it in a great fan, like a peacocks tail. Guess what my house smells like this morning? Patchouli incense. 15 tons of patchouli incense. With more on the fire even as we speak.

Springtime means time to mow. Now I finally put my foot down after living here for a year and demanded a riding lawnmower because 1. our property comprises four city lots, and 2. I am 45 and I DESERVE A GODDAMN RIDING LAWNMOWER. Which at present sits unused and dead of battery in the shed. Meanwhile, the grass is getting tall and lush. I may have to hire a stout young native with a machete and a good knowlege of the forest before I venture out again. In fact I may do that anyway.
(Yahoo! Last minute update! The yummy biker just this moment got the rider going! They're playing my song!)

Across the back fence from my yard is the community soccer field. Right now it is covered with gulls, overflow crowd attracted by the green rain of food across the street. And in that flurry of white and gray there is one black spot. A crow. A crow with romance on his mind. And the object of his affections is a gull.
This little drama gets played out every year. To me, adult gulls look identical. But for some reason this poor crow singles out a lady gull and follows her and her alone for days, bowing and cawing and strutting and offering her nightcrawlers the size of anacondas. He has even tried to mount her. She just dips her bottom and steps around him. And this is the treatment he receives every year. But hope apparently springs eternal in the corvid breast.
Is it spring where you are? ( Oh, well, for the love of Mike of course it is. But does it show?)

I couldn't resist! I had all these great songs saved!

This one goes out in honor of Noshit Sherlock, my top coon. Wielding a disciplinary spoon and living with her cheddar-abusive sister in the land of the wily waka-rere-rangi*, Ms. Noshit survives in apparent self-sufficence despite her tender years, performing singlehandedly all the necessary household tasks and simultaneously playing a number of wind instruments. One assumes the neibors who are aware of this fact are buried in the back yard under the kiwi vine, a' la Jodi Foster in 'The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane'. She attends Miskatonic University along with Our Saviour, Jesus, his twin brother James, and any number of fun-loving lesbians who play rugby and drink a lot. Ms. Noshits' favorite beverage is one which has the word 'proof' on the label. Do visit this amazing prodigal here at http://drivingthebustohell.blogspot.com/ but be nice, or I'll find you and hurt you. And your dog. In fact I think I'll kick the shit out of your grandmother too if I can catch the old sow.

THE NOSHIT POST

....................Last night was dark. Today finds me full posession of my faculties once again, dammit. I keep trying, but nobody wants to lend me their fish.
"In the morning
Laughing, happy Fish Heads
In the evening
Floating in the soup
Ask a Fish head
Anything you want to
They won't answer
They can't talk
I took a Fish head
Out to see a movie
Didn't have to pay
To get it in"
Fishheads, by some group

I hit my sister thirteen times today with the rear bumper off a Buick but she still wouldn't shut up about the flies. Wwhy do the flies keep annoying me? I don't like the flies. Make the flies go away.
I know they're watching.
And waiting.
" Oh Lydia, oh Lydia, say, have you met Lydia?
Lydia The Tattooed Lady.
She has eyes that folks adore so,
and a torso even more so.
Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclo-pidia.
Oh Lydia The Queen of Tattoo.
On her back is The Battle of Waterloo.
Beside it, The Wreck of the Hesperus too.
And proudly above waves the red, white, and blue.
You can learn a lot from Lydia!
La-la-la...la-la-la.
La-la-la...la-la-la. "
Lydia the Tattooed Lady, the Marx Brothers

The dogs. The dogs. The dogs. The dogs. The dogs. The dogs. The dogs. The dogs.
The dogs. The dogs. The dogs. The dogs. The dogs. The dogs. The dogs. The dogs.
"smelly cat, smelly cat
what are they feeding you?
smelly cat, smelly cat
it's not your fault
they won't take you to the vet,
you're obviously not their favorite pet.
you may not be a bed of roses,
you're no friend to those with noses
smelly cat, smelly cat
what are they feeding you?
smelly cat, smelly cat,
it's not your fault"
Smelly Cat, by that goofy broad on Friends

I met my friends outside the emergency room and we all ran in and pushed over all the wheelchair people. We switched catheter bags with Ringers' lactate. We sang foul ditties and smeared food on the walls of the cafeteria. Later, we wondered why. We wondered why.
"I woke up this morning with a bad hangover
and my penis was missing again.
This happens all the time:
it's detachable.
This comes in handy a lot of the time:
I can leave it home when I think it's going to get me in trouble,
or I can rent it out
when I don't need it.
But now and then I go to a party, get drunk, and the next morning
I can't for the life of me
remember what I did with it."
Detachable Penis, Primus

Tomorrow I will go to school the same as always. I long for the day when my kind will rise again, up from the primordial slime and muck which shrouds the bed of the obsidian-dark fathoms, up from below the leaden grey and icy waves of the ocean, up from the seaweed-garlanded spires and temples where once the Elder gods were worshipped in their foulness......until then, i wait.
No, wait.
I mean, I wonder if Billy will let me copy his homework?
Geeze, what comes over me?


* translated: airplane. they're untrustworthy however you look at it but never moreso than on newzealands' soil.

Bread

Today I am making bread (and actually I should be proofing the dough right now.)
Baking used to be something that I found difficult, but in the last five years I've become something of a dab hand at it. I think once I let go of the scientific method and started going by feel is when it all came to me.

Most baking books preach absolute precision. You must rigorously measure and weigh and temp and dither and worry. Now, that's in disregard of the fact that perfectly lovely bread was being produced for centuries before it even occurred to anyone to invent clothes. My grandmother (fully clothed) made it in a zinc tub and baked it in a wood stove 'until it smelled done.' Guys in the Klondike made it in a hide bag they wore on their belly under their shirts. And once you've sat back and entertained THAT mental picture for a moment or two, you never look at a loaf of sourdough bread the same way.

If I didn't have a Cuisinart (a robocoupe) my shit would be sunk, though. Not only for bread, though. I use that sapsucker at least once a day; in fact I've chainsawed my way through three so far. I'm on #4, and #5 is waiting in the cupboard for its debut. Fork blending? Yeah, right. Kiss my what?

I love the smell of the ingredients. A nice egg, a little yogurt, water, yeast, the flour, the sugar and salt...they all have a perfume. And I love to handle the dough. I knead with my eyes closed, going mainly by feel to determine when enough is enough or things are too sticky or need dampening up.

Bread dough as it begins to work is a magic substance. Warmth begins to flow from it as the strands of gluten lengthen and the structure becomes silky. It's the same warmth a baby gives off when it's sleeping on your chest. A fragrance like heaven must smell early in the morning (when Jimi Hendrix is making toast) rises in little wisps as you turn and fold and turn and fold.

I make a french-style loaf once a week just for a giant hoagie sandwich dinner. So that all the goodies and yummies will fit and not squit out the sides, I tear out some of the fluff with a fork. For the rest of the evening the Yummy Biker and the Goonybird sneak into the kitchen and pick at the 'bread guts' for a snack and feel like they're getting away with something.

This is one of the priceless pleasures in life. Bill Gates has nothing I want.

hassled by the man

Not one to pattyfoot around, I emphasize the following:
hey! yeah, you! leave a fucking comment! It's mandatory now! Thats right! House A' Pain, baby!

I had to appear in district court yesterday for a mitigation hearing. Remember back when I went dashing up to the Stainless Steel Amazons's house to pick up the Goonybird (out of the kindness and generosity of my heart and a genuine concern for the welfare of my grandson because I am a woman with a beautiful soul) and got stopped by the cop? Yeah. He was kind enough to drop the speeding ticket-and I was flying low- but he felt compelled to cite me for the expired tabs*. That, I'm assuming, had something to do with the fact they had been expired for nearly half a year.
So anyway I had to show up in court at 8:30 a fucking m.
At the vestibule I get wanded in and pass through the metal detectors; fine. Then recall that I'm carrying a pocketknife on my keyring. Back I go to the security guard like a good little citizen. She examines the knife (sharper than madonnas tits, too-I use it to purloin cuttings.) "Oh no," she says, handing it back. " You can keep it. It has to be a little longer than this." Now the thought occurs to me to point out that the human heart lies a mere two inches behind the sternum, a plate of gristle easily punctured with a determined blow- and anyway you can kill somebody by sticking a pencil in their eye, and here I am wandering around at large in a public building with a cranium full of prozac and a knife for the love of fuck, but I decide not to. I am smart like that.
When it comes my turn for judgement I run a quick wedgie check (nope!) and then step up to the bar.
"I'd like to see your license" the judge states.
I rummage around in my purse and pull out my wallet. And the fucking zipper sticks. Bad enough; but the pull is a stupid skull with a rose in it's teeth. I'm trying to keep the judge from seeing that since I'm disguised as a responsible adult and I'd like to maintain that impression as long as I'm in the hands of the law. I managed to wriggle the vinyl thing holding all my cards out of the side of the wallet. The vinyl tears, and as all my identification and photographs go sliding across the bench I present my license to the judge.
"Oh,' he says. "I didn't want to see your license. I meant your license."
I pause. A small blood vessel in my brain begins to swell.
"Did you get them? he asks."
"I have a license", I chirp helpfully.
"I don't want to see your license. I mean your license", he says.
I shuffle through my papers as though I know exactly what this smiling busload of rectums is trying to get at. But then-
'Aha,' I realize. 'Not license. Buckwheat means 'tabs.'
"Oh, yes. The expired tabs, yes. I had new ones on the car 45 minutes after I received the ticket" I reply.
"Oh. Then I'm reducing your fine to 60.00"
He smiles all crinkly, obviously about to deliver himself of a bon mot. "Oh, and, by the way, nice license."

Plumb fuckin' eludes me, too.

* 'Tabs' are reflective stickers with a date you have to attach to the license plates of your car. They're due every few years. It's a form of extortion.

...a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that chocolate, lard, white sugar and caffeine are all health foods. and beer.

As the level of gleeg in my lungal regions decreases, my level of wanting to do things increases. Drawing of crows picking hideously at a severed head? check. (Turned out good, too.)
Dishes washed? check.
Hair tinted in a sad attempt to appear as though I HAVE hair? check.

Messers. Piggy and Tazzy get the tip o' the hat for todays post. Everyone go see http://www.tazzyandpiggy.com/nsfw/ right now and give them both a big ol' blow job, won't you?
Yes, that means you too.
P and T suggest....
"1. Blog about your deepest sexual fantasies,
2. or poo,
3. or that woman down the road that you don't like the look of,
4. or the person down the street that you DO like the look of.
5. Or how about telling us your thoughts as you masturbate?
6. Or even something as dull as your favourite socks?
7. What about that tattoo? Tell us about that!"

1. Geeze, guys, my daughter reads this.
.........Nyeh, so what!
My deepest sexual fantasy took place in Ape Caves National Park (you see the 'deep' connection here?) which was located on Mt. St. Helens, also making it the highest sexual fantasy I ever had. Having retreated to a small bell-cavern off the main tunnel to moke a doink, I briefly but vividly entertained vulvar visions of vaginas and full body fucking when I became temporarily lodged like a fat boy in the almond-shaped passage back out. Soon afterwards the entire mountain exploded. Coincidence?
2. Already done poo, and rather well I think. I promised another story concerning horses and dogs, though, and that one's in the works.
3. Did that too. But God knows that well aint dry.
4. Geeze, which direction? And how far down the road? In my little corner of heaven there are people I dislike, people I kind of dislike, people I tolerate occasionally and to date 5 people I actually like-like. (not counting you, my darlings.)
5. Who thinks? Do you think? Isn't that distracting? Are you suposed to think? Nobody told me. Now I'm all paranoid. Thanks.
6. Toe socks. They're like cozy little gloves for your feets. I like 'em.
7. Which one?

And thank you to everyone. I really felt like deep fried dogshit last week and you cheered me up.

the nation in review

In the breaking up stage of things today. I will spare you the descriptions.
-Oh all right; fine.
Ever had a fishtank? Think of the worst fishtank you have ever seen. No, worse than that.
...and hold that picture...
Thats it.
Yeah.
Thinking seriously about not doing the blog thing anymore. The weather is changing and I am turning my attentions to other things....That, and I feel 'all talked out'. I guess I have a limited need to communicate? I dunno. Ideas and suggestions and questions and stuff welcome.
But mostly, tissues.

state o' the nation

How am I?
You are adorable and kind to worry.
In answer, I only have two words:
banana slugs.
Send rum.
*stumbles back to her bed of pain*