the first word in methane is 'me', baby.

A lake of methane was just discovered on Titan; one of Saturns' moons.

In the name of the native Titanians and native peoples everywhere, I hereby christen this lake 'Lake Paul'.



hey wow! did you hear?
A methane lake on Titan is named after my blog!
I am so proud.

goodbye, refries, goodbye

In case you missed it, go here: http://www.hendrixcat.com/
thats her new url, so update your blogroll (do as i say, not as i do...yeah, yeah.)

Well, I have diabetes. Barely, but there ya go.
I don't doubt it for a moment. I was expecting this. The way I've been eating for the last 20 years? Shit, yes.
I do not regret one single moment.
No I don't.

What will I miss most?
Mostly, I will miss not having to worry.

I tell you what, though, I am not going to go around all penitential eating fucking ry-krisps and smacking myself in the head with a board. Food is a celebration and I damn well intend to see that it stays that way.

I'm going to have to learn a whole new repetoire of staple recipes. After all, the ones I have in my head now are what got me to this place! Does anybody have any suggestions for diabetic cookbooks? Particularly with Mexican and Italian recipes? Is there such a thing as a diabetes cookbook put out by a master chef? Jesus, if there is, let me know. I don't care if it's complicated; I can do complicated.

I got myself into this place; I'll damn well get myself out of it.


Because of the heat, I had to take the clippers and shave my poor girldog the other day. Poor wooly sheepie! She has Labrador retriever blood back there in the woodpile someplace so she has an undercoat like felt and a long topcoat to boot. I swear I don't know how one small animal could have so much hair. It was appalling! Now she feels better, though. Looks smaller, too. Lots smaller. And guess what; I'm not done yet. Oh yeah, I'm gonna be her BEST FRIEND.

We are gradually getting the Playboy of the Western World moved in to his new place. Thank God the man was not a packrat. Still, there are a lot of small things that he thought were special, and they are all sitting here in my house now, *sigh* waiting to be boxed up, and eventually donated.
Now goddammit, this is sad. I don't like any of it. Neither does the Yummy Biker. None of it is particularly valuable either, but it's not exactly crap...what it is, mainly, are trinkets he picked up in Greece, or things he saved from when his mothers house caught on fire years ago. Mismatched cups and saucers, figurines, glasses, things like that. I hate boxing it up and then having to lie to him about where the stuff is. But we will.*
Fortunately all his buddies have been given first crack at the large furnishings. Have at, gentlemen! When we finally throw open the doors to the relatives they're going to be rather puzzled by all the empty carpet. I DO hope someone gets shitty with me; I've been spoiling for a fight. Probably won't happen.

Come to think of it, that's a pretty nice statement about the family, isn't it?





*The Yummy Bikers' mother had rather regrettable tastes in her younger years. Her worst judgment, beside marrying the same man three times and a gay man the fourth, was the purchase of the infamous Chicken Dishes. You'd honestly hesitate to put food on them. They're glazed this really odd, mustard-diaper color that's speckled with gnats or pepper or birdshot or something...and smack in the center of each is a huge picture of what can only be described as a gravely psychotic chicken. Each one hefts approximately the same as a boat anchor. She passed them on to us. Gee, thanks. And she always asks about them. "Do you still have those dishes?" and we nod and smile real big. "Well, are you ever gonna use them?" Not even on a dare, honey. We have them stored safely away from young children and the nervous, waiting to be thrown into Bellingham Bay the instant you go to your reward. In fact I may arrange for the hospital to call me. Until then, they're packed away, and we lie.

context

Next in the wildly popular 'Muk In Her Native Habitat' series, we explore the quaint riverside village of Sumas, the place our little Muk calls home.
Welcome to Sumas, everyone!
















...uh, yeah. *Ahem.*


Here is the entirety of the downtown core, this street here, looking north with that 'Welcome to Sumas' sign at my back. Twelve tiny little blocks.
Down at the very end, if you look hard, you can see a faint, faint sort of reddish bar that crosses the street? That's the Canadian border.

















Lets take a drive down Main Street, shall we?
OK!
Now here is your typical city block in the downtown core. Both buildings date from the 1920's, both buildings are standing slap ass vacant. Lets stop the bus! Everyone out for a Kodak moment!

















Here is an abandoned titty bar. This is a huge place, too; it goes waaay back there.















Yes, City Hall is housed in a metal utility building. So is the police station. And yes, you're looking at both of them.















Another abandoned building! Right across the alley not 15 feet from the entrance to the police station, it was understandably not the fun filled, whoopin', hollerin' free for all fightin' old west kinda place its name seems to promise. No, in fact, it was a hangout for recent immigrants from Russia and the Ukraine; all 20 of them. Ride 'em, comrade! The white banner proclaims 'this business for sale-agricultural trades considered'. Yes, that's right. The guy who owns a BAR on an international border crossing wants to trade it for a FARM. I'm not sure what this says about the Sumas economy, but it doesn't seem....good.

















Meet Lone Jack. Jack is alone because Jack has been having some proctological issues recently.
What's in the pan, Jack?
No. Don't tell me.
Want to know why I live here? Because of the people. What kind of people? The type of people who would start an international shipping business, house it in an old burlesque theatre with this morphodite squatting out in front...and leave him there. And name the business the only name possible out of all possible names in the universe.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is with the greatest of pleasure that I give you....
"Ship Happens"
















Youth community service. Get chipping, you little bastards! Hahahahahaha! This is how we school 'em! Put 'em to work chipping yellow paint off the curbs in the hot sun! Stick 'em right out in front of the police station so we can keep an eye on 'em too! That's right!
When I came by five minutes later, Buckwheat on the left was still in the exact same position, pinin' for the fjords.
















Ten years ago there were 23 empty businesses along the main drag. Today there are still ten, not counting empty single offices.
If any town needed a reason to support business, Sumas IS that town.
This would be the business.
This right here is the BEST MEXICAN FOOD IN THE UNIVERSE. The service is superb, the people are great...
So why not lets' us City Hall moo-rons perpetuate a tacit policy of harassment? Why not look the other way while the local police put roadkill in their doorway and on their employees' cars? Why not have them raided just before every major civic event so they have to close down? After all, it's the only restaurant in town that hires people long term, AND stays open seven days a week. AFTER ALL, THEY'RE MEXICANS!! Why not? WHY NOT I ASK YOU?? WHY DON'T LETS JUST BUG THE FUCK OUTTA THEM UNTIL THEY PACK UP AND MOVE TO ANOTHER TOWN AND LEAVE ONE MORE ABANDONED BUSINESS ON THE MAIN DRAG??? WHY NOT PUT 23 LOCAL PEOPLE OUT OF WORK??? WHY NOT FORFEIT THOSE TAX DOLLARS? HAHAHAAHAAHAAHAAHA!!!! GREAT IDEA!!!!!
















First patron of the day.
This old geezer comes buzzing up at the turn of the lock every morning. They 86'd him for being just generally disgusting about three months ago. What he does now is come in early. He sits in the bar, mumbling, occasionally yelling, pissing himself and bothering the staff until they get some customers; then they cut him off and he wheels away, wearing his knitted toque and his grey wool overcoat, shouting at cars.
















Now lets veer off the main drag and amble through the neiborhood.
On our way out to drop off our biodegradable yard waste we find this National Security spy pole, the silver post at the center of the picture with the little goggles at the top.
I see you!
Of course, they see me, too.
Yeah! See this? It's the fat chick! FUCK YOU GEORGE BUSH! CANADA IS NOT THE ENEMY!
















THIS is the community compost pile. See the sign? That's how you tell. It says 'Compost Pile'. It is for the community. To put compost in. On. Whatever.
















Lush, cool and beautiful.

















Here's a bed and breakfast. Although it's in the center of the neiborhood, it backs on a river, and is at the end of a street which backs on a cornfield. Hell, I'd stay here and I live three blocks away.
















The Sumas River running through the center of town. No deer today, sorry to say. Yes, this is what passes for a river here..that barely visible trickle. Dumbass Washingtonians can't tell a river from a crick.
















Oh crap. A trout jumped and I tried to catch it swimming away but I didn't even get a ripple. Anyway, this is the river. See? Water.
Note that I am standing on a bridge on the main east-west thoroughfare through town at high noon, holding a camera with my ass draped over the guardrail.
Um...
Nah. Make of the preceeding sentence what you will. It just might be true.

















I mean, come on. This is the worst place in town. Of course I live next door to it. But you can't even see it!
Betcha they see me, though.
Oh crap! She's taking a picture! Quick! Hide the illudium q32 space modulator!















This is the entirety of town looking east to west, from city limits sign to city limits sign...or at least the low hill in the background there where the 'City Limit' sign is.
What town? I don' see no steenkin' town.













You see what I mean? As soon as you leave the main business center the place is beautiful. People sit out on their front lawns and have conversations. The kids say 'hi' to you. The dogs wag. Yes, everyone is in your shit, but I'm in their shit too so it evens out.
But to drive through the business center of town, you'd think 'Jesus Christ, keep on going; what a goddamn dump".

I may shoot a copy of this via email to the mayors office.

On second thought, maybe not...

Hmmmmmmmmmm.

ok fine

Here it is. So sit down, keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times while the ride is in operation because....
ITS RANCHO FIRSTNATIONS IN LIVING COLOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The humble abode. This picture was taken from the sidewalk, facing northeast. That peaked roof on the right marks the origional house. Bitty, wasn't it?
I did all the plantings. Yay me! Yes, that is a torchiere lamp on the front porch. I keep forgetting to donate it.

My rural idyll. This is the view from my front porch, facing southeast. The field where I crashed my motorcycle. Left out of frame is Mt. Baker, but the alpenglow was on it and it wouldn't print.
Turning to the southwest, we have this...

ONE YEAR AGO all that was hayfield too. Every single house and rooftop you can see in that picture went up in one years' time. I honestly DO remember when all this was farms. Now, turning full west, we have this...

Remember my nutty neibors with hundreds of cats and the pet semetary? The ones who yell at their apple tree? Here's their place. Trust me; its in there. So are they. Waiting. Watching. Not bathing. The miscreant apple tree pokes up at center-right. Looks innocent. But it's not.


And now, the backyard! WOW! Remain calm!
Here is all the tomatoes I could fit into one picture without sitting down on the tickly grass in my shorts. You will note the raised bed, a necessity for gardening tomatoes here. In one months' time these plants will double in size and be loaded with 'maters. Yummmmmmmm!

Potted stock ready for sale cheap! 100% hippie grown.

My Goonybird. Ya spend a fortune on toys and the kid sits in the wheelbarrow making hooting noises and laughing. I blame his mother.

This is taken standing on tiptoes on my back deck. There is the evil ex-crack shed, now turned to the cause of good, and my picnic awning. Between them in the distance? That line of trees and the mountains? Thats Canada! YAY CANADA! HI ELLE! HI MJ!

bees hate me. tomatoes don't.

The day before yesterday, watering the plants on the front porch, I got nailed in the leg by a wasp. Yesterday, on the motorcycle, I got nailed in the face by a honeybee. Right below the right eye; it felt like a damn rock. I was really lucky that I was a. wearing my goggles, except for the part where the poor bee got stuck under the foam part and scrabbled about a little bit, ew ew ew ew, and b. I am not allergic to stings. Because boy, I tell ya, I'd be in some sad fucking shape by now. This morning the side of my face is swollen up. Attractive! Looks stylin' with my Pekingese haircut too, I must say.

At least the Bumbler beebers are still my buddy *snif*

So I called the Dr's office for the results of my blood tests, and they gave me the old 'well, all we have here is a note in your chart saying to make an appointment to come in' so I'm about ninety percent certainI've got radioactive rat scabies and possum ass rash. Happy mother butt fucking joy joy.
Farewell, beloved refries.
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.

At least I will still have tomatoes.
And damn, do I have tomatoes. This is the beauty of choosing indeterminate plants; you don't get a huge glut all at once; just enough to always have fresh and a few to put up at the end of the day. My saladettes have been giving me a few every evening for the past couple of weeks, and I made a fresca sauce out of them with some olive oil and crushed black olives. Oh my god, food should not taste so good. Well, yes it should, but this was pornographic. I am so going with this variety next year. The tomato flavor is brilliant! It's a solid savory note, rich but not sweet or buttery, or ketchuppy. It has notes of citrus, but is not sour. It is juicy rather than 'meaty', but thick walled with very little gel, and that not sour. The skin is thin enough so that it dissolves readily with blending; so there is no need to blanch and peel whatsoever; and the seeds are small. Tell you what, I believe I have found the perfect sauce tomato, kids. The variety is 'Olpaka'. Write that the fuck down.

Now, my other variety is a beefsteak...*runs outside and pulls a tag* Big Beef. Now the reports are still coming in about its parentage, but what really bothers me is that the seed broker, Seminis, has been bought out by Monfuckingsanto. Monsanto, people. Better living through Frankenfood Monsanto. Seminis carries all the Northern range vegetable stock. Shit! And Big Beef is a hybrid, too, so you can't save the seed because it won't come true. But ANYWAY. That's a rant for another time.

it's hot; I'm grumpy, and i blame the Pre-Raphaelites, goddammit

"When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things." I Cor. xiii. 11.

Which is fine as far as it goes, save the part about being a man. Well then.

(This one goes out to Arabella! who is a Brit; so don't get all poopy with me ya limey bastards.)
When I was young I was SWOONY over the Pre-Raphaelites.

My God, the opulent colors, the dramatic poses, the ethereal forms and languid gestures! No one was more shocked than I was to discover that these paintings came out of a 'serious' school of art. I had always thought they were book illustrations.
Now that I am a grown woman *ahem* there isn't a one of them I would hang in a main room of my home. I still look at the 'serious school of art' aspect with the same bemusement, though.




William Waterhouse occupies the nadir of the pretty wallpaper-whups, the Pre-Raphaelite movement. I believe he had a keen enough appreciation of business to realize that in the end he needed to create something in keeping with a passing trend that would look nice on a clients' wall. Take poor St. Eulalia* here, dead in the snow with the pigeons picking at her toes. Somehow he manages to make even this decorative. Give the man his due; he was a fantastic artist and technician.










Wacky, zany, loveable madcap commie William Morris actually DID turn out pretty wallpaper. Pretty textiles, pretty furniture, pretty homes and pretty bad fiction, too. Still, good for you, Bill. He stated exactly what his aim was; elevating craft, and by God he did. He may have been a goofturd, he may have been windy and self-important, but he was honest about his calling. Publicly.



There are lots of other artists who gathered under the Pre-Raphaelites' banner, and many of them were quite good at what they did and worthy of a favorable mention. But I, uh, don't know very much about them. And since it's more fun to leave a flaming bag of shit on someone doorstep than it is to sing praises, I present you Holman Hunt.

Holman Hunts' work has an extremely visceral effect on me. It makes me long to travel back in time and beat the living crap out of him with a pitching wedge for being such a SENTITOUS WAD OF PUKE. Remember the kid on the playground that smelled like pee, the tattletale, always trying to kiss girls and wipe boogers on people? I am certain that this describes Holman Hunt as a child.

I can't help it. Everything about his work makes me want to dig him up and set him on fire. His use of color BLOWS. His models are ugly and have a strangely unwashed look to them, many times.
And he uses INDOOR light on OUTDOOR subjects. GOD, this makes me nuts!






This is like bad carnival superimposition. Am I not supposed to notice this? What the fuck? GAAAAAAAH.

Yet stay; and let us focus for a while on his poor grasp of symbolism. Yes, do lets.
Poor grasp indeed; in his hands symbolism is a highly annoyed dogfish that he's frantically trying to club to death with a sock. Remember: Just because you use a lot of symbolism does not automatically mean that you use it well. Let's give it the hamster test, shall we?

Guest hamster: bluto schmuggleware,
a typical hamster on the street
and ENTIRELY WITHOUT ODOR.


Tell me what is going on in this picture.
-Well, its some sheep.
What else?
-It's sheep...outside.
Good....
-Um. Yeah. Sheep.
No no no you dumb hamster! This is a stinging, biting sociopolitical comment on Englands' lack of preparedness and leadership and stuff! Bad hamster! Go back to college!


Gentle reader, I ask you: Should this have ever been painted?

No. No, it should not ever have been painted.
At this moment I cannot think of another single image that annoys me as much as this one.
Lets give it the hamster test!

Now tell me what is happening here.
-It looks like she sat in his lap and got surprised when he popped a wooder.
Victorians never, ever popped wooders. It made Queen Victoria cry.
-No, lookit! He's saying, like 'Hey, come one, it's friendly!' and she's like 'Woo! Wasn't expecting THAT!"
No...
-She looked out the window and saw a UFO?
You Philistine of a hamster; that is CLEARLY a picture of a womans' higher being awakening. She is leaving the embrace of luxury to embrace Salvation! She has realized that she CAN rise above debasement and leave delivingroom!**

And then...there's this. Well?
-She owns a depressing houseplant?
Try again...
-She owns depressing pottery?
No...
-She forgot to take her birth control pills? She forgot to use moisturizer after she exfoliated? She's trying to hear the ocean?
No, no no. NOTHING could be more clear. Obviously she is a woman in the grip of a strange and powerful love...a love so strange and powerful that it cause her to decapitate her recently deceased lover and put his head in that giant urn. And plant basil on top of it.
-...All right. Now you're just fucking with me.

Bluto Exuent.
Good thing too, because here comes a man who really needed a hamster up the ass;
Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
What a prize creep. I can hardly stand to look at this guy...he's begging for an aluminum baseball bat; man, right to the side of the head. Wwwwwwwwhap! Home run! Right over the fence.
First of all, he self-named. Wwwhap! That earned him a freebie.
Notice how people who self-name never choose anything like Paul or Mary? Its always something simpy. Like Dante. Or Moonshadow Warrior or Jas'Mynne.

Today, our Mr. Rossetti would be a sweater humping emo boy with a razrphone and ironic hair. He'd weigh 98 lbs soaking wet and be prone to bronchial aliments. And smoke 'Camel' cigarettes. He would be a vegetarian. He would have a dirty, dogeared copy of Joseph Campbells' 'Hero with a Thousand Faces' and it would be papered with yellow Postits. He would have a rip-roaring case of herpes, genital warts and be a carrier of chlamydia. Every woman he knew would be itching and burning and afraid to go for long car rides.
God I HATE this guy.

This is his wife and model, Elizabeth Siddal; a plain, thin unremarkable woman, yet a perfect tabula rasa for him to scribble all over. He marries her after condescending to live with her socially inferior ass for 11 years, all the while putting the meat to everything female that crossed his line of vision. A few months after he does her this huge favor, she loses a child and commits suicide. But he loves her SO MUCH that he buries a book of his love poetry with her-what a romantic gesture!! Except he gets to thinking about how great this poetry is and how it's his only copy, so he has some friends rob her fucking grave a few months later so he can get it back; the self-centered, craven little prick. What a guy!
This is his picture of his wife.










Ah. Much better. She has lips now. And she's, you know, pretty.

This is a picture of his friends wife, just about everybody's model, and Rossetti's mistress, Jane Morris.




A woman who possesses an undeniably glorious bone structure, not to mention a head of hair you could get lost in. And a decidedly Mediterranean cast to her features.






This is her, whited-up jest a tech, by yours truly. The way he always sees her. Neck and bone structure, hair and lips. What an IMPROVEMENT,, huh?


All his women are the same...mindless, exquisite, room-temperature bodies flapping around the landscape like wet laundry. The very last thing Rossetti wants in his 'idealized' women is anything like a person present.
This is not just wallpaper...
This is icky wallpaper.

And Bluto agrees.

With no detectable aroma whatsoever. Other than cuteness.



**boy, I remember the martyrdom of St. Eulalia a little differently than this...torn with hooks and set afire, wasn't she? maybe they tossed her in a snowbank to put her out or something.
**forgive me; I could not help it. I truly apologize for any permanent damage that may have caused.

ramblin ramblin ramblin

Well, some dumb slut brought her kid in sick to daycare, so now the Goonybird has chickenpox.
Yay!
How in hell do you miss chicken pox? Now, really? Other things, yes. Your kid covered in red spots; see, that I have a problem believing. I think she damn well knew; she just dumped the kid off and split. Luckily the 'Bird was innoculated so he probably won't have a very severe case, but it's noticeable enough so that he can't go back to daycare until he looks presentable; meaning that I will be watching him today and tomorrow. Not a bad gig, considering it means I take my leisure by the lake in a charming neiborhood, watching my polkadotty grandson toddle around the yard shouting 'Don't touch! No no! Don't touch!' at the landscape plantings.
What it also means is that I'm not at my own computer so I don't have access to my secret policemans other files filled with demented shit and so I can't work on the Preraphaelites like ah said I would (with a bag full of lead shot and a mallet).

I went to the doctors last week, complaining that I was sick too often and sleeping too much, and the upshot of the whole thing was I ended up giving six vials of blood and being told that I may be suffereing from a. heavy metals exposure (ZEP RAWKS DUDE! FUCKIN NINE INCH NAILS! RIGHTEOUS! 666!) or b. mature onset diabetes. Using the word' mature' advisedly in my case. And reacting predictably, as a mature adult, I have decided to refuse to call the office for the results and instead load up on burritos like a goddamn tanker taking on heroin at a turkish port of call.

What in hell am I going to do if I am deprived of burritos? No, I mean it. Refries, chiles, mexican food in general; thats what I eat. You eat a sandwich and go out and work in the yard, and one hour later you're back in the house scavenging around in the 'fridge again. You eat a plate of burritos early on and you're good to go for the rest of the damn day, barring frequent rehydration courtesy of the Miller Brewing Co.
See, but what I really AM doing is spending all day in front of the computer chowing down on red hot beef-n-beaners, dipping them right into the jar of hot sauce like the Queen of fricken' England. I should just skip the whole digesting part and glue them right to my ass.

I need more tattoos. Speaking of beer and chili. No, I really do. My yummy biker has a full left sleeve of magnificent work. The artist laid in on freehand with a brush-no template, just following the grain of the skin and the muscles...glorious stuff. Gracious...getting a little warm in here. Huh. Anyway, I feel kinda pale and plain. I want more blackwork. Not tribal and certainly not celtic. I already have one small kanji on my shoulder that looked pretty good twenty years ago but now just looks like a seagull crapped on me. Before my last operation I got a pachuco on my left hand. There is a lot of acreage left to cover. I'm thinking foreign lettering and/or pure design...I'm not one for pictures. I'm the main attraction. Besides, I dont want to be lying in my bed at the nursing home thirty years from now, eating mashed banana and pissing through a tube with a tattoo of fucking Tweety Bird on my tit. You know? Or maybe a little guy with a lawnmower buzzing my snatch. Yeah, that'd be classy.
I have a picture of an indonesian guy with what looks like a continuous prayer circling his entire body..I couldn't tell you the name of the script; only that it depends from a single line and has lots of diacritical marks. Anyway, I don't want to go that extreme, but I like the look of the ornamental calligraphy; and that the words have meaning and the whole combination comprises a third level of design. Ideas? Pictures?

I've taken three separate harvests off my blueberry bushes this year, and theres still a few left for the robins. That comes out to four nice big blueberry pies! They're pretty tasty too. I chose commercial early croppers, but I don't keep them flooded the way the growers do, so the berry is smaller, but the taste is concentrated. Kind of the same principle as lowbush wild blueberries. Up on Mt. Baker right now the lowbush harvest is going on; good fucking luck. Between the people with the cranberry rakes and the sneaky robins in their hundreds you're lucky to find a couple on the ground.
One year the Stainless Steel Amazon and I did a 'bay to Baker' dinner for the Yummy Biker. We went up to Baker and filled a hat full of tiny blueberries (which took about 2 hours), then drove down to Chuckanut Bay and dug scallops and clams, which are so abundant in places that you can toe them out of the sand. We made chowder for dinner that was so nice it had clams just climbing over the sides of the bowls. Blueberry muffins for dessert, and a great day out.

Jumping Out, Mechanical Man Kikaida - 3D movie!!

ladies and gentlemen, turn your attention to these two outstanding women high above you in the center ring!


oh my god. just go here
http://hendrix-cat.blogspot.com/
and read this post. this is just, oh my god. writing? good? oh good gravy MARIE.

and for class? go here
http://marlowefish.blogspot.com/
and read the last few entries to find out how someone deals with a difficult romantic situation with more class and maturity than i've ever had.

blogroll these people now.
do it.
i mean it.
get moving.


really.
don't fuck around with me, now, do like i said.
hey listen, I'm menopausal, I own guns, and my near ancestors ate dog.
Without ketchup.
it was heartbreaking.

you were warned

When I was in grade school I had one good friend, T. She was the only normal kid of a family of four daughters...morbidly obese, allergic to sunlight youngest, ear tubes, rat teeth and hives at the drop of a hat middle sister and profound Downs' Syndrome oldest sister.
Now I was a member of the inagural class year when the 'mainstreaming' movement was all the rage in the public school system. That means that all the 'special' classes were dumped out and everyone got all heaped together in a big pile of brotherly love and understanding.

Ahem.

Anyway, C, the older sister, wasn't a revelation to me. In her own goofy way she was charming, in fact, but I did my best to avoid her. And this reaction is key, here...I was a pretty nice kid. I didn't get rotten until Jr. High. And I am proud to say that I was not one of those weasels who tormented other kids, ever. But C aroused a type of contempt and ire in me, just by her presence, that seemed to be waiting there fully formed for a chance to deploy. I spent a lot of time crying about that. It felt ugly. It didn't make me like her any more, though, or make her my best buddy or include her in my games. I wanted her the fuck off me.

I had plenty of opportunity to see this same reaction played out as a member of the class of 1978. The hippy dippy motives of the mainstreaming movement failed to take into account that 1. children are primitive little beasts who are not fully formed socially or morally, and that 2. children are ferociously heirarchal, and very brutal about establishing that heirarchy, also 3. the teachers already had more than enough on their plates.

So here all these utterly disadvantaged children were, dumped into the dog pit, and they never had a fucking chance. The most unpopular of the unpopular normals now had an underclass to feel superior to at whim. It was beyond brutal, and it went on daily, AND THE TEACHERS SAW NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING. The beatings, the mocking, all the cruelties that kids can heap on each other were heaped doubly on these kids, at whim, universally, and the teachers did nothing. They saw it. It happened right in front of them. I remember this clearly.

Now what kind of a chance does a special ed kid have anyway, dumped into a world that they are not and never will be equipped to participate in? Realistically? None at all. And I stand by that. What kind of a chance does this same kid have when the parents wont even throw them in the bathtub occasionally? Or when they dress them in whatever crap comes to hand because 'they're retarded anyway so they don't care?' And that last really burned me up. It revealed a lot about these parents state of mind when they denied their kids even that amount of humanity. Not to mention camoflage.

Eveyone was going about in this fog of idealism and it ended up being horrific. On the level of Bosch, horrific. Every single day. I don't know whose wonderful idea this was but I'd like to find them and introduce them to the crowbar I carry in my truck.

This is why, when I was pregnant, I gladly submitted to amnioscentesis. And if the result had been positive, I would have terminated.

I wonder how many of the children I went to school with even remember those mainstream kids? Or if they ever think about the shit they did to them? One kid was almost blinded by a huge crowd of boys who took lime off the playing field lines and rubbed it into his eyes. The teachers watched. The playground attendants watched. After the kids were done and had left this boy there on the ground, did they come haul him off to the nurse. Nobody got in trouble for it. I still remember the perpetrators names to this day. But of course they were only kids, right? And they probably have kids of their own now.

When my daughter was still in high school, another special ed kid was ratpacked and nearly choked to death up in Ferndale, near here. These were Jr. High age kids. I asked a girl who witnessed it and she told me calmly that everyone wanted to; so they all waited until after school when everyone was getting off the bus near a secluded area and lured this kid down into it like a dog, with treats. That everyone had hated this girl anyway, because she was gross and inappropriate.

Then there were the daily indignities and torment these kids suffered. I challenge a normal person to put up with that kind of treatment and not come away worse for the experience. But to put someone who never had a chance into that circus? No. They could not keep up in class and so every assignment they were given they failed. They couldn't fathom social things so they had no friends. They never got a joke, never knew the answer, always got the worst playground equipment-if any, and always got ridiculed and physically abused behind closed doors at every opportunity. It was as though the normal kids were in the grip of an uncontrollable compulsion.
I honestly think that they were.

I say that the adults involved felt the same revulsion as the kids did. I say they took a secret schoolyard satisfaction in seeing the gross retard get the shit kicked out of him. There is a part of human nature at work here that needs to be addressed a lot more openly than it has been. Humans shouldn't act like chickens attacking a speck of blood, like pirrahna, like sharks. I say you carry this impulse too far and institutionalize it, and what you end up with is Columbine.

ok, im taking that one down now.

being able to have this forum (as twere) to explore this crap and get feedback to think about is inestimably valuable to me. all of you are rock! y'all have been gracious enough to reply on a subject that is pretty damned difficult and I thank you. i though of everyones responses as i went around this weekend and did my errands in town (bellingham is much more racially diverse than sumas) and i really thought about all of it. i'm started on the way to getting my shit together and not being such a redneck anymore. just because i live in the country now doesn't mean i have to act like it.
muchas smoochas!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

it boils down to this

I am afraid of black people.
Seeing a black person on the street makes me paranoid. And to make it even more ridiculous, there's two distinct levels to this paranoia. Level 1- Woops, I saw them. Where do I look? Do I look? Do they think I'm staring? Is it obvious that I've noticed them? Did I look away too soon? Do they think I'm being rude? Am I being rude?
This is general social paranoia, but cranked to extreme high volume because of the persons color. It's contemptible.

Level 2-Are they gang bangers? Do they look dangerous? Do they look like crime people? Are they poor? What's their hair like? Are they dressed all flashy?


By this time of course the black person is several miles away buying roofing nails at Lowes or something.

I was taught very early on in no uncertain terms that black people were bad. My father believed it. In his words, black people hated the whites because we had all the money and they had been slaves, and only the very lowest kind of black person ever had anything to do with white people. My mother? Was raped, beaten and thrown down a flight of stairs by a black man in New York back before she was married. She didn't like them either, no.

My personal experience? Every black person I have ever known, dated (one), been friends with, worked for and worked with has been pretty much just like me, an average everyday working slob. So personally? It's a non-issue on that level. But I don't trust that. And not trusting it makes me act like a dipshit. That fear is always in the back of my mind. 'You have to be extra, extra careful around black people', is what that fear is all about. The fear that you are going to say something stupid, sooner or later, something really ignorant and thoughtless, or display some kind of cultural bias you aren't even aware you have until you get that look and realize what a goddamn cracker you sound like. Princess Klanella Ofay of Trailerparkania. Oh hell yes, I've done it, too.

I am probably living in the same town with a fair variety of genuinely bad people, criminals and deviants, face it; if only by virtue of sheer odds, and living in Sumas means that the vast majority of those are going to be white. Do I worry about white people when I pass them on the street? I don't even give them a second thought.
Fuck this.

Now, I am not looking for absolution or explanations. I know exactly why I feel the way I do; it's real obvious that the larger portion is early indoctrination and the rest is too many music videos. Maybe what I'm doing here is residual catholic confessional compulsion or something. The fact remains that here I am, middle aged, tripping when I see a black person walking down the sidewalk. I don't know. It's all stupid.

i finally do get to the point of this post by the end

I was just standing around in the kitchen, not sufficiently caffeinated to have much of a purpose in mind, watching my Yummy Biker fry up some eggs.
One of the nicest things in the world is watching an egg fry. They make a nice chuckling sound and they bubble, the edges get brown and lacy and the yellow beams up at you like a happy sun. I need breakfast.

The poor Goonybird got sent home from daycare yesterday crusted with goop. He has a less virulent version of the crud I have, poor little tato.

His daycare is a great place. Someone bought adjoining residential properties in the middle of Bellingham, enclosed the whole thing with a fence and turned it into a really neat kid compound like a little secret garden world. The house at the back of the garden is toddler Seg. When I went back there with the teacher I could hear a chorus of tired little voices joined in the 'Just Woke Up From Afternoon Nap' seranade. It cracked me up, and the teacher cracked up too. They know better than to let the little diaper demons into GenPop.

After a visit to the doctor, I took him back home and we watched The Wizard of Oz three times. I feel it is my job as his grandmother to introduce him to Great Camp Film while he is young and moldable. 'You told me to live, live, LIVE!' he'll shout when his mommy discovers him eating carpenter ants, covered in postage stamps. 'Well, I LIVED!' He should have a solid foundation in the classics by the time he is ready for kindergarten. Which child is my grand son? The one sitting in Morning Sharing Circle with a newspaper on his head throwing hot dogs at the teacher. *snif* damn, need a tissue.
I am a postmodern grandma.

I have a very disturbing and very politically incorrect group of memories dealing with mentally challenged kids. This is an issue that I am going to be working out in this space. I am going to post them next. I do not intend to be anything other than what I have always been or to express myself kindly or carefully. If this is a tender subject for anyone, either get ready or plan other activities. Nobody has to read it and nobody gets blamed for avoiding it either. Hell, I've been avoiding it for forty years.

The same goes for the subject of race. I have noticed a real redneck, racist tone coming out in some of my stuff...yesterdays' entry in particular. I will be dealing with it the same way, with the same language. I'd better. Nobody has to read this stuff. Any of you who are black, bear in mind that I am completely lost in this subject. I know nothing about black culture and I don't know the polite or correct way to express myself and it's going to show. I do not like this in myself. Butt-ignorance is not a pretty thing. I invite you to smarten me up. God knows I need it.

You Have Been Warned.

Does anyone have a bible story or something that they'd like me to write an insightful and exhaustively researched essay on? Or a school of art, or something? Because I'm going to need to lighten up the tone around here occasionally during the course of all this garbage. Send in your requests or ideas. I already have a trove of inappropriate Venus nipple tweaking cached....

hiya, marian!

Omigod!!!!!
I just got my first Nigerian Scam letter!

*****************************
From Hajia Mariam Dear Beloved, Due to the sudden death of my husband General Abacha the former head of state of Nigeria in June 1998, I have been thrown into a state of hopelessness by the present administration.I have lost confidence with anybody within my country. I got your contacts through personal research,and had to reach you through this medium. I will give you more details when you reply. Due to security network placed on my daily affairs I cant visit the embassy so that is why I have contacted you. My husband deposited $12.6million dollars with a security firm abroad whose name is witheld for now till we communicate. I will be happy if you can receive this funds for safe keeping and I assure you a very good percent of this fund I will instruct my son to contact you so please feel free to comunicate with my son. I await your urgent response, Hajia Mariam. NOTE: SEND ME YOUR CONTACT TELEPHONE NUMBER SO THAT MY SON MUSTAPHA CAN CALL AND DISCUSS WITH YOU VERBALLY REGARDING THIS TRANSACTION SO THAT YOU CAN ASK ANY QUESTION THAT YOU FEEL LIKE ASKING REGARDING THIS TRANSACTION
*************************************

*Snif* they like me!
They really like me!


The first thing I will buy is a three month vacation at a fat sucking spa. Once my fat is sucked and distributed to the peasants or whatever they do with it I will proceed to Tiffany's, Rodeo Drive, and buy one of those huge cheap looking necklaces done up in c grade novelty colored diamonds...maybe a Parve hesher, I'm thinking! The size of a hubcap!
Then on to Fredricks of Hollywood! Only the top designers will do. I have decided that I want to look like Lil' Kim because hotpants and lame' pasties are so today.
People everywhere will fall all over themselves because one look will tell them I am rich.
I will go to Alinea and eat polymerized tamari off a car ariel.
I will go to Japan and eat fugu. I will eat fugu till I'm googoo. Then I will barf on their prime minister because it seems to be the American thing to do.
I will snort cocaine off Rowan Atkinsons bare ass!
Wooooo, I'm gonna be rich! I'm gonna be rich!

And hey, lissen, Frobisher...you get ahold of your dusky princess and tell her you have enough money to rent a tux now. With a percentage of 12.6 million dollars as good as mine, I can afford to be generous!

no magnetic death cannon, though.

What was your most memorable amusement park experience?

I'll be honest right at the front here and tell you that I cribbed this idea from another site. Not like either one of us care, but if you should happen to visit the same site and have an 'aha' moment I will have already trumped you. This one goes out to Tazzy the Yorkshire sex god and Piggy the...whatever he his- who never visit any more because there are too many big words. Cunts.

New York had Coney Island, California had Knotts Berry farm. Portland Oregon had Oaks Amusement Park. It was not world famous like Coney and it was not state of the art like Knotts Berry was at the time, but what it was, was stone fucking cool.

This midway area was still present in large part when I was a kid, but most of the buildings were boarded up, gated over and flood damaged. Spooky? Romantic? The very definition thereof, my dear.

I defy you to find another amusement park with as much pure class as the Oaks had back then. Think of the myriad haunted amusement parks in Scooby Doo...bullshit. Think of the best midway you had ever visited...roadkill. The Oaks had it ALL. And all of it was blessed with that perfect touch of dereliction, sleaze and enchantment that all proper amusements parks should have.

It had been built at the very beginning of the 1900s on what at the time was a small island in the Willamette river...far enough out of town at that time so that a special excursion trolley ran out to it on a trestle over the water, hung with strings of lanterns at night.

It was a fantasy of carved wood, Victorian lace, gargoyles, a little Venice, a little New Orleans and a lot pure Americana. Straight out of Dandelion Wine was this place.

The main portion of the old park was shut down save for a very few of the pitches. You had to traverse this entire midway to the far end to reach the remaining few operating rides, pitches and roller rink. All of it was set in the midst of huge oak trees full of swallows and bats and the rich smell of the river and cotton candy and diesel.

in the 1960's and '70's, you crossed over a small bridge and the first thing you passed was a tiny cinderblock radio station on the right hand side down amid the blackberies. KXI, I think it was*. It was painted sea green with glass blocks by the entry and a tall tower rising from the roof with blinking red lights on it at night.
And it was haunted.

The story was, a night shift dj had played a farewell song dedicated to his girlfriend...'Misty'...and when someone came in a few hours later to find out why the same song had been playing over and over they found the dj hanging from the overhead pipes with the phone cord wrapped around his neck. Sometimes, late at night, it was said that the 'On the Air' sign would light up, and you could hear 'Misty' playing inside, but there never was a night shift after the dj died.

Wooooooo!

Next you came onto a huge picnic and outdoor gathering park. The living trees were used as part of the decoration, hung with electric lights and incorporated into bowers, bandstands, and picnic enclosures, all of them fancifully themed with spiders webs and wooden vines. John Phillip Sousa had played here during his heyday.

An elfin railway ran the circuit of the park with a tiny engine and 20 cars, a scary tunnel and a causeway out over the water that crackled when the train passed, making fish jump out from around the pilings to take a look as you chugged by.

There was a permanent midway with carnival games of skill. Most of it was shabby and abandoned and cooler than jeezley fuck. All the joints had been decorated with gilt and glass gems, applied- relief cherubs, theatrical masks and gargoyles, monkeys and pierrots and ladies and gentlemen in domino masks dancing minuets, and all this ornament colored. Everything else was painted white. Most of it was fancy with turrets and widows walks and fretwork and oriental arches all falling into the most delicious, mysterious shadowed ruin!. this pitch still operated intermittantly, the faded origional lettering showing up behind the new signs. later it was gated off and used as a storage area and was full of old ride cars and carnival flash.

At the very end of the place was a funky rollerskating rink that was built on a floating platform. It had been added in the 1930's. The place had a pipe organ for music. The works were suspended over the center of the rink and covered with colored lights. The organist sat in a glass block booth high up above one end, wearing a suit with a ruffled shirt. He rang the skates and took requests and controlled the lights and everyone waved at him as they rolled around.

this is a very spic-and span picture of the pipe organ works suspended over the rink. in my day they were crusted with blowing dust scarves and old crepe streamer fragments. the whole place looks like it got the 'Pine-Sol and paint' treatment, which is all for the good.


The thrill rides, I now realize, were probably as close as I ever came to a horrible death in my youth.

I don't think these things had ever been inspected for safety. I don't think that most of them were built during a time when safety codes existed. The oldest and most beautiful of them all was called The Caterpillar. All it was, was a kind of roller coaster that ran in a circle on a planked runway that dipped and banked. The cars were driven from a single engine in the center from which diabolical blue clouds would billow as it chuffed and blew and gathered speed. A fan of iron spokes ran from the central turbine to the cars.

The whole ride was decorated with 'Alice in Wonderland'-y scenes....it had kind of an 'Early Campbell Kids meets Arthur Rackham' look to it. The Caterpiller himself was a cheery, googly-eyed bug with fat green segments for cars and jolly rubber wheels with red centers. As long as you didn't look too closely, this was all very reassuring. Jolly Green Caterpiller was the childrens' friend!

As the ride would gain speed, the fissured, chewed-up tires would begin to skip and sing over the boards, making the cars rattle and bash against one another and tug at the spokes. Faster and faster the ride whizzed around the track, harder and harder you were pressed against the rattling half-moon door of the car, louder and more alarming became the truly amazing creaks, bangs, snaps, sudden jolts and screeches of the machine. Boards would lift away from the racecourse and rattle. Huge blasts of steam would FASSSSSHHHHH! out of the engine unpredictably. The platform of the ramp-in other words, the entire base of the ride- would lift up off the ground on the opposite side and wham back down when the cars passed over it again.
And then, at the height of all this, The Caterpiller Canopy began to deploy.
All along its length it began to unfold from the inner side like an accordian, revealing thousands of brightly colored dots and squiggles, and slowly, slowly, the canvas arched overhead and came down on the other side, latched-
and then the ride REALLY SPEEDED UP.
You were entirely in the dark. Inside the Caterpillar.
The whole thing felt like it was going to wrench itself apart at any moment.
Some of the cars were rattling and skitttering so hard that they juddered back and forth like marbles on a roulette wheel. The platform was lifting off the ground in full earnest now, WHAM!WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAM!
Until there was a sudden huge screeching and squealing of brakes and an exhalation of steam, and the entire ride came to a complete stop in the space of a single rotation.
The canopy unlatched and slowly accordianed back overhead; folded itself away with a 'whapkechunk'.

It was the Goddamndest thing!

The Carousel, back then, was a thing of splendour. It had been built by convict labor, horses, decoration and engine, up at Rocky Butte prison**. It was everything the rest of the park was and more. It was a jewelled wedding cake, a castle, a hall of mirrors, a pile of pirate treasure. I have yet to see a carousel to equal it for sheer Victorian glory.
The central pillar was shaped like an octagonal castle tower. Its sides were covered in painted french panels...lady Columbia danced over the river with a star on her forehead that sparkled when the light caught it. Triton rode a sea-chariot pulled by white horses with manes of wave-crest, surrounded by nymphs. A dawn-lit view of Mt. Hood. Men in leather helmets scored a touchdown with a cheering crowd in the background. America the Beautiful, revealed in triumph with an eagle and star spangled negligee; a gorgeous, rosebud mouthed Gibson girl. In fact for years I was certain that this merry go round had really been decorated by Charles Dana Gibson, because that was the style and the skill of the work.

Imagine it!

My favorite mount was a sable charger with patriotic banners and rubies studding its equippage. I loved that horse. It had a real bridle and reins and real stirrups with starred spurs. It was a beautifully executed thing. All the animals on the circuit were-ostriches, kangaroos, sea beasts, zebras, eagles, swans and a jewelled throne for mothers with scared children to circle around in with a little dignity saved.

below is is a picture of the pavillion that housed the carousel taken from a rollercoaster ride that was derelict by the time I came along. unfortunately, the carousel was the victim of a tasteless and unskilled restoration in the 80's.


The other ride that I will never forget was The Mad Mouse.
Remember the Milton-Bradley game 'Mousetrap'? Kind of a Rube Golberg rack of rails and clackety rickety things? That was this ride.
It was based on a roller coaster, but with a twist-the cars were single, and they made right angles. There were no macaroni curves, just ramps and angles. And the whole thing ran at light speed!

The cars got released from a starting gate at intervals with split second timing and passed each other as though they were going to collide. In fact, there was a segment of rail that shunted open at the middle where two cars would suddenly find themselves speeding head on, then at the last possible moment race off at right angles to each other.
This fucking thing scared the living piss outta me. I ALWAYS rode it.

The last time I rode, I was the only rider on the course. That was fine. It must have been about 1969-70. The first stage of the ride was a long, slow incline up from the starting gate, upon which you gained speed until you reached the top just screaming along, came to a dead stop, spun in a circle and headed down a zigzag.
My car gained speed going up the hill. All around me flakes of rust are falling off the track scaffolding, rivets are visibly pivoting, some are completely missing and replaced with wire looped around and around.
My car gains speed. My braids are flying straight back.
My car reaches the top.
It comes to a whiplash stop.
And the entire structure continues to move.
Creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaak k k kkk k.
I look out over the marsh below me. My braids are in front of me now.
The car pivots around in a circle and comes back to the starting gate. The operator hands my father his money back.

It took me years to put it all together and realize just how close I came to taking a swim that day.

The Oaks is still there. It's on the national register of historic places and has been completely restored from what I understand.
I will never go back and visit. I like it just the way it is now.


update:
this brought the memories tumbling back. i visited some historic sites for the pictures and was pleased to find that the stories i had heard, and my memories, were pretty accurate. interestingly enough very few pictures survive from the 60's and 70's, when the parks finances were at their lowest point. I did find mention of the midway being haunted by a kid in 70's clothes, though... I remember when that rumor started! the owners were just beginning to think about reviving the place and everyone pretty much knew that it was something they had cooked up. I found the story on a ghost site! But no mention of the haunted radio station.
*if somebody knows, please tell me!!
** the history says that this was a 'noah' ark' style carousel manufactured back east. I recount the story told me by my father and grandmother. they were certain that the animals had been made locally by convict labor. i remember they had to ship in a tiny litle guy from italy to fix the animated musical contraption inside about once a year, too.

just exactly how many times CAN you beat a dead horse? lets find out.

Once again I am sick. I have bronchitis. I feel very, very grumpy. The doctor gave me Azithromycin, so after I take that I will be asleep for the rest of the day having dreams that David Lynch would envy.
In the middle dealing with that, we hosted a childrens party here for one of the guys that the Yummy Biker works with.
These children have no future I am sorry to say. Their parents are collectively the stupidest, dullest, hyuk-yukkinest, mouth breathing, replacement clone Joad-beasts it has been my misfortune to host in some time. Thus, the following.

I am proud to say that I KNOW that I am preaching to the converted in large part here.
And I love you for that, my darlings!
But this is Blogworld, and I can shout from my virtual rooftop and not worry about tranquilizer darts. And I need to. (worry about tranquilizer darts.)

To wit:
I am tired of not having a meat peer group that I don't have to sign up for as though it were group fucking therapy.
Book circles? Discussion clubs?
I would rather lick the sidewalk in front of the homeless mission.
I would rather stick a lit cigarette in my eye.

YES! I READ FOR FUN!

I am not rich, I am not from a good family, and I do not have a degree.
Nobody made me.
None of it was required for a grade.
I HAVE NO EXCUSE FOR MY ACTIONS.

And it gets much worse.
I don't watch much television.
I like history.
I read nonfiction.
I even have rules.

-In the beginning, once I picked up a book or a magazine, I could not put it down. Even if it sucked, even if the contents bothered me, I had to read it cover to cover.
-If I didn't know a word, I went right then and looked it up. If I couldn't, I wrote it on the back of my hand and looked it up when I could.
-I read whatever I wanted to. 'The Boy's Library of Adventure Stories'? I do not think so, Buckwheat. Yes! I am a rebel; bad, mad and dangerous to know!
-If I was probaby not supposed to read it, I made sure to read it FIRST.
-If I liked an author, I had to read everything by that author.
-Read classics. That wasn't hard!
-Read crap. See, in school you are fed 'good writing' and that's all you know. (Well; I guess it would be a waste of the taxpayers money to teach kids out of 'TV Guide', right?) When I first discovered trash fiction, man, my gast was flabbered. Completely worthless fiction without a shred of redeeming value? I am so there.
-Follow it wherever it leads you. Possibly the best and most important rule of all.
-Read different translations of the same text.
-OWN. My house is a book nerds wet dream. Tissues are provided.
-OWN HARD REFERENCE. And I do. A very nice collection, too. If my hard reference was a person I would make dirty, dirty phone calls to it. Then the police would track me down.


These were good rules. They still are.
I've lightened up on the fiction, though. About ten years ago or so I was quite ill with pneumonia-again- and there I was, lying on the couch reading some piece of crap and forcing my way though it simply because I had picked it up. And for the first time in my life I thought "Would I want to die with this garbage in my hands? Fuck that." And so, if I find that the writing blows or that I no longer care what happens to anyone in the story, sayonara.

Is it an American thing? Is it a feminist thing? An age thing? Blogworld is the only place I can regularly find titles that I have read and find that OTHER PEOPLE HAVE READ THEM TOO. Fuck; its the only place I find titles I've never hear of that OTHER people HAVE read. Is it a class thing? What?

I have read more than anyone I presently know.
That includes EVERYONE.* This is not an exaggeration. This is a fact.
I do not talk about it. Even to me it sounds like I'm just flat making up a ridiculous lie.
I AM NOT.
No shit.
Can I quote like a demon? I cannot. Does that prove I am lying? No, it proves I spent more time reading than I did memorizing quotes to impress YOU.

I am not dangerous, or contagious, or lusting after your underage children, or an arsonist, or a Jehovahs' Witness, or an unwashed nut on the bus who smells like piss and wants to talk to you really really loud about JESUS for the entire busride.
Just well read.
And I might mention a book from time to time.
Fucking deal with it.



*y'all don't count. you could all be magic invisible library pixies for all I know.

oo what a lovely garden

Before I start to work in my garden I do 'rounds', assessing and admiring and generally looking like a vagrant nutjob or a fashion photographer as I comment and kneel and stand and judge and adjust. Not that my garden is a setpiece, oh lordy no. I just want to enjoy it for a little while in depth, you know, before I fuck it all up. That's what I was doing up until just a little while ago, and now I must brag. I cannot stop this urge. It is uncontrollable.

My garden is BEEYOOOOOOOTIFUL, dahling!

Where a huge Lombardy poplar stood dividing my driveway there is now a circular area of blue and pink linnarea and cornflower mixed in with periwinkle and the odd lychnis coronaria. This not only serves to hide the stump* but it works as my trap crop by keeping the neiborhood kids from coming into my yard to pick the flowers. That, I planned, and it works like a dream. There's nothing growing there that they could possibly damage, and so when I do accidentally bust one with a fistfull of blooms, I can smile and be the nice neiborhood lady and help them cut a few more, instead of being the mean neiborhood lady chasing them and yelling.

This area grew up like a monster this year. So did everything else in the front yard, now that it's free of the shade and the poplar roots sucking away all the good from the soil. Poplar roots are rather alarming in their ability to wick damp-I've cut them in half in years past, and the far side just kept on drawing, leaking a thin skim milk trickle continuously into the hole (until I got ooked out and flipped a handful of dirt over it.)

The first large bed in my yard is devoted to red flowers. This is sheer exuberance on my part. My house is a light blue grey and so red has no business being anywhere near it, but dammit, there are just so many great red flowers! So I put them where they wouldn't foreground the view of the house continuously. At least that was the plan, and we all agree that it worked really well, don't we. Yes we do.

This bed actually pulls a great magic trick every year-due to no planning on my part whatsoever, to be quite honest-it goes from blue to red in a period of 4 days time with almost no overlap. April and May see it cool with aquilegia, veronica and periwinkle, viola and blue-toned pinks and chilly jade foliage. June pulls the hemerocallis and the papaveracaea up from the ground like silk scarves out of a magicians sleeve and all the blue petals blow away.

I played around with crossing my papaver the last couple of years trying to make a silk vermilion nudicaule using Flanders poppies as the 'male'. What I ended up with is a vermilion nudicaule with a sienna pollen. (I think it was me. I'm pretty sure it was me. Who knows what the sneaky bees have been up to.) But it's in the place where I planted the crossed seed, so maybe. Very pretty and a good middle ground between the clarion orange of the californicas and the hard reds thrown up by some of the nudicaule.

Ok, lets translate that. I used a Flanders poppy, which is small and orangey-red and has a single row of petals, and pollenated a red Iceland poppy with it, one that was as close to orange as I could find in my garden. Icelands have a larger blossom and more petals, and the petals are of a beautiful, 'crumpled silk' texture. I actually opened a bud that was ready to pop, immediately dabbled the center with my Flanders poppy, and then isolated the Iceland blossom with a little bag made of a nylon stocking so nobody else would visit. When that blossom ripened a seed capsule I planted those seeds in a cleared and marked spot. And it worked!

I have a variety of poppies. They are so generous. I grow one Orientalis; a dwarfed orange with a black throat that for all its' modesty-for an oriental poppy, that is- still wants to take over the earth. It is a perennial, and it will easily outlive me as the Orientale commonly reach the three digit years.

All the rest I grow are annuals. Clear lemon Welsh poppies for the spring with their herbal looking foliage, Californians for the sheer love of everything about them, Himalayans on occasion, Flanders, Icelands, and Somniferums.

I have a time with the somniferums. The things come up everywhere-even in my houseplants!
Some are an ill, washy, liver-and-lights pink, some are lavender. Most are dreamy rich pink like a raspberry milkshake. Some are single and tiny, and some are so huge and fat and doubled that they resemble silk ribbon pompons. These fell themselves, being so greedy. Some are a peculiar color-I call it 'heart patients' lips purple'-and these are the ones that bleed milk at the slightest scratch. The seed capsules look like tethered Perispheres or upside down jade Montgolfier balloons bobbing above the garden...Kind of a faery, bubbly effect that I like against the whipcracks of the serpentine garlic I let go nuts in my front border.

Yes, you can get nice and ripped on raw opium grown right in your own garden. Ignore the' only the scarlet ones; only in a hot climate' bullshit. You can grow it right in your own back yard; hell, you can grow it on top of your car; the shit's profligate. You can also subsequently experience the perfect joy of a perfect and instantaneous constipation, one which will magically transform the contents of your bowels into perfectly hardened oatmeal made with epoxy glue. Lacking opium poppies, you can easily duplicate this effect at home in your spare time by packing a burlap sack up your ass as far as you can reach with a broomhandle. Skip it. Get drunk instead.

And in fact I like to garden with a beer or three going. It is important to stay hydrated when engaging in summer outdoor activities. Wandering around the flowers with a can of lager and a rose shears; speaking of looking like a vagrant nutjob, hell, I fit in perfectly. Sumas, I am home.


* We cheerfully await the day when somebody decides to whip a bitch through the flowerbed ha ha! oh, how incredibly funny! And gets their undercarriage high centered on the hidden stump. Oh come on, baby! Yeah!

oh allright fine. here is a picture taken last year of me and the goonybird in the strawberry patch. as fast as i'm picking them, he is eating them. this is in the backyard and there are yellow columbines and serpentine garlic coming up through the strawberry plants.

book review- the empire of the wolves, jean-cristophe grange'

Despite the title, the Empire of the Wolves is not gothic horror, and let God be praised. No, what it is, in fact, is the best police thriller I have read in many, many years. It is extraordinarily good.
Does it have everything going for it? It does. Drugs, murder, procedure, espionage, torture, corruption, double crosses, narrow escapes, gunplay, the whole croissant.
-Oh yes, it's French.

No, now, wait.

Most French-to-English fiction suffers from having been too literally translated to communicate properly, I know. There is none of that here. It certainly reads 'French' but you are spared the indecipherable pop culture references and the awkward idioms like 'He is short like a kneeling apple', in the middle of an otherwise smooth read. Ian Monk as translator gets the coveted 'Golden Blowjob' award for this one.

No, I am not playing with you. It's a 1. French 2. cop thriller that's 3. so good even the translator gets props.

This is the part where I should tell you something about the story. I would like to. It is a smoking hot story. But this is the type of read where discovery is part of the thrill, and there is no way that I want to ruin any of the pleasure or fun of reading it for anybody. I am not trying to be cute; I know, its annoying when people do that. Still, this novel is structured in such a way that my detailing the ingredients would take the starch right out of it.

The plot is straightforward; a victim on the run from a double cross gone bad. The main characters follow standard types...The embittered old timer/hired gun called in to show the youngster the ropes, the honest cop confronting temptation and battling his own nature, the idealist turned rebel. We go from prissy Parisian chocolate shop to the Turkish ghetto, horrific crime scenes, doctors offices, torture chambers, middle class living rooms, a columbarium, a cheap disco, a high desert archaeological site, and nothing breaks the logic or throws you out of the movie. Nothing.

More twists than Orson Welles' upper bowel.

Simply as a reading experience it was worth the time. The guy is a master technician and can make the flow of narrative do amazing things without breaking pace. His dialogue is genuine. He plays with character drawing in a way that I can't remember seeing before on the genre fiction level and it works flawlessly; the author remains invisible. But as a brass tacks cop thriller? It wiped me out. What a ride! A thriller that is genuinely thrilling! You become so enmeshed in the tale that putting this book down for a moment is jarring.

No, this ain't Clive Cussler. Not for a minute.

Go read it NOW.

Trapped! Dante Texas Fart Barbecue! The Modifier Laughs!

Chaucer, you are so in trouble.

In his seat high atop Mt. Olympus the Baby Jesus looked down and saw Chaucer and his evil henchpersons cheating all over the place like dogs. Now although the Baby Jesus was a big fan of The Canturbury Tales, that was not all right with the Baby Jesus AT ALL.

Quick as a wink he became the Holy Infant of Prague and flew down to stop the bout.