The sign at either end of town reads 'Sumas: A Nice Place To Live...And Do Business'. My house is the first thing you see right after you pass that sign, and I try to keep the place looking nice. So it was that I came to be outside yanking weeds last Summer when a couple of bicyclists came riding past reading the sign to each other in snarky voices and laughing. I flipped them off and said 'Yeah, keep on riding, assholes' as they passed. They had the nerve to look astonished. But I was hurt, y'all. Snotty fucking bicyclists and their snotty fucking attitudes. Keep pedalling your kids' toy right on out of town and don't let a combine hit you on the way out, dipshits. We wouldn't have you.
Is it perfect here? Depends on your definition.
The wind through here can reach hurricane force in Spring and Fall, and does so often. If you have a metal shed, you either tie it down or you watch it fly away like the Wicked Witch. On the other hand, snow doesn't stay around for long, since it never really gets a chance to touch the ground.
There are times that it smells like you're living in a cow butt. Silage, flattened skunk, aged dairy pee and rotting cole add to the symphony of delicious aromas on certain still, humid days.
We have weird next-door neighbors. They live in a tottering house just barely visible behind a tangle of un-mowed grass and overgrown shrubs and trees. (Migrating birds love this jungle and I've added seven new species to my life list just by looking out my kitchen window at their yard.) The neighbors hoard animals. Rats seem to be their favorites. Occasionally those tame rats come over to visit and to amble around in my flowerbeds and lick their butts in my front yard. The daughter likes to argue loudly with the pear tree, and occasionally on nice nights she comes out onto the back porch and screams gibberish. Perfectly nice woman in her right mind, as is her mother, who I haven't seen in two years. We haven't seen the father in over five.
I've had worse neighbors. Hell, I've had worse family. Add prime birdwatching and the knowledge that they'll never, ever complain about anything we do over here (mainly because they don't come out during the daytime), and you have a situation that is pretty much ideal for both Hippie and Biker and the type of element we attract. In fact it's like the Small World ride at Disneyland here. I dress up like a toy nutcracker and the Biker puts on his dirndl and everyone sings about global brotherhood, and you never hear a peep from next door.
Across the street is a hayfield. In the spring and summer, and on into the early fall they take a harvest off it about once every three weeks, and my allergies kick into high gear. The mower sends a fine green mist into the air as it circles the field, which you can taste. When the silage equipment comes through and shoots the cut green hay into the wagon, the fermented spray that creates acts like a heavy drifting fog that leaves dried ripples of fibrous stuff on windshields, windows, and the side of the house. The crud I dump out of my vacuum cleaner turns beige and fluffy for a couple of days, and when you sneeze it tastes like grass. That can get annoying.
On the other hand I can go into City Hall dressed in yoga pants and a cut off t-shirt with my tattoos hanging out, or caked in mud with shit all in my hair like aphids and twigs and stuff, and compost down the front of my pants and my shoes tracking wet lagoonage, and I can speak with the Mayor just by asking to. Any damn time I want. Or the Chief of Police. Or anyone on the City Council or in the Works Department. I've done this. Despite my appearance they'll listen to me and take me seriously. They did.
This kind of casual accessibility is priceless. These people aren't sequestered, they aren't faceless; they don't belong to a different class than me and they don't live in another part of town...they're neighbors. I see them wearing torn sweatpants buying animal beer at the Quickie Mart. We know each other. Cops included.
Last winter when the Biker was working graveyard I was up alone about midnight when I heard something outside at my front door. Something THROWING ITSELF at the front door! I could see the door shudder with each blow! Pistol in hand, eyes bugging out, I dialed the police. Before I hung up the goddamn PHONE they were in my driveway shining a spotlight.
No it wasn't a tweaker. Or a zombie. Or a zombie tweaker. It was a stray dog. Why some random-ass dog tried to bread into my house at 12:03 at night is still a mystery. I still get a big smartass grin and wave every time I see the officer who answered that call.*
Here's another example. One day the Biker decided out of the blue to stop off for a drink after work at the local watering hole, three blocks away. Once there, he thought that it would be a good idea to take three of the brand-new pain pills he'd just been prescribed that afternoon with a Long Island Iced Tea, because he is a man. After that hit, he realized he was feeling a little funny; so because he is a man and also sixteen and bulletproof, decided it was time to drive home. Very slowly.
On the wrong side of the road.
With a police car following him.
The police simply made sure he got home safely and let it go. Never said a word, never issued a ticket. Why? Because they know us. We're not fucked-up people. We don't make a habit of visiting the local watering hole, let alone driving 10mph on the wrong side of the road. That, and they probably realized that the best thing they could do in terms of deterrence is to let him face ME.
But the best example of why we live here happened while we were away in Nevada.
We pay our utilities directly to the City. Once they bill you, you have I think it's three working days to settle before they send a guy out.
We got caught up in the preparations for our trip, and the bill went due two days before we left.
We came back after four days gone and receive a telephone call from the city. Did we know they had to shut off our lights?
WTF? Our lights are still on.
Oh, 'Local Philanthropist' paid your bill. Holy crap lady, we're glad to hear from you. We've had the police making welfare checks on your place for the past three days! We were scared you guys were laying dead in there or something! I mean there were cars in the driveway, and...
OK freaked-out person. We'll be right in. Don't worry.
I went down and everyone in the office is all relieved. Oh, there she is! Thank God!
The cops peek in from their desk in the next room. 'We didn't know what happened to you guys! You usually let us know when you go away! We didn't know what to think! I was going to get a dog and, because..'
Local Philanthropist wanders in. 'Listen, it's OK if you need time. I know you just got back from Vegas-'
Not at all. Here's the cash. We shake hands.
And that's why we live here.
________________________________________
*Of course, I have a history of dog-centric police calls. Like the time someones' Australian Cattle Dog decided to herd me, in my car, all the way back to his house, and then lead me around the whole farmyard five times barking and crying before running off. I called the police on that one, because I've evidently seen too many episodes of 'Lassie' as a child, and figured Timmy was laying in there with a broken leg helpless to stop the weasels from eating his face. Turns out this dog likes to herd vehicles. He's even stopped semi trucks and herded them back to his farm.
Friday, February 17, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
Quaint Vignettes From My Charming Rural Idyll
The Biker is descended from original (white) settlers here in Subdued Excitement. If there is a street out hyar that was named prior to 1900, chances are that it's named after the pioneer family homestead it lead to, and that the Biker clan is related to that family. They liked their strange, those Bikers. Which is a good thing, particularly when you consider the whole 'rural and isolated' part of the equation. This is a part of the country where memories are long and people stay put generation after generation. Long-time residents hear a last name and go 'Oh. You're a 'Fill In the Name,' huh?' after which you're either welcomed and accepted, or turned down for a loan, or remanded to sheriffs' custody. If you've ever read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' you know what I mean.
We got a visit yesterday from one of the self-appointed family historians, who came to consult the photographs and papers we inherited from the Bikers' father, the Playboy of the Western World. In passing he mentioned that what we'd thought was the original family homestead was instead the second one. The actual factual first homestead was only a short distance away, and the two cabins that those early Bikers had hammered together from cedar logs, sawpit baulks and hand-whittled pegs are still there and still inhabited. They've been remodelled over the years of course, but the original structure is still clearly visible.
Across the street from the main ancestral manse is a graveyard. We walked through and found where the Bikers ancestors were planted. I was happy to see that despite their age, isolation and Goth appeal, the old granite and marble markers have lain unvandalized all these years.
It brought back a lot of memories for us about the Playboy, and how much history was lost when he passed away, and how much our visitor had resembled him in feature, turn of phrase and gesture. There is no mistaking a member of the Biker clan. It was the type of sodden winter afternoon, overcast and windy, and certainly the type of excursion, that made you think about mortality. It was an interesting day.
Today, the Biker was almost killed in a head-on collision on the way to work.
_______________________________
A car tried to pass a semi in the oncoming lane, doing 70. It shot out in front of the Biker, who braked hard. The car missed him by less than a foot and continued on into the ditch at the side of the road, plunging at speed beneath a concrete flood control grate.
The Biker pulled over. The car in the ditch was bent in such a way that the rear tires were actually higher than the roof, and the roof was smashed backward by the impact. The Biker reached through the window and held the man upright because he was drowning in his own blood. It took a rescue team and lots of equipment to cut the car from around the man. He was alive and in a lot of pain when they took him away in the ambulance.
The Bikers vehicle? Not a scratch. The Biker? Not a scratch.
So he went to work.
The Bikers are a hardy fucking breed, folks.
_________________________________
We got a visit yesterday from one of the self-appointed family historians, who came to consult the photographs and papers we inherited from the Bikers' father, the Playboy of the Western World. In passing he mentioned that what we'd thought was the original family homestead was instead the second one. The actual factual first homestead was only a short distance away, and the two cabins that those early Bikers had hammered together from cedar logs, sawpit baulks and hand-whittled pegs are still there and still inhabited. They've been remodelled over the years of course, but the original structure is still clearly visible.
Across the street from the main ancestral manse is a graveyard. We walked through and found where the Bikers ancestors were planted. I was happy to see that despite their age, isolation and Goth appeal, the old granite and marble markers have lain unvandalized all these years.
It brought back a lot of memories for us about the Playboy, and how much history was lost when he passed away, and how much our visitor had resembled him in feature, turn of phrase and gesture. There is no mistaking a member of the Biker clan. It was the type of sodden winter afternoon, overcast and windy, and certainly the type of excursion, that made you think about mortality. It was an interesting day.
Today, the Biker was almost killed in a head-on collision on the way to work.
_______________________________
A car tried to pass a semi in the oncoming lane, doing 70. It shot out in front of the Biker, who braked hard. The car missed him by less than a foot and continued on into the ditch at the side of the road, plunging at speed beneath a concrete flood control grate.
The Biker pulled over. The car in the ditch was bent in such a way that the rear tires were actually higher than the roof, and the roof was smashed backward by the impact. The Biker reached through the window and held the man upright because he was drowning in his own blood. It took a rescue team and lots of equipment to cut the car from around the man. He was alive and in a lot of pain when they took him away in the ambulance.
The Bikers vehicle? Not a scratch. The Biker? Not a scratch.
So he went to work.
The Bikers are a hardy fucking breed, folks.
_________________________________
Saturday, February 11, 2012
You're Happy And You Have The Lobotomy Scar To Prove It
Part un: How do I find the meaning of life and the reason I exist?
Damn it's a good thing you came here. I can seriously help you with that shit because I'm old and I know more than you do. Now this will get a little convolute but I don't feel like making it any clearer because I've spent a long fucking time getting it narrowed down this far. So then.
Start by looking in the right place. Don't ask your dog, for example. Try to use some common sense here. People who seem to have a lot of meaning and reason for their lives are a good place to start. The microwave is not.
'Reason' and 'meaning' are then formed from what is found in the combination of ones' favorite personal experiences of observable reality and ones' personal history of experienced reality with ones' favorite versions of other peoples' stories about their history of experienced reality.* Doesn't mean the result will be right, but you'll get a reason and a meaning you can understand.
Bear in mind that expecting the conclusion you arrive at to apply perfectly to everything all the time is like looking for a pair of shoes in a steak using a sweater. It won't. Why? Because at the same time you're engaged in this process, other people (although not nearly enough of them) are doing it too, which means that ideas and points of reference will shift. Things outside your sphere of perception and control are meanwhile continuously beginning, changing and ending. Bear in mind too that your ability to perceive is limited, and you will never achieve omnipresent omniscience, which even if you did, might not provide you with much of a 'reason' or 'meaning' anyway.
It's OK though. Here's what you do in the meantime:
Come up with an idea you like about meaning and reason and test it by attempting to use that idea to effect a specific outcome. If the test bears out your idea, then you adopt the result and use it as a tool to investigate more ideas. This is called 'having a life and living it'. If your idea works, then at this point, you experience 'belief' and 'certainty' and 'increased efficiency'.
If it doesn't work, then this is the point at which you experience 'doubt' and 'instability' and 'suckage'.
What do you do then?
You don't just continue to try and wham the original fucking idea into fitting the results....you come up with a new goddamn idea and see if that works.
It will not kill you. In fact about 3/4 of the time you will experience the resulting paradigm shift as an enormous sense of relief. That 1/4 of the time you experience it as fucked up, when it destroys everything that came before and leaves you bereft of formerly familiar landmarks, is the point at which you get to make a very simple decision: build a new paradigm, or go back to the old one?
What do to?
Well...did the old one paradigm bite? Build a new one. All the phenomena you based the old one on is still there, you just have to recombine it and probably throw out a lot of stuff. This is an important point. Subtraction is a part of creation.
Did the old paradigm provide you with things that you believe to be important to you? Return to it.
All done? Good.
I know what you're saying. No seriously I do. Yes I do too. Which is why we'll tackle the issue of happiness next.
______________________
Part deux: Happiness - it's not just a city in China!
If you listened to your dog when you asked it about meaning and reason, then right now you're probably eating cat crap. Do you experience this as pleasant, fulfilling, relevant and survival-enhancing? Then you're happy, and you need to go sit over there and be happy.
If not, you're unhappy, and you still need to be sitting over there.
You do not fix unhappiness by telling yourself that you actually are happy, any more than you fill up your gas tank by telling yourself it's full.
You certainly do not solve it by telling yourself that you should be happy. Why? Because 'should' doesn't put you at 'happy'. 'Should' puts you at 'still pre-happy'.
Nor do you fix it by making other people agree that you're happy and getting pissed off at them when they won't play along.
You fix it by deciding to be happy according to your own standards, as discovered by implementing the principles in part un, and then changing things around you until you are.
Start here:
The more fallacies you base your life around, the shittier your life will be. Thus it follows that if your life is shitty, what you believe-or are trying to believe- right now is REALLY STUPID. Therefore:
Quit believing in stupid things. It makes you do stupid things. Doing stupid things makes you unhappy.
_________________________________
Part C: 'Qui Custodit Portam Asinum Caput Mouere Prius Habito'
Which is French for 'wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.'
People who deceive themselves are first of all aware of the stupidity of their data. In order to complete the operation they must then decide to continue to utilize it.
Stupidity is a state.
Self-deception is the decision to impose that state upon yourself.
As such, it is usually painfully obvious to onlookers. Those who lack the mental furniture to detect it are exactly the type of supporting cast that anyone looking to achieve happiness does not need, yet deserves, and will get. Nothing attracts more stupid like stupid, as we observe in the case of the Insane Clown Posse.
Magnets: how do they work?
Muthafuckin' rainbows.
The decision to replace action and change with self-deception subsequently and invariably creates great deal of unpleasant suck. Where many people would say 'hey, this sucks' and stop doing it, the determinedly self-deceived generally refuse to abandon the use of lies, and attempt to lie their way around this suckage by erecting higher and more elaborate buttresses of lies, which effort feeds back into itself resulting in an ever-increasing rate of material and metaphysical entropic decay; or, as it is commonly known, a giant clusterfuck of stupid.
The by-now completely overwhelmed self-deceived will commonly react to this snowballing state of affairs not by abandoning their initial strategy, but by imposing a greater volume of self - induced stupidity....attempting to cover it all over like a cat shitting in a gravel driveway by using more lies combined with abreactive stress responses. And all the while, their fucked-up paradigm state steadily propagates as they continue to apply it to the people and things around them.
Get it? It propagates.
Your determination to be stupid and behave stupidly makes other people miserable to the direct degree of their involvement with you. Your determination to CONTINUE this behavior makes their lives worse exponentially right along with yours.
Got it? Now QUIT BEING A FUCKING IDIOT.
_________________________________
*Wasn't that easy? You can stop paying for those e-meter sessions now!
Damn it's a good thing you came here. I can seriously help you with that shit because I'm old and I know more than you do. Now this will get a little convolute but I don't feel like making it any clearer because I've spent a long fucking time getting it narrowed down this far. So then.
Start by looking in the right place. Don't ask your dog, for example. Try to use some common sense here. People who seem to have a lot of meaning and reason for their lives are a good place to start. The microwave is not.
'Reason' and 'meaning' are then formed from what is found in the combination of ones' favorite personal experiences of observable reality and ones' personal history of experienced reality with ones' favorite versions of other peoples' stories about their history of experienced reality.* Doesn't mean the result will be right, but you'll get a reason and a meaning you can understand.
Bear in mind that expecting the conclusion you arrive at to apply perfectly to everything all the time is like looking for a pair of shoes in a steak using a sweater. It won't. Why? Because at the same time you're engaged in this process, other people (although not nearly enough of them) are doing it too, which means that ideas and points of reference will shift. Things outside your sphere of perception and control are meanwhile continuously beginning, changing and ending. Bear in mind too that your ability to perceive is limited, and you will never achieve omnipresent omniscience, which even if you did, might not provide you with much of a 'reason' or 'meaning' anyway.
It's OK though. Here's what you do in the meantime:
Come up with an idea you like about meaning and reason and test it by attempting to use that idea to effect a specific outcome. If the test bears out your idea, then you adopt the result and use it as a tool to investigate more ideas. This is called 'having a life and living it'. If your idea works, then at this point, you experience 'belief' and 'certainty' and 'increased efficiency'.
If it doesn't work, then this is the point at which you experience 'doubt' and 'instability' and 'suckage'.
What do you do then?
You don't just continue to try and wham the original fucking idea into fitting the results....you come up with a new goddamn idea and see if that works.
It will not kill you. In fact about 3/4 of the time you will experience the resulting paradigm shift as an enormous sense of relief. That 1/4 of the time you experience it as fucked up, when it destroys everything that came before and leaves you bereft of formerly familiar landmarks, is the point at which you get to make a very simple decision: build a new paradigm, or go back to the old one?
What do to?
Well...did the old one paradigm bite? Build a new one. All the phenomena you based the old one on is still there, you just have to recombine it and probably throw out a lot of stuff. This is an important point. Subtraction is a part of creation.
Did the old paradigm provide you with things that you believe to be important to you? Return to it.
All done? Good.
I know what you're saying. No seriously I do. Yes I do too. Which is why we'll tackle the issue of happiness next.
______________________
Part deux: Happiness - it's not just a city in China!
If you listened to your dog when you asked it about meaning and reason, then right now you're probably eating cat crap. Do you experience this as pleasant, fulfilling, relevant and survival-enhancing? Then you're happy, and you need to go sit over there and be happy.
If not, you're unhappy, and you still need to be sitting over there.
You do not fix unhappiness by telling yourself that you actually are happy, any more than you fill up your gas tank by telling yourself it's full.
You certainly do not solve it by telling yourself that you should be happy. Why? Because 'should' doesn't put you at 'happy'. 'Should' puts you at 'still pre-happy'.
Nor do you fix it by making other people agree that you're happy and getting pissed off at them when they won't play along.
You fix it by deciding to be happy according to your own standards, as discovered by implementing the principles in part un, and then changing things around you until you are.
Start here:
The more fallacies you base your life around, the shittier your life will be. Thus it follows that if your life is shitty, what you believe-or are trying to believe- right now is REALLY STUPID. Therefore:
Quit believing in stupid things. It makes you do stupid things. Doing stupid things makes you unhappy.
_________________________________
Part C: 'Qui Custodit Portam Asinum Caput Mouere Prius Habito'
Which is French for 'wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.'
People who deceive themselves are first of all aware of the stupidity of their data. In order to complete the operation they must then decide to continue to utilize it.
Stupidity is a state.
Self-deception is the decision to impose that state upon yourself.
As such, it is usually painfully obvious to onlookers. Those who lack the mental furniture to detect it are exactly the type of supporting cast that anyone looking to achieve happiness does not need, yet deserves, and will get. Nothing attracts more stupid like stupid, as we observe in the case of the Insane Clown Posse.
Magnets: how do they work?
Muthafuckin' rainbows.
The decision to replace action and change with self-deception subsequently and invariably creates great deal of unpleasant suck. Where many people would say 'hey, this sucks' and stop doing it, the determinedly self-deceived generally refuse to abandon the use of lies, and attempt to lie their way around this suckage by erecting higher and more elaborate buttresses of lies, which effort feeds back into itself resulting in an ever-increasing rate of material and metaphysical entropic decay; or, as it is commonly known, a giant clusterfuck of stupid.
The by-now completely overwhelmed self-deceived will commonly react to this snowballing state of affairs not by abandoning their initial strategy, but by imposing a greater volume of self - induced stupidity....attempting to cover it all over like a cat shitting in a gravel driveway by using more lies combined with abreactive stress responses. And all the while, their fucked-up paradigm state steadily propagates as they continue to apply it to the people and things around them.
Get it? It propagates.
Your determination to be stupid and behave stupidly makes other people miserable to the direct degree of their involvement with you. Your determination to CONTINUE this behavior makes their lives worse exponentially right along with yours.
Got it? Now QUIT BEING A FUCKING IDIOT.
_________________________________
*Wasn't that easy? You can stop paying for those e-meter sessions now!
Friday, February 03, 2012
Muk Visits Nevada: A Photo Essay, With Photos
The Biker and I visited Laughlin, Kingman and Oatman, and a little bit of Las Vegas, which was horrifying. We took pictures with our digital picture taking thing. There are batteries inside it. It is called a 'camera'. 'Camera' is Latin for 'room'. Now quit bugging me about it. The pictures show images of things we saw. Like this:
This is the road to Laughlin. Whole lotta nuffin, is what you see in Nevada, in between casinos and tiny, bleak towns filled with mobile homes and identical tan houses. Why didn't I take any pictures of Vegas? Because you can go online and see pictures of Vegas. That, and we spent only as long as it took to rent a car and return that rental car in Vegas. Fuck Vegas. I mean seriously fuck Vegas.
This was taken on the main street of Kingman. Why didn't I take any pictures of Laughlin? Laughlin is fucking ugly, is why. Laughlin consists of one main street with five or so bigass casino-hotel complexes, surrounded by identical tan houses, and desert. Fuck Laughlin. The Colorado River runs through it, and it's ok as rivers go but it's a RIVER, PEOPLE. If it were on fire, or was filled with hybrid dolphin-humans, that would be another story, but it isn't.
This is the side of the storefront Catholic Church (traditional) in the last picture. Remember? The one with the fat chick? That one. Jesus has an air conditioner on his shoulder. Remember back in the 80's when everyone was carrying around a bigass boombox on their shoulder? Yeah. But Jesus is a practical guy, and this is the middle of the Great Basin desert. If he wants to hear tunes he can duck into a tavern.
...like this one. Only this is a cocktail lounge. I think Jesus would dig the sign.
This is another painting of Jesus we saw in Kingman. Someone needs to buy this because it is cool as shit. You want it, it was in an antique shop called 'Bubbies'. The same person painted another awesome-ass painting of a Chicago Dog, and I wanted that sapsucker bad, but it cost 300.00 and there isn't a hot dog in the damn world I'm going to spend 300.00 dollars on cool or not. Fuck hot dogs.
This is a random mountain just poking up out of the desert outside of Kingman. This mountain is so old it is actually CRUMBLING into dirt, just from standing out in the hot sun getting baked to shit and then freezing at night for weeks on end like it has. If you have a mountain you should think about this. You can ruin a perfectly good mountain without meaning to really easily.
You see this here? This is the reason me and the Biker came to Nevada in the first place. This is some of the last few remaining miles of the original Route 66. We wanted to see this and travel on it ourselves. Now it's paved. It wasn't 60 years ago.
This is a ghost of what the Dust Bowl migrants faced in their desperation--20 unpaved miles across waterless, shadeless, open desert, headed straight toward the sudden dangerous grades and washouts of the jagged stone mountains in the distance. Crossed with sand-filled arroyos that the tires of the cars sank into, washes that could turn into a pit of death and erase you without warning if a flash flood occurred...caused by a rainstorm you never saw, that happened far away in the hills. The desert is still giving up the bones and belongings of these people.
Once well into the hills the stone and sand begin to give way to amazing desert plants, cacti, mesquite brush, palo verde and spanish dagger, alien and spiny. There is no sound and no smell of water anywhere. The still air perceptably draws the moisture from your skin and your hair crackles with static.
In places the road is supported on piles of stone rubble. Once well into the mountains it shrinks down until it is barely two cars wide. The hairpin turns and switchbacks are short enough so that you can scrape your car on the stone walls of the mountain in navigating them, and the grades are dangerously steep. Some of the washes you cross are so narrow that long vehicles can get lodged tight stem and stern between the downhill and uphill. This shit is not for the fainthearted driver even today. Imagine it in a Model T. I wish I could have gotten pictures of it to illustrate what I mean, but there was literally no place to get out of the car to do so. This was taken on the only wide turnout we found. It's some plants.
Up in the middle of these mountains you suddenly come into the little town of Oatman. Named after a Victorian era woman with a facial tattoo who was enslaved by the Paiute, in fact. (go Red Team!)
Among other inhabitants of the place are a herd of semi-tame hippie-ass donkeys that were turned loose way back when the mine up the road switched over to mechanized transport. The donkeys lie down in the middle of the road. They wander into the stores. They lick your windsheild. They eat cactus. They crap where they want. They do not give a fuck.
This is pretty much it for Oatman. It's in a ravine, and the town, such as it is, is perched up on the hillsides on either side of Route 66 going right through the middle.
You have to look around the corners for the 'old' Oatman to peer back at you. A lot of what stands is whats been built and re-built for years out of what remained after something fell over or burnt down. Some of it still remains, though.
If I have to live in Nevada, I'm going to live here. I'll craft motorcycle 'windsheild wipers' out of donkey leather and sell them in the summer for beer money. Come winter, I'll just pop the air conditioner out, give it back to Jesus, unblock the stack and stick on the tin chimney, fire up the woodstove with 100$ bills, uncork the Recipe, light up a cigar and watch the snow fall in my living room.
This'd be my next door neibors. The house is a cabin thats been sided and drug up to another cabin as an addition. It's built up on mesquite posts and rocks for a foundation, and the gap between the floor and the hillside closed in with shaved log slabs. The aluminum windows are salvaged, and the old shingle roof is roofed over with another roof of tin for whatever reason.
Just out of Oatman the road flattens out and becomes straighter, the grades become less nerve-wracking, and it's a long glide down into the desert along the banks of the Colorado River. This is the perfectly magic, perfectly timed sunset we saw as we rounded the last bend on Route 66. It went straight through me.
Now I have to go pee. You should probably go pee too.
This is the road to Laughlin. Whole lotta nuffin, is what you see in Nevada, in between casinos and tiny, bleak towns filled with mobile homes and identical tan houses. Why didn't I take any pictures of Vegas? Because you can go online and see pictures of Vegas. That, and we spent only as long as it took to rent a car and return that rental car in Vegas. Fuck Vegas. I mean seriously fuck Vegas.
This was taken on the main street of Kingman. Why didn't I take any pictures of Laughlin? Laughlin is fucking ugly, is why. Laughlin consists of one main street with five or so bigass casino-hotel complexes, surrounded by identical tan houses, and desert. Fuck Laughlin. The Colorado River runs through it, and it's ok as rivers go but it's a RIVER, PEOPLE. If it were on fire, or was filled with hybrid dolphin-humans, that would be another story, but it isn't.
This is the side of the storefront Catholic Church (traditional) in the last picture. Remember? The one with the fat chick? That one. Jesus has an air conditioner on his shoulder. Remember back in the 80's when everyone was carrying around a bigass boombox on their shoulder? Yeah. But Jesus is a practical guy, and this is the middle of the Great Basin desert. If he wants to hear tunes he can duck into a tavern.
...like this one. Only this is a cocktail lounge. I think Jesus would dig the sign.
This is another painting of Jesus we saw in Kingman. Someone needs to buy this because it is cool as shit. You want it, it was in an antique shop called 'Bubbies'. The same person painted another awesome-ass painting of a Chicago Dog, and I wanted that sapsucker bad, but it cost 300.00 and there isn't a hot dog in the damn world I'm going to spend 300.00 dollars on cool or not. Fuck hot dogs.
This is a random mountain just poking up out of the desert outside of Kingman. This mountain is so old it is actually CRUMBLING into dirt, just from standing out in the hot sun getting baked to shit and then freezing at night for weeks on end like it has. If you have a mountain you should think about this. You can ruin a perfectly good mountain without meaning to really easily.
You see this here? This is the reason me and the Biker came to Nevada in the first place. This is some of the last few remaining miles of the original Route 66. We wanted to see this and travel on it ourselves. Now it's paved. It wasn't 60 years ago.
This is a ghost of what the Dust Bowl migrants faced in their desperation--20 unpaved miles across waterless, shadeless, open desert, headed straight toward the sudden dangerous grades and washouts of the jagged stone mountains in the distance. Crossed with sand-filled arroyos that the tires of the cars sank into, washes that could turn into a pit of death and erase you without warning if a flash flood occurred...caused by a rainstorm you never saw, that happened far away in the hills. The desert is still giving up the bones and belongings of these people.
Once well into the hills the stone and sand begin to give way to amazing desert plants, cacti, mesquite brush, palo verde and spanish dagger, alien and spiny. There is no sound and no smell of water anywhere. The still air perceptably draws the moisture from your skin and your hair crackles with static.
In places the road is supported on piles of stone rubble. Once well into the mountains it shrinks down until it is barely two cars wide. The hairpin turns and switchbacks are short enough so that you can scrape your car on the stone walls of the mountain in navigating them, and the grades are dangerously steep. Some of the washes you cross are so narrow that long vehicles can get lodged tight stem and stern between the downhill and uphill. This shit is not for the fainthearted driver even today. Imagine it in a Model T. I wish I could have gotten pictures of it to illustrate what I mean, but there was literally no place to get out of the car to do so. This was taken on the only wide turnout we found. It's some plants.
Up in the middle of these mountains you suddenly come into the little town of Oatman. Named after a Victorian era woman with a facial tattoo who was enslaved by the Paiute, in fact. (go Red Team!)
Among other inhabitants of the place are a herd of semi-tame hippie-ass donkeys that were turned loose way back when the mine up the road switched over to mechanized transport. The donkeys lie down in the middle of the road. They wander into the stores. They lick your windsheild. They eat cactus. They crap where they want. They do not give a fuck.
This is pretty much it for Oatman. It's in a ravine, and the town, such as it is, is perched up on the hillsides on either side of Route 66 going right through the middle.
You have to look around the corners for the 'old' Oatman to peer back at you. A lot of what stands is whats been built and re-built for years out of what remained after something fell over or burnt down. Some of it still remains, though.
If I have to live in Nevada, I'm going to live here. I'll craft motorcycle 'windsheild wipers' out of donkey leather and sell them in the summer for beer money. Come winter, I'll just pop the air conditioner out, give it back to Jesus, unblock the stack and stick on the tin chimney, fire up the woodstove with 100$ bills, uncork the Recipe, light up a cigar and watch the snow fall in my living room.
This'd be my next door neibors. The house is a cabin thats been sided and drug up to another cabin as an addition. It's built up on mesquite posts and rocks for a foundation, and the gap between the floor and the hillside closed in with shaved log slabs. The aluminum windows are salvaged, and the old shingle roof is roofed over with another roof of tin for whatever reason.
Just out of Oatman the road flattens out and becomes straighter, the grades become less nerve-wracking, and it's a long glide down into the desert along the banks of the Colorado River. This is the perfectly magic, perfectly timed sunset we saw as we rounded the last bend on Route 66. It went straight through me.
Now I have to go pee. You should probably go pee too.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
This is a space filler. Please disregard.
No seriously, this is. If you're interested in reading this blog, I've just created HANDY TAGS which you'll find down at the very very bottom of this page by scrolling down, so you can go directly to the - and I use this term loosely-'Good Stuff', and skip all the crap where I whine about my family and talk about Swiss Belted cows and other crotch-punchingly dull trivia like that.
Now here is a picture of some random strangers' ween.
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Exotic ball comments, Asian Pee
Yes, it's time. Long since time, in fact. What is it time for? It is time to discuss why so many Americans are so poopy, is what time it is. And who better to ask than that sage of the sands, the pimp daddy of the prognosticators....
MR. EGYPTIAN PENIS MAN!
Q- Mr. Egyptian Penis Man, how did people come to live in America?
A- Oh, thats easy. America is where everyone from the rest of the world used to send all their dipshits.
Lumpy, un-circumcised and feelin' the breeze: If you ain't Dutch, you ain't much
Earlier in their history the fun-loving Dutch had dealt with the problem of excess pee-babies and asscabbages in a haphazard manner.
MR. EGYPTIAN PENIS MAN!
Q- Mr. Egyptian Penis Man, how did people come to live in America?
A- Oh, thats easy. America is where everyone from the rest of the world used to send all their dipshits.
You see, it all started with the prehistoric Asians...
The early Europeans were slow to catch on, although the rudiments of the practice were already in place...
Of course, once the Industrial Revolution started and the losers and dipshits started piling up faster than wars and plagues could kill them off, the Europeans re-discovered America and started loading up the boats.
Q- Despite that, America went on to be quite a worldwide social and economic influence during the 20th century. What factors lead to it's current troubled state?
A- Lead consumption.
....Seriously. It started during the Victorian Era.
The Victorian Era: Sixty-four years of wacky hijinks and madcap hilarity
Q- What was the Victorian era?
A- Crap, do you have a library card? Ring ring pick up the clue phone! The Victorian era was the freakin' SHIZNIT!
Everyone in the Victorian Era wore elaborate goggles with multiple lenses. People carried Navy Colts and wore corsets and dressed in leather aviator helmets and fingerless gloves. Plus about 1/3 of the population were vampires! The only downside was that lead contamination was omnipresent, because of the Industrial Revolution, which required lots of lead because it kept the zombies who worked the looms in check. Soon everything contained lead. Common household products like medicines, cosmetics and cleaning agents contained lead. The post-combustive exhausts produced by dirigibles, patent autoperipatetikoticons and armoured land leviathans filled the air with lead-laced smog. Fish taken from waters polluted by those same early industrial wastes were high in lead, and when troops ran out of conventional ammunition during the Great Zombie Uprising of 1843, those same fish were used as bullets by villagers . Un-spent cod and bream 'rounds' dropped by panicked troops were devoured by starving children left orphaned by the fighting.
This brings us to the Dutch.
Lumpy, un-circumcised and feelin' the breeze: If you ain't Dutch, you ain't muchEarlier in their history the fun-loving Dutch had dealt with the problem of excess pee-babies and asscabbages in a haphazard manner.
Solving the Vegan Problem Haphazardly, Amsterdam c. 1500
But all that changed during the Dutch Waffle Famine of 1755:
Insufficient dietary fiber leads to rampant grouchiness, poor millenary choices, and Calvinism: Solving the Vegan Problem, Amsterdam c. 1723
And so it was that one small boy found himself chained in the hold of a dirigible bound for the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave...one small, seemingly insignifigant boy, young in appearance but already ancient in the ways of evil......
Q- Oh no! What happened then, Mr. Egyptian Penis man?
A- Wait another couple of weeks and I might tell you.
TO BE CONTINUED
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
Not my words, but I wish they were.
From me, and from all of us living in random conservative pockets of social wilderness still grimly holding the line, I thank you humbly, Dan Savage, for the following stark, wonderful words. Mr. Savage, you and your family can come have dinner at my place any time. Just call first and let me know if y'all have any food allergies.
_____________________________
IN YOUR IMAGE (article originally printed in The Stranger)
Oct. 14, 2010
"...I heard an interview with you about your It Gets Better campaign. I was saddened and frustrated with your comments regarding people of faith and their perpetuation of bullying. As someone who loves the Lord and does not support gay marriage, I can honestly say I was heartbroken to hear about the young man who took his own life.
If your message is that we should not judge people based on their sexual preference, how do you justify judging entire groups of people for any other reason (including their faith)? There is no part of me that took any pleasure in what happened to that young man.
To that end, to imply that I would somehow encourage my children to mock, hurt, or intimidate another person for any reason is completely unfounded and offensive. Being a follower of Christ is, above all things, a recognition that we are all imperfect, fallible, and in desperate need of a savior. We cannot believe that we are better or more worthy than other people.
Please consider your viewpoint, and please be more careful with your words in the future.
L.R."
(Mr. Savage replies:)
I'm sorry your feelings were hurt by my comments.
No, wait. I'm not. Gay kids are dying. So let's try to keep things in perspective: Fuck your feelings.
A question: Do you "support" atheist marriage? Interfaith marriage? Divorce and remarriage? All are legal, all go against Christian and/or traditional ideas about marriage, and yet there's no "Christian" movement to deny marriage rights to atheists or people marrying outside their respective faiths or people divorcing and remarrying. Why the hell not?
Sorry, L.R., but so long as you support the denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples, it's clear that you do believe that some people—straight people—are "better or more worthy" than others.
And—sorry—but you are partly responsible for the bullying and physical violence being visited on vulnerable LGBT children. The kids of people who see gay people as sinful or damaged or disordered and unworthy of full civil equality—even if those people strive to express their bigotry in the politest possible way (at least when they happen to be addressing a gay person)—learn to see gay people as sinful, damaged, disordered, and unworthy. And while there may not be any gay adults or couples where you live, or at your church, or in your workplace, I promise you that there are gay and lesbian children in your schools. And while you can only attack gays and lesbians at the ballot box, nice and impersonally, your children have the option of attacking actual gays and lesbians, in person, in real time.
Real gay and lesbian children. Not political abstractions, not "sinners." Gay and lesbian children.
Try to keep up: The dehumanizing bigotries that fall from the lips of "faithful Christians," and the lies about us that vomit out from the pulpits of churches that "faithful Christians" drag their kids to on Sundays, give your children license to verbally abuse, humiliate, and condemn the gay children they encounter at school. And many of your children—having listened to Mom and Dad talk about how gay marriage is a threat to family and how gay sex makes their magic sky friend Jesus cry—feel justified in physically abusing the LGBT children they encounter in their schools. You don't have to explicitly "encourage [your] children to mock, hurt, or intimidate" queer kids. Your encouragement—along with your hatred and fear—is implicit. It's here, it's clear, and we're seeing the fruits of it: dead children.
Oh, and those same dehumanizing bigotries that fill your straight children with hate? They fill your gay children with suicidal despair. And you have the nerve to ask me to be more careful with my words?
Did that hurt to hear? Good. But it couldn't have hurt nearly as much as what was said and done to Asher Brown and Justin Aaberg and Billy Lucas and Cody Barker and Seth Walsh—day in, day out for years—at schools filled with bigoted little monsters created not in the image of a loving God, but in the image of the hateful and false "followers of Christ" they call Mom and Dad.
__________________________________
For more, go here. Go now.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Spastic Twitching Muk Has Seven Seizures!!
Folks, I am back. Really I am. I know I haven't been posting. The reason why is because I am quitting smoking. Anyone out there who has tried to quit smoking knows exactly what I mean when I use that as an excuse, too. But for the rest of you smug pottyheads with your shiny pristine lungs, I will explain.
I cannot keep myself on task for longer than a minute before I'm up and pacing, gritting my teeth and clenching my fists like a goddamn tweaker. 10:am rolls around and I want a smoke. The phone rings and I want a smoke. The news comes on tv and I'm reaching for my lighter. I crack a beer? FORGET IT. But yeah...I sit down to write a post and before I finish a paragraph I'm wanting a smoke so bad I can taste nicotine in my mouth. So bear with me folks. Meanwhile, here is a nice picture of Jimmy Olson riding a big weiner:
As you can see, our man Jimmy is experiencing such a ride that all the words fell out of his word balloon! What do you suppose he's saying? What would you say? Do tell us as we gather in the comments lounge, won't you?
I cannot keep myself on task for longer than a minute before I'm up and pacing, gritting my teeth and clenching my fists like a goddamn tweaker. 10:am rolls around and I want a smoke. The phone rings and I want a smoke. The news comes on tv and I'm reaching for my lighter. I crack a beer? FORGET IT. But yeah...I sit down to write a post and before I finish a paragraph I'm wanting a smoke so bad I can taste nicotine in my mouth. So bear with me folks. Meanwhile, here is a nice picture of Jimmy Olson riding a big weiner:
As you can see, our man Jimmy is experiencing such a ride that all the words fell out of his word balloon! What do you suppose he's saying? What would you say? Do tell us as we gather in the comments lounge, won't you?
Monday, December 06, 2010
Maroon Dog Is Have The Misplace Preposition!!
Oh for heavens' sake I have been Christmas shopping and cooking things and babysitting grandbabies already. I have also been procrastinating on my super secret Canada post because cows have been looking at me funny. Seriously. I drive by and they all look at me funny. Like they know something. Something bad. Something serious. Something involving my social security number and address kinda stuff. I have duct taped all my windows and am only leaving the house to purchase sugar, coffee and flour. I am making candles out of lard and re-using bacon fat in oil lamps I made out of old soup cans and tampons (unused. I am not gross.) All my breakers are in the 'off' position and I am busily wadding up old newspapers and stuffing them down between the wall studs which is difficult while wearing a gas mask but I am coping. The cows are near, after all, and time is fleeting.
the cxows.
the COW2SSSSSSSSSSS.
the cxows.
the COW2SSSSSSSSSSS.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Nine Flamingo Runs With Dangerous Have Pointy!!
What has FirstNations been doing lately, you ask?
1. Not doing a hell of a lot to quit smoking.
2. Gauge'n her ears out. I am presently wearing what appear to be large stainless steel curlicue fish hooks though each earlobe and while I don't recall the exact gauge they are about as big around as a common framing nail. They look wicked cool and divert attention away from the fact that I am 50, and dye my hair. Seriously. It works.
3. Chillaxin' here at the Rancho next to the heater while the ass half of me freezes (1 degree Fahrenheit, which is 'Shit, we ran out of degrees it was so fucking cold' in Celsius) and the other half of me watches large pieces of other peoples' barns whip past at 30mph. Well, actually that was the week before last. It snowed at some point during the proceedings but it all turned into freezing white sand and blew away north someplace. Of course, the only thing north of here is Canada. And our used snow. So that's OK.
4. Trying to offload some excess muffin top after a Lucullan Thanksgiving at my sons' place. Two duckies, half a delicious sugar saturated pig bottom, lots of gravy and gratuitous usage of butter makes Muks chubby. You too.
5. Slapping on the Retin-A with the same clandestine recklessness as Michael Moore hiding in a rented room with a jumbo sized jar of Nutella and a big spoon. And the news is: the stuff WORKS. I mean, the stuff works crazy good. Are you all old and shit? Run out right now and get you a big ol' Costco-sized jug of Roc and start slapping it all over yourself. It actually reverses time. Did you see that Superman movie where he makes the world revolve backward so fast that time itself reverses? Exactly like that. I now look just like my third grade class photograph.
6. Making a lot of bread. Loaf bread, not money bread. Although you'd be happy to pay money to eat this bread because it's really that good. I turned out a challah for Thanksgiving that would have made the Pope reverse his circumcision. Really.
1. Not doing a hell of a lot to quit smoking.
2. Gauge'n her ears out. I am presently wearing what appear to be large stainless steel curlicue fish hooks though each earlobe and while I don't recall the exact gauge they are about as big around as a common framing nail. They look wicked cool and divert attention away from the fact that I am 50, and dye my hair. Seriously. It works.
3. Chillaxin' here at the Rancho next to the heater while the ass half of me freezes (1 degree Fahrenheit, which is 'Shit, we ran out of degrees it was so fucking cold' in Celsius) and the other half of me watches large pieces of other peoples' barns whip past at 30mph. Well, actually that was the week before last. It snowed at some point during the proceedings but it all turned into freezing white sand and blew away north someplace. Of course, the only thing north of here is Canada. And our used snow. So that's OK.
4. Trying to offload some excess muffin top after a Lucullan Thanksgiving at my sons' place. Two duckies, half a delicious sugar saturated pig bottom, lots of gravy and gratuitous usage of butter makes Muks chubby. You too.
5. Slapping on the Retin-A with the same clandestine recklessness as Michael Moore hiding in a rented room with a jumbo sized jar of Nutella and a big spoon. And the news is: the stuff WORKS. I mean, the stuff works crazy good. Are you all old and shit? Run out right now and get you a big ol' Costco-sized jug of Roc and start slapping it all over yourself. It actually reverses time. Did you see that Superman movie where he makes the world revolve backward so fast that time itself reverses? Exactly like that. I now look just like my third grade class photograph.
6. Making a lot of bread. Loaf bread, not money bread. Although you'd be happy to pay money to eat this bread because it's really that good. I turned out a challah for Thanksgiving that would have made the Pope reverse his circumcision. Really.
In the quest for better bread I even made myself a new little friend: it's name is Dave, and it is a sourdough starter that lives in a mason jar in my kitchen. I feed Dave some flour and honey and a little of this and that and then shake the living daylights out of it a couple of times every day and then when Dave gets good and bubbly I dump off part and make bread with it. Owning a Dave is like owning a dog....it smells funny, its gassy and you have to feed it every day, but unlike a dog it doesn't hump the baby or eat cat crap.
7. Working on a super spectacular post about Canada, which is a secret.
8. Having a head cold.
9. Sitting underneath a nice new haircut, which is really really short.
10. Owning three new tattoos: an einkorn plant on the inside of each forearm going from the center of my palm up to the inside of my elbow:
7. Working on a super spectacular post about Canada, which is a secret.
8. Having a head cold.
9. Sitting underneath a nice new haircut, which is really really short.
10. Owning three new tattoos: an einkorn plant on the inside of each forearm going from the center of my palm up to the inside of my elbow:
...this exact picture, only I copied it so it would be one whole plant and made the roots look better and drew in a taproot that ran down into the lifeline of my palm which didn't feel real wonderful but was worth it, plus both plants mirror one another which looks awesome.
...and a nice picture of John Lee Hooker on my left shoulderblade. Jimi Hendrix is next up, and he'll be on my right shoulderblade. And yeah, I know exactly what you're thinking and you should get your mind out of the gutter.
That's what I'm doing.
What are you doing?
Monday, November 22, 2010
Green Bonobo Strike Force: Nadular Dangling!
Another cooking post!
Yes! More cooking stuff, despite the pleas of certain of you for more hot dugong action.
This photograph from Beasts' last Indonesian vacation explains why he came home wearing that ankle bracelet.
Yesterday I made a nice pasta dish using CHANTERELLE MUSHROOMS. And it was...nice. Chanterelles have a very delicate flavor. It's a good flavor, but not a terribly assertive one. What I want is a way to bring that flavor forward.
Another peek at his vacation piccys: A recent day trip to the Isle of Jersey reveals Beasts' unnatural fascination with fruit bats.
"This very bad man makes kissing of dugong, then and try walk away date underage dugong like as though he can come to foreign country like big talking imperialist and just do whatever he want to. We here in Jakarta say no Mr. Beast who is all hairless like ladyboy is not welcome back here ever!"
Yes! More cooking stuff, despite the pleas of certain of you for more hot dugong action.
This photograph from Beasts' last Indonesian vacation explains why he came home wearing that ankle bracelet.Yesterday I made a nice pasta dish using CHANTERELLE MUSHROOMS. And it was...nice. Chanterelles have a very delicate flavor. It's a good flavor, but not a terribly assertive one. What I want is a way to bring that flavor forward.
Another peek at his vacation piccys: A recent day trip to the Isle of Jersey reveals Beasts' unnatural fascination with fruit bats. It might be as simple as using more chanterelle, or making some kind of an infusion; I dunno. Has anyone out there ever worked with chanterelle? If so, gimme some tips on how to achieve this.
YES I have looked online. NO I don't want to use a bunch of spices or onions or sausage or other types of mushroom. I just want the chanterelle flavor to be LOUDER.
"This very bad man makes kissing of dugong, then and try walk away date underage dugong like as though he can come to foreign country like big talking imperialist and just do whatever he want to. We here in Jakarta say no Mr. Beast who is all hairless like ladyboy is not welcome back here ever!"Thursday, November 11, 2010
Violet Ibis Amusement Of Fire: Drapery Hot Flaming!
This is the story of my second-to-the-top Worst Date Ever. Number 1 is here.
Now, many of my dates have had bad moments, but this date was bizarre from beginning to end, which is why it earns the second place ribbon. So..... (extensive preamble follows)
_______________
My senior year in High School my parents decided to allow me to have a social life*. My new friends-to-be were selected from the offspring of my mothers' religious buddies, a rather shallow and murky pool at the best of times.
Our outings were...charming, I guess you'd have to say. It was sort of like the 50's...we would attend evening 'Youth in Christ' meetings and then all go out in a big heap to McDonalds or something and sit around with our huge bibles stuffed with tracts, talking about the Lord and sipping pop. One memorable evening found the ten of us seated in a greasy banquette at Lani Louis' while the boys chugged Pepsi and then treated the other patrons to a belching contest, which is what passed for 'pushing the social envelope' among this crowd. Maybe the adjective I'm looking for is 'sad'.
My Mom had decided that I was going to be best friends with one girl in particular, and this girls' mother was consulted and had agreed. T's mother described her daughter, the eldest of eight children, as being mature enough to be able to keep an eye on me and steer me in the right direction, and firm enough in her walk with the Lord to be able to resist any temptations I might throw in her path. (T recounted this end of the phone call to me and we were both almost too appalled to laugh about it. Almost)
T's mother was a very sincere and sweet lady, but she had no memories whatsoever of what being a normal teenager was like**. As soon as T and I were out of the driveway the fuckity-fuck-fuck started flying and we lit up a smoke. Then we hit a gas station, slapped on a couple of layers of makeup in the restroom, and headed out to see if we could get served alcohol somewhere.
One night T stopped off at a house and picked up two boys. Surprise! It was one of those 'guess what?' double dates. Her chosen was a nondescript young man with a sprinkling of violently red acne. His version of 'hello' was to step into the car, slide across the seat and attach himself to her mouth like a lamprey.
My date was a total Red Shirt. His name didn't even appear in the credits...all I remember about him was that he was male and somewhat taller than me. He said nothing. He just took my hand in his, covered it with his other hand, and spent pretty much the rest of the evening patting it gently from time to time. This was better than having a lamprey attached to my face, and as lampreys tend to run in schools I was content to let things remain on this lower rung of the piscine 'affectionate display' scale.
T and her date smooched and slurped pretty much constantly from that point on. Me and the Red Shirt sat in the back seat and looked out opposite windows. How we managed not to end up dead in a ditch still amazes me. Still, I wasn't complaining; I was out of the house. So it was that we spent what seemed like the next 10 hours driving aimlessly around Clackamas County, no radio, no conversation, just the constant slurp blat splat blurble of Lamprey Boy attempting to hickey T's face into a meaty goo so he could suction it into his tooth-rimmed maw.
Somewhere in the outskirts of Oregon City Lamprey Boy broke suction and said "Hey, turn here. I know a guy who lives up the street. He'll probably let us party at his place."
That was how I met Jay.
We walked into an apartment filled with overweight armchairs, a cabbagey smell, hobnail glass and crocheted doilies. It looked like it had been decorated by someones' grandmother, probably because it had. Jay's grandma. Jay had been living there taking care of grandma during her last days and had simply failed to move out once she'd gone on to that big Bingo hall in the sky. His only personal addition to the decor from that point on had been to take his deceased grandmothers' lipstick and write 'affirmations' all over the walls. "You are a worthwhile person" "You matter" "Life is good" and other things like that. A huge mirror dominated one wall directly across from the couch, framed in roccoco gilt, and this was completely covered in happy mottoes, a little sparkly place with a crown on top drawn right in the middle where our boy Jay could admire himself.
Anywho, I could see at once where the evening was headed so I pleaded cigarettes, and with that Lamprey Boy took his overactive salivary glands, T and Red Shirt into the back bedroom and shut the door. Jay seemed to take this in stride. "Would you like to sit down?" he said.
Jay and I perched on his couch and made distracted, awkward small talk for the next hour while I chain smoked and angled around trying to frame my face in the bare spot on the mirror. While we sat there and the silences grew longer, someone obviously sent by God chose that moment to set a series of dumpster fires up and down the block. We opened up the window and leaned out to watch the firetrucks and police cars caroming up and down the street randomly while flames and smoke roiled up from the alleyways. The evening had taken a distinct turn for the better, I decided. It certainly was less creepy than trying not to hear what was going on in the back bedroom...and distracted me from dwelling on the fact that I still had what was bound to be an extremely awkward ride home ahead of me.
(Now we're coming to the date part. Hang on.)
A week later the phone rings and who should be on the other end but Jay, sweet talking my mother, asking her for permission to take me out.
What, as they say, the FUCK.
T, as it turned out, had given him my phone number. And since T was approved by God and my mother, that, it seemed, was good enough. Sight unseen, permission was given, and just like that, I was going out on a date. What I thought about it was obviously immaterial, but after a moments' reflection I figured, as I did a lot in those days, what the fuck. It got me out of the house.
Saturday night Jay showed up at the door with his thinning mullet, Michael Caine glasses, and a friendly expression. He wore a yellow percale shirt with a tie and neatly pressed slacks. He looked so...nondescript. My mother was simply thrilled! I was completely bemused. He lead me out to his car.
It was his grandmothers car.
It was a Rambler.
This is the first and only time I have ever been in a Rambler. I am here to tell you that riding in a Rambler is a completely average experience, crocheted doiley on the rear package tray notwithstanding. It becomes less average when the driver begins giggling and veering randomly across four lanes of heavy traffic on 82nd Boulevard like a small motorboat piloted by a drunk. During this time Jay taught me how to let the slipstream coming from the wing window suck the ash off the end of a cigarette, and told me that he was 35. Being 17 and thus kind of an idiot, I had no problem with that. He smiled over at me. "Anyway, I thought we'd go see a play," he said. "A live theatre performance up at Lewis and Clarke College. Is that ok?"
I was thrilled! "Why sure, thats fine!" I replied.
.........It was 'Equus'.
An hour later I was seated in a small auditorium filled with middle aged people in tweed and hand-woven fabrics, not ten feet away from a naked kid smacking himself with a wire coathanger, a makeshift snaffle bit in his mouth, followed shortly thereafter by a naked kid riding another naked kid wearing a horse head sculpture made of rebar, which happened just before the part where the naked kid has sex with a naked girl and then the naked kid jumps up and runs around screaming and blinds a bunch of other naked horse head things with a pointy thing. I was fascinated, but mainly I was trying not to imagine why this 35 year old man had taken a 17-year-old girl to see a naked play about horse-blinding.
After the play was over he announced that we were going to go visit a friend of his and the whole bunch of us were going swimming.
What he failed to tell me was that this friend of his did not own a pool.
And was female.
And had three kids.
And five pythons, one anaconda the size of the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, and one rattlesnake. And lived in an extremely bad part of town.
It turned out that this woman had not been expecting him, which added a whole new level of awkward to the evening. She stood there in the doorway, completely surprised and obviously more than a little dismayed to see us on her front step at 11 pm, looking from him to me and him to me again, her frown deepening. "God, Jay, are you kidding?" she finally said.
She was even more surprised when he asked her if the group of us could go swimming. "You mean, at my work? I'm......not sure that would be such a good idea right now," she explained uncomfortably. "It's a full moon."
"Oh," said Jay, nodding.
I didn't get it.
"She's head nurse up at the psych ward at O of U hospital," Jay explained. "So she has the keys to the therapy pool."
We all looked at each other.
It only occurs to me now that I should have wondered under what circumstances he had originally made this womans' acquaintance. What I did wonder was why on earth anyone would think "Hey! What a great idea! It's nearly midnight; I'll just invite myself and my retardedly underage date here over to a psych nurses' house in the middle of deepest, darkest Albina and ask that she jeopardize her career by sneaking all of us into the county charity hospital so we can go swimming in a pool full of nutty people whiz!"
I went outside onto the porch and had a smoke. I had several as I watched the lowriders thump past, smoke lazing out of the windows. Fortunately it was a lovely night. As far as I could tell. One clue was the distinct absence of light. There was a lot of it. I reached inside and flipped on the porchlight. The lady of the house leaped over and turned it back off. Through the thin crack of the rapidly closing door the lady of the house told me that if she left on the porch light and let me stand there under it looking white I'd probably get shot.
Gosh. Thanks.
I figured 'Oh well' and went around to the side of her house to take a leak.
So there I was with my skirt clutched in a bunch before me, bare ass hanging in the breeze, taking an alfresco piss between two houses in the middle of a slum...still, I had the trees, I had the grass, the night sky, and sweet music in the distance (Bootsy Starr 'Dr. Funkenstein' as I recall) which all combined to make this the most romantic part of my evening.
When I came back inside, she and my date were missing. I went straight to the bedroom door and listened. Bob Marley was playing on the stereo. She was giggling.
This was not as dismaying as you might imagine.
I wandered around the room and looked at the snakes. I found a butter tub full of crickets and dumped some in with the rattlesnake. I watched it capture and eat the crickets. It was interesting. I dumped the rest of the crickets out behind her couch (crickets-the perpetually chirping gift that keeps on giving). One of her kids woke up and I got him a glass of milk. He let me watch him feed a white mouse to the anaconda. That was interesting too. About 45 minutes later I knocked on the door of the bedroom and announced that I had to be home by 1:am. My dishevelled date emerged and we went home.
Inevetably, INEVITABLY, Jay called me a couple of days later.
My mother could NOT understand why I refused to come to the phone.
_____________________________________
*Little did they know!
**T's mother had entered a convent at 17 and was back out at 23. Ten years later she had eight children. I kind of expect that her version of 'happy teenage memories' involved saying seven decades of the rosary while kneeling on uncooked rice.
Now, many of my dates have had bad moments, but this date was bizarre from beginning to end, which is why it earns the second place ribbon. So..... (extensive preamble follows)
_______________
My senior year in High School my parents decided to allow me to have a social life*. My new friends-to-be were selected from the offspring of my mothers' religious buddies, a rather shallow and murky pool at the best of times.
Our outings were...charming, I guess you'd have to say. It was sort of like the 50's...we would attend evening 'Youth in Christ' meetings and then all go out in a big heap to McDonalds or something and sit around with our huge bibles stuffed with tracts, talking about the Lord and sipping pop. One memorable evening found the ten of us seated in a greasy banquette at Lani Louis' while the boys chugged Pepsi and then treated the other patrons to a belching contest, which is what passed for 'pushing the social envelope' among this crowd. Maybe the adjective I'm looking for is 'sad'.
My Mom had decided that I was going to be best friends with one girl in particular, and this girls' mother was consulted and had agreed. T's mother described her daughter, the eldest of eight children, as being mature enough to be able to keep an eye on me and steer me in the right direction, and firm enough in her walk with the Lord to be able to resist any temptations I might throw in her path. (T recounted this end of the phone call to me and we were both almost too appalled to laugh about it. Almost)
T's mother was a very sincere and sweet lady, but she had no memories whatsoever of what being a normal teenager was like**. As soon as T and I were out of the driveway the fuckity-fuck-fuck started flying and we lit up a smoke. Then we hit a gas station, slapped on a couple of layers of makeup in the restroom, and headed out to see if we could get served alcohol somewhere.
One night T stopped off at a house and picked up two boys. Surprise! It was one of those 'guess what?' double dates. Her chosen was a nondescript young man with a sprinkling of violently red acne. His version of 'hello' was to step into the car, slide across the seat and attach himself to her mouth like a lamprey.
My date was a total Red Shirt. His name didn't even appear in the credits...all I remember about him was that he was male and somewhat taller than me. He said nothing. He just took my hand in his, covered it with his other hand, and spent pretty much the rest of the evening patting it gently from time to time. This was better than having a lamprey attached to my face, and as lampreys tend to run in schools I was content to let things remain on this lower rung of the piscine 'affectionate display' scale.
T and her date smooched and slurped pretty much constantly from that point on. Me and the Red Shirt sat in the back seat and looked out opposite windows. How we managed not to end up dead in a ditch still amazes me. Still, I wasn't complaining; I was out of the house. So it was that we spent what seemed like the next 10 hours driving aimlessly around Clackamas County, no radio, no conversation, just the constant slurp blat splat blurble of Lamprey Boy attempting to hickey T's face into a meaty goo so he could suction it into his tooth-rimmed maw.
Somewhere in the outskirts of Oregon City Lamprey Boy broke suction and said "Hey, turn here. I know a guy who lives up the street. He'll probably let us party at his place."
That was how I met Jay.
We walked into an apartment filled with overweight armchairs, a cabbagey smell, hobnail glass and crocheted doilies. It looked like it had been decorated by someones' grandmother, probably because it had. Jay's grandma. Jay had been living there taking care of grandma during her last days and had simply failed to move out once she'd gone on to that big Bingo hall in the sky. His only personal addition to the decor from that point on had been to take his deceased grandmothers' lipstick and write 'affirmations' all over the walls. "You are a worthwhile person" "You matter" "Life is good" and other things like that. A huge mirror dominated one wall directly across from the couch, framed in roccoco gilt, and this was completely covered in happy mottoes, a little sparkly place with a crown on top drawn right in the middle where our boy Jay could admire himself.
Anywho, I could see at once where the evening was headed so I pleaded cigarettes, and with that Lamprey Boy took his overactive salivary glands, T and Red Shirt into the back bedroom and shut the door. Jay seemed to take this in stride. "Would you like to sit down?" he said.
Jay and I perched on his couch and made distracted, awkward small talk for the next hour while I chain smoked and angled around trying to frame my face in the bare spot on the mirror. While we sat there and the silences grew longer, someone obviously sent by God chose that moment to set a series of dumpster fires up and down the block. We opened up the window and leaned out to watch the firetrucks and police cars caroming up and down the street randomly while flames and smoke roiled up from the alleyways. The evening had taken a distinct turn for the better, I decided. It certainly was less creepy than trying not to hear what was going on in the back bedroom...and distracted me from dwelling on the fact that I still had what was bound to be an extremely awkward ride home ahead of me.
(Now we're coming to the date part. Hang on.)
A week later the phone rings and who should be on the other end but Jay, sweet talking my mother, asking her for permission to take me out.
What, as they say, the FUCK.
T, as it turned out, had given him my phone number. And since T was approved by God and my mother, that, it seemed, was good enough. Sight unseen, permission was given, and just like that, I was going out on a date. What I thought about it was obviously immaterial, but after a moments' reflection I figured, as I did a lot in those days, what the fuck. It got me out of the house.
Saturday night Jay showed up at the door with his thinning mullet, Michael Caine glasses, and a friendly expression. He wore a yellow percale shirt with a tie and neatly pressed slacks. He looked so...nondescript. My mother was simply thrilled! I was completely bemused. He lead me out to his car.
It was his grandmothers car.
It was a Rambler.
This is the first and only time I have ever been in a Rambler. I am here to tell you that riding in a Rambler is a completely average experience, crocheted doiley on the rear package tray notwithstanding. It becomes less average when the driver begins giggling and veering randomly across four lanes of heavy traffic on 82nd Boulevard like a small motorboat piloted by a drunk. During this time Jay taught me how to let the slipstream coming from the wing window suck the ash off the end of a cigarette, and told me that he was 35. Being 17 and thus kind of an idiot, I had no problem with that. He smiled over at me. "Anyway, I thought we'd go see a play," he said. "A live theatre performance up at Lewis and Clarke College. Is that ok?"
I was thrilled! "Why sure, thats fine!" I replied.
.........It was 'Equus'.
An hour later I was seated in a small auditorium filled with middle aged people in tweed and hand-woven fabrics, not ten feet away from a naked kid smacking himself with a wire coathanger, a makeshift snaffle bit in his mouth, followed shortly thereafter by a naked kid riding another naked kid wearing a horse head sculpture made of rebar, which happened just before the part where the naked kid has sex with a naked girl and then the naked kid jumps up and runs around screaming and blinds a bunch of other naked horse head things with a pointy thing. I was fascinated, but mainly I was trying not to imagine why this 35 year old man had taken a 17-year-old girl to see a naked play about horse-blinding.
After the play was over he announced that we were going to go visit a friend of his and the whole bunch of us were going swimming.
What he failed to tell me was that this friend of his did not own a pool.
And was female.
And had three kids.
And five pythons, one anaconda the size of the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, and one rattlesnake. And lived in an extremely bad part of town.
It turned out that this woman had not been expecting him, which added a whole new level of awkward to the evening. She stood there in the doorway, completely surprised and obviously more than a little dismayed to see us on her front step at 11 pm, looking from him to me and him to me again, her frown deepening. "God, Jay, are you kidding?" she finally said.
She was even more surprised when he asked her if the group of us could go swimming. "You mean, at my work? I'm......not sure that would be such a good idea right now," she explained uncomfortably. "It's a full moon."
"Oh," said Jay, nodding.
I didn't get it.
"She's head nurse up at the psych ward at O of U hospital," Jay explained. "So she has the keys to the therapy pool."
We all looked at each other.
It only occurs to me now that I should have wondered under what circumstances he had originally made this womans' acquaintance. What I did wonder was why on earth anyone would think "Hey! What a great idea! It's nearly midnight; I'll just invite myself and my retardedly underage date here over to a psych nurses' house in the middle of deepest, darkest Albina and ask that she jeopardize her career by sneaking all of us into the county charity hospital so we can go swimming in a pool full of nutty people whiz!"
I went outside onto the porch and had a smoke. I had several as I watched the lowriders thump past, smoke lazing out of the windows. Fortunately it was a lovely night. As far as I could tell. One clue was the distinct absence of light. There was a lot of it. I reached inside and flipped on the porchlight. The lady of the house leaped over and turned it back off. Through the thin crack of the rapidly closing door the lady of the house told me that if she left on the porch light and let me stand there under it looking white I'd probably get shot.
Gosh. Thanks.
I figured 'Oh well' and went around to the side of her house to take a leak.
So there I was with my skirt clutched in a bunch before me, bare ass hanging in the breeze, taking an alfresco piss between two houses in the middle of a slum...still, I had the trees, I had the grass, the night sky, and sweet music in the distance (Bootsy Starr 'Dr. Funkenstein' as I recall) which all combined to make this the most romantic part of my evening.
When I came back inside, she and my date were missing. I went straight to the bedroom door and listened. Bob Marley was playing on the stereo. She was giggling.
This was not as dismaying as you might imagine.
I wandered around the room and looked at the snakes. I found a butter tub full of crickets and dumped some in with the rattlesnake. I watched it capture and eat the crickets. It was interesting. I dumped the rest of the crickets out behind her couch (crickets-the perpetually chirping gift that keeps on giving). One of her kids woke up and I got him a glass of milk. He let me watch him feed a white mouse to the anaconda. That was interesting too. About 45 minutes later I knocked on the door of the bedroom and announced that I had to be home by 1:am. My dishevelled date emerged and we went home.
Inevetably, INEVITABLY, Jay called me a couple of days later.
My mother could NOT understand why I refused to come to the phone.
_____________________________________
*Little did they know!
**T's mother had entered a convent at 17 and was back out at 23. Ten years later she had eight children. I kind of expect that her version of 'happy teenage memories' involved saying seven decades of the rosary while kneeling on uncooked rice.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Blue Monkey Battles Seven Dog!
I've been on a weather kick lately.
I live in an interesting kind of microclimate here. I am in a long, flat level valley running ne to sw in a little town which is almost surrounded by mountains, only not...oh shit I'll just draw it:
OK. So this terrain makes for some really interesting weather formations. My picture taking skills blow or I'd post some pictures I've taken; they kind of lose their impact when all you see is a strange blur in the distance and I have to explain "See, that huge cloud is a thunderhead and that thing hanging down from it is a verga formation filled with locusts, see, and it's like raining from three different cloud levels, but the wind is bending it into an 'S' shape, or a W, only you can't make that out, and those blurs are meteorites so yeah, Vancouver is on fire out of frame there to the left, and that building there is just about to explode because some lightning struck it right after I took this."
Anyway, my question is this: What's the wildest, weirdest weather phenomenon you've ever seen? And/or experienced?
I live in an interesting kind of microclimate here. I am in a long, flat level valley running ne to sw in a little town which is almost surrounded by mountains, only not...oh shit I'll just draw it:
OK. So this terrain makes for some really interesting weather formations. My picture taking skills blow or I'd post some pictures I've taken; they kind of lose their impact when all you see is a strange blur in the distance and I have to explain "See, that huge cloud is a thunderhead and that thing hanging down from it is a verga formation filled with locusts, see, and it's like raining from three different cloud levels, but the wind is bending it into an 'S' shape, or a W, only you can't make that out, and those blurs are meteorites so yeah, Vancouver is on fire out of frame there to the left, and that building there is just about to explode because some lightning struck it right after I took this."
Anyway, my question is this: What's the wildest, weirdest weather phenomenon you've ever seen? And/or experienced?
Monday, November 08, 2010
Bleeding Doughnut Take Daring Leap Of Fly!
I have a pah. It's spelled 'pie' but I like to say 'pah'. So anyway I have one.
I have a pah because I bought the wrong kind of yogurt. I went to buy plain whole milk unpasteurized Guernsey yogurt but I got vanilla instead. Both yogurt containers have a picture of a cow on them and I only looked as far as the cow picture.
I wanted to make Greek yogurt. I used to make this waaaay back when the same product was called 'yogurt cheese' and only hippies made it. I used to use it in place of mayonnaise. I used to make my own yogurt too. This is because I don't watch a lot of television and I don't play a lot of video games and I'm beginning to think I should start.
So I made the Greek yogurt, only when I went to drink off the whey (which I like; plus, if you fart a lot this will totally cure it. Someone please buy me a Gameboy.) it was totally sweet plus it tasted like vanilla. I drank it anyway and it was good. But that still left me with a pound sized lump of sweet vanilla flavored Greek yogurt about the size of a grapefruit. I had no idea what the fuck I was going to do with that. It sat in my refrigerator. I thought about it.
Two days later it was still there so I decided to make pah.
A yogurt pah.
When it was done I made a little heart on top of it with some Hershey's chocolate syrup but the top of the pah was still warm so it spread out. Now it looks like the floor of a tavern where loggers hang out; plus there is a bug on it.
It is a a fruit fly. It is 41 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Why are fruit flies dying on my pah?
YOGURT PAH
All ingredients at room temperature:
1 pound of whole milk Greek yogurt made out of vanilla yogurt, well drained and firm
1 package of plain cream cheese
1 tbl vanilla extract
1/3 cup of honey
1/4 cup confectioners sugar
4 eggs
Whup all these together until they are completely shiny and smooth.
-1 graham cracker crust in the aluminum pan like how you buy at the grocery store in the freezer case
Bake the crust for 15 minutes on 350. Cool to room temp.
Dump the filling into the crust.
Bake at 350 for 50 minutes.
Make a heart design on top with some Hershey's chocolate syrup using your ass.
Pick off dead bug. Or just sink it and smooth over the place with a wet spoon.
____________________________
GREEK YOGURT
I have no idea why this is Greek or whats supposed to be so Greek about it. It looks nothing like any Greeks of my acquaintance.
Utensils you will need:
One fine mesh strainer or some cheesecloth doubled over which you will have left over from making laudanum
One bowl to catch the whey
-Dump the yogurt from its container into the a. cheesecloth and hang this in a bundle over the bowl overnight. b. strainer, put this over the bowl and leave it overnight.
-Drink off the whey to keep you from farting so much.
What is left in the a. cheesecloth b. strainer is Greek yogurt. If you leave it go longer in the a. cheesecloth b. strainer, you will have yogurt cheese. It's good to cook with. I really don't care what you use it for.
If you don't ever fart and you're standing there looking at the bowlful of whey going 'ew there's no way in hell I'm going to drink that shit' you could make Kimchee instead.
__________________________________
KIMCHEE (makes about 16 oz)
One head of NAPA cabbage. Has to be Napa cabbage. You will think 'Holy crap this is a lot of cabbage' but have faith.
One bunch scallions (about five or six scallions)
brine (very salty water which you make yourself using KOSHER salt and water. Add enough salt to the water until it tastes oceany. That being said, do not use sea salt or worse yet, sal gris that some old broad in France scraped off the beach and is full of seagull crap and dried shrimp buttholes; use PLAIN KOSHER SALT. It's simply a better, cleaner product.)
flavoring-
Garlic
fish sauce, sparingly...its salty and rather assertively flavored
Mild chili powder
toasted sesame oil
fresh ginger
1/3 cup whey off live culture yogurt, plain
-Wash your vegetables very, very thoroughly. Core and cut up the Napa cabbage into bite sized pieces. Take the root end off the scallions and pitch, rough chop the rest. Put the chopped veggies in enough brine to cover them. Wash them around in the brine with a spoon and then put a plate on top of it to keep the veggies submerged.
-Leave overnight.
-Drain the veggies and pat them dry with a towel, or put them in a salad spinner. Reserve about a cup of the brine. Taste it for saltiness; you might want to add a little plain water to make it palatable.
In a blender or Cuisinart, mix together the spice ingredients. I used about 1/3 cup chili powder, half a head of garlic, about three tbls of ginger (peeled and grated) and then the fish sauce and sesame oil to taste. You know I also used hot chili powder but I went into this assuming you were kind of a weenie so I neglected to mention that in the ingredient list.
With a spoon or your hands, blend the vegetables, the whey and the spice mix, coating every surface. It will smell SO DELICIOUS!
Put the whole shebang into a very clean glass jar or crock. Tap it on the counter to get it to settle and bring the air bubbles out of it. Now, top up with the brine. Fasten the lid on but not too tightly. Now place this into a plastic bag and fasten that shut. What's going to happen is that this whole mixture will begin to ferment, which is exactly what you want, and it will need to be able to spill out a bit. The bag is to prevent a mess.
Store this in a cool, dark place. Check it every day, morning and evening. In about two or three days it will begin to ferment and you'll have a mess, but the bag will have caught it. Clean up the jar, tip out some of the juice if you need to, then fasten the lid down but don't reef on it. Now put it into another clean bag, fasten the top and put it in the refrigerator.
Keep on checking it. If you need to, change the bag and clean up the jar. This is all perfectly fine; it doesn't mean the kimchee is spoiled. But yeah, since this is fermenting, it might leak again. Then again, it might not. I don't know. That's the fun of cooking. Sometimes everything goes according to plan, and sometimes things explode and you end up with a bagfull of broken glass and cabbage and crap in your refrigerator.
This will keep for about 30 years. You can dip out a little whenever you want and eat it on rice, or your dog, or even put it on a hamburger. It is supposed to be one of the top five healthiest things you can eat. No kidding.
_____________________________
You'll still have a lot of whey left. My advice to you is to drink it because you really do fart a lot more than you think you do.
I have a pah because I bought the wrong kind of yogurt. I went to buy plain whole milk unpasteurized Guernsey yogurt but I got vanilla instead. Both yogurt containers have a picture of a cow on them and I only looked as far as the cow picture.
I wanted to make Greek yogurt. I used to make this waaaay back when the same product was called 'yogurt cheese' and only hippies made it. I used to use it in place of mayonnaise. I used to make my own yogurt too. This is because I don't watch a lot of television and I don't play a lot of video games and I'm beginning to think I should start.
So I made the Greek yogurt, only when I went to drink off the whey (which I like; plus, if you fart a lot this will totally cure it. Someone please buy me a Gameboy.) it was totally sweet plus it tasted like vanilla. I drank it anyway and it was good. But that still left me with a pound sized lump of sweet vanilla flavored Greek yogurt about the size of a grapefruit. I had no idea what the fuck I was going to do with that. It sat in my refrigerator. I thought about it.
Two days later it was still there so I decided to make pah.
A yogurt pah.
When it was done I made a little heart on top of it with some Hershey's chocolate syrup but the top of the pah was still warm so it spread out. Now it looks like the floor of a tavern where loggers hang out; plus there is a bug on it.
It is a a fruit fly. It is 41 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Why are fruit flies dying on my pah?
YOGURT PAH
All ingredients at room temperature:
1 pound of whole milk Greek yogurt made out of vanilla yogurt, well drained and firm
1 package of plain cream cheese
1 tbl vanilla extract
1/3 cup of honey
1/4 cup confectioners sugar
4 eggs
Whup all these together until they are completely shiny and smooth.
-1 graham cracker crust in the aluminum pan like how you buy at the grocery store in the freezer case
Bake the crust for 15 minutes on 350. Cool to room temp.
Dump the filling into the crust.
Bake at 350 for 50 minutes.
Make a heart design on top with some Hershey's chocolate syrup using your ass.
Pick off dead bug. Or just sink it and smooth over the place with a wet spoon.
____________________________
GREEK YOGURT
I have no idea why this is Greek or whats supposed to be so Greek about it. It looks nothing like any Greeks of my acquaintance.
Utensils you will need:
One fine mesh strainer or some cheesecloth doubled over which you will have left over from making laudanum
One bowl to catch the whey
-Dump the yogurt from its container into the a. cheesecloth and hang this in a bundle over the bowl overnight. b. strainer, put this over the bowl and leave it overnight.
-Drink off the whey to keep you from farting so much.
What is left in the a. cheesecloth b. strainer is Greek yogurt. If you leave it go longer in the a. cheesecloth b. strainer, you will have yogurt cheese. It's good to cook with. I really don't care what you use it for.
If you don't ever fart and you're standing there looking at the bowlful of whey going 'ew there's no way in hell I'm going to drink that shit' you could make Kimchee instead.
__________________________________
KIMCHEE (makes about 16 oz)
One head of NAPA cabbage. Has to be Napa cabbage. You will think 'Holy crap this is a lot of cabbage' but have faith.
One bunch scallions (about five or six scallions)
brine (very salty water which you make yourself using KOSHER salt and water. Add enough salt to the water until it tastes oceany. That being said, do not use sea salt or worse yet, sal gris that some old broad in France scraped off the beach and is full of seagull crap and dried shrimp buttholes; use PLAIN KOSHER SALT. It's simply a better, cleaner product.)
flavoring-
Garlic
fish sauce, sparingly...its salty and rather assertively flavored
Mild chili powder
toasted sesame oil
fresh ginger
1/3 cup whey off live culture yogurt, plain
-Wash your vegetables very, very thoroughly. Core and cut up the Napa cabbage into bite sized pieces. Take the root end off the scallions and pitch, rough chop the rest. Put the chopped veggies in enough brine to cover them. Wash them around in the brine with a spoon and then put a plate on top of it to keep the veggies submerged.
-Leave overnight.
-Drain the veggies and pat them dry with a towel, or put them in a salad spinner. Reserve about a cup of the brine. Taste it for saltiness; you might want to add a little plain water to make it palatable.
In a blender or Cuisinart, mix together the spice ingredients. I used about 1/3 cup chili powder, half a head of garlic, about three tbls of ginger (peeled and grated) and then the fish sauce and sesame oil to taste. You know I also used hot chili powder but I went into this assuming you were kind of a weenie so I neglected to mention that in the ingredient list.
With a spoon or your hands, blend the vegetables, the whey and the spice mix, coating every surface. It will smell SO DELICIOUS!
Put the whole shebang into a very clean glass jar or crock. Tap it on the counter to get it to settle and bring the air bubbles out of it. Now, top up with the brine. Fasten the lid on but not too tightly. Now place this into a plastic bag and fasten that shut. What's going to happen is that this whole mixture will begin to ferment, which is exactly what you want, and it will need to be able to spill out a bit. The bag is to prevent a mess.
Store this in a cool, dark place. Check it every day, morning and evening. In about two or three days it will begin to ferment and you'll have a mess, but the bag will have caught it. Clean up the jar, tip out some of the juice if you need to, then fasten the lid down but don't reef on it. Now put it into another clean bag, fasten the top and put it in the refrigerator.
Keep on checking it. If you need to, change the bag and clean up the jar. This is all perfectly fine; it doesn't mean the kimchee is spoiled. But yeah, since this is fermenting, it might leak again. Then again, it might not. I don't know. That's the fun of cooking. Sometimes everything goes according to plan, and sometimes things explode and you end up with a bagfull of broken glass and cabbage and crap in your refrigerator.
This will keep for about 30 years. You can dip out a little whenever you want and eat it on rice, or your dog, or even put it on a hamburger. It is supposed to be one of the top five healthiest things you can eat. No kidding.
_____________________________
You'll still have a lot of whey left. My advice to you is to drink it because you really do fart a lot more than you think you do.
Friday, November 05, 2010
It gets better. Meanwhile, you don't have to put up with shit.
I grew up in Milwaukie, Oregon, which was then, and by all accounts still is, a very poor, rather squalid, working class area just outside of Portland. In fact they refer to that whole area these days as 'Felony Flats'. My family was a mess. I spent the first three years of my school career in Catholic school, and it was there that I met my first crushes...a little girl named Robin and a boy named Patrick...both of whom I wanted to marry. Both of whom I felt exactly the same way about.
Yes, I was bullied.
The thing is, I wasn't bullied for being bi. I was bullied for being a victim. Bi never came into the equation. Of course I got called 'dyke' and 'lezzie' like every other girl did back then, but it was just another epithet. Shit; I didn't even realize there was such a thing as 'bi' until I was in high school, and hadn't a clue that it applied to me until I was 18. That's why my voice doesn't really belong in Dan Savages' 'It Gets Better' project. But having been bullied is something I need to come out about anyway, and maybe some kid will read this and grab a few pointers about how to survive until they can get away from the vile, substandard, hopeless snake pit full of dull norms, moral cowardice and future real estate salespersons that is the American school system. Feel free to pass this along, but be warned: it is not politically correct, and it is not the typical adult 'just tough it out' sophistry that people my age are supposed to pass along when talking to kids. It's real, and 'real' is not pretty. I'm not going to dumb this down or lie.
I was bullied. I was the goat. I was the kid in class that everyone could mistreat, and did. I was the kid that all the adults disliked and ignored. Anything you did to me you did with impunity, in front of anyone you pleased, without a care in the world for any reprisal or punishment whatsoever. I was that kid. It started in first grade and continued up until I started Jr. High. Bear in mind that the things I'm going to recount were perpetrated by little children, little grade school aged children, ON a little child. Your precious angels are capable of being bloodthirsty little hyenas, folks. If you look away, you collude.
I was hit. Shoved. Cursed. Struck with tree limbs and dirt clods and pieces of pavement and rocks. I had traps laid for me, where some kid would pretend to be my friend and lure me to some secluded place where a group of others would ratpack me. One group of kids tried to catch me by the neck with a rope. I had shit thrown at me many, many times...and I mean actual shit. I was hunted around the neighborhood by huge packs of kids, on bicycles, running, screaming 'Kill her! Get her!' I couldn't go swimming unsupervised; not at someones' house and not at a public pool. I cannot tell you how many times kids tried to drown me, holding me under and take turns doing it.
This kind of thing went on every day. Every single day. It happened in front of adults, who would simply turn their backs. It happened in front of teachers at school, who either turned their backs or made me spend recess in the classroom. It happened in front of my parents, who did nothing to hide their utter contempt of me, who did nothing to prevent it, and who blamed me, to my face and to anyone who happened to be present, because I was being spoiled and sensitive and weak. That I was just doing this for attention. That I was deliberately inviting other kids to bully me because I liked the attention. Yes indeed.
School was its own kind of hell. Summers were worse. At least in school there were rooms to hide in and doors that closed behind me. In the summertime if I was out in the open I was prey. The only way I could go outside my yard was to either sneak out at night or wait until it was Sunday, when all those good little children were in church.
I spent the majority of my childhood hiding. From everyone. I spent that entire time in a constant state of mortal fear. And that's no exaggeration. I had absolutely no backup whatsoever. Any adult who took my side was actively discouraged from doing so by my parents, who took pains to explain to them what a contemptible, sick, bad, weak, lazy little girl I really was. Once again, this is no exaggeration. None of it.
By the time sixth grade rolled around I had perfected the art of judging when it was relatively safe for me to be seen, and how, and where. The vigilance was constant. I cried in school every day. I went home and cried every single day. All the adults in my life were either sick to death of me or had been so thoroughly co-opted by my parents that they worked at ignoring what was going in in the name of not feeding into my perceived sick attempts to get attention.
To this day it horrifies me to think that most of the children responsible for the worst of the bullying actually went on to have children of their own. Most of the kids in on it were simply going along with the crowd and acting out whatever aberrant group behavior dynamic was happening. But some of those children, more of them than you'd think, were absolutely fiendish... calculating, unrestrained, gleeful little psychopaths. I always wondered what their parents would have done if they'd known that their darling little angels spent recess kneeling on a little girls chest wiping dogshit in her face and trying to force it in her mouth, or trying to pull down her underpants and shove sticks or pencils into her crotch. I remember looking up into the glittering eyes and hectic faces, the spitty red lips and fast breathing, and being repelled and horrified and feeling terror beyond belief. It was like rape. It was like being attacked by demons. And I wonder of any one of the group of kids standing around in a circle laughing and jeering, watching all this happen to me, ever remembers any of this at all. Or what they think of their own participation, if they do.
The adults, when they deigned to notice, wrote it off as 'kid stuff'. I cannot tell you how many times I heard that hateful, dismissive phrase. "Oh, its just kids being kids. One of these days she'll figure it out but I guess she just has to learn it the hard way!"
The first time I ever thought of suicide was when I was six years old. I thought of suicide every single day. The first time I realized that God was not there was when I was six years old. God still isn't there, but I no longer expect it either, which is a huge relief. Adults lie about God to children. God will fix everything. Nothing happens to you without a reason, and the reason I was given was that I was being punished. I was told to pray. I was told to ask God for forgiveness. That was supposed to fix everything. All it did was take the complaints out of their ears.
The reason that all this happened to me was because of two things: First of all, I was raised by extremely disturbed, antisocial people, and my earliest behaviors were all centered around trying to placate and please people who simply were not going to be placated or pleased by anything except the opportunity to bully someone. I learned how to be a bully magnet, in other words. A perfect one. By their lights, when I was being 'good', I was being a victim. I was trained to be a specialist at drawing out the worst behaviors out of the worst people. And I was no charming little girl to be around either. When I was very little I acted out many of their behaviors. No, I was not a nice or a pleasant little girl.
Secondly, I had juvenile onset clinical depression. I would go in one sweeping moment, apropos of nothing at all, from feeling normal to barely able to think or move, and I can remember these episodes occurring when I was as young as four years old. As I got older they would happen more frequently and would last longer each time. My only defense was to simply 'blank out' and become inert. This did nothing whatsoever to further my career as 'nice' or 'pleasant'.
Everyone learns that survival of adversity is a matter of inner strength and perseverance and bravery and clean living and moral rightness. And if your name is Meg, Jo, Beth or Amy that might in fact be the case...but here in the real world the only thing that counts is what you DO. No psychopathic ten year old is going to stop and reflect on the error of their ways in the face of their victims courage. A psychopathic ten year old is going to continue to gleefully smack the crap out of that victim and to enlist all her little friends to come help. Children love a victim. A victim is someone upon whom they can act out their anger and take out their frustrated powerlessness. A victim is someone who has even less power than they have. This same dynamic plays out for adults too. Ever noticed? It also explains why girls are by far the most horrifyingly evil, sadistic, calculated and most of all SNEAKY bullies that walk. Society still has a long way to go, and there is nothing angrier or more frustrated than a thwarted little girl. Give that same the leadership of some deranged little psycho and a secluded spot on the playground and your darling daughters think nothing of stabbing that kid on the ground with a sharpened pencil. In the breasts.
I was not the worst case of a bullied child at that school. There was one boy who got it worse than me. There were two other girls who were shunned for being poor and smelling like piss. I have to say though that I hold the dubious distinction of having been the most hated girl at Seth Llewelling 1968-1971. Go me!
The thing-the ONE thing- that saved me was anger. And how did I discover that buried beneath everything I had learned and everything I was going through?
I went through puberty.
Nothing releases the floodgates of hell like a few extra squirts of estrogen, folks. I'm telling you!
And boy, did I know all about acting out anger. I learned from PROFESSIONALS. My whole childhood was like a textbook. And I practiced. Yes, I actually practiced. In a mirror. I looked back on my own history and thought about what had worked and why. I read all kinds of things I should not have to pick up as many swear words and putdowns as I could. I studied movies for devastating lines. I plotted out sneaky tricks and pranks. I began paying a lot of attention to vandalism and the tools of that trade. I laid plots for revenge. Most importantly, I mapped escape routes and devised convincing alibis. The day I first set off to Jr. High my feeling was "There is no way in hell that I'm going down without a fight. Fuck them ALL."
As important as this decision was, there was another aspect to it that is possibly more important than simply the declaration of war. You see, there was no doubt in my mind that I WAS going down. There was no other fate for the person I was then. As I laid my plans, I had also, as a consequence of finding out just how much anger and hate I was filled with and capable of putting into action, come to the realization of who I was. I finally faced and accepted, with the worst grace and the worst motives in the world, myself as I was. There was no 'love' involved. Self love played no part in that whatsoever. I did not like who I was. Frankly, I was not at that point a lovable person. But that acceptance, THE SIMPLE FACT OF THAT ACCEPTANCE OF WHO I WAS, resigned and grim and negative though it was, was in fact the most important thing I ever did in my life. And it's important that I make that as plain as possible here.
Your inner motives are secondary to your ACTUAL DEEDS. The fact of acceptance. That you HAVE ACCEPTED. No matter what you are or how you feel about yourself or what brought you to that place is all aside the point! Having accepted yourself will lead you to great things. Having accepted yourself, as shitty as you might be, will actually lead you out of the darkness. It will lead to good things. It will lead you to a better self. It will lead you to the rest of your life.
All you have to do to get there is survive. Your inner reasons for surviving don't have to be pure. Revenge is a perfectly good reason. In fact it's a great reason. So is hatred. And anger. My reason, back then, was that I wanted to live long enough to see my parents get old and die, which is certainly less than noble or pure.
AND IT WORKED LIKE A CHARM.
You only have to find something that you want more than you want to die. It doesn't have to be nice.
Nobility or purity of motive play no part in survival whatsoever. You don't NEED nobility or purity! There is no RIGHT way to survive! That you DO survive is the only thing that's important! Nobility and purity of motive are luxuries of the privileged and the protected. They're superfluous. Not necessary. Aside the point. They don't matter a damned bit more for the privileged and the protected than they do for the victimized and the abused.
ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS SURVIVE.
ANY FUCKING WAY YOU CAN.
Now, I never expected for a moment that I would survive past my 18th birthday anyway. I have a chronic lung condition that was severe enough to put my life expectancy at about 18 to 21 years (that is, if the people who 'loved' me didn't take me out first.) But I was determined as hell that when I did go out, I was going to go out trailing a wake of nuclear fucking devastation. People wouldn't just be sorry....people were going to be MADE SORRY. By ME.
And they were.
And IT WAS GREAT!
I am a 50 year old woman with five grandkids. I have been married for close to 22 years to an amazing Biker. I am thought of by most as a relatively nice, unassuming, average little lady. I'm a housewife. I grow sunflowers. And yet to this day some of the proudest moments of my life are when I set the school bathroom on fire...spit on the chair of the boy who'd come up and grabbed my tits hard enough to leave marks, just before he sat down (to the delight of all his 'friends')...took a magic marker, disguised my handwriting and wrote even viler crap on the walls about the bitches who were tormenting me than they were writing about yours truly. I am proud of all the times I snotted off to the teachers who played to the popular kids and mistreated everyone else. I am proud of vandalizing their cars, their purses and their desks. I am proud of devising the most disgusting rumours imaginable about the people who took such glee in starting them about me. And nobody ever wanted to get on the wrong side of my sense of humor once I developed the ability to make up phrases and nicknames that STUCK.
This all began to take on momentum. Soon I thought nothing of snotting off to anyone who irritated me, despite who they were, despite their threats. I knew how to duck their threats. I had no problem whatsoever running from a fight. Oh HELL no. I was no fighter. I'd skip a class, hide, duck around corners, I had no problem with that. Pain HURTS. Many's the day I took a later bus or walked home to avoid people who were waiting beat me up. Was it cowardly? It was. Did I get called a pussy? I did. But I didn't get beat up either, which I figured was the more important issue at hand. And after all, 'pussy' was the least of what I'd already been called. That, and the expletive 'pussy' was merely a minor weapon in MY arsenal.
I ended Jr. High with the reputation as a flaming bitch; meaner than catshit. I was avoided. I was feared.
And I started to make friends.
Real friends.
The bullying stopped. Gradually, but after word got around that I was taking less shit than before, it cut off sharply and just kept on diminishing.
It took six months.
And when I got to the point that I took no shit whatsoever, the bullying STOPPED.
Oddest of all, when it did flare up, the teachers suddenly began to step in and do their jobs.
I swear to God this actually happened.
It was the Goddamndest thing.
I did not treat my first friends very well...I thought they must all be snivelling victims like I was who were simply drawn to my acting out and who would probably desert me as soon as I stopped being amusing and dangerous. I got rid of them first.
But I made more.
And people started to like me!
By the time I hit high school I had quite the reputation as a dangerous, though amusing, nutcase. I dressed outrageously. I said and did outrageous things. I was not by far the most outrageous, disturbed or amusing person in school, but I was among their number, and for the most part I still kept my head pretty low. I am proud to say that never once did I stoop to bullying, that I stuck up for people who were being bullied, and that I never started shit. I just FINISHED IT.
And all of this was done without resorting to interpersonal violence. I mean, God help your locker and God help your car if you fucked with me, but I didn't smack anyone around....for what that's worth in light of all the property damage I caused. I dunno.
I arranged my classes so that I graduated half a year earlier than the rest of my class. I did not attend graduation. Fuck that. The day I graduated high school I walked out the front doors, turned around and flipped the place off with both hands. I will never forget that day. I went down to Perry's drug store and caught a bus home in a daze. I walked around in a daze for a week before it all finally hit me: I never had to go back to that place EVER, EVER, EVER AGAIN. IT WAS OVER FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.
It was immediately better.
It was far from perfect. I had two bad relationships and five years of therapy ahead of me before all the monsters from my past were slain. But I swear on John Cleese and H.P. Lovecraft that the worst day of my adult life (and I've had some doozies; you don't just stop being a hateful bitch and I inflicted a lot of pain on myself and others) was still better than the best day of being nine years old. Or any day of any age between 1960 and 1978. Because I was out of prison. I had got the fuck out of Dodge. My tour of duty in Vietnam was over. I was free.
I AM free.
Yes, I was bullied.
The thing is, I wasn't bullied for being bi. I was bullied for being a victim. Bi never came into the equation. Of course I got called 'dyke' and 'lezzie' like every other girl did back then, but it was just another epithet. Shit; I didn't even realize there was such a thing as 'bi' until I was in high school, and hadn't a clue that it applied to me until I was 18. That's why my voice doesn't really belong in Dan Savages' 'It Gets Better' project. But having been bullied is something I need to come out about anyway, and maybe some kid will read this and grab a few pointers about how to survive until they can get away from the vile, substandard, hopeless snake pit full of dull norms, moral cowardice and future real estate salespersons that is the American school system. Feel free to pass this along, but be warned: it is not politically correct, and it is not the typical adult 'just tough it out' sophistry that people my age are supposed to pass along when talking to kids. It's real, and 'real' is not pretty. I'm not going to dumb this down or lie.
I was bullied. I was the goat. I was the kid in class that everyone could mistreat, and did. I was the kid that all the adults disliked and ignored. Anything you did to me you did with impunity, in front of anyone you pleased, without a care in the world for any reprisal or punishment whatsoever. I was that kid. It started in first grade and continued up until I started Jr. High. Bear in mind that the things I'm going to recount were perpetrated by little children, little grade school aged children, ON a little child. Your precious angels are capable of being bloodthirsty little hyenas, folks. If you look away, you collude.
I was hit. Shoved. Cursed. Struck with tree limbs and dirt clods and pieces of pavement and rocks. I had traps laid for me, where some kid would pretend to be my friend and lure me to some secluded place where a group of others would ratpack me. One group of kids tried to catch me by the neck with a rope. I had shit thrown at me many, many times...and I mean actual shit. I was hunted around the neighborhood by huge packs of kids, on bicycles, running, screaming 'Kill her! Get her!' I couldn't go swimming unsupervised; not at someones' house and not at a public pool. I cannot tell you how many times kids tried to drown me, holding me under and take turns doing it.
This kind of thing went on every day. Every single day. It happened in front of adults, who would simply turn their backs. It happened in front of teachers at school, who either turned their backs or made me spend recess in the classroom. It happened in front of my parents, who did nothing to hide their utter contempt of me, who did nothing to prevent it, and who blamed me, to my face and to anyone who happened to be present, because I was being spoiled and sensitive and weak. That I was just doing this for attention. That I was deliberately inviting other kids to bully me because I liked the attention. Yes indeed.
School was its own kind of hell. Summers were worse. At least in school there were rooms to hide in and doors that closed behind me. In the summertime if I was out in the open I was prey. The only way I could go outside my yard was to either sneak out at night or wait until it was Sunday, when all those good little children were in church.
I spent the majority of my childhood hiding. From everyone. I spent that entire time in a constant state of mortal fear. And that's no exaggeration. I had absolutely no backup whatsoever. Any adult who took my side was actively discouraged from doing so by my parents, who took pains to explain to them what a contemptible, sick, bad, weak, lazy little girl I really was. Once again, this is no exaggeration. None of it.
By the time sixth grade rolled around I had perfected the art of judging when it was relatively safe for me to be seen, and how, and where. The vigilance was constant. I cried in school every day. I went home and cried every single day. All the adults in my life were either sick to death of me or had been so thoroughly co-opted by my parents that they worked at ignoring what was going in in the name of not feeding into my perceived sick attempts to get attention.
To this day it horrifies me to think that most of the children responsible for the worst of the bullying actually went on to have children of their own. Most of the kids in on it were simply going along with the crowd and acting out whatever aberrant group behavior dynamic was happening. But some of those children, more of them than you'd think, were absolutely fiendish... calculating, unrestrained, gleeful little psychopaths. I always wondered what their parents would have done if they'd known that their darling little angels spent recess kneeling on a little girls chest wiping dogshit in her face and trying to force it in her mouth, or trying to pull down her underpants and shove sticks or pencils into her crotch. I remember looking up into the glittering eyes and hectic faces, the spitty red lips and fast breathing, and being repelled and horrified and feeling terror beyond belief. It was like rape. It was like being attacked by demons. And I wonder of any one of the group of kids standing around in a circle laughing and jeering, watching all this happen to me, ever remembers any of this at all. Or what they think of their own participation, if they do.
The adults, when they deigned to notice, wrote it off as 'kid stuff'. I cannot tell you how many times I heard that hateful, dismissive phrase. "Oh, its just kids being kids. One of these days she'll figure it out but I guess she just has to learn it the hard way!"
The first time I ever thought of suicide was when I was six years old. I thought of suicide every single day. The first time I realized that God was not there was when I was six years old. God still isn't there, but I no longer expect it either, which is a huge relief. Adults lie about God to children. God will fix everything. Nothing happens to you without a reason, and the reason I was given was that I was being punished. I was told to pray. I was told to ask God for forgiveness. That was supposed to fix everything. All it did was take the complaints out of their ears.
The reason that all this happened to me was because of two things: First of all, I was raised by extremely disturbed, antisocial people, and my earliest behaviors were all centered around trying to placate and please people who simply were not going to be placated or pleased by anything except the opportunity to bully someone. I learned how to be a bully magnet, in other words. A perfect one. By their lights, when I was being 'good', I was being a victim. I was trained to be a specialist at drawing out the worst behaviors out of the worst people. And I was no charming little girl to be around either. When I was very little I acted out many of their behaviors. No, I was not a nice or a pleasant little girl.
Secondly, I had juvenile onset clinical depression. I would go in one sweeping moment, apropos of nothing at all, from feeling normal to barely able to think or move, and I can remember these episodes occurring when I was as young as four years old. As I got older they would happen more frequently and would last longer each time. My only defense was to simply 'blank out' and become inert. This did nothing whatsoever to further my career as 'nice' or 'pleasant'.
Everyone learns that survival of adversity is a matter of inner strength and perseverance and bravery and clean living and moral rightness. And if your name is Meg, Jo, Beth or Amy that might in fact be the case...but here in the real world the only thing that counts is what you DO. No psychopathic ten year old is going to stop and reflect on the error of their ways in the face of their victims courage. A psychopathic ten year old is going to continue to gleefully smack the crap out of that victim and to enlist all her little friends to come help. Children love a victim. A victim is someone upon whom they can act out their anger and take out their frustrated powerlessness. A victim is someone who has even less power than they have. This same dynamic plays out for adults too. Ever noticed? It also explains why girls are by far the most horrifyingly evil, sadistic, calculated and most of all SNEAKY bullies that walk. Society still has a long way to go, and there is nothing angrier or more frustrated than a thwarted little girl. Give that same the leadership of some deranged little psycho and a secluded spot on the playground and your darling daughters think nothing of stabbing that kid on the ground with a sharpened pencil. In the breasts.
I was not the worst case of a bullied child at that school. There was one boy who got it worse than me. There were two other girls who were shunned for being poor and smelling like piss. I have to say though that I hold the dubious distinction of having been the most hated girl at Seth Llewelling 1968-1971. Go me!
The thing-the ONE thing- that saved me was anger. And how did I discover that buried beneath everything I had learned and everything I was going through?
I went through puberty.
Nothing releases the floodgates of hell like a few extra squirts of estrogen, folks. I'm telling you!
And boy, did I know all about acting out anger. I learned from PROFESSIONALS. My whole childhood was like a textbook. And I practiced. Yes, I actually practiced. In a mirror. I looked back on my own history and thought about what had worked and why. I read all kinds of things I should not have to pick up as many swear words and putdowns as I could. I studied movies for devastating lines. I plotted out sneaky tricks and pranks. I began paying a lot of attention to vandalism and the tools of that trade. I laid plots for revenge. Most importantly, I mapped escape routes and devised convincing alibis. The day I first set off to Jr. High my feeling was "There is no way in hell that I'm going down without a fight. Fuck them ALL."
As important as this decision was, there was another aspect to it that is possibly more important than simply the declaration of war. You see, there was no doubt in my mind that I WAS going down. There was no other fate for the person I was then. As I laid my plans, I had also, as a consequence of finding out just how much anger and hate I was filled with and capable of putting into action, come to the realization of who I was. I finally faced and accepted, with the worst grace and the worst motives in the world, myself as I was. There was no 'love' involved. Self love played no part in that whatsoever. I did not like who I was. Frankly, I was not at that point a lovable person. But that acceptance, THE SIMPLE FACT OF THAT ACCEPTANCE OF WHO I WAS, resigned and grim and negative though it was, was in fact the most important thing I ever did in my life. And it's important that I make that as plain as possible here.
Your inner motives are secondary to your ACTUAL DEEDS. The fact of acceptance. That you HAVE ACCEPTED. No matter what you are or how you feel about yourself or what brought you to that place is all aside the point! Having accepted yourself will lead you to great things. Having accepted yourself, as shitty as you might be, will actually lead you out of the darkness. It will lead to good things. It will lead you to a better self. It will lead you to the rest of your life.
All you have to do to get there is survive. Your inner reasons for surviving don't have to be pure. Revenge is a perfectly good reason. In fact it's a great reason. So is hatred. And anger. My reason, back then, was that I wanted to live long enough to see my parents get old and die, which is certainly less than noble or pure.
AND IT WORKED LIKE A CHARM.
You only have to find something that you want more than you want to die. It doesn't have to be nice.
Nobility or purity of motive play no part in survival whatsoever. You don't NEED nobility or purity! There is no RIGHT way to survive! That you DO survive is the only thing that's important! Nobility and purity of motive are luxuries of the privileged and the protected. They're superfluous. Not necessary. Aside the point. They don't matter a damned bit more for the privileged and the protected than they do for the victimized and the abused.
ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS SURVIVE.
ANY FUCKING WAY YOU CAN.
Now, I never expected for a moment that I would survive past my 18th birthday anyway. I have a chronic lung condition that was severe enough to put my life expectancy at about 18 to 21 years (that is, if the people who 'loved' me didn't take me out first.) But I was determined as hell that when I did go out, I was going to go out trailing a wake of nuclear fucking devastation. People wouldn't just be sorry....people were going to be MADE SORRY. By ME.
And they were.
And IT WAS GREAT!
I am a 50 year old woman with five grandkids. I have been married for close to 22 years to an amazing Biker. I am thought of by most as a relatively nice, unassuming, average little lady. I'm a housewife. I grow sunflowers. And yet to this day some of the proudest moments of my life are when I set the school bathroom on fire...spit on the chair of the boy who'd come up and grabbed my tits hard enough to leave marks, just before he sat down (to the delight of all his 'friends')...took a magic marker, disguised my handwriting and wrote even viler crap on the walls about the bitches who were tormenting me than they were writing about yours truly. I am proud of all the times I snotted off to the teachers who played to the popular kids and mistreated everyone else. I am proud of vandalizing their cars, their purses and their desks. I am proud of devising the most disgusting rumours imaginable about the people who took such glee in starting them about me. And nobody ever wanted to get on the wrong side of my sense of humor once I developed the ability to make up phrases and nicknames that STUCK.
This all began to take on momentum. Soon I thought nothing of snotting off to anyone who irritated me, despite who they were, despite their threats. I knew how to duck their threats. I had no problem whatsoever running from a fight. Oh HELL no. I was no fighter. I'd skip a class, hide, duck around corners, I had no problem with that. Pain HURTS. Many's the day I took a later bus or walked home to avoid people who were waiting beat me up. Was it cowardly? It was. Did I get called a pussy? I did. But I didn't get beat up either, which I figured was the more important issue at hand. And after all, 'pussy' was the least of what I'd already been called. That, and the expletive 'pussy' was merely a minor weapon in MY arsenal.
I ended Jr. High with the reputation as a flaming bitch; meaner than catshit. I was avoided. I was feared.
And I started to make friends.
Real friends.
The bullying stopped. Gradually, but after word got around that I was taking less shit than before, it cut off sharply and just kept on diminishing.
It took six months.
And when I got to the point that I took no shit whatsoever, the bullying STOPPED.
Oddest of all, when it did flare up, the teachers suddenly began to step in and do their jobs.
I swear to God this actually happened.
It was the Goddamndest thing.
I did not treat my first friends very well...I thought they must all be snivelling victims like I was who were simply drawn to my acting out and who would probably desert me as soon as I stopped being amusing and dangerous. I got rid of them first.
But I made more.
And people started to like me!
By the time I hit high school I had quite the reputation as a dangerous, though amusing, nutcase. I dressed outrageously. I said and did outrageous things. I was not by far the most outrageous, disturbed or amusing person in school, but I was among their number, and for the most part I still kept my head pretty low. I am proud to say that never once did I stoop to bullying, that I stuck up for people who were being bullied, and that I never started shit. I just FINISHED IT.
And all of this was done without resorting to interpersonal violence. I mean, God help your locker and God help your car if you fucked with me, but I didn't smack anyone around....for what that's worth in light of all the property damage I caused. I dunno.
I arranged my classes so that I graduated half a year earlier than the rest of my class. I did not attend graduation. Fuck that. The day I graduated high school I walked out the front doors, turned around and flipped the place off with both hands. I will never forget that day. I went down to Perry's drug store and caught a bus home in a daze. I walked around in a daze for a week before it all finally hit me: I never had to go back to that place EVER, EVER, EVER AGAIN. IT WAS OVER FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.
It was immediately better.
It was far from perfect. I had two bad relationships and five years of therapy ahead of me before all the monsters from my past were slain. But I swear on John Cleese and H.P. Lovecraft that the worst day of my adult life (and I've had some doozies; you don't just stop being a hateful bitch and I inflicted a lot of pain on myself and others) was still better than the best day of being nine years old. Or any day of any age between 1960 and 1978. Because I was out of prison. I had got the fuck out of Dodge. My tour of duty in Vietnam was over. I was free.
I AM free.
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