Rerun: Bambi vs. the Potty Monsters, part UN

All right. THIS is the one that SurlyGirl requested. And what SurlyGirl wants, SurlyGirl gets! Because she WILL shank you with her rattail comb, yo.

...oh. and before anyone asks, it's true. every sorry word.
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My mother found Jesus the way a Peterbilt truck finds a raccoon on the highway-sudden, hard and messy. At first it was a positive thing...for a short (and rather confusing) time, she went from being God's miserable hemorrhoid to being Jesus ' little sunbeam. Was this my mother? Smiling?
Anyway, for a variety of reasons I may go into at another time, I found myself an unwilling participant in what rapidly became my mothers religious mania, going to what were termed 'Charismatic Catholic' , Born-Again style prayer meetings three evenings a week.

Lemme digress a bit. Catholicism in white, working-class America isn't remotely ecstatic. Catholicism in white, working-class America is in fact about as exciting as attending a talk at the public library about Gypsy moth infestation, except with more kneeling and a light snack towards the end.

Understandably, then, Catholics did not do the charisms, or 'ecstatic religiosity' very well. These prayer meetings tended to be rather shy and restrained things until the very, very end, when people got that 'now or never' feeling and suddenly went belly-flopping awkwardly into the deep end. It was essentially two hours of quiet prayer with upraised hands followed by a half-hour of crying, speaking in tongues, falling, twitching, and singing loud songs with accompanying gestures while hopping up and down.
Yes, really. Barney the Dinosaur meets our Lord Jesus Christ.

Still, I honestly think the greater part of the people in attendance were sincere, if misguided. Unfortunately my mother, being who she was, got drawn into the lunatic fringe.
Eventually she was running buddies with this unbelievably odd bunch of Jesus-groupies. All of them were garden-variety unfulfilled Catholic women...morbidly obese 50-year-old virgins, glum married lesbians in brick-wall denial with six kids , borderline (and not-so-borderline) psychotics, rage junkies, low-norms who smelled like pee and beat-down throw pillows, mostly. All of them could have been case studies in a book called 'Women You Should Never, Ever Be Like When You Grow Up'.
And I took note, yo.

One evening there was a new member in attendance, a thin, trembling fawn of a woman draped in scarves and ethnic fabrics, like an aging ballet dancer with a thyroid problem. Her buggy eyeballs never stopped scanning the room. She smoked with a strange metronomic regularity, sipping at the filter and blowing steadily until the cigarette was one long ash drooping gracefully down over her red bony knuckles. She sat at the edge of the group drawn up into a knobby heap on the metal folding chair .

The Fringies were instantly enthralled. The poor thing, let's go be friendly!
Poor thing indeed.
Soon she was in the middle of a circle of chairs filled with a whole bunch of terribly friendly, sympathetic women listening raptly to her 'testimony'.

This stuff was usually pretty gross, so I went outside and lit a smoke.*

I was joined by one of my moms' friends a short while later. "You'll never believe what happened to this poor woman," she said.
She was right.

According to 'Bambi', she'd grown up in a wealthy family, her father was a very well-known public figure who she was afraid to name, all of them were against her and they wanted her to stay married to a man who was beating her. They had been drugging her for years and had finally poisoned her with a mysterious substance in an attempt to 'keep her quiet'. She was also being chased by a cult, by organized crime and by an ex husband, and all of them were trying to kill her while at the same time plotting to have her committed to a mental institution. This was why she was hiding out on the streets and in homeless shelters AND living in her car and also why nobody could know her real name.

Man, I was 16 and I smelled this bullshit a mile away, even secondhand. The woman breathlessly recounting all this to me as fact was 56. You could tell she thought this was the coolest, most glamorous and interesting thing that she had ever heard EVER.

Once I'd finished my cigarette I went back inside. 'Bambi' was being prayed for.

Now, in an ordinary setting, this might mean that people were, you know, sitting, maybe kneeling, hands folded, praying.

In this group it meant that everyone present stood in a circle around the person being prayed for, placed one hand on them and raised the other hand high into the air (presumably to get better reception) closed their eyes and made bossy demands on the Lord. "Jesus! See this woman! Jesus, help this woman! Yes! Jesus, help her bear this burden! HEAL her! Heal her now! Jesus heal her! HEAL HER NOW! IN JESUS NAME! LIFT HER BURDEN! LIFT THIS BURDEN FROM HER!"
They typically did this in turns, getting louder and more vehement until the whole group was crying, moaning, and speaking in tongues.

Yep, yep yep. Just another typical Friday night with the Catholics.

The thing was, these women were all on the downslope of middle age, and they couldn't stand for very long without getting tired. They started to droop and lean on one another after they'd been at it for a while. From a distance this looked like a bunch of people peering at something down a well while signaling to passing aircraft.
And as I knew from personal experience, the person in the middle, the one being prayed for, bore the full weight. Poor waif- like Bambi was nearly bent double.

We heard a lot from Bambi in the passing weeks. Oh my God, did you hear what happened? Bambi threw off a group praying for her with 'supernatural strength'. Bambi had 'spoken in an unnatural voice and cursed God'. Bambi had 'accepted Christ and suddenly become ill'.

Clearly, Bambi was under demonic attack.

Consequently Bambi became very, very popular. Everyone had Bambi over for dinner. Everyone took Bambi out for coffee after the meetings. People fought over who would drive Bambi back to the shelter. The group took up a collection and got Bambi out of the shelter and into an apartment. Everyone listened raptly to Bambi's stories about being raped by shadowy figures on orders from her family, receiving threatening phone calls in the middle of the night, Bambi finding her belongings had been gone through by the Mafia, Bambi seeing demonic messages appear on the ceiling above her bed at night. The 'let's pray for Bambi' session at the end of every meeting became the main draw. You never knew what would happen, and something dramatic always did. Attendance was never better.

One evening I was smoking outside in the garden when one of the Fringe came out to get me.
'We need you to come help us! Do you think you could be a prayer warrior?' she said breathlessly, clutching my arm.
" Well, let me finish my smoke first," I replied. "What's going on?"
"Bambi's apartment is haunted!" said the Fringie. "That's what's been at the center of all these disturbances!"
"You mean her new apartment she just moved into?" I asked.
"It's not new," said the Fringie. "It's in an old house. And there were people who were drug addicts and Satan worshippers living there before she moved in. And they had orgies."

I'd like to say that I laughed in her face, but no. Whaddya gonna do; it's how I was raised. We bought that kind of thing without thinking twice about it.

Now how drug-dealing Satan worshippers had managed to move into a place owned by one of this Christian groups' leaders and live there, holding orgies, drugging and worshipping away for a matter of years, was never explained. What I accepted without a thought at the time** was that kind of thing really happened, that it really called up demons and that it really opened a PORTAL TO HELL.

And I was being asked to help cleanse it! I was being asked to help cast out demons, to help a fellow Christian and to bring the light of the Lord into her home! Well fuck yeah I'll help, are you nuts? An exorcism? YOU WANT ME TO PARTICIPATE IN AN HONEST TO GOODNESS EXORCISM? I am A SIXTEEN YEAR OLD GIRL! Color me THERE!

We all piled into the Mystery Mobile-I mean, the former prostitutes' car- in an excited, Bible-toting heap...the grumpy lesbian, the vindictive Jap-hater and the former prostitute that nobody was supposed to have figured out was a former prostitute in the front seat, and the 55- year-old morbidly obese virgin, the sixteen-year-old smoker, and the smokers batshit-nuts mother in the back. We zoomed away, praying and holding hands. When the traffic lights changed we prayed for the traffic light to turn green.
Some of the ladies in the front seat started getting a little excited. Unknown tongues began creeping into the mix.

"Don't get carried away by the Spirit,' called the former prostitute as she drifted a corner on two wheels "I don't have any insurance!"

We prayed for her to get a raise so she could buy insurance at the next light.

We caromed through downtown Portland and over the Powell Blvd. bridge. Smokers' Mother had the brilliant idea to roll down the window so that upraised hands could poke out.

We passed the Poulson House, a grim Victorian I was secretly in love with. 'That's a Satanic looking place,' said the Jap Hater darkly. "I've always hated it."

We prayed holding hands over the back of the seat, all the way up McLoughlin Boulevard and down River Road until we drove up to the house, the Rental of Evil, and stopped. We prayed a little more before we climbed the stairs.

We prayed before we went inside.

We went inside, and stopped to pray in the foyer.

Bambi was already there, looking pale and twitchy in the bare overhead light.
"Where's the disturbance?" demanded former prostitute.
"I don't know", breathed Bambi. "It's the whole place, I think.."
We all joined hands and began to
....guess?


The whole group moved in an awkward clump into the first room off the foyer. Speaking in tongues began in earnest. Then singing in tongues. I got mashed into a wall by 55-Year-Old Virgin's huge ass and there I remained. Trembling hands reached out and touched the walls. The furniture. The pictures. The telephone. "You never know," said Jap Hater. "Oh! Good idea!" they agreed.

The clump shuffled down the hall and moved to the next room, lead by Bambi. An overhead bulb flickered and she screamed. "It's here!"
The praying gained volume.
I got mashed into a door by the 55-Year-Old-Virgin.
We entered the kitchen. The kitchen was tiny.
Closet doors were opened and prayed into. Someone started swaying, and the whole group started rocking back and forth in unison. I was mashed into another wall at this point, and resigned myself to simply trying to draw breath while the others did the heavy battling with the demons infesting the cabinets. "It's here! I can feel it moving! It's running before us!" various people commented. "Where's it going? It went past me! I felt it! OOOOoooooooo! Lord JeEEEEEEzuz amalavangAFALAworingafala, bilitimaSIGUNAfala....."

The whole group moved as one, in a clump. A couple of the women were already reduced to panting, barely able to gasp 'Thank you Jesus, Thank you Jesus' by this point. Nobody'd told them that Satan would be wearing track shoes.

"It went in here! cried Bambi. The group surged forward.
'Here' was the bathroom.
A very tiny, tiny bathroom.

The group pushed forward and found that not all of them could fit into the claustrophobic, closet-sized room at once.
Satan had obviously chosen the venue for this final showdown with care.

The group decamped to the entry and considered. Bambi twittered and meeped in the background like a nervous gerbil with a bad nicotine habit. I noticed that there wasn't one single place on the floor that didn't have a cigarette burn.

Suddenly "I found it!" cried the former prostitute. She was a tiny woman, and had wormed her way to the front of the group. "Come look! I found it! Here it is!"
Everyone crowded forward.

Ever heard of Masonite? It was marketed as a waterproof, decorative material for tub surrounds in the 60's and 70's...kind of a cross between Formica and wallboard. The smooth 'space age' material it was coated with supposedly*** rendered this material moisture-resistant and easy to clean. This coating was often printed with designs...flowers, snowflakes, geometrics...

This tub surround was printed with a tropical island scene.
Straw huts, palm trees, coconuts, ocean waves.

And Tiki god statues.

"I knew it! I never felt comfortable in there! I always felt like I was being watched!" exclaimed Bambi.

Grumpy Lesbian was crammed against the sink. Former Prostitute was seated on the toilet. Jap Hater had what floor space there was in the center of the room.
I was crammed into the bathtub, by now utterly mortified, with Smokers' Mom and the 55-Year-Old Morbidly Obese Virgin.
'Now everyone put their hands on the wall and pray!" Former Prostitute commanded.

And they prayed. Please, God, deliver this house from the clutches of Satan. Please, God, drive the presence of demons from the images on this bathroom wall. We refute thee utterly, Satan, and all thy works, and thy leering image of thyself as rendered in driftwood and dogs' teeth by the Polynesians and the DuPont Corporation in gold glitter paint with a light waterproof coating.

Oh yeah... there they were. Jesus' little prayer warriors. Standing in the bathtub.

Exorcising the wallpaper.

Amen.



___________________________
*one of the first things I found out about being a charismatic catholic was that the typical unfulfilled adult catholic woman had really good reasons for being that way, most of them horrifically gynecological. also, that it takes very little provocation for your typical unfulfilled catholic woman to explain the exact nature of her particular problem at length and in excruciating detail.

**also the subject of yet another story. lucky you!

***masonite is bullshit. one scratch and the stuff swells up with black fungus like the black plague.

UPDATED: Quaint vignettes from my charming rural idyll

It's been a week of fun projects and home improvement here at Rancho FirstNations! Almost a 'duel' of projects, in fact.


The Yummy Biker made me a new computer station?

I made a Japanese-style lamp (which cleverly turns into a Rennie-inspired lamp when lit).

Inspiring the Teutonic Delinquent to stride manfully off to the garage and whomp up a small display bookcase for the front room...just because.

I cut, prepped and tempered some grounds?
The Delicious Degenerate re-routed the lighting fixtures in the front room.
I concocted a unique 'moonglow' effect for the aforementioned lamp?
The Scrumptious Sinner concocted a 'setting sun' addition to help describe the 'autumn light' quality that I was trying to reproduce, and made it PERFECT.
I threw together a collage?

The Tasty Terrorist threw together a fall meal that would have made Anthony Bourdain cry like a little bitch.

Lets all stop and enjoy that image for a few moments, shall we?

...aw, what the hell; go ahead and enjoy this one too

OK.

The Delectable Deviant had pulled into the lead by the end of the week. One glorious breakfast, a pot of excellent chili, a batch of oatmeal/chocolate chip/cocoanut/date/walnut cookies, a whirlwind cleaning of the garage and subsequent profitable 1/4 hour spent on Ebay that netted him a quick couple of bills won him the 'Home Improvement Capo Di Tutti Capo' crown.

What motivated this sudden burst of 'can-do' spirit?

THE BANANA SPLITS!

...specifically BJ.


*ahem*

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Nah, I'm messing with you! There wasn't really a Banana Split named BJ. But it's not like it wouldn't have been entirely in keeping with the general tone of 'WTF?' that informed everything that came out of this particular cartoon syndicate. Plus, it would have been pretty cool, huh.

Their names were Bingo (I think he was a muskrat or a beaver or a marmot or something; something in need of large-scale orthodontic intervention), Snorky (an elephant with paralyzed vocal cords), Drooper (a lion with erectile dysfunction) and Fleagle (an unbathed dog of some sort). As was common in many rock-n-roll supergroups of the time, they never appeared without their signature sunglasses, worn to hide the tragic evidence of their narcotic dependence.

The Banana splits were one of those Sid and Marty Kroft abominations. Another one was H. R. Puffinstuff. GOD I HATED THAT THING. "Oh MAH, Jimmay, whad're we a-gonna DEW?" seemed to be Puffinstuffs' favorite line.

..."Hey! You said it wouldn't hurt when you touched me there, Mr. Puffinstuff!"

I have no idea what H. R. Puffinstuff was supposed to be, aside from the hallucinatory product of one hell of a lot of lsd (i.e a mugwump, in which case a blowjob would not have been entirely out of the question.) My impression was of a guy with some kind of a serious, serious endocrine disorder. He had a tail, he wore a frock coat, had a giant clam for a head and he held some kind of political office. Maybe he was the Antichrist. I personally suspect him of being the sperm donor for South Parks' Ike.

...remember that lost weekend in Vancouver, H. R? Yeah that's RIGHT.

These feature cartoons were the time slot lead-ins to the suckiest lineup of the stupidest cartoons and live features ever to puke all over childrens programming.

This is one of those things from the 70's, like the band KISS and disco music, that was NEVER COOL no matter what their subsequent marketing claims. Banana Splits and Puffinstuff ATE ASS. Little kids were SCARED of them - that's why they took them off the air! GAAAAAAH big nasty stupid old dumb looking things flapping their mouths and jiggling around like lipid tumors in shoes; ick.

There's many reasons my generation turned out the way it did, kids. Sid and Marty Krofft were a big one.

RERUN: elderly hover peeing and other sins of the mothers

oh for goodness' sake of COURSE its been edited.
this request per SURLYGIRL, who you really need to go see and get reacquainted with because she is rollerbitchin' and live action and funky fresh and also groovy in a happening way!

...ACTUALLY, you know what? SURLYGIRL requested the exorcism story. BEAST requested this one.

Kinda says it all, doesn't it?
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You can go to numerous places...say, any tavern, for example- and hear terrifying accounts from men forced to take a dump outside their castle walls. Once I stop laughing I can commiserate, because after all, everyone has to 'vote Republican', right? And eventually you have to do so in a public restroom, where you run the chance of having an audience of people who are not close family. Depending on which part of the South you live in.

But see, guys know nothing about this, not really. Oh, they whine and bitch about being serenaded whether they want to be or not, but has anyone really addressed the horror that is THE WOMEN'S' SIDE OF A PUBLIC RESTROOM? No.
Because it's too horrible.

Of course, that is why I am here.

This, then, is what WE have to contend with.


Nice enough looking woman, right?
No.
You see, from the navel down she's nothing but holding tank. I can say that with complete confidence because a number of years ago it was standard operating procedure for women to have pretty much all their lower organs removed once they'd hit menopause. They'd just pack whatever was left into a plastic bag and let it bob around in there. Meanwhile Zelda is still putting away the sauerkraut and cabbage rolls, only now it has all this ROOM in which to accumulate...and compost...and it's all expected to exit out one hole...a hole upon which gravity, not enough dietary bulk and childbirth have taken a certain toll.

So lets say you're an average female-type gal sitting in a stall taking a leak, maybe humming a little tune, when the swollen ankles and black K-Mart tennies of this woman appear beneath the wall next to you.

They always sigh.

Then there's a Rgnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. Which is more of a concentrated lack of breathing than it is an actual sound, although sadly this is not always the case.

Then they bear down and WALOOPAGAZOWPAKASPLOOSHKADOOSH WABOBP FRAPPO KADOOSH out gallops every meal they've eaten for the past week.

Then the pyroclastic wave hits. Your shoelaces start crying and crawl away and hide.
The hair on your ankles begins to singe.

Now some women are content to simply expel this burden in one long, LOUD, chunky rush, kind of like when the city flushes the hydrants in the summer.
Other women, midway through this process, become so intent that they evidently lose all sense of their surroundings and begin to emit long, sustained birthing groans.

UUUUUUUUUUUhhhhhhhhhhoooooooooooooooooooooh.

~SplooshFlabbabbabbablatchow~

HNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNnnn

~Gaslooshasooshagadonk,foosh gadooshgoooooooooosh~

Little ladies can surprise you with their capacity. And they're yippers rather than groaners. But it's the big ones who perform the awe-inspiring crimes against nature.

They are also the ones most frequently guilty of firehosing the entire back wall of the cubicle.

Let's revisit that concept for emphasis, shall we? FIREHOSING.
Over the years they've lost track of where exactly their rear exit is anymore so they just work their pants down over the rolls, bend over and hope some hits the water.

Ever gone into the ladies room in a club and heard the drunk woman in the next cube crying and farting at the same time?
'BwaAAAAAha..." ~fuurrrAAAAAAAAAAP! pt pt'
'Hic, Uwuaaaaa,huh hwaaaa,WwAAAA haaaaaaa!"
~FFFFFFFFFFFfft pt pt pt`

It's tragic.

At Charlies' on Capitol Hill all this was playing out one drunken evening when my glasses fell off and clattered under into the adjoining stall. She handed them back to me.
"H H H Here, are thehehese yours?"
I thanked her. "Listen, are you ok?"
"Y Yeah, I'm fiiiiii huhiiiiii hi hi hine UWAAAAAAAAAA...." ~FFRAP! pt pt pt~

OK then.

Many older women have a deep aversion to placing their bottoms onto a seat which has recently supported the bare buns of a stranger. And that's understandable. Use one of those hippie t-shirt things in the wall dispenser. Or craft your own ass gasket out of toilet paper, Martha Stewart style.

But no. That will not do.

No, these women would rather STAND UP AND PISS ALL OVER THEIR OWN FEET.

And their pantslegs. And their shoes.

Because peeing all over yourself is ALWAYS WAY BETTER than sitting on a bare toilet seat. EW GROSS A BARE TOILET SEAT EWWWWW.

You glance over and see a pair of trembly blue veined old ankles with some big old underpants streeeeeetching out between them as elderly Mrs. Anonymous Potty Person tries to convince those Teflon hips to let her straddle the bowl and you can pretty much be certain it's gonna rain.

And it does. All you can do is hope the floor slopes away from your position. You think I am exaggerating. HA.

The rest stop on I-5 at Smokey Point seems to be where all their potty alarms start ringing at the same time. I've been sitting in there when an entire flock of old ladies has gathered to stage a group performance of ELDERLY SYNCHRONIZED HOVER PEEING.

Invariably, these are the woman who pee in splurts.
Or who make motorboat noises.
Imagine Angelina Jolie with a mouthful of Mountain Dew making motorboat noises.
That's what I mean.
And then you hear them flush, and then here they come out of the stalls, chattering away, and off they go, feeling that sense of accomplishment that comes of having successfully avoided sitting on a DISGUSTING BARE TOILET SEAT, soaked with piss from the knees down.

Some of you may be too young to remember these.



No. Not butts; girdles.

Now, in the '60's, back when coelecanths ruled the earth and I was a little kid, all the older ladies wore them. You were supposed to wear them over your big old underpants but nobody did, because with nothing to grip they'd slip and shift suddenly and flub would come shooting out in odd places. And back then girdles were still made with rubber...either rubberized sateen, or just...plain rubber.
This is a recipe for evil.

1. Rubber girdles......had an......aroma. Already. Right out of the box. A very rubbery aroma.
2. Rubber girdles were not machine washable.
Hand wash only. In the bathroom sink. Strange. Tan. Floaty. MOMMY THERES A SCARY THING IN THE BATHROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM
3. Rubber girdles DID NOT BREATHE LIKE EGYPTIAN COTTON. (Except for this one, which looks it could have been played like an ocarina.)

No, very little air passed in and out of a rubber girdle.
....Except when it did so under pressure, in a series of sharp little reports, out the waistband or the legholes. SNAP! SNABABABAP!
And remember - this air had exited first through an aperture better left unimagined and then spent an unknown amount of time racing desperately around and around the hot, sweaty, compressed flub of a fat womans ass like a hamster in a Habitrail.
As Redd Foxx points out, this woman may have been riding in a taxi cab. This woman may have run to catch a bus. She may have had liver and onions for lunch.
Usually she was standing next to me on the elevator in Meyer and Franks. Giving ME dirty looks every time it happened.

Rerun: You gotta wash yo ass!

This is a story about the Meadows family. See the sidebar? If you have not met the Meadows clan yet, do go and hit the list there. You'll probably regret it. In the meantime, this is true story about a real family that I rented from....BRIEFLY.
...and yes, its been edited. I remembered a few things. Lucky you!____________________________________

Driving professionally takes a certain toll on one's lower body, and Mr. Meadows was decidedly gimpy after twenty some-odd years behind the wheel of a milk truck. In full stride he walked like a sailor in a full diaper. When he got up from a chair it would take him a couple of minutes to build up steam, during which he'd make a great big dramatic deal out of hitching around room, bent over at the waist, groaning and exclaiming, knocking over potted plants and end tables with his giant ass.

We were all sitting around the kitchen table watching this show one evening when Kelvin laughed and said to his brother "Hey, aren't you glad you don't have to squeeze his butt anymore?"

WHAT?
___________________________

I thank God that this following episode happened before I knew these people.
___________________________

Many moons gone*, seems ol' dad had been bothering a zit on his ass. After a couple of weeks he'd succeeded in making it nice and infected. The time he spent loading and unloading his truck each night further aggravated this condition, as did hustling back and forth making deliveries. The additional hours spent behind the wheel of an unsprung truck seated on vinyl might as well have been spent scooting his bare backside across a patch of coarse grit sandpaper for the effect it had on his carbuncle. It grew into a distinct, golfball-sized entity one could detect through the heavy twill of his white uniform pants.

Yes, well. The spreading pinkish stain was also a giveaway that all was not well in assville.

But he carried on, brave soldier. And sure enough, his Spartan regimen of shitty diet, hairy crack, poor hygeine and neglect paid off; the thing subsided and went away. See? Nothing to worry about.
And all was well.

Until he hopped up into the seat of his truck one night and a quart of green pus shot out of his ass. He screamed, he jumped, and in doing so drove his forehead into the windshield so hard he passed out.
Dad had given himself an anal fistula.

(Now at this point in our story Mr. Meadows himself sauntered over and chimed in, all smiles, to helped tell the tale. By the end even Sunflower had joined the fun. And the important thing to bear in mind here is that none of them saw anything inappropriate at all about entertaining a guest with a story about ass disease.)

Mr. Meadows woke up in the hospital on his stomach with a freshly shaved fundament and some nice big dressings.

The original carbuncle had moved back beneath the skin and fat into the meat of the muscle, and then had actually migrated downward toward a vestigial anal gland, which it ruptured and emptied into. Because this gland had an open channel to the rectal passage, all the old pus and other chunky necrotic guck met up with some brand new bacterial buddies floating around in the fluid that was already there. The whole stew turned into a horrifically toxic ticking bomb. When he jumped up into the truck, the impact of his giant lard ass hitting the seat with all his weight behind it made the fistula explode. It burst, sending a quart of unimaginably horrible semi-fluid corruption geysering out through the pore-sized exit of the gland, enlarging it to the size of a dime.
All this had happened right at the ingress to his egress.
Yes.
He'd literally been torn a new asshole.

Now that dime, and the tennis-ball-sized cavity behind it, were cleaned out and filled with cotton packing. They sent him home and told him he could remove it himself in a couple of days.
Oh by the way. Don't leave rejoicing just yet, Mr. Milkman. If you don't keep your ass clean, the thing will FILL BACK UP.

Skip ahead one week.
It filled back up.
With the packing in place.

The only course of action now was to nut up, remove the packing, express the gland and keep it filled with Neosporin.

Sunflower flat out refused. Of course.

So the task fell to Eldest Brother.

There were several YARDS of surgical gauze up there.

Luckily, once the part that had hardened into a solid, cork-sized plug of blackened matter had been worked out, the rest of it came slithering out pretty easily. Yards and yards and yards and yards of it. Slithering out.

Don't imagine that this was accomplished without lots of commotion on the part of Satan's Milkman. Eldest finally had to tie him to the bed.
With belts. Leather belts.

So every night for a couple of months thereafter, it was Eldest Brothers' job to collect up everyones' belt, buckle them together, tie his father to the bed face down, spread dads giant nasty asscheeks and then pinch his dads' nasty infected asshole between his thumbs and express the infected gleeg out of the gland into a washcloth until it was empty. No matter how many washcloths it took.
Then he had to poke a tube of goo up there, root around until he found the right hole, and squeeze until the goop started to squit back out.**
Then he'd fold a bath towel into a square and slap it up against dads pucker, let his asscheeks slap back together, and wrap it all in place with an ace bandage.

All done!

I never took a shower in that house again.


______________

*like I was going to resist that? please.

** Sometimes Eldest Brother didn't find the right hole and went through a whole tube of Neosporin before he realized that he'd just disenfected his fathers entire lower colon, and somehow never thought to wonder why dad never bothered to mention that something felt different. (I did. And then I thought about it for a second, and I.... didn't.) Sometimes the Neosporin came squitting back out at velocity right into Eldest Brothers....whatever happened to be in range. This Mr. Meadows idea of a fun little joke. Surprise!

FUCK YOU CALIFORNIA

Right in the lungs. You passed Prop 8? You evil, bigoted hypocrites. How dare you legislate discrimination in my country. You make me ashamed to be American.



I add my fickle finger of fate to that of Joe In Vegas and Heather.
There's my wedding ring. That represents 22 years of marriage. I've upped it with the tattoo I got that represents my permanent commitment to my family. I put all that behind my convictions here,. I will not tolerate this bullshit in my country. Repeal Proposition 8 NOW.

quaint vignettes from my charming rural idyll

My husband is the type of man who might just happen to have a whoopee cushion on him at any given moment, sadly. He is also the kind of person who thinks it's real funny to gives said cushion to his four year old grandson. Who subsequently ran around for the rest of the evening frapping it loudly at people and then collapsing on the floor in hysterics. This made it difficult to follow Antiques Roadshow (shh, honey, quit farting for a second; grandma wants to hear how much the Victorian nipple electrodes are worth!) until his mommy took it away from him. And started farting it at people and collapsing in hysterics. This proves a. that there is such a thing as genetically heritable disposition, and b. we are a real classy group.

Despite the rain, this leaf season has been unusually brilliant. The deciduous trees that color up look as though they are artificially lit. I took a few pictures outside:
Welcome to the view out my front windows as of yesterday afternoon! Let's start by looking northeast from my front porch. What ARE they growing down in that white barn?

...moving ese...the twin to this tree used to stand in the middle of my driveway.

...southeast, toward Tweaker Hill (or Kendall, as its known on maps)

...and straight south.
Let's give my zillion dollar view a big hand!!! This view is one of the many reasons I keep saying that Bill Gates has nothing I want. And I'm serious about this too. CALL THE SALVATION ARMY BILL. REALLY. NO REALLY QUIT IT BILL. GO AWAY.


Remember the pumpkins?
...the full horror becomes apparent after a week out in the weather.

...This is the Opie tree looking spectacular with a wild and crazy black cohosh coming up through it

...and this is my favorite little magnolia stellata going off like fireworks.

Now that we have worshiped the glory that is my view, lets take a quick rip through the galley, shall we? Yes, lets!

The best thing about being my age is that I finally know how do some things with a certain degree of expertise. It's taken me years to finally get to the place where I think that I know a little bit about how to make bread, for example.

Out of everything I've set myself to do, learning how to work with fermentation and grain flours has been the one that turned out to be the trickiest. You can produce a pretty and edible loaf of bread on your first time out provided you can follow a recipe carefully, of course. But to really turn out something that can stand up to an informed opinion means years of practice. You have to develop a knowledge of your materials, tools and even climate with all five of your senses. The only way to do that is to just plain make a whole fuck of a lot of bread. And eat a whole lot of bread, and read about bread, and baking, and flour, and yeasts, and talk about bread, and basically turn into an obsessive with a bread grudge.

At first, when I was around 10-11, I was afraid of the breadmaking process. The dough is all...weird. It was messy and floury. But I was bound and determined that I was not going to be defeated. My grandmother used to make bread every three days from the time she was eight years old for heavens' sake, and she worked with salt batter, sourdoughs, wild yeasts and nonstandard flours!!!! If a barefoot kid in a covered damn wagon could make bread in an iron pot then I damnsure was going to make some bread too.

Making bread is a basic human skill. Once you get into it your realize that you make bread by feel and by intuition moreso than by recipe or technique-once you dig your hands in you can understand how a bunch of pre-literates could have come up with it. The ability to make fermented (and thus easily digested and long-keeping) protein food out of grains is the one thing that separated us forever from the hunter/gatherers. Making bread is how civilization started. People think its agriculture? Oh lord no. Agriculture is just planting seeds in convenient places; good lord, robins do that. Mice do that. Civilization started from the need to settle near the supply long enough to not only plant, guard and harvest a crop, but to husband the final product through its different stages of refinement as a food, document the changes, record the amounts, and store it. As beer.
Yup.
Bread was not the intended final product. Bread was just a stage on the way toward making beer. Which proves that our ancestors were smarter than we are.

Because I am only partially civilized, I just make bread. In this case, challah.
...with a scroungy old Yummy Biker finger serving as a prop there upper right.

This is the best loaf of bread I have ever made in my entire history of making bread, and its also my favorite bread in the entire world. This, friends, is a challah for the ages. A resplendant challah. A perfect challah. Usually its braided, but this time I wanted it for toasted sandwiches so I left it loafy (which is a word because I said it was.) The next time I make it I'll braid it, because I'll be celebrating. Do you know why they braid it? So you can pull it into nice pieces and throw it. Yes. This is a fact. Apparently, you hand bread to people who are mourning. You chunk bread at people who are celebrating.
Consider yourselves chunked at!

UPDATED: Suggest that funky music, white boy!

UPDATE:
OH YEAH! ITS STAYING UP AAAAAAAAAAAAALL WEEK, KATS AND KITTENS! MAYBE EVEN LONGER!!! SO DIG OUT THEM 8 TRACK TAPES AND DUST OFF THAT MP3 PLAYER! SEND IN THOSE PLAY LISTS!!!!


Wow! One failed music meme = a whole weekend listening to your excellent musical suggestions (and a few real stinkers, but hey, we can't all be ballerinas.)

OK. Y'all have suggestions. And complaints.

"Why didn't you include brit faves 'The Overproduced Sellouts' singing "I Got Drunk And Sat On The Side Of The Road And A Policeman Talked To Me'?






Where's 'Rabies Vector' by 'Alvin and the Chipmunks?












And what about the Iggy Pop version of 'Unchained Melody'? "


Fine. I have a comments lounge....use the sucker. Feel free to include as many suggestions, links and titles as you want!!! IMPROVE THE AIRWAVES HERE AT RANCHO FIRSTNATIONS...AND AROUND THE GLOBE!!

What music should we REALLY be listening to?

My taste rules; your taste is sorryass at best

It is a very strange experience to find that someone whose taste you usually admire likes weird music.

Not that the stuff wasn't listenable....some of it...I mean, at least it wasn't 'Madman Across The Water' while you're stuck in an elevator, right...but yeah. I was so puzzled. I ALWAYS like this guys' suggestions. About EVERYTHING.

I shot the dude an e-mail accusing him of fucking around.

He wasn't.

"Its difficult! Try it!" he retorted. 'It' being, come up with the names of 100 songs by 100 different artists right off the top of your head that you like.

Hell yes its difficult; mainly because I never remember the names of songs. Still, you aren't going to know what I mean if I go 'that one by those guys that has that 'DA DADADADA rrrrrOOOOOW' kind of guitar riff in the middle' since that describes most of the songs I like anyway and thats no help for a whole variety of reasons, so I had to resort to YouTube, Amazon Music and my own music collection. I did try to be honest at least as far as trying to find the songs I had in mind. And the different artists thing? Yeah, fail. I cheated the terms of this meme all to fuck. Send the meme police.

Don't ask me where this taste came from. I grew up in the middle of a suburban wasteland that rang to the tinny sounds of Donny Osmond and the Monkees. My parents liked country and western, show tunes, Lawrence Welk and Scandanavian folk music.

So here you go, heres a few of my favorite ditties. Do try and have good speakers; change the batteries in your hearing aid...pacemaker too, come to think of it. Things may spontaneously combust. And watch it with the John Lee Hooker; the love of God will come down upon you heavily and you will be slain in the Spirit.

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Nine Inch Nails: Only, Closer, Capital G

JOHN LEE HOOKER: Bad Like Jessie James, Hobo Blues, Boom Boom, Crawlin King Snake, Serve Me Right To Suffer, Boogie Chillun, Tupelo, I'm in the Mood, Need Love So Bad, Big Legs Tight Skirt, Chicken and Gravy, Gonna Use My Rod, 1 Room Country Shack, Red House

Allman Brothers: Midnight Rider, Whipping Post

Foghat: Slow Ride, Honey Hush

ZZ Top: Asleep in the Desert, Nationwide, La Grange, Manic Mechanic, Chicago

Steely Dan: Chain Lightning, Show Biz Kids, Black Friday, Do it Again, Kid Charlemagne, Jack of Speed, Any Major Dude, Pretzel Logic

Curtis Mayfield: Superfly

White Zombie: Grease Paint, Return of the Phantom Stranger, Blood Milk Sky, Children of the Grave, The Devils Rejects, Let It all Bleed Out, 17 Year Locust, Foxy Foxy, Meet the Creeper, Death of it All

Rob Zombie: Brickhouse, More Human Than Human, I'm Your Boogieman, Living Dead Girl

Mandrill: Fencewalk

PFunk Allstars: Give Up the Funk, Up For the Downstroke

Earth, Wind and Fire: September, Shining Star, The Way of the World, Gratitude

Slave: Great American Funk Song

Funkadelic: Get off Your Ass and Jam, Good to Your Earhole

Ohio Players: Love Rollercoaster, Fire, Funky Worm (thats like seven cans of shaving powder; man, thats funky!) Skin Tight

War: Slippin' into Darkness, The World is a Ghetto, Cisco Kid, Lowrider

Robin Trower: Everything. no seriously, everything the man recorded.

Edwin Star: War, Funky Music, Turn Me On

Robert Johnson: Crossroads

Leadbelly: Where Did You Sleep Last Night, Goodnight Irene

Lightning Hopkins: Baby Please Don't Go, Mojo Hand

Blind Willie Johnson: Dark Was The Night, Cold Was the Ground

George Thorogood: I Drink Alone


Rare Earth: I'm loving you, Celebrate, Born To Wander, Big Brother

Al Greene: Lets Stay Together (may cause spontaneous orgasm)

Joe Cocker: Feelin' All Right, Love the One You're With, Unchain My Heart, Lets Go Get Stoned, Delta Lady, She Came In Through the Bedroom Window, The Letter

Sly Stone: Thank You For Letting Me Be Myself, Hot Fun, Dance To The Music, Family Affair, If You Want Me To Stay

Rufus and Chaka Khan: Tell Me Something Good, Sweet Thang, Once You Get Started, You Got The Love, Rufusized, Stompin at the Savoy

Creedence Clearwater Revival: Born on the Bayou, Grapevine, Hey Tonight, Late Night Drive, See the Light, Green River, Run Through the Jungle, Down on the Corner, Graveyard Train, Up around the Bend, Keep on Chooglin, Midnight Special

Standells: Dirty Water

Aretha Franklin: Chain of Fools, Respect, I Never Loved a Man, Natural Woman, You Send Me

Alice In Chains: Rooster, Them Bones, Man in the Box

Neal Young: Just too many

Led Zep: Ditto

Hendrix: Oh yeah

...there. That oughtta school ya.

Stickin' shit on other shit and calling it Art

...But first, the Rancho FirstNations Halloween Pumpkin Spectacular!!!!

From left to right:

Scary Face, by The Goonybird
Domo, by The Lucky Bastard
Opies' Butthole, by FirstNations (after Kurt Vonnegut)


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OK. Here are some FirstNations collages.

This is an example of the refined technique. This one was made from hand-tinted papers (MY hand, chillun) The colors are actually a lot more saturated than this but its early morning here and the light is all white and reflected so its washed out. Deal.
Does it have a name? NO IT DOES NOT HAVE A NAME. WHAT ON EARTH WOULD YOU NAME THIS? CHUCK? DONALD? WHAT? Fine. It's named 'Donald'. Are you happy? Meet fricken' Donald the collage.

This whole wall is a collage.

I always wanted to do a work using a single color with just the textures and edges as the prominent features. It is navy blue here....other times it's indigo or black, and gives back a single color. In the morning light, or in any reflected light, suddenly the pattern becomes evident-not jarringly so, but enough to make you go 'wha...?" and look closer.

This is a collage in a frame, hanging on another collage that is on another wall. ITS COLLAGE OVERKILL AT RANCHO FIRSTNATIONS! WE'RE KURAAAAAAAAAAAAAZY!

The one in the frame actually has a name; its called 'Newgrange'. (Points given to anyone who can guess why.) The wall is just old civil war era sheet music that I fell in love with and had to use. It has no name. It is a nameless wall.

Here is one that hangs out in the Yummy Bikers garage.(Yes, he has framed art in his garage.)

This one is made out of old thrashed, rat-chewed Easyrider Magazines that Lame George gave us right before he was incarcerated (the first time.) It's done using traditional collage technique, which explains the lumpiness.


This is the door to the spray booth in the garage with a little Sponge Bob figurine stuck to it.

Yes I did that too. Because everyone needs an illuminated door in their garage.

Here is another old school technique collage.

Its made out of this lady's old cookbook and recipe collection that I scored at an auction preview. Two of the recipes are X-rated pass-along folklore things; 'How To Make An Angel Cake'. I think its charming!

Same technique. Another womans old recipe collection. I scored this one at an estate sale.

At first you think 'what kind of heartless asshole would sell something like this? This is a treasure!' Until you look at the recipes and realize that gramma made things like cherries and black olives in Jello.
I'm dead serious. Thats one of the recipes here.

So yes, not heartless; prudent.

Indigo Clam Residence, Brasierre Container Furious Of Porcupine!

I've been working on presents lately, and I have a backlog. CB, MJ; I have not forgotten you. They're in the works.
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THINGS TO MAKE AND DO!!!!!

Let's all make a collage the FirstNations way! Not the regular normal way, because that way is all assy. This way rules and is studly, because it is durable and because I made it up and tested it and it just rules, ok?


Here's what you'll need:

AN IDEA.
No seriously. If you're like me and you love old paper ephemera, you have boxes of the shit just waiting to be made into something. To begin, then, get out all your boxes and sort through your papers (which will be a fun afternoon in itself!) with an idea in your head. The key here is GO IN WITH AN IDEA IN YOUR HEAD.

Ask yourself: "Self? What do you feel like you want to do a picture about?"
Now sometimes you'll have an answer ready: "I want to do a picture about the color blue" or "I want to do a picture about things that are jungly and warm".

Now, with this idea uppermost in your mind, go through your papers one by one and think "Does this match my idea?" and if it doesn't, put it to one side. If it does, save it out.
Then go back through the save pile again, with the idea in mind, and cull and adjust. By this time all the papers you have looked at will have begun to suggest a final appearance to you. This is so fun that you might spend days just dinking around going through all your cool papers. Well, if you're me.

Now: Decide if you still like the idea. Sometimes you won't.
Don't do it.
If you do still like it, now think: Do I want to do this suggested appearance?" Sometimes you don't.
Don't do it.

Both these things happen. Go with it. Do not force it. Otherwise you won't like what you did, and it will bother you. If you go ahead and make the collage you'll just put it away because it bothers you, and then some random person will come along and say they like it and THAT will annoy you and you'll give it to them just to get it out of the house and they'll hang it up and every time you go over you'll have to see it and that will annoy, bother and irritate you.

Now sometimes you just want to do a picture about something but you don't know what. This is when you get some of the best results, weirdly enough!

Go through all your papers and save out the ones that just appeal to you for some reason. Then arrange them on a big table (out of the draft!!!) and let them lay there while you glance at them as you walk by. Rearrange them if the spirit moves you.
Suddenly an idea will suggest itself.
Sometimes it will just get bothersome, and you'll put it all away again.
Sometimes, you just find that you really like the arrangement for some reason, and you do it, and then months later the underlying idea will suddenly come to you when you look at it, and you'll go "Huh!"

Here is how to assemble it so that it lasts for one million years (dog years)

For the ground-
1 sheet of luan panelling, flat, no pattern*. You can cut this stuff to size by scoring it with a stanley knife or even an exacto and then crack it off around a doorway or over the edge of a table.

1 bucket of premixed sheetrock mud or joint compound, untinted (you can tint it yourself with water based tempera if you like.)

1 large bottle of Elmers CARPENTERS glue-not the white school stuff. The white school stuff is disgusting and rubbery while the yellowish Carpenters stuff dries really rigid and sands easily.

Water

A flat throwaway house painting brush-a small one, like for indoor walls. Not a huge one.

Medium grit sandpaper

CLOTH rags-NOT paper towelling.

Method for preparing your ground:
Cut the luan to size, sand the edges and clean the surface. Make sure it is completely dry. Now, look at it and judge the natural bow. The side that bellies up toward you will be your work side.

Mix up 1 cup of the joint compound with 1/4 cup of Elmers Carpenter glue and some water until smooth. You want it to be exactly as goopy as condensed cream of chicken soup is right out of the can, or like standard latex housepaint.

**Glop up a brushload of the mixed compound and begin painting it on the luan (remember, belly side up.) Cover the whole surface uniformly. Be fairly generous; cover the entire sheet to a uniform depth. Neatness does not count here; coverage does. Err on the side of too much.

Dry in front of a fan overnight-first the front, then the uncoated back. Set it up off the ground on some books so the air can flow around it.

Sand the dry surface to a uniform smoothness, first top to bottom, then side to side. Dust off the crumbs and then go over it again lightly with a damp rag to pick up everything. This is the point where I usually stop, because this gives you a nice 'toothed' surface that your papers will adhere to very well.

You can always add a dab more wet compound to fill if you need to; just let it dry for an hour before you try and work it.

Sometimes you might want to use a very flat surface (say, you're using stains or something.) To achieve this, wet a rag or sponge until its not dripping but still pretty wet, and then burnish it over the surface in circles lightly. Keep checking it in an angle of light that skips off the surface and will reveal any remaining flaws. It will still be porous when it dries, but it won't have a visible 'grain'.


The luan should have dried more or less flat now with the coating on it. If it still bellies out toward you a bit, so much the better! The papers you apply will draw a bit as they dry and pull it flatter.
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Surface supplies:

Water based clear polycrylic finish, eggshell (or whatever lustre you like)

Elmers Carpenters glue, mixed 1:4 with water (this can vary; that's just ballpark)

Premixed tempera paint, water based (you can use this to tint the adhesive, the finish, the papers or the ground. I also use instant coffee granules. Seriously. You get a perfect 'aged' look with it.)

Fine grit sandpaper, for breaking up finishes and creating effects

Throwaway brushes (NOT foam; it crumbles)in varying sizes-flat and artists tips-for applying adhesives, finishes and manipulating wet papers

Clean, non-linty rags for dabbing up excess finish and adhesive, also spills-you'll have 'em.

An absorbent dropcloth (I use an old flannel sheet doubled over)

A large box fan with adjustable speeds

A standard blowdryer

optional: chopstick, palette knife, old butter knife or popsicle stick, exacto knife-for moving and manipulating papers and creating effects.

PAPERS:
This is up to you. To begin with, try and use papers that are made of the same material and that have the same thickness because thats just easier to deal with. Start with old newspapers to get a feel for the medium. You lose nothing and it turns out cool!

Magazine pages have a coating on them that needs to be sanded lightly on the glue side to help them stick better.

Some papers are not colorfast; the inks will bleed. Sometimes this is a cool effect. Sometimes it will ruin everything. Tear off a tiny corner and get it wet to see if the color runs before you get it all wet.

Once the papers are perfectly dried, you can sand over them to get various effects, like to feather out an edge or fade an image, or reveal a layer beneath, or make it take up tint heavily. It's fun and it makes a huge mess!

Note: all papers will stretch out when they get wet. When you glue them down, burnish out the wrinkles and air bubbles with a wet artists brush, working from the center out in all directions, also pressing out excess glue. This is a very light operation; don't reef down hard on it. It's wet paper and it will fall apart, you know! Dab up the excess glue with a dry rag.
The cool thing is, though, that once they're stretched out and glued down, they stay that size even if you get them wet again. You can glue layers, letting things dry in between times, and it won't ruin it!

TO BEGIN:
Coat the entire surface of the prepared board with the Elmers glue mixture. I work north-south first, then let that dry and go over it again east-west, and let it dry overnight.

That is called 'sizing' the surface. What that accomplishes is to give you a surface that will dry at the same rate of speed and draw as what you apply to it. It is also easily repairable... if you stick something on that you don't like you can just lay a wet rag on the mistake until the glue gets wet again, then peel the mistake up. Let the area dry again by hitting the place with the blowdryer.

Method:
Exactly the same as papier mache (to a point.)
Run the papers through the glue solution, let them drip off for a second, then apply them to the surface. Brush out the air bubbles (use a damp brush and work from the center) and dab off the excess solution with a rag. Stop every now and then and let things dry a little in front of the box fan.

Here is where it differs from papier mache, though: Do NOT let all your papers lay in a bowl of adhesive solution and soak! This can make some papers dissolve, plus you can get a nasty surprise if one of them has a water-soluble ink and it runs and tints the rest.
One at a time, run each paper through the bath by itself, let it drip then stick it on- you can repair it quickly while its still wet by just wiping it off with a dry rag.

The actual assembly can take a few days. Luckily, this is the really fun part.
Let each layer dry overnight before starting the next one, or else you can get an effect where suddenly huge slabs of the work lift off the surface.

Once you are finished, coat the perfectly dry piece with the water-based polycrylic clear. This stuff is safe, but it reeks bad, so have a fan going and be prepared to open a window.

Let it cure for one week. Then take and seal the back of the board with the polycrylic.

And you're done! Now you have a lovely decoration.

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*I've worked with heavy card backing, but this usually ends up lumpy and if I wanted 1st grader art on my walls I'd mug a 1st grader for some. To get it to lay flat you have to cure it under a weight for a week at a time between layers and thats just annoying....then the first time you boil water or it rains it will get lumpy again anyway. So, yeah.

**Why, Nations, why? Why do I gotta do this crap? Why can't I just stick the papers right on the wood? Why?
If you have a very damp day followed by a very dry, hot and windy day, the surface collage (now one continuous plane that draws in multiple directions) can actually draw up and pull itself off the luan (wood is made of long lignin fibers that only draw along the length of the grain.) I've had it happen.
By coating the board with the compound and glue mixture, what you're creating on a microscopic, oversimplified level is kind of a shock absorber. The addition of carpenters glue to the joint compound sticks the compound firmly into the luan AND prevents the compound from crumbling! THIS IS SCIENCE! ISN'T THAT COOL? YES IT IS.

Red Whale Shark Has Strange Playings: Majorcan Gambit!

This is part of something over at UJ, but its something thats been bothering me enough so that I thought I might throw it open to debate over here, with a little rewording. I was curious enough about this that I asked the Stainless Steel Amazon, and even between the two of us we couldn't couldn't come up with much of an answer. So I turn it over to you:

The last time I looked at a straight porn video was waaaaay back in the 'Flesh Gordon' days. All that shiny lip gloss and polyester was enough to put me off the genre for 30 years. Seriously. 30 years.

Enter the Internet, and amateur porn videos. I finally conquered my trepidations recently and looked up a few.

Oh my.

Things have certainly changed since the days of Seka and Traci Lords. Here are two things in particular that I noticed after a 30 year absence:

1. Whats with all this smacking people on the butt? All of a sudden, apropos of nothing I can figure out, people are smacking each other on the butt in the middle of the proceedings.

Now to me, this looks suspiciously 'hip hop music video'. Someone thought it looked all sly and G and thought "Hey, I'll 'bust that move' on 'my ho' next time we're 'freakin'! And film it! AND POST IT ON XTUBE! Then the world can see how sly and G I am too!" Or I could be way off base here and I need to hop on the ol' smacky train before it leaves me at the station.

2. Our couple are in the middle of a tender interlude. Everything seems to be going well. Suddenly our hero grabs his johnson and starts bouncing it off his lady friends face. Or butt. Or whatever's within whapping distance.

Ok. Does this elude anyone else? Because I am at a total loss here. I have no idea whatsoever what this is supposed to signify. Nobody seems to enjoy it particularly. This is supposed to convey what to the observer exactly? I know one thing for damnsure: it didn't come from real life. You guys know exactly what I mean, too. You stop suddenly in the middle of the proceedings....? let alone pull some lame dorkyass stunt like that; you won't live to see daylight.

So there you go. Random spanking and weiner whapping. Where did it come from, why do they do it? And most importantly: What. The. Fuck.

More fun with geraniums!

Since that last post was such a riproaring success, ya bakeheads, I thought I'd share this recipe with y'all.

Back in the day I knew a group of four orphan brothers who had inherited a huge estate. Money and housing taken care of for the rest of their lives, they all decided to live off the grid and go completely alternative, and so they did; the fact that they lived in the middle of an upscale suburb notwithstanding. They ripped out all the landscaping and planted corn and other *ahem* vegetation, cut off the electricity and phone lines, set up several distilling operations for things like fuel grade alcohol, booze grade alcohol and 'et cetera'...tore out the central heating and switched to wood heat and cooking, bought an old gasoline generator and used it to run their amps (they had a band!) and keep the plumbing thawed out in the winter, had honeybees, made mead, wine, vodka, brewed beer, made bread...these guys were like fricken' GODS.

One of the things they made was something they called 'keef'.

Now with a name like that you kind of already get the feeling its going to fry a few braincells, right? Well, it really wasn't keef, it was a kind of homemade cut plug made out of geraniums. They'd knock a chunk off and smoke it through a hookah. Delicious? Oh my God, it was absolutely sybaritic. I've never smoked anything as enjoyable...not only for the effects but also simply as a smoke. If you've ever smoked a fine tobacco through a hookah you have some idea of what I mean...this stuff was just WONDERFUL.

As best as I can remember, the method went something like this:

Large mature leaves, washed, separated into 'fingers', dried flat and cured (in other words, let to dry until they get kind of leathery)

Homemade dry blackberry wine...specifically, the bottom 1/4 of the fermentation with the dregs in it. (Stay with me, it doesn't end up tasting like candy at all.)

equipment:
cheesecloth,
a wooden butter press with lid, (oh look it up)
1 brick,
broad, shallow baking pan
-all of this should be surgically clean, including the brick, which can be scrubbed off with bleach water and then baked for a couple of hours to sterilize it.

Method: soak the cured leaves in the thick dreg blackberry wine (how long I don't know. Presumably at least overnight.) You can up the alcohol by tipping in a little vodka. This is just to help sterilize the mixture and sharpen up the taste. The alcohol burns off.

Your butter press should be sitting in the broad, shallow baking pan. It MUST be scrupulously clean. If you're using a wood press, this will turn it purple and flavor it permanently, so be forewarned. Do NOT use an aluminum press.

Line the butter press with cheese cloth.

Take the leaves out of the wine. Let the excess drip off, then lay flat in the bottom of the butter press. Continue this process, alternating the direction of the layers, until all the leaves are used or the butter press is filled.

Place the top on the press and set the brick on top of that.


Set this all aside to a very dry, warm place with good air flow. The brothers used the top shelf of their woodstove. Cover the whole operation with another single layer of cheesecloth to keep dust and bees out.

In a couple of days, lift the 'cake' from the butter press using the cheesecloth liner. In the meantime, dump out any collected juice in the pan and wash it out. Turn the cake over and return it to the butter press. (You can now switch out and use a clean cheesecloth to line it if you're worried about it; and if the stack falls apart, just re-stack it. You don't have to, though.)

Replace the lid, the brick and the cheesecloth covering and let sit for another few days.

Once it has stopped weeping fluid you can take it out of the butter press and just let it sit in the clean, dry pan, wrapped in cheesecloth, with the brick on top. Turn the cake over every day.

This is done when you have a nasty looking black block of hard ick. it will look like old leaves that have been sitting in a pile for a few months, only drier, and it will smell like blackberries (and be kind of pliable, as I recall.) If the cheesecloth sticks you take a damp rag or clean damp sponge and dab it on the stuck places until it loosens.

To use, cut a corner off and set it on fire. I mean, please. You know.

It sounds nasty, but it smokes GREAT. I would go so far as to say it's an epicurean experience, in fact. The brothers would sometimes mix this with fine smoking tobacco, opium, honey oil or hash, and truthfully it was best with a little bit of fine tobacco.


I can't vouch for the complete accuracy of this method, although I'm 90% certain I've got it down here. The brothers always said that the method is the same as for making homemade cutplug chewing tobacco. I wasn't able to find a 'recipe' for that online but its gotta be out there. If you have the straight 411, please, don't Bogart that info, my friend! Share it with us in the comments lounge!

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Hey kids! Do you have any favorite geranium recipes? Please leave them in the comments lounge! Maybe we can do a 'Flatbutt Tribal Party Cookbook'!

Harvesting Geraniums with FirstNations!

One of the onerous tasks associated with growing geraniums is stripping and grooming. Now by that I do not mean what you think I mean; no, I mean getting naked and actually taking a bath instead of spritzing on a half gallon of Chanel and calling it French. Actually no, I really mean getting the product market ready. For most people this means getting naked and calling a Frenchman to harvest your geraniums for you, which doesn't make anyone happy and is not sanitary. This is where technology can help you.

Anyone with access to a machine shop and scrap steel can make this simple, elegant and highly effective tool which can handle everything down to the daintiest bud:
This highly technical tool is called: a piece of metal with some holes in it.

The one I saw was made out of 1/4 inch thick stainless steel angle stock. The draw holes had first been bored on a drill press, and then the guy had taken a mandrel and gauged them out wider by whamming it through from the back of the face plate (he made four different sized holes.) Using a mandrel also makes the burr on the outer side crown up nice and high, which is what you want. To finish he simply took a rat tail file and filed the crowns nice and sharp. And there you have it!

You can clamp this to a table, or use nails or screws to attach it to your work surface. It cuts off the leaf material like a knife; you get very little waste. (Hint: to be really effective, the stems should first be de-budded and then drawn through top first, against the curve of growth.)

The tinier holes stem the buds neatly. Feed them through stem end first; duh. The lower portions drop off and the top pops off in one piece.

An unexpected side benefit of this tool is that you can periodically scrape off the face of the draw plate with a razor or exacto and collect honest to crap hash. Yeah, it will be harsh because of the chlorophyll and frag. Knock a couple bucks off the price. It's still bonus cash, and it has the added benefit of not having passed through the hands of a nine year old kid who wipes his ass with his fingers.

I hope this has been helpful. I know I've spend many an hour bitching and clipping hunks of skin off the sides of my fingers wishing I had a goddamn clue, so I offer this as a public service to those of you who labor in ignorance as I once did. You'll still have to do a little scissors and clippers work, but nothings perfect; and there won't be any Frenchmen involved. Yay!

Quaint Vignettes From My Charming Rural Idyll

This year, because of the mild conditions, the farmers around here have yet to harvest the feed corn. I guess the upside of that is that I haven't had to put up with the truly godhorrid stench of silage being trucked around-and I have no idea what that shits about either; it seems like they make it, and then they drive it around the county for a couple of weeks for no good reason that I can figure out. Maybe it likes to go on car rides. Maybe driving it around for a couple of hours is necessary to the whole silage process. What I do know is that the stuff smells absolutely disgusting. Worse than pig shit, worse than rotted liquid pig manure even, worse than whatever that Parmesan-foot-ass stuff is that they spray on the fields in July. And if anyone could identify just exactly what that stuff is for me I would appreciate it. But anyway....

The smell of silage defies description. It smells worse than the dump. Really. You know how if you spend enough time at the dump you eventually stop smelling it? Not so with silage. Its one of those smells that you can taste, and if you get a strong enough whiff of it you gag-not even as a disgust response either; you don't get the chance to register disgust. Its involuntary. You're driving along having a nice chat with your buddy and then a truck goes paHEURGK! HUAAARP! *BURP* ...yeah. Men dig that.

Around here a kid can drive farm equipment on the street. I suppose there's a special permit involved or something; all I know is that I envy these kids. Maybe the Fates conspired to keep me out from behind the wheel of large equipment, though, given what I was like when I was younger (i.e. EVIL) and Lord only knows what I would have got up to with a corn auger under my command. Actually I know what I'd have done; I'd have headed straight toward my grade school. Drove that mother right through the parking lot; grind through all those Datsun subcompacts and Toyotas RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRkshhhhCRUNCKCRACKGADOON! SSSSSSBOOM! SCREEECHcrunchmangledestroy! Then hammer down straight toward the main office, locked on target, lasers charged and ready; and bury that bitch full speed right up to the rear wheels. Hop out of the cab at the last minute, of course, before it goes up in a huge ball of flames FOOM! with all them big freakyass pointed things flying off and then aw fuck, man, here they come all twirling down back out of the sky eeeeeeeEEEEEWOOOOOOOOOOM!
Right through the main boiler! DIRECT HIT!
Meanwhile I would stand across the street and watch it all go stern skyward...take a majestic half turn...and then silently sink beneath the chill dark seas. And I would laugh a grim and icy laugh- heh heh heh heh heh!-light a panatella, turn, and ride my horse off into the desert.
AYIAYIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! wa wa waaaa...
(that's The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly music. keep up.)

So yeah. Better off that I don't get a corn auger for Christmas this year.

I keep trying to talk my husband into getting me one of those little mini backhoes like landscapers use? But he says that all I'd do is go around digging holes. Well, duh, yeah, that's what they're for.
"In the middle of the night. At random," he adds.
But here again; duh, that's what they're for. If you had a mini backhoe, wouldn't you? Who'd complain? Someone wakes up because their dog is barking and you're out in their front yard in your mini backhoe digging a hole, what? Like they're going to even call 911? "Yes, hello, 911? It's 3:am and there's a native American in a mini backhoe digging up my landscaping?" Please. No way. Especially if it was modified so that flames shot out from underneath it, and had big telescoping spider legs that would unfold out of the sides with pinchers on the end that had black poison dripping off them that would hit the ground and stuff would dissolve into glick and smoke would come up? See, no. You'd have to be pretty stupid to try.