shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit shit. and shit.

Thank you everyone for all the music suggestions. I've got them all stashed and saved and hopefully I can put them to use. Once I , you know, join the 21st century and actually get an IPOD. Ahem.

____________________________________

Things are sucking a big one around here right now.

...Or rather,'still sucking a big one'.

OK fine. There was a brief letup in the sucking, but then it started again, is what I'm trying to say. I'm going to tie up a couple of loose ends, whine about my life for a few paragraphs, and then go someplace and sulk for awhile. Who knows at this point.

Loose end one: The people next door had been raising rats to sell, except they never sold them. Instead they took all the doors off the rooms up on the third floor, left the sink and the bathtub running and hove a bag of Purina Rat chow across the floor once every couple of days. The rats quickly overran the entire house and property, coming and going freely through holes they'd chewed through the walls. Wild Norway rats soon joined them, and were welcomed inside and eventually hand tamed just like the pet-stock rats. We called the health department and Animal Control. The police decided to get involved too. They came over and gave us the details of what was going on, and the rest was filled in by various people around town. Oh, we were local celebrities for awhile. Anyway, the neighbors cleaned up their property, got rid of the rats, and I haven't seen them since. I know, big anticlimax.

Loose end two: I have a new baby grand daughter! She was born last May and has finally figured out how to crawl forward! (She was stuck in reverse for a couple of months. This was funny to everyone but the baby.) This is the Stainless Steel Amazons' baby that we all thought was permanently attached up in there and was going to have to attend high school graduation in utero; well, she finally blooped out. And because attending ones' daughter giving birth once was more than enough, grandma was NOT in attendance for this one. The SSA had her at home just like she did the Goonybird, with a midwife, and from what I understand it was just as squitty and funky as getting born usually is so I don't feel like I missed anything.
_______________________

Well then.

Me and the YB have been in marriage counselling for a few months. It just took a giant shit.

To make a long story short, I'm the only one who thinks theres a problem and there wouldn't be one if I'd just "shut up and stop complaining". That is a direct quote from our therapist. Oh yes! He has been full of terrifically humorous little comments like that. At my expense, generally. He tossed off that little bon mot last night.

I fired him this morning.

This leaves my marriage right back where it was three months ago, and us several hundred dollars poorer. Basically what it amounts to is that I just paid out several hundred dollars to learn that there's really no reason to hire someone with a degree to ignore you when you are already being ignored for free.


Life is given its depth and meaning by these small moments of clarity.


Now I went into this knowing that I was going to look bad. I wanted to get things fixed, right; so I chose to see a male therapist thinking that at least my husband would feel comfortable talking to another guy. All along I suspected that I'd be hard for him to take, training or no, because in my experience MEN HATE THIS SHIT. Training, education, whatever; when it comes right down to it, if you have tits, men just want you to shut up and stop complaining. And here I was: big tits, heap big upset. The ONLY one who's upset, I might add. Because my husband is fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine. My husband is tolerant and a little hurt and befuddled but being kind by humoring me and showing up for appointments. This is because my husband is a genuinely nice guy. Unfortunately, he's also one of those guys who figures if nobody yells or acts upset, then there isn't anything wrong.

No, seriously. Really. He honestly thinks that if you don't act like anything is wrong, then there magically IS NO PROBLEM. Yes, I know this is screamingly counter intuitive. Pay attention. We're not talking about academic issues here; this is emotions, and as Mr. Spock teaches us, 'emotion is illogical'. See what you can learn here at Paul? And from Star Trek?

I figured, as I can be excused for doing, that someone with a degree in marriage counselling might be able to help show us a middle road to take so that issues would resolve instead of just building and becoming horrible. I also figured we had a good shot at success... my husband and I are still best friends after everything is said and done..despite the fact that once one of those squishy emotional family marriagey icky issues would crop up, I was set adrift out there all alone on my ice floe screaming in the darkness, because everything would be just fine if I'd just stop making such a big deal about it.

Apparently our therapist agrees. And really, who wants to deal with some whining, histrionic broad when who just keeps on bringing up a bunch of problems; Jesus lady, come on! when its so much more fun to sit around a chat about motorcycles and Alaska and then get a check for it at the end of a couple of hours? Shit yeah!

So I don't know where things are going to go from here. I know that attempts are going to be made to get me to be a nice lady and play nice and apologize to the nice therapist for firing him and quit being 'so emotional'. I also know that I'm going to refuse because I'm sick of being treated like I'm someone who can be cozened and co-opted and bought off with lip service and then immediately ignored once the proper response has been jacked out of me. I am not asking for the fucking moon here, folks. I just want to be able to talk about things outside of an increasingly narrow range of safe subjects without being consigned to Outer emotional cocksucking Mongolia.

Oh well. It does free up my Wednesday nights, I guess.

Please come through for me, y'all!!

I'm having a difficult time writing the third and last chapter of the Rat Saga. I think that's mainly because I'd just like to forget that whole period of time ever happened, and sitting here trying to remember it instead is really fucking with that impulse. Therefore, I've decided to go to Oregon for a week.


It makes perfect sense. It does.


Now: what I want you-alluns to to is to go directly to the comments lounge, have a cocktail and leave me the answer to a serious question:

WHERE DOES ONE FIND NEW MUSIC THESE DAYS?

I can guarantee you it ain't on the radio. Not around here.



But see, I also want to get an Ipod and download bunches and bunches of music; big talk from someone who has only the very faintest idea of what an Ipod is or how it works. Still, I've been making playlists, using Amazon Music recommendations and Youtube. While I was doing that I ran across lots of music that came out during those years between 1979 and the present when I was busy doing other things, like having a life, and some of it is INCREDIBLE! I feel so cheated! All this stuff was going on and I FUCKING MISSED IT!! Go check out Critters Buggin', Buckethead, Blues Saraceno, and anything Les Claypool has ever been involved with, for example. Of course, you probably already know about this stuff. I didn't until just recently. You see how serious this is? It's pathetic.


The only radio stations we get out here are country, christian rock and classic rock (and whatever happens to float in over the border from Canada when they aren't jamming our signals with Radio Free Cheese broadcasts.) I swear to God I will start flinging shit like a macaque if I have to listen to 'Love to Watch Her Strut' ONE MORE TIME.




My favorite music comes in two flavors: blues and metal. By 'metal' I mean stuff like White Zombie, Tool, Filter, Rage Against the Machine. You know, songs about babies dying, napalm and global warfare. I particularly like screaming guitarists who make strange faces and play until their fingers bleed . Hopping around is a plus.

By 'blues' I don't mean Dr. Hook. Lord save me from Dr. Hook AND his Medice Show. No. I mean BLUES. I mean elderly black men singing about shooting people, selling their souls to the Devil, women with large butts, and drinking themselves to death.

I am not particularly interested in pop, country, girl singers or anyone who has been on American Idol. If they aren't demonstrably psychotic, depressed, violent, on drugs or in need of medication then I don't want to hear from them.



See, I know a lot of music is coming out via the Internet, and I need to know where that music is. I don't know where to find it! Send me links! Websites! Don't assume I know a goddamn thing about this stuff because I really don't. Use short words.

Seriously, folks, I'm desperate here. I am seriously desperate. It's serious. So please, fill my comments lounge with links and names and places. Please. Please give me

1.Leads on new music,

2.How to find new music,

3.Where to find new music

HOOK A BITCH UP!!!!

Dog is not the answer

...and now for something completely different!
_______________________________________



People deal with stress in different ways. I get scared, which pisses me off, and then I attack whatever is pissing me off, and violently destroy the crap out of it, render it into tiny little quivering peeing bloody shreds, which I then set on fire and stomp on and call bad names. That's me.

My husband retreats immediately to the top of some remote inner Himalaya from where he'll issue infrequent communiques in response to whatever faint cries happen to reach him, form letters which invariably read 'I don't know', 'nothing', and 'no I didn't'. That's him.

This disparity in coping methods combined with a year of incredible personal upheaval finally resulted in me locking myself in my bedroom for two solid days, during which I did nothing but sob uncontrollably and smoke menthol cigarettes.

In the middle of the afternoon of the third day, as I was lying on the bed thinking about how truly vile menthol cigarettes are and wondering why I was smoking them, I heard his car door slam out in the driveway.

Then I heard a series of excited yips.

Say what?

Oh no.

Aw fuck.

AW FUCK .

Please God. Please God tell me that isn't a dog.



PLEASE GOD DO NOT TELL ME THAT THIS MAN HAS BROUGHT HOME A DOG.


PLEASE GOD.





The bedroom door opened and in ran a dog.

"Guess what? " The Biker announced cheerfully.

.......








Now, 'I got YOU a dog' is bullshit for 'In utter disregard for whatever the underlying cause of this present episode might be, I decided to use it as an opportunity to go get a dog from the pound without your input because I want a dog, and so I'm going to make like it's a sweet cuddly attempt at making up; and in the rapture of the moment, overcome by the mesmerizing cuteness rays emanating from the dog, you'll buy this, and everything will be great.'

I sat there on the bed in utter disbelief. I looked from one to the other, feeling my whole inner being just shrug and give up.

Fine. We have a dog.

Hooray.

Now to be honest, I really wanted to like Maxwell. Maxwell was a good boy and could have been a great boy given an experienced trainer. Experienced trainer, unfortunately, does not even remotely describe anyone who lives at this address. Still, he was a cute little guy, a mutt cross between a rat terrier and a shih tzu, and was as happy and good natured as the day was long.

He was also completely un-housebroken, and, as we were to find out, completely un-house-breakable.






He had a long white high-maintenance coat made of Fiberglas and static electricity that tangled itself into thousands of hard little knots that worked their way into his skin. He was a yapper. He was a climber. He was a humper. He was an eater of carpets and houseplants and shoes and upholstery and the corners of walls and furniture and books and mail.






He carried toilet paper around the house.





He climbed out of the windows.





He climbed into the dryer.





He drug my bras out of the dirty wash and out into the yard. And rolled on them. And got tangled up in them. And then wore them.


Until you looked out the window and realized your dog had been outside wearing a bra for God only knows how long, and ran out to get him, only he wriggled out from underneath the fence and ran off into the middle of the soccer field.


Wearing a bra.




If the lid on the toilet were down he would use it as a step in order to climb up onto the vanity where he'd eat soap. When the lid was up, he fell into the toilet trying to use it as a step to get up onto the vanity so he could eat soap.






His idea of going on a car ride meant to ride quietly in your lap, which is a total lie. Max's idea of a car ride was climbing on top of your head while you were going 75mph down the freeway. Sometimes it meant weaving himself through the steering wheel. It also meant leaping out any windows he found open, and sometimes we found ourselves driving down the road with half a dog dangling out of the side of the car. He would suddenly dive over the back of the seat and land on the side of your face and neck, claws extended, and have to be forcibly removed. Not that he wasn't being safely restrained; he was! I swear to God! Right up until he....wasn't, somehow. And he certainly wasn't scared. He was having the time of his life! He was just being a puppy.


A puppy spawned by Hell.

Since I'm a stay-at-home wife, it fell to me to 'train' him. Dad could go to work each day and come home and either ignore or enjoy doggies' cute antics per his whim. I had the responsibility of attempting to civilize an animal that you literally could not turn your attention away from for a single moment. I now have something of an inkling of what it must be like to raise a hyperactive child. You simply could not have anything but your fullest attention on this animal one hundred percent of the time or he was trying to open drawers, climb into the stove, pulling books off the shelves, or drinking coffee.



Yes. Drinking coffee. He preferred it black.

Cute puppy Maxwell was a non-stop Maxwell. The high speed mayhem and destruction caused by a caffeinated Maxwell was worthy of Sam Peckinpah . But yeah...somewhere along the line before he came to us he'd developed a taste for coffee. At first it was kind of cute. He would sit on the kitchen floor in the morning and stare at the coffee maker and whine. "You aren't getting any, buddy," I'd say. "It'll stunt your growth!"

"Oh yeah, chubby?" he'd grin. "Just set that cup down where I can get at it."

And as soon as your attention was diverted there he'd be with his whole head jammed in the cup, sucking it down like a little bilge pump. I'd chase him around with a rag, wipe off his steaming, coffee-sodden face, and feel him beginning to vibrate as I held him in my arms. One of the very first things I learned about Max was to to keep my coffee mug inaccessible. I was finding full cups for a week after we got rid of him, stashed on top of the entertainment center, the cabinets and the refrigerator.

The novelty of Maxwells' antics soon wore thin when his destructive campaign moved from general household items to things that belonged to the Biker. When he pulled up long strands of carpet and ate them, that was him 'just being a puppy'. It was a case of 'You shouldn't have left those lying around' when Maxwell ate my glasses. Chewing shoes was funny when they were my shoes. It rapidly became not so funny when they were the Bikers' 250.00 Red Wing work boots. Or his favorite running shoes. Or his socks. Or his pillow. Or...


Maxwell could jump like a little kangaroo. It was amazing. If you've ever seen a Jack Russel terrier leaping six feet straight up over and over and over again as though it had a spring in its butt you have an idea of what I mean.



Max liked to jump up, catch the drawstring of the Bikers' pajama pants in his teeth and give it a tug. He'd come out of nowhere, leap, catch the string between his teeth and the Biker would let out a whoop, by which time Max was a speck in the distance.



Tugging on the string quickly became 'giving the string a good healthy yank and pulling the pajama pants halfway down the Bikers' ass'. And that was hilarious....right up until that fateful day that Maxwell...missed. And nipped the wrong...drawstring.

But the big turning point came when we caught Maxwell humping the baby.


This perplexed the baby and made everyone else fairly uncomfortable. Everyone but Maxwell, that is. No, you'd lift him off the baby for the 500th time and he'd keep right on going, humpityhumpityhumpityhumpityhumpity, humpity, humpityhumpity.....humpity.......hump........what?



So it was that the Biker finally came to agree that he'd made a spectacularly bad decision, and posted Maxwell on Craigslist.

A seller quickly responded, and Maxwell and all his accouterments were gone two days later. I felt kind of dishonest taking their 200.00, truthfully, but somehow I found it within me to do so.



And you know what I did with that 200.00?
I took that 200.00 and went out and bought STUPID SHIT.

RAT SAGA PART DEAUX: Emerald Aoudad Awaken The Twisted Scheme!

I noticed the first unusually casual Norway rat on my property about five years ago while I was out gardening. What I thought was a mallard duck bumbling around in the flowers turned out to be one of the biggest Norways I've ever seen. This thing had an ass the size of a softball. And there it was, maybe three feet away from me, ambling along, making no attempt to hide. It just gave me a casual 'S'up?' kind of a glance and paid me no further mind.

The first thing that springs to mind when you've grown up around wild animals and one of them starts acting atypically is that it's probably sick, and 'sick' usually means 'rabid'.

I eased back toward the house. The rat ignored me.

For the rest of the afternoon I looked out the living room window and watched while the rat sauntered around in my flowerbeds. "Jesus Christ come look at this thing!" I'd say, while my husband continued to watch Powerblock. "No seriously! The goddamn thing is still out there! Come look at this!"
"I've seen rats," he'd reply.

Over the next couple of years we saw a few more, from a distance. Since I have no problem with distant rats I grew to accept their presence as one of the unpleasant aspects of living in a rural area, like Avon products, fundamentalists, and widespread methamphetamine abuse.

Then we had our next close encounter. You can read about that here. G'head. I'll wait.

As the next couple of years went by I began to see more wildlife around the place, rats included... but since they weren't parking their Winnebagos on my lawn or trying to sell me Amway I shrugged it off. Until the morning I stepped out onto the front porch last summer and a huge goddamn Norway rat came trotting up the steps toward me.

No shit! Just heard the door opening and came merrily right on up the steps like it was going to come in the house! Like a dog!

I took a threatening step towards it, clapped my hands and yelled 'Shoo! Go home! Go home now!' I flapped my hands at it and stomped my feet a couple of times too.

It stopped short and looked up at me, totally perplexed. Just flummoxed.

When it finally dawned on me that I was standing out on my front step attempting to interact with a feral garbage rat as though it were a stray poodle, I booked ass into the house and slammed the door.

I looked out the window a couple of seconds later.

It was on the porch.

Over the next couple of weeks I watched as several more rats came roaming through the yard. Now, not to be boastful, but up until then I'd had one of the showplace gardens in my town. Nothing takes the bloom off that 'showplace garden' image faster than a couple of huge rats wandering around. Not even cement deer. Not even Canadians.

These were some chill rats, too. Nothing phased them; not pedestrians, not passing cars, nothing. They were out there basking in the sun, washing their little ratty faces and licking their little ratty asses! Seriously! And some of these newer rats were not doing real well. They had some kind of scabby rat disease and their hair was missing in big patches. So not only did I have rude rats; no, that wasn't bad enough! I had rude diseased crack addict rats with eczema out in my front yard performing acts of intimate personal hygiene!
No!
This was not acceptable!
No way in hell was this acceptable!

You want to know what was really unacceptable, though? When my husband, the Yummy Biker, walked into the mud room a few days later to find a huge goddamn disgusting filthy vermin covered rat calmly eating out of the dog* bowl.

YES.


A wild Norway fucking rat had come into my house THROUGH THE DOG FLAP, and was EATING THE DOGS FOOD.

Now, I was outside when this happened and had no idea what was going on. I remember a huge shout going up and then a lot of loud crashing and banging and yelling. I decided my presence was not required.

Apparently upon seeing the rat, my husband grabbed a broom and began randomly flailing away at the rat there in the small entryway. The rat responded by leaping at the broom and hanging onto the end of it, which caused the Biker to whip it around in the air, kind of like rat lacrosse, which activity finally flung the rat up into the air and behind the dryer. The Biker jumped right up onto the dryer after it, and with the broom now held like a javelin began stabbing at the rat, which was jammed back there down in the small space between the dryer and the wall. All this did was dent the dryer and chase the rat beneath the nearby washing machine. My husband leaned over, yanked the washer out from the wall, and continued to try and skewer the rat with the bristle end of the broom, something he reports wasn't getting him much of anyplace fast, although it seemed to annoy the rat, which ran out into the kitchen. Where it went after that he didn't know. It disappeared. So he ran into the bedroom, grabbed a rifle and systematically began tearing the entire house apart. Broom in one hand, rifle in the other. He was prepared.


Thank God it was summer. We think what happened was that the rat ran straight through the house and out the front window. We never found a single trace. Still, getting to sleep that night was....difficult.

*TO BE CONTINUED!!!!!!!!!!!!*




_____________________________

*we briefly owned a dog this last summer, but he will be the subject of a future post.

Temperate Azure Chicken In Instant Rescue Caper!

If you've been visiting 'Paul' awhile you know that I've had ongoing problems with my next door neighbors.

Big sister, while usually a quiet type, occasionally goes prowling around her yard at night growling and screaming. She also has some kind of ongoing conflict with the pear tree back there, which has lead to several loud disagreements with same. Mom and Big Brother are harmless, if quiet, furtive and unwashed. Actually all of them are harmless and generally pleasant folks (unless you're a pear tree)and its not them specifically I've had the issue with; its the overflow animal problem.

At first it was just cats. Sis collected cats. White cats, when we first moved in, although as they had kittens that changed rapidly. Over the past ten or so years I've had these cats die in my compost bin, have kittens in my flower pots, barf on my front porch, climbing my trees, digging up my plants, and crapping everywhere they damn well pleased. Now, that last issue is just not normal cat behavior. I've had cats. Even the feral ones are usually cool enough to take a dump in an out-of-the-way place. These things were shitting on the hood of our pickup truck. They shit in the middle of the porch. They shit in the middle of the lawn. They built big volcanoes over their butt nuggets in the middle of the driveway. I have no idea what that was about. They shit in my potted plants, in the middle of the steps, just any damn place the urge struck. And these cats were host to some downright frightening intestinal fauna too. Huge squirming clods of it. This was not, as my grandson would say, beautiful OR propriate.

Now as time went on the neighbors' property became overgrown to the point that you could not make out the house behind all the underbrush. That was fine with me. It was also fine with the wildlife. I enjoyed the various native and migrant birds the thick brush and tall trees invited. In the summer evening three different types of bat flutter and chirp overhead, venturing out and returning in acrobatic loops to the immense Scoulers willow in their front yard. I even got a kick out of the big old boar raccoon that used to amble around in the evening, fat jiggling, in no hurry, like he owned the place.

Until he started living under my back deck.

And climbing up the lattice on the side of my house, right next to my bedroom window.

In the middle of the night.

Did you know that raccoons make noise? They do. They make lots of noises. Not just 'throwing your garbage all over the driveway' noises, or 'going through the toolbox in the garage and throwing sockets onto the floor' noises. They also make creepy yipping, growling, barking, screeching noises. At night. They have lots to say, turns out. All of it at night. Outside my bedroom window. I have no idea what its about, or why they're doing it; I didn't ask. They probably would have told me, though. I should have.

Turns out there were a lot of raccoons living over there. Lots and lots of them. Enough so that they were sending out reconnaissance squads to my place. They've blazed a permanent trail, bare of grass, across the lot and straight into my back yard...From there it goes around the garage, the shed, the raised beds, around the side of my house and right up onto my front porch. How do I know it's raccoons? I've seen them. Bold as fuck. And they leave footprints, too. They aren't big on wiping their feet. They come right up on my front porch, go right up onto the bench out there and look in my window. Oh look, the fat broad got new curtains.

Now, right from the beginning when we moved in, there were rats. Not in the house, mind; outside. Regular field rats; of course, this is farmland so you simply expect field rats. Not a big deal.

A couple of years later, the Norway rats showed up.

Well, OK, you know, Norways are a part of life. What are you going to do? Again, theres a lot of farms out this way, lots of manure ponds and grain silos and silage tips. The fact that you'd see them in broad daylight was a little worrisome; but I'm no rat expert either. I figured they came from the surrounding farms, and they'd gotten a little bold from smelling the presence of people all the time or something.

As time passed this all became so much a part of everyday life it went without notice.

Then last summer the animal population around here just exploded.

I had raccoons running around on my roof every night. I had raccoons going through my garbage, looking in my windows, barking and yipping from the top of my umbrella tree, dragging boxes around the back of our pickup truck and tracking dirty footprints all over my car. Cats everywhere, crapping in my garden, wandering up and down the sidewalks, yodelling from the top of the shed, squashed into little cat pizzas all over the road up and down the block.

And rats.

Oh yes.

...and rats.




*TO BE CONTINUED*

Eleven Blue Moles Plan A Resounding Active!!

Yesterday evening the Biker and I went to our weekly therapy session, and I found myself regaling our counsellor with the following tale (apropos of what exactly I don't recall.)

__________________________________

I had an arrangement with my parents the year I was 16. I would, without complaint, accompany my mother to every single one of the crackpot, embarrassing, bizarre, humiliating, excruciatingly awkward religious events she attended, and in return I got to continue to live in their house*. I've gone into the reasons why this arrangement was made elsewhere; the short version is that my mom wasn't going to put up with anyone who was 'possessed by an unclean spirit' using her bathroom.

That any arrangement was made at all was sheer lucky timing on my part. Shortly prior to this my mom had found Jesus, and apparently Jesus doesn't like for people to turn their daughters out in the street. Now I was grateful as all heck to Jesus for the opportunity to continue to sleep indoors, and maybe I shouldn't complain; but to tell you the truth Jesus- who was a great guy otherwise- could not manage his money for jack shit.

Fortunately for him, as long as my mom was around Jesus never had to worry about his credit rating.

The only thing about any of this that benefited me personally was that it got me out of the house, and gave me an opportunity to meet a entire sector of the American public that I never would have known existed otherwise.

One day my mom decided that we were going to go to Las Vegas and see Kathryn Kuhlman. And so it was done. The woman who saved bacon grease until it grew an afro and hoarded boxed muffin mix in case another depression suddenly hit coughed up the wherewithal for a couple of round trip airplane tickets, two event admissions and a sizable 'love gift'...and my dad drove us to the airport.

Kathryn Kuhlman's popularity is difficult to describe to anyone who isn't familiar with 'Born Again' evangelical culture. How she was able to get away with what she did for as long as she did is a testimony to the same American tendency to 'willing gullibility' as was noted by that other giant of the religious community, Aleister Crowley. Weighing in at maybe 70 lbs, standing about four foot nothing, with bad hair and a voice that alternated at random between alto and baritone, you could not call her physically compelling. Her preferred dress was white chiffon. When I saw her she'd added a cape and train, wizard sleeves and a Mary Poppins neckline, all of it edged in scallop.

As she spoke, or rather, declaimed, she would dramatically flow across the stage from left to right and back, taking large measured steps, and then suddenly STOP! ...one arm outstretched! and hold the pose while her garments hurried to catch up with her, face ablaze with fervor. Then suddenly back she'd go as though someone had released a spring, arms fully outstretched and circulating like goldfish fins, and once again STOP! Then dart to the front of the stage full tilt, and STOP! right on the very edge of disaster! The whole time croaking away about Gods heavenly loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooove for his chiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiildren, and his glooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooorious heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeealing POW-errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

This show was one well-oiled machine. She had an orchestra. She had a choir. She had soloists. She had costume changes. She also had a crack team of gimps. 'Patients' on gurneys parked around the front of the stage with 'nurses' and 'doctors' in exaggerated attendance, a large coterie of the 'differently-abled'; the whole crowd of them clearly playing roles, slicker than hell. I'm not being bitter here. It was so clearly rehearsed and had been repeated so many times that it looked as mannered as a kabuki theatre production. While whatever passed on stage took place, the folks down in the pit area on the floor ground through their accompanying routine...a nurse suddenly rushing to the side of a patient struggling to get out of their wheelchair...two doctors holding an impromptu emergency consultation while one of the gurney folks showed the first signs of consciousness in years; ushers rushing to their sides and then whispering loudly to one another 'She was blind for 14 years! She says she can see shadows!' and sending rumors up through the crowd**. All clearly cued by orchestral flourishes, key lines, and the ends of songs.

I had been under the impression that we were here to attend a revival. After a short while of watching it,though, I thought 'Oh, OK. This is like a play' and settled in to patiently wait for the whole weird-ass thing to be over.

I was right, as it turns out. This was a theatrical performance, in the same tradition as psychic surgery, the medicine show, and the carnival pitch . It even has a name. It's known as the 'straight healing service'. What Kathryn did was, she got the crowd whupped up, stuck her hand on people, they fell down, and it cost 65$ a head to see her do it.


Meantime Kathryn is healing the halt and the lame hand over fist. A long queue of people snaked down through the aisles and up onto the stage. As soon as she'd stick her hand one one person WHAMMO down they'd go like a sack of crap. The ushers would expertly catch them under the arms and hardly have them drug off before the next one hit the floor. People in the audience were standing and waving their arms in the air, speaking in tongues! Huge ovations went up when the formerly speechless uttered their first words in years! Plane crash victims with both feet sewn to their faces gave eloquent testimony! Cancer patients who'd had their entire brains removed calculated square roots! The crowds went wild!!!!!

And all of a sudden Kathryn stretched out one scrawny arm and everything HUSHED.

The whole place-silent. All eyes on her.

She swept to the very edge of the stage, faced 'A' section, stretched out one arm like a flagpole and announced "SEIG HEIL!"



















....naw, I'm fucking with you.

She stretched out one arm like a flagpole and announced "FEEL THE POWER OF GODS LOVE!"

And every single person in 'A' section went down like they'd been scythed.

EVERY SINGLE PERSON.

She suddenly darted across to stage right! Stuck out her arm toward 'C' section and shouted "FEEL THE POWER OF GODS LOVE!"

Every single person in 'C' section hit the floor.

I'm seated in 'B' section, center floor, with my mom on one side of me and her best friend on the other. We are standing up praising the Lord with our arms upraised. Everyone around us is speaking or singing in tongues, moaning, swaying, crying, laughing...

Kathryn sweeps to the center of the stage, and out goes the arm. She's pointing at us. 'B' section falls silent.

Kathryn Kuhlman shouts "FEEL THE POWER OF GODS LOVE!"



And everyone in 'B' section goes down like dominoes.
Every single person.
All of them.



Except me.


______________________________________________________


Now imagine for a moment that you're a 16 year old girl who's been told that she is literally harboring demons. I showed up at this event carrying quite a burden of guilt and shame and fear. And lest you think I had my mind closed, know that I did not, not this early on; I was all for Jesus and love and forgiveness and God. I thought that a lot of what I had already seen was sad and embarrassing, but there was enough sincerity floating around to keep me hoping that maybe I was just missing something and that eventually I'd 'get it'.

And I did. As I was standing there, all alone, literally in the middle of the auditorium, glancing around...slowly putting my arms by my side...slowly sitting down in my seat...my mom shooting me dirty glances, her best friend shooting me dirty glances, people looking away in embarrassment...I finally got it.


These people were all nuts.


___________________________________________________________________






* instead of at the Perry Center Home for Wayward Youth, where my cousin was currently being raped by the staff and her fellow inmates.


**How obvious was it? When the program was over and we were all filing out, the 'doctors' were helping stack up folding chairs.

Yellow Mouse Comeback is Dire

I am here to tell you that money most certainly does not buy happiness. It buys choices, as the saying goes, but you can have a whole pocket full of cash and a whole array of choices and still be having an absolutely suck time.

This is the first time in my life that I can say that; at least the part about money. The Playboy of the Western World (my father in law, now gone to that big bath house in the sky) left us pretty well off. Having money is definitely better than the alternative, but it made no difference in the quality of the suck factor when everything around here decided to take a massive shit.

I am a person who likes my home life stable, happy and free of drama. I work hard to keep things that way. Growing up surrounded by alcoholics, criminals and sociopaths, I swore that I would never let my family life be tainted by that kind of chaos, once it was my turn. That decision had absolutely no magic 'drama-averting' effect on my life subsequently, but it did mean that, like any other vermin, problems were hunted down and exterminated as they arose, instead of being left to fester and multiply. I loved my family, I sacrificed, I made good decisions, blah blah blah blah fucking blah.

I don't know if it's just American culture or just me or what, but once you have achieved the home and family thing, the societal models kind of peter out. So I assumed,like a doofus, that things must pretty much just peter out on the inter-familial stress front since there was apparently nothing left to report. I figured the kids moved out, you got wrinkly, you went to Vegas a lot, then had a hip replacement and eventually died.

Ahem.

There are times over the past year that I wished I'd never made the decision to have a family. That's a new one for me. I went into the endeavor thinking that if I did everything 'right' that things would, you know, turn out right. Which in retrospect was astonishingly naive of me. Had I been raising feeder mice perhaps that expectation might have proven closer to the mark; feeder mice don't cause a lot of drama and either way you end up feeding them to anacondas. During the course of this past year, there were people in my life that I would have liked to have fed to anacondas. I would be surrounded by obese anacondas right now. Obese, non-dramatic anacondas.

Half the problem is me. I might be pushing 50 hard but the rotten kid who used to vandalize things at random and get into fights is still very much alive and well here. I should be mature enough by now to be able to keep my shit together; to be able to pull back, to separate from things that are no longer under my control. Am I? I am not. I want to leap onto things that are no longer under my control and rend them into bleeding shreds, kind of like what happens to stray teenagers out for a casual walk through the woods around Forks, Washington on a moonless night, only everyone involved would be wearing a shirt. The only difference between me now and then is that back then I used to get off on being enraged. Now it just makes me feel like shit.

So are we in counselling? You bet your little red wagon. This rotten kid does not give up. Ever. Resistance is fucking FUTILE.

Red Gopher Has Spasmodic Breathing Sound Or Discoteque!

RECIPES!!!

The Hebrew National brand hot dog is the worlds' best hot dog. Best quality, best spices, best flavor, period. I bought a pack of these on sale recently, never tried them before, and I was just totally impressed. I mean, yeah, its just tube steak, I know. But it's everything a hot dog is supposed to be and none of the things you run into too often...those gasoline flavored, foamy, splurty, tallowy things coated with elephant ass grease or whatever that weird crap is. I prize that lack of elephant ass grease in particular because its one of those things that if you don't develop a taste for it in youth you're probably never going to and I never did. Hebrew National hot dogs are 100% free of elephant ass grease. They also don't have that weird clear jello crap all over them like canned ham, or visible tattoos. All plusses, in my book.

Go buy some Hebrew National hot dogs and make awesome

CHILI DOGS

1 eight-oz can of commercial beef chili, dumped into a pan and hit with a hand mixer until it's sort of slushy. What you want to do is break everything down into uniform chunks, not make a liquid.

1/3 cup minced white onion
1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
2 tablespoons lime juice

Stir together and place over medium low heat.
Dump six whole hot dogs into the pan and dunk them under the sauce. Let this heat for about 1/2 an hour, then serve in nice sturdy sandwich rolls with some sauce spooned inside. Don't use regular hot dog buns because they'll melt.
________________________________________

This fall I had my usual overflow crop of tomatoes (because I rule,) and in addition to those my Bermuda onions went batshit and were rolling all over the place. Right at the same time there was a bumper crop of peppers coming in from Canada...multicolored bells, sweets, hots, Anaheim's, jalpenos, anchos, Hungarians, everything you can imagine. I bought those by the huge bagfull. Once my freezer was full I still had seven metric shit-tons of produce left, and so I switched on my dehydrator, dug out my mandoline slicer and made

CREOLE SPICE POWDER
This is not rocket science.

You need
a good big dehydrator...
...this is an 'Excalibur' brand and its a good one. Don't waste your money on one of those round ones; the only thing they're good for is drying that bud you grew in your bathroom.



a mandoline slicer...
...I wish I had one this nice; if you google/image the phrase 'mandoline slicer' you'll see a crappy one made out of white plastic which is the one I have. Anywho, use the thinnest slice adjustment on it.


a grindey thing....
...truthfully about the only thing a blade bean grinder is really good for; what you want is a BURR style grinder for coffee beans. So HA on you if you have one of these because it sucks and is stupid and smells.



and the ability to ignore the smell of tomatoes, peppers and onions for two days at a time.
METHODE:
1. Slice vegetables as thinly as possible
2.Dehydrate (as in: hit the 'on' button of the dehydrator and then go sculpt the Space Needle out of lard like you've been wanting to do)
3. Pulverize

...OK fine.
The tomatoes will take the longest. The first day, slice your tomatoes very, very thin and dehydrate them until they shatter. Now what I mean here is not merely crispy, I mean they should shatter like a dry leaf. The tomatoes will take about 24 hours. Start them on high, and despite what the instructions on the dehydrator says, turn the trays 180 every hour. Take them out about midway through, pry them off the grids and turn them over. After about three hours of this, or when they are withered and leathery and no longer drippy at all, turn down the heat to low and let them go all night.

The next day, slice up the onions and peppers-once again, very very thinly. Knock the sliced onions into rings, then load the dehydrator. Start everything on high for the first hour, turn them 180, and then then turn down the heat to medium and let them go until they shatter, which should take all afternoon. (The reason I say to do the onions and peppers together is, that while doing them alone would work just fine, a whole load of onions by themselves in the dehydrator going all day long gets pretty stinkass after awhile. Onions and peppers together just smells a lot better.)

Now you can pulverize them. Go ahead and use a mortar and pestle. *snork* Build up those biceps. Go ahead. It'll work. You'll be doing it for a week, but it WILL work.

You can use a regular blender as long as you run very small batches at a time, just a few chips.

A food processor will zip right through them, but it won't powder them as finely as a blender will (in other words, you'll get granules, not talc.)

A blade coffee mill will do the job, but make sure you thoroughly wipe out the mill after you use it for this.

Once pulverized, combine them all together in a jar with a tight lid and shake it up.

I have no interest whatsoever what kind of combinations or ratios or varieties you decide to use because its none of my business. Obviously if you use hot peppers its going to be spicy, and if you use vidalia onions its going to be sweet; just as if you were to use a parakeet it would be parakeety. In addition you could put some salt in there; maybe a little lemon pepper or some chili-lime spice. I mean, go nuts. Cumin, oregano, bay, powdered garlic, plain black pepper, sassafras, achiote, do what you feel.

Dump it on some fish or eggs, or in soup, or on your mother.
________________________________

I finally beat the crows to my hazelnuts and took a nice little harvest off my tree for the first time this year! And by 'I' I mean 'my daughter and grandson' because I didn't feel like grovelling around in the grass at the time, so I threw a couple of bowls in their direction, found some shade and cracked a beer.

The only problem with hazelnuts is that they're kind of process-intensive and fiddly. I cannot hull hazelnuts without fragging my entire surroundings in a 9 foot radius. Then I go all gifted and talented on they ass and put the meats into the shell pile and vice versa, or they get stuck in the shell and then I wham them with a hammer to get the shell off and they turn into moosh, or I hit them 67 times and chase them all over hells half acre and they turn out to be empty and it's just sad.

Once you have your small little handful of nutmeats and have disposed of the seven garbage bags of hulls that once held them, you have to toast them and skin them before you can use them to cook with. This means spreading the meats out on a metal tray in the oven and baking them on moderate until they smell toasty, and then dumping them into a big towel, bundling it up and smacking the bundle against the wall which looks both intelligent and sane, while random nutmeats go bouncing around your kitchen and brown flitters fly everywhere.
After all this drudgery you deserve a treat. Make some

HAZELNUT DIP
In a bain marie, melt one cake of broken-up Abuelita style Mexican chocolate, 1/2 cup fondant sugar, a couple of tablespoons of Hershey's special dark unsweetened cocoa, some heavy cream to keep things fluid, six ounces of white chocolate chips, and at least two cups of roughly chopped, toasted hazelnuts. Just keep stirring, tasting and dipping. Add cream until you have what you consider a nice dip consistency. Once everything is melted and you're satisfied with it, put it in a bowl and serve it with an insouciant air and some biscotti.

Quaint Vignettes From My Charming Rural Idyll

The best books of the past year:

SMILLAS SENSE OF SNOW
No superlatives are adequate. Stop reading this and run out and get Ol' Smilla RIGHT NOW. The writing kicks ass, the story is riveting and the main character is the only woman in recent fiction that I could see myself being able to talk to for longer than five minutes. Except for the lady in....

THE #1 LADIES DETECTIVE AGENCY
Oh, it starts out simple and charming. It is most assuredly NOT simple and charming. And it most assuredly is not merely a story about a woman who decides to be a detective. This one is worth whatever you have to pay for it, folks. As is...

THE ENGLISH PATIENT
It took me a long time to pick this up, and I was so glad I did. There are passages in this book that are so lucid that you experience them as visual memory. No shit. The only other author I've read that was able to elicit a scene like that was Kipling. Don't go into this expecting a story. It's many stories, and some of them are horrible and vast tangled around stories simple as dirt. How they even thought they could make a movie out of this one plumb eludes me.

I gotta go but I'll be back later this evening...I have to go to the dentist.

YAY.
___________________________________________

The dentist actually was not bad. I had to get a filling, which only took half an hour. Yeah, no kidding! I tell you what, its not like back in the '60's when you'd come out of the office after two hours, picking crap out of your hair and off the front of your shirt and tasting burnt enamel.
Since I have not been in to see the dentist since these amazing strides were made in the art, I was expecting SS Field Marshal Fred Flintstone wielding a stone hammer and a bird with a pointy beak like I'm used to; thus I was baked off my tits on Valium.
Half an hour later I'm completely through the procedure and just beginning to peak back out in the car. Fortunately I had enlisted my daughter to do the driving, and while she nattered on about boob jobs and public transportation I smiled and nodded and enjoyed the chemicals.
_____________________________________________

I did something this year that I haven't done since I was a little kid, which was to go hit the post-Christmas sales. I came out of the experience having learned two things: you can make out like a BANDIT, and that I will never set foot in the Bon Marche again. You want to talk about a nasty, sniffy, shitty bunch of entitled women. Meaning the clientele, of course; not the longsuffering and generally excellent staff. They were lovely and attentive, which I can only attribute to some kind of selective Bon Marche clerk breeding program in the Midwest because if I worked there I'd be tasing some bitches in the throat. I had forgotten how utterly putrid a certain class of woman can be. Shopping for a scarf in the accessories department of the Bon brought it all cascading back. Oh the eye-rolling! The sneering! The curled lips and the exasperated sighs! Nasty Clinique-marinated matrons thrusting their diamond studded chicken claws past your face to finger the cashmere with the mindless avidity of zombies eating a baby, botoxed foreheads glinting in the fluorescent light! Skeletal high school girls, bad Ferragamo knock-off bags like buckle encrusted footballs tucked in each ones armpit, huffing their impatience with having to stand and wait to use their credit cards! Nobody meeting anybody elses gaze, grim, pissy and joyless...it was a less than delightful shopping experience. And all to buy a 6 foot length of yarn for 93 goddamn dollars? I walked my ass down to Target and found the same scarf for 23 bucks. Fuck the Bon.
__________________________________

Just for the record: I now own NINE different Jimi Hendrix t-shirts!
____________________________________

One more good book for the road:
STONE BUTCH BLUES
Oh man. This one was so intense I had to put it down a lot and just think about it all. I knew these women-not literally, of course- but I had no idea. NO FUCKING IDEA WHATSOEVER. This is our history. Read it. Be ready to feel some shit. This woman;s struggle to simply make a living and live out each day in peace and dignity makes Henri Charriere's efforts to escape the French prison islands look like the Jungle ride at Disneyland.

Have a nice holiday

And remember...no matter what you're serving...



...one flying baby can spoil an entire meal.

Have a wonderful holiday!

Pull Up Your Goddamn Pants You Fucking Moron: more butt humor for the masses

I remember back when the whole 'men wearing baggy pants' look came on board. It made me sad. All that fine denim-clad s-curved hine walking around for years was suddenly hidden from view inside over-sized board shorts*. It didn't seem fair. But after some reflection, I had to admit that not all men were meant to wear pants that fit correctly. If there's one thing I do NOT miss about the late 70's (aside from 'everything') it's men with big sloppy flubba-butts wearing shrink wrap pants. Man that was just nasty. NASTY!

Still, here's the deal: they were wearing pants. There was fabric between them and me. Not a lot, but its psychological distance we're talking about here as much as it is actual dernier, OK? You knew that stuff was CONTAINED. It wasn't going to suddenly break loose and run around going WOOWOOWOOWOOWOO like the Three Stooges.

Most importantly, you could rest assured** that you wouldn't ever accidentally have to SEE ASS.

And now this-and by 'this' I mean 'guys who wear their pants below their whole entire butt'. Not saggin'. I am not talking about saggin'. I mean the whole butt is hanging out of the back of the pants. The ENTIRE BUTT. HANGING OUT. ALL OF IT.

I don't know what this look is supposed to be conveying or who it's supposed to be emulating. All juggalo guys wear their pants this way; which is of course as one naturally expects from the developmentally disabled.

can you pick out which one... a. is only 14 years younger than his mother b. grew up in a single wide c. changed his name legally to 'Violent Hatchetman'?


But wearing your pants as though you've just filled them with shit isn't limited to the halt and the lame. Sometimes you see hip-hop looking guys rocking this look, sometimes meth-heads, dorkboys, rednecks... it just doesn't seem to matter.

For example, when I was in downtown Silverton last summer I saw this hipster kid coming down the street; black eyeliner, Hitler hair and all.
He was wearing a belt.
Cinched up tight.
BELOW HIS ASS.
He could not have pulled his pants up by tugging on the waistband in other words; he wasn't sagging. No, not in the least was he sagging. Them things were practically tattooed on. No, homeslice was doing this DELIBERATELY. Now even though I realized I was in downtown Silverton, smack dab inn the middle of the couture universe, I'm still trying and failing to cope with the sight of this Christmas tree farmers' slutty little 17 year old son taking tiny duckie steps down the sidewalk with his ENTIRE ASS HANGING OUT OF HIS PANTS.


I had no problem with the view as he came toward me. He was cute. Gave me a 'sup?' little nod, even. Hell, once he got close enough you could make out some dick-cleavage. I am all for dick cleavage. I am a huge fan of dick cleavage. But once he passed by I turned around to scope the back pasture and there was, just...... you know.

I cannot begin to describe what a complete buzzkill it was.

Guys, its stupid looking. And it's not even about the ass. It's

-well, actually most of the time, it IS about the ass. Like women and whale tails, it always seems to be the men whose butt you never, never want to imagine seeing who wear their pants like this. Still, you have to take into account the big picture. The whole enchilada. It's about the ass AND the underpants. Your hind end might be smokin hot; I'll never know. I won't care either. You know why? Because you're wearing guy's underpants over it.


Men need to not bother wearing underpants. Mens underpants are bad. They are pointless and bunchy and ugly. I don't even know why men wear underpants. You might think they're keeping your junk corralled; I say save your cash because thats already a lost cause, bucko. Brand new, mens underpants are at best depressing and vaguely medical looking. Once you run them through the wash a couple of times you lose all that sexy. You end up with a sexy which is a kind of 'are these my grandpas?' sexy. This is not a good sexy to have.

Do we see what I'm getting at here? Baggy wore the fuck out skivvies are what I'm getting at here. Look through your underpants drawer, guys. Do they really convey anything close to a 'come and get it' vibe? No they do not. They convey a 'my mom shops at Sears' vibe. Combine that with a less than optimum caboose and pants that hang down around mid-thigh and make you walk like you have a dozen bagels packed up your ass and what one is left with is the exact opposite of 'Let me enthusiastically sire many healthy children upon you'.

Now maybe if you're a 13 year old girl this kind of 'Woo! My butt is HANGING OUT!' retardation seems all daring and bad and therefore terribly alluring...the problem being that what you've just accomplished is to impress 13 year old girl. I mean, I once WAS a 13 year old girl. That's just....no. Guys, seriously. No matter how gross your ass is or nasty your underpants are, you can and should be aiming a LOT higher than that.


__________________

*right, Zack? Uh huh.

**you see what I did there? huh?

*** See! I did it again! did you see? did you get that?

Green Marmot Vexed By An Hundred Sandwich

One of the most interesting things you will ever go through is a colonoscopy, although this is hearsay since I went through mine passed out cold. From what I am told, I woke up midway through the procedure (I have no conscious memory of this whatsoever) facing the monitor where the drama of my lower intestinal tract was showing and loudly exclaimed 'Is that me? Oh wow! That is so cool!' and then fell back asleep. Now I wish I'd been awake enough to remember just what it is I saw that was so interesting. It could have been Amelia Earhart. I'll never know.

As it turns out I have four diverticules. A diverticule is a pocket-like rupture in the tissue of the intestinal lining.

OK fine. You know those big innertubes you use for river rafting, and how they'll get a weak place in the rubber and get this big weird bulgy part that bloops out? That's a diverticule. Or it would be if it were a colon.  So what we should all take away from that analogy* is not to ever use your colon as a form of alternative watercraft.  Of course if you go 'tubing you should bring your colon along; your colon wants to have fun too, but I mean just use the innertube for rafting because that's what it's for. If in the interim you should have cause to use your colon, then for the love of Pete go ashore. It would be gross if you just stayed there floating down the river in your innertube grunting out a dump. Instead, do like we did back when I was a kid in Oregon:  crap in the front seat of someones' car. (Some moron always forgets and leaves their window rolled down.)  It's a hell of a lot more convenient than duckwalking up and down the bank all bent over looking for a restroom since most rivers don't have them. The river will still be there when you get back.

I am given to understand that the major cause of diverticules is too much red meat in the diet, which simply doesn't apply in my case at all. Now as a child of the 60's and 70's of course I ate more than my share of cow, but in my case it had been pressure cooked for three hours beforehand. The result was best described as slippery. I don't see how it could have massed up enough to blow out the colon of a vole, let alone a person. Still, the fact remains. And there's photographic proof.

Oh yes!

I was offered copies of these Polaroids, in fact. Now honest to snot, what the hell would you do with something like that? Send them out as Christmas cards? Which now that I come to think about it I wish I had. They were kind of Christmassy. You know, all red and shiny and kind of....red, and stuff.

Insides are really red, too. I mean, REALLY RED. I figured they would be pale pink. You remember those medical books with the layered transparencies and how the upper intestinal tract was pink and the lower was a tasteful sort of muted puce? Those are wrong. It's red.

When you get a colonoscopy the first thing they do after they pump you full of anaesthetic and you say a bunch of stupid shit that you think is really funny but probably isn't and then pass out, is they take an air hose and pump a couple of blasts of air up there to inflate things. I was kind of appalled at how much inflation they can get by doing that. Jesus CHRIST. Take it from me, if they were feeling frisky they could pack a lot of stuff up there and you'd never have a clue as long as it was stuff like old rubber gloves or margarine. You could probably walk around all damn day just humming a lil' tune and never notice a thing until you took a crap, and then you'd probably scream.

Anyway, once that's done they take that hose out and then stick another different hose up there that has a fiber optic camera in it. It has a little headlight on it too; and what it lights up is shore nuff red, like I've been saying. Shiny, too. And there's all these little red spidery veins all over the place. I was expecting something that looked like raw chitlins. In reality it looks nothing whatsoever like raw chitlins. That didn't bother me as much as you might think it would.

Before all this takes place though you have to drink this liquid laxative called citrate of Manitoba for two days. Man does this stuff clean you out. Much to my surprise it tasted pretty good. Kind of like Squirt soda, appropriately enough. Basically, you should plan on just taking your pants off altogether and sitting on the toilet for that entire couple of days while this stuff does its job since as soon as it goes in, it comes RIGHT OUT. At VELOCITY. And it ain't over 'till the fat lady sings...or in this case, 'till the fat lady shits clear for at least an hour. And the fat lady did. Hell, the fat lady about fucking took the shine off the enamel.

Besides diverticules I had a couple of polyps. This pleased a certain vile, Lovecraftian part of my psyche: Ewwwww polyyyyyypsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

It sounds like something with tentacles and slime that barfs up corrosive acid like those gross deep sea fish that glow in the dark and sneak around at night and lick your steering wheel and go 'wghnnnnn' because they're mutated.  And if you have to have something potentially life-threatening growing in your butt it might as well be something with a cool disgusting name, like 'polyps' instead of something with a lame boring name, like 'toaster'. Think how humiliating it would be to read 'Cause of death attributed to ass toasters' on your death certificate.

Intestinal polyps supposedly can turn into colon cancer. I have no idea how this happens or why. If it were an infestation of things with tentacles and slime that barfs up corrosive acid you could appease them with blood sacrifices, but it's not, which is why they have to inflate your butt and stick a camera up it. Life is a mystery. In any event they stuck ANOTHER thing up there that had an electrified cautery thing and lassoed the polyps and sent a charge through and the polyps went 'PFFFT'. I can't say I was displeased at all. When you consider the fact that this completely obviates the need at some future date to remove several yards of colon, sew your anus shut, and cut a hole in your side so you can shit in a bag, you got to figure you don't have a whole lot to bitch about. The disgusting practical joke potential is, of course, astronomical; but I'll shit in that bag when I come to it.

This procedure takes about an hour, all told. Now that you are finished, when you wake up  you'll know three things immediately:
1.You are completely empty because not having eaten anything for 24 hours will do that to a person.
2. But now, thanks to modern medical science and a small compressor, all that unused storage space now contains the cubic air mass of a military weather balloon and it smells like vaporized ass growths; therefore
3. You are now primed to cut the fart of a lifetime.

And they encourage this!  The nurse who comes in to make sure you aren't dead actually tells you to try as hard as you can to rip ass!  Oh yes! And as soon as you do...for a good two minutes, like five draft horses, a trumpeting bull elephant, plus another elephant that's dead and all bloated up like how they get but then someone threw a rock at it so now it's deflating out this jet of green dead elephant fumes...omg, you will be SO PROUD.  Everybody in the whole building will now know exactly what kind of a procedure you just had, too.  The human body is a miraculous thing, kids.

Quaint Vignettes From My Charming Rural Idyll

I remember my ex-husband the way he looked when last I saw him 23 or so years ago: a sweet little catamite angel, pretty as an elf. Naturally platinum blond, with sculpted lips, bone structure forever, chocolate brown eyes, slim, athletic and stylish (and trying to choke me out and kick my legs out from underneath me while I held our infant daughter in my arms. Ahem.)

Time, as they say, wounds all heels. I finally saw a picture of him taken about a year or so ago.

The guy looks exactly like a really mean hard boiled egg.

I could not POSSIBLY be more delighted!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
_______________________________________________________

The swine and their so-called flu which has the brain of a duck you know have been defeated and I once again reign supreme, striding unseen and foul through the waste places of the earth. I thought it was gonna kill me. I can see why this shit is taking lives-even with good nutrition and timely medical care I was left feeling like I'd had a giant horrible leech sucking my will to live. The only other time I was left feeling this completely beat up and exhausted was after I'd given birth. It scared me badly.

From what I read swine flu heads straight for the lungs and creates all kinds of havoc there. I am here to testify to that fact, chillun. I went straight from it to bronchitis and pneumonia without stopping at GO. I could not walk across the room. I felt like-no exaggeration-I was being shot in multiple places all over my torso and upper legs with an industrial pin nailer every time I coughed (yeah I know I already said this in my last post but it bears repeating. It HURT.). All I can say is thank God I finished my Christmas shopping early because one trip to the seething dish of agar and pestilence called the ladies room at WalMart would have flat killed me. Just touching the latch on the stall door. BOOM. Dead. On the floor.

My advice to you is: don't get swine flu. And if someone offers you some swine flu, like say at a party or on the elevator or something, just say no.

____________________________________________________

This past summer the Yummy Biker decided to take a mental health holiday from work. The Playboy of the Western World was kind enough to leave us more than enough wherewithal (which is French for 'massive cash') to take a few months off and enjoy life. We did a little recreational spending, travelled around, took a few road trips on the Victory, and hung out with degenerates. It was awesome!

Whats not so awesome, at least as far as my ego is concerned, is that suddenly the Biker has blossomed into a world class chef.

Here's the deal: I am the queen of cuisine around here. ME.

When I first met this man he was doing lame bachelor white trash things like eating dehydrated mashed potatoes and putting brown sugar into marinara. Meanwhile its been me who cranked out the serious chow and garnered all the applause and had to pretend to be all humble and shit. Sure, I'd let him mess around and make a few side dishes and stuff or do simple shit like roasts. I even let him keep his gimpy kitchen tools in my kitchen; it made him happy. And its not like he didn't have native talent; once I'd introduced him to the concept of respect for ingredients (and hidden the brown sugar) he demonstrated an amazing gift for flavor combinations and textures, better by far than mine. Still, could he make bread? Deep fry? Knock out a hollandaise, or put together a pate brisee or make a comfit or do any of that fancy technique stuff? No way.

Not then.

Here I thought he was laying on the couch all mokin da doink and reading American Iron. I was wrong. What he was actually doing was laying on the couch mokin da doink and watching Food Network and taking notes.

No kidding. I've found notes.

I'd be outside working in the garden, feeding stray cats into the chipper and meanwhile his ass was in the kitchen making fucking tapanade. I come in and he's all like "Oh here," and hands me some dish of amazing miraculous amazingness. "I made dinner."

I put on ten pounds in three months.

I has it

No I did not get a flu shot. Yes I know I'm in the high-risk demographic because I'm an asthmatic. Paradoxically, that is exactly the reason that I can't get a flu shot. Why? BECAUSE IT ALWAYS GIVES ME THE FUCKING FLU.

This is by far the most PAINFUL flu, in terms of general body aches, I've ever had. It started out, weirdly enough, as a horrific painful burning backache and then suddenly jumped up into my lungs. Whenever I cough it feels like I'm being shot with a pin nailer in multiple places on my chest, back, face and legs, and let me hasten to assure you that is NO EXAGGERATION. I've been coughing so hard that I've thrown up. My lungs have filled with a substance that closely resembles semi-hardened carpenters glue, and there's been times that I thought my air passages were going to stick together and stay that way. Bad news, kids.

The good news is, if you can get ahold of some amoxycillin and a bottle of Cheretussin (codeine and guaifenesin syrup), your shit is set. Run a line of the antibiotic, knock back a half a shot of the syrup and stay hydrated. Stay warm. Watch some Food Network. It'll fix you right up.

Quaint vignettes from my charming rural idyll

THE CANADIAN APOCALYPSE CAPTURED IN DIGITAL IMAGES THAT YOU HAVE TO CLICK ON TO SEE PROPERLY


...holy SHITBALLS

This was taken as I stood directly before a manifestation of God's anger; an ANGRY SABLE CLOUDAL PROW OF ELECTRICAL DESTRUCTION WITH ALL THUNDER AND LIGHTENING GOING SMACK! BAM! FIRE! AND ALL HUGE SMOKING CRATERS OF VITRIFIED FORMER GRADE SCHOOL AND PARTS OF BURNED UP KIDS FLYING ALL OVER AND LEXUS DEALERSHIPS WITH DEATH, AND FLAMES. This is looking WWN toward where MJ used to live before God destroyed it. I mean, just look at this! God is just stomping the crap out of Canada.


...just freaking pitiful

Note how you can clearly see the slashing streaks of Gods' precipitational judgement hammering down upon the teeming, apostate humanity which climb around all over British Columbia, commiting sins, failing to wipe properly and generally messing it up. Meanwhile....



As you can see, God is sparing America. This is because our stuff is the coolest plus we have FREEDOM.

How much clearer does it have to be? God's even following the federally designated boundary between the USA (yay) and the godless cheeser hordes (boo)!
See? Right on the other side of that line of trees is the Canadian Border. And Canada is GONE. It is NO MORE. It's been WIPED OFF THE MAP, BABY. This is what happens when you piss off God. God will flat TAKE YOU OUT.



Here you can see the pulverized pieces of former Canada that have fallen all over my lawn, which I just overseeded a couple of months ago. This happened in three minutes. It's still happening in the picture, which is why its kind of blurry. See, though, this is pretty typical; Canada pisses off God and then I get stuck with a bunch of burnt-up Celine Dion chunks trashing up my yard.

Here we are looking SWW: Lynden is looking good.



...which it continued to do for another two minutes, when this happened:



OK now wait.

OK now wait. Where is Lynden?
OH CRAP LYNDEN IS GONE.
...well wait though. OK, I can live with that. Seriously, Lynden is kind of annoying. I'll just shop in Bellingham and




...now wait. What the fuck.

CANADA HAS REAPPEARED.

...well SHIT.

*scraps plans to rule a post-apocalyptic Canadian wasteland dressed in motocross gear and a loincloth riding around in a dunebuggy firing a machine gun and oppressing people*

_____________________________________________________________


Heres another couple of pictures I took just this morning:



Just another sunny gorgeous morning here in Sumas. Meanwhile, up on Dead Drug Dealer Mountain, a blanket of cloud hides the summit from view...



...then moves away, leaving behind a blanket of light snow five minutes later. This is how quickly things happen and how localized the weather phenomena are here. Lets all give my million dollar view a big hand, shall we? Isn't it excellent?

BICYCLISTS SUCK BALLS

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