please help me.

It has been a Carnival of Pestilence here at Rancho FirstNations. Bacteria roam freely, breeding in uncontrolled wads. Virii are forming herds of brackish evil. The trail of pain is written in effluvia, phlegm and befouled towelling.
Yes, I am sick again, yes, I have bronchitis again; or rather, I still have bronchitis, and it is resisting all antibiotics. Next week I will be rippin down the Cephalexin, most likely, and that means I'll be blogging between frantic sprints to the toilet and frantic trips to the quickiemart to buy Ritz Crackers to forestall frantic trips to the toilet. Because Cephalexin and my lower intestinal tract are not the best of friends, friends.
Meanwhile....
Yesterday I juggled Germans.
In this corner at upwards of seventy the Playboy of the Western World, his walker and his overly complicated, day-long series of nuclear cardiac assesments!
...And in this corner, weighing in at none of your business, The Yummy Biker and his amazing Blooping Bellybutton! Bloop, purple! Bloop, not purple! Bloop, outie! Lookit! Bloop, innie! Are you looking? Look!
Both of them were scheduled for their procedures
ON THE SAME GODDAMN DAY.
And I was barely able to walk without pausing to huff and blow and drool and pant and watch the pretty fireworks go off around the sides of my field of vision and try not to pass out.
YAY!
Guess who had to drive?
First up, the Playboy. We pull up in front of his residence and there's a fire engine and an ambulance out front and a gurney in the lobby, which was full of interested wrinkly observers. No, it wasn't the Playboy's turn, but I didn't know that before I took a sprint into the place and almost passed out in front of the receptionists desk and rolled down the stairs. It was like a goddamn wedding reception and how we managed to get the Playboy out of there I'll never know...A tiny little old lady with blue lips was the star of the show and she was doing the Rose Festival float wave as they loaded her onto the gurney, everyone was chatting and re-establishing old acquaintance with the firemen and the emt's, people from different floors and dinner schedules who hadn't seen each other for a few hours were catching up, and the Playboy in the middle of it all announcing to everyone at random 'I have to get a Nuclear Assesment!' and receiving the admiring congratulations of everyone in earshot.' Wow! I've never heard of that before! A nuclear assessment! '
We bundled him into our tiny car, folded the walker into the tiny trunk, bungeed it shut and headed off to the lab, which was running late. OF COURSE.
Left him there with some magazines.
Took the Biker to his appointment...oh no, wait, I mean, the Biker DROVE and I PASSENGED BECAUSE AS LONG AS THERE IS A BREATH OF LIFE IN THE MAN HE HAS TO DRIVE. I AM INCAPABLE OF DRIVING AT AN ACCEPTABLE LEVEL OF SKILL TO SUIT HIM. Of course you have to realize that JUNIOR MOTHERFUCKING JOHNSON , MARIO ANDRETTI, AND SHIRLEY 'CHA CHA' MULDOWNEY WOULD BE INCAPABLE OF DRIVING AT THIS LEVEL OF SKILL.
We got there and made arrangements to meet at noon, assuming (naiively) that since his procedure was scheduled for five minutes hence, that it would be over and he'd be all straightened up from the anaesthetic.
I was NOT looking forward to this part of our program. The man reacts very badly indeed to general and becomes combative and loud. That kind of behavior from a sober person his size is frightening, but coming from a disoriented man who is both incoherent and unable to walk a straight line who I am married to i's hilarious, because I am kind of a bitch like that. I mean fall on the floor hysterical, too...but god help you if you laugh. Because THAT, he'll remember. He won't remember asking you at the top of his lungs to 'Ma fa gub wha voobuh nuh gub" in the lobby and he won't remember trying to enter the car by the drivers side door and then denying loudly and publically and repeatedly and semicoherently that he had any thought whatsoever about driving as he attempts to sidle past you and sit behind the wheel... oh, but he will remember that when he tried to put a chew in, and he missed and poked himself in the side of the face, you laughed. Yes. That, he will remember, and you'll never hear the end of how you ridiculed him while he was helpless.
Marry a German. Do it now. I'll wait.
Drive back across town to the Playboy, who is finished with his first procedure. Since he hasn't eaten since 6pm the previous day we go out for lunch at the olde englishe halfe timberede lesbian bar. Outside, we were greeted by a wino who was scavenging cigarette butts off the pavement. He followed us inside and began loudly trying to bum a pancake off the bartender. ( Hey! I want a pancake! How mush I got fo a pancake! Gimme one! Gib me a pancake!) While the company was iffy, the food and service remained excellent and we had fun people watching and cracking each other up with outrageous observations.
Then back we go to the same clinic for his second procedure, which is running late, of course. We kill time reading magazines and criticising all the recipes.
Then I have to leave him cooling his heels while I go back to get my Biker out of pawn.
It is noon.
The Biker has only JUST GONE IN FOR HIS PROCEDURE.
Please come back in 45 minutes, he'll be all done by then, I am assured. Oh, he'll be completely out of the anaesthesia too, I am promised.
Yeah. Right. Ok.
Back across town to get the playboy.
The Playboy has ONLY JUST GONE IN FOR HIS PROCEDURE. Come back in an hour. he should be done by then.
Back across town to the Biker.
By now I am nervous as a stripper in a room full of lacrosse players. I am expecting to have to drag him out of the office with him three sheets to the wind, trying to steal all the candies off the receptionists desk and slurring 'Wheres my chew? Go get me some chew! I forgot my chew! They took my chew! Go look for my....' you get the picture.
I go back.
He's done.
You want to come on back and we'll give you all his post-op instructions?
No.
They make me.
And he's fine.
Apparently once they FINALLY got around to making the 1/2 inch incision and taking the three tiny little stitches, they only used a twilight anaesthetic and lots of local. He's lucid. He is ambulatory.
And he wants to drive.
I do not let him drive.
He wants to eat. In a restaurant.
I make him sit in the passengers seat and watch me order him a small shake from a drive-thru. All the while he is clutching the grabhandle as though AT ANY MOMENT I will floor the gas and drive off uncontrollably into oncoming traffic and hit a fuel tanker and explode and roll in a ball of flames into a grade school full of crippled orphans and DIEDIEDIEDIEDIE... yeah. By the time we are partway down the road the fabric around this handle is beginning to tear from him grabbing it like a spazmodeus every time I slow down for a corner.
Grab the first German you see and marry him. Really. You'll thank me.
Baaaaaack across town to the Playboy.
The playboy is still cooling his heels. While I am commiserating, the biker roams off while I'm not looking. When I get up to look for him, I come back and the Playboy is gone as well.
Where is my father in law? Oh, they took him back for the stress test a minute ago. He'll be right out.
I decide to stay in one place. I figure that will make me easier to find, in case either one of them is so inclined. I am also experiencing the coming attractions of an asthma attack, so I take a couple big woofs off my inhaler and wonder whether or not passing out and being hospitalized might not be the better option at this point.
The Playboy returns.
He looks like he has seen a ghost.
He is walking very, very slowly.
You can see the white all the way around his eyes.
He died again.
When they injected him for the stress test.
While all this is being explained to me, the Playboy and I both sit down, wheezing and gasping and holding our chests and shaking our heads.
The biker returns and everything is explained all over again.
The procedure is rescheduled.
We leave.
The Biker wants to drive.
No. I realize that is been almost an hour and a half now since you had abdominal surgery but no, you cannot drive. I know this is both unreasonable and mean on my part. Sit in the back seat and grab the headrest every time I slow down for a corner. Ok? Ok.
All the way back to the Playboy's residence he and the Biker make plans about how they're going to go shopping together the next day.
Right. And run the Boston Marathon and conquer Everest and fight rabid republicans in a steel cage suspended over a pen of starving zombies, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Today, the biker, as predicted, is lying on my sofa watching SpongeBob Squarepants, moaning and clutching his tummy and asking me to bring him shit, refusing to take his pain medication and stumbling around like Frankenfrickenstein.
However I think I was able to convince the Playboy yesterday that the isotopes they shot him full of would make his whiz glow in the dark, and the thought of him turning the light out every time to check the contents of the bowl is the only thing that sustains me.
That's all I have left.
Pray for me.

yoost a qvikie

Aha! Access at last!
Blogger has been its usual self lately and that is why I haven't been visiting around like usual. No, I am not floating around on a sheet of plywood inside the K-mart, in other words.
We continue un-flooded.

Skagit County, as per usual, is completely tits deep. The cows are swimming right alonside the salmon and they're both hitting the road, if you'll notice. Governor Christine Gregoire says 'Give it up, people! Move! Move, for the love of God! You flood out every year! You've flooded out every year since 1885! Get the message! Earth calling Skagit county! Are you deef? We're sick of spending half the state's budget every fucking year rescuing the same people off the roof! WAKE UP! You live on alluvial fan! Half the fricken county is reclaimed salt marsh! "
You know things are getting bad when the only voice of reason is that of a politician.

Parts of Snohomish and King are using their efforts to gather up animals two by two to free those being held for 'recreational' purposes in Enumclaw and Stanwood.

We have...from what I can see, we have a small puddle in the cornfield across the street. The 'river' never even crested.

I attribute this to France.

The French have obviously been eyeing our precipitational resources with a greedy eye for some time and have coerced the World Bank into redeploying their weather satellites into an altered array, brandishing slabs of unrefrigerated whole foi gras as a threat. The rain which should have been falling onto the heads of the wicked here in Sumas has instead been falling into a field outide of Nimes, where the citizenry have set out Tupperware containers to catch the vital resource.
Never underestimate the power of liver.

DON'T PANIC....updated!!!!!

...There's a picture there...just click on the big empty space and it will magically appear!
Ok. So apparently half of Whatcom County is underwater this morning, and pretty much all the rest of Western Washington along with it. And truth be told, it has been a trifle dampish lately....I went out to pick up the Goonybird yesterday and almost got cut off by floodwaters that rose suddenly. And by that I mean within a 45 minute period of time it went from dry pavement to pavement under sixteen inches of flowing water.
But once you get inside Sumas city limits? Nothing. Oh yeah, its raining...but nothings flooded.
Refer to the map above.
Sumas is six feet below sea level. It is reclaimed floodplain. It was origionally seasonal marshland drained by the so-called Sumas river, and a smaller part of the Fraser River flood complex. This is a water-created geological formation you can see from space.
We have nothing.
Now either something is just about ready to give way and pour the entire county's worth of flood into the little muddy dog dish we live in, or the Illuminati or whoevers in charge of the weather satellites will spare us just for a laugh. Either way, it's a trip.
Usually, the first sign of rain, our property goes from suburban to lakefront. We have a couple of mallard ducks that move into the back corner and tear up my lawn all winter dabbling for whatever mallard ducks eat (mud? gravel? used cars?) We've had great blue herons fishing-yes, fishing- behind our garage. Just beyond the fence we'll get flocks of huge trumpeter swans FLOATING around.
Today?
Nothing. The usual couple of seagulls and a crow or three.
I'ts.......creepy.
We've never had the water come into our house, although we've had plenty of water UNDERNEATH the house...which sets on piers. Yeah. No foundation slab here. Remember, part of this house was built before America was a country...no building code. I am thinking about installing a brace of marine diesel inboards. Maybe a couple tiers of sweeps and a burly slave to beat a drum.
Actually, that would be cool! Instead of building houses as though simply by denying the existance of flooding you could magically prevent it, build houses equipped to float around like boats! You could go visiting! You could make big rafts out of a whole neiborhood by tying a bunch of houses together and then you could climb all through the windows to go see your friends, run across the roof, jump between doorways, shit. It would be cool! You could have wars! The Yummy Biker and I would run up the Jolly Roger and go plundering down south for this year's Christmas presents! We'd just tie off on the Space Needle and prepare to repel boarders! Hoist the mizzen! Flail the jeebers! Revamp the foc'sle franes!
Yeah, fuck...I need breakfast.

UPDATE FOR WASHATONIANS!
as Danator would say, clickie for biggie:




Did you see the SALMON MIGRATING across the highway down in Skagit county on the news? no fricken lie, man, theres SALMON swimming upstream to spawn on highway 9!!! Check it on Fox News 13!

how to acheive world peace

....Serve this Brown Gravy.

"Nations", ya say, "Nations, yer gross. All we ever get outta you is potty legends and exploding road kill...well, dammit, we're sick of it, ya hear? Sick of it!'
Well fine. Don't get all in a bunch for heavens' sake.

Here's a recipe. Actually, it's a recipe and a tutorial! Lucky you!

Read the entire recipe before you start...remember, I have a strange brain. And in using this recipe, please bear in mind that these are not exact measurements. I repeat: THESE ARE NOT EXACT MEASUREMENTS. It 's more important to use the exact ingredients than it is to measure them with scientific accuracy. Have all your tools accounted for and set out beforehand, including little plates or bowls to hold the 'aside' portions. Ideally ingredients should be at room temperature.


1/2 cup dry, fine, white breadcrumbs. May be sourdough, french, egg, potato or wonder. Not whole wheat EVER. No sweet breads, no highly spiced or herbed breads, no rye, just plain white damn bread.
...brown these in a teflon pan over med-hi heat, turning with a plastic spoon or spatula, until they are a yellow golden brown, set aside on a saucer to cool. Put the teflon pan away because you will not be using it again.

4 cups brown stock, unsalted, to which may be added any drippings and





cast juices from one beef, vennison or pork roast, DEGREASED.
...combine. pour off 1 cup or so of this mixture into a jar with a tightly fitting lid and set aside.

1 heaping teaspoon cornstarch-if it's a rainy day you may add a little more

1/4 cup milk, room temp

2 ribs celery, with leaves
1 carrot (or 1/2 if you have big carrots or don't like the sweetness that carrot imparts)
1/2 cup chopped onion, med. dice for purposes of measuring. More or less to taste.
...combine these three items and chop fine in cuisinart, set aside

(optional..crimini mushrooms, coarse dice. These cook down to about one third their initial size and cast a lot of juice in the process which may be poured off into the stock with no effect on its subsequent thickening. To your taste and bite with these.)

plain vegetable oil for sauteeing. not olive oil, not any other type of oil like canola, safflower, corn etc. just plain VEGETABLE OIL. NOT MARGARINE. NOT BUTTER.

plain beer, like Miller. nothing flavored, fancy or extra dark needed here. crack a can and enjoy it while you cook; you'll only be using a two-count pour of it.

white zinfandel or any 'blush' crap wine, for deglazing


1. Take the cooled breadcrumbs, the cornstarch, and the milk and add them to the 1 cup of stock in the jar. Place the lid on and shake until the contents are mixed throughly and there are no big chunks or dry places, and set aside. Return and shake this mixture throughout the rest of the gravy making process so that the contents don't settle to the bottom and turn into a brick. This slurry mixture may be made in the morning and set aside to soak, and be shaken occasionally, until it's time for dinner. The longer the crumbs have to rehydrate and cast their flavor the better .


2. Place the remaining stock and juice combination into a saucepan and heat to low.

3. In a large saute pan, (bare steel or well-seasoned cast iron works well, but not calphalon because it's bullshit and definately NOT teflon because you're trying to develop a fond here) add a little vegetable oil and the chopped vegetables (not the mushrooms, though, if you are using them). DO NOT crowd the pan. Saute and turn. When the vegetables have become golden, add a small amount of the beer(a slosh, in technical terms). It will foam up briefly and then subside. Do not panic. When the contents of the pan have returned to the volume they were before the addition of the beer (in other words, reduced) pour the contents into the warm stock. DO NOT SCRAPE THE PAN.
( optional step-now add the mushrooms and a little more oil. Pour whatever juice they cast into the stock. When the mushrooms are dark and beginning to brown a little, pour into stock. As above, DO NOT SCRAPE THE PAN.)

4. Replace pan on fire. When the bottom begins to sizzle, pour in a little (a slosh) of the wine so that the pan bubbles and foams up. Using a spoon or hard spatula, scrape and stir the bottom of the pan until all the crud on the bottom is lifted and mixed into the wine. Continue to stir. Use your nose, now, and smell the steam. When it no longer has that sharp 'booze' smell, dump the contents into the stock. NOW you scrape the pan.

5. Raise the heat on the stock. When the surface shimmers, shake the contents of the slurry jar and then stir them into the hot stock. An ideal tool for this is a flat bottomed spring style whisk, NOT a balloon whisk. Do not whisk, just stir constantly. Do not flail. Do not panic. The stock will turn murky; this is fine.
Your sauce should begin to 'kick' momentarily. Small dark blobby pieces like clouds will rise to the surface of the stock. Now you should begin to pay careful attention to getting the entire bottom of the pot stirred. Figure eights all over, right down on the bottom of the pan. Now the thickening will commence and you will feel the new resistance increasing as you stir.
During this portion of our show the contents of the pan will begin a small boil. As long as you are attentively stirring the bottom of the pan and you are not meeting any resistance or speed bumps there you are fine. The instant you begin to feel resistance, take the pan off the fire and set it on a cool burner. Continue stirring as before until the bubbles stop rising. (at this point you can go back and forth to the burner if you feel the mixture needs the extra high cooking.) In a few more moments, stop stirring. Take off the fire. Let this sit over the oven vent for the rest of your meals cooking time, and stir it again before you serve it. You may also strain it, or run an immersion blender through it if you like a smooth gravy. NOW taste it for salt and add as needed!

It am good!

Sometimes gravy just flat doesn't gravy; it refuses to thicken. The reasons for this include cursing by Gypsies, so go look it up elsewhere if you're interested. But how do you fix it?
Take the pan filled with the failed gravy off the fire. Fill up the sink with cold water and set the pan in it, as deep as possible with out overflowing, and stir very briskly. Now is a good time to use that balloon whisk. What you're trying to do is to lower the temperature quickly. Stand there and do this for three minutes or even longer, until you can stick your finger in the liquid without getting burned.
Now spoon off about a half-cup of the liquid into the jar, and drizzle in a little cold milk to further reduce the temp to warm, not cold. To this add a teaspoon of cornstarch and a teaspoon of white flour, cap and shake well.
Return the pan to the fire, and this time raise the heat slowly, stirring, until you have a simmer. The top of the fluid should be moving but not bubbling. Get out your trusty spring whisk and pour the shaken contents of the jar slowly into the liquid, stirring steadily.(It helps to count off a waltz time here...one side, then the other, figure eights, 123, 123, 123) That done, reach over and raise the temperature once again to high, continuing to stir as before, making sure you get the bottom of the pan but not whisking or whipping. When the sauce kicks, it will do so quite suddenly. Do not panic, just keep stirring in waltz time, covering the entire bottom of the pan. When you start to feel resistance on the floor of the pan, take it off the fire, do not return it, and keep stirring until the liquid remains at a constant thickness and the increasing has stopped.

Yay! You are a gravy hero!

How do you fix gravy that has solidified into a hard mass? Drizzle in warm water form the tap and stir. When the desired consistancy is reached, test for salt and adjust seasoning.

meat meat meat meat

The first job I ever found all by my little lonesome was at a fast food joint called Arby's. I was living in my first apartment with the Dishrag. As the only reliable source of income, I clung to this job like a barnacle despite the ensuing horror. Besides, I knew I'd been lucky to get it in the first place. I'd been hired not because I had experience, not because I had a nice personality, but quite frankly because I had big tits.
They got exactly what they paid for, too. After one night on the counters, during which I gave a guy 15 dollars in change for a two dollar purchase made with a five dollar bill, I was relegated to the sandwich board.

The 'Seventies may have been the era of disco elsewhere, but I recall them as a time of scuzzy polyester clothes, dopesmoke and poverty. Our state economy was gasping it's last. The Japanese were buying up moribund businesses right and left; anyone who wanted to pay bills had to dance to their tune. The tune playing was 'Japanese Management Technique'. And oh my God, if you ever want for an example of cultural misapplication, then picture trying to force the children of the pioneers into the role of identical happy worker ants.

In a corporate environment it must have been exasperating; but in a minimum wage environment it was just grotesque. This was FAST FOOD. Our manager was a crying drunk. The assistant manager was a chainsmoking slutbag who used to ash her smokes in the coleslaw tub. Our crew was made up of high school students, poverty-stricken young marrieds and the marginally employable.
Manditory morale building seminars?
Let me see if I understand this...You want me to give up my evenings to attend 'manditory morale building seminars' until 10:00 at night? I won't be compensated, there will be no child care, but there will be singing? And cake? And we'll split up into teams and do cheers? 'Night Crew, Night Crew, we're number ONE! We're the ones who'll get it done!'

Listen, fucker, I have bills to pay. I don't own a car; you don't pay me enough to own a car. I ride the bus an hour each way just to get here. You have me down for split shifts; I get no damn sleep as it is, this is a minimum wage job with no benefits.
I am an adult with A LIFE.
AND YOU WANT ME TO COME TO A PEP RALLY???????
Oh fuck yeah, they did. And if you didn't participate, you got fired.

Now this was bad enough. But working day to day at Arby's on top of all that had a lunatic charm all it's own.

Arbys was new at the time and was struggling to find an image. It opened with the full-on hearty cowboy thing. This didn't fly too well in a town populated by folks who had moved there to escape from cowboys and were doing everything short of building a palisade to distance themselves from everything beefy, hearty and cowboylike. Somehow Arby's got the message and backed off on that, but the lobby remained distinctly 'chuckwagony' It was very weird to see a group of Pakistani standing there waiting for their sandwiches, surrounded by saddles, longhorn mounts and wagonwheels.

Arby's pride and joy were it's big, beefy sandwiches, meat meat meat sliced from 100% pure beef roasts cooked fresh daily in their beefy hearty convection ovens on site. By cowboys. (Or at least quasi-cowboys. Oh fine; people in chequered neckerchiefs.)
The description and the reality were two different things, however. What you got was a hamburger bun with a bunch of hot deli slices mashed onto it, and then you proceeded to a condiment bar and added things like mayonnaise, mustard and ketchup...and a very unfortunately named, whitish, translucentish substance known as Arby's 'Horsey Sauce'.
Do NOT go there.*

....let's say it together, shall we?
What. The. Fuck.

....So it wasn't really a burger and it wasn't really a deli sandwich, and you were supposed to put ketchup on it.
People who had seen the advertisement on television ended up milling in the lobby with a brightly wrapped sandwich on a plastic tray, searching for an answer. It was tragic.

In a desparate bid to remain open a salad bar was installed, but you had to police it to keep people from making the honest assumption that it was there to build sandwiches from... probably aided in this mistaken impression by the fact that there were NO DRESSINGS OFFERED. Regular customers learned a Pavlovian fear of the salad bar** and refused to buy salads, and the salad, consumed by grief, rejected and alone, withered and turned brown and limp and looked the very picture of appetizing, being the first thing you greeted right through the door.

There is no other way to put this: The Arby's beef roast was a thing of crawling horror in it's raw state.
Pay, attention, children.
Remember the movie Soylent Green? No, now stay with me. The kicker was that dead people were hauled off to a central location where they were dumped into giant vats filled with a digestive fluid that broke them down into a sort of undifferentiated slish from which nutritious Soylent Green was made.***
Arby's roasts used emergency room discards.

No, ha ha! Oh, ha, to my joking is laugh!

No, Arby's roasts only looked like they were made from emergency room discards. What they were made from were the chunks of meat trimmed from premium cuts to pretty them up. Honestly, it started out as good stuff. But then they would soak these trims in a papain solution, and they would begin to....get...kinda....soft.
And kinda....greyish...on the outside.
The meat chunks which had started out as discrete entities became an intertwined mass, which was then drained like a cheese. Spices - the industry term for chemical colorants, a truly frightening list of preservatives and SALT up the wazoo - were injected, and the whole mass was forced into collagen tubes, which were in turn forced into heavy visquine and vaccuum sealed.
The roast you unwrapped weighed in at about 30 pounds, although I don't recall exactly. Once freed from its' casings it would lie there on the board and....creak.
I swear to God.
Black-red chunks of raw beef bulged from a cocoon of grey foam; interlaced with loooooooong strands of partially digested tissue# ...the whole weeping a thick, clear liquid that smelled of kerosene.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Cree ee eeak.
The roast went into convection ovens and came out transformed. What was once something that looked as though it had shot out of Cthulhu's asshole was now a deceptively normal looking roast of beef.
Smelled great, too.

Other meats were served as well...turkey, chicken, ham and roast pork, as I recall. All produced by the same process, all fascinatingly disgusting in their uncooked state. Each roast went onto an electric slicer and whipped back and forth in a blur of juice and protein sawdust as the slices were cut away, thin enough to see newsprint through. The stub ends were loaded into a bustub, and at the end of the evening they were bundled together tightly, loaded onto the slicer and cut up. Then back into the tub. Two huge plastic jugs of barbecue sauce were stirred in and the contents left to marinate overnight. The next day this was heated in the oven and sold in scoops as barbecue sandwiches. Good ones.

Now, barbecue is a pretty primordial affair and generally the less you know about it the better, but that sauce....oh my God, that sauce. I do not know what was in it, but almost as soon as I bent over the tub to mix the ice-cold shit into the sliced meat my eyes would burn, my sinuses would swell shut and my pyloric would start to flutter and shimmy. Just remembering it makes my mouth fill up with spit and my tongue cringe. It smelled perfectly fine, though. Regular ordinary barbecue sauce-smell.
Once it was baked, like I said, it was delicious.

It being the 'Seventies, our uniforms were ugly enough to make small children cry and were made of plastic. Plastic clothing is always a good choice for people who work around open flames as it melts into a hard candy shell that protects the body's tissues from unsightly charring as they cook. Plastic clothing is washable, and although no actual soil is ever extracted by washing plastic clothing, it is washable. You can dump a gallon of dishwasher solution onto it and run it through the Hobart, you can beat it against the hard stony heads of Republican party members, you can dry clean it and you can wash it with solutions used to DEGREASE ENGINES, but the shit simply will not come clean. But it is washable.
That's why everyone always smelled like sour tallow whenever they were in uniform. As a consequence we Arby's galley slaves were very big on perfume and aftershave. Sadly, this only compounded the fonkay behind the counter during a rush.

The first time I was ever flashed was at Arby's. I was mopping the floor around 2: a.m. when a bum knocked on the glass door. When I looked up, there was his tiny shriveled weenie hanging out of the zipper hole of his pants. He was doing a little dance, too, grinning and bobbing, pointing to it delightedly with both hands as though I might miss out on the whole purpose of this performance without the extra visual cue.
Everyone laughed at me. Ha, ha ha, you got flashed.
They called the cops, grudgingly, and the cops thought it was pretty funny too, ha ha ha, gave the premises a quick once over and drove off.
I, on the other hand, had to ride my bicycle home. Alone. By myself.
Three miles.
At 2:30 am.

I quit. Ha ha ha!






*it was tasty sauce, as long as you didn't actually see it. the mental picture was inescapeable.
** the grouchy broad with the big tits and the meat slicer would bean them with rolled up balls of foil from behind the pop machine. death from above.*** gosh, I hope I didn't ruin the ending for anyone.


#science experiment time!
(You spent night shift getting stoned in the walk-in!! so instead of thawing the wrapped roast in a sink full of hot water overnight, you unwrapped the roast , threw it into the bottom of the sink and dumped several hotel pans full of stale water from off the steam table over it, and left it over night.)

take one uncooked Arby's roast at room temperature. place in large, deep sink full of hot tap water. leave overnight. the next morning, skim the foam, which should come away from the surface of the water in solid, styrofoam-like chunks, and describe what's floating in the water.
OO! OO! I know! pick me!
Ok. You remember Cousin It, right? Little hairy lump? Imagine if, like cousin It got married? To another It? A girl one? And she got pregnant? But since they're Its, shes, like, going to have a whole litter instead of just one, right? But cousin It doesn't have a job, so Mrs. It has to get an abortion?

um, yeah.

Brown Gila Monster The Vengeance Car Is Fast!

I get to have the Goonybird overnight tonight! Yay!

I'm sorry, but really now - is there anything better than grandchildren?
This is how I wanted to be able to love my daughter when she was this age...just to play and enjoy her presence, not to be the mommy police and spoil the fun with 'no no!'
It does not hurt that my Goonybird is the most beautiful, sunny, intelligent child in the known universe.
I look at this kid and I feel pure satisfaction and pure, unconditional love. He's like finding money! Or receiving unexpected good news!
It never grows old. I marvel at his perfect little feet and hands and the little rosebud mouth and I feel the same way as I did when I first met him, when he was quiet and blue and covered in ook and opening his eyes and looking around like a space traveler.

He wrote his name on the bathtub last night with his soap crayons. Two years old, folks!!! Needless to say this bathtub has taken on the status of an international shrine in my eyes. (His mother took pictures so don't start with me.)

When I pick him up at daycare he spots me and his eyes light up. His whole face lights up. He runs to me with his arms wide shouting 'Grandma!'
It knocks me out, folks.

I keep trying to remind myself that in no time at all he'll be a sniggering, zitty adolescent boy.
I will probably feel the exact same helpless, sappy adoration I do now. Aw look, he just set that abandoned car on fire! That's grandmas' boy! Hey, let's go shoot rats out at the dump this weekend! Grandma will show you how to fire the sawed-off!

I wish we had trick-or -treat pictures of him, but it was below freezing Halloween night so he went out as a 'sensibly dressed person'. The cuteness would have been blinding. Cuteness sensors all over the globe would have registered 7.62. Citizens would have been evacuated from street level buildings where the cuteness rays were the highest. That's what happened last year. Really. The Japanese were pissed.
He's growing up so fast, dammit. I've got to get busy with the sewing machine for next Halloween. In a couple more years, he won't make a very convincing Holy Infant of Prague.

one for the printers and two for the road.

Having successfully avoided abduction and incarceration in some noisome tidal cell during his country's latest political upheaval, Tim Footmanhas managed to deliver the finished manuscript of his book on RADIOHEAD to the printers!
Dear Jesus, I would be absolutely trippin my tits off.
Can you imagine? Getting published?
Order it HERE, NOW..
Do it. I'm going to. It's HERE.
If you read Cultural Snow you know it'll be good. And if you don't read Footman, quit being lame. Go read him. Use your head for something more than a hatrack. Geeze.
_________________________

TWO FOR THE ROAD, Jane and Michael Stern

I have been reading the Sterns ever since the beginning. While they always turn out something entertaining and well written, they've also tended to be real heavy on the 'arch'. Plenty of that East Coasty 'Ew, how rustic' tone that everyone from Tom Wolfe to Howard Stern thinks they have some kind of right to cop regarding the rest of America. I could go off on a rant here about how the United States does not in fact terminate at the western borders of the Thirteen Original, but I will not. This latest book by the Sterns is damned good, and I'd rather talk about that.

'Two For The Road' is an overview of their years as self-designated traveling food critics. It is a genuinely remarkeable tale, too, reminiscent of the best adventure writing... how two urban naifs, armed with nothing but rumor, instinct and the gargantuan appetites of bull hippopotami, traversed America in search of their next meal.

The chapters are bracketed with recipes, and these recipes are generally nothing to exclaim over. They're the only weak part of the whole. I suspect they may have been the idea of the editors, though (because after all that's trendy and all the cool intellectual but whimsical books are doing it. I swear, ever since that Like Water For Chocolate* book everything has just gone to hell.)

Despite a few forgivable and non-toxic lapses, the Sterns have finally managed to get ever themselves and do their subject, American food, without apology.
That sound you hear is not stampeding buffalo, by the way, it's all the foodie dipshits running for their Pepto Bismol. Everyone KNOWS there is nothing worth eating and paying for outside the city limits of New York, right? and only two places there, and they're French. Right? Right?

You cannot accuse the Sterns of being dilletantes, that's for damn sure. They have been doing this for years. They not only eat and enjoy, they pass through doors even I would fear to pass. They get shitfaced drunk at the Let-er-Buck in Pendleton...no word as to whether Jane adds her brassiere to the collection that moulders in the rafters, though. They order from roach coaches and dine in the back of semi trailers. They guzzle red beer. They eat steamed cheeseburgers, scrapple, tripe and red velvet cake. They dine off paper plates and drink from plastic cups. They fearlessly order mystery croquettes, hot turkey sandwiches and macaroni salad, and eat jello full of
things that should not ever, ever be found in jello. They do fried food. Boiled food. Food from boxes and cans. Wild game. Home preserves. And they manage to do so without having to drop constant snide little bon mots or laughing up their sleeves for a change.

What makes this book so worthwhile is that this is a pair of people who know and love their subject, who have well-educated palates and who share a poison pen they aren't in any way afraid to use. Anyone who has read their excellent articles in Gourmet magazine knows this. In Two For The Road they take the courageous and unheard-of step, finally, FINALLY, of taking fried chicken and mashed potatoes as seriously as they take haute cuisine. With the playing field level, they go after each dish and make it prove itself. And it works, and I think they deserve a damn medal.

After all these years, they've got it right. They've finally taken their subject more seriously than they take themselves.



* the only book I've read that was both worthwhile and had good recipes was Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flag, although the recipe of the title is an acquired taste at best.

Gold Wolf Howls In Hell

This is Mr. Grumpy Punkie! Say hi to the kids Mr. Grumpy Punkie!
Now go HERE, and read this post
(Sunday, October 29, 2006 My Son Has Outdone Himself Once Again )
and find out how a pumpkin should REALLY be done. And join me in welcoming the newest member of the FlatButt Nation, Burning Buffalo Chaos!!!!



Well. Now It's time to write the dreaded Halloween Spooky Post you've all been waiting for and I'm a little reluctant to do it. But here goes.

Yes it really happened. And thats the first and last time I'll ever say that here.

I have had lots of bizarre things happen to me in my life...some of them perpetrated by the living and some of them perpetrated by the living in ways I didn't quite understand at the time. I strongly suspect this story falls into the latter case. At the time I was so frightened it didn't all hit me at once but kept rolling over me in waves for weeks afterwards. At the time, I thought it was proof of Satan.

My mother, up until the time of her conversion experience, was a deeply superstitious person. She was a believer in spirits and Spiritualism, communication with the dead, angels, demons, posession and ghosts. When an item would turn up missing in our house, once everyone had been found guilty and then dismissed through lack of evidence she would head for the hall closet and pull out her Ouija board to ask the spirits for assistance. This was standard procedure for years.

From the time I was old enough to sit still, about four, I was often the second set of knees under the board and the second set of fingertips on the planchette. I recall her using the thing by herself, too, seated in a chair next to my bed while I settled down for a nap. And this never seemed odd to anyone, not even to me, not for years. It worked.
And thats something to remember here. Bear that in mind.
It worked.
Lost items were found. Forgotton names were revealed. It was used to find lost keys, jewelry, paperwork, gravesites (we were the caretakers of our town's Pioneer Cemetary and records were sketchy) waterlines, etc. In fact it succeeded on the waterline location issue where the city and a dowser we'd called in had failed.

My mother was convinced that I had either a gift of 'sight' or at least attracted unseen helpers gifted with same. In any event I grew up believing that an unseen world with purposes of it's own surrounded me, rearranging small items around the house, making the cats stop and stare at nothing and generally dicking with our heads, and that I was attracting them.

By the time I was eleven or twelve the weird was running full bore. My mother taught herself to compose astrological charts. I had been given a set of Tarot cards-her old ones. 'Fate' magazines littered the basement and front room, Edgar Cayces' collected works were in the bookshelves, Jeanne Dixon was a household word and Yuri Gellar was taken at face value. Oh, we never missed Yuri. And each time he appeared my mother would send me into the kitchen and dining room during the commercial breaks to check and see the clocks were still running and the silverwear wasn't jumping around inside the drawers. In fact he got the blame when her watch stopped running and she wondered whether or not she should call the Mike Douglas Show and tell them about it. I suspect she may have, and I think she wanted Gellar to pay for it to be repaired.

Oh yes.

One evening we had company and the subject of the Ouija board came up. Everyone was all for it, until the thing actually came out of the box and then they chickened out. My mom came and got me, and I was happy enough to join her. Everyone gathered around us and we set up, chairs facing, knees touching and the board resting on our laps, fingertips barely contacting the planchette. My mother was very particular about all this.... your fingertips had to be arched high and over, like a pianist, so that only the barest dot of skin actually contacted the surface. Nobody could talk. Nobody could laugh. Nobody could interrupt and the television had to be turned off.

I don't remember what the questions were. Stuff like 'name everyone here' and what's your name' and 'when did you die' and shit. The questions never mattered much because the whole point of the experience was watching the planchette glide around the board, A, B, C...Yes, No....and this time was similar. And as soon as I touched the thing it set off around the board in long, slow arcs and away we went. Our company was absolutely fascinated.

The initial glee and amusement wore off instantly when the planchette began moving faster. It started spelling out words so quickly that our designated scribe had trouble keeping up. The whole company started calling out the letters. Everyone was gathered closely around watching.
The damn thing would not stop. It circled around and around the board, stopping over letters just long enough for the group to call them out to the scribe.
It started to be a chore to keep my fingers on the planchette. My mom realized this at the same time and we glanced up at each other in surprise a couple times. Her touch was so light you could hear her fingernails chattering lightly on the plastic. Finally I had to lean over the board and follow the movement with my arms in motion just to maintain contact.
The group was still calling out the letters and the scribe was frowning at her notepad. She started to act concerned, then irritated and then put the notepad down. 'It's a bunch of dirty words', she said, only half amused.
My mother took her fingers off her side of the planchette and settled back in her chair. My fingers were still on the thing, and I was still concentrating on keeping up. The planchette kept racing around, pulling me after it.
And then suddenly it shot sideways off the board, across the room, and hit the fireplace like a bullet.
Pause.
And then scream. Everyone jumped back, my mother stood up, knocked her chair over backwards, and there I sat with the board still on my knees gaping at the fireplace with my hands still poised midair. Everyone was jumping out of the way and yipping and milling. 'Why'd you do that for!' shouted my my mom.
'She didn't!' replied several guests. 'I didn't', I added. 'It did it itself!'
The notepad was being passed around and when it reached my mom she laughed, tore the page off and threw it away, with me clamoring after her to show it to me.
The Ouija Board got burned.

To this day I look back on that and time still hasn't changed my perspective or my understanding of the event. And I really want that to happen, y'all; I mean, I want a rational explaination for what I remember clear as a bell. I was barely, barely touching the planchette when the thing thing shot away sideways-horizontally-like a whipcrack. It shot across the room like an arrow for twenty five feet, hit the fireplace in the next room with a crack and rebounded off it. I felt it take off. I was looking at it when it took off. My mother, my aunt and uncle, and a woman named Meta were looking too, and my father and another man were present in the living room and complained loudly when the thing hit the fireplace near them. The lights were on, I for one wasn't in an altered chemical state and...there you go.

Oh yes. Happy Halloween!

while you were asleep

For as long as I can remember I have come awake around 2 am, every night, and just lain there for awhile. No reason, just taking a break, I guess. The difficult thing for me is to avoid fretting over daytime issues until my thoughts are circling as I lie there, because that leads to nothing but morning, and me still wide awake. So I find other things to occupy my mind until I fall asleep again.

I have grown very fond of listening to the sounds in the darkness and listing them one by one. As a child I did this to combat the ghosts and banshees...ruling them out by elimination. But being me, and being a child, identification lead to the need to confirm-at least that's the story I'm sticking to- and that lead to midnight rambling. Being eight years old wandering through the streets in the dark trying to figure out whose dog is barking or whose radio is on is not the safest or the smartest thing I've ever done. Fun, though.

Standing under the streetlight down the block I made the acquaintance of impossibly tiny bats, their fluttering and their chirps and squeaks and their little cries of joy when they caught a big white moth and all their bat buddies came to crowd around and look and comment.

I discovered that birds fly at night, high high up near the clouds. The whispered migrations of birds silhouetted against the stars is a very beautiful thing, their voices muted and their feathers brushing overhead in waves.

Barn owls are conspicuous by their utter absence of any sound at all as they pass over. They will soar close enough to touch your hair and make you gasp. Your only warning is a creamy hush moving swiftly overhead and the startling white flash of their hooked legs swinging past and gone. The next thing you might hear is the last call of a mouse or a rat as those hooks carry it away.

One summer night recently I laid and listened to a sound like the seaside as the tide washes the gravel but much fainter than that, although still plenty loud enough in the night here because of our isolation. I finally went to the open front window and turned my flashlight on the field across the street. It reflected back to me in the green eyeshine of seven coyotes, milling and milling, crossing and recrossing each other like ice skaters, their feet and their fur brushing as they trampled down the the hay nosing after rodents.
They only spared me the briefest glance, inside my house with my eyes like saucers.

Now I would still rather see coyotes close, for all their wild slinky looks, than hear them. Or at least I'd rather hear them at a distance, already in song, coursing up the dry creekbed and going in the opposite direction. This is why: A pack of coyotes bursting into sudden chorus close at hand sounds like the earth has split open and the insane dangerous dead are howling and gibbering as they escape from Hell.
It is not romantic.
It is not evocative of the Old West.
It is freaky.

I've never had a clear look at the owls that call to each other all night, except one quick scary glimpse when I startled one up from the side of the road and it flew across my windshield, all eyes and claws and tan belly filling up the entire glass. They roost in the top of fir trees and call in turns up and down the valley, one hoot, a pause, then a hoohoooo. They have a very gentle voice, very mannerly and patient sounding. Their flight is not quite silent. You hear a small sound as they pass over, a 'whisssssh' which could be a vocalized hiss; I'm not sure. To be lying on your back in the night watching the Perseid meteors blaze down and have one of these owls cross through you line of vision is an awe-inspiring thing. They move with the same deliberation as a ship under full sail in a light breeze, smooth and slow and unsettling in their size and silence.

I have always lived within hearing distance of trains, and of all the sounds in the night trains are my favorite. I can hear the rails screech shunting cars off to the Ellenbaas siding, and the big freight trains rumble car by car as they slow at the border, at the creek, at the highway and then gather speed on down the valley. The horns sound off first far up north, in Canada, and once again south approaching Nugent's Corner, in the middle of the fields of corn.

When I was much younger, on my rambles through the neiborhood at night, catching glimpses of televisions tuned to blue static in the darkened front rooms of careless people, I was struck by the nighttime occupation of dogs. Whatever it was, they seemed to take it very seriously. Dogs with a mission. Dogs with places to go. Dogs who came to me to be petted during the day would pass me down the centerline of the street, giving me a smile as they went by but never stopping even if I called them. They'd toss their head back like 'Yes, I heard you, but I have to go!' with that same dog smile and continue on. I went as far as the wooded lot that bordered our school playground one night, expecting to find the trails full of dogs, but saw not a one. I reasoned that they might be sneaking out at night to play 'Wild Dog' in the woods together, but I guess they were doing something else. To this day that makes me wonder.

I remember going to sit by night in my grandmothers porch swing. She grew tawny daylillies, a hedge of them that bordered her porch. One out of every twenty, perhaps, had the faintest, sweet aroma that came up full and round during the night, although the flowers that showed out at noon were now tightly curled shut once and for all. You could smell the fat concord grapes that grew up and over the porch too, and the big black cherries getting ripe in the light of the moon across the fence. Some times she was awake too, and would come out and sit with me and we'd swing the porch swing fast until the frame began to lift and then we'd slow it down and laugh. Sometimes she'd fling off a slipper by accident and I'd go crawl under the swing and find it for her where it had landed in the grapes. The hot orange moon would pass overhead, and the stars would shine white and bright. We sang 'Harvest Moon' and 'Swing Upon a Star'. And very occasionally, off in the apple trees, a nesting robin would talk in it's sleep and my grandmother and I would stop to listen with the exact same delight, holding on to one anothers' arms.

Crisis Jiro! The Operations Full Shutdown!!

Today, my Yummy Biker came home at noon, big ol' happy grin on his face, lifted up his shirt and said 'Look! My bellybutton's purple!'

The man has an umbilical hernia.

While I leaned against the kitchen counter and hyperventilated, the Biker patiently explained that this is something that can be taken care of in a 45 minute outpatient procedure. An incision ____ that long is made and a couple stitches are taken, and that's it. Since he is owed a weeks' vacation with pay, he will take that time to (lie on my couch and channel surf in a medicated semi-coma and get on my last fucking nerve) recuperate. No sweat. No problem.

For him.

Baby Jesus, why do you hate me?



Quick as a wink I was whooshed away to the top of Mt. Olympus, where the Baby Jesus gave me a stern talking to.

"You know, the poor man has a fricken length of gut poking out of his bellybutton, ok? I mean come on.
And yes I know I'm naked but I'm home and I'm just a little baby so get over it."


"You need to put on your big girl panties and be a grown woman about this, Nations. Because let me tell you what, it could be one heck of a lot worse.



"Ever heard of an inguinal hernia?


"One time Steven Neal got one right in the middle of the world Graeco-Roman Wrestling Title Championship? Oh yes. He felt something go 'bloopaladoop!' down there in the gusset of his shiny red panties; hoo boy did HE jump a mile."









"And was he working with cattle? No he was NOT. The dreaded shrinkage disorder 'shuk yon' is passed from cattle to humans via livestock judging. Oh yes. It's tragic. People get divorces."

Fine, I made that up.
Fine, thats a horse.











"You want worse? Have you ever heard of trichotillomania? It's a real thing. It's when people start pulling out their own hair and pulling and pulling until they're really funny looking. Now I'm not saying it leads to acid washed jeans, but it can.










"And at least the guy has a good medical plan! Remember poor Viktor Fries? How all that on-the-job cryochemical exposure made him really mean and bald and he ended up having to wear that stupid looking suit all the time? Yeah, but nobody ever tells you what happened to his nurse, who HAD INSUFFICIENT MEDICAL COVERAGE. She's been living in this Food Warehouse now for sixteen years."

Fine, thats Batman. Still, you get my point here.





"He won't have to go through any extensive occupational re-training. He can go right back to his old job."











"He won't have to adapt to a prosthetic of any sort."












"He can go right back to life as usual."

You know what I realized?

He's absolutely right.
Baby Jesus, I thank you.
President Lincoln thanks you too.

quaint vignettes from my charming rural idyll

I finally caught this!
Of course you can't make it out for jackshit, but it's there nonetheless. Try the clickie for biggie and see what you can see.

I am headed south-I almost wrote driving south, but credit me for having the sense to pull over to the side of the road before I dick with the camera-anyway, headed south, shooting this facing towards the east. That odd haystack cloud formation, looping up over the mountain there? That is a rainstorm being blown up, over and south by a freak northeast wind down the Fraser Valley. Were there no wind, that rain would be falling in Canada, around Yarrow. As it is it's blowing up and over, and coming down around the bottom of Reese Hill. Which is that hill in the picture there.
Here's what you're supposed to be seeing:













Here's another view of it. I've traveled another quarter mile headed south. Once again, facing east:



What happens is this: that mountain, hill, whatever you call it, is a spur of the Cascade foothills that nips into the northeast flow of the Fraser Valley and creates something like a backwash, or a venturi effect. ( I don't know what that would be in meteorological terms.) When the northeast wind veers just right, you get amazing cloud formations and standing weather patterns, like huge monster thunderstorms that lay trapped up against the northern face of that spur and stay there for hours, firing off lightning like a Frankenstein movie. Or backwards-arching rainstorms.


I could be totally full of shit, too.










I don't hear National Geographics photography department beating down my door either.
Oh well.
To me, stuff like this is cool. I grew up in a place where there was only two kinds of weather-shitty, humid and hot, or shitty, humid and cold. To me, this is BIG weather. Of course, according to people from the Midwest, this is sad, tiny weather, I know, but I like it.

The Cruel Green Waterbug's Poison Project

It went off without a hitch.
I know, everyone's thinking 'Oh no! No madcap wacky zaniness? Well, no. Not one bit.
He's nice.
Dinner went fine, socializing afterwards went fine, pointing to the spot on the carpet where the goonybird was born went fine (not an ACTUAL spot, for heavens sake I DO clean)
It all went fine.
This must be someone elses life. I feel disoriented.

And now I must be off the the doctors office to have blood drawn. Yippie shit!

-back.
I feel like I won the lottery*! A fasting blood draw and a surprise urine sample.I hope they can make do with the spare teaspoonful I had to offer. All they're going to find is that I really needed some coffee. I want both specimens collected around 11am, when they actually effervesce in the container from all the caffeine. That would be a much more accurate representation of my vital bodily fluids. This way, 9 a.m., hell I could barely drive.

Anyway, I am really bemused by the whole dinner experience last night. The guy was so normal. A little nervous, yeah, you expect that, but otherwise...damn.
So lets recap...He
1. Does not live with his parents
2. Is not in near-constant contact with his parents, and does not ask 'How high?' whenever they say 'Jump'.
2 1/2. Does not have a lame, ghetto sister who named her poor little baby 'Camus' and who still insists a. that 'Camus' is a wine variety, and b. that it's pronounced 'Kay-miff.'
3. Does not in fact even live in the same state as his parents.
4. Has a job, an apartment and a running car.
5. Is not a useless hippie arts major emo dipshit. (former boyfriend 'I'd rather you spend your gas money coming to visit me in a distant city so I can subsequently ignore you and be a tormented emo boy and write this script that nobody will ever see ')
6. As far as I could tell, he did not show up stoned. Or too stoned to function. Fine; he didn't smell stoned and he could make conversation and drive and he hit the toilet and remembered to put the seat down and that's all you can ask for. You bet I'm hedging. But I don't think he was stoned. Much. Also, he
7. Did not dissappear for extended periods of whispering with my daughter throughout the course of the evening. For points two, two point five, six and seven I have ex-boyfriend B, or 'Dishrag Jr.' as I think of him, in mind...a big goofy Dutch dumbass my daughter used to haul around by the nose who had no discernable ambition or personality.
8. Worked well with the Goonybird.

I will NOT get my hopes up.
I will NOT get my hopes up.
I will NOT get my hopes up.



*The one in the Shirley Jackson story

do not read this, stainless steel amazon. i love you. have a nice day.

Fat Sparrow: Fire in the hole: A true story

Go read this now. This cracked me up so bad it was PITIFUL!

Kind of ties in nicely, what with my recent tales of oven- toasted horror, and the immanent arrival of the latest boyfriend for dinner. We are serving roast beef, dinner rolls, sauce, mashed, and salad. The guy hasn't seen a piece of beef since he met my daughter so I figured I'd do it up 'flyover state' stylee.
This (poor bastard) young man comes from a family of judges and attorneys, heavily Democrat by the sound of it. While I applaud the Stainless Steel Amazons' choice, I cannot help but wonder what kind of bizarre political notions she's going to whip up for herself, just to be difficult. This is why I worry for the future of this relationship because she does this, oh my God, she does it and nobody knows why, least of all her.

Eighty times out of a hundred she is the soul of reason. Then there's that last twenty percent when she's just batshit off her rocker. And I don't mean anything as simple as 'I say black, she says white, 'contrariness either, no no no. It's a case of 'I say black, she accuses me of being racist. Or argues that there is no such thing as black because black is the absence of light and nobody can see without light so black doesn't exist and even to say the word black means you are hatefully ignorant and not worthy of breathing the same air.' Or she'll go completely off the deep end, give you the stinkeye and snarl 'what's wrong with my shoes?' So in a couple of weeks I expect to hear she's become a Workers' Party revised orthodox whig or something; a position she will argue to the death until the hormones wear off.
Poor fucker has his work cut out for him.

Anyway, here I sit, braless and blogging instead of rushing around like Mary Tyler Moore on amphetamines like I usually do the day we officially 'meet the boyfriend'. There's a bag of boughten (it is too a word) rolls on the counter. I might skin the potatoes before I mash them. I am a rebel, dammit!
I've reached the point that I just don't give a rusty rats' ass whether the guys she drags in think we're weird or not. What good has it done me in the past? None whatsoever. I've fed these dinks, I've been June Cleaver nice, I haven't worn the 'fuck off and die' t-shirt, I've boiled the entire house and so far it's turned out to be wasted sweat. So fine. He comes over, the titty mags are staying in the bathroom and devil take the fuckin hindmost if he can't hang with it. Judges son? Meet the hippie-ass biker mofos who raised your girlfriend. We listen to Vivaldi and we say FUCK* whenever we want because that's just how we roll.

And that smell is EXACTLY what you think it is.



*Actually the Yummy Biker was roaming around the house yesterday chirping 'Nipples!' randomly because it was cracking me up. I dared him to go out on the back porch and do it and he did, and there were kids riding bikes past on the sidewalk, and it was ugly. Behold the dire badness of our ruthless G !

it's 9:p.m...do you know where your deceased are?

You want Halloween? I gotcher Hallowfreakinween right here. Is this something out of Robert Bloch or what?
http://www.livescience.com/othernews/061018_ap_body_parts.html

No, you have to read it. You're human; you will die. Go read the damn article.

This is not only callous, it's not merely fraud, it's just not clean. These are people who know better than most why it is not a good idea to carve up the deceased like deli salami and pass them around. But they did! To anyone! They didn't care! They even went ahead and parted out Aleister Cooke!!! For the love of God, people, Aleister Cooke! You don't part out Aleister Cooke! No no no!
Furthermore, poor Aleister died raddled with cancer, so someone with a compatible blood type got an unexpected bonus gift along with their cadaver meniscus or skin graft.

This was just waiting to happen. In fact I'm not at all surprised to see it.

Leslie P**** ran the funeral parlour in the town I grew up in and he had an established reputation for stealing things off the dead. To this day, I think of that pallid, hand-wringing waste of skin eyeing my grandmothers' ring and wondering whether it was worth the trouble of taking and my blood just boils.

He hired one of my cousins as a mortuary beautician and fired her when she walked in on the night janitor enjoying the charms of a female drowning victim. ( Your 'moistened bint' joke here.)

My high school asked him to donate the use of a coffin to our high school haunted house.
We got a cardboard box. A goddamn cardboard box with a cardboard lid; an actual, brown, unadorned cardboard box like appliances come in. (And I know all about this particular one because I spent Halloween night in it dressed as Dracula, which was most excellently cool, especially as I was stoned off my tits and my eyes glowed green under the black lights hanging overhead and my face and shirt were smeared with fake blood as though I'd hit an artery the last time I had lunch.)
When the haunted house was over the cheap, cheap, cheap prick asked for it back.
Someone went to their reward in a USED CARDBOARD COFFIN.

A girl I was friends with was engaged to a mortician in California. Guess what he did as a sideline? For a certain consideration, he would 'lose' those pesky dead drug dealers you had stacking up around the place. Permanently. Right up the flue.

My daughters' first grade teacher was married to a mortican with one of the only crematoria in the county. It was in a residential neiborhood, on a busy intersection. We used to drive past it every morning. Some mornings, thick, black, greasy smoke was oozing out of the stacks and across the road and lawn, raining ash onto the cars passing by.
I started taking a different route.
A retort operating at legal temperature emits nothing but superheated air. Only one in which the temperature is illegally low will put out smoke....and only one operating at household oven temperatures will put out BLACK smoke. Black smoke is cold smoke. And cold smoke contains PATHOGENS.

The only thing that will act to lower the preset temperature and hold it there in a crematory retort is cold mass in excess of manufacture standards.
The disgusting bastard was doing multiple body burns. Utterly in defiance of the health code, not to mention decency. And doing them in a residential neiborhood, two blocks down from an elementary school. I called the health department. Mr. Le V*** was 'retired' from the operation shortly thereafter.

A mortuary retort fires at kiln temperatures. To comply with public health standards, Mr. Cadaver's water and fat-based elements must completely volatilize and the mineral content reduced to clinker; a shrunken heap of black-grey crud similar in appearance to what you find on the bottom of your oven at home after you run the 'self-clean' operation. (The morbidly obese cadaver has been taken into consideration here when they design the things. The chamber is pretty big.) Consequently, an optimum crematory burn consumes an enormous amount of energy. And that's the problem.

If they still perform them, most cremations undertaken by a small, family type operation are probably in violation of the public health code. Unless the funeral parlor is charging rates even more obscene that the norm, the place couldn't break even otherwise. That's one reason why the funeral industry in America is moving from privately run operations into one made up of corporate franchises.

If the place has no viewing chamber, if you do not see dear departed Aunt Gazania actually enter the oven alone, you can begin placing odds that Gazania may have had some very diverse companions on her last trip. She may have gone in with a load of amputated parts from the local hospital. The teeth the dentist pulls. Bales of marijuana. Heroin seized by the cops. Even animals from the local veterinary. That old 'urban legend' about the guy finding a six inch fang in the cremains of his uncle has a basis in truth.

The old switcheroonie is another time-honored method of making sure the morticians kids go to college. Family A buys Grandpa a top of the line funeral...viewing coffin, sealed enrobement, and concrete vault. While you're all piling in to the limo to ride to the boneyard they dump grandpa out of the nice coffin, stuff him into a cheap one, seal him up and ship him out. All you see going into the hole is the concrete vault.
"But I stood there and watch the guy seal the enrobement! He used a morticians key and everything! We heard the vaccuum! "
The sealing mechanism is REVERSABLE. It's the law. It has to be. It's a simple screw-driven latch. A morticians' key is not magic. It's a socket driver.

There is no such thing as a Funeral Home Enforcement Squad. Most municipalities would prefer to spend their resources on the living, which is perfectly understandable. But it leads to an enforcement gap wherein a complaint must be pursued before any action takes place. People who are grieving a personal loss are not likely to be in that kind of a headspace, and people who are struggling to pay bills already are not going to have the kind of money it takes to prove a case of fraud against a crooked funeral home. Furthermore, most people are willfully ignorant about mortuary practices in general, fraudulent practices in particular, and utterly in denial that anything of the sort occurs anyway.

Given this state of affairs only the most egregious offenses are the ones that tend to come to light.

Like Ray March, a funeral director in Kentucky who inherited the business from his father and carried on the fine tradition of dumping bodies in the woods behind his house. 322 have been found so far.

Or the funeral director in California who operated an urban crematory in such vile, blatant disregard of public health that his night attendants used to bet on how many bodies they could cram into a single oven...and burnt the place down when the rendered fat pouring out of the retort chamber caught fire. They were using broomhandles...salmon gaffs...rakes...yeah. The same man, David Sconce, openly referred to intake procedure as " harvesting AU" (that's the periodic table of elements sign for 'gold', y'all) . Never without his pliers, he had an amusing habit of playfully snapping them like castenets at employees. Sconce was keeping a fence in business almost singlehandedly by sending him 'harvested' gold bridgework and teeth and letting him keep a portion of the smelting.

The moral of this story is: Unless your faith prohibits it, get an organ donor card. If you don't have one, become an organ donor. At LEAST do some good.

Another option is to be an observant Jew and be buried in accordance with halacha. It's clean, reverent and very sane.

OR GO ALL THE WAY. State explicitly in your will that your body is to be donated for research and donorship. Specify an institute. Inform your family.
This is what I have done. I will end up in a nice clean medical facility somewhere and be portioned up, shipped off, used for practical jokes and finally reduced to hamburger by enthusiastic medical students under the auspices of a single, well-regulated agency. There is no way in hell that I'm letting the funeral trade get ahold of me.


News story about David Sconce, California:
http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_4242337
Books: 'Chop Shop' also 'Family Business' (out of print)

News story about Ray March, Noble, Georgia funeral home scandal Feb. 2002:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1825248.stm
http://crime.about.com/od/news/a/marsh041116.htm

By the way, the Crime.about.com site above there is an excellent place to gorge on tales of violence and depravity. Visit today!

i seen 'em

It's been a week full of semisignificant synchronous signs and symbolic postrational parallels here at Rancho FirstNations. Inevitably we find Billy woven throughout the cosmic mesh of it all.
Here's how it all lays out: (I swear to you I did not do that intentionally)
1a. Billy is hitting that stuff like the fist of an angry god. Yay!
1. Larvae come from eggs.
2. Larvae are freaky.
3. Cute little baby chickens come from eggs.
4. So do baby GEESE.
5. Some people like geese A LOT.
6. If you make a burrito with scrambled eggs it is still called a burrito
7. The face of Jesus has appeared on both EGGS and BURRITOS.

Chickens (like ducks* and other birds and some reptiles and one mammal, unless I am wrong about the platypus and she just poots her eggs out all over the woods without regard for their aesthetic appeal) shape the egg in their cloaca, an oval sort of waiting room that exits under their tail. The finished egg bloops down into the cloaca while the chicken is going about it's daily chicken business, and when the shell hardens a bit, the mommy chicken runs back to her nest and squits it out.

Not all cloacas are created equal, and thus, not all eggs are created egg shaped*. We raised chickens when I was very small, and we saw all kinds of bizarre eggs... round, empty, solid, teardrop, dumbbell, conjoined, peanut, and oddly textured. Any particularly unusual example would get put aside and hauled out of the 'fridge to show company. Then consumed. No big deal.

I remember hearing older people talking about having seen chicken eggs with the face of Jesus on them*...Apparently these showed up mainly in the South, during the Depression Era. Nobody made too big a deal out of it because everyone knew chickens had artistic butts. I wonder where all those Southern Miracle eggs are now? Hopefully emptied and preserved. You never see oddball eggs any more. Nowadays the bumpy eggs are the ones that get put aside for dehydration or preshelling. They aren't pretty enough to make it into a store dozen.

Aha; see, but Jesus was prepared for this; and apparently He had a backup plan already in place . One that involved the humble tortilla.

(Digression follows: skepticism raises it's ugly head)
The questions that always burned in my mind were
1. How did chickens know what Jesus looked like?
2. How did the person who discovered the egg know what Jesus looked like? Did they throw the ones that looked like Sandy Duncan in the trash? What about Andy Griffith?

Well here's how. How the farmer, I mean, knew what Jesus looked like. (The rest is a mystery, like the Antikothera device and how to make the alarm on my new wristwatch shut up.)

Everyone in America owns a copy of this picture. Everyone in America has seen this picture except Stevie Wonder. My parents had a huge copy of it hanging in their bedroom, in fact. Which is teh sexy.

(Digression: I was too young to hallucinate something this tacky)
Now I remember a picture of Jesus from my youth which showed him with long blonde hair. The damn thing was everywhere; and the lower down the redneck religion scale you visited, the more likely it was to be sitting on top of the T.V. It was a really creepy version of this one...

but full face, with large, almost Carolyn Keene-style eyeballs
that regarded you with an altogether-too-knowing expression.

For Catholics in our class, 'Blonde Jesus' was considered far too tasteless to display in the home.

Remember, these were people who thought nothing of putting this

up all over the house. Catholics in my youth were big into bleeding, flaming internal organs and thought nothing of using them as decorating accents. But a blonde Jesus? Come on.

So anyway, you have nothing to worry about because I cannot find the Blonde Jesus image anywhere on the net. It's nowhere. This really really bugs me. I cry 'revisionism!'
I remember it played a significant role in the set decor of 'Raisin in the Sun'.
I remember my best friends' grandmother had a huge one on her wall that lit up.
Steven King mentions one in the book 'Tommyknockers'. As would not surprise anyone who had to grow up with one of the things in the house, it talks this lady into shooting her husband.

( LENGTHY 'I AM NOT NUTS' DIGRESSION) Years ago this section of the Tommyknockers was published as a separate short story in Cavalier magazine...a publication known for its unique layout i.e. picture of a broad on a couch with her innards on display, story, picture of Seka, story, picture of a naked chick with one knee behind her head, story'. It got passed around a motel I worked at in Portland, back when Steven King was barely a blip on the screen. Damn good story, too, I must say. Pictures not so much. And years later King admitted to it. I felt vindicated for all the times I'd told people about seeing Kings' writing published in a porn magazine and everyone told me I was dreaming. HA!.)

Now the image above is only one of a number of popular depictions of Christ wallpapering the Americas. For example, here's what people are seeing on tortillas and burritos:

















Kind of a combination of



















and














isn't it? Variations on a theme.
Here's Jesus the way the early Christians saw him


















Here's a Mediterranean person of the day




















Here's a Semitic man from modern times



















Here's Eleanor Roosevelt and a hot dog












There's Catholics and quasi-Catholics all over the world and whatever else they may or may not hold in common, they all believe in miracles and apparitions. Yet you see no Jesus faces appearing on the hum bao of the devout.
Nestorians do not see Him on their toaster pastries or Fig Newtons or whatever Nestorians eat. The Orthodox aren't running through the streets brandishing Jesus on rye.
In other words, nobody else in the world is seeing Jesoids on their ethnic bread products. Just the Catholic indigenous people of the Americas.

To me, it all points to one inescapable fact.

Jesus wants me to eat more burritos.

*Hey, nerds? Remember this one?

**Drop a hit of acid and visit here to view the ROTATING DUGONG RESEMBLING EGG OF DIRE PORTENT.

*** Go here
Now don't take this explanation at face value,comrades. Ask yourself these questions:
A. Might the discussion of sex with geese at Billy's place the other day have had other, more sinister layers (not intentional I swear) beneath what at first glance seemed a mere exercise in speculative sexuality? One involving ALIENS?
b. Goose down is known for it's warmth. Might primitive man, shuddering in the chill of the last Ice Age, stuffed a live goose onto the head of his infant and forgot and left it there long enough to make the baby's head egg shaped? Because I could never keep a hat on my kid. What is it with kids and hats? Should I have tried a goose instead?
c. Is this what happens when you don't cut the head off Billy's goose, and it escapes and limps away and blends in with all the other geese, and then nine months later you're out in the goose house and you findOH DEAR GOD NO!!! RUN!!!RUN AWAY!!

For those of you who think I need to increase my medication:http://skepdic.com/pareidol.html

signs and omens part 1

The first news story that popped on to the screen when I turned on the television this morning was about a young mother in Sacramento CA who found the holy visage of Jesus staring back at her from the surface of the burrito she'd just cooked.*

I maintain that it is no mere coincidence that Jesus would choose Mexican food as his Sacred Venue. So far this makes two Holy Burritoes found this year, and if we count the wrapping separately, five Sacred Tortillas. That I know of. Who knows how many others have gone unheralded, eaten in the hunger of the moment, blessing the intestines of the faithful and the apostate alike????

In humble acknowledgement of this miraculous event I am going to grab my nickles and my Metformin and head down to El Nopal for lunch. This is clearly the Chosen Food. And who knows, perhaps even my Lourdes. I will leave my lancet and test strips outside the door of the lounge and go forth rejoicing.

Other than missing my favorite resteraunt (where I was putting their kids through college), I'm finding diabetes more a minor irritation than anything else, and that's only when it happens to cross my mind. I've lost weight, changed my eating habits and made better food choices, and it's been no great strain. I think having been a vegetarian hippie child helped because I already know how to 'do' healthy. Now it's just a question of finding a happy medium between 'reasonably tasty and low in dietary sugars' and healthy.

So what am I reading for nonfiction lately? A book on how to recreate the great mother sauces of French haute cuisine in the home kitchen. Yes, I saw the title ('The Sauciers' Apprentice'...oh, ha! so laugh the face of me!) on a shelf at a garage sale and dove on that action like a fullback. Outta my way bitches.

The first thing the author wants you to do is order 30 gallon stockpot with a tap from Williams Sonoma.

The next, cultivate a smoochy relationship with your local butcher. Now sadly enough, or fortuituously enough; however you want to view it, I already am on amiable terms with the man. Hint**: most men, you tell them they have beautiful meat? They'll view you in all future dealings with a friendlier eye. Yes I honestly said that to the guy. In the spirit of the moment, now, come on. I realized how it sounded about halfway home.

So. Anyway. Next? Invest in ungodly amounts of animal flesh. Beefy Deathberg? Check.

Finally, devote an entire weekend to simmering and skimming. Not a problem. Thats already part of my routine. Seriously, I take a weekend out every month or so and put up all my stocks, my salsas, etc soups and what have you to freeze.

I have most of the requirements already in place; but I must tell you that I will be rat fucked before I play around around with no huge ass stockpot. Never mind the expense; I'd have to stand on a stepstool to stir the thing. There's just no way I want something like that in my kitchen full of hot liquid, too heavy to lift.

You can tell I'm thinking about this, though, can't you. Yeah. 'Well, I could do it in the summer, outside, on a gas ring. Oo, better yet, I could pick up one of those big gas-fired beach boilers at a yard sale! I'm always running into those! And set up on the deck! And run a stock line from the kitchen out through the utility room...yeah...the washer and dryer are work height....I have good knives...'

Making a brown stock is only part un. Part deux involves all the extra flapulation of reducing it down to a demiglace, which is what I'd be doing ideally.
But hey! We'll be bathing in Bourguignonne for the rest of the year! And that doesn't sound like such a bad thing at all.

Update:
OH MY GOD ITS LIKE AN OMEN.
Just as I was getting up to go down to El Nopal? At that very instant? My Yummy Biker came home. Do you know what he had?
Never mind what he had.

Fine, he had a burrito por moi.
An UNSOLICITED BURRITO.

I must meditate, and pray.




*Q13 Fox News Seattle, Bill Wixie reporting, Tuesday October 17.

** I'm assuming the butcher is male here. It seems to be a standard. Proceed with caution. Straight ladies and men with fully functioning gaydar only. Otherwise, guys, I hope I don't have to tell you that if you go up to an American straight man who can bust down a hanging beef in under three minutes? Using only a knife and a steel? And drop the 'beautiful meat' line on him? Probably no.