Red Gerbil Extreme Getaway!

Snaps and Pix day here at Paul!

Let's see what's on the ol' chip, shall we?

Sometimes you'll be driving down the road and messages appear out of the fog.

And sometimes, answers.

It was a sign. No, I mean really, it was a sign. Furthermore the timing was eerily apt. Should I continue at my present breakneck pace or was it time to slow down? I snapped another picture to be sure.
DEAL WITH THIS. THIS WAS TOTALLY CHANCE. ARE YOU ALL TINGLY? BECAUSE I AM.
Clearly, God scoffs at posted speed limits! This is practically a divine mandate here!

Nothing I have ever endured as a melanin-challenged Native American can match the sorrow on this noble natives' pale face. Imagine his life if you can. Surrounded by a virtual bird ghetto, his head emitting some kind of...an emission, chest-television permanently tuned to the blue screen of death, standing next to the road in all kinds of weather, wearing an orange miniskirt with a big huge 'W' on it and his butt cheeks hanging out (butt cheeks which, as a result of nuclear testing in the late 60's, are located in front instead of in back.)


Primeval father-god of the Teletubbies? Postmodern totem? Any way you look at it this shit is just TRAGIC.


Breakfast food gone wrong.
Time: yesterday afternoon
Place: Squalicum Parkway, Bellingham, Washington

I called Blockbuster Video and no, they had no recently-released pancake films that they were promoting. This leaves us with a giant pancake in a miniskirt holding down a corner on the most notorious stroll in Bellingham.

Yes, I blame society.

When I describe Washington State as 'blue' I ain't just whistling Dixie, chicks. We are inclusive to a fault and tolerant as the day is long.

Yes, even if you're a British dyke and you aren't real picky how either adjective is spelled.

Of course now that I look at it again I wonder if it might be some kind of message: STOP DIKE BRITT! Or : BRITT DIKE STOP! You could take it a number of ways I guess. 'If you're british and a dike, stop' is a possible interpretation, as is 'Stop, dike britt' which could be like destiny telling you to pause for a moment in the midst of your dikey brittness. Actually, you need to go bug someone else about this because I have no friggin' idea what it means. Quit bothering me. Seriously. Can't you go play? Is your room clean? Maybe you should go ask your mom for something to do.

funk!

I have a really, really sensitive nose, at least when my sense of smell happens to be working. Most of the time it isn't. (Weirdly, this effects my memory.) When it is, I rival a pedigreed trufflehound. I can tell if something I'm cooking has been salted or not. I can tell where any given cloakroom is by the smell of all that concentrated detergent and hairspray and smoke and aftershave. I can smell peoples' individual scents before they enter a room. And that's creepy. I don't like it a bit, particularly after discovering the fact that smell is particulate. Bad enough I can identify you in complete darkness, but to know that I'm huffing actual matter shed by God only knows what...regions... No.

Still, its a cross I bear. Without warning. This makes it worse, like a sneak attack. One minute I'll be wandering around in an absentminded fog and breathing will be the involuntary, unconscious activity that it's meant to be....another moment and suddenly I WILL KNOW what brand of douche the woman on the escalator ahead of me uses. Or if she...does. Yeah.
No really, it's honestly that bad. Ignorance really is bliss, kids.

If I'm in a public place and my nose suddenly decides to work I instinctively switch to breathing through my mouth, which is always attractive. I don't know why this makes it any better; I'm still sucking in funk chunks. I guess not being instantly aware of their probable source is a comfort. Huffing ass frag is one thing... KNOWING it's ass frag is another thing entirely.
An assy thing.

Assy things were plentiful in the hospitality trade, as you might imagine. I dreaded Monday mornings for just this reason. I would walk in to a recently vacated room, a room that had been closed tight for at least two solid days while the guests drank, smoked and performed carnal acts of slappity squittiness on each other. Sometimes it was all I could do not to give notice. Motel rooms are typically tiny and stuffy to begin with. That compounded with the rank, porklike human smell of skin and hair and sweat, the body-temperature humidity, knowing you were inhaling other peoples' exhale, stirring up their buttflakes and dick particles when you stripped the bed, shuffling up clouds of foot frag as you vaccuumed...it was not propriate. Or beautiful. At all. You tried not to think about it.
Particularly because you still had the bathroom left to do.
__________________________________


I used to do a lot of amyl nitrate during vocational training class. Me and my buddy would roll in already baked, and then run back to the darkroom and take a couple rips just to get into a 'graphic arts' frame of mind. We'd sneet a few more for the road during break. Beside giving you an excellent sweeping headrush, amyl, and the combination of various noxious darkroom chemicals, would effectively kill your sense of smell for about 15-30 minutes. Once we discovered that our intake doubled, since we used it pre-emptively for those times when we knew we'd have to deal with Meg, our instructor.

I have no idea what kind of medical condition this woman had, but her breath smelled like boiling cat urine. The most ammoniac, venomous piss stench imaginable, like a bus shelter full of winos. The fact that it was definitely her breath made it even more disturbing. It made you wonder what she....ate.

Her office was a small glassed - in cubicle and it had absorbed that pee-breath smell deep into its very subatomic structure. Opening the door was like taking the lid off a diaper hamper. That held true whether she was in there or not.

During class she'd come around and appraise everyone's work on the light table. The atmosphere back in that area was already pretty thick; light tables, adhesives and teenagers give off a lot of heat. Every time she'd lean in to speak to me, my eyes would literally begin to water and sting. It was beyond belief! You could taste it! You could practically see it shimmering like paint thinner fumes, scorching your sinuses, bleaching all the color out of your eyebrows. It was just horrifying.

Me and my buddy went through an entire 8 gram perfume bottle of amyl during that quarter. That in combination with the chemical darkroom stew we were already breathing probably destroyed a whole lot of vital brain cells, which may go a long way toward explaining why I am the way I am now. Or not.

Quaint vignettes from my charming rural idyll

We've hit that stretch of 'false spring' we get up in these parts. Certain signs: bulbs breaking dormancy with frostbitten noses, eagles sitting their nests, and FirstNations ass-up next to the road pitching and bitching. I nabbed back some shrubs and trees, tore out a bunch of old dead stems and seedheads, and walked around shaking my head and squinting at things. Still, it COUNTS. I made a mess. It's gardening.

I'm going to finish up all my late winter pruning, stack that up, and then get into some serious compost turning action, weather permitting. I cannot wait to stick a pitchfork into that stuff and see what happened over winter. I had an amazing amount of breakdown this season, about 2/3 less mass than what I started out with. Usually it's about 1/2. I think its because of the extreme weather we've had; that, and all the visitors, like crows and ravens and raccoons and mice and hippies and whatnot.

I look forward to the first turning of the year. I really get a kick out of seeing who's been in there and the traces they've left behind...tunnels, seed caches, tiny round nests, flask-shaped hibernaculums lined with clematis fluff, and occasional mortal remains. I'm particularly curious to see if maybe I have an extra large number of angleworms in the heap because of the flooding we had during the winter.

After any spell of cold or rainy weather the compost heap will have a zone of giant freaky long angleworms, chased up out of the deep soil by the rising water table, knotted up in big tangles like spaghetti all around the edges . If I'm careful I can transfer them in handfuls without waking them up too much right into the soft soil of my raised beds and cover them over. Once they wake up they're amazingly fast, strong and agile. They go through my heavy clay soil like mining equipment and leave tunnels as big around as my index finger. These are some buff damn worms. They can beat up your angleworms. Seriously. I try not to piss them off.

Anyone else that gets uncovered has to take their chances, though. The robins always line up on the fence impatient for me to finish and watch me while I turn the heap, giving me one-eyed glares with their heads thrust forward in a grouchy manner. When I get done I watch them from the kitchen window going back and forth from the fence to the heap, flinging chunks of compost out into the yard in their greed, getting chubbier and chubbier as they feast on all the slug eggs and redworms and centipedes and potato bugs I've turned up.

This year I have to take out a couple of trees...a Bradford pear and a Leyland cypress. The Bradford is simply a nuisance. We bought it as an ornamental. It was supposed to be male. It wasn't supposed to fruit. After a few years of throwing a single pear, if that, it suddenly decided to blast out bushels and bushels of fruit like a mad thing, much to the delight of every hornet, crow and raccoon in the neighborhood. Time for you to die, Bradford pear.

The Leyland simply got away from me. And take that as a warning, kids: cupressus leylandii grows like a mad motherfucker. I had been nabbing it back pretty faithfully, keeping it low and stout, but then I left it go for a year. That was all it took. Now instead of a nice short, trim, full tree I have a tall wandy nuisance that's shading out my magnolia stellata. I have to jump on it too before it gets too big for me to handle myself, thus begging the intervention of the Yummy Biker, who does NOT belong in the garden because he makes my plants very sad. (Plus he has cooties and boy germs.) Besides, this gives me an excuse to use my chainsaw, and I'M BY GOD GOING TO USE MY CHAINSAW.

...my chainsaw! MINE!!!!!

Seriously, can you think of a better way to bring in the new gardening season than by using loud destructive equipment to kill a perfectly healthy tree? I can't. It's gonna be awesome!

Moneyless in Seattle

Being on Welfare wasn't as bad as you might think it would be. Yeah, there was a lot of paperwork, but nothing worse than what you'd run into during a typical day at school. Some of the people were less than polite, but that's life in general; no problem. I guess the worst parts were the long, interminable waits in the DSHS office, sitting on the sticky chairs, watching the 'challenged' couples making out in the corner while feral children ran batshit around the room with their hair full of bugs. None of which is a treat, but imagine sitting in the middle of same with two black eyes, holding a helpless infant in your arms. Yeah, that I could have done without.

Anywho, the actual day-to-day living was remarkably free of worry. I could count on having money to pay the bills when they came due every month. I got the best medical care I have ever received in my life. I never needed for anything related to caring for my child...food, medical care, supplies, diapers, you name it. I was able to make a budget for the first time since moving out of my parents house and not have to worry about someone going on a big self-pity jag at the end of the month when bills were due, smacking me around, grabbing the checkbook and dashing out to purchase, say, a dartboard.

LENGTHY DIGRESSION FOLLOWS:
And not just any dartboard; a competition-quality dartboard. Because all the other guys where he worked could play darts and he couldn't, see, and it took inches off his dick or something, so this meant he had to go buy the most expensive dartboard available and specialty darts RIGHT NOW and practice so he wouldn't be embarrassed. (and in doing so take out the entire wall around the sonofabitch for about a foot around and lose us our cleaning deposit...because we were renting at the time....) OO, or then there was the time we ABSOLUTELY NEEDED A BANG-OLUFFSEN STEREO and I got slapped around because I pointed out the fact that we were a month behind on the rent and our only means of transportation (a benelli road racing motorcycle, just what the urban couple with a kid on the way needs, parts scarcer than hens teeth and made of platinum when you did find them; another MUST HAVE RIGHT NOW purchase) had just shit the bed. Again. Or then there was the time we ABSOLUTELY HAD TO GO LOOK AT A SMALL PLANE for sale in Enumclaw...even though by this time we had to take the bus to get there because were living in an attic, our 4wd (...guess why we had that?) was being reposessed, and we were both 'employed' by a cult that 'paid' in past life regression sessions, but that he deserved because he also worked at a print shop and earned a paycheck (ostensibly for standing next to a machine with his hand resting on it for 8 hours, when he wasn't screwing the secretary) and my pregnant ass did not. Then he decided that he needed an emerald tree boa. Want to hear about the emerald tree boa? A week after not buying the small plane we're out at some goddamn sporting goods store in Bumfuck Egypt looking at bamboo flyfishing pole blanks (because everone who is dirt poor and in debt and who lives in the middle of the city and has no transportation and works for a cult that pays in past life regressions and has a baby on the way NEEDS TO MAKE THEIR OWN FLYFISHING ROD -which I might add, is NOT the cheapest hobby in the world but one that absolutely had to be pursued) and while we were there we happened to wander in to a pet store where there was an emerald tree boa. SUDDENLY WE HAD TO OWN AN EMERALD TREE BOA.

So yes, being on welfare was a significant step up compared to that shit.

My absolute favorite thing about Welfare was food stamps. I don't know how they do it these days, but back when they gave you sheaves of what looked like Monopoly money, all colorful and fake looking, just screaming to anyone who cared to look 'hey, I'm indigent!' Of course, you got over the stigma real quick when everyone else in line was buying their groceries using stamps too....and you had a baby to feed.

Since I was fortunate enough to be poor in downtown Seattle, I had access to what were possibly the best ingredients available on the West Coast, and that at the beginning of the 'Pacific Rim Cuisine' movement as well. Even ghetto little corner markets carried things like craft brewed beers and frozen quail. Soon I was shopping at the foggy break of day at the Pike Street Market, expresso in hand, baby in frontpack, bumping elbows with world-class chefs and food managers, buying duck, goose, salmon, wildcrafted chanterelles, you name it. ON FOOD STAMPS. It was awesome!

Now, I might have bought upmarket, but I was a single woman with a child who made my own everything. This meant that at the end of any given month I had a full freezer and a whole stack of funny money left over, stuff that could ONLY be used to purchase food. Since you can only buy so much duck, and you can only fit so much food into a freezer, this was when you started 'cracking stamps.'

Anything that cost less than a dollar was changed back to you in coin, at par. (This is why you can go in to any quickie mart here in the Northwest and find boxes of apples, onions and potatoes next to the checkout stand.) You could actually make money cracking stamps, since their face value was some percentage less than real cash, so some dedicated cheaters would get their stamps at the beginning of the month and crack the whole stack. You came out money ahead, and it was all real coin money you could spend on ANYTHING YOU WANTED....plus, you ended up with a whole bunch of stuff like single onions and potatoes and turkey tails lying around, so you could make stew, too.

I completely let down welfare queens everywhere. I should have cracked my stamps and then run out and bought a whole bunch of malt liquor and a couple of rocks, right? Nope. My coin went to cab fare.
Yes, it's sad. I know.

I hated riding public transportation with a baby. Public transportation is NOT CLEAN. That, and I hated riding mass transit anyway because I am a freak magnet. I am. If there is someone within a city block of me wearing a tinfoil hat, they will be irresistably drawn in by my freak magnetron and end up in the seat right next to me talking about how the CIA implanted a tracking device in their penis that shoots out radio frequencies whenever they masturbate.
Oh yes.
The final straw was when I was riding the bus just looking out the window, caught a motion and turned and found a filthy freaky drunk slowly stroking my sleeping baby's head. I was nice. I told him to please stop. This earned me getting my shit called a fucking whore for the rest of the bus ride, and then Mayor McFreak followed me off the bus and called me a fucking whore all the way down the street too. So yes, whenever possible, I preferred to take a cab.

I like cabbies. Every single one I ever met was a man with a plan, a total scamming motherfucker, and a smartass. They were pretty good to me at a time when I really needed the break...helping me with my groceries, taking me the shortest routes and then waiving half the fare, showing me around town and telling me where things were, and just being friendly, decent and real. In a different reality, with a better driving record, I could totally get into driving hack, and God help pedestrians everywhere; right, so I guess it all worked out for the best. To this day I will take a cab if it is at all possible or necessary.

I was driving around shopping yesterday with the 'all-growed-up' version of the baby I was packing around back then, musing back on how different things are. Some things haven't changed, though. We're still shopping together. I guess thats pretty cool.

Oh good gravy Marie enough of that already.

Here. Look at this instead.


Kinda brightens you whole day, doesn't it?

Release the Hounds

By the end of next week I will have sent my first story to be published by an actual 'we will give you money' type publishing outfit!

I expect nothing. I have no illusions about my skill or my chances. Aw FUCK no. But just doing this is a rush and a half! And I figure I'm going to keep on doing it if only to learn a lot, first hand, about what not to do and how not to do it...and what the fuck, right, I'll be learning it free, and firsthand! THIS MAJOR BIGTIME TOTALLY KICKS MAJOR ASS MAJORLY!!!!!

Back when I was still doing visual art as a primary medium I found it was pretty easy to get shown and even to sell. I'm not talking about anything huge here, but just that if you do it, chances are that someone else will notice. I've done business cards, concert posters, an album cover, tons of automotive art, tattoo designs, portraits, cartoons, just all kinds of shit, and been paid for it too. It was no big deal. No formal training, no portfolio, no nothing. I just put it out there and did it.

I'm hoping it turns out to be the same way with writing...that the big, huge 'thing' that I've put up there about it's being difficult and frightening and only for such and what kind of qualified people is just that....a thing.

Cross your fingers. AND IF ANYONE HAS ANY PRACTICAL ADVICE ABOUT THE BUSINESS END OF THINGS WOULD YOU PLEASE PASS IT THE FUCK ALONG TO A BITCH?

Legalize it

Oh my God lets all jump up and run around in circles flapping and tweaking because Michael Phelps smokes dope! Lordy lordy shit oh dear!

my man phelps sparking off

Yeah, who'da thunk it...an athlete smoking dope. What IS the world coming to. Not even his top sponsors give a fuck.

Look at him. Please. If I thought it would give me a middle body like that I'd smoke a hell of a lot more of it than I do now. Unfortunately it gives me a middle body like Jello Pig.



Right about now the best thing that could happen for this fucked up economy is the legalization of marijuana. Its time. It is really, really time. Slap a tax stamp on that shit like they do cigarettes and watch the dollars roll on in. Now lets look at Mark Spitz.



You think this boy here didn't be mokin da doink? Please. He put ALL KINDS OF THINGS in his mouth.

Is this messing with anyone else? Because I remember that swimsuit being a hell of a lot briefer, I truly do...although that could be time and wishful thinking operating on my memory. I also remember that rockin' little happytrail and I see I got that right, at least. God bless the photographer who thought to mist him down lightly with baby oil before this shoot, and God bless You, Mr. Spitz, and your happy trail, wherever you are. Burn one for me. Now we need to look at Michael Phelps again:


Whoever decided to make this picture the Sports Illustrated cover shot needs to be hit with an orange rubber shoe. The only thing I can think of is that they didn't want to intimidate their straight male readership. Seventy-leven gold medals and good looking too, laying there on the coffee table laughing every time you walked by would probably cause terminal pecker shrivel.

I would love to bounce dimes off that. I bet if you got him wasted enough he'd let you, too.

You want to bring back farming in a big way? Legalize it. Acres and acres of bud stretching out toward the purple mountains majesty, full of happy farmers and profoundly stoned bees....tell me that's not a beautiful picture.

Get some overseas money flowing back into the economy? Holland is thinking about repealing its openness policy. There's going to be a lot of disappointed stoners out there if that happens. Vancouver BC already turns a blind eye toward their burgeoning green culture and believe me when I tell you it turns over a stack of cash for them; I've seen it first hand! Shit, I've done it first hand. Stoned people buy things! And then they sit around for the next four hours and laugh at them! Come on!

You want to turn things around for small business? Legalize it! Dope cafes, the snack food industry, the novelty toy market, head shops, tie-dyed clothing manufacturers, beanbag chair makers, they all win! There is no downside. It smells better than cigarettes and it doesn't lead to the kind of horror that alcohol can.

LEGALIZE IT.

Kind of blue

Blues music is as ordinary as a dog. In a lot of cases you're talking about a man and a guitar and a time signature like cold molasses; lyrics cut down to nothing but a single declaration of fact.

The moment I 'got it' is engraved very distinctly in my mind. It was genuinely like falling in love. I don't mean romance, I don't mean the limerance; I'm not talking about an emotion at all. I mean that thing that's bigger than you, that flow and change that rolls through you and brings something new to life. I was about 12 or 13 at the time. Nothing has changed.

Now here in my declining years I'm still stuck with this thing and I carry it like a worry. I like a lot of different kinds of music. I love metal, thrash, rock, funk, Motown, I can sing everything off Goodbye Yellow Brick Road word for word in my sleep, I love the Kronus Quartet, Robert Kyr, Bach, Glenn Gould, Aretha Franklin...my tastes are pretty fucking eclectic. But none of it happens to me the way that blues music does and I do not understand that now any better than when I was in Jr. High.

I know I've been annoying on the subject too. I know I have. And I swore I would not be this kind of person. One CANNOT dictate taste to other people. I KNOW this. It's rude. I remember the first time I read American Splendor... I was so blown away that I wanted to walk up to people on the street and MAKE them read it. Of course, I did not do this. That 'social restraint' mechanism in your head that keeps you from having public arguments with trees and cats and dumpsters and shit kicked in, as it should. I restrained myself, realizing that not everybody wants to have complete strangers come up on them raving and slobbering about Harvey Pekar.

That restraint is completely absent when the subject of John Lee Hooker comes up. 'You need to buy this,' I'll inform some poor fool down the racks from me. Apropos of nothing. Just turn to them and hold up the Rhino compilation like John Brown's bible. 'You see this? You need this. Right here. This is the VOICE OF GOD, DUDE.'
I've done this. Yes I have.

Not to say that I like the blues unconditionally, or that I could stand listening to it all the time either; I mean, come on, right? There are simply times you don't want to hear about how someone wants to lay on the railroad tracks and die. But then again, you can hear that in the context of the blues and it will raise you up in your heart like the St. Matthews Passion being sung in a big church will raise you up, if anyone can get with that.

I have no more in common with someone like Leadbelly now than I did when I was a poo-butt kid. I have no idea what it is about this particular kind of music that is speaking to me so clearly. None whatsoever. But nevertheless it cuts straight through me like I don't even exist. I'd like to be able to apologize if I've offended anybody, but to tell you the truth I'm not sorry because I did it for your own good.

The Red Balcony

this is a description of a real place that I used to go to in Portland back in the '70's. I've been looking for a mention of it or pictures of it and no luck. The whole building is gone now.

__________________________

The Red Balcony was a bar, and like most bars in downtown Portland it had a big mirror and a cute bartender and some old movie posters on the brick walls. What it lacked were the Boston ferns, Nagel prints, and the 'flamingo and palm tree' neon sculpture that would have said 'gay bar'. It was, though.

The first thing you noticed was the height of the ceiling. The walls with their antique molded pilasters seeming to go up and up and up into the gloom until complete darkness obscured their capitals. Sometimes in the evening the sunlight would reflect in off the windows of the skyscrapers and reveal it for a moment; ship lapped fir with flaking paint, blind chipped athenas with acanthus garlands atop the dusty columns.

The bar was mahogany and the top was either zinc or steel; some kind of grey metal that bore the mark of every sharp blow it had ever received. It smelled like money in your hand on a warm day. None of the taps wore a distributors pull. You took the bartenders word that the glass he filled for you was what you had ordered.

This was not a place you ordered a daiquiri. Napkins, no. Umbrellas, monkeys, picks, toy fish, no. If you found anything other than booze and ice in your glass you picked it out and reminded yourself that alcohol is antiseptic.

There were two slate top pool tables in the front next to the only two windows in the place. Twelve bar stools lined the bar, six on either side of the grab rails. Six tables with four chairs each in the front of the house, then a stage in the middle with a dance floor the size of a postage stamp, and finally a large back room with more tables, the walls lined with booths.

A semicircle of eight brass columns rose in barley twists around the stage to support the floor of a large half-moon balcony. A person seated up there had a view over the entire space and yet remained in constant shadow, unless they sat right against the rail.

A perilous, narrow and distinctly non-code corkscrew stairway lead up to the balcony. Each step you took made the entire structure shudder and creak. Flakes of rust fell down onto whoever was standing in line waiting to use the restrooms below. If you didn't think you could make it, then you'd probably be better off staying downstairs. If you made the climb, then chances were you knew enough to conduct your shit once above just as carefully.

Up above in the balcony everything was red and black, all of it old and stained and smelling of spilled drinks and cigarettes, aftershave and Brasso. Low backed chairs lined the rail overlooking the bar, and more of the same were scattered around, along with padded hassocks and low side tables. Bounding this was a Moorish-styled railing, bellied wrought iron, scaled with ancient paint. The only light was provided by one small candle on each table. No waiters served the balcony.

I used to sit at the bar in the early part of the evening and watch the young boys come in after school and go up the stairs, dark hair and sweet smiles as they glanced your way. You could hear them laughing up there in the shadows, lanky arms and legs, smooth faces up above you in the gloom, holding hands as they sat and leaned along the railing, sharing cigarettes, passing pipes.

and the rest of this is up at UJ.

NEW ONE UP AT UJ

...ok now go down and read the dugong thing. VVV

rerun: Black Lynx Caution the Five Angry Diatom!!!!!

q: What is a dugong?

The dugong is a member of a small group of aquatic mammals known as 'Sirenia'. Other members include the manatee (which is not nearly as fun a word to say as 'dugong' so we'll just pretend that it doesn't exist) and the (now extinct) Stellars' Sea Cow.

...yes, it's two you-know-what-atees. it's my blog and i'm calling them dugongs.


...which was in fact not terribly cow-like; it was more like a big hippo-seal type thing.
Although it would be really cool if it HAD been like an aquatic cow and it gave milk and said 'moo'? and like maybe it had these huge horns that stuck out REALLY FAR and they would stampede and they'd get in cool fights and stuff? and divers could go down and have rodeos and the seaweed would be like tumbleweeds?
Yeah.


Centuries ago, the first Dugong sightings were reported in the logbooks of Spanish sailors who (upon seeing the bald, grey, flippered animals swimming around chewing on seaweed and burping) immediately mistook them for a race of seagoing human women.






This may say more about Spanish femininity than we care to know.



q: Where do dugongs come from?
a: Duh; the ocean.
q: Oh Jesus fine. What is the life cycle of the dugong?
a: Ah. Well then. That's an interesting question.

When a mommy dugong and a daddy dugong love one another very much, they want to share that love with a baby dugong. So the Mommy dugong lies on her back, and the daddy dugong orders one from Ikea.
But ordering from Ikea can take time, and sometimes the quality sucks, so the smart mommy and daddy dugong usually go to the KING OF THE DUGONGS and ask him for one.

...click; it gets bigger. waaaaaaaay bigger.

This is the beginning of a magical, mysterious process that has very seldom been documented on film. Are you paying attention? I said put down the damn ocarina and pay attention. I don't care if it's called a sweet potato in the rural South put the damn thing DOWN.

Opie, King of the Dugongs, goes out to a sacred place far, far back in the woods where small dugong bulbs lay dormant in the soil. At his command, a small gnome-like creature emerges from the grass and begins excavating.


It digs and digs and digs and digs, throwing soil everywhere and getting exceedingly filthy...soil in its ears, soil in its butt crack, soil absolutely everywhere.














...until finally, the first tiny newborn dugong emerges.








Close enough.




q: Is communication with dugongs possible?
Yes! Recent experiments using extra sensory perception have yielded undreamed-of results in the field of dugong-human communication.


Here a diver uses the 'mind meld' technique.


"Can you understand me, fellow earth dweller? Gentle giant of the sea, can you understand me?"







"HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO REPEAT MYSELF HERE. RING RING PICK UP THE CLUE PHONE. LEAVE. ME. THE. FUCK. ALONE."



Q: Do dugongs spy on America and then give all our secrets to hostile foreign powers?
a: Yes.





....plus they sneak up on your when you are swimming and yell "DUGONG!" in your ear real loud and then swim away.

Dugongs SUCK.



q: Do dugongs migrate?

a: During certain times of the year the trans-oceanic currents shift, and with this shift comes a subtle change in the temperature of the sea. ...image of migrating dugongs thanks to KYAHGIRL

This is the signal that the dugongs have been waiting for.
Once a reliable source of medical-grade helium has been found and the deliveries completed, they line up along the shore in the light of the full moon, wait for a favorable wind, and ascend towards the stars.

Aren't you glad that only happens in Florida? Talk about making a mess of your car. I mean that would be RASTY. They're herbivores.

The Umpqua River Valley, Highway 38, Oregon

I filled the chip on my camera with pictures of this drive. Out of all of those pictures, only three give you even a vague hint of what this place looked like. THREE. And to tell, you'll have to click to make them bigger because the effect is that faint.
Now, trying to capture exactly what I was seeing that particular day might not have been a realistic goal anyway owing to the subtlety of the light. But I managed to get three hints. Completely inadequate hints.
I cannot urge you strongly enough...if you ever, ever get a chance, go drive through the Umpqua River valley. There's other locations in Oregon that are more spectacular and impressive; but there is something about this place that is so beautiful, gentle and perfect that it almost broke my heart.

________________________________





So here I was:



View Larger Map

I took I-5 down past Roseburg to Winston, and headed west to Coquille on highway 42. You can deedle around with the map enlargement thingie if you're really interested in seeing for all the good it'll do you. They show highway 42 doing this:




and what it really does is this:



which, to be fair, is a scenic enough drive too; at least those glimpses you manage to catch as you're speeding downhill with a log truck ramming your rear bumper and turkeys attacking you.

Had I to do it over again I would have still gone by this route if only because it goes directly into Coquille and no place else; and when you're going somewhere for the first time in a state where people think that logical city planning, good roads and street signs are vain extravagances, DIRECT is GOOD.

Once, however, was enough.

I went back this way:


View Larger Map

...I took 101 up the coast to Reedsport. There, I took a right at Highway 38, heading east toward Drain, then caught 99 up to Curtin and I-5.

I am taking particular pains to direct you here because everyone needs to go see this place at least once before they die.*

The area is the Umpqua River Valley. I didn't name the river or the valley; I have no idea what Umpqua means, if anything. Just be nice. I bet you think that the Callapooia and the Skookumchuck rivers have funny names too. That's just fine. *snif* You think that.

If you own a motorcycle or a sports car, go NOW. It is one of the most beautiful stretches of roadway on the West Coast. The road is twisty but not perilously so; the surface is well maintained and the grades are all pretty gentle. You travel alongside the river for the most part. The whole time you are going through beautiful low-altitude forest interrupted by open stretches of rolling fields that look something like wine country. And no turkeys. That I saw.

The Umpqua valley is fairly wide and the hills around it are mostly uniform in height. It was about 3 in the afternoon, full on day and beautiful... not a cloud in the sky and 72 degrees. The valley, however was filled with just a trace of mist, just barely enough to soften the outline of everything and diffuse light that was already oblique owing to the low angle of the winter sun in the sky. The hilltops all around were standing in the sunshine like islands. The valley itself stayed in a mild, constant twilight.


For the greater part of the trip I drove alongside the calm, flat river. There was only an occasional stretch of small rapids crossing it. From a distance I thought I was seeing white horses walking through the water. In the darker turns spray had frozen into lace shelves along the banks.

The forested stretches are filled with lots of different kinds of trees, most prominently cedar, fir and hemlock, bare alders and oaks, with Scoulers' willow and hazel and osier and vine maple along the water. All the branches of the oaks and alders and a good portion of the barer evergreens were furred with a thick, pale jade lichen, crisp as kale, unexpectedly bright and amazingly profuse. For some reason the trees closest to the water didn't support quite as much of this growth. There the Scoulers' willows were the tallest and stood in drifts along the bank, grey trunks, bright ochre yellow wands of new growth carried above like huge clouds. The new wood of the vine maples was bright red, and the osiers scarlet-orange. Wild hazels had hanging catkin fringes of golden tan. Separately, all this color wouldn't have been terribly noticeable, but growing in swaths as they were along the riverbanks, picked out by the odd quality of the illumination, they looked like colored mists..scarlet, yellow, golden and red.

The hillside cuts were filled with evergreen trees, the lower branches draped in long scarfs of ghostly bryophytic moss. These loomed over a rocky understory covered in cushions and blankets of yet more moss, every imaginable variety and shade of green, interspersed by huge splayed sword ferns and delicate skeletal snowberry bush with fruit clusters like white moths. Ranks of liquorice fern hung from the sides of the boulders, growing up through velvet green moss five inches thick and perfect, studded with little pearls of ice. Deep as the shadows were all the greens positively glowed...and when I say glowed, I mean that literally. It was as though everything were faintly luminous.

The further I drove the more I also began to take note of an odd, lambent, slightly unreal quality that informed everything I was seeing. What you saw were familiar things, of course, but as though everything was partially removed from the present. Not quite real. Everything visible flattened by distance and faintly, barely blurred by mist, and colored just slightly to the left of natural by the soft, reflected, pervasive light. It filled the valley with the same kind of glimmer that light under water has; everywhere at once and sourceless, tinted by whatever color happened to be most prominent. That effect was further picked up and spread into optically illogical places by the pale lichen which filled the branches of nearly every tree.

You'd drive around one turn and enter a swale covered in yellow meadow grass, and everything was tinted gold; perfect, diffuse, orange gold filling the valley, spread by the haze like smoke. Everything took on a subtle difference in color from it, right down to the shadows. Anything already colored green was rendered even more brilliant and stood out like a star.

Around another corner where the black rock walls rose up around the road, everything was deep somber grey and colorless; black with damp or furred thick with needles of white frost. Then the next turn took you down into a valley filled with faint, faint violet as the sun skimmed the hilltops;

palest violet sky, pale violet mist condensed in little glittering drops on the barbed wire, on the broken antlers of an elk grazing next to the road, greens turned russet and sienna, shadows faintly blue.**

The most common effect of all was a perfect encompassing, pale green light, the color of a monarch butterfly chrysalis. Like what the insects first view of the world must look like from inside.



Occasionally you'd come on to a small town. Most of them consisted of a few wooden false-fronted buildings still open for business, not a plumb line in sight, all painted clean white. Usually a couple of grand Victorians graced Main street; an Odd Fellows Lodge or a bank or a company mercantile with a curly date in a demilune on top and a poured cement staircase leading up to the front doors. Narrow farmhouses on little rises, two arborvitae on either side of the door and two maples down by the road at the entrance to the driveway. Red barns. Blackberry tangles growing over old trucks. Sheep and lambs with clouds of steam rising off their backs. Two herds of elk, each one lead by a lone male who stood guard by the road, chewing grass like a cow.

Royce, you gave this to me. Thank you. And I really, really hope you still have a job.

__________________________________________________


*But remember: don't move there. Just go visit and spend a lot of money. Then leave.

*Yes, I missed the elk. Forget the elk. You know what an elk looks like. They weren't doing anything interesting anyway.

Green Tube Snake Crime the Plot is Thick!!

I tell you what, crossing the state of Washington to get back home here was like trying to swim the Amazon river holding a t-bone steak between my teeth.

...6 a.m. just outside of vancouver...the worlds prettiest traffic jam

The roads in Oregon suck, but the traffic in Washington just trumps that all to shit. What the fuck, people, you were all supposed to be home watching St. Obama take office, not out on the freeway driving like a stinky bad toilet! NO!!!! It was two in the freaking afternoon on a Tuesday, people! NOBODY NEEDS TO GO ANYPLACE AT TWO IN THE AFTERNOON!

Nevertheless, the trip went well. Once again I listened to the sound of silence coming from the direction of the passengers seat, nobody checking the goddamn speedometer, nobody checking the gas gauge, nobody hearing noises that mean we're all going to die coming from the engine compartment.
Of course I'm assuming silence here since the radio was playing loud enough to delaminate the safety glass.

And now, a PHOTOGRAPHIC INTERLUDE.


My boy and I went wandering around Portland on Sunday, and decided to hit one of the local music stores. So we go driving up and dang; there I was smack in the middle of what used to be 'The Pink Triangle' up on Burnside; up by the notorious Kachina Lounge, the Family Zoo, and the Red Balcony.

Not no mo it ain't.

The Zoo is kaput, The Kachina is history, The Balcony is gone entirely, building and all. Here I was all braced to be chasing drag queens off my son, and nada.

And to top it off, Burnside as a whole is no longer lined two deep in winos, either. We did get spanged by a guy with a walker. I gave him a buck. He was wearing red nail polish.

First we (me and my son, not me and the guy in the walker) went to a music store and spent too much money, and then he (my son, not the guy in the walker) took me to this incredibly excellent place here:
...that's The Arborist with his elbow up on the bar...photographic proof that the apple did not fall very far from the tree. It fell as far as the next barstool over.


Here is the view past him, looking toward the front door. Pay attention, foreign persons in general and Mr. The Dog in particular; I took these for you. This is the inside of a cool bar in America.





Ok. Here is looking directly up at the ceiling. I'm not sure what purpose it served, but that round thing up there was covered in green and clear mirror pieces and it rotated. It kind of reminded me of that mind-control device in original Star Trek, where Kirk goes to the insane asylum planet and they put him in the device and it messes with his brain and makes him kiss that one broad? And then the one guy gets trapped in there and it sucks all his thoughts out and he dies of loneliness and then Captain Kirk says something pithy and they play the closing theme? Yeah.



I swear to you I am not falling off the barstool here; I was holding the camera at an awkward angle. Just turn your head sideways.

Look at how cool this place is. The Arborist has the most excellent taste, I swear. I loved it. They had excellent brew too. Plus there was a hot guy playing pool just out of shot to the right.




This was a bicycle parked out front of the place.
We are looking west up Burnside toward the old 'Kuntz Plumbing' building. -hey, I shit thee not. Kuntz Plumbing. I almost rented out an apartment upstairs from it years ago. The name was kind of offputting, of course...


This is the Oregon I remember when I left:
You have to make the bigger by noise of an insect becoming largeness in order to really get it, unlike this sentence. Boarded up tacky old buildings, general crumminess, squalor...
I shot this someplace way out in the brush somewhere. It's the exception to the rule now.



Here is an excellent example of what I mean when I talk about Portland being better than it used to be. This is Third Street in downtown Portland, right across from the Old Spaghetti Factory building (now an architects' office.)
Third used to be a pretty gritty area. You were getting too close to Burnside at this point, and down near the low-rent, filthy waterfront area beside...it used to be heinously dirty, the storefronts were largely unoccupied, there was lots of vandalism, and there would have been people asleep on the street and lots of graffitti and posters rotting off the walls as well. Now look.




I'm standing in the same spot looking in the opposite direction, toward the college.

No winos. No garbage in the street. Trees.
I tell you, its like that one episode in original Star Trek when they all go back through a time portal thing and Kirk falls in love with that Edith Keeler broad and has to let a car hit her so that history isn't changed? And then they go back to the Enterprise and Mr. Spock whips off his shirt, and he has a tattoo, and they have wacky space love.


Some things did stay the same. See that circle thing in the curb? The one right next to my foot there?

That's from waaaaaaaay back in the day. It's an iron ring to tie your horse to. Finding this made me really happy. I always got a kick out of them when I was a little kid and look; something good from back then is still here. Cool!
______________________________________


When I lived in Oregon, you used to hear people from out of state bitching about the poor condition of the roads and think "Aw geeze, grow some hair on your ass." Now, having lived for 23 years in a state that actually maintains its highways, I can go back and appreciate from an informed perspective just how bad it was, and is. Not only poorly maintained surfaces - think 'downtown Baghdad'- but unnecessarily narrow, poorly marked, and what the fuck is it with the off-camber turns? Middle of a mountain pass on a 50 mph stretch of road and suddenly you're coming around a turn and you feel the entire chassis begin to plane. And there's a log truck on your ass. And a Mexican broad in an Aerostar is passing you on the left so close her kids are trying your doorhandles and she's weaving in and out of the lane, talking on her cell phone.

The thing that complicates all this even more is that, down in Oregon, suddenly there IS SCENERY WORTH SEEING, even on the interstate. Good scenery. World class scenery, in fact. Your only choice is to pull over and stop, or miss it. You can't casually gaze out and enjoy the passing landscape; there might be a giant goddamn chuckhole coming up with a submarine floating around in it that you have to manouver around.

Once off the main highway the scenery goes from merely pretty to 'astoundingly beautiful.' Particularly along the coast, immediately west of the coastal range, along what they used to call the Miracle Miles. Now its just plain U.S. 101.
Go there. NOW.

-wait. I mean, don't move there or anything; they don't want you. Just go visit and spend a lot of money. Then LEAVE.





So anyway, there I was, traveling west through the coast range, losing altitude at an astonishing rate, going through the most excellent, moss-draped primeval forest, past incredible rock formations.... doing 55 around hairpin turns canted in defiance of ballistic motion, with a log truck gaining on me. I'm driving along with my eyes bugging out, trying to stay on the mountain, when suddenly out of nowhere all these godawful GIANT BIRDS go blasting right across my windshield! Jesus H. Christ!

At first I thought 'vultures,' but no. TURKEYS. Oh yes, definitely turkeys. I got a real good look at them. I could even read the little 'made in Macao' tags.

Nothing gets your blood moving brisky along like getting fucked with by turkeys on an frost-covered, 70% downhill grade.

I was on my way to visit a friend of mine who lives in Coquille. Now, had I been thinking, I wouldn't have just gone right in off the road without getting my shit together first.
I was not thinking.
No, I showed up at her place of work shortly after the turkey incident with my hair all sticking out wild, face pale, hands trembling, wearing my black trilby, a stained 'Spam' t-shirt and a rasty old leather jacket with crap all dangling off it.

Asked the receptionist to announce me as 'FirstNations.'

....eeeeeYeah.

This is a professional workplace, bear in mind. This nice woman comes walking out into the lobby and a deranged hippie wearing a Zippy the Pinhead badge comes clanking and jangling up and throws her arms around her in a big ol' cloud of patchouli and adrenaline-laced fear sweat...oh yes, it was choice.

...this is the view from the parking lot where she works. Deal with this. This is a view from a fricken' PARKING LOT. In Oregon. Does your parking lot at work have a nice view like this? No it does not.

She wanted to buy me lunch, but I said no, that's ok. Then I ate most of her french fries and forgot to catch the tip.

Anyway, we sat and relaxed and just chatted nonstop. She is just as smart cool and laid back (not to mention groovy in a far out, happening way) as she comes off in her writing. We got along like a house afire. The woman is incredibly interesting, and I swear she has read EVERYTHING. I wish I'd have stayed longer, I really do. She was so nice to me. Before I'd left, she even loaded me up with dirty romance novels, and I mean, dang; lunch AND porn. That's hospitality.

In parting, she told me "Head on up the coast a ways and then take the Drain exit back to I-5. It's just a much nicer drive." A friendly bit of advice which I took. And I'm glad I did, too. Had I stuck to my original plan, I would have missed one of the most extraordinary experiences I have ever had. Retro, that was a star in your crown. That valley along the Umpqua river was one of the most gorgeous places I have ever been.


NEXT: a lot of descriptive crap about that drive, with average pictures!!!

Spotlight on: FRANCONIA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Perhaps some day you might like to take a nice trip someplace. You could go to FRANCONIA!

Franconia is located in the land. It is near Europe, French, and Dutch Holland. You can only reach it if you take three boats, and then you have to rent a car. Here is a map:


Fact: French Fries aren't really French. They are potatoes.


Danger in Franconia:

Wolves are a very dangerous part of life in Franconia. Nobody likes them. If you have a chicken, or some sheep? Wolves will eat them. Plus things that are made out of meat, like kids.

Pie is dangerous.

Fire. It can burn stuff.

Mean dogs. Everyone has to beware of mean dogs in Franconia.

One day the Spain people had a fight with the Franconia people! "We will fight you!" they said. They were sneaky. They dressed up in the disguises of baseball players, clowns, and waiters, and sergeants, and they got in their car and snuck in! They were very rude to everyone.

The Franconia people were sad.

But one day a new hero appeared across the land... Super Franconia Man!

...actual unretouched photograph

Nobody knew who he was, but he could fly! And he had a chainsaw! He chased the Spain people and made them give back all the stuff they took, and it was all greasy. The Franconia people said "Why did you make our stuff all greasy?" And they said "Oh, get your mom to wash it for you." And so Franconia had a new freedom!!!

Here are some Franconia facts:

The Flag of Franconia is pine scented.

The official Franconia mascot is the pileated womb ferret.

...actual size

Franconians like to have a spoon or two around the house.

Children in Franconia learn Klingon and Esperanto in addition to their regular classwork.

The national Anthem of Franconia is "Hey, Franconia, You are a Land"

In Franconia, no one can hear you scream.

So when you go to Franconia, you will be very happy, and your family will too! They have stores, and cheese, and television. Remember to always flush and wash your hands. You are a representative of your country, and you wouldn't want people to think that country was Canada.
____________________________________________________



Meanwhile, I will be in Oregon doing secret Oregon things that you can't know about. Maybe when I come back I will tell you all about what happened there. But not now. I haven't done them yet.

The Yellow Mouse Has A Mysterious Secret

As we travel down lifes' highway we all have times of doubt...

...of worry...

...of not knowing which way to turn...

...of having reached one of lifes' crossroads in a Volkswagen with faulty brakes, and got in a huge flaming wreck with a busload of nuns and mexican wrestling personalities...

Yes, when times get to be too much, and you wish you had a friend...

...someone to trust,

...someone to provide counsel and a shoulder to lean on during this difficult time...

you need someone like Mr. Egyptian Penis Dude.

....thats him.

Mr. Egyptian Penis Dude is standing by right now waiting for your questions. Ask Mr. Egyptian Penis Dude about any concern you may have...life, love, money or what lies beyond the veil, none of these things are hidden from Mr. Egyptian Penis dude. He can help. Let him help now.

FACT: Mr. Egyptian Penis Dude has devoted his life to the service of others. Many consider him uniquely qualified to service others. Gifted, even.

Anyone may approach Mr. Egyptian Penis dude with a question. Here we see Mr. Yen Shi Baby asking Mr. Egyptian Penis Dude for his sage advice.

Seeker: Please can you tell me if i will ever-

EPM: Blah blah blah blah yes, fine, sure, I know, I know already. I'm psychic. I know. Please God, I know. Seriously.

Seeker: But can you tell me-









EPM: Would you like to meet my twin brother? We get in fights all the time. Watch us fight. Watch.

EPM: EEEEE Hawakowa! I FIGHT YOU!

epm2: OW OW OW OW OW OW

EPM: OK now I have defeated my evil brother! I can answer now.






Seeker: Ok, Mr. Egyptian Penis Dude, I'm ready to receive your wisdom!

EPM:....OK. Are you sure?

Seeker: Yes.

EPM: Are you sure you're ready?

Seeker: ...

EPM: Are you really really super-allidocious top secret ready?

MAKE YOUR LIFE BETTER TODAY. ASK MR. EGYPTIAN PENIS MAN A QUESTION.

NOW.

...SERIOUSLY. NOW.