It gets better. Meanwhile, you don't have to put up with shit.

I grew up in Milwaukie, Oregon, which was then, and by all accounts still is, a very poor, rather squalid, working class area just outside of Portland. In fact they refer to that whole area these days as 'Felony Flats'. My family was a mess. I spent the first three years of my school career in Catholic school, and it was there that I met my first crushes...a little girl named Robin and a boy named Patrick...both of whom I wanted to marry. Both of whom I felt exactly the same way about.
Yes, I was bullied.
The thing is, I wasn't bullied for being bi. I was bullied for being a victim. Bi never came into the equation. Of course I got called 'dyke' and 'lezzie' like every other girl did back then, but it was just another epithet. Shit; I didn't even realize there was such a thing as 'bi' until I was in high school, and hadn't a clue that it applied to me until I was 18. That's why my voice doesn't really belong in Dan Savages' 'It Gets Better' project. But having been bullied is something I need to come out about anyway, and maybe some kid will read this and grab a few pointers about how to survive until they can get away from the vile, substandard, hopeless snake pit full of dull norms, moral cowardice and future real estate salespersons that is the American school system. Feel free to pass this along, but be warned: it is not politically correct, and it is not the typical adult 'just tough it out' sophistry that people my age are supposed to pass along when talking to kids. It's real, and 'real' is not pretty. I'm not going to dumb this down or lie.


I was bullied. I was the goat. I was the kid in class that everyone could mistreat, and did. I was the kid that all the adults disliked and ignored. Anything you did to me you did with impunity, in front of anyone you pleased, without a care in the world for any reprisal or punishment whatsoever. I was that kid. It started in first grade and continued up until I started Jr. High. Bear in mind that the things I'm going to recount were perpetrated by little children, little grade school aged children, ON a little child. Your precious angels are capable of being bloodthirsty little hyenas, folks. If you look away, you collude.

I was hit. Shoved. Cursed. Struck with tree limbs and dirt clods and pieces of pavement and rocks. I had traps laid for me, where some kid would pretend to be my friend and lure me to some secluded place where a group of others would ratpack me. One group of kids tried to catch me by the neck with a rope. I had shit thrown at me many, many times...and I mean actual shit. I was hunted around the neighborhood by huge packs of kids, on bicycles, running, screaming 'Kill her! Get her!' I couldn't go swimming unsupervised; not at someones' house and not at a public pool. I cannot tell you how many times kids tried to drown me, holding me under and take turns doing it.

This kind of thing went on every day. Every single day. It happened in front of adults, who would simply turn their backs. It happened in front of teachers at school, who either turned their backs or made me spend recess in the classroom. It happened in front of my parents, who did nothing to hide their utter contempt of me, who did nothing to prevent it, and who blamed me, to my face and to anyone who happened to be present, because I was being spoiled and sensitive and weak. That I was just doing this for attention. That I was deliberately inviting other kids to bully me because I liked the attention. Yes indeed.

School was its own kind of hell. Summers were worse. At least in school there were rooms to hide in and doors that closed behind me. In the summertime if I was out in the open I was prey. The only way I could go outside my yard was to either sneak out at night or wait until it was Sunday, when all those good little children were in church.

I spent the majority of my childhood hiding. From everyone. I spent that entire time in a constant state of mortal fear. And that's no exaggeration. I had absolutely no backup whatsoever. Any adult who took my side was actively discouraged from doing so by my parents, who took pains to explain to them what a contemptible, sick, bad, weak, lazy little girl I really was. Once again, this is no exaggeration. None of it.

By the time sixth grade rolled around I had perfected the art of judging when it was relatively safe for me to be seen, and how, and where. The vigilance was constant. I cried in school every day. I went home and cried every single day. All the adults in my life were either sick to death of me or had been so thoroughly co-opted by my parents that they worked at ignoring what was going in in the name of not feeding into my perceived sick attempts to get attention.

To this day it horrifies me to think that most of the children responsible for the worst of the bullying actually went on to have children of their own. Most of the kids in on it were simply going along with the crowd and acting out whatever aberrant group behavior dynamic was happening. But some of those children, more of them than you'd think, were absolutely fiendish... calculating, unrestrained, gleeful little psychopaths. I always wondered what their parents would have done if they'd known that their darling little angels spent recess kneeling on a little girls chest wiping dogshit in her face and trying to force it in her mouth, or trying to pull down her underpants and shove sticks or pencils into her crotch. I remember looking up into the glittering eyes and hectic faces, the spitty red lips and fast breathing, and being repelled and horrified and feeling terror beyond belief. It was like rape. It was like being attacked by demons. And I wonder of any one of the group of kids standing around in a circle laughing and jeering, watching all this happen to me, ever remembers any of this at all. Or what they think of their own participation, if they do.

The adults, when they deigned to notice, wrote it off as 'kid stuff'. I cannot tell you how many times I heard that hateful, dismissive phrase. "Oh, its just kids being kids. One of these days she'll figure it out but I guess she just has to learn it the hard way!"

The first time I ever thought of suicide was when I was six years old. I thought of suicide every single day. The first time I realized that God was not there was when I was six years old. God still isn't there, but I no longer expect it either, which is a huge relief. Adults lie about God to children. God will fix everything. Nothing happens to you without a reason, and the reason I was given was that I was being punished. I was told to pray. I was told to ask God for forgiveness. That was supposed to fix everything. All it did was take the complaints out of their ears.

The reason that all this happened to me was because of two things: First of all, I was raised by extremely disturbed, antisocial people, and my earliest behaviors were all centered around trying to placate and please people who simply were not going to be placated or pleased by anything except the opportunity to bully someone. I learned how to be a bully magnet, in other words. A perfect one. By their lights, when I was being 'good', I was being a victim. I was trained to be a specialist at drawing out the worst behaviors out of the worst people. And I was no charming little girl to be around either. When I was very little I acted out many of their behaviors. No, I was not a nice or a pleasant little girl.

Secondly, I had juvenile onset clinical depression. I would go in one sweeping moment, apropos of nothing at all, from feeling normal to barely able to think or move, and I can remember these episodes occurring when I was as young as four years old. As I got older they would happen more frequently and would last longer each time. My only defense was to simply 'blank out' and become inert. This did nothing whatsoever to further my career as 'nice' or 'pleasant'.

Everyone learns that survival of adversity is a matter of inner strength and perseverance and bravery and clean living and moral rightness. And if your name is Meg, Jo, Beth or Amy that might in fact be the case...but here in the real world the only thing that counts is what you DO. No psychopathic ten year old is going to stop and reflect on the error of their ways in the face of their victims courage. A psychopathic ten year old is going to continue to gleefully smack the crap out of that victim and to enlist all her little friends to come help. Children love a victim. A victim is someone upon whom they can act out their anger and take out their frustrated powerlessness. A victim is someone who has even less power than they have. This same dynamic plays out for adults too. Ever noticed? It also explains why girls are by far the most horrifyingly evil, sadistic, calculated and most of all SNEAKY bullies that walk. Society still has a long way to go, and there is nothing angrier or more frustrated than a thwarted little girl. Give that same the leadership of some deranged little psycho and a secluded spot on the playground and your darling daughters think nothing of stabbing that kid on the ground with a sharpened pencil. In the breasts.


I was not the worst case of a bullied child at that school. There was one boy who got it worse than me. There were two other girls who were shunned for being poor and smelling like piss. I have to say though that I hold the dubious distinction of having been the most hated girl at Seth Llewelling 1968-1971. Go me!


The thing-the ONE thing- that saved me was anger. And how did I discover that buried beneath everything I had learned and everything I was going through?
I went through puberty.
Nothing releases the floodgates of hell like a few extra squirts of estrogen, folks. I'm telling you!

And boy, did I know all about acting out anger. I learned from PROFESSIONALS. My whole childhood was like a textbook. And I practiced. Yes, I actually practiced. In a mirror. I looked back on my own history and thought about what had worked and why. I read all kinds of things I should not have to pick up as many swear words and putdowns as I could. I studied movies for devastating lines. I plotted out sneaky tricks and pranks. I began paying a lot of attention to vandalism and the tools of that trade. I laid plots for revenge. Most importantly, I mapped escape routes and devised convincing alibis. The day I first set off to Jr. High my feeling was "There is no way in hell that I'm going down without a fight. Fuck them ALL."

As important as this decision was, there was another aspect to it that is possibly more important than simply the declaration of war. You see, there was no doubt in my mind that I WAS going down. There was no other fate for the person I was then. As I laid my plans, I had also, as a consequence of finding out just how much anger and hate I was filled with and capable of putting into action, come to the realization of who I was. I finally faced and accepted, with the worst grace and the worst motives in the world, myself as I was. There was no 'love' involved. Self love played no part in that whatsoever. I did not like who I was. Frankly, I was not at that point a lovable person. But that acceptance, THE SIMPLE FACT OF THAT ACCEPTANCE OF WHO I WAS, resigned and grim and negative though it was, was in fact the most important thing I ever did in my life. And it's important that I make that as plain as possible here.
Your inner motives are secondary to your ACTUAL DEEDS. The fact of acceptance. That you HAVE ACCEPTED. No matter what you are or how you feel about yourself or what brought you to that place is all aside the point! Having accepted yourself will lead you to great things. Having accepted yourself, as shitty as you might be, will actually lead you out of the darkness. It will lead to good things. It will lead you to a better self. It will lead you to the rest of your life.

All you have to do to get there is survive. Your inner reasons for surviving don't have to be pure. Revenge is a perfectly good reason. In fact it's a great reason. So is hatred. And anger. My reason, back then, was that I wanted to live long enough to see my parents get old and die, which is certainly less than noble or pure.
AND IT WORKED LIKE A CHARM.

You only have to find something that you want more than you want to die. It doesn't have to be nice.

Nobility or purity of motive play no part in survival whatsoever. You don't NEED nobility or purity! There is no RIGHT way to survive! That you DO survive is the only thing that's important! Nobility and purity of motive are luxuries of the privileged and the protected. They're superfluous. Not necessary. Aside the point. They don't matter a damned bit more for the privileged and the protected than they do for the victimized and the abused.
ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS SURVIVE.
ANY FUCKING WAY YOU CAN.

Now, I never expected for a moment that I would survive past my 18th birthday anyway. I have a chronic lung condition that was severe enough to put my life expectancy at about 18 to 21 years (that is, if the people who 'loved' me didn't take me out first.) But I was determined as hell that when I did go out, I was going to go out trailing a wake of nuclear fucking devastation. People wouldn't just be sorry....people were going to be MADE SORRY. By ME.

And they were.

And IT WAS GREAT!

I am a 50 year old woman with five grandkids. I have been married for close to 22 years to an amazing Biker. I am thought of by most as a relatively nice, unassuming, average little lady. I'm a housewife. I grow sunflowers. And yet to this day some of the proudest moments of my life are when I set the school bathroom on fire...spit on the chair of the boy who'd come up and grabbed my tits hard enough to leave marks, just before he sat down (to the delight of all his 'friends')...took a magic marker, disguised my handwriting and wrote even viler crap on the walls about the bitches who were tormenting me than they were writing about yours truly. I am proud of all the times I snotted off to the teachers who played to the popular kids and mistreated everyone else. I am proud of vandalizing their cars, their purses and their desks. I am proud of devising the most disgusting rumours imaginable about the people who took such glee in starting them about me. And nobody ever wanted to get on the wrong side of my sense of humor once I developed the ability to make up phrases and nicknames that STUCK.

This all began to take on momentum. Soon I thought nothing of snotting off to anyone who irritated me, despite who they were, despite their threats. I knew how to duck their threats. I had no problem whatsoever running from a fight. Oh HELL no. I was no fighter. I'd skip a class, hide, duck around corners, I had no problem with that. Pain HURTS. Many's the day I took a later bus or walked home to avoid people who were waiting beat me up. Was it cowardly? It was. Did I get called a pussy? I did. But I didn't get beat up either, which I figured was the more important issue at hand. And after all, 'pussy' was the least of what I'd already been called. That, and the expletive 'pussy' was merely a minor weapon in MY arsenal.

I ended Jr. High with the reputation as a flaming bitch; meaner than catshit. I was avoided. I was feared.
And I started to make friends.
Real friends.
The bullying stopped. Gradually, but after word got around that I was taking less shit than before, it cut off sharply and just kept on diminishing.
It took six months.
And when I got to the point that I took no shit whatsoever, the bullying STOPPED.
Oddest of all, when it did flare up, the teachers suddenly began to step in and do their jobs.
I swear to God this actually happened.
It was the Goddamndest thing.

I did not treat my first friends very well...I thought they must all be snivelling victims like I was who were simply drawn to my acting out and who would probably desert me as soon as I stopped being amusing and dangerous. I got rid of them first.

But I made more.
And people started to like me!

By the time I hit high school I had quite the reputation as a dangerous, though amusing, nutcase. I dressed outrageously. I said and did outrageous things. I was not by far the most outrageous, disturbed or amusing person in school, but I was among their number, and for the most part I still kept my head pretty low. I am proud to say that never once did I stoop to bullying, that I stuck up for people who were being bullied, and that I never started shit. I just FINISHED IT.

And all of this was done without resorting to interpersonal violence. I mean, God help your locker and God help your car if you fucked with me, but I didn't smack anyone around....for what that's worth in light of all the property damage I caused. I dunno.

I arranged my classes so that I graduated half a year earlier than the rest of my class. I did not attend graduation. Fuck that. The day I graduated high school I walked out the front doors, turned around and flipped the place off with both hands. I will never forget that day. I went down to Perry's drug store and caught a bus home in a daze. I walked around in a daze for a week before it all finally hit me: I never had to go back to that place EVER, EVER, EVER AGAIN. IT WAS OVER FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.

It was immediately better.

It was far from perfect. I had two bad relationships and five years of therapy ahead of me before all the monsters from my past were slain. But I swear on John Cleese and H.P. Lovecraft that the worst day of my adult life (and I've had some doozies; you don't just stop being a hateful bitch and I inflicted a lot of pain on myself and others) was still better than the best day of being nine years old. Or any day of any age between 1960 and 1978. Because I was out of prison. I had got the fuck out of Dodge. My tour of duty in Vietnam was over. I was free.

I AM free.

Seven Dangerous Dogs Carry A Terrible Tune!

...and speaking of contemptible pukes, I started smoking again a couple of months ago. Oh yes! And I'm now in the process of trying to quit.

It is a stone bitch.

Now, I deny myself nothing. If I feel so inclined, I will and do avail myself of whatever recreational chemical, unhealthy eating practice, dangerous idea or impulse that captures my fancy. Avail away, is my motto; life is short and all that crap. But I never get surgically attached to any of those things either. Why that is I have no idea; it certainly isn't because I posses any uncommon strength of character. What I dislike I leave by the wayside and what I do like I continue to do when the whim strikes, or not.

That doesn't apply to smoking, unfortunately. I am having one tough motherfucking time getting this nasty smelly expensive monkey off my ass. What the hell is that about? Smoking? Of all the things? If anyone has any insight into this issue it would be most appreciated because it is baffling the fuck out of me.

_________________________

I went out trick or treating with the Goonybird and the SSA last night. The Goonybird was G.I.Joe, his mommy was Gwen from 'Mad Men', and I was kind of a cross between Wendy O. and Adam Ant, although I told everyone I was Sarah Palin. Danger Lady, the SSA's newest bump, was dressed as a kitty. She had to stay behind with the Biker and her daddy The Lucky Bastard, which made her cry, the treatment for which, according to her grampa and her daddy, is chocolate. When we left she was a little pink kitty, When we returned she was a little brown kitty with a 'Twix' wrapper stuck to the side of her face.

The neighborhood was full of kids out trick or treating; running up and down the streets, their parents standing under the streetlights talking and laughing. It was so great! I was so glad to see it! For a lot of years there you saw nobody out, and nobody decorated their houses either. Something has changed. Maybe parents feel safer, or maybe everyone just got sick of the whole 'Halloween is evil and Satanic' thing that was part of the local culture around here for so long. I know even when I was a kid, if given the chance to choose between going out trick or treating in a cool costume for candy, or going to some lame church-sponsored 'Harvest Carnival' and playing musical chairs for a plastic ring with a pumpkin on it, I wouldn't have even stopped to think about that shit. Maybe all those new parents, former Harvest Carnival survivors all, vowed to themselves 'I'll never do this to my kids when I'm a grownup!' and carried through on the promise!

The coolest house we stopped at this year had the single most freakyass decoration I've ever seen...up in the second floor windows, right over the front porch, they had set up two big television screens. Each screen had the image of a huge green eyeball, and they moved together and blinked in unison, as though the house was aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive and its big ol' eyeballs were looking up and down the street AND AT YOU! I would have never gone up to this place when I was a kid. Shit no, are you nuts? I would have stood at the end of the block and cried! It was excellent!
_______________________________

LAST MINUTE UPDATE FROM THE SSA:
I cannot help but snort in derision whenever I pass the boxed and canned stock in the supermarket. Please. What a scam. Just go set some dollar bills on fire and toss them into the toilet, folks; really? Box O Stock? No. No no no no no. Make your own stock. Need instructions? Here:

http://1hplovecraft.blogspot.com/search?q=chicken+stock

See? A nice post about making stock. Just go. Make your own stock. It's ridiculously simple. Need a good reason? Because I said so. There ya go.
Now go here:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0ISW/is_259-260/ai_n10299306/

read that, feel great guilt, then fire up the stove and fill a big pot with water. Get going.

Suck it the fuck up

Dear men* (particularly men in committed, long-term relationships):

I love you all. You are wonderful friends and fun companions, you are strong and smell good and are hairy and have wacky dangly bits.

That having been said, you need to stop acting like a bunch of contemptible whining pukes when it comes to your relationships. Like it or not, relationships are emotionally based and need tending in order to continue to exist. So read the following and then take this GOOD, FREE advice and do yourself a favor:

Deal with your family of origin issues NOW.

Or were you looking forward to long-term unresolvable grief, horrible depression, job loss, constant ill health, getting divorced and losing everything you have, dipshit?

One of the many things you are not told about marriage is how the death of your parents will screw it up. Royally. Like a big dog. No, really, you have NO FUCKING IDEA WHATSOEVER how much impact this will have on your marriage.

Watching anyone you love going down the last road is horrible. Watching a beloved parent die is excruciatingly painful. But losing a parent with whom you had a difficult relationship comes with its own particular brand of hell.

Every single one of your unresolved 'family of origin' issues will come back to bite you in the ass. Guaranteed.

That's how the mind works. Here, now, at the worst possible time, sure as the sun rises in the east, while all your emotions are raw, all those issues will all come rocketing to the forefront, adding a huge unwanted burden of conflicted bleeding emotion to what is already a bad situation.

What you learned from your parents, good and bad, impacts your marriage daily on hundreds of levels simultaneously. Yeah. Now think about when that rug gets yanked out from underneath your feet suddenly and all those levels begin to shake down into unrecognizable rubble. And remember, you still have to deal with what's already been going on at the same time...financial issues, your own family's issues and your own personal crap, all on top of all this. You bet your sweet fucking ass your marriage is going to take a monumental hit. And do you really need that on top of everything else? No you don't.
Neither does your partner.

You cannot treat this like something you can ignore and it will go away. That shit never works anyway. Oh, you may think it's working fine. That's because the only person you're fooling is yourself. Once again, this is how the mind works: for every action, there will be an equal and opposite reaction. Your inner upset, despite the fact that you think you're hiding it so well, is in reality translating into irrational and bad decisions, intolerable irritability, sleep and health issues, and oh so much more. In effect you are channelling your petulant inner three-year-old in desperate need of a nap, acting all your shit out on everyone and everything around you. And again; don't fool yourself: playing the 'Duh' card will not automatically cause everyone else around you to magically agree with you ('He says he's not acting like an asshole and has no idea what we're talking about...so....he must not be acting like an asshole and we must just all be wrong!' Um...yeah, no.) No, what that does is to eventually make everyone around you so angry with you and your unresolvable bullshit in their lives that they choose not to have it in their lives anymore. And that will be....disruptive, at best. You feel me?

Want to avoid this?
It is absolutely vital to your emotional welfare, as well as to the welfare of everyone around you, that you make an honest attempt to go to your parents NOW and attempt to confront all those things that have been swept under the rug. Don't wait until they're so infirm that you have no chance whatsoever of bringing anything up and finishing it because you'll never forgive yourself, or them.

It doesn't have to be a big scene. It doesn't even have to work. In fact, chances are good that if you're dealing with parents with long-term substance abuse issues, impulse control disorders or borderline personalities, you'll get absolutely nowhere.

The important thing is that you try. That you approach them in good faith, with honesty, as an adult....THAT is what makes all the difference in the world. Why? Because you will have just been shown beyond all shadow of a doubt where you end and they begin, and that you have no power whatsoever over their actions.
Just like you didn't when you were a little kid.
Just like you never had, and never will.
And this needs to happen in real time. Just accepting it intellectually won't mean shit.

What you have when a failed attempt at reconciliation is done is your adult perspective and their up-to-date reactions....information with which you can go back and re-evaluate all those things that went awry in your relationship with your parents. You use these to re-evaluate those things. You'll be surprised to realize that many of the guilty burdens you have been carrying belonged to someone else. You'll mourn all the emotional energy that you wasted trying to change people and events that were never under your control to begin with. That mourning period should burn up a couple of weeks. Have a good book handy. It won't kill you so quit putting it off.

You will come away with the knowledge that you, the adult, have been brave in the face of difficulty. You honestly tried your best. And then, when the time comes, as it will inevitably, saying the final goodbye will be uncomplicated by other issues. Your life will go on.
_______________________________

*OK fine women too. Although the only experience I have with this crap is with men doing it...and I gotta say that y'all are by far the worst offenders when it comes to playing the 'emotions are pussy so I just won't deal with any of them and ignore them and pretend that everything is fine and it will be' game. And you know that's true so get over it.

Green Weasel Smells Loudly The Destroy!!

It's been a year of degeneracy and terrible thrills here at Rancho FirstNations, my darlings. I will eventually get around to writing about it all, I'm sure, but for now I'm going to (puss out) fall back on a favorite subject: RECIPES FOR THINGS THAT COULD POSSIBLY KILL YOU!

It is with great pride that I bring you the following. I call it 'The Recipe', which is a little Waltons humor there for ya...but you should call it

Лестница к звездамthe Baldwin sisters never had it so good

Supplies you will need:
-A HUGE JAR OR CROCK WITH A LID that will fit into your refrigerator.
-A JELLY FUNNEL (also known as a 'Chinese Hat' and a 'jelly drip'. It is a long, pointy conical COLANDER, not a funnel, although it's called a funnel, which it's not, with a little stand it sits in. Oh look it up; you're sitting in front of a computer.)

-A CHEESECLOTH. You can get this at any supermarket. Cut it to fit the inside of the jelly funnel and overlap the side a couple of inches, doubled over once.
...OK listen. Cheesecloth is this very loosely woven cotton cloth used in cheesemaking and canning and for some cooking operations, right? And it's sold all folded over in a bag. Take and unfold it on a clean tabletop until all of it is lying out there flat, then fold it over ONCE. Now, poke that into your dry, clean jelly funnel, arrange it so that it laps over the top a couple of inches all the way around (it won't be tidy looking) and then take a scissors and cut off the excess. Now fold the excess up nicely and stick it back in the bag so you can use it for the next batch which, I assure you, you WILL be making.)

- A BROAD, SHALLOW BOWL

-A LARGE TOWEL, sheet or what have you, big enough to cover the jelly drip and the bowl. This keeps the snoids out.

-A STANDARD KITCHEN FUNNEL that will fit into the neck of a bottle
-A FOOD PROCESSOR or a blender

Ingredients:

-1 Fifth + 1 Quart of acceptable Vodka. Not flavored. Just plainass bar-standard vodka. Actually, if you have a Brita pitcher you could bang some cheap vodka through that ten or twenty times which will give you a smoother vodka to start with. As any muppet knows, the only difference between the good shit and the cheap shit is the number of times it's filtered. Purchase wisely. But if you do decide to filter your vodka, do it NOW, BEFORE you continue. Further reading will reveal the reason why, or not.

-A whole fucking shitload of well-washed Shasta Daisies, stripped of leaves, roots and petals. For best flavor these should be bone dry. Don't worry about seeds; they go in the mix too. For an explanation of the term 'Shasta Daisy', go to that little white box up at the very top left of this screen and enter 'Shasta Daisy' so that it searches my blog and then the answer will come up and you will know a lot more about 'Shasta Daisies' than you know now.

Cave Vodkanum et Papaveracea: Having been a habitue of this blog and consequentially having slavishly tried all the recipes given previous to this post, you should know by now not only how much Vodka you can handle, but how many Shasta Daisies you can safely ingest given your age, weight and health. You should also be able to judge your personal crop of Shasta Daisies for relative strength. If not, you should fuck right off and not try this because you will DIE.

-up to 1/4 cup freshly ground black pepper

-2 tbls ground chipotle (Yes, this matters. Has to be chipotle.)

MethodeLET GRAVITY DO YOUR WORK FOR YOU. AT NO TIME DURING THE FOLLOWING ARE YOU TO SQUEEZE, FORCE, SKLIT, MOOSH, WHOMP, SIT DOWN UPON OR OTHERWISE APPLY WEIGHT OR FORCE TO THE MASH. Why? Because I said so. Jeeziz would you just quit having to dick with stuff all the time. Are you six?

1. Break up your Shasta Daisies until they will fit into the jar of the blender, or the bowl of the cuisinart, which you would have if you had any pride.

2. Now add a little vodka, enough to get things moving, and whup them around until they're pretty well chopped up. Not liquid, but not big rough chunks, sneering and shopworn and underfed and pallid, a half-smoked cigarette dangling from their ripe, bitten lips, slouching up against the filthy brick of an alley rank with the smells of cabbage and old sin. No, what you want is kind of a wet, chopped up mess.

4. Dump this, and as much of the vodka will fit, into the crock or jar. Seal it, give it a shake, and put in the fridge.

4. Shake it once a day for 10 days.

5. By the end of 10 days the solids should have sunk to the bottom of the container. If not, let it go until this happens, shaking once every day.

6. At the end of this time, take it out of the fridge and get your other tools ready.

7. Put the jelly funnel, lined with the cheesecloth, over the bowl.

4. Now dump the chopped-up Shasta Daisy goop out of the container and into the jelly funnel, which you will have lined already with the doubled-over cheesecloth, RIGHT? OK. Fill the cone of the funnel about 3/4 full. This will already have begun to drip. Good. Cover the whole works with the towel since the snoids will have begun to circle, and nobody wants snoids in their goop.

11. Now go find something do do while this finishes dripping.

602. Is there room for more glop? Dump it in. Wait.

8. Used all the glop now? Good. Now start tipping in your unused vodka, unless you've drunk it in the interim, ya lush.

6. Done? Good. Now dump some more vodka through it. Once again, cover the whole works with the towel or your mother or whatever and go find something to do for an hour or so. Every now and then, tip a little more of the vodka into the jelly funnel.

7. You've used all the unsued vodka. The jelly funnel has completely stopped dripping into the bowl. Lift the jelly funnel away from over the bowl and put a saucer under it just in case the jostling makes it drip anew...you don't want to lose any.

12. Now, put the small, ordinary but not at all frumpy kitchen funnel into the neck of the larger quart empty bottle and pour the concoction from the bowl into the bottle. It won't fill the whole thing...don't worry, the angels have taken their portion; which explains how angels fly but now how come there aren't angels all smashed out of their gourds flying into office buildings and picture windows and shit. Still, it's a small price to pay so quit complaining.

9. Put the jelly funnel back over the bowl.

11. Now. Dump all the vodka BACK THROUGH the whole mess AGAIN.

12. Done? OK. Take the top two-thirds of chopped up Shasta Daisy mush out of the jelly funnel and pitch it. Now, pour all the vodka back through what remains AGAIN.

13. Once this has dripped through, take out the cloth and rinse it very well in plain running water. Wring it out as dry as you possibly can. Replace it in the jelly funnel and put the black pepper and chipotle in it.

14. Now dump the whole shooting match through this.

YOU ARE DONE!!
You will end up with one quart of laudenum, roughly. Because yes, thats what this is; it's laudenum. GASP! CLUTCH THE PEARLS!

Now, remember: this is not your grandmas' laudenum. First of all it's got a vodka base and not glycol or wood alcohol or gasoline or whatever they used to use. B, because of the peppers you used it will be the most lovely smoky amber color and it will taste FUCKING WONDERFUL. As in, top shelf gourmet booze. Seriously! I impressed the hell out of myself! You'd pay bank money for something this tasty at the liquor store but you made it at home! And its full of heroin!!

Well, actually it's full of opium, codeine and other fun alkaloids. Bearing that in mind, know also that drinking this is tantamount to squeezing an entire tube of shoe goo up your ass, by which I mean its constipating. Keep up. You'd do well to plan your meals accordingly. Do not ingest this directly before or after eating a whole bag of flour, in other words. STAY WELL HYDRATED*.

Does this make a smoking hot Bloody Mary? My word YES it does. One shot is enough for me.

To get all sciencey for a moment: This is a tincture. A tincture dosage is measured by the drop. If you have any doubts about what you've got here, you should start out with about seven drops in a glass of plain water on an empty stomach and then go from there, documenting the effects. Don't just go off all willy nilly and slam a shot like you're all G because you could drop dead or nod off onto one of the stove burners or bite the end off your own dick or something and I refuse to be responsible for that kind of crapola.

I missed you.

________________________________________

*That means water, not more laudenum, Voices.

Quaint Vignettes From My Charming Rural Idyll

I am sitting here on the most beautiful, sunny early spring day, looking out at my million dollar view and listening to the album 'Precious Lord' by Aretha Franklin, and let me tell you, life is extraordinarily GOOD. In fact, I cannot imagine anywhere I'd rather be right now than right here. So tell ya what, more later....because right now I am gonna just do like Ram Dass and BE HERE NOW, chilluns.

__________________________________

Yellow Monkey Irregularity Caper!! Danger!!

Oh good gravy Marie enough of that.

Instead, here are two sauce recipes.

And here is the link for measurement conversions for wacky and non-wacky foreign persons:
http://www.wwrecipes.com/convert.htm
...so don't say I never gave you anything.

Tomato-Lemon-Basil Toss Sauce (you shut up, Frobi)
...best over fettucini


1 handful sun dried tomatoes (you shut up, Beast)
1 cup hot water
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
Juice of one cocktail lemon (you know, those little bitty round lemons, not the big honkers that look like a boob.)
1/2 tsp fresh rosemary, approx.
1/2 tsp fresh thyme, approx.
1/4 cracked black pepper (I use more)
Chiffonade of fresh basil, 1/4 cup (measured after cutting)
Zest of one cocktail lemon
salt to taste

optional: 1/4 cup simple white sauce.


-Soak the tomatoes in the hot water. When hydrated, remove and julienne, reserving liquid.
-Chiffonade basil
-Zest lemon, using one of those zesters that makes long strips if you have one. If not, no biggie. Use a grater. See if I care.

Set all these aside in a bowl, and add the cracked pepper.

To juice the lemon, first wham the zested cocktail lemon against the counter, roll it around, and squish it in your fist a few times. I mean, don't burst it, but make it say your name. This helps break up the little pearls inside it, which makes it easier to squeeze out all the juice. Of course if you have a lemon squeezer thingie don't bother smacking your lemon around. I don't have a lemon squeezer thingie. I just squash the lemon half in my hand and pick out the seeds, because I am a low tech barbarian.

-Dump tomato soaking water, olive oil and lemon juice into blender with the rosemary and thyme and blend until completely liquified.

-Dump into the bowl with the other stuff. Now, give it a taste and salt it. Depending on your ingredients, you can stop here and use this 'as is' over pasta. Maybe use a little parmesan cheese to help it stick.

By adding a little white sauce, you get a thicker sauce which has a milder, richer flavor. This would go nice on some spinach noodles.

_____________________________

Asiago Cream Sauce....because your arteries are not clogged enough.
...wondering what to do with that boring-ass poached chicken breast? Wonder no more. Dump this sauce over it, run it under the broiler to put a nice brown on there, and once you taste it you will forget all about how you are speeding recklessly toward a quadruple bypass.

2 cups chicken stock
1/2 cup (packed) cream cheese
1 heaping teaspoon cornstarch
2 teaspoons powdered bread crumbs
1/4 tsp grated garlic
1/2 cup grated Asiago cheese
salt and WHITE pepper to taste

Dump all this into the Cuisinart and blend the everloving crap out of it. Get it completely liquified.

Now taste it for salt, add what it needs, and put it over the fire. This is a cornstarch sauce, so you know the drill....stirring constantly, bring it up slowly to medium, then crank it up to high. Keep on stirring! When it begins to kick, turn down the heat to low, keep on stirring to make sure theres no big lumps, then once the danger of boiling has passed let it sit. It will continue to thicken up a bit.

Before serving, run an immersion blender through it just to make sure it's completely smooth. Thin with a little milk if necessary.

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

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

____________________________________

Things are sucking a big one around here right now.

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

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

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

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

Well then.

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

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

I fired him this morning.

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Please come through for me, y'all!!

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


It makes perfect sense. It does.


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

WHERE DOES ONE FIND NEW MUSIC THESE DAYS?

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



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


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




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

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

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



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

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

1.Leads on new music,

2.How to find new music,

3.Where to find new music

HOOK A BITCH UP!!!!

Dog is not the answer

...and now for something completely different!
_______________________________________



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

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

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

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

Then I heard a series of excited yips.

Say what?

Oh no.

Aw fuck.

AW FUCK .

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



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


PLEASE GOD.





The bedroom door opened and in ran a dog.

"Guess what? " The Biker announced cheerfully.

.......








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

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

Fine. We have a dog.

Hooray.

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

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






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






He carried toilet paper around the house.





He climbed out of the windows.





He climbed into the dryer.





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


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


Wearing a bra.




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






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


A puppy spawned by Hell.

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



Yes. Drinking coffee. He preferred it black.

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

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

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

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


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



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



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

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


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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I looked out the window a couple of seconds later.

It was on the porch.

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

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

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

YES.


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

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

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


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

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




_____________________________

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

Temperate Azure Chicken In Instant Rescue Caper!

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

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

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

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

Until he started living under my back deck.

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

In the middle of the night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then last summer the animal population around here just exploded.

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

And rats.

Oh yes.

...and rats.




*TO BE CONTINUED*

Eleven Blue Moles Plan A Resounding Active!!

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

__________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

The whole place-silent. All eyes on her.

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



















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

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

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

EVERY SINGLE PERSON.

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

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

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

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

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



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



Except me.


______________________________________________________


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

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


These people were all nuts.


___________________________________________________________________






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


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

Yellow Mouse Comeback is Dire

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

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

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

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

Ahem.

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

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

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

Red Gopher Has Spasmodic Breathing Sound Or Discoteque!

RECIPES!!!

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

Go buy some Hebrew National hot dogs and make awesome

CHILI DOGS

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

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

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

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

CREOLE SPICE POWDER
This is not rocket science.

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



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


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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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